by Lou Berney
“I’m not going to shoot anyone. It’s just for protection.”
“You can stop talking. ’Cause I stopped listening.”
“Five hundred dollars. That’s really all I have.”
A new song began to play. Julianna recognized the simple, gritty guitar lick, as rough and elemental as a cave painting: Lou Reed’s “Turn to Me.” Genevieve had played it incessantly when the album the song was on first came out. The spring of 1984? Genevieve would have been fifteen years old, Julianna ten. Genevieve said the song cheered her up—the idea that there was one person out there in the world you could always turn to. If your car broke down, if your apartment had no heat, if your father was freebasing.
Julianna, age ten, had thought freebasing was some kind of sport. With Frisbees, maybe? She disliked the song. She thought the man singing sounded menacing, his voice sinuous and insinuating—he seemed like he wanted your car to break down so you would have to call him. Julianna had been grateful she already had someone she trusted, Genevieve, who for the rest of her life she could always turn to.
The redhead was studying Julianna again.
“Scootch on over,” she said.
Julianna slid back out of the booth so the redhead could slide out, too.
“I need to use the ladies’ room,” the redhead said. “Wait here and we’ll head on over to the Land Run.”
Julianna knew it was hopeless. She’d never be able to talk the redhead into loaning her the gun. This woman wasn’t crazy. Julianna’s idea to borrow her gun had been, all along, crazy.
“We never had this conversation,” the redhead said. “All right?”
Julianna nodded. She turned to leave.
The redhead caught her by a belt loop and reeled her back.
“Where you going?” she said.
“I have to go.”
“I need to use the ladies’ room,” she said again, more slowly this time. “And you need to keep an eye on my purse, ’cause Carla May’s too drunk to do it. All right?”
She waited until she saw that Julianna understood, then walked away. The drunk friend swayed to the music. Julianna sat back down. The big turquoise purse was on the seat next to her, unzipped. Keeping her eyes straight ahead, following the swaying beat of the drunk friend’s head, Julianna reached into the redhead’s purse. She felt a wallet, a cell phone, a tube of lipstick, a box of what were probably pads or tampons, and then she found the gun, small but heavy. The drunk friend watched Julianna through half-closed eyes as under the table Julianna moved the gun from the redhead’s purse to her own.
Julianna wondered if the redhead would report the gun stolen right away or wait to see what Julianna did with it.
“Where’d that bitch go?” Carla May said, slurring her words. “She was just here.”
“She’ll be right back,” Julianna said. She stood up and left.
JULIANNA HAD THOUGHT the entrance to Stars and Stripes Park would be gated after hours, but it wasn’t. She turned off the lake road and drove a few hundred yards through the darkness, past stands of trees and a baseball field. At the playground area, the road branched. She couldn’t tell in the darkness if the rocket-ship slide was still there or not. She steered right and made a long, slow loop around the flat brick pavilion that you could reserve for family reunions and T-ball team picnics. The parking lot in front of the pavilion was empty.
Julianna kept driving. She saw a solitary car, a small sedan, parked near the slender finger of land that poked out into the lake. Where the nail of the finger would be was a round plaza with a flagpole. No flag flew this late at night, but when Julianna parked next to the sedan and walked closer, she saw that the surface of the plaza was itself a flag—colored tile formed white stars on a blue background, red stripes on white.
Crowley was standing out past the plaza, at the very edge of the park, where the red-dirt bank crumbled into the water. It was dark and very quiet. No wind. In Oklahoma you never noticed the wind, did you? You only noticed that one day out of a hundred when it took a breather.
Julianna had removed the gun from its turquoise holster. It rested naked now in her purse, a small snub-nosed revolver, next to the bundle of cash.
The ground was uneven. She stumbled and almost fell. Crowley glanced at her, then back at the water.
“You know what I heard?” he said. “Just the other day. I don’t know it’s true or not, but a lady I met told me. We was driving along, and she said when they built that highway over there, they drained part of the lake and found a ’63 Cadillac with a skeleton behind the wheel.”
The highway was less than half a mile away, but due to some trick of topography the sound from it didn’t carry this far. Julianna watched headlights float silently along, the glowing bellies of fireflies that had paired off to mate.
“The old duck pond,” she said. She knew the story.
“It was a lady been missing thirty years. All that time police thought her husband must have done it, made her disappear ’cause of an inheritance she came into. Turns out the road was icy and she just missed a curve in the dark. Went under and never came up.”
He looked out at the water. Julianna knew why he was telling her the story. He was letting her know how easily she could disappear, too. He was playing his game, enjoying it.
“It was the woman and her daughter,” Julianna said. “They disappeared the night before Kennedy was shot.”
“So it’s true, then?”
“You don’t have an alibi.”
He chuckled again. “You don’t need an alibi, darlin’, if you don’t get caught. I’d be halfway to California by morning.”
“No,” Julianna said. “I mean the night my sister disappeared.”
He turned to her. In the darkness his blue eyes were a pale gray. He reached up to hook a strand of his long, greasy hair behind his ear, and Julianna almost flinched. Crowley smiled, then lowered his hand, his big gut shifting beneath his plaid shirt.
Because the bank sloped a little, he stood a couple of inches below her. But he was still so much taller than Julianna that she had to look up to look him in the face.
“I was in jail that night. If that ain’t an alibi, I don’t know what is.”
“The woman who said she saw my sister after she left your trailer never really saw her. She saw a girl who looked like my sister.”
Crowley mused. He stroked his goatee.
“You bring my money?” he said.
Julianna reached into her purse and handed Crowley the packet of cash. He tore open the plastic Target bag, removed the three envelopes, then dropped the bag to the ground. He kicked the bag away.
“How much?”
“Twenty thousand.”
He licked his thumb and counted the money in the first envelope. Julianna held her purse tight against her, a hand resting on top of it. Crowley counted the money in the second envelope.
“What did my sister say to you?” Julianna said.
He counted the money in the third envelope, taking great care to make sure no bills stuck together. When he finished, he put the three envelopes in the back pocket of his jeans.
“She turned up at my trailer, and we talked for a minute or two. Like I told you. I don’t remember what all we talked about. I probably told her my name, she probably told me hers. I said I had a guitar and we could make some music together. She said—what was it?
“Let’s not and say we did.”
“Let’s not and say we did.”
Crowley had turned back to look out at the lake. The water, with no wind, was a flat, impeccable black. So, too, was the sky to the north. Julianna could barely make out the hinge between sky and water—a line of faint light running along the top of the dam.
“I was a young man,” he said. “Shit.”
“Keep going,” Julianna said.
“So I said, ‘Okay. Why don’t you come on inside then and party with me.’ Don’t tell me your sister didn’t like to party. I could tell. I didn’t have no dope on me at the moment, but I knew where I could get some. There was so much dope in that camp people was giving it away.”
He made Julianna wait.
“What did she say?” she finally had to ask.
“She just started walking off. Not the way she came, though. I remember that. Not back toward the rides, I mean more off toward the sideshows and such.”
“What did she say to you?”
“ ‘First things first.’ ”
“I gave you the money.”
He laughed. “No. That’s what she said. I told her, ‘Hold on a minute now,’ but she just kept on walking. She looked back over her shoulder and said, ‘First things first.’ ”
Julianna waited. Crowley yawned.
“What does that mean?” Julianna said.
“You tell me.”
“So was she planning to come back?”
“Struck me that way at the time, but she never did.”
First things first?
“Where was she going? Why was she heading toward the racetrack?”
“No idea.”
“So that’s all she said?”
“That’s all. ‘First things first.’ So I ran out to buy some beer and find some dope. Glad I did it in that order, the beer first and not the dope. Glad that cop stopped at 7-Eleven for doughnuts. Hell. Otherwise I probably woulda ended up in the electric chair.”
Julianna had her hand around the grip of the revolver before she was even aware of it. She had dropped her purse and was pointing the revolver at Crowley.
“You told me it was important,” Julianna said. “What my sister said to you when she left.”
Crowley regarded her. His eyes stayed on her eyes. The barrel of the revolver was a foot from his chest, but he ignored it.
“I never did,” he said calmly.
Julianna’s finger was tight on the trigger. She could feel the trigger begin to give. You were supposed to squeeze, she remembered hearing somewhere once, not pull. She’d never fired a gun in her life. She told herself she was too close to miss.
She tried to keep her voice calm, too. “You told me I’d want to know what she said.”
Crowley gave Julianna his innocent look. “Didn’t you?”
“What did you do to her?”
“I ain’t giving you your money back, if that’s what you want. We had a deal.”
“What did you do to her?”
“I fucked her first,” Crowley said. “Backwards and forwards. She couldn’t get enough of it. She rode me so hard that I—”
And then out of nowhere his hand was on the revolver, wrenching hard, and Julianna’s head exploded—a slap, or a punch, from his other hand. She stood frozen while the ground rushed up and slammed against her.
Crowley held her down, his knee on her chest. The weight crushed. Julianna fought to draw in a breath. Crowley used the torn plastic bag from Target to hold the gun while he wiped it clean with the tail of his plaid shirt. When he finished, he flung the gun into the lake. The splash sounded like a kiss.
He moved his knee off her chest. Julianna gulped air, but before she could move, Crowley straddled her and pinned her wrists above her head—both of her wrists locked in one of his big hands. She kicked and twisted. With his free hand, he slapped her. When she screamed for help, he clamped his hand over her mouth. She tried to bite his palm, and he slapped her again.
“Stop it,” he said. “Look at me.”
She wouldn’t. She focused on his tattoo. The blurred blue snake that wound around his thick forearm. She focused on Genevieve, standing off to the side, bemused and bored.
Genevieve shook her head. Is this what you wanted all along, you idiot?
I don’t know.
“Look at me,” Crowley said.
Julianna wouldn’t. He sighed.
“Everything I told you’s the truth,” he said. “I never touched your sister. I don’t know what happened to her. I wish I did. She showed up, we had those few words, she turned around and left. That’s all. She never even came inside. She didn’t say where she was going, and she never came back. That’s it. You understand?”
He’s telling the truth, Juli. You idiot.
I know.
She knew. He had no reason to lie.
Crowley let go of her wrists and straightened up. He looked back out at the water.
“I wish she had come inside,” he said. His voice was quieter now, with a touch of something—sadness, maybe, regret—that Julianna hadn’t heard before. “You never know, do you? She comes inside and listens to me play my guitar, maybe it all ends up all right for everybody.”
Life, Julianna thought he meant. She didn’t know if he was still playing with her or not.
He climbed to his feet. Slowly, in stages, wincing at each stage.
“I’m keeping your damn money,” he said. “We had a deal.”
Julianna lay on her back, staring up into the darkness. She listened to Crowley start his car. She listened to the engine fade as he drove away.
How could it be so quiet in the middle of a city? Oklahoma City without the wind was not Oklahoma City at all. She lay on her back, eyes open, and now, finally, she could hear it—the cars on the highway a mile away. Just an occasional whisper, a soft hushing, shhhhh, shhhhh.
Wyatt
CHAPTER 22
Sunday morning, Wyatt’s tour of Oklahoma City’s authentic old-school breakfast joints continued. La Oaxaqueña Bakery was just off Olie, on a stretch of SW Twenty-ninth where the signs in Spanish far outnumbered those in English. The place was homey and unpretentious, with plastic tablecloths, ripped vinyl seats, and a tile mosaic on the wall of what appeared to be a Mayan god devouring a small human being. All that and a pastry case that boggled the mind.
Wyatt, running a few minutes late, looked around. Most of the tables were occupied by multigenerational Latino families and a few older couples. Only one person sat alone, a non-Latina woman in a wheelchair, early fifties or so. Wyatt checked his watch and then noticed that the woman in the wheelchair was eyeing him. He realized that Brett Williams was a woman, a fact Haskell had failed to mention. Wyatt supposed he’d failed to ask.
He walked over. “Detective Williams?”
The woman nodded and motioned for Wyatt to sit. “Pardon me if I don’t get up,” she said.
Wyatt smiled and sat. “Who says cops don’t have a sense of humor?”
“I’ve been retired almost ten years. Call me Brett.”
She studied Wyatt, so he felt free to study her back. She had strong, square features and dark, shoulder-length hair shot with gray. She was neither attractive nor unattractive. Wyatt wondered if she’d had to work at that balance the years she’d been on the force or if it was just her natural state. Her eyes were so pale they seemed empty.
“Thanks for meeting me,” he said.
“How can I help?”
She put a hand over her coffee mug before Wyatt even saw the waitress approaching.
“Try the concha,” Brett Williams told him. “Or the churro with caramel.”
Wyatt shook his head. “I’m fine with coffee,” he said. “So you remember the details of the movie-theater case?
She laughed. “I’d made detective exactly four days earlier.”
“Welcome to the big leagues.”
“Something like that. So yes. I remember.”
“The afternoon of the murders,” Wyatt said, “an elderly woman accidentally rammed her car into the Dumpster behind the theater.”
“Yes. The young man who survived the shooting told us about that.”
“The collision left the Dumpst
er at a slightly different angle to the building,” he said. “He didn’t tell you that. So on that one night, Grubb wouldn’t have had his back to the exit doors, not completely. Grubb, the doorman who took the trash out that night. He would have been turned a little to his right when he lifted the lid of the Dumpster. I think he would have had a clean view of the exit doors.”
Brett Williams listened, neither frowning nor not frowning. A placid expression. That was the best way to describe it, Wyatt supposed—a surface unruffled by breeze above or by current below.
“The killers couldn’t have snuck past him,” Wyatt continued. “They had to come through the front doors of the theater. They had to have keys. There were no signs of forced entry. Correct?”
“Correct,” Brett Williams said. Placidly.
Wyatt realized he was leaning forward across the table. He was coming off as the kind of crackpot who fluttered around the edges of every high-profile crime, a species dreaded by cops.
He sat back in his chair. He took a sip of his coffee.
“Was that avenue ever investigated?” he said. “The possibility that someone who worked at the theater gave the killers the keys?”
“Of course.”
“How seriously, if you were certain the killers came in through the exit doors?”
She regarded Wyatt with what might have been amusement. Or contempt. Or boredom.
“Seriously,” she said.
“I’m not talking about the kid who survived, I’m talking about the theater employees who weren’t working that night.” Wyatt realized he was leaning across the table again. “How did the killers know that the deposit didn’t go to the bank until Monday morning? The entire weekend take, all cash, was in the safe that night. The timing was clockwork. It was perfect.”
“We looked at everyone who wasn’t working that night. We looked at them twice. Every possible connection. The theater employees, the mall security guards. The brass kept it out of the papers, for obvious reasons.”
“But—”
“Janella Crawford, one of the girls who worked behind the candy counter. Seventeen years old. Her sister’s boyfriend had been picked up a couple of times for possession with intent, so we brought him in. The poor guy. We scared the shit out of him. We kept at him in the box for eight, nine hours. I talked to Janella myself probably half a dozen times. I knew that girl’s life inside and out. I knew what brand of shampoo she used. We knew everyone, all of us did, inside and out.”