by Lou Berney
But Joe and Denny and the others were never real suspects. Crowley was the only real suspect, at least until he wasn’t. He’d been there. Genevieve had been on her way to meet him. He had to know something. It was inconceivable he didn’t, no matter what DeMars said.
Crowley, after all these years. Julianna had put him so far out of her mind that he’d ceased to exist for her. And now, suddenly, here he was.
She realized her hands were shaking. Her thinking, though, was steady. DeMars had warned her that she didn’t want anything to do with Crowley. Julianna didn’t want anything to do with him. She was just going to ask him a few questions. She just was going to find out, for herself, what he did or did not know about Genevieve.
She put her hands on the steering wheel and squeezed. She was parked down the block from the address the girl at the casino had given her. The address was a crappy little house in a neighborhood of crappy little houses, just off South Robinson, only a few miles from where Julianna and Genevieve had grown up. Every house on the block had an old car up on blocks, or a kiddie pool turned upside down in the weeds, or windows blocked off by bedsheets, or a scrawny dog up on its toes behind a rusty chain-link fence, panting and peering over. There was one beautiful old oak tree. Someone had hung a tire swing from the thickest branch.
Crowley’s house was no better or worse than the others. The windows were blocked off by bedsheets and what Julianna guessed were black plastic lawn bags. She didn’t see a dog.
She got out of her car and locked it. Noon on a school day, almost no one around. Two men wrestled what looked like a gravestone out of the bed of a pickup truck and carried it into the house with the beautiful old oak tree. They never even glanced at Julianna.
She climbed the cracked concrete steps to Crowley’s porch. She took a breath, held it, and then knocked. She waited, knocked again. Her hands were really shaking now, so she stuck them in the back pockets of her jeans. She tried that, then took them out of her pockets and folded her arms across her chest.
The door opened. He looked down at her.
“Yeah?” he said.
He was so much older, so much heavier. Julianna had prepared herself for this moment driving here, but still it was a shock. The big sagging gut, the face seamed and creased and sagging, too. A wiry gray goatee. Tangled gray sideburns and eyebrows.
His eyes, though—still so blue. And his shoulder-length hair, greasy and dark and streaked with gray, was hooked behind his ears exactly like it had been hooked when he handed Julianna her Pink Panther. Handing it to Julianna but watching for Genevieve’s reaction.
He’d been twenty-nine when Genevieve disappeared. That would make him, now, fifty-five years old.
“Christopher Crowley?” she said. A stupid question. Of course it was him.
“What do you want?” he said. Shifting with a wince from one foot to another. His blue eyes were alert, alive, moving over Julianna and then past her—to the yard, the street, up and down the street.
The tattoo of the snake on his forearm had not aged well. The lines were blurred and broken, the blue ink faded. He had a diamond stud in the lobe of his right ear. Julianna couldn’t remember if he’d had it in 1986.
“My name is Julianna Rosales,” she said.
“Who?”
“My sister was Genevieve Rosales.”
His eyes moved back to her. He winced again and started to shut the door.
“I just want to talk to you.”
“I got nothing to say.”
“I just want to talk to you,” Julianna said.
“I told that black cop.”
She put her hand on the door to keep him from closing it. He looked at her hand.
“I wrote you letters when you were in prison,” she said. “A long time ago. You never answered them.”
“Move your hand. I’ll tell you the one time.”
She moved her hand. “I just want to talk to you,” she said. “Five minutes.”
His eyes had moved back to the yard, the street, the houses across the street.
“Leave me alone,” he said, and shut the door without looking at her again.
Wyatt
CHAPTER 9
At a stoplight Wyatt flipped through his notes. If somebody was screwing with Candace, he concluded, there was a strong possibility that Jeff Eddy was the one doing the screwing. He had motive—he wanted her to sell him the Land Run—and he was definitely a tool.
But. Wyatt just wasn’t feeling it. Not yet at least. Jeff Eddy felt wrong. Or maybe he felt too right, too on-the-nose.
On the other hand, though, in Wyatt’s experience as both a newspaper reporter and then a private investigator, he’d found that real life was often much simpler than the twisty-turny plots you saw on television. A lot of times, the bad guy was exactly who you thought the bad guy was.
If there even was a bad guy, Wyatt reminded himself. If somebody really was screwing with Candace.
Wyatt’s phone rang. Laurie. He started to answer it but then realized that the light had changed from red to green. The drivers behind him, polite Oklahomans, refrained from honking. Wyatt waved and pulled in to the intersection.
His uncle lived in an old neighborhood along the edge of Memorial Park, on a tree-lined street of two-story Prairie-style houses with sweeping eaves and deep porches. At one time this had been among the most desirable places in the city to live, right off the old Classen Boulevard streetcar line. By Wyatt’s day, though, mandatory school busing had done a number on neighborhoods like this, driving out everyone but the old, the poor, the old and poor.
Now, he saw, the area had perked back up. For every junker with a quarter panel duct-taped in place, there were a couple of late-model Subarus. For every slump-shouldered house on a broken foundation, there were two others with fresh paint and new walkways.
His uncle, Wyatt’s last living relative in Oklahoma City, still lived in the house where he and Wyatt’s father had grown up. It was in decent shape. The paint on the shutters was peeling, but the flower beds brimmed.
Pete was sitting on his porch, in a wedge of sunlight that had managed to sneak beneath the overhanging eaves and between the columns. He peered out when Wyatt got out of his car.
“Who’s that?” he said.
“Uncle Pete,” Wyatt said. “How are you?”
“Mikey! Why, my favorite nephew!”
His one and only nephew. Wyatt smiled. His uncle had been cracking the same joke, in the same deadpan baritone, since Wyatt was in diapers. Wyatt realized this was the only part of his trip back to Oklahoma City that he hadn’t been dreading.
“Come here, Mikey,” Pete said. “Let me get a look at you.”
Wyatt had prepared himself for a shock—it had been twenty years since he’d seen his uncle in person—but Pete looked just the same. The hedgehog head of gray hair, a face like an old baseball glove you found in the attic. “Lived-in” was probably the polite way to describe it. Pete had looked seventy-five years old when he was fifty. Now, closing in on eighty, he still looked seventy-five. Shoulders back, chin up, and a smile, as always, tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Only his hand gave him away. It weighed nothing when Wyatt shook it—bone and vein and crumpled onionskin paper.
“I’m back in town,” Wyatt said. “I thought I’d drop by and say hello.”
“Well, come on in.”
Wyatt followed him inside. It wasn’t too bad—just a hundred years’ or so worth of old newspapers and magazines and junk mail piled everywhere. Pete settled himself on the sofa. Wyatt took a seat next to him. The house smelled like Old Spice and feet, which made Wyatt want to open a window. His father had worn Old Spice, too. Wyatt didn’t hold that against Pete.
“Mikey,” Pete said. “Son of a gun. I remember when you were just a twink
le in your father’s eye.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Wyatt said.
His uncle knew what he meant—Wyatt’s father was not the twinkly sort. That smile tugged at the corner of Pete’s mouth.
“How have you been, Uncle Pete?” Wyatt said. He called his uncle once a year or so to say hello. The last time had been . . . last year at Christmas? Or maybe the year before? Wyatt wasn’t sure.
“Just fine, just fine. How do you like my flowers out front?”
“An impressive display.”
“The gay fella who lives next door, he helped me with those.” His uncle lowered his voice, conspiratorial. “You’d never guess it.”
Wyatt lowered his voice, too. “That he lives next door?”
His uncle’s rumbling baritone chuckle filled a room better than most laughs. “Son of a gun,” he said. “Mikey!”
Pete had always been the opposite, in every possible way, of Wyatt’s father. He was generous and kind and funny and, when Wyatt was growing up, pretty much constantly drunk. In 1995 he stopped drinking—joined AA and stopped cold—the day after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Pete’s wife, Beverly, had worked in the Social Security office, on the side of the building that took the main force of the blast. Beverly needed an emergency root canal the morning of April 19 and had called in sick. She was on the other side of town when the bomb went off.
Beverly passed away in 1999. Pete remained sober. He told Wyatt once that he’d stay sober through all eternity to pay off the extra four years he got with her.
“I remember,” Pete said, “you were a worker. You were the worker in the family. When you set your mind to something. Oh, my.”
Wyatt was surprised. “Me?”
“Nose to the grindstone. Remember what Daddy always said?” Pete’s eyes floated for a second, lost. It was like watching a car hit a patch of ice and fishtail. “No. Your father, I mean to say. He was the worker. You’re Michael. I know that.”
“I know you do,” Wyatt said.
His uncle rubbed the rolled arm of the sofa, back and forth.
“I haven’t lost my marbles yet,” he said. “Not all of them. You’re the detective. The private eyeball.”
“That’s right.”
“Florida. Tampa, Florida.”
“That’s right. Vegas now, though. The last couple of years.”
“And before that—Minnesota. You worked for a newspaper. And somewhere back east before that. Massachusetts.”
“Now you’re just showing off,” Wyatt said.
“I remember one time we went downtown to see the Harlem Globetrotters.”
Wyatt had been eight or nine years old. A bleak, gray Sunday in February. Inside, though, it was all color and heat. The laughter had leaped around the arena like a living thing.
“I only had enough money for a Coke or a pack of Globetrotter cards,” Wyatt said. “You said—I don’t remember what you said. But you told me to buy the Coke. When I got home, maybe it wasn’t even until the next day, I put my hand in my coat pocket.”
And there were three packs of Harlem Globetrotter trading cards his uncle had purchased on the sly, had slipped into Wyatt’s pocket while he wasn’t looking.
“I remember another time,” his uncle said. “You called me from school. No, I think the school nurse did. I picked you up, and we went for a drive. Just the two of us driving around and shooting the breeze. You were almost old enough to drive. I told you I’d give you a lesson, just as soon as you were—”
He stopped himself as the memory sharpened and he realized the circumstances of the drive.
September, or early October. Wyatt had returned to school after missing the first two weeks of his junior year—a month after what happened at the movie theater. Going back to school wasn’t awful. Nobody stared, nobody whispered. The locker doors banged like they always did, the chalk tap-tapped on the blackboard, the warm narcotic breeze drifted through the classrooms in the afternoon and put everyone to sleep. For an entire class period, sometimes, Wyatt could do it—he could imagine that nothing in him or the world had changed.
But how, all the other times, was he supposed to sit in geometry class and not go out of his mind? He probably did go out of his mind. One day, when he was very, very sure he could not stand another minute in his own skin, he lied and told the school nurse he had a stomachache. He lied and told her his parents were in Chicago. So she called his uncle to come get him. And Wyatt lived to fight another day.
“We drove around the lake,” Wyatt said, “and then we stopped for a root beer at Coit’s. At Coit’s? I think so. Or was it the A&W on Wilshire? I think the A&W was already gone. Both places had the frosted mugs, I remember.”
His uncle rubbed the arm of the sofa. He found a thread and picked at it. A crumpled Kleenex was tucked into the wrist of his cardigan.
“That was a hard time for you, Mikey,” he said. “I know it was.”
When Pete dropped him off at home that day, he’d turned to Wyatt. He’d been drinking, probably, but his eyes were always clear, his baritone always steady, no matter how drunk he might be. He’d put his hand on Wyatt’s shoulder and told him . . . what, exactly? Wyatt couldn’t remember. He remembered the root beer in a frosted mug, the hand on his shoulder.
A week or two later, Wyatt’s father found a job coaching basketball at a high school just outside San Diego. An old navy buddy of his was the principal there. They’d moved in early November.
Wyatt’s phone rang. Bill Haskell, the reporter he’d asked to find out about the Land Run’s true value. Wyatt excused himself and moved to the porch.
“It’s a new map,” Haskell said.
“A new map?”
“No. A new MAPS. Capital M. Capital A. Capital P. Metropolitan Area Projects. A series of sales-tax initiatives to fund civic improvements. The most recent one, a few years ago, paid to upgrade the arena to NBA standards. There was another one before that for the public schools, one for Bricktown. The last measure passed with sixty percent of the vote.”
“You know, I enjoy a buried lede as much as the next man, Bill.”
Haskell grunted. “The drums have begun to beat for a new MAPS. So I’m told. Softly at this point—only a few people are in the know thus far. I talked to my man in the mayor’s office, and he refused to confirm nor deny.”
“Which means he confirms.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the new project?”
“A convention center, a central park, a residential and retail district.”
“Let me guess,” Wyatt said.
“South of Reno,” Haskell said. “Out to the eastern edge of Keeler Park.”
Wyatt pulled up Google Maps on his phone. The Land Run, at Walker and SW Sixth, was located two blocks from Keeler Park.
“Bill,” he said, “I owe you one.”
Wyatt clicked off. So that explained why Jeff Eddy had changed his mind so abruptly and now wanted to get his hands on a so-called dump like the Land Run. If city development money came pumping into the neighborhood and made the desert bloom, the land beneath the Land Run would bloom right along with it.
Double the value? Triple? Wyatt didn’t know. He didn’t really care. The exact lushness of the bloom was beside the point.
He pulled up the numbers on the most recent MAPS ballot measure. He confirmed that it had passed with 60 percent of the vote.
He thought for a second and then called Jeff Eddy’s office. His assistant, Emilia, answered.
“Emilia,” Wyatt said, “I feel like we’ve been drifting apart.”
“Mr. Rivers,” she said, in such a way that Wyatt thought there might be a 30 percent chance she was not 100 percent unhappy to hear from him. “How may I help you?”
“The boss man, please.
Tell him it’s important. Tell him I’ve got some earthshaking news.”
“Hmmm,” she said. Or maybe it was “Hummph.”
After a second, Jeff Eddy came on the line. “What do you want?”
“I’ve got some earthshaking news,” Wyatt said. “You’re not gonna believe this, but the Land Run might be worth more than we thought. I found out about this tax initiative that’s in the works, the very early works. I’m quoting my source. Big development money for the neighborhood. Can you believe it? I hope you’re sitting down. I wanted to be the first to tell you.”
Wyatt could hear Jeff Eddy breathing.
“Wait,” Wyatt said. “You didn’t already know about all this, did you? I feel stupid now.”
Wyatt heard a pop and a buzz as Eddy hung up on him.
A few seconds later, Wyatt’s phone rang. Eddy again. Wyatt wondered if he was calling back just so he could hang up on him again.
“Look,” Eddy said. “I think what’s happened here, I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot.”
His voice was friendly and folksy now, a big hearty slap on the back.
“Did we?” Wyatt said.
“Let’s get together again. I’d like to fill you in on a couple of important facts about the situation. Before . . . you know, this gets more complicated than it has to.”
Wyatt was pretty sure he knew what that meant. “Before I tell my client, in other words, that the Land Run is worth a lot more money than she thinks it is?”
Was it possible to hear someone grimace? Wyatt discovered that it was.
