by Lou Berney
He stepped out of the salon just as an old Jeep Cherokee squealed into the parking lot and pulled in to the space right in front of him. Megan, Chip’s wife, popped out of the passenger side. She started toward the salon but then stopped and came back around to the driver’s side of the Jeep. She leaned in the window and gave the young black barista a long, lingering kiss on the lips.
“Bye, sweetie,” she told him.
Wyatt held the door of the salon open for her.
“Thank you, kind sir,” she said, and went inside.
The Jeep backed up and drove off. Wyatt walked over to his car. He considered, not for the first time, how often his profession involved the discovery of that truth which destroyed the lives of others.
He got out his phone to call Chip. He didn’t know how Chip would take the news that his wife was in fact having an affair with another man. Not well, Wyatt supposed. People never took the news well, no matter how prepared they thought they were. Wyatt had an uneasy feeling that Chip might handle the truth even less well than most.
He scrolled through his contacts until he found Chip’s number. But he didn’t press the CALL button. Why did something feel wrong here? Why, buried within the swell of the orchestra, did a single woodwind sound flat?
Wyatt couldn’t put his finger on it. Chip’s wife had arrived with the barista. She’d kissed him on the lips. A kiss—emphatic, intimate, lingering for a beat—that in no known universe would ever pass for friendly or platonic. Wyatt had been standing ten feet away. He’d seen the barista put his hand on Megan’s cheek, sliding his fingers up under the slanted chop of her hair.
Wyatt would have staked his career on the position that Chip’s wife and the barista were sleeping together. It was obvious. So what was the problem, then?
Wyatt had spent hundreds of hours, no exaggeration, secretly observing the mating rituals of the North American adulterer. He’d found that every cheating couple, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, cheated in its own particular way. Some couples were fanatically cautious and discreet, with Cold War dead drops and car swaps. They wore wigs and paid for motel rooms with cash. Other couples seemed to thrive on the thrill of potential discovery. There was one guy, Wyatt remembered, who’d taken his girlfriend to Mon Ami Gabi, an outdoor café at the Paris. The Paris was directly across the street from the Bellagio, where both their spouses worked. The guy had finger-banged his girlfriend under the table during dessert.
In Wyatt’s experience, though, all cheating couples did have one thing in common: The married half of the couple (or both members of the couple, if both were married) always displayed a heightened self-awareness that he, or she, was cheating. For some people, such as the public finger-banger, that self-awareness was probably half the fun. For others a nerve-racking drag. The self-awareness could be subtle or not, but it always was. At least one member of a cheating couple was always glancing, if only figuratively, over his or her shoulder.
Married couples didn’t do that. Who was watching them? Nobody.
Chip’s wife had popped out of the Jeep without thinking about it. She’d gone around and kissed the barista without thinking about it. She’d barely glanced at Wyatt on her way into the salon. The barista had backed his Jeep out without even noticing Wyatt.
Maybe Chip’s wife and the barista were the exception that proved the rule, but Wyatt still found it strange. They were acting like they were married to each other, not their respective spouses.
He put his phone away without calling Chip and walked back to the salon. The receptionist was applying a fresh coat of lipstick, a darker shade of red.
“Help you?” she said. And then, when she recognized him, “Oh, hey. You’re back. Megan just got in, but she’s crazy booked today.”
Wyatt saw Chip’s wife at one of the sinks, lathering up the annoyed woman who resembled a greyhound. He moved past the receptionist.
“Hey!” she said. “Wait!”
Next to Megan’s sink was her station. A chair, a mirror, an antique oak cabinet. The top of the cabinet was crowded with various jars and tubes of hair-care products, combs and scissors, a blow dryer, a box of Kleenex, a pack of Nicorette gum, an iPhone.
No photos.
Megan looked at Wyatt, bemused, as she continued to knead the annoyed woman’s soapy scalp. The annoyed woman’s eyes were closed.
“Hi,” she said.
“Excuse me, Megan,” Wyatt said. “This is going to sound crazy.”
He wore the suit for moments like these. People tended to give you the benefit of the doubt when you were nicely dressed.
“Okay,” Megan said.
The annoyed woman opened her eyes. “Excuse me,” she said.
Wyatt ignored her. “The guy who dropped you off,” he said. “The guy driving the Jeep. Who was that?”
“Excuse me,” the annoyed woman said.
Megan began to knead the woman’s scalp more vigorously. The woman closed her eyes again. Megan gave Wyatt a look that said, Welcome to my life.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s Jake. That’s my hubs.”
The shampoo smelled like jasmine. The hot water Megan was using to rinse made the annoyed woman’s head steam. Wyatt felt a little light-headed himself.
“The black guy,” he said. “The guy driving the Jeep. He’s your husband?”
She laughed, but Wyatt could see her wondering if maybe the guy in the suit was crazy after all.
“Last time I checked,” she said.
Wyatt
CHAPTER 26
Wyatt walked back to his car, fast, and drove to the Marriott. He recognized the woman at the front desk. She was the one he’d asked about a late checkout.
“Hello, Mr. Rivers,” she said. “Did you change your plans?”
“I’m looking for Chip,” Wyatt said. “Is he working the front desk today?”
The woman cocked her head. “Chip?”
That was all Wyatt needed. He turned and strode back across the lobby.
“Mr. Rivers?” the desk clerk said. “Is everything okay?”
Wyatt sat in his car and worked his way through the facts, one at a time:
Chip said he worked at the Marriott. He did not.
Chip said Megan was his wife. She was not.
He’d even texted Wyatt a photo of her—a photo, Wyatt realized now, that Chip had probably harvested from Megan’s Facebook profile. He’d probably lifted the Marriott name tag off some guy in maintenance or room service.
Chip had begged Wyatt to investigate the affair he suspected his “wife” was having.
Why?
The answer was there before Wyatt could even finish scribbling down the question.
Chip—bashful, broad-shouldered, aw-shucks “Chip”—had used the fake wife, the fake affair, the fake case, as a way to keep tabs on Wyatt, as a way to track the progress of the real investigation. He was the person, all along, who’d been harassing Candace.
Wyatt remembered the first telephone conversation he’d had with Chip. It was the morning after Wyatt had been attacked in the playground across the street from the Pheasant Run.
So you’re still going to help me, Mr. Rivers?
Chip had attacked Wyatt in the playground. And then he’d called Wyatt to find out if the message had been received, if Wyatt had decided to bail on Candace and head back to Las Vegas.
You haven’t changed your mind or anything?
And Wyatt remembered the conversation he’d had with Chip at the burrito place yesterday morning.
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?
Wyatt couldn’t believe
how stupid he’d been. But before he called the police, he needed confirmation. He needed more information.
He took the Broadway Extension south and then merged onto I-40, keeping his eye on the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t being tailed. The first exit dropped him onto Robinson. Two minutes later he pulled up in front of Lyle Finn’s warehouse.
Finn was in back, sitting on the loading dock, doing yoga again in nothing but his kilt. He’d twisted around in such a way that the top half of his body faced west, the bottom half east.
“Lyle,” Wyatt said.
Finn turned his head. When he saw Wyatt, he looked the way Wyatt felt when a doctor grabbed his balls and told him to cough. Wyatt’s doctor back in Vegas was a petite, soft-spoken woman with a surprisingly robust—and icy—grip.
Wyatt didn’t give him a chance to freak out.
“The first time we met,” Wyatt said, “you said a blogger had been there the day before me. That’s why you thought I was a blogger, too. I need to know what he looked like, Lyle. The blogger.”
Finn slowly brought the upper half of his body back into alignment with the lower. He brought his head back into alignment with his body and warily regarded Wyatt.
“The blogger?” he said.
Who, Wyatt guessed, had spent much of his time inside Finn’s warehouse on the top floor, at the windows that looked down on the back of the Land Run, plotting the perfect way in and out.
“What did the guy look like, Lyle?” Wyatt said.
Finn sprang to his feet. Wyatt saw him glance at his escape route, the door on the far wall of the loading dock.
“This is a weird conversation,” he said.
Wyatt took a deep breath. He needed it.
“Lyle,” he said. “You can do some good here. Remember the Vedas? What did the guy look like?”
“I don’t know, man. Youngish, I guess. Like in his early twenties?”
“Dark hair?” Wyatt said, testing him. “Glasses?”
Finn shook his head. “He had blond hair. I remember that. And no glasses. He was very polite. He reminded me, I remember now, of one of the von Trapp kids. You know? One of the von Trapp kids from Sound of Music. Like he could have been wearing lederhosen?”
That was Chip. On the nose. It had to be him.
But now Wyatt faced the bigger questions: Who was Chip, and why the hell was he harassing Candace?
Wyatt knew he had to go back to the beginning, the very beginning, and walk the entire path again. Somewhere along the way, he’d missed the importance of a detail, he’d stubbed a toe on it but kept right on walking.
He took his notebook out and flipped to the beginning, the notes he’d taken during his very first meeting with Candace. Halfway through the second page, he saw a phrase he’d scribbled down—“sore loser”—and stopped. Occam’s razor, Wyatt realized. The correct explanation is often the simplest one.
Finn was still standing on the loading dock, watching him.
“Does that help?” Finn said. He seemed hopeful.
Wyatt nodded. “Thank you, Lyle.”
He left his car parked out front and took the shortcut, squeezing through the fence between the warehouse and the Land Run. There was one car, not Candace’s, in the employee lot. Wyatt pounded on the back door. A few seconds later, Jonathan, the sound engineer opened it. He looked worried.
“Have you talked to Candace?” he said. “Fudge says Dallas says we might not open tonight. He says she says we might not open at all.”
Wyatt pushed past him and headed to the bar. Jonathan followed him.
“We’ve got two bands on the bill tonight,” he said. “What am I supposed to tell them? We haven’t paid them yet. One band is driving like eight hours from Albuquerque.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Wyatt said. He found the shoe box that Candace kept under the cash register. He dumped onto the bar the postcards Candace’s ex-husband had sent from Hawaii.
“Whoa,” Jonathan said. “Hey. I would not do that if I was you, dude. Candace is not going to be cool with that.”
Wyatt picked up the most recent postcard and read it.
“Maui is better then ever,” Candace’s ex-husband had written. “Its 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!”
Sore loser. That had been Wyatt’s first thought when Candace explained the real purpose of her ex-husband’s upbeat messages. Her ex-husband knew she’d inherited the Land Run. He knew she had a shot at a fresh start. He couldn’t stand the thought that she might be happier than him.
Sore loser. It was right there, day one, in Wyatt’s notes. He’d never given it much thought because most of the cards were postmarked—Paia, Maui—after the harassment had begun. The most recent one was postmarked only four days ago, after Wyatt had arrived in Oklahoma City. He had just assumed that Candace’s ex couldn’t be in two places at once.
Wyatt arranged several of the cards, overlapping, so he could compare the postmarks. He leaned close. Fuck.
“What’s wrong?” Jonathan said.
In each postmark there was variation in the integrity and darkness of the ink. That made sense, since the postmarks were hand-stamped and it would have been impossible to apply uniform pressure, at a uniform angle, with a uniform amount of ink, every single time. But Wyatt could see that the variation in each of the postmarks was identical—the cancellation bars over the stamp faded at exactly the same point, the circle that enclosed the date and location had exactly the same slight, ragged blotch, the P in every “Paia” looked like more like an F. Only the date, in each postmark, was different.
He supposed that some sort of clip-art image had been used for the postmark and then the dates had been changed individually in Photoshop. The postcards, in other words, had never been mailed from Hawaii. They were designed to make Candace think her ex-husband was far away when the harassment started. Otherwise she would have suspected—instantly—who was behind it.
“It’s her ex-husband,” Wyatt said. “Chip is Candace’s ex-husband.”
Jonathan frowned. “No. I think his name is Brady. Or Brandon. Something like that.”
Wyatt called Candace and got her voice mail. He sent her a text: CALL ME. IMPORTANT. He called Dallas.
“What?” she said. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, Wyatt.”
“Is Candace still at your place?”
“She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She turned her phone off.”
“Dallas,” Wyatt said. “Tiffany. Is she at your place right now? Give her the phone. I have to talk to her.”
The tone in his voice got her attention.
“What’s going on?” she said. “Yeah, she’s there, but I’m down in Norman for a class. I’m taking her and Lily to the airport in a couple of hours.”
“Don’t. She doesn’t have to leave now.” Wyatt piled the postcards back into the shoe box. “Never mind. I’m heading over there now.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll see you at your place.”
Jonathan was shaking his head. He pointed to the shoe box full of postcards that Wyatt had tucked under his arm.
“Oh,” Jonathan said. “Oh. You can’t have those, dude. That is definitely not cool.”
“It’s okay,” Wyatt said. “I’m bringing them to Candace.”
He pushed past Jonathan again and exited through the front door, not the back. Wyatt was 95 percent certain he had not been tailed coming to the Land Run, but he wanted to be 100 percent certain he was not tailed leaving it. He cut through the parking lot of the abandoned body shop next to the Land Run and walked all the way up to the corner. Turning right, then right again, he landed at the top of the block that Lyle Finn’s warehouse was on. He watched from
a distance for a minute, to make sure his car was the only one around, then hurried down the block and got in.
He jumped back onto I-40, then jumped right back off at the first exit. No tail—Wyatt was 100 percent certain. He headed toward the Plaza District, where Dallas lived, using surface streets that took him past the old mansions of Heritage Hills and Mesta Park.
Wyatt didn’t want to call the police yet, not until he could provide them with solid information on Chip’s—Brandon’s—location. He thought for a second and then dialed Chip’s number.
“Mr. Rivers?” Chip said, surprised. “Hey!”
“Hey, Chip,” Wyatt said. “I have an update for you. About your case.”
“Really? But I thought— That’s awesome, Mr. Rivers!”
The performance was sensational. Wyatt felt a chill—he couldn’t help it. The guy was even better at this than Wyatt was. A sobering thought.
“It’s an update,” Wyatt said, “not an answer. Not yet.”
“Okay, Mr. Rivers.”
“I told you I couldn’t work your case anymore, but I had some free time this morning. I felt bad about bailing on you. So I went by the salon where your wife works.”
All that was true. Why take chances?
Chip let it hang there for a beat. An exquisitely timed beat.
“What did you see, Mr. Rivers?” he said.
“I can’t talk right now. Can you meet me later this afternoon? I’ve got to wrap up the other case I was working. Well, shut it down is more like it. It’s over.”
“Sure, Mr. Rivers. Just say when. Just say where.”
“I’ll come to your place. Three o’clock. Text me the address.”
Wyatt hung up without waiting for an answer. That was what Chip would expect him to do. He waited. A minute. Another minute. Finally Wyatt’s phone chimed. A text from Chip—an address on Penn, an apartment number.
SEE YOU THEIR THANK YOU SO MUCH.
Wyatt was almost to Dallas’s apartment. He tried Candace again. This time she answered, with a sigh.
“Please,” she said. “Okay?”
“I know who it is,” Wyatt said. “I know who’s been doing this to you.”