by Lou Berney
The list wasn’t long. The Pheasant Run Twin was small even by the standards of the day, with only two screens and auditoriums that held maybe two hundred people each. On a slow day or night, three employees could run the place—a cashier to sell and tear tickets, one person to work the concession stand, the projectionist.
On the day of the massacre, Tate and Janella had worked the matinee shift and clocked out at six. They were gone even before the old lady rammed the Dumpster with her Cadillac.
The matinee projectionist, Haygood, had also clocked out at six. Ingram, the night projectionist, never stayed a minute longer than he had to—you could hear him thudding down the stairs almost before the last reel of the night stopped spinning. Wyatt couldn’t remember precisely, but he knew that Ingram was gone before Grubb even started the auditorium sweep—at least thirty minutes before the killers showed up.
Tate. Janella. Haygood. Ingram. At the time of the robbery, there had been ten employees of the Pheasant Twin: the five dead, the four living, and Wyatt.
He switched off the microfiche reader—the fan panting, the metal growing warm from the lamp inside. He tried to get his head around the possibility that someone he’d known, someone he’d seen every day for months, had been working with the killers.
Tate. Janella. Haygood. Ingram.
On the way to the library, Wyatt had driven up Northwest Expressway. On the north side of the curve, near Classen, was a development of big-box chain stores—Old Navy, Walmart, Babies “R” Us, a Nordstrom Rack. In the eighties, that had been the site of the abandoned Belle Isle power plant, its smokestack visible for miles around. Steel plates welded over the doors and lower windows had enticed local teenagers to break in. Rumor had it that the power plant was haunted by the ghosts of kids who’d plunged to their deaths in the darkness while exploring the massive, derelict building.
Wyatt himself had never been inside. One afternoon in May, though, after a late-spring thunderstorm, Tate bought a couple of forty-ounce Budweiser bottles from the Circle K on Western and took Wyatt four-wheeling on the muddy grounds of the power plant, in his old red Ford F-150. It was a blast. Wyatt didn’t remember where O’Malley had been at the time. If O’Malley had been there, he would have insisted they explore the abandoned power plant. He would have figured out a way to get in.
Tate and Wyatt had gotten along well, but they weren’t tight the way Wyatt was tight with O’Malley or the way Tate was tight with Grubb. Wyatt couldn’t think of another time when it had been just him and Tate hanging out together, none of the others around.
Was it Tate who made copies of the front-door keys and gave them to the killers? But why would Tate have them murder Grubb, his best friend, and leave Wyatt alive?
Janella’s attitude toward Wyatt, most of the time, was one of general annoyance. That was her attitude, most of the time, toward everyone. She was a tiny wisp of a girl, but she could drink anyone except O’Malley under the table. Her relationship with Melody, the other black girl at the theater, was prickly. Janella had much lighter skin than Melody, and straightened her hair. Melody had the cornrows and went to church every Sunday.
Janella liked Wyatt, she tolerated him. They’d even made out a few times on break, getting moderately hot and heavy, the winter after Wyatt started work at the theater. More from boredom, though, than anything else. If Janella was the one who gave the killers the keys to the theater, why would she tell them to spare Wyatt and not Melody? Janella’s relationship with Melody was prickly, but they were like sisters.
After the murders Wyatt never saw or talked to Tate or Janella again. He didn’t try to contact them, and they, as far as he knew, didn’t try to contact him. Maybe they found the prospect of meeting again as unbearable as he did.
If you set aside Tate and Janella, that left only Haygood and Ingram, the projectionists. They were surly old union guys in their fifties, heavy smokers, limpers both. Haygood was white, Ingram black. When they arrived for a shift, they limped across the lobby without making eye contact and headed straight upstairs to the booth. O’Malley called Haygood and Ingram the phantoms of the opera. He claimed that he’d seen the inside lid of Haygood’s toolbox, and it was decorated with full-color close-up beaver shots that Haygood had clipped from nudie magazines.
Ingram, the other projectionist, had a crush on Melody. He’d come downstairs every now and then when she was working, when he knew she was trapped behind the candy counter and couldn’t flee. He told stories about his time in the army, in Germany. Best days of his life. The bane of his existence now was his wife’s enormous standard poodle, which would climb onto the sofa and refuse to get off.
“If that damn dog standard,” Wyatt remembered Ingram saying once, “I never wanna see no jumbo size.”
Haygood didn’t know that Wyatt existed. Ingram only noticed Wyatt when he needed someone to fill his thermos with Sprite.
Wyatt looked at the list. Tate. Janella. Haygood. Ingram. That was everyone. And Steve Herpes. Wyatt had almost overlooked the snotty rich kid Mr. Bingham had hired at the beginning of the summer. His real last name was Hurley, but that had been quickly modified when everyone realized how snotty he was. Steve Herpes had quit around the middle of July, long before the murders, but he would have had access to the keys before that. He would have had even better access than the rest of them, since he was always in Mr. Bingham’s office, sucking up to the boss. Everyone feared that Mr. Bingham was grooming Steve Herpes to be assistant manager.
Wyatt hadn’t given Steve Herpes much thought over the years. He was tall and square-jawed and looked like a lifeguard. Karlene, Wyatt remembered, had been interested in him for about a minute, until Steve Herpes casually mentioned three times in a single conversation that he drove a Porsche that his parents had given him for his birthday. How it cost a fortune to insure, how it didn’t handle well on ice, how the cops were always pulling him over for speeding, even when he wasn’t.
Karlene twisted a strand of hair around her finger. She did her best dumb blonde.
“Is a Porsche one of those cute little cars from Yugoslavia?” she said. “I love those.”
Really, though, everyone had tried at first to welcome Steve Herpes into the tribe. But whenever Tate or O’Malley asked him to come along to the park or the pool after work, he always had something better to do—a party to attend, friends to meet.
Friends to meet. Putting a point on it, that the people he had to work with were just the people he had to work with.
Steve Herpes refused to take his turn with the popcorn machine. Officially, the concession girls were supposed to clean the popcorn machine, but it was such hot, nasty work that the doormen always pitched in—Wyatt would clean the bin, for example, while Melody cleaned the kettle.
“Not my job,” Steve Herpes would say if any of the girls asked him for help.
Most grievously, he would check out his own square-jawed reflection in the glass of the framed, outdated one-sheets in the lobby—What’s Up Doc?, Rocky, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—when he thought no one was watching.
So they called him Steve Herpes and parked too close to his Porsche and spent the long, empty hours in the lobby giving him shit.
Wyatt had given him as much shit as anyone else. Maybe more. And yet Wyatt had been spared. So again: Why?
He flipped his notebook shut. Too many questions. Too many paths that looped around and left him back where he’d started. But still there remained the strong possibility that someone had given the killers the keys to the theater. With luck, Bill Haskell’s contact at the OCPD would be able to point Wyatt in the right direction.
It was almost one. Haskell still hadn’t called. Wyatt swung by Whole Foods for a rotisserie chicken and drove to his uncle’s house. Once again his uncle was sitting on the porch, even though the temperature had dipped and there was a real nip to the wind. In another w
eek or so, the leaves on the old trees along the street would burst into flame: scarlet, saffron, goldenrod. And then down they’d come.
“Mikey!”
Wyatt shook his uncle’s hand. “How have you been, Uncle Pete?”
“As good as can be expected under the circumstances.”
“What about some lunch?”
“What about it?” his uncle said, and they both laughed.
Wyatt was on his way to the kitchen with the chicken when his phone rang.
“Don’t tell me you forgot,” Candace said.
“Of course not.” Wyatt tried to remember. Lunch? Yes. Candace had invited him to lunch. Shit. “I’m on my way now. I’m pulling in to your driveway as we speak.”
“Ha.”
“Do you mind if I bring a date for you? My elderly uncle. I think you two are a match made in heaven.”
“Sure. You’ve got an uncle in Oklahoma City? And you never told me what you were doing at Burlington Coat Factory at one o’clock in the morning.”
“We’re on our way,” Wyatt said.
CANDACE LIVED ONLY a few miles from Wyatt’s uncle, in a neighborhood of small, tidy ranch houses built in the fifties. When she answered the door, she gave Wyatt a glare. She gave his uncle a big white flash of a smile.
“I’m Candace,” she said.
Wyatt’s uncle shook her hand, gravely. “I’m Pete,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic.”
Candace laughed. “Hi, Pete!”
“Sixteen and a half years.”
“Good for you! My dad just got his ten-year chip.”
“I stopped drinking the day of the bombing. Tell her, Mikey. Not a drop since.”
“It’s true,” Wyatt said.
“Good for you, Pete!” Candace said.
“I didn’t do it alone, I’ll tell you that.”
Candace looked at Wyatt. “Mikey?”
“Middle name,” Wyatt explained. “I switched over a long time ago. There were four other Michaels in my senior class.”
He felt a small, warm hand work its way into his. He looked down. Lily, pale and solemn. Wyatt wasn’t sure what to do with her hand, so he just held it.
“We’re having a picnic, Wyatt,” she said.
“It’s pretty chilly out, Lily.”
She looked up at him with the long-suffering patience of a medieval saint. “In the living room.”
“Got it,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t know what she sees in you,” Candace said. “It was her idea to invite you over.”
Wyatt doubted that, but Lily nodded. She tugged at Wyatt’s hand and led him into the house. Candace took Pete’s hand and followed them.
A picnic blanket was spread in front of the sofa. Lily served everyone chicken-salad sandwiches that had been cut into triangles, with Cheetos and grapes. When she finished, she sat down next to Wyatt, so close he could feel her breathing. She watched him and waited until he took the first bite of his sandwich before she took the first bite of hers.
“There are three different kinds of grapes in the world,” she said.
“No!” Pete said. “I don’t believe it!”
“Grapes that make raisins,” Lily said. “Grapes that you eat. Grapes that make grape juice.”
“Very good,” Pete said.
Wyatt picked up a grape and examined it. Lily watched him.
“This one might be the fourth kind of grape,” Wyatt said.
Lily looked at her mother for a ruling. Wyatt tried to remember how to do the trick, the only one he knew. O’Malley had taught it to him one night after he’d gone up to the bar above the theater to swap movie passes for booze. O’Malley had used a cocktail olive and told Wyatt that the secret to magic was a full commitment to believing your own lie.
“You know, this might be the kind of grape, Lily,” Wyatt said, “that is impossible to squash.”
He set the grape on the coffee table. He covered it with a napkin.
“You’re cleaning that up,” Candace said.
Wyatt slapped his palm down hard on the coffee table. He felt Lily jump. He removed the napkin. The grape had vanished. Lily’s eyes went wide.
“Take off your shoe, please,” Wyatt told her. “Unsquashable grapes sometimes like cool, dark, stinky places.”
Candace laughed. Lily pulled off her sneaker and handed it to Wyatt. He reached deep inside the sneaker and produced the grape. He sniffed it, wrinkled his nose, and then popped it into his mouth.
A beat passed, and then Lily giggled. It was the first time, Wyatt realized, he’d seen her look her age, five, and not a century or so older. Candace, laughing harder now, poked her daughter in the ribs, and Lily kept giggling. Wyatt’s uncle laughed, Wyatt laughed.
It was a nice moment, a moment of simple, stupid human happiness, the best kind. And yet even as Wyatt sat in the middle of the scene, he remained outside it, apart, as if partitioned off behind special glass that let in light but not heat. He’d experienced this sensation before. It was like looking at a photo of a family gathered around a roaring fire. The fire warmed the people in the photo but not the person holding the photo. You’d have to be crazy to think it ever would.
After lunch Wyatt settled his uncle in the rented Altima. Lily waved good-bye from the porch and went back inside to play.
“So everything’s been quiet at the Land Run?” Wyatt asked Candace when they were alone.
“Yeah. Do you think it’s over? Maybe he’s mad it’s over, so he beat you up.”
Wyatt didn’t think it was over. He doubted that Candace did either.
“I may have a real lead, finally,” he said.
“It’s about time.”
Wyatt dropped his uncle off at home and drove back up Classen. He didn’t want to run into Chip at the hotel, so he found a bar on Western that had strong and reasonably priced drinks, with a bonus view of the Baptist church across the street. The sign in front of the church said AUTUMN LEAVES, JESUS DOESN’T.
Wyatt had purchased a pack of three-by-five index cards. He wrote down the names, one per card—“Tate,” “Janella,” “Haygood,” “Ingram,” “Steve Herpes”—and lined the cards up on the bar in front of him. On the other cards, he wrote down everything he could remember about each person, every point of contact, one memory per card.
Haskell called around nine.
“Brett Williams will talk to you,” he said. “Tomorrow morning at ten. La Oaxaqueña Bakery on Southwest Twenty-ninth.”
“You’re a prince, Bill,” Wyatt said. “Don’t ever let anyone say otherwise.”
Julianna
CHAPTER 21
A little before seven, Julianna called and told the supervising nurse in the ER she had a family emergency and wouldn’t be in for her shift that night. She said she was sorry for the last-minute notice.
Silence. Julianna waited. “Hello?” she said.
“Is there anything else?”
“Just that.”
“Okay.”
The supervising nurse hung up. Julianna went to the fireplace, opened the damper, and reached up into the chimney. She’d been too enthusiastic when she’d taped the packet of cash to the metal wall of the firebox. She had to yank and yank. Ash sifted down. The plastic Target bag, once it came free, now smelled like the ghost of fires past. So did she.
An hour before she was supposed to meet Crowley at the lake, Julianna drove to the Double R Ranch, the big barn of a bar where she’d watched him pick up the woman with the braid. She thought it had been around this time, eleven or eleven-thirty. She hoped so.
She didn’t see Crowley’s truck in the crowded parking lot. Either he’d switched vehicles, which was likely, or he continued to avoid places he knew Julianna could find him. Also likely. She left the cash in her car, tucked under the seat,
and went inside.
Her first scan of the room came up empty. The man next to her, a biker standing alone at the bar, gave her a nudge with this elbow. His beard was gray and long, trembling and nebulous, like the stuffing a dog might tear from a plush toy.
“How ’bout a drink?”
“I’m meeting a friend,” Julianna said.
“We can be friends.”
She scanned the room again, losing hope. And then Julianna saw her, the hard-looking redhead, hitching her big turquoise purse onto her shoulder as she emerged from the ladies’ room.
Julianna ignored the biker and followed the redhead to a booth in the back. The redhead slid in across from her drunk friend, who seemed even drunker tonight than before. She swayed back and forth to the song pounding from the speakers, so far out of rhythm she was almost about to be back in rhythm.
“Well, well,” the redhead said when she saw Julianna. “Look who it is.”
She patted the seat next to her. Julianna sat down.
“I need a favor,” Julianna said.
“You find that man you was looking for?”
Julianna leaned close. She lowered her voice. “I’ll give you three hundred dollars to borrow your gun.”
The redhead lifted her drink, mahogany liquor on the rocks, and took a dainty sip. “You don’t have to whisper. Does she, Carla May?”
The friend swayed to the music, her eyes half closed. “Huh,” she said.
“Three hundred dollars,” Julianna said. “Just for a couple of hours.”
The redhead turned to study Julianna. “You think I’m crazy?”
“It’s just for protection. Just in case.”
“Don’t answer that.” She laughed, turned away, took another dainty sip.
“I did find him,” Julianna said. “The man I was looking for. But he’s not who I thought he was. He might not be who I thought he was.”
“Come on with us over to the Land Run. We’ll find us a couple of college boys and dance all night.”
“No. How much?”
“What if you go off and shoot somebody? And they find out I gave you my gun?”