The Long and Faraway Gone (21 page)

“Tell me about it,” Dixon said. “Lyle has great fans, most of them, but the ones in the inner circle can get very protective. No. What's the word? Very
possessive.
” He noticed Wyatt's face. And then Wyatt's bandaged hand. “What happened to you?”

“Just your typical weekday evening. Is Lyle around?”

“No. He always goes into seclusion somewhere beforehand. I don't ever know where. It has something to do with the creative potency of his seed point. Or something like that. I try not to really ever ask him follow-­up questions if I can help it.”

“Beforehand?” Wyatt said.

“Tonight's the parade.” Without a change in his friendly, suburban-­dad face, Dixon mimed stabbing himself in the stomach and committing ritual Japanese suicide. “I look forward to it all year.”

Wyatt caught the two groupies on the loading dock glancing at him. He gave them his best, biggest smile, but it had no effect. They turned away. He wondered if he was losing his touch. Or if, on the other hand, maybe it was the bearded pig who had beaten the shit out of him last night. Gavin would love that, too, if he ever found out. Wyatt would have to make sure he never did.

“Oh,” he said. “That's a shame. Because I was going to ask Lyle about his feud with Candace that neither of you happened to mention to me yesterday.”

Dixon gazed off into the distance and stood very still, as if maybe Wyatt would forget he was there and eventually walk away.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Sorry about that.”

“I caught the end of your argument with Lyle after I left. My guess, you suspected that Lyle is the one harassing Candace and you called him on it.”

“No. Yes. Yes and no. Yes, he was mad at Candace about the new deal. I thought the new deal was fine, by the way. Who cares, you know? The Barking Johnsons would have to play the Land Run twenty times to clear what we clear one night at a festival or some arena in Japan. The Land Run's never been about the money.”

“Is it the principle of the thing?”

“The thing is, Lyle's never thrilled when you tell him no. That's why he was mad at Candace. But he told me he didn't have anything to do with what's going on over there. He told me I was a dick for thinking that. And I believe him, the more I think about it. You said everything in the Land Run was turned upside down. Every single thing, right?”

Wyatt saw where he was going. He nodded. “It took a lot of focus, a lot of work.”

“Lyle can focus. When he needs to. He's actually a very smart guy. But yeah.”

“Maybe he had help.”

“And it was
anonymous.
You know? Lyle doesn't really do anonymous.”

“Says the longtime manager, outwardly exasperated with his rock-­star client but willing to go to any lengths to protect him.”

“Oh, believe me, I've buried a few bodies over the years. Figuratively speaking. But if Lyle was doing something like that, he'd want to show it off. That's my theory. I love the guy like a brother, but he doesn't clip his toenails without Instagramming it.”

The manager had a point. But—­just like the cop who'd convinced himself that the Land Run had been turned upside down by kids—­Dixon had skin in the game. He wanted Lyle Finn to be innocent. He
needed
him to be innocent. You could talk yourself into believing anything if you needed it enough.

“What parade tonight?” Wyatt said.

“The Halloween parade downtown. Lyle always leads the March of a Thousand Barking Johnsons. This year it's zombies, and an insurance premium thirty percent higher than last year because Lyle thinks that mixing tiki torches and big papier-­mâché zombie heads is an awesome idea.”

The girl on the stilts stumbled and almost fell. The bearded pig caught her.

“I need to be stoned,” Wyatt could hear the girl tell the pig. “I think it'll be easier when I'm stoned.”

The bearded pig nodded in agreement. Finn's manager nodded.

“And everyone on stilts,” he said. “I forgot the stilts. Awesome.”

Wyatt laughed. He liked the manager of the Barking Johnsons. In different circumstances he'd enjoy having a drink with the guy and listening to what Wyatt knew had to be some entertaining war stories. But he had not neglected to note that Dixon—­like Finn, like Jeff Eddy, like the bearded pig—­was roughly the same size as the guy who'd attacked him. Dixon hadn't been limping when he came over to greet Wyatt, but Wyatt couldn't say for sure that his attacker had been limping when he took off either, or if Wyatt had even hit his leg when he stabbed him with the ballpoint pen.

“Thanks,” Wyatt said.

He headed back up the alley and squeezed through the hole in the fence just as a paint-­blistered Ford Focus pulled in. Candace got out and looked at him.

“What happened to you?” she said, in a tone implying that Wyatt had been at fault.

Wyatt held up his bandaged hand. “Doctor, will I be able to play the violin when this comes off?”

“Shut up. What happened?”

He told her about getting jumped. Her eyes went wide.

“What?”

“It's okay,” Wyatt said. “I think someone just wants me to back off your case. I don't think he wanted to really hurt me.”

Her eyes went even wider. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It's supposed to make
me
feel better, Candace.”

“Crap!”

“Your concern for my well-­being is touching.”

“Shut up.” She reached up and touched her knuckles to the big bruise on his cheekbone—­not tenderly but more tenderly than Wyatt would have expected. And then she used her knuckles to whack him hard on the sternum. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you gonna bail on me now?”

“Shut up. No. But I have a proposal for you.”

“And wait,” Candace said. “What were you doing in the parking lot at the Burlington Coat Factory at one in the morning?”

“I'd like to propose that you close up shop for a few nights. Lie low until I can figure out who's behind all this.”

She started walking toward the Land Run. “Sure,” she said.

“Candace,” Wyatt said, keeping pace with her. “Just consider it.”

They reached the back door. Wyatt saw that the door and frame had been repaired, a new, heavy-­duty lock installed. Candace sorted through the keys on her ring. Attached to the ring, he noticed, was a rubber rabbit with only three feet.

Candace found the key she was looking for, unlocked the door, and then wheeled around. She pointed the key at a spot right between Wyatt's eyes.

“Screw!” she said. “You!”

“Just for a few nights.”

“No! That's what he wants me to do, isn't it? He wants me to give up!”

Wyatt knew she wasn't wrong. But that didn't make her right.

“You're not giving up,” Wyatt said. “You're just being careful.”

“I
am
careful! I spent like two hundred bucks on this stupid lock!”

“You're just being more careful.”

“I don't have two hundred bucks! Seriously! I can't afford to close for
one
night. I'm not going to! Screw him!”

She went inside and shut the door behind her. A second later the door opened back up.

“I knew you'd change your mind,” Wyatt said.

“Come over for lunch tomorrow. You look like crap. One o'clock sharp. I'll text you my address.”

She shut the door again. Wyatt heard the lock snap.

I
T WAS ALMOST
noon. Wyatt was still curious about the conversation he'd had with Jeff Eddy's wife at the game—­why
did
Greg Eddy choose not to leave the Land Run to his brother?—­so he drove downtown. He found an open meter on Park Avenue and walked across to Leadership Square. The lobby elevators were opposite a shop that sold Oklahoma City Thunder merchandise. Glass walls, a detective's best friend. Wyatt found a spot with a nice angle and browsed a rack of Russell Westbrook official authentic replica jerseys.

Ten minutes later he saw Jeff Eddy exit one of the elevators and make his way toward a sandwich shop on the far side of the lobby. Wyatt waited. Another elevator door slid open. Out stepped Emilia, Jeff Eddy's assistant. She pushed through the revolving doors, out of the building. Wyatt followed.

The sidewalks were packed, so he didn't need to give Emilia much of a cushion. Looking ahead, he saw that most of the lunch crowd was hooking left on Harvey—­everyone seemed to be headed toward the new skyscraper. Wyatt decided to roll the dice. He crossed the street, picked up his pace, and made it to the corner half a block before Emilia did.

The lobby of the new skyscraper was much nicer and brighter than the lobby of Leadership Square, the food court more upscale. Wyatt grabbed a plastic tray. Sushi, soup, or salad? He guessed soup. If he guessed wrong, he knew he could always cut over to the cold-­drink case.

He took his time selecting a bowl, a spoon. He took his time studying the selections. French onion. Split pea with smoked ham. Tomato basil cream. Lentil vegetable. He was about to move to the salad bar when he saw Emilia approach.

When you pretended to be surprised, Wyatt had learned over the years, you had to use a soft touch. A half blink, a quick recovery.

“Emilia,” he said. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

“Mr. Rivers,” she said.

He thought he caught the beginning of a smile before she remembered to frown.

“Are you tailing me?” Wyatt said. “Did Jeff tell you to tail me? I'm not sure how I feel about that.”

She touched the knot of her elegant scarf, scandalized, then realized he was kidding.

“I'm sure I have better things to do,” she said.

“I would certainly hope so, Emilia. And I'm sure you have better things to do than have lunch with me, but I'm going to ask anyway.”

“Oh, no. I don't think that would be a good idea.”

“Just lunch, no business,” Wyatt said. This was what behavioral scientists, and pickup artists, called building a permission structure. Start small and make it as easy as possible for your subject to say yes. “I just hate to eat alone. I feel like I'm back in high school, at a new school where I don't know a soul.”

She hesitated and touched the knot of her elegant scarf again. A good sign.

“Well,” she said finally.

They found a table for two on the edge of the dining area. Wyatt didn't push, he didn't rush. He found Emilia a delightful lunch companion. Her stories about flying for Pan Am in the seventies—­about an oil sheik in the first-­class cabin who got drunk on Dom Perignon and tried to play Russian roulette with a starter's pistol, about a pied-­à-­terre she shared for a time in the Latin Quarter with two other stewardesses—­were great stories.

That, Wyatt supposed, was his secret. He liked ­people, he liked stories. The world was a fascinating place if you didn't hurry through it.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “It's already one-­fifteen.”

“Back to the salt mines,” Wyatt said. “What's it like to work with Jeff, by the way?”

She gave him a look. “By the way?”

Emilia was no fool. But Wyatt could tell she'd had a pleasant lunch. She appreciated his effort.

“Tell the truth,” he said. “Your boss is kind of a tool, isn't he? Between you and me.”

She hid her smile with a dab of her napkin. “Working for Mr. Eddy can occasionally be . . .
trying.
”

“A tool, in other words. But even so, I don't understand it.”

“Understand what?”

“Why Greg didn't leave him the Land Run. Jeff might be a tool, but he was Greg's only family in the world, right?”

Emilia set her napkin on the table. Wyatt watched her make the rapid, complex calculations that ­people make. The moment of truth.

“Mr. Rivers,” she said, “I'm a person who values loyalty.”

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.”

 

W
yatt 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.

CH
IP 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, chunky 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.

B
ROADWAY 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.