The Long and Faraway Gone (9 page)

DeMars tried again to track Crowley down when he inherited the case—­when . . . well, Julianna begged and bitched and bullied. But he came up empty, too, and so did Julianna every time she used the Internet to find Crowley on her own. DeMars told her that Crowley was probably dead. He told her to forget about him, and eventually she had.

But now.

“He's here?” she said. “In Oklahoma?”

“He doesn't have any answers, Juli. He never did.”

“Let's make sure.”

“We did. Long time ago.”

We.
Meaning the police, the original detectives in the case, all the ­people like DeMars for whom the case was just a job.

“When?” she said. “When did Crowley pop up?”

“Few months ago.”

“A few months ago.” She pressed her palms flat against the table. “And you just now . . .”

Julianna realized he hadn't been planning to tell her at all. Face-­to-­face, though, he'd had a pang of guilt, of pity, something. She nodded. “I see.”

“I talked to him. Went down there, where he's staying at. Crowley said what he said before. He doesn't know anything.”

“Why didn't you let me know?”

He didn't bother answering that.

“Where's he staying?” she said.

“I told you. I already talked to him.”

“I want to talk to him myself.”

“You don't.”

“Where is he? He didn't get the casino job.” Not with two felony convictions and prison time.

“No.”

“You have to tell me.”

He leaned back, ramrod straight, and lifted his chin—­the move he used to show you that he wasn't playing. “Is that what you think?”

Her neighbor's kids were in the backyard, running around with their dog. Julianna could hear the laughter and panting and happy growling.

She went into the kitchen and cut two slices of the lemon meringue pie she'd bought at the German bakery DeMars liked.

“My favorite,” he said when she set the plate in front of him. “Look at that.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I was out of line.”

He ate the slice of pie in four big bites, then squared up the loose crumbs with his fork and ate those, too. “You don't want anything to do with him, Juli,” he said. “He's bad news. You have to trust me on that.”

“I do.”

“All right.”

“What about the other thing? The woman on Facebook?”

“Give it another week,” he said. “You don't hear back from her about the photo, I'll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, DeMars.”

He reached across the table and took her small hand in his big one. He leaned in and let the lines on his forehead soften. This was another one of his moves, the gentle father. “Forget about Crowley. All right? He doesn't have the answer. You are here. That's the answer. Forget about him.”

“I will,” she said, and gave his hand a squeeze. “You're right. I promise.”

 

W
yatt's father was stern and humorless, a buzz-­cut high-­school basketball coach. One time the school principal made him phone a player on his team to apologize for an incident at practice. Wyatt's father had thrown a basketball and nailed the kid in the head with it. Wyatt's father called the kid and told him he was sorry—­he'd been aiming for the kid standing next to him. Wyatt's mother laughed, but his father didn't understand why. He just looked at her like he always did, with vague and patient disgust.

It wasn't until Wyatt landed the job at the Pheasant Run—­in September of 1985, the day after his fifteenth birthday—­that he realized just how lonely and unhappy his life had been up until then.

His first day of work at the movie theater, O'Malley came over to Wyatt and asked him who his favorite band was. Wyatt panicked. He was fifteen years old. O'Malley was seventeen and a half. They inhabited different universes.

“I don't know,” Wyatt said.

“I like that,” O'Malley said, nodding. “An open mind. I'll bring you some tapes. Come here.”

O'Malley straightened the knot of Wyatt's official Monarch Theaters tie. The tie was black polyester, to match the slacks. The blazer was orange.

“Thanks,” Wyatt said.

“What's your name? You want some Junior Mints or Raisinets? Here's what we do. Just take a ­couple of pieces from every box, two or three max, then put the box back in the case. Ingenious, if I do say so myself.”

It
was
pretty ingenious. This was back before boxes of candy were sealed or shrink-­wrapped.

“Michael,” Wyatt said. “My name's Michael Oliver.”

“Michael?” O'Malley said. “Hmm. You look more like a Heinz to me.”

So that first day O'Malley made Wyatt a name tag that said
HEINZ
. This was back when you used a special device to punch letters into an adhesive plastic strip.

“Heinz!” Melody said when she saw the name tag pinned to the lapel of Wyatt's blazer. She was a ferocious-­looking black girl, cornrows and muscular forearms, who rarely ever stopped giggling. “What is that? Like the ketchup? What kind of name is that? I thought I heard every crazy white-­boy name there is. Heinz!”

“He's Czechoslovakian,” O'Malley explained gravely. “A refugee from political persecution. His family makes sausage.”

“In the Sudetenland,” Wyatt said, because his sophomore history class had been studying World War II. O'Malley grinned, and in that instant Wyatt felt—­he could still feel it now, remembering the moment twenty-­six years later—­like he was home, like he'd come home.

Wyatt had never seen cornrows before, not up close. He'd never seen a girl with forearms like that. Melody smelled like Strawberry Splash Bubblicious and popcorn grease. Everyone who worked at the theater smelled like popcorn grease. It baked into your pores like pottery glaze.

The cashier, that first day, had been Karlene. Oh, Karlene. She was a talker. O'Malley would watch and wait until Mr. Bingham approached Karlene to check the box-­office numbers, and then O'Malley would slide over and ask Karlene a question designed to set her off.
Hey, Karlene, how was your day off yesterday?
At which point he'd slide back away and leave Mr. Bingham trapped there for the duration of Karlene's never-­ending answer.

Karlene was tall and tan and stacked, as they used to say back then, with a riot of frosted blond hair that made her look like a girl rushing the stage in a Whitesnake video. Rumor had it that O'Malley and Karlene had slept together a time or two before he started going out with Theresa. O'Malley refused to confirm or deny.

“Always respect the privacy of your paramours,” he told Wyatt once.

O'Malley said shit like that all the time. Wyatt didn't know where he came up with it.

The girls at the theater, the cashiers and the concession girls, wore orange polyester uniforms that matched the doormen's blazers. The hem fell just above the knee, and a zipper ran all the way down the front of the dress, top to bottom.

Those zippers drove Mr. Bingham crazy. He tried occasionally to enforce the official Monarch Theaters policy of full zip, but the girls just laughed at that. It got hot in the concession stand during a rush, and the uniforms were already ugly enough—­no way was a teenage girl with any self-­respect going to compound the embarrassment by zipping all the way up to the neckline.

“A free society,” O'Malley said, “cannot legislate cleavage.”

“I couldn't do it even if I wanted to,” Karlene said. “My boobs are too big.”

She demonstrated: zip up, zip down, zip up, zip down.

O'Malley, Wyatt, and Grubb watched. After a minute, Janella behind the candy case grabbed the soda gun and hosed them down with water.

Once their shift ended, the girls changed out of their uniforms so fast you wouldn't believe it. They used the cramped little room at the bottom of the projection-­booth stairs, across from the manager's office, where Mr. Bingham posted the week's schedule next to the clock and the metal rack of time cards.

Karlene always changed into tight, acid-­washed jeans. She was a talker, a teaser, and a hugger. When Wyatt stocked the hot-­dog rollers, she'd tell him to stop playing with his wiener, and then, as everybody laughed, she'd give him an apologetic hug.

Karlene was the second person shot in the head, after Mr. Bingham. Grubb was next, and then Theresa, and then Melody, and then O'Malley. Wyatt, lying between Theresa and Melody, should have been number five.

One week earlier Karlene had turned eighteen. They'd celebrated her birthday when they got off work, in the small neighborhood park across the street from the back of the theater. Most nights after the late shift, if the weather was good, the theater employees hung out in the playground there, drinking and talking and passing around the giant doobie that Grubb always had on hand. The night of Karlene's birthday, one of the other girls, Wyatt couldn't remember which, had brought a cake from IGA.

Heinz! Heinz from the Sudetenland! Wyatt hadn't thought about that in years. Melody, he remembered, had said one crazy white-­boy name was good as another and refused to call Wyatt by his real name from that point on. Grubb, genial and permanently stoned, thought Heinz
was
Wyatt's real name. Karlene always called him “Sugar Pop” or “Pop Tart.” O'Malley called him Michael, usually, but sometimes Heinz and sometimes “Little Buddy.” Tate called everyone, male or female, “Man.” Mr. Bingham rarely called Wyatt anything.
You.
You there.

When Mr. Bingham finally noticed the
HEINZ
name tag that Wyatt had been wearing for a ­couple of weeks by then, he assumed correctly that O'Malley had been behind this violation of the Monarch Employee Handbook and wrote O'Malley up. And then he took Wyatt aside for a heart-­to-­heart warning: Fair or not, Mr. Bingham said, Wyatt would always be judged in life by the ­people with whom he chose to associate himself.

Mr. Bingham had been such a dick, an officious and petty dictator, incapable of any genuine human emotion. O'Malley called him the Little Cheese.

The alarm on Wyatt's phone finally chimed. He'd barely had time to brush his teeth when Candace called.

“Wake up,” she said. “Are you awake yet?”

“Who says I ever went to sleep?” Wyatt countered. “Maybe I don't plan to rest until justice is done.”

“Shut it. I want an update.”

“It's six o'clock in the morning, Candace.”

“So?”

Wyatt stood by the window and watched dawn break, the line of the horizon smoldering like a fuse. His room was on the top floor of the hotel. Back in the eighties, the Marriott on Northwest Expressway had been the fanciest hotel in town, with the hottest nightclub and the best restaurant. Tate had plans, once he turned eighteen, to get a job as a barback at the nightclub. He said he'd heard the tips were outrageous, man, and so were the girls.

“Give me a day or two,” Wyatt said. “You'll be the first to know when
I
know something.”

Candace made the sound she made—­groan to sigh to hiss.

“I have to make breakfast for Lily,” she said.

“Sorry to keep you. I don't know what I was thinking.”

“Get to work!” she said, and hung up.

W
YATT SHOWERED, SHAVED,
and got dressed. It was too early to eat breakfast—­he was still on Vegas time—­so he just made a cup of instant coffee in the room and drank it. He flipped through his notebook and found the number that Candace had given him for Jeff Eddy, the late Mr. Eddy's older brother.

When Wyatt called, Jeff Eddy's assistant told him that she might be able to squeeze him in that morning. But only, the assistant's tone made clear, if she moved heaven and earth to make it happen.

Wyatt drove downtown. Once there, he had a hard time getting his bearings. The buildings were the same, the old First National Bank and the courthouse and Leadership Square, but . . . the ­people. There were ­people everywhere! ­People and cars and buses and the morning hubbub of a real downtown, a real city. Men in suits, women in suits, a surge of pedestrians whenever a light changed. A line of ­people waiting outside a hip-­looking coffee shop at the corner of Park and Robinson. A woman in yoga pants walking a yellow Lab. Trees in full autumn flourish along the median. Wyatt tried to think. Had there been trees downtown before?

And no, actually, not all the buildings were the same buildings. There was the glittering glass skyscraper that Wyatt had seen coming in from the airport—­fifty or sixty stories high. A huge new library, a new brick-­faced arena. The old Colcord Hotel, a dead shell when Wyatt left town in 1986, had been renovated, as had the Skirvin, now a Hilton. Even the Myriad Gardens, he saw, now resembled actual gardens and not the surface of some barren and inhospitable moon.

Wyatt sat in his car at a red light, taking it all in.

Times change,
he told himself again.
Life goes on.

Get over yourself.

Jeff Eddy's office was in Leadership Square. Wyatt rode the elevator to the fifth floor and followed the engraved brass pointers to a door marked
EDDY COMMERCIAL
REAL ESTATE APPRAISAL
. He stepped inside. A woman behind the reception desk eyed him suspiciously. She was in her early sixties, with lots of makeup and a wine-­colored silk scarf tied around her neck in the French fashion. At the corners of her mouth were the deep creases of a lifelong frowner.

“Yes?” she said, frowning.

“Wyatt Rivers. I have an appointment with Mr. Eddy. You must be his assistant. Emilia? Iago's wife in
Othello
and the most interesting character in that play, if you ask me. We spoke earlier.”

She gave him more of the same frown. “Mr. Eddy is on a call,” she said. “He'll be with you when he can.”

When, in other words, the power dynamic had been clearly established. Wyatt had wondered, riding the elevator up, if Jeff Eddy would make him cool his heels or not. Now Wyatt knew something about the guy—­just a little something, but something—­he hadn't known before.

Wyatt took a seat on the sofa. The reception area was decorated with framed posters of former Oklahoma University running backs on two walls and current Oklahoma City Thunder basketball players on the third. Wyatt stood back up and crossed the room to examine a poster of Heisman Trophy winner Billy Sims. This put him side by side with Jeff Eddy's assistant, Emilia. It was always more effective to approach from the side if you wanted someone to lower her guard, rather than head-­on.

Billy Sims, in his crimson-­and-­cream Sooner home uniform, leaped over two tacklers. The stands behind him were a sea of soft-­focus crimson and cream.

“Cruise director,” Wyatt said.

A moment went by. Jeff Eddy's assistant turned her head. “Pardon me?”

“I'm guessing you were a cruise director at one time in your life,” Wyatt said. “Back in the eighties, when cruise ships were still kind of glamorous, a glamorous way to travel.”

He finally looked over at her. She was still frowning at him, but in a different way now.

“Am I way off?” Wyatt said.

Another moment went by. “I was a stewardess,” she said.

“No kidding.”

“How did you know that?” She had turned all the way around in her chair to face him.

“I didn't,” Wyatt pointed out. “Just a guess. The way you tie your scarf, like the French do? It's very cosmopolitan. And before you jump to any conclusions, I'm not being a smart-­ass.”

A smile—­maybe, possibly—­began to swim its way up to the surface of her face.

The door to the inside office opened, and a man stuck his head out. Jeff Eddy. He saw the empty sofa and looked surprised. Then he glanced around and saw Wyatt.

“Come on,” he said. “I don't have all day.”

“
M
Y LITTLE BROTHER
,
I loved him dearly, but sometimes he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground,” Jeff Eddy said. “Pains me to say so.”

It didn't seem to pain him, Wyatt noted. But he nodded politely. Jeff Eddy was jowly and sunburned. A golfer, Wyatt suspected. His body was pear-­shaped, and so was his head. The shelves behind him were loaded with signed footballs, signed basketballs, a signed basketball shoe that looked big enough to fit a giant.

“So I take it you didn't think it was a wise decision,” Wyatt said, “for him to leave the Land Run to Ms. Kilkenny?”

Now
that,
Wyatt noted, seemed to genuinely pain Jeff Eddy.

“A wise decision? A wise decision. Look. Greg was a child. He was gullible. He was gullible his whole life. I loved him dearly, like I said. He was my brother. But he was . . . okay, my complete dumb-­ass of a brother.”