by Lou Berney
“Okay,” Wyatt said.
“Toby Haygood, the daytime projectionist. He was a diabetic. Do you want me to tell you what his hobbies were? Who he played poker with every Saturday night?”
“I get it.”
“We looked hard at everyone.”
Not everyone. Not hard enough. Someone had to have given the killers the keys to the theater. Wyatt could feel the anger building, a hot blue bubble at the base of his throat. Why was he so pissed? He couldn’t say for sure. Who was he pissed at? That one was easier. He took a breath.
“There was a kid,” Wyatt said, “a doorman who only worked a couple of months that summer. He quit in July. He wasn’t on the payroll at the time of the murders.”
Brett Williams shifted in her wheelchair. Leather creaked. Her expression remained placid.
“Steven Hurley,” she said. “His family owned one of the big furniture stores on Reno.”
Steve Herpes. “You knew about him?” Wyatt said.
“We knew about everyone. We ran down every person who’d worked at the theater in the previous five years.”
Wyatt, the way he was seated, could see one of her legs under the table. When Brett Williams shifted again in her wheelchair, the leg didn’t move at all, the foot resting dead on the chrome footplate.
So that was that. Of course the police had investigated the possibility of an inside man. Wyatt should have known that. He had known it. The movie-theater massacre had been the most notorious crime in the history of Oklahoma City up till then. Every question had long ago been asked. If there was an answer, it had been found.
Grubb had been stoned the night of the murders. He was stoned every night. The Dumpster had been angled toward the building, and still he hadn’t noticed the killers slip through the auditorium exit door. He probably wouldn’t have noticed them riding horses across the parking lot.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Brett Williams said.
Wyatt looked up at her. “What?”
“That morning. The morning after.”
For an instant Wyatt didn’t understand what she was talking about. The morning after what? And then suddenly he could see her face again, those pale eyes searching his. Her hair back then was shorter, no gray in it. She’d patted his knee. His ears were still ringing.
Is there anything else you remember? Try hard, hon.
Brett Williams had been the female detective, the one who sat with Wyatt on the grassy median between the back lot of the movie theater and the street. Who’d assured him, just before the EMTs loaded him into an ambulance, that this was his lucky day.
“They sent you over because you were a girl,” Wyatt said.
“I guess I was supposed to be comforting. Nurturing? I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”
“What happened to you?”
She didn’t have to ask. “A bullet. A ricochet. Quarter of an inch higher and the vest catches it. That’s what the doctor told me anyway.”
“That was an asshole thing for him to tell you.”
“Maybe.” She sipped her coffee. “I don’t know how you did it. Sitting there, fifteen years old. I would have lost it. I did lose it. That night when I got home.”
“They gave me a Valium.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I,” Wyatt said. “How did you recognize me after all these years?”
She shrugged. “How could I not?”
That sat in silence.
“I never remembered your face until just now,” Wyatt said. “I remembered your shoes. You had ugly shoes.”
“I did?” She seemed genuinely surprised.
Wyatt stood up. “Thanks for your time, Brett.”
“I’d help you if I could,” she said. “Do you understand that?”
“Sure,” he said.
Driving back to his hotel, Wyatt saw a sign for the Oklahoma City National Memorial. On impulse he made the turn. He’d read about the memorial but had never been there. He parked and crossed Robinson to the massive bronze gate at one end of the reflecting pool. Cut into the panels above the entrance was the time that morning in April of 1995—9:01—when Oklahoma City had last been whole. At the opposite end of the reflecting pool, on the other side of the grounds, was an identical gate. The time cut into that gate was 9:03, one minute after the bomb in Timothy McVeigh’s Ryder truck had detonated.
Wyatt walked through the 9:01 gate and took a seat on one of the sandstone benches. On the spot where the Murrah Federal Building once stood, there was now an open lawn, filled with row after row of empty chairs. One hundred and sixty-eight chairs, one for each person killed in the blast. Nineteen of the chairs were sized for children.
The empty chairs were powerful in a way Wyatt had not expected. They captured something essential about the dead—how they could be so far away and yet at the same time right here, right now, right next to you, close enough that you could still hear them breathing.
One evening, a week or so before the murders, Wyatt and Theresa had parked by the lake. They sat on the long hood of her old yellow Buick Skylark and watched the setting sun hit the water and shatter—a thousand fragments of unbelievable color.
Wyatt couldn’t believe he was here with her. He still couldn’t believe that she’d picked him.
“Why me?” he asked her.
Theresa had her slender arm looped around his neck. “Because why,” she’d said.
Two benches down from Wyatt, an older woman sat gazing at the empty chairs of the memorial. One strand of white hair lifted in the wind and then settled. Who, Wyatt wondered, had she lost? What had she lost?
One hundred and sixty-eight chairs. Wyatt knew that the toll was much higher than that. Oklahoma City was a small town at heart, and everyone knew someone who had been killed or maimed in the blast or someone who’d descended into hell to help with the rescue.
And yet a minute after the explosion, at 9:03, the city had begun to pull itself back together, to become something new. The gate at the opposite end of the reflecting pool didn’t mark the end of something. It marked a beginning.
There was a lesson here for Wyatt. Wasn’t there? He could walk out the far gate and out of the past. All he had to do was leave behind the dead and stop asking questions.
Why am I still here and all the others gone?
He knew he couldn’t do it. He knew he’d never be able to do it.
It was eleven o’clock in Vegas. On most Sunday mornings, Laurie went into the office for a couple of hours to catch up on e-mail. Wyatt took out his phone and called her.
“You’re right,” he said.
There was a long silence. “What does that mean, Wyatt?”
“It means you’re right.”
“Wyatt. Talk to me.”
“I can’t do this right now.”
“Call me later, then.”
“No,” he said. “I can’t do this. Us. You were right.”
“Wyatt.”
He could picture Laurie at her desk, her back turned to the doorway of her office in case someone walked past and saw the tears rolling down her cheeks. Wyatt wanted, so badly, to reach out and take her hand and never let go.
But he was cut off, shut out, partitioned behind glass. She was there, and he was here. She was real, and Wyatt was just a memory of a person, a ghost, a dead planet anchored to its orbit while the rest of the universe drifted farther and farther away.
He didn’t understand why he was so fucked up. He was the one who had survived.
“I’m sorry,” he told Laurie. “You were right.”
WYATT’S PHONE RANG. Chip, yet again. Wyatt answered.
“Hello, Chip.”
“Hi, Mr. Rivers. I’m really . . . I’m sorry to bother you. I know you’re really busy with your other case, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am, Chip,” Wyatt said.
He was driving north on Western, past Fairlawn Cemetery. The man who killed the man who killed Jesse James. Wyatt wondered if O’Malley had known about Edward O’Kelley when he picked Fairlawn for their game of graveyard Frisbee. It was the kind of shit O’Malley would have loved. If there was any justice in the universe, O’Malley was the boy buried next to the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James.
“I know, I’m really sorry. But I’m just wondering if . . . you know, if maybe you had a chance to look into it yet? My situation with my wife? How I think she might be having an affair?”
“I remember, Chip. Yes, I looked into it.”
“And did you— What did you find out?”
This was truly the last thing in the world Wyatt wanted to deal with right now. Or ever again.
“Where are you, Chip?” he said.
“Where am I?”
“Are you at work?”
“No, Mr. Rivers. It’s Sunday. I’m off on Sunday.”
“Meet me in twenty minutes. The hotel lobby.”
“Oh,” Chip said.
Wyatt remembered. Employees weren’t supposed to approach guests for personal reasons. An excellent rule. Wyatt wished it were better enforced.
“Across the street from the hotel to the west,” he said. “What is that? It’s a burrito place, I think.”
“It’s a Chipotle.”
“Twenty minutes. Okay?”
“Okay, Mr. Rivers. Thank you, Mr. Rivers.”
When Wyatt got to the Chipotle across from the hotel, Chip was already there, seated at a table, his broad shoulders bowed around a napkin he was carefully shredding into a thousand tiny pieces.
Wyatt sat down across from him. Chip looked up. His cheeks were even rosier than Wyatt remembered, as if someone had given them a few hard slaps. Wyatt couldn’t tell if he’d been crying. Maybe he had.
“It’s bad news,” Chip said, “isn’t it, Mr. Rivers?”
“It’s no news.”
Chip wasn’t sure what to do with that. He swallowed. He picked up another napkin and began to shred it.
“No news at all?” he said.
“None worth reporting.”
Wyatt knew that was probably a lie, but he saw no reason to tell Chip about the male barista at Starbucks or the hand squeeze that Wyatt had witnessed between the barista and Chip’s wife. A little information could be a dangerous thing, and he didn’t want Chip jumping to any conclusions based on partial, potentially misleading evidence. Maybe Chip’s wife was banging the barista, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was banging someone else entirely.
“But you saw my wife?” Chip said.
“I did.”
“So no news is maybe good news?”
“No news is no news,” Wyatt said. “Here’s the deal, Chip. Why I wanted to talk to you in person.”
Chip scooped up pieces of shredded napkin and clenched his fist hard. “Are you married, Mr. Rivers?
“No.”
“But . . . you’ve been in love? Really, really, really in love?”
“Chip—”
“Because when you lose that, when you think you might lose that—you just feel broken. It’s the worst feeling in the world.”
He loosened his fist and sprinkled bits of shredded napkin across the table. Wyatt was glad he hadn’t said anything about the barista, the hand squeeze. Chip, with his bashful smile and rosy cheeks, the sweet-tempered demeanor, didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would flip out and open fire on the man who might or might not be banging his wife. But there was something there, a dark nuclear throb far belowdecks. Wyatt realized he’d picked up on it in the elevator, the first time they met.
Who knew what a broken heart could drive a man to do? Well, Wyatt supposed, everyone knew.
“I know you want an answer, Chip,” he said.
“I do, Mr. Rivers. I just want an answer.”
“I get that. But I’m not your guy.”
“If it’s about the money, then—”
“It’s not. You need an investigator who can give you his full attention, Chip. I told you when we met, I’m working another case.”
“But maybe— What about when you solve that other case, Mr. Rivers? I mean, if you’re close to solving that case? Then I can just wait and—”
Wyatt laughed. “Chip. You’d probably die waiting. That’s how close I am.”
Chip’s eyes pleaded. Before he could say anything else, though, a woman came over to their table. She was smiling. She smiled at Chip and then smiled at Wyatt.
“Did you hurt your hand?” she asked Wyatt.
She’d seen the bandage on his hand. Wyatt was confused. Did he know her? He didn’t recognize her.
“Just a few stitches,” he said.
“Can we pray for your hand?” the woman said. She pointed to another woman, also smiling at Wyatt, a few tables over.
Wyatt thought he’d misheard. “Pardon me?”
“They want to pray for your hand,” Chip said.
Wyatt searched for a response appropriate to the situation. “No, thank you,” he said finally, giving up.
Her smile faltered. She walked back to her table and said something to her friend. Her friend’s smile faltered.
“That was kind of weird,” Chip said.
Wyatt held out his hand, his good hand, for Chip to shake. He wanted to get the hell out of there before Chip remembered that forty-five seconds ago he’d been in the process of falling apart. He wanted to get the hell out of there before Chip resumed doing so.
Chip shook Wyatt’s hand.
“I wish you the best, Chip,” Wyatt said. He meant it.
He walked back across the street to the hotel parking lot. As, wouldn’t you know it, the stitches in his palm began to ache. And—this was clearly the vengeful God of the Old Testament at work here—the bar in the hotel lobby didn’t open until five o’clock on Sundays.
Wyatt drove down to the Plaza District and found the tattoo shop, Ink & Roses. It was closed all day on Sunday, but the lights were on. Wyatt rapped on the shop’s plate-glass window until a heavyset guy in a black T-shirt emerged from the back. The guy crossed his arms and stared at Wyatt.
“I’m looking for Dallas!” Wyatt yelled through the glass.
The guy gave Wyatt the finger and then a thumbs-up. A mixed message if ever there was one, but Wyatt managed to sort it out: Fuck you, dickhead, for ignoring the Closed sign, and She’s upstairs.
Wyatt walked around to the side of the building. A flight of stairs led up to the apartment on the top floor. Wyatt knocked.
After a few seconds, Dallas opened the door. No makeup, her hair piled precariously on top of her head. She didn’t seem surprised to see Wyatt.
“Hey there, you,” she said.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“Were you, now?”
Her skin was pure cream, an immaculate canvas for all those colorful tattoos. The phoenix rising from the ashes, a woman’s face painted to resemble a Día de los Muertos skull, a vine bristling with poisonous-looking flowers. Beneath the thin cotton fabric of Dallas’s T-shirt, Wyatt could see the rumor of even more tattoos.
“I’d never lie to you, Dallas.”
“You know that’s my last name, don’t you?” she said. “Dallas is?”
Wyatt hadn’t known that. “What’s your first name?”
“Tiffany.”
“Tiffany. You don’t look like a Tiffany.”
“That’s why everybody calls me Dallas.”
She opened the door wide. Wyatt stepped inside. A one-bedroom flat, sunny and tidy. On the wall in the living room was a large oil painting, a version of the phoenix on Dallas’s arm. Moon-faced dolls filled a
bookshelf, along with framed photos and a vintage red Bakelite telephone.
“Beer or whiskey?” Dallas said.
“Sure.”
She smiled and went into the kitchen. Wyatt picked up a framed photo. In it Dallas was maybe eight or nine years old, grinning cheek to cheek with a woman Wyatt supposed was her mother. The daughter, Wyatt saw, had inherited her mother’s nose, her feline eyes.
Dallas returned and handed him a glass with two fingers of scotch.
“That’s my mom,” she said. “She used to work at the Land Run, too, way back when. She worked the door. How do you like that?”
What was it O’Malley used to say about the relationship between past and future? Wyatt couldn’t remember. O’Malley’s theories were endless and arcane.
“Where’s your mom now?” Wyatt said.
“Florida.”
Wyatt observed that every photo was just mother and daughter. He picked up one of the moon-faced dolls.
“I can’t remember what they’re called,” he said. “I remember they were very popular. There were fistfights at Christmas.”
“Cabbage Patch Kids.”
“That’s it.”
She took the doll from him and pressed it to her nose, breathed in the scent.
“My father used to bring me those.”
“Where’s he?”
“Gone. He died when I was little. Killed.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember anything about him. He got my mom pregnant and ran out on her. I remember the way he smelled.”
“Tell me about this old telephone.”
Dallas took the glass of scotch from Wyatt’s hand and set it on the shelf.
“You want to see the rest of my place or not?”
The bed, through another doorway, was unmade, the sheets invitingly rumpled.
Wyatt thought about how nice it would be to step into that room, into this woman’s life for a while. How nice she would feel pressed against him, his mouth on her neck and her ribs beneath his fingers. Wyatt would be able, for an hour or a week or a year, to stop asking why.