by Lou Berney
She remembered the smell of the place. Hot grease, burned meat, ginger, and garlic. Julianna had wanted the fried sweet-and-sour pork for dinner, doused in an orangish sauce that looked excitingly radioactive, but then changed her mind at the last second and had an Indian taco instead.
“All right,” DeMars said.
“Keep looking.” She knew he’d already seen the man in the cowboy hat. At the edge of the frame, his back to the camera, standing in line at the barbecue trailer next to the Chinese place.
“Juli,” DeMars said. “Come on, now.”
“Half the guys at the fair had cowboy hats. Right? And we don’t know what time this photo was taken. We don’t even know what night, really. The caption could be the wrong night.” The State Fair of Oklahoma ran for eleven days in 1986, from Thursday, September 18, through Sunday, September 28. Genevieve had disappeared on the first Saturday night of the fair. The police had not begun to canvass until Tuesday. “But just listen to me. What if this photo really was taken on the night of the twentieth? What if the lady who took it has other photos, too? She must have, right? And what if in one of those photos we can see his face? The guy in the cowboy hat?”
Julianna didn’t say it aloud, what else she was thinking: What if in one of those photos we can see her?
When Genevieve disappeared, cell-phone cameras were twenty years in the future. Otherwise Julianna would have had hundreds of online fair photos to pore over, thousands of them, each dated and time-stamped, each individual flash illuminating some dark corner of that night.
Julianna could close her eyes and see that BORN IN THE USA T-shirt like it was right in front of her. Genevieve had bought it at a concert in Dallas the year before. A lot of her friends were into metal and thought Bruce Springsteen was faggy. The headband he wore, the stupid dancing on MTV. But Genevieve had been a fan before he became so popular, when his music was muddy and brooding. On the album cover for Darkness on the Edge of Town, he looked scrawny and grimy and haunted, like someone who could have lived down the street from them.
“All right,” DeMars said. “What if ?”
He meant that it didn’t help them—so what if they found a photo with the face of an anonymous man in a cowboy hat? They’d never be able to identify him. They’d never be able to find him. Abigail Goad had passed away in 1988, after a stroke, so they would never even know for sure if he was the man that Genevieve had been talking to. That she might have been talking to.
But Julianna refused to think that way. You had to open every door and see what was behind it. DeMars, as kind and smart as he was, didn’t understand that. This was his job. It was just a job.
“Maybe I’d recognize him if I saw his face,” Julianna said. “Maybe he was someone Genni knew, or someone we’d seen earlier. He could have been following us. Or maybe the lady who took the photo remembers something about him. Maybe she saw something.”
DeMars slowly smoothed a hand over his silver-flecked goatee and waited. His hands were big, the color of some rich, dark wood.
“I sent her a message on Facebook,” Julianna said. “The woman who posted the photo. But that was a week ago, and I haven’t heard back. So I thought there might be something you could do.”
“Juli.”
“DeMars, just—”
“Listen to me now. You been talking.”
“Fine.”
“We do this, don’t we? Every year or two.”
“This?” There was more poison in her voice than Julianna intended. DeMars pretended not to notice.
“You want an answer,” he said. “I understand that. But there’s not an answer. There’ll never be an answer. It’s been twenty-six years. Your sister is gone, and you are here. That’s the only answer there is. You are here.”
They sat in silence. Julianna closed her laptop and timed her breathing to the slow green pulse of the sleep-indicator light.
“Oh, DeMars.” She smiled. “You think I’m still that girl. I’m not.”
“All right.”
At certain points in her life, Julianna’s obsession with what had happened to her sister—with finding an answer—had threatened to consume her. But now she had a life and a career. Friends. Fresh towels in the bathroom.
She felt so angry, suddenly, that she wanted to pick up her laptop and smash it against the wall. Because who was to say she shouldn’t be consumed by what happened to Genevieve? Not Detective Charles DeMars, for whom this was just a job. Fuck him.
She smiled again. “All I wanted, De Mars, I just wanted a favor. I thought you might be able to do me a favor. If you can’t, no problem. No hard feelings.”
He was an excellent cop and could read her mind. She guessed he would try now to put her on the defensive, on her heels. You don’t think I care about all this, Juli? You don’t think I care about you?
Julianna didn’t understand why he hesitated. “What?” she said.
He smoothed his hand over his goatee. “Crowley popped up.”
For a moment she didn’t register the name. And then, for an even longer moment, she didn’t register what DeMars was saying.
“What?”
“State system flagged him, so they let me know. Because the investigation’s still ongoing, officially. He applied for a job down near Chickasha, so they ran a background check. The Indian casino down there.”
Julianna was so surprised she felt as if she were in a dream, the kind where you tried to run but couldn’t move, where you tried to cry out but couldn’t speak.
Crowley. Christopher Wayne Crowley. She hadn’t thought about him in years. He was the carny who worked at the booth where Julianna won her stuffed Pink Panther. Early on, in the first few days after Genevieve disappeared, he’d been the primary suspect in the case—the only suspect, really, the only solid lead. Julianna told the detectives how he’d flirted with Genevieve and invited her to meet him later. Genevieve, at the time, probably thought Julianna had missed all that, too enraptured by her new Pink Panther to notice. Julianna, of course, missed nothing. It was Genevieve she had been enraptured by, and she monitored her big sister’s every breath with fascination.
Crowley had been arrested twice before, once for possession and once for assault and battery. The police picked him up and questioned him for hours. He denied at first that he remembered Julianna, then denied that he’d ever invited her to come by his trailer. Finally he admitted that he’d invited her but swore she never showed up. He’d been disappointed when she hadn’t.
The police couldn’t find any physical evidence in the trailer or his car, but they were certain he was lying. Julianna had seen the official transcripts of the interview. She remembered a handwritten note about Crowley that some cop had jotted in the margin of the transcript: “Lies like he breathes.”
Crowley stuck by his story. It was Abigail Goad, the rancher’s wife from Okeene, who cleared him. She saw Genevieve alive and well at 9:00 P.M. in Food Alley. Ten minutes earlier, at a 7-Eleven store a block from the fairgrounds, Crowley had been arrested for trying to shoplift a six-pack of beer. He spent the night in Oklahoma County Jail.
So much for the one suspect, the one solid lead.
A year later Crowley was convicted on another drug charge, in Tennessee. Julianna, fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, found the address for the prison and wrote him a letter. Even though Crowley could not have murdered Genevieve, Julianna was convinced he knew more about what happened that night than he’d told police. Lies like he breathes.
He didn’t reply to that first letter, or to any of the others she sent him. The last few, in the winter of 1991, were returned with a stamp on the envelope that said the addressee was no longer in custody. Fitch, the detective who had the case at the time, checked for Julianna. He found out that Crowley had served his full sentence and been released without condition: no parole officer, no forwarding
address, no trace.
DeMars tried again to track Crowley down when he inherited the case—when . . . well, Julianna begged and bitched and bullied. But he came up empty, too, and so did Julianna every time she used the Internet to find Crowley on her own. DeMars told her that Crowley was probably dead. He told her to forget about him, and eventually she had.
But now.
“He’s here?” she said. “In Oklahoma?”
“He doesn’t have any answers, Juli. He never did.”
“Let’s make sure.”
“We did. Long time ago.”
We. Meaning the police, the original detectives in the case, all the people like DeMars for whom the case was just a job.
“When?” she said. “When did Crowley pop up?”
“Few months ago.”
“A few months ago.” She pressed her palms flat against the table. “And you just now . . .”
Julianna realized he hadn’t been planning to tell her at all. Face-to-face, though, he’d had a pang of guilt, of pity, something. She nodded. “I see.”
“I talked to him. Went down there, where he’s staying at. Crowley said what he said before. He doesn’t know anything.”
“Why didn’t you let me know?”
He didn’t bother answering that.
“Where’s he staying?” she said.
“I told you. I already talked to him.”
“I want to talk to him myself.”
“You don’t.”
“Where is he? He didn’t get the casino job.” Not with two felony convictions and prison time.
“No.”
“You have to tell me.”
He leaned back, ramrod straight, and lifted his chin—the move he used to show you that he wasn’t playing. “Is that what you think?”
Her neighbor’s kids were in the backyard, running around with their dog. Julianna could hear the laughter and panting and happy growling.
She went into the kitchen and cut two slices of the lemon meringue pie she’d bought at the German bakery DeMars liked.
“My favorite,” he said when she set the plate in front of him. “Look at that.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was out of line.”
He ate the slice of pie in four big bites, then squared up the loose crumbs with his fork and ate those, too. “You don’t want anything to do with him, Juli,” he said. “He’s bad news. You have to trust me on that.”
“I do.”
“All right.”
“What about the other thing? The woman on Facebook?”
“Give it another week,” he said. “You don’t hear back from her about the photo, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you, DeMars.”
He reached across the table and took her small hand in his big one. He leaned in and let the lines on his forehead soften. This was another one of his moves, the gentle father. “Forget about Crowley. All right? He doesn’t have the answer. You are here. That’s the answer. Forget about him.”
“I will,” she said, and gave his hand a squeeze. “You’re right. I promise.”
Wyatt
CHAPTER 7
Wyatt’s father was stern and humorless, a buzz-cut high-school basketball coach. One time the school principal made him phone a player on his team to apologize for an incident at practice. Wyatt’s father had thrown a basketball and nailed the kid in the head with it. Wyatt’s father called the kid and told him he was sorry—he’d been aiming for the kid standing next to him. Wyatt’s mother laughed, but his father didn’t understand why. He just looked at her like he always did, with vague and patient disgust.
It wasn’t until Wyatt landed the job at the Pheasant Run—in September of 1985, the day after his fifteenth birthday—that he realized just how lonely and unhappy his life had been up until then.
His first day of work at the movie theater, O’Malley came over to Wyatt and asked him who his favorite band was. Wyatt panicked. He was fifteen years old. O’Malley was seventeen and a half. They inhabited different universes.
“I don’t know,” Wyatt said.
“I like that,” O’Malley said, nodding. “An open mind. I’ll bring you some tapes. Come here.”
O’Malley straightened the knot of Wyatt’s official Monarch Theaters tie. The tie was black polyester, to match the slacks. The blazer was orange.
“Thanks,” Wyatt said.
“What’s your name? You want some Junior Mints or Raisinets? Here’s what we do. Just take a couple of pieces from every box, two or three max, then put the box back in the case. Ingenious, if I do say so myself.”
It was pretty ingenious. This was back before boxes of candy were sealed or shrink-wrapped.
“Michael,” Wyatt said. “My name’s Michael Oliver.”
“Michael?” O’Malley said. “Hmm. You look more like a Heinz to me.”
So that first day O’Malley made Wyatt a name tag that said HEINZ. This was back when you used a special device to punch letters into an adhesive plastic strip.
“Heinz!” Melody said when she saw the name tag pinned to the lapel of Wyatt’s blazer. She was a ferocious-looking black girl, cornrows and muscular forearms, who rarely ever stopped giggling. “What is that? Like the ketchup? What kind of name is that? I thought I heard every crazy white-boy name there is. Heinz!”
“He’s Czechoslovakian,” O’Malley explained gravely. “A refugee from political persecution. His family makes sausage.”
“In the Sudetenland,” Wyatt said, because his sophomore history class had been studying World War II. O’Malley grinned, and in that instant Wyatt felt—he could still feel it now, remembering the moment twenty-six years later—like he was home, like he’d come home.
Wyatt had never seen cornrows before, not up close. He’d never seen a girl with forearms like that. Melody smelled like Strawberry Splash Bubblicious and popcorn grease. Everyone who worked at the theater smelled like popcorn grease. It baked into your pores like pottery glaze.
The cashier, that first day, had been Karlene. Oh, Karlene. She was a talker. O’Malley would watch and wait until Mr. Bingham approached Karlene to check the box-office numbers, and then O’Malley would slide over and ask Karlene a question designed to set her off. Hey, Karlene, how was your day off yesterday? At which point he’d slide back away and leave Mr. Bingham trapped there for the duration of Karlene’s never-ending answer.
Karlene was tall and tan and stacked, as they used to say back then, with a riot of frosted blond hair that made her look like a girl rushing the stage in a Whitesnake video. Rumor had it that O’Malley and Karlene had slept together a time or two before he started going out with Theresa. O’Malley refused to confirm or deny.
“Always respect the privacy of your paramours,” he told Wyatt once.
O’Malley said shit like that all the time. Wyatt didn’t know where he came up with it.
The girls at the theater, the cashiers and the concession girls, wore orange polyester uniforms that matched the doormen’s blazers. The hem fell just above the knee, and a zipper ran all the way down the front of the dress, top to bottom.
Those zippers drove Mr. Bingham crazy. He tried occasionally to enforce the official Monarch Theaters policy of full zip, but the girls just laughed at that. It got hot in the concession stand during a rush, and the uniforms were already ugly enough—no way was a teenage girl with any self-respect going to compound the embarrassment by zipping all the way up to the neckline.
“A free society,” O’Malley said, “cannot legislate cleavage.”
“I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to,” Karlene said. “My boobs are too big.”
She demonstrated: zip up, zip down, zip up, zip down.
O’Malley, Wyatt, and Grubb watched. After a minute, Janella behind the candy cas
e grabbed the soda gun and hosed them down with water.
Once their shift ended, the girls changed out of their uniforms so fast you wouldn’t believe it. They used the cramped little room at the bottom of the projection-booth stairs, across from the manager’s office, where Mr. Bingham posted the week’s schedule next to the clock and the metal rack of time cards.
Karlene always changed into tight, acid-washed jeans. She was a talker, a teaser, and a hugger. When Wyatt stocked the hot-dog rollers, she’d tell him to stop playing with his wiener, and then, as everybody laughed, she’d give him an apologetic hug.
Karlene was the second person shot in the head, after Mr. Bingham. Grubb was next, and then Theresa, and then Melody, and then O’Malley. Wyatt, lying between Theresa and Melody, should have been number five.
One week earlier Karlene had turned eighteen. They’d celebrated her birthday when they got off work, in the small neighborhood park across the street from the back of the theater. Most nights after the late shift, if the weather was good, the theater employees hung out in the playground there, drinking and talking and passing around the giant doobie that Grubb always had on hand. The night of Karlene’s birthday, one of the other girls, Wyatt couldn’t remember which, had brought a cake from IGA.
Heinz! Heinz from the Sudetenland! Wyatt hadn’t thought about that in years. Melody, he remembered, had said one crazy white-boy name was good as another and refused to call Wyatt by his real name from that point on. Grubb, genial and permanently stoned, thought Heinz was Wyatt’s real name. Karlene always called him “Sugar Pop” or “Pop Tart.” O’Malley called him Michael, usually, but sometimes Heinz and sometimes “Little Buddy.” Tate called everyone, male or female, “Man.” Mr. Bingham rarely called Wyatt anything. You. You there.
When Mr. Bingham finally noticed the HEINZ name tag that Wyatt had been wearing for a couple of weeks by then, he assumed correctly that O’Malley had been behind this violation of the Monarch Employee Handbook and wrote O’Malley up. And then he took Wyatt aside for a heart-to-heart warning: Fair or not, Mr. Bingham said, Wyatt would always be judged in life by the people with whom he chose to associate himself.
