The Long and Faraway Gone

by Lou Berney

  “No, no,” Eddy said. “That’s not it at all. I just want you to have all the facts when you talk to her about this. The big picture. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?”

  “It sounds reasonable,” Wyatt agreed.

  “Hey, now, I got an idea,” Eddy said. “You like football? Why don’t you come on out to the OU game with me tomorrow night? I’ve got club seats on the forty-­yard line.”

  “I generally prefer to sit in the stands,” Wyatt said.

  Jeff Eddy laughed the fakest laugh of all time—­the three-­dollar bill of laughs.

  “We’ll grill some steaks beforehand,” he said, “drink a few beers, get to know each other a little bit. What do you say? And in the meantime we put all this other business on hold.”

  “Sure,” Wyatt said, “why not?”

  AFTER THE GUNSHOTS Wyatt remembered nothing. He was deaf. He was blind. He didn’t open his eyes until he felt fingers press against his neck and he heard someone yell, as if from a great distance away, “This one’s alive!”

  Wyatt’s left eyelid wouldn’t open at first. It was like a window that had been painted shut. His eyelid was painted shut with blood. He heard someone say, as if from an even greater distance away, “Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

  The janitor had arrived at seven to clean the theater restrooms. Mr. Bingham hadn’t been there to let him in, so the janitor tracked down Disco Otis, the security guard. Disco Otis had peered through the glass doors and noticed the bloody footprints leading away from the projection-­booth stairs. He called the police. The first cops arrived at 7:37 A.M., which meant Wyatt had been lying there in the darkness for almost six hours.

  Wyatt learned all that later. To him, there in the projection booth, it was as if no time had passed at all. He heard the last gunshot and felt the cop’s or paramedic’s fingers press against his neck, one beat right after the other. Wyatt had thought at first that the fingers and the voice belonged to one of the robbers. He waited for another, final gunshot. He prayed for it.

  He remembered very little of what happened next. Someone must have cut the cord that bound his wrists behind his back. Someone must have led him back down the narrow projection-­booth stairs and across the lobby and out of the mall. The female detective in the black, square-­toed shoes? Maybe her. Wyatt remembered her shoes but not her face. He remembered her voice, gentle but urgent, as they sat on the strip of grass behind the auditoriums and police lights strobed across them.

  “Is there anything else you remember, Michael?” she’d said. “About what happened? Try hard, hon. Anything at all?”

  Wyatt had told her everything he remembered. He told her everything again. And then the two male homicide detectives took over. The one Wyatt remembered, the one who was obviously in charge, was an older guy with acne scars. Detective Siddell. His voice was less gentle than the female detective’s.

  “Look at me, Michael,” he said. “Look me in the eye. Are you telling us the truth?”

  Wyatt didn’t understand. Why did the detective with acne scars think he wasn’t telling them the truth? Wyatt, at that point, didn’t understand anything.

  He described the robbers, as best he could, over and over and over again. Big nose, I think? A mustache. Red hair. Reddish hair. I think. In their twenties. Or thirties. Darker hair. Big eyebrows. Like a skeleton’s face, sort of, bony. The other one was taller.

  Wyatt had caught barely a glimpse of the two robbers without their masks on. He’d been too scared to look at them. He hadn’t seen the other robber’s face at all. Wyatt had been facedown on the floor of the projection booth. All he could see, really, was Theresa’s face next to him. Their shoulders touched. Her eyes were closed.

  The next thing he remembered, he was in a room in a hospital. And then he was in a different room of the hospital with his father and two different detectives. Or maybe these detectives were Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agents. Wyatt remembered realizing that he’d lost his black clip-­on bow tie. Mr. Bingham took five dollars out of your paycheck if you lost your bow tie.

  The police, Wyatt learned later, considered him a suspect at first. He supposed they had to. Five ­people dead and Wyatt, miraculously, unharmed. The scene in the projection booth made sense only if Wyatt had been working with the killers. But it made no sense that Wyatt had been working with the killers. He was a fifteen-­year-­old kid with no criminal history. And he was telling the truth. He was telling the police everything he knew. They must have realized that pretty quickly.

  But why? There had to be some reason the robbers had killed everyone else but left Wyatt alive.

  “Do you have any idea, Michael,” Detective Siddell had asked, in his ungentle way, “why you’re still here and the others are . . . gone?”

  Wyatt had no idea.

  Why?

  Did he think one of the killers knew him? Did he think that a gun jammed before the killers could . . . finish? Did he think something—­some noise from downstairs, maybe?—­caused them to flee? Did he think they lost track of their victims and mistakenly believed that Wyatt, covered in the blood of the others, was dead? What did the killers say before they left the booth?

  Wyatt had no idea. He hadn’t heard them say anything before they left the booth. He was deaf and blind. He didn’t even know that the three men had left.

  In October, all the way across the country in Kingman, Arizona, a woman called police to complain about the loud music coming from the apartment below hers. A county sheriff’s deputy responded. He knocked on the door of the apartment and identified himself. A shotgun blast tore through the door. The deputy, before he died from his wounds, managed to crawl to his car and radio for backup.

  An Arizona state trooper by chance was less than a minute away. He reached the apartment complex as three men were attempting to flee the scene. A bullet shattered the trooper’s right elbow, but he switched his weapon to his left hand and managed to keep the three men pinned down until two more county deputies arrived. In the gunfight that followed, two of the men were killed. The third man shot himself in the head when more cops showed up and he realized he was surrounded.

  Investigators found—­discarded on the floor of the apartment in Kingman, beneath the couch—­a key to a motel room in Oklahoma City. The manager of the motel confirmed that three men had rented room number 7 at the Sooner Be Here Inn on the 39th Expressway from June 29 to August 16. When police in Oklahoma City searched the weed-­choked vacant lot next to the motel, they found an empty night-­deposit bag, flecked with dried blood.

  Detective Siddell, the one with acne scars, showed Wyatt photos of the three men who had died in Kingman. Mug shots. All three men had done time. They had done time early and often.

  “Are these the guys?” Siddell asked. He’d become, after that first night and day, Wyatt’s primary law-­enforcement contact. Everything Wyatt said went through him. Everything Wyatt learned came from him.

  “Yes,” Wyatt said. He stared at the photos of the faces spread out on the table. He tried to understand.

  “Do you know them? Do you know one of them from somewhere? Do you recognize their names?”

  Wyatt stared and stared. He felt deaf again, blind. He didn’t understand.

  “I don’t,” he said.

  Siddell didn’t ask Wyatt if he was sure. Siddell knew it. He gathered up the photos and slid them into a manila file folder.

  “I don’t understand,” Wyatt said.

  Why am I still here and all the others gone?

  That was the only question that remained, but now there was no one left alive who could answer it.

  “Who knows?” Siddell said.

  Ballistics had matched two of the guns in Kingman with the two guns that had been used in the projection booth. The case was closed. Justice had been served.

  Why am I still here and all the others gone?<
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  Wyatt sat at the bar in the Marriott, his laptop open. The bartender came back over, and Wyatt ordered a plate of pasta. He glanced at his empty glass of scotch and did a double take, shock and horror.

  The bartender, a young guy, laughed. He poured Wyatt another three fingers and tried to sneak a peek at the screen of Wyatt’s laptop. Wyatt turned it toward him so he could see.

  “I just created a dummy Facebook account,” Wyatt said. “What you have to do, though, you friend your target’s friends first, before you friend your target. That way he’ll confirm without even thinking twice about it. But will I be able to gather anything useful from Jeff Eddy’s Facebook page? I can’t say for sure, Andrew. Probably not. But there’s an improvisational quality to all this. Like playing jazz.”

  The bartender’s smile was uncertain.

  “I’m a private investigator,” Wyatt said.

  “No shit?” the bartender said.

  “No shit.”

  The bartender had more questions, but a ­couple of businessmen at the other end of the bar were flagging him down. “Sorry,” he said, and headed off.

  He did seem sorry to go. Or maybe Wyatt just wanted to think that. Or maybe it was Wyatt who didn’t want him to leave, not before his pasta arrived and he could focus his attention on that.

  On the way back to the hotel, Wyatt had taken May Avenue instead of the highway, so he could drive past the Pheasant Run again. The Burlington Coat Factory that used to be the Pheasant Run Mall. Wyatt remembered how the interior of the mall had been designed to look like you were outside in Paris or New Orleans, with brick floors and lantern-­top streetlamps and wrought-­iron railings along the second-­floor balcony. Directly across from the movie theater was a brick fountain that never worked.

  On her break sometimes Theresa would sit on the edge of the broken fountain and lean her head against the streetlamp and smoke a cigarette. Wyatt would stand at the ticket box and make funny faces at her through the plate-­glass front of the theater. The lobby camera connected to the monitor in Mr. Bingham’s office could see only his back. If Wyatt worked hard enough at it, if he made enough funny faces, Theresa might give him the finger and half a smile.

  Wyatt thought about his uncle. Was memory like a river that slowed over time to a trickle? Or was it like a house with many rooms that became a house with fewer rooms and then finally just a single room you could never leave?

  Was that the worst fate in the world? It depended, Wyatt supposed, on what room you ended up in.

  Wyatt’s first week at the theater, his first several weeks, Theresa had ignored him completely. O’Malley told him not to take it personally. Theresa took but mild interest in the petty affairs of doormen.

  O’Malley and Theresa were a ­couple at the time. They’d been together for almost a year, on and off. Or, as O’Malley put it, waxing and waning, waning and waxing. Wyatt remembered the way during the Saturday-­night rush that Theresa would rest her fingers on O’Malley’s shoulder when she reached across him for ice or a popcorn bucket. Wyatt remembered the first time she did that to him.

  Why would they kill Theresa and not Wyatt? Why would they kill O’Malley and not Wyatt? Why would they kill Melody and Karlene and Grubb and Mr. Bingham? And not Wyatt? Why, after killing everyone else, would they leave a witness—­an eyewitness—­alive?

  It made no sense. Wyatt didn’t know the killers. He’d never seen them before in his life.

  It was a question that could never be answered, so Wyatt had stopped, long ago, asking it. He had tried his best to stop asking it.

  Why am I still here and all the others gone?

  The bartender returned with his pasta. Wyatt gave his glass, empty again, a nudge with his elbow.

  “Please, Andrew,” he said, “don’t let this ever happen again.”

  THE NEXT MORNING the chirp of Wyatt’s phone woke him. He checked the time—­later than he’d thought, almost eight—­and the caller. Candace, of course. Calling for an update.

  “I was going to call you first thing,” he said, before she could get a word in. “I have been devoting my life to your cause.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she said, her voice shaking with anger. “Shut! Up!”

  “What is it?”

  “What do you think? Where are you? Get over here!”

  Julianna

  CHAPTER 10

  Julianna spent the afternoon at the Nichols Hills Starbucks. Around two, Ben called to see how she was feeling. Julianna thought he might. What was he expecting? To catch her with the sound of a party in the background? The squeals and dance beats of bacchanalia that would allow him to bust her?

  “How’s the diarrhea?”

  “It’s still diarrhea, Ben.”

  “Electrolytes are your friend.”

  “My best friends right now.”

  “Okay. Well. Feel better.”

  Feel better. Julianna hated when ­people said it like that, like it was an order. Fuck you. What if I don’t want to feel better?

  “I will,” she told Ben. “Thanks so much for checking on me, Ben.”

  She hung up and logged back onto Facebook. Still no reply to her message. She’d sent it eight days ago now. Julianna tried to think of reasons that the woman who posted the state-­fair photos had not responded. Julianna’s message had been deliberately innocuous and lighthearted. She hadn’t wanted the woman—­her name was Mary Hilger Hall—­to think Julianna was some obsessive weirdo.

  “Hi! Loved your fair photos from 86. Memories! Do you have more? Please let me know!”

  Maybe Mary Hilger Hall checked her Facebook messages only infrequently. She could be away on vacation. She could be in the process of scanning more fair photos for Julianna’s viewing pleasure.

  Julianna clicked over to the woman’s Facebook page, to see if she’d been active in the past few days. But Mary Hilger Hall had her privacy settings set to Friends Only. Julianna debated the wisdom of sending a friend request. Why not? What was there to lose? She clicked and sent it.

  She logged off Facebook and opened the photo that Mary Hilger Hall had posted. Julianna studied the woman biting into her egg roll, blown out by the flash. The woman had big hair and bigger earrings: oh, the eighties. Was the eater of egg roll Mary Hilger Hall? Was she just, at the time, Mary Hilger? Behind the woman was the Chinese place in Food Alley that Julianna remembered so vividly. At the edge of the frame, standing in line for barbecue and his back to the camera, was the man in the cowboy hat.

  “Fair Food 9/20/86!”

  Julianna zoomed in on the man in the cowboy hat. The pixels ballooned and ruptured. The man’s head was turned slightly to the left, just the rumor of a nose beneath the brim of the caramel-­colored hat. His head was turned slightly away from the window of the barbecue place where he was waiting in line. As if, maybe, he were talking to someone standing next to him, someone standing just outside the frame of the photo.

  When Julianna won her Pink Panther—­when Genevieve had helped her win the Pink Panther—­there’d been another man at the booth, playing the game with them. Julianna didn’t remember if that man had left before or after she won her Pink Panther. She did remember he wore a cowboy hat. Brown. Or black. A brown or black cowboy hat. Genevieve had made a remark about him later, as they strolled toward the midway. Julianna couldn’t remember what it was. Genevieve had laughed unkindly.

  Julianna’s coffee had gone cold. She went to the counter for a refill and then realized she’d cut the line. Lost in her own fog. She apologized to the woman waiting to be served, an attractive, glum blonde. The diamond on the woman’s wedding ring was spectacular. Nichols Hills was the wealthiest neighborhood in Oklahoma City.

  The woman smiled. It made her look even glummer. “You’re fine,” she said.

  You’re fine. Julianna hated when ­people said that, too. Fuck you twice.
Who are you to say so?

  “Sorry,” Julianna said again. “I’m out of it.”

  “You’re fine.”

  Julianna sat back down and opened a Word file. The timeline. Abigail Goad, the rancher’s wife from Okeene, had positively identified Genevieve at 9:00 P.M. in Food Alley. The last time Genevieve had been seen on earth. She’d been talking to a man in a cowboy hat. Genevieve might have been talking to a man in a cowboy hat.

  Julianna needed to know when, precisely, Mary Hilger Hall’s photo had been taken. She needed to know if there were other photos. She needed to know if there was a photo that showed the man in the cowboy hat talking to a beautiful brown-­eyed girl wearing her favorite BORN IN THE USA T-­shirt. If there was a photo that showed the man’s face.

  The sun had set on September 20 in 1986 at 7:30 P.M. It would have been completely dark by 8:00. The fair closed at 11:00. Food Alley emptied out well before then.

  It all came down to Crowley. Julianna was sure of it. At 8:50 P.M., ten minutes before the rancher’s wife saw Genevieve in Food Alley, Christopher Wayne Crowley had been arrested at a 7-­Eleven store a block from the fairgrounds. But Genevieve had headed toward the midway an hour earlier. It had been around 7:45 P.M. that Genevieve gave Julianna a ten-­dollar bill and told her she’d be back in a flash.

  The walk from the south parking lot at the fairgrounds, where the carnies parked their trucks and their trailers, to the 7-­Eleven on May Avenue took approximately ten minutes. The 7-­Eleven was gone now, but Julianna had walked the route when she was in high school. She’d timed it. So that left almost an hour that Genevieve might have been with Crowley in his trailer.

  There was no question that Genevieve had been on her way to see Crowley. Genevieve’s friend Lacey had seen her. The corn-­dog vendor had seen her. And Julianna, at the time, had known exactly where Genevieve was going, and why. Of course she’d known it. Genevieve was going to get high with the skeezy carny dude.

  If she’d made it to Crowley’s trailer, if Crowley had lied to the police about that, he had to know something. Maybe he knew the name of the man in the cowboy hat.