The Long and Faraway Gone

by Lou Berney

  Wyatt ate dinner on Automobile Alley, a stretch of Broadway that long ago had been lined with car dealerships. Abandoned for decades, the historic old Art Deco showrooms had been converted to upscale restaurants and shops. The grass-­fed rib eye that Wyatt ordered was as good as anything he’d ever eaten in Vegas or L.A.

  After dinner he headed over to the Land Run. There was a long line out front, but Fudge, the giant guy who worked the door, spotted Wyatt and waved him up.

  “Yo!” he said. “What up, Mr. PI? Mr. PI. Mr. VIPI.”

  “How’s your swag, Fudge?” Wyatt said. “Are we talking legit or not?”

  “Oh, legit. No question.” He bumped fists with Wyatt. “You see what happen last night?”

  “I saw it.”

  “Somebody turn all this shit upside down. I’m talking upside down. Took us all day get it all turned right side up again. I’m talking all day.”

  “I’m on it,” Wyatt said. “Is the boss around?”

  “Yeah. But let me ax you a question first, Mr. VIPI. You know why they call me Fudge?”

  Wyatt suspected he did know. But he noticed a ­couple of girls at the front of the line who were listening in. Fudge had noticed them, too. Wyatt was happy to oblige.

  “You know, I don’t,” Wyatt said. “Why do they call you Fudge?”

  “Because,” Fudge said for the benefit of the honeys, “I am dark and sweet and no woman can’t get enough of me.”

  The honeys giggled. Wyatt bumped fists again with Fudge as he stepped past.

  Inside, the Land Run was packed and happily raucous as everyone waited for the next band of the night to take the stage. The crowd skewed white and youngish, with a lot of college-­age kids, but other and older demographics were represented to a surprising degree. There were hippies and bearded hipsters and barflies and yuppies and rednecks and a pair of elderly lesbians, holding hands. A white Sikh and a black cowboy.

  The mix was probably different from what it had been in Wyatt’s day. Hipsters, for example, had not yet been invented in 1986, and he spotted no girls now with ’Til Tuesday hair and eye shadow. But he was glad to see it was still a mix: Oklahomans from all walks of life brought together by a shared love of off-­the-­beaten-­path music played loud in a scruffy, intimate venue—­and adventurous enough to park their cars at night in a neighborhood like this one.

  Wyatt remembered what O’Malley had called the Land Run: the Church of All Sorts.

  He squeezed his way to the bar and caught the eye of the bartender. Dallas, with her elaborate, colorful tattoos and silver nose hoop. Tonight she had epic hair, a pompadour with a ponytail. Dark red lipstick, Cleopatra eyes.

  “Hey there, you,” she said.

  “Dallas. You’re looking very rockabilly tonight.”

  “That’s the idea. You want a drink?” Her Oklahoma twang made it sound like drank. “Wyatt. Like the sheriff.”

  “No thank you.”

  “Your loss.”

  “Don’t be that way,” Wyatt said. “I feel like we can still make this relationship work.”

  “Too late. I’m fixin’ to move on with my life.”

  She headed off with a toss of her ponytail. She pulled a ­couple of drafts and delivered them to the end of the bar. Banged four glasses down and hit them with ice, tonic, vodka, and lime wheels. Broke a twenty with one hand while with the other she hit two more glasses with ice and Jack Daniel’s.

  A minute later she worked her way back down the bar to where Wyatt was standing.

  “I knew you’d be back,” he said.

  “Guess I can’t stay away.” Cain’t. “You crack the case yet?”

  “This close,” Wyatt said. “Here. Let me see that one.”

  She let him have her forearm. Wyatt held it, he turned it this way and that.

  “That’s a tattoo of a phoenix, Dallas,” he said. “Rising from the ashes.”

  “I know what it is. I designed it.”

  “Did you?”

  “I apprentice over at Ink & Roses in the Plaza District. Three more months and out I go, on my own.”

  Wyatt traced the tail of the phoenix with his thumb. The tattoo had great color and detail. Every individual feather in the plumage was a different shade of red or yellow or green.

  “A woman of many talents,” Wyatt said.

  “Get a room, you two,” the grizzled old guy next to Wyatt growled. He had dyed black hair and a matching soul patch. He lifted his empty glass and rattled the ice cubes.

  Wyatt gave Dallas her arm back, and she started making the old guy a fresh drink.

  “You know where Candace is?” Wyatt said.

  “Don’t look now.”

  Candace was up in the balcony, at the rail, glaring down at Wyatt. He made his way up the creaking wooden stairs.

  “Stop flirting with my bartender,” Candace said. “Do that on your own time.”

  “I’m not. And I have my own time?”

  “No. Not until you figure out who’s trying to screw up my life.”

  He followed her to a booth at the far end of the balcony. The table was piled with stacks of invoices, inventory sheets, receipts. Half a dozen Red Bull empties and a plastic clamshell with the remains of a Caesar salad. A Disney Princesses coloring book.

  Wyatt slid into the booth across from her. “Your office?”

  “Mr. Eddy’s, too,” Candace said. “He told me. He said this way he could keep an eye on everything. He said what fun was it owning a place like this if you couldn’t listen to the music? He was such a sweet old dude. That’s him.”

  She pointed to the framed black-­and-­white photo that hung on the wall of the booth. It showed a kid barely out of his teens with a friendly, open face. Next to him stood a guy with an acoustic guitar who looked like a young Johnny Cash. Wyatt realized it was the young Johnny Cash.

  “I left you like four messages,” Candace said. “Where were you all day? What if it was an emergency?”

  “You would have said so. I was at the OU game with Jeff Eddy. Drinking beer in the crisp autumn breeze.”

  Candace ignored the provocation and checked the incoming number that was making her phone buzz. She growled.

  “What now?” she said into the phone. She listened. “No! It’s not cool if they all come over! I said you could have just your boyfriend over.” She listened. “No! I said she should be in bed by eight-­thirty! She’s five years old! Let me talk to Lily, please.”

  Wyatt picked up a postcard with a picture of a sea turtle soaring past a coral garden. The most recent rub-­it-­in greeting from Lily’s father, Candace’s ex. The postmark was from Paia, Hawaii, stamped Tuesday, the day Wyatt had arrived in Oklahoma City.

  “Maui is better then ever. It’s always nice weather. Sabrina and I have a house on the beach now. One wall is all glass. My new job pays two times what the old one did. Life is good!—­Brandon.”

  Wyatt put the postcard back on the table. Karlene had been so excited about moving to Hawaii. She was scheduled to leave on the Wednesday after the Friday she was murdered. Her airline ticket had been purchased back in June, and she carried it around in her purse. Whenever a customer or Mr. Bingham really pissed her off, she’d take the ticket out of her purse, give it a big wet smack of a kiss, and then put it back away.

  “Hi, baby,” Candace said into the phone. “What’s shaking? Did you brush your teeth yet? It’s time for bed.”

  Wyatt remembered how Grubb one time, teasing, had asked Karlene if she’d let him kiss her ticket to Hawaii, too. Karlene had laughed and said he could kiss this. Grubb had said, “Yeah, I wish!” Everyone hanging out around the concession stand, Wyatt and Tate and Janella and O’Malley, had thought that was the funniest exchange in the history of comedy.

  The lights went down, and the crowd downstairs roared as the band took the stage. Wya
tt remembered the Hüsker Dü show in the spring of 1986, the crowd in front of the stage so packed you could barely breathe, Wyatt giddy because his terrible fake ID had finally worked. Theresa stood on his left, Karlene on his right.

  What shape would Karlene’s life have taken, Wyatt wondered, if she’d been allowed to live it? Would she have settled forever in Hawaii or spent six months there before she returned to Oklahoma, homesick and broke? Would she have ended up marrying a tool like Jeff Eddy? Would she have a kid and an ex-­husband like Candace’s who sent taunting postcards about his great life far away in paradise? Or would she be down on the dance floor of the Land Run right now, whipping her hair around like there was no tomorrow?

  And Grubb, Theresa, Melody, O’Malley. Who would they be now, if they’d survived that night in the projection booth? What would they be? Where? Wyatt had tried hard over the years to resist this sort of speculation. He tried to remember the line from Lear. “That way madness lies.” Or more madness. A different kind.

  The band downstairs was playing an old-­fashioned country-­roadhouse stomp. A guy with a stand-­up bass, a drummer with just a kick, a snare, and a cymbal, a female lead singer in red cowboy boots and a black net funeral veil.

  Candace kissed Lily good night over the phone and hung up. She picked up the postcard Wyatt had been looking at.

  “No way is Brandon’s life that awesome,” she said. “Jerk. He’s probably sleeping in his car on the beach. He’s probably working at Burger King.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Not long. I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Does he pay child support?”

  “I don’t want his money. I don’t want to ever think about him again.”

  “It was that rocky?”

  She sighed. “I picked the wrong dude. Okay?”

  “You wouldn’t be the first woman.”

  “I thought he was a nice dude. He could be, when he wanted something.”

  “When did you split up?”

  “A ­couple of years ago.”

  “Does Lily ask about him?”

  “No. Not really. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about him. That’s the past. Now, shut up about it, I’m serious.”

  She did look serious, in a way Wyatt had never seen her look before.

  The woman onstage downstairs could sing. She was doing justice to a cover of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.” She was setting the song on fire.

  “So what’s your story?” Candace said. “Do you have kids? I don’t know anything about you.”

  “I’m a mile wide and an inch deep. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  That surprised him. “Who says I don’t have a girlfriend?”

  Candace leaned across the table and thwacked Wyatt in the sternum with her knuckle. “You were watching football and drinking beer?” she said.

  “I was gathering intelligence.” Wyatt told her about Jeff Eddy’s proposal. “So all I need to do now is convince you to sell and find out what lowball offer you’re willing to take.”

  “I! Am! Not! Selling!”

  “Really? You never mentioned.”

  Candace glanced down at the woman onstage, then back at Wyatt. “Does all this mean Mr. Eddy’s brother probably is or isn’t the one screwing with me?” she said. “I can’t decide.”

  “Neither can I,” Wyatt said. “Now, tell me about Lyle Finn.”

  “Who?”

  “Lyle Finn, your neighbor, lead singer of the Barking Johnsons.”

  “Oh! The goof in the kilt.”

  “That’s the one.” Wyatt doubted it was connected to his case—­the little argument he’d happened to witness between Finn and his manager on the loading dock—­but it was always best to leave no stone unturned. Especially when you had so few stones to turn over in the first place. “Are you aware he creates functional erotic art?”

  “Functional erotic art? How does that work?”

  “Gradually, I guess,” Wyatt said, “and then all at once.”

  “That goof! I had to deal with him, like, my first week here. He was totally screwing Mr. Eddy over! He’d play a show here and make Mr. Eddy give him all the door and half the bar on top of that. Because, I don’t know, he’s this supposedly famous rock star and he was doing Mr. Eddy a big favor? But he’s not that famous a rock star!”

  “You told him that?” Wyatt didn’t have to guess how Lyle Finn would have taken that news.

  “Sure. And none of his fans drink! Not the hard-­core hippie ones. They just get baked out in the parking lot before the show. So the bar take is, like, almost nothing to start with. I told him he could have half the door and none of the bar. Take it or leave it.”

  Wyatt picked up an empty Red Bull can and tossed it at Candace. She ducked out of the way.

  “Hey!”

  “You’re right, Candace. I don’t see how any of this information could possibly have been useful to me two days ago.”

  “Screw you!” she said. But she sounded almost more contrite than defiant. Almost. “I forgot about it. It was way back when I first took over. Do you have any idea how busy I am?”

  “You’ve mentioned. So what happened after you punctured his ego and played hardball with him?”

  “I didn’t! It was a fair deal.” She sold it for a beat, and then her big white smile flashed. “Nothing happened. He got pissed off. He said, I don’t remember, something about how I was a thug and I was stepping on art with my boots.”

  “A jackbooted thug.”

  “Whatever. Do you think he’s the one?”

  “I don’t know,” Wyatt said.

  An minor altercation seemed to be developing down at the corner of the stage—­an overenthusiastic young mosher and the pair of elderly lesbians. Candace had already spotted it. She stood.

  “Well,” she said. “Find out!”

  WYATT COULD SEE from the back lot of the Land Run that the windows of Lyle Finn’s warehouse were dark. He decided to call it a day—­it had been a long one—­and track down the supposedly famous rock star in the morning. The supposedly famous rock star who had failed to mention his feud with Candace.

  On the way back to the hotel, Wyatt drifted. Out to the lake, around the lake. Back across town and past the Cowboy Hall of Fame, home to the famous statue of an American Indian slumped on his horse. Oklahoma was where the Trail of Tears ended.

  He drifted through the neighborhood where Theresa had lived—­small old houses with weathered stone facing and peaked, witch’s-­hat roofs. He rolled slowly along and tried to remember which block Theresa had lived on.

  He drifted over to May Avenue, up May Avenue. He stopped at Homeland for a six-­pack of beer and then, once again, found himself back at the Burlington Coat Factory that used to be the Pheasant Run Mall. He drove around back and parked.

  The little playground, where the theater crew had often gathered late at night after work, was deserted. Wyatt was sad to see that the rusty old merry-­go-­round was gone. Liability issues, probably. And the swings and slide and jungle gym had been updated. Only the playground’s source of light was vintage—­a single fatigued streetlamp with a drooping gooseneck, barely enough wattage to attract bugs.

  Wyatt took a seat on a swing and cracked open a bottle of beer. The playground faced, across the street, what used to be the back of the theater. The OSBI investigators theorized that the killers had entered the theater there, through one of the auditorium exit doors that were now plastered over.

  Every night, after the last show ended and the last customer left, one of the doormen went through the auditoriums row by row—­picking up empty popcorn buckets and nacho boats. After he bagged all the trash, he lugged it out to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot. You were supposed to pull the auditorium exit
door shut and locked behind you, then come back in through the main mall entrance. But the doormen always just propped it open with a rock, so they could get back in that way and not have to trek around to the far side of the building.

  According to the OSBI, the killers must have watched the theater and learned the routine. They waited until Grubb—­on trash duty that night—­turned his back to wrestle with the lid of the Dumpster, and then they slipped in through the door that had been left propped open. It was the only explanation. There were no signs of forced entry, and the double dead bolt on the glass front doors of the theater had been locked when the janitors arrived the morning after. The robbers could not have hidden in the theater after the last show. The doormen, going row by row through the auditoriums, stocking the bathrooms, would have discovered them.

  Wyatt, rocking in the playground swing, wondered if the killers had lurked here, watching and waiting for Grubb to bring out the trash. Right here, on the spot where a week earlier Karlene had blown out the eighteen candles on her birthday cake.

  It was just the luck of the draw that Wyatt hadn’t been on trash duty that night. Would it have made a difference? Would he be dead now and Grubb alive?

  The killers had timed it perfectly. Mall management was always trying to save money, so from midnight till eight there was only a single guard on duty. Disco Otis, who positioned himself in the mall, outside the theater, until the crowds cleared and Mr. Bingham locked the front doors. At that point Otis rotated through the mall to the main parking lot, then around to the back lot. The killers would have been inside the auditorium before he made it there.

  Wyatt stood and walked over to the new slide. It seemed shorter than the old one. The old slide, he could climb to the top and see the roof of his house in the distance.

  The day after Wyatt tried to tell Theresa he loved her and she shushed him by pressing two fingers to his lips, he worked the matinee shift with her. Just the two of them—­Theresa selling and tearing tickets, Wyatt in the concession stand.

  It was the longest seven hours of his life. Theresa acted like nothing had happened between them. For her, Wyatt remembered thinking, nothing had happened between them. She told him to get a new bucket of pickles from storage. She knocked twice on the counter when she saw Mr. Bingham’s office door open, so Wyatt could pretend to be sweeping the lobby. She sat on the edge of the fountain, smoking and yawning. Wyatt knew he was going to die, of heartbreak or humiliation—­he just wasn’t sure which would kill him first.