The Long and Faraway Gone

by Lou Berney

  Wyatt nodded. While thinking, Well, shit. This was why, as a detective, you’d better enjoy the journey as much as you could. Because sometimes you got all the way to your destination only to discover you weren’t welcome there.

  “Well,” he said. “I understand. Begrudgingly. I really did enjoy lunch, though. Thank you.”

  He stood. She didn’t. She was giving Wyatt a curious look. He sat back down. He realized he hadn’t understood her at all.

  “You’re not talking about your loyalty,” he said. “You’re talking about Jeff’s.”

  Her eyes blazed. “He had an affair with Greg’s wife. He ruined Greg’s marriage and destroyed his life. His own brother. That’s why Greg didn’t leave him the Land Run.”

  Wyatt

  CHAPTER 18

  Wyatt had checked for a tail when he left the Land Run. He checked again when he left downtown. He was clean as far as he could tell, but traffic was heavy and every other car on the road seemed to be a silver Honda CRV. On Hudson he bounced lanes at the last second and hooked onto Twelfth Street. The silver CRV he’d had his eye on continued up Hudson without him.

  Emilia had given him the name of Greg Eddy’s ex-­wife, who’d moved to Florida after the divorce. Wyatt thought about calling to confirm she’d had a brief affair with Jeff Eddy and that Greg had been devastated when he found out. What was the point of calling, though? Wyatt believed Emilia. And, regardless, he already had all the evidence he needed that Jeff Eddy was a sleazy, duplicitous tool. In terms of the Candace case, the affair didn’t really move the ball up the field. What Wyatt needed was concrete evidence that linked Jeff Eddy to the harassment.

  Wyatt’s phone rang. Gavin, calling from Vegas.

  “Did you put up a fight at least?” Gavin said. “Or did you just let the guy knock you around until he got bored?”

  “That was quick.”

  “Candace has developed a certain affection for you. I tried to explain her error in judgment.”

  “Thank you. You’ll be getting the hospital bill, by the way.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “You can rest easy.”

  “I am resting easy,” Gavin said. “I’m just gathering facts.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Do you have any leads?”

  “Lots of them,” Wyatt said. “Unless you mean something that actually leads somewhere.”

  “I told you to spend a day on this. A day or two, max. You’re just my goodwill gesture. If you’re trying to make me feel guilty by staying out there, it won’t work.”

  “I believe you.”

  Wyatt listened to the staticky purr of cell-­phone silence. The sound of Gavin trying to figure him out. Good luck with that.

  “Send me the hospital bill,” Gavin said, and hung up.

  Wyatt checked his rearview mirror again. Once tailed, twice shy. Once tailed, jumped, and beaten senseless with a board, twice really, really shy.

  He saw nothing suspicious behind him, so he pulled off Sixty-­third and parked on the street next to the playground. He crossed to the lot behind the Burlington Coat Factory.

  A thought had been nagging at him ever since he’d been here earlier that morning. Maybe the thought had been nagging at him ever since last night’s football game, when he’d sat there listening to the University of Oklahoma fight song and remembering the old bat in the Cadillac, the car horn that played “Boomer Sooner.”

  The original Dumpster had been positioned near the back of the parking lot, centered between the two auditorium exit doors and parallel to the building, sixty feet away. Wyatt found the spot. Lifting the lid of the Dumpster with one hand, wrestling the bag of garbage up and over the side with your other hand—­the doorman’s back was turned to the auditorium. It would have been easy for the killers to slip through the propped-­open exit door without Grubb spotting them.

  But.

  Wyatt stood with his back to the building. On the night of the massacre, the Dumpster had not been in its usual spot. The old bat’s Cadillac had rammed the corner of the Dumpster—­at an angle, hard. The force of the impact had turned the Dumpster sideways.

  Right after the murders, Wyatt had forgotten all about the old bat in the Cadillac. Could you blame him? But then Detective Siddell walked him through the events of the day, over and over, a dozen times or more, and Wyatt remembered. Siddell took notes on the details and sent uniforms out to track the old bat down. That lead, as expected, led exactly nowhere.

  Now, though, standing here again in the parking lot, Wyatt started to wonder. How much had the Dumpster been turned? He rotated forty-­five degrees to his left. That seemed pretty close. Maybe it had been less than that, but even so . . .

  He lifted the lid of the imaginary Dumpster with his left hand. He wrestled the invisible trash bag with his right. With the Dumpster turned forty-­five degrees, or even, say, thirty degrees, Wyatt had a clear view of both exit doors. Grubb, when he dumped the trash on the night of the massacre, would’ve had that same clear view of both exit doors. There was no way one person could have snuck past him and into the auditorium, let alone three. Grubb would have seen them.

  So how, then, did the killers get into the auditorium?

  The question, Wyatt supposed, was academic.

  His knee had started to ache. He was walking back to his car when his phone buzzed. A text from a number Wyatt didn’t recognize: Are you busy?

  Wyatt sent a text back: DEPENDS. WHO IS THIS?

  His phone buzzed again.

  SORRY THIS IS CHIP.

  Who? For a second, Wyatt came up empty. And then he remembered: Chip. Who had begged Wyatt to find out if his wife was cheating on him. Shit. Wyatt decided to ignore the text.

  CHIP FROM THE FRONT DESK SORRY.

  Wyatt sighed and hit the CALL button on his phone.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look into anything yet, Chip,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s only been a day.” Had it? Wyatt couldn’t remember now. “Or two. Okay, Chip?”

  “So you’re still going to help me, Mr. Rivers? You haven’t changed your mind or anything? Because I know you said how busy you are, and—­”

  “It’s been one day, Chip. I haven’t changed my mind. You need to be patient.”

  “It’s really hard.”

  “I’ll call you when I know something.”

  Wyatt ended the call. It was a little after three, which gave him a few hours until the Halloween parade began downtown. He could go back to the hotel and take the nap he badly needed, or he could start looking into Chip’s case. The choice was clear, unfortunately. Wyatt knew that the texts and calls would keep coming until he could give Chip some news, good or bad.

  He took out his notebook and skimmed the information Chip had given him yesterday. Chip’s wife, Megan, was a stylist who worked at a salon in Nichols Hills Plaza called A Snip in Time. According to Chip, she worked Tuesday through Saturday, nine to six. Most days she took a quick break at noon, for lunch, and another around four, for coffee.

  Wyatt drove up Wilshire, through the heart of Nichols Hills. Rolling green-­velvet lawns and big mansions—­Spanish Colonials and antebellum plantation houses built in the twenties and thirties, a ­couple of sprawling bomb bunkers from the swinging sixties.

  Nichols Hills Plaza was on Western, just north of Sixty-­third. The parking lot was, helpfully, large and crowded with cars. Wyatt found a spot near the back that gave him a good angle on A Snip in Time. He rolled down his window and settled in.

  Twenty minutes later a young woman stepped out of the salon and headed toward the Starbucks at the other end of the shopping plaza. Wyatt checked the photo that Chip had texted him. A match. Megan, Chip’s wife, was a petite, fresh-­faced pixie in her mid-­twenties, with a sort of cubist hairstyle, lots of slants and streaks, c
hunky layers and wedges. In the photo, a candid close-­up of her that it looked as if Chip had taken on a beach, she was smiling, her enormous brown eyes alive with mischief. In real life, this afternoon, hurrying to Starbucks, Chip’s wife looked a little preoccupied, a little tired.

  Wyatt tried to read her body language, her walk. Was this a girl having an affair? Was she feeling guilty, nervous, amped? Was she worn down by all the effort it was taking, the sneaking around and the lies and the need, at every turn, to rationalize her sins to herself ? Was she worn out by all the excellent illicit sex she was having?

  Or, on the other hand, was this a girl who worked way too many hours a week and just wanted to collapse on the sofa in front of The Millionaire Matchmaker when she got home from work, who was being driven up a wall by her needy and needlessly paranoid husband?

  Wyatt waited for Megan to emerge from the Starbucks. When she did, carrying a big cup of coffee, she wasn’t alone. A male barista in a green apron held the door for her and then followed her out onto the patio. He was small, lean, and black, with thick-­framed hipster glasses and a carefully tended fauxhawk—­the opposite in almost every way of big, bashful, apple-­cheeked Chip. Wyatt remembered poor doomed Bledsoe back in Vegas and how the girls he chased looked nothing like the girls he caught.

  The two of them stood for a minute on the patio, Megan and the barista, chatting. Just that, it seemed to Wyatt: chatting. But when Chip’s wife turned to go, she paused and reached back to give the barista’s hand a quick squeeze.

  An innocent, friendly squeeze? Or not? Wyatt got out of his car and strolled down to Starbucks. Inside, the barista with the hipster glasses and fauxhawk was back behind the counter, pouring beans into a grinder.

  Wyatt saw that he was wearing a wedding ring. Which didn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that the barista was gay, but—­this was Oklahoma after all—­reduced the odds significantly. Still, though, Wyatt thought he’d better find out for sure.

  He pointed at the kid. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” Wyatt said.

  The kid pointed back at him. “Do you ever go to the Starbucks at Nichols Hills Plaza?”

  Wyatt laughed. A fellow smart-­ass, a brother-­in-­arms. “C’mon. Help me out here.”

  “Okay.” The kid studied Wyatt. “Nope. Sorry. Don’t take it personally.”

  “Does your wife maybe work at that place on Twenty-­third? The cupcake place?”

  “Not that I know of,” the kid said. “I wish she did. Those cupcakes rock.”

  That answered one question—­he was married to a she. As for the larger question, Wyatt couldn’t think of an offhand way to ask the barista if he happened to be banging a pixie hairstylist on the side.

  Wyatt bought coffee, left a five-­dollar tip, and returned to his car. An hour passed. Clouds came, clouds went. The coffee kept Wyatt awake. Around five-­thirty the barista with the fauxhawk emerged from Starbucks. He made his way up to the hair salon and went inside. Five minutes later he came back out. A spring in his step? Maybe. He got into an old Jeep Cherokee and turned north on Western.

  Was Chip’s wife cheating on him? Wyatt wasn’t prepared to call it yet. Gun to his head, he’d probably guess probably. But only probably. The evidence was far from conclusive. Wyatt waited. Six o’clock came and went—­Megan was working late. At six-­twenty still no sign of her, Wyatt started his car and headed downtown. He’d have to pick this thread up again later—­or hope he could talk Chip into letting it go.

  BROADWAY WAS SHUT down from Thirteenth Street on. Wyatt finally found a parking space a few blocks away and walked over to what appeared to be a staging area. He hit the skeletons first, a dozen ­people in full makeup and black bodysuits. The bodysuits were fitted with anatomically correct vinyl bones—­arms and legs, rib cage and spinal cord, pelvis. When Wyatt passed, heads turned, skulls grinned. It was a little unnerving.

  After the skeletons came floats. One flatbed trailer was decorated to look like a graveyard, with ghostly ballerinas practicing twirls between the headstones and snapping cell-­phone photos of one another. The bed of another pickup was crowded with half a dozen somber, panting German shepherds dressed like tarantulas. Each dog had four extra jointed and furry legs, surprisingly realistic, attached with elastic bands.

  A woman painted green, head to toe, moved from dog to dog with a bag of treats. She paused to study Wyatt.

  “What are you supposed to be?” she said. The whites of her eyes gleamed against her green skin. “Hold on. Let me try to guess.”

  The woman was kind of attractive. Because of all the green paint or despite it? Wyatt couldn’t decide.

  “Have you seen Lyle Finn?” he said. He stroked the head of the nearest German shepherd. The dog seemed to recognize the indignity of its situation but be determined to rise above it.

  “I know,” the green-­skinned woman said. “Are you supposed to be like a white Obama?”

  A white Obama? Wyatt supposed it was the suit he was wearing.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Have you seen Lyle Finn? And zombies, I think.”

  She shook her head. “Lyle’s not here yet. He’s always the very last part. He’s the grand finale.”

  Wyatt borrowed a map of the parade route from a pair of bored teenage vampires, checked the time, and started walking. The sun dropped beneath the horizon and then detonated, torching the racks of clouds stacked up above the downtown skyline. Wyatt had forgotten how quickly, in the vast empty sky of the southern plains, the ordinary could turn so flamboyant.

  Night fell. The crowds along Broadway built. Wyatt had to squeeze his way through the park across from the old newspaper building. By the time he reached Bricktown and the bleachers set up in the parking lot across from the baseball stadium, the marching band at the head of the parade—­their plumed shakos splattered with fake blood, of course—­had caught and passed him. They played a slow, gloomy version of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” from the Broadway musical Oklahoma! A nice touch.

  Wyatt found a seat in the bleachers and watched the rest of the parade from there. The ballerinas in the graveyard twirled and scissor-­kicked. A squadron of drag queens buzzed by on roller skates. The German shepherds, released from their truck, trotted somberly past in tight formation, their tarantula legs jiggling. A dozen demonic clowns piled out of a slow-­moving hearse. And then back in. And then back out.

  Some of the floats were charmingly half-­assed. One was just a beat-­up old Chevy with a pair of beach balls glued to the hood and painted to look like eyeballs.

  The crowd applauded everyone and everything. After an hour or so, flames began to flicker in the dark distance, beneath the Bricktown bridge. Wyatt heard the hollow boom and shiver of a gong. A current of anticipation ran through the spectators on the sidewalks, up through the bleachers. The ­people around Wyatt stood, so he stood, too.

  Here came the Marching Zombies. Until now Wyatt had seen only the unpainted papier-­mâché heads. Now he got the full effect—­crazed eyes, convincingly rotted and bloodstained teeth, missing chunks of cheek and jowl. The oversize heads were three or four times the size of a normal head, so when you added in the stilts, each zombie was nine or ten feet tall. And there had to be at least a hundred of them, tiki torches ablaze, lurching forward with every beat of the gong. Wyatt had to admit it was pretty damn impressive.

  Behind the zombies was an Aztec temple that had been constructed on a flatbed trailer. Lyle Finn—­in his kilt and a white tuxedo jacket with tails—­stood at the top of the pyramid. With one hand he bashed a gong. With the other hand he fired a confetti cannon out over the crowd.

  “Obey!” a voice boomed over a PA system at the base of the pyramid. Wyatt realized Finn was wearing one of those wireless microphone headsets. “Obey!”

  And that was it. The Marching Zombies lurched past and headed toward the breakdown area, a block farther alo
ng, where the long snake of the parade had stopped to curl up. Finn and the Aztec temple rolled past, followed a few minutes later by a lone golf cart. In the back of the golf cart rode a dazed-­looking guy, still wearing stilts, who was hugging half a cracked zombie head to his chest.

  A guy in an EMT’s uniform was driving the golf cart. Finn’s manager sat in the seat next to him. He saw Wyatt and gave him two thumbs-­ups. A hundred papier-­mâché zombie heads hadn’t erupted in flames—­a good night for all concerned.

  Wyatt waited until the crowd of spectators thinned, and then he walked over to the breakdown area. Marchers milled around without their zombie heads, their real hair plastered with sweat. Most of them were still on stilts. There was a lot of hugging and high-­fiving and spontaneous whooping, a lot of chugging from the water bottles that parade volunteers in reflective vests were handing out. Other volunteers were busy snuffing out the flames of the tiki torches.

  The Aztec temple was on the far side of the parking lot. Wyatt dodged a developing conga line and headed over. Finn stood on the bottom step of the pyramid, surrounded by a throng of adoring fans as he ate a candy apple. He beamed and waved to the sea of iPads held aloft that recorded the moment for posterity. His bare chest under the tuxedo jacket glittered—­bits of metallic confetti that had blown back onto him during the parade and stuck.

  Two zombies stood below Finn, flanking him. When a woman with a baby tried to hand the baby up to him—­for his blessing? as an offering?—­one of the bodyguard zombies waved her off. Finn waved her on. He gave the candy apple to a zombie, wiped his hands on his kilt, and lifted the baby above his head. The fans cheered. The baby’s mother just about lost her shit, she was so excited, shrieking and snapping photos. After a few seconds, Finn gave the baby back and retrieved his candy apple.

  Wyatt worked his way to the edge of the flatbed.

  “Lyle!” he shouted over the song blasting from the PA. It was the Barking Johnsons song that everyone knew, a catchy, crunchy piece of hard guitar pop about time passing, horses, and the psychedelic robot jockeys who rode them.