by Lou Berney
Wyatt squeezed back through the fence and went inside. Candace had climbed on top of a card catalog. She was turning the show bills on the wall next to the stage right side up.
“Do you want some help with that?” Wyatt said.
She didn’t dignify the question with a glance. “I’m not paying you to turn the stupid posters back around.”
“You’re not paying me at all,” Wyatt reminded her.
Candace lifted a show bill off the nail. “U2, February 17, 1982, 8 P.M.”
“Dallas and Jonathan are coming in early to help,” she said. “You need to find out Who! Is! Screwing! With! Me!”
“He came through the fence in back. Past the warehouse behind you. He or she or it.”
“Why not ‘they’?”
Maybe. Wyatt just had a feeling. This—the attention to detail—didn’t feel like a team effort to him.
Candace turned another show bill. “Tool, December 4, 1992.”
“It’s not like this is some gigantic breakthrough,” she said. “That whoever did this came through the fence in back.”
It wasn’t. It was a single pinprick in the dark fabric of the night. But put together enough pinpricks and eventually the dawn bled through.
“Come on, baby,” Candace said. “I’m going to take you to mother’s day out.”
Wyatt realized that Lily was sitting cross-legged on the stage. She had teleported down from the balcony.
“Bye, Wyatt,” she said.
“Bye, Lily,” he said.
ON THE WAY to his car, Wyatt’s phone rang. Laurie. He’d meant to call her back last night. But he’d had a few drinks, he was tired, he didn’t like to talk to her unless he could give her his full attention. In Wyatt’s opinion that was the secret to a successful relationship. One of the secrets. In love as in life, you had to be present.
“Tell me what you had for breakfast,” he said. “Tell me what you’re wearing. Read me the minutes of the most boring meeting you had yesterday.”
“What time is it there?” Laurie said. “Are you one hour ahead or two?”
“One. Do you have any idea how much I miss you? It’s apocalyptic.”
Wyatt checked the bars on his phone.
“Hello?” he said.
“Wyatt,” she said finally. “Are you coming back?”
The question took him by surprise.
“What?” he said. “Am I coming back? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course I’m coming back. I’ll be back in a few days. At most.”
She didn’t say anything. Wyatt could picture her expression, her eyes. The one moment out of every million when the surface obscured the depths, when he was blind to whatever the hell was down below.
“Laurie,” he said. “Why would you ask something like that?”
“I don’t know.” He heard her sigh. “Since almost the beginning, really, that’s how I thought we’d end. I can’t explain it. Just this weird sense. That one day you’d just leave and I wouldn’t even realize it.”
“What? Laurie. What?”
“What’s the longest, Wyatt, you’ve ever lived anywhere? In one place? Before you had to . . . I don’t know.”
Another question that so baffled Wyatt he didn’t know how to answer it.
“I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you. I’ve told you that. I tell you that all the time.”
“You do,” she said, and Wyatt knew the tone, the point. Laurie had said before that he never talked in a real way about making what they had permanent. Whenever they began to talk about it in a real way, according to Laurie, Wyatt turned slippery—a rubbery, muscular eel, able to flatten and elongate and squeeze away through the most impossibly tiny gap in the conversation.
Well, that was bullshit.
Wyatt took his time. He knew he had to be careful.
“I’ve told you this, babe,” he said. “The reason I’ve never had anything last with a woman before—I’ve never met the girl of my dreams before. Until I met you. You. And I’ve moved around a lot because— C’mon, Laurie. Who doesn’t move around a lot anymore? It’s America in the twenty-first century.”
“I don’t care about getting married,” she said. “You know I don’t care about that. It’s about— I want to feel like when we’re together, we are together. I want to feel like you’re there.”
“I’m not?”
“Have you ever had a conversation with someone at a party?” she said. “It’s a wonderful conversation, but then you realize the other person has been edging toward the door the entire time.”
“Laurie,” Wyatt said. “Listen to me. That’s ridiculous.”
“You really don’t understand?” she said. “You really don’t see it?”
Wyatt didn’t want to have this conversation right now.
“We can talk about this when I get back,” he said. “We can talk as much as you want.”
“I just want . . . I want you to think about this,” she said. “Really think about it. About us.”
How could she know him so well but not know him at all? Wyatt didn’t understand.
“I don’t need to think about us,” he said. And then, before the silence could stretch too thin, “But I will. Okay? I will.”
After Wyatt said good-bye to Laurie, he sat on the hood of the rented Altima for a minute. There were only a couple of clouds in the sky. He’d heard, when he was a kid, that Oklahoma City had more sunny days than almost any other city in the country. He didn’t know if that was true or not, but he thought it might be. Even in the winter. January and February could get cold down on the southern plains, but there were also long periods of bright, blazing blue, the temperature in the sixties and seventies.
It was O’Malley, Wyatt remembered now, who’d told him that Oklahoma City had more sunny days than anywhere else in the country. They’d been loitering in the lobby, waiting for Mr. Bingham to emerge from his office so they could then quickly look busy. The new doorman had been there, too, the snobby rich kid who only lasted a month that summer before he quit. He’d sneered and said O’Malley was full of shit.
“What’s your point?” O’Malley had asked pleasantly, and the new guy didn’t know what to do with that.
Wyatt walked back around to the Land Run’s employee parking lot. He set the loose planks aside and squeezed through the stockade fence again.
The warehouse behind the Land Run appeared to be abandoned. The loading bays were empty, and there was gang graffiti everywhere, balloon letters and demented squiggles. On the other side of the building, though, several cars were parked out front. Wyatt found a door and pressed the buzzer next to it. He waited. Just as he was about to give up, a lock clanked and the door swung open.
He stepped into an empty stairwell. He heard music above, so he climbed the set of shaky metal stairs to another door. This one opened onto the top floor of the warehouse, a huge airy space flooded with sunlight. At the far end of the room, a band was rehearsing—a drummer, guitarist, and bass player noodling without a lot of enthusiasm through what sounded like an acid-rock version of “Folsom Prison Blues.” Closer to Wyatt, at his end of the warehouse, a cluster of kids in their teens and twenties, hippies and white rastas, sat cross-legged on the floor. They were dipping strips of newspaper into buckets of white goo and then placing the strips on a wire-mesh armature the size and shape of a giant head.
The kids weren’t paying much attention to the job at hand and none at all to the music. They were focused, rapt, on the action in the very center of the room—a shirtless guy in a tartan kilt who squatted and then slowly lifted himself off the floor with his hands.
“Yeah!” a kid with fingerless gloves and a Shriner’s fez called out.
“Hey, Lyle!” the guitar player called from
the other side of the warehouse. “We need to work on the vocals at some point, man.”
The guy in the kilt ignored them both. He extended one leg, then the other, still balanced on just his hands. He flexed his bare toes.
Lyle. The kilt, the vocals. Wyatt put the pieces together. The guy doing yoga was Lyle Finn, lead singer for the Barking Johnsons, the most well-known rock band from Oklahoma City. Well, maybe the only well-known rock band from Oklahoma City. The Barking Johnsons had started out in the late eighties and were best known for psychedelic rock, trippy stage spectaculars, and Lyle Finn’s general eccentricity—not necessarily in that order.
A guy came out of an office and walked over to Wyatt.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m Dixon. The band’s manager.”
He was in his forties, wearing creased khakis and a polo shirt with a smear of what looked like blueberry yogurt on the collar. His face was friendly but slightly bewildered. He looked like a suburban dad who had awakened one morning and discovered, to his surprise, that he was now the manager of a rock band.
“Wyatt Rivers,” Wyatt said. He shook the guy’s hand. “I’m a private detective.”
“Oh. I thought you were the balloon dealer.”
“That’s a job?”
“Lyle wants me to buy him a hot-air balloon. Like, a full-size hot-air balloon? I have no idea what he plans to do with it. Private detective?”
“The new owner of the Land Run has been having some problems at her place lately. She asked me to look into it.”
“Candace?”
“You know her?”
“Sure. She’s cool. She booked a couple of the baby bands I manage. What kind of problems?”
Wyatt told him about the marquee letters, the bird poop, the break-in.
The manager frowned. “Huh,” he said.
Wyatt had noted that the bank of windows along the south wall of the warehouse provided a good view down into the alley and the Land Run’s back parking lot.
“Last night,” he said, “did you happen to notice anyone or anything suspicious? It would have been late, after the Land Run closed.”
“No. I took off early yesterday. Five or six o’clock. Lyle was the only one still around last night.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“You can try.”
Wyatt didn’t know what that meant, but he followed the manager to the center of the floor, where Lyle Finn’s yoga poses were becoming increasingly spirited. Wyatt hoped the guy was wearing boxers or briefs beneath his trademark kilt, because Wyatt had no desire to see his johnson, barking or otherwise.
“Mr. Finn,” he said, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
Finn glanced at Wyatt and then scissored his legs around, ending up balanced on his hands again.
“They say I have a way with words,” he announced. “ ‘They,’ whatever that means. A way with words. But check it out. I say away with words. Away! Or aweigh. Like anchors aweigh? Because words are anchors. They anchor us, man. Because what is a sentence? What is a lyric? I want to make a record, man, where it’s just, like, drums and a guitar and the beautiful wrenching cry of me giving birth. You know? I would love to be pregnant, man.”
He balanced on his hands and waited for Wyatt’s reaction. Wyatt checked to see if he had one. He didn’t.
“Great,” he said.
“Lyle,” the manager said, “just talk to the guy like you’re a normal human being for a second, will you?”
Finn lowered himself to the floor and then sprang to his feet. Wyatt would never have guessed that Finn was almost fifty years old. He was tan and lithe, with long, golden, luxuriously cascading hair. On album covers and in music-video close-ups, his eyes were always filled with childlike wonder.
Finn pulled on a T-shirt and gave Wyatt a hug.
“Like a normal human being,” he said. “Did you hear how Dixon said that? Dixon doesn’t think I’m capable of being a normal human being.”
The manager nodded. “That is correct.”
“You’re not that blogger from yesterday,” Finn informed Wyatt. “I mistakenly thought you were that blogger from yesterday.”
“He’s a private investigator, Lyle.”
The band had given up on their lead singer and ended the song they were playing. The guitar player cracked open a bottle of beer. The drummer climbed on a Segway and rolled over to watch the groupies building the giant papier-mâché head.
Finn put his hands on Wyatt’s shoulders and stared deep into his eyes. His hair smelled fantastic.
“You have my full and undivided attention,” he said.
“Thank you,” Wyatt said. “How late were you up here last night?”
“Byron!” Finn waved at the drummer. “Can I ride your Segway, Byron?”
The drummer rolled over and helped Finn onto the Segway.
“So I just, like, lean forward to go?” Finn said. He turned to Wyatt. “I concentrate better when my brain is in a dynamic state.”
He shot off, spun around, shot back over. The groupies whooped and clapped. Finn beamed.
Wyatt could see he needed to get Finn offstage, away from an audience, if he wanted to have anything that resembled a real conversation with him.
“Lyle,” he said, “can we go outside and talk in private?”
“Why?” Finn shot off again. “Privacy is piracy! Anything I say to you I can say to the whole beautiful universe!”
The groupies whooped and clapped.
“If you’re thinking we might trade jobs,” Wyatt told Dixon as they watched Finn zip past, “you can forget about that.”
“I’ve been doing this for twenty-three years,” Dixon said. He shook his head, bewildered. “Lyle! Please surrender the Segway!”
Finn did a few more figure eights, then looped back over. He followed Wyatt downstairs and out to one of the loading docks. Finn looked around—for an audience, presumably. When he found one lacking, he sat down with his back against the wall and turned his face up to the warm October sun.
“So you’re a private investigator?” Finn said. “Right on.”
“Is the kilt comfortable,” Wyatt said, “or is it just the thing you do?”
“My shtick?” Finn said. “It’s both. Now it is. It started out because I was tired of getting my ass kicked in high school.”
“You figured wearing a kilt in high school would stop you from getting your ass kicked?”
Finn looked more his actual age in this light. Wyatt could see the wrinkles, the fine crosshatching.
“I figured if I was gonna get my ass kicked every day in high school anyway, because the jocks thought I was some weirdo, this weird arty weirdo, I might as well go full-on, full-out weirdo, you know?”
“How did that go?”
Finn cupped his hands in front of him. “According to the Vedas, if one sows goodness, one reaps goodness.”
“So here’s the deal,” Wyatt said. “Somebody broke into the Land Run and turned it upside down. Literally. Did you happen to notice anything suspicious last night, late?”
“No way! The Land Run?” Finn sprang to his feet. “I love that place, man. I love playing there. The energy is phenomenal. We played our very first show there. You know, the first show that wasn’t in, like, somebody’s basement. No way, man! The Land Run?”
Wyatt tried again. “Last night. Did you see anything at all? The windows in your warehouse look right down on the back of the Land Run.”
“I was in back most of the night, at the kiln. Clay is the one truly honest artistic medium. Earth, hands, fire. What I’m into now, I use clay to create functional erotic art.”
“Say no more,” Wyatt said. Please.
“They’re not dildos. I find it deeply offensive when people call them that.”
“Lyle.”
“Do you know what Filipino sailors do for the pleasure of their female sexual partners? They’re called bolitas. They make incisions in their penis and insert tiny metal ball bearings.”
“Lyle.”
“What?”
Wyatt put his hands on Finn’s shoulders. “Did you see or hear anything last night?”
“I don’t think so. No. Wait.” He put his hands on Wyatt’s shoulders. “You don’t think it’s me, do you?”
“What?”
“The Land Run is just on the other side of the fence. What if whoever broke in there really meant to break in here and they just got the building wrong? It’s starting to freak me out, man. What if, you know, this is all about me?”
Wyatt suspected that when you were a rock star, it was always all about you.
He eased out from beneath Finn’s hands. “I think you’re good,” he said.
Wyatt made his way back up the alley between the Land Run and the warehouse. Candace’s nearest neighbor to the east, on the other side of the vacant lot, was a place that sold discount cigarettes. Wyatt walked over and went inside. The guy behind the counter, an older Latino man packing cartons of Parliaments into a box, nodded to him.
“Hello, my friend,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
The guy’s smile was friendly but guarded. Wyatt guessed that the discount-cigarette business was not exactly as pure as the driven snow. Wyatt explained what had happened last night at the Land Run. He asked the guy if he’d heard or seen anything.
The guy pondered and then shook his head. “I am afraid not, my friend.”
Wyatt wasn’t shocked. He thanked the guy and walked out to his car. In the parking lot behind the Land Run, he heard two voices he couldn’t quite make out—one quietly angry, one quietly angrier. Wyatt squeezed back through the hole in the fence, made his way up the dirt path, and peeked around the corner. Lyle Finn was now standing on the loading dock of the warehouse with Dixon, his manager.
“You better believe me, Lyle!” the manager said. He went inside, slamming the door behind him.
Finn closed his eyes and pressed his hands together as if he were praying. After a few seconds, he opened his eyes and kicked the door. He kicked it again.