by Lou Berney
The guy smiled bashfully and shook his head. “No, I mean I work at the front desk. We’re not supposed to approach the guests for personal reasons.”
It was news to Wyatt, that he was being approached for personal reasons. He noticed now that the guy seemed nervous—opening his hands, closing his hands. Wyatt checked the display. Four floors to go.
“Fire away,” he said.
“You’re a private detective, right?”
“I am.”
“My friend in food and beverage told me you were. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
“Don’t worry. I blame my own big mouth.”
“I need your help, Mr. Rivers.”
“You don’t,” Wyatt said. “You may need help. That’s entirely possible. But you don’t necessarily need my help.”
The kid, Chip, worked his way through that one. The elevator continued to shudder upward. Slowly, slowly.
“I can pay you. I’ll pay you whatever you want.” Chip hesitated. His hands opened, his hands closed. He bit his lower lip. “How much would that be, do you think?”
Finally the bell dinged, and the elevator doors slid open.
“Chip,” Wyatt said, “I’m afraid my dance card is full.”
“Oh.”
It didn’t appear that Chip knew what a dance card was. Wyatt wasn’t entirely sure he knew either.
“I’m booked,” he explained. “Busy. Unavailable.”
“It’s my wife,” Chip said. “I think she . . . I think she’s having an affair. It’s eating me up, not knowing for sure. I feel like I can’t even breathe sometimes.”
He looked too young to be married. But how young was too young? He was probably twenty-three or twenty-four. Maybe he was already an old hand at marriage.
“Ask her,” Wyatt said. “That’s my best advice. A healthy relationship is best served by trust and candor, not the services of a private detective.”
“I did ask her. She said I was being stupid. And maybe I am. But how do I know that? When do you know if you’re being stupid or not?”
Wyatt didn’t have an answer for that. He wished, selfishly, he did. “I’m sorry.”
He stepped out of the elevator. His room was four doors down. When he got there and turned to swipe his key card, he saw that the kid was still standing there—forlorn, halfway in the corridor and halfway out—the jaws of the elevator trying to snap closed on him.
“All I need, Mr. Rivers,” he said, “one way or another I just need to know.”
Wyatt swiped his key card but didn’t enter his room. Shit. He felt a certain amount of bad for the kid, but mostly he felt motivated by caution. Yesterday he’d asked a favor from the cranky reporter at the Daily Oklahoman. So how wise would it be for Wyatt to refuse now when the universe asked a favor in return?
If one sows goodness, one reaps goodness. According to the Vedas.
“I’ll try to look into it, but no promises.” Wyatt took out his notebook. “I’ll need some information about your wife.”
“Mr. Rivers. Thank you. Oh, man. Thank you so much.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Wyatt’s point sailed right by the kid, a passed ball the catcher never even saw. When Chip shook Wyatt’s hand, he shook Wyatt’s entire arm.
“Oh, man,” he said. “I will. I won’t.”
THE DRIVE DOWN to Norman took Wyatt twice as long as it should have—game-night traffic, bumper to bumper, big-ass SUVs with crimson flags flapping from plastic arms wedged between window and roof. Some SUVs had four Sooner flags, one for each window. Wyatt felt naked without one.
When the crawl finally reached Norman, he had to park blocks from campus, in the patchy front yard of two college students who charged him twenty bucks for the privilege.
Wyatt scored the last spot in the yard. He squeezed his rented Altima between an Escalade (two flags, a vanity OU plate) and the porch of the house. The porch was crowded with more college students, the guys with tribal tattoos on their calves and struggling chinstrap beards, the girls in cut-off jeans and bikini tops. One shirtless guy was attempting to do a keg stand while another guy slapped at him with a wet towel.
Wyatt thought that looked like more fun than spending the evening with Jeff Eddy, but duty called.
The massive redbrick football stadium was in the center of campus. It dominated the campus, like a medieval cathedral surrounded by mud-and-wattle huts. Wyatt could feel the throb of religious excitement, of ecstatic near hysteria, as the crowd he’d become enfolded in funneled closer and closer to the stadium. Every thirty seconds or so, someone would shout “Boomer!” and then the rest of the crowd would roar back “Sooner!”
Wyatt knew that OU was now a very good public university, well regarded nationally. Back when he was a kid, though, people had joked that they wanted to build a school that the football team could be proud of.
Wyatt’s father had lived and breathed sports—he’d loved, literally and without exaggeration, nothing and nobody else in his life but sports. O’Malley hadn’t given a shit about sports. He gave a shit about books and movies and music. From the first day they met, he’d made Wyatt feel good about himself, not bad, for giving a shit about the same things. O’Malley understood that there was a world outside Oklahoma City, which in the 1980s could feel—for someone like Wyatt, from a family like Wyatt’s—like a closed fist.
O’Malley had planned to move to California, or maybe Rome. Wyatt, after he graduated high school a couple of years later, or maybe even before if he saved enough money, would follow. He would take the spare bedroom in O’Malley’s beach house or Renaissance villa.
One hot summer Sunday—it must have been late June or early July—they all drove down to Lake Thunderbird to drink beer and water ski. “Lake Dirtybird,” everyone called it, because the water was a deep reddish brown. Janella’s sister’s boyfriend had loaned them his boat, under what false pretenses Wyatt couldn’t imagine. O’Malley took control of the wheel and opened up the throttle. He blasted around the lake, ignoring the “No Wake” zones and seeing how closely he could cut past the shoreline. The girls in the back of the boat, Janella and Karlene and Theresa, laughed and gripped the gunwales and yelled at O’Malley to “Slow down!”
Like he would ever do that.
“Never fear!” O’Malley had hollered to Wyatt over the roar of the engine, the pummeling of the wind. “These walls can’t hold us!”
Wyatt located Jeff Eddy, as instructed, in the choicest of choice tailgating spots. Eddy was wearing a crimson sweater vest with a white OU insignia above his heart. He forked sausages on a grill almost as big as Wyatt’s rented Altima and held court, surrounded by four guys dressed in similar fashion, of similar age and jowliness, with similar tipsy, shit-eating grins.
The ladyfolk had hauled their high-end canvas folding chairs, margaritas in the cup holders, upwind from the billowing grill smoke. They wriggled their toes, comparing pedicures.
“Even better,” Eddy was telling the others, “you ’member how Chunks here got his name? Night of that party we threw with the Deltas.”
“Oh, hell no,” one of the guys groaned. Chunks, presumably. The other guys grinned and snickered.
Eddy spotted Wyatt before Wyatt could make a break for it. “Wyatt, buddy!”
Eddy passed off the tongs so he could head over and give Wyatt’s hand an overly hearty pump. And then another pump, a slap on the back. Wyatt couldn’t tell you the last time someone had slapped him on the back.
“What are you drinking?” Eddy said. “We got anything you can think of.”
“A pisco sour if it’s not too much trouble,” Wyatt said, just so he could appreciate the effort it took Eddy to maintain his totally bogus bonhomie. “No. How about a caipirinha?”
Eddy forced a laugh.
“A beer all right?”
“You bet.”
Eddy found him a Sierra Nevada and introduced Wyatt to the other guys as his business associate from Las Vegas. In addition to Chunks, there was Otter, Goose, and Big Boy. Wyatt didn’t bother trying to keep them straight.
“Where’d you go to school?” one of the guys asked Wyatt. “Just don’t say Texas.”
“Or OSU!” another guy said.
Big Boy, clearly the drunkest of the bunch, was eyeing Wyatt, who had on a lightweight light gray suit, white shirt, no tie.
“So,” Big Boy said. “You just come from the prom?”
The other guys held their snickers and waited to see if Wyatt could take a little good-natured shit or confirm their suspicion that he was some humorless, bed-wetting liberal.
“Funeral,” Wyatt said. He looked down at his wing tips. “My mother.”
You could hear the condensation beading on the neck of Wyatt’s beer bottle. The four guys stared at him, then looked away, then lifted their glasses and bottles, in perfect synchrony, to take a long, uncomfortable drink.
Big Boy and Goose were drinking whiskey, Otter beer, Chunks a margarita.
Wyatt guessed that Big Boy and Otter were in the energy business—they were talkers, deal makers, hustlers. Chunks—watcher, lurker—was probably a lawyer. Taxes. Big Boy was the drunkest, but Wyatt thought it was probably Goose who had a problem with the bottle. His wife was the alpha blonde who kept glancing over at him, her mouth a tight seam. She was counting how many drinks her husband had, tapping her wedding ring against the side of her margarita glass.
One of the toughest things about being a detective, Wyatt supposed, was that you never really stopped detecting. You didn’t get a coffee break.
Jeff Eddy put his hand on Wyatt’s shoulder and forced another smile. This smile submitted even less willingly than the first one, like the driver after a high-speed chase getting wrestled to the ground by cops.
“He’s kidding,” Eddy said.
“I’m kidding,” Wyatt said. “It was just a cremation ceremony.”
From the stadium came a blast of brass as the OU marching band struck up the university fight song.
“Let’s go watch some football,” Eddy said.
“Boomer!” Big Boy yelled.
WYATT WOULD HAVE preferred for Jeff Eddy to just cut to the chase, but he supposed there were worse ways to kill an evening. It was beautiful out, cool and crisp, and Eddy was buying the beer and bringing it to him. Wyatt was pretty sure Candace would kill him if she knew he was here, if he were ever brazen enough to call this “investigating.”
The third or fourth time Eddy went for beer, late in the second quarter, his wife scooted over to sit next to Wyatt. Her name was Karen. She was thin, expensively perfumed, with one eyebrow hiked in such a way that suggested either a natural haughty skepticism or recent facial work that had been done neither too well nor too wisely.
Wyatt tried to imagine what this fifty-something woman had looked like when she was seventeen years old, what she’d been like, what future she’d dreamed of. He couldn’t do it. She could have been anyone back then. Whoever she’d been back then could have become anyone.
“So,” Eddy’s wife said, “you’re the private investigator has my husband’s panties all in a bunch.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to know that, Karen,” Wyatt said.
“Well.”
“Tell me more.”
“Not me.”
They watched the game for a few downs. Wyatt watched one of the Sooner defensive linemen at work against his opposite number—probing, faking, charging, spinning, hammering, curling. Each play was a ballet, each attack a chess move designed with the next three or four in mind.
Wyatt thought it was probably the only useful advice his father had ever given him: Don’t just watch the ball. The real game happens on the edges.
“I’ve been coming to these games for forty years,” Eddy’s wife said. Her tone was neutral.
On a third-and-long, the Sooner lineman who Wyatt was tracking juked a blocker out of his shoes and broke through. The quarterback had to hurry his pass. It sailed high and wide.
“There are some parts of my life that feel now like they never happened,” Wyatt said. He thought of the two years he’d spent in Minneapolis, the year before that in Charlotte. “Do you know what I mean? It’s not that I don’t remember them. It’s that I don’t even remember to remember them.”
She nodded.
“How long have you and Jeff been married?” Wyatt said.
“Thirty-one years.”
“Congratulations.”
Eddy’s wife turned to him. She put her hand on his forearm. “I want to know why Greg didn’t leave the Land Run to Jeff.”
“Ms. Kilkenny isn’t a prostitute,” Wyatt said. “She’s not a stripper or a gold digger. I don’t know what your husband told you. There was no sexual or romantic component to her relationship with your late brother-in-law.”
“You’re not listening to me,” Eddy’s wife said.
Wyatt was surprised. He thought of himself as an excellent listener. His livelihood often depended upon it.
“I don’t want to know why Greg left the Land Run to that girl,” she said. “I want to know why he didn’t leave it to his own brother.”
Jeff Eddy had returned with the beer. His wife scooted back over to her seat, and he sat down next to Wyatt.
“Now then,” Eddy said. He lowered his voice, even though he didn’t have to. The crowd was roaring, the band playing. “Let’s talk some turkey.”
“Let’s talk.”
“So you haven’t mentioned it to Candace?” Eddy said. “This alleged new MAPS initiative?”
Alleged. “Not yet,” Wyatt lied. “I wanted to hear what you had to say.”
Eddy nodded. He was studying Wyatt, eyes narrowed, trying to get a read on him.
“I’d like to employ your services,” he said finally. “With regard to the Land Run.”
“With regard to the Land Run?” Wyatt laughed. “I foresee a potential conflict of interest.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. And that’s what you need to understand. Our interests, mine and Miss Kilkenny’s, they’re exactly aligned.”
Wyatt couldn’t wait to hear this. “Go on.”
“Look. You think that girl is gonna be happy running that dump? You think she’s gonna be happy a year from now when that dump goes bust and she loses everything?”
“Is that your plan? To keep screwing with her until she goes out of business?”
“What? No. I told you, I don’t have anything to do with any of that. What I’m talking about, I’m talking about the reality of the situation. What does she know about running a place like that? Can I tell you a secret?”
“It won’t leave this stadium.”
“My brother never made a dime. He worked there seven days a week since he was fifteen years old. He knew the business inside and out. And it was all he could do to break even two years out of three.”
Wyatt didn’t know if that was true or not. It didn’t really matter to him one way or the other.
“So what do you want from me?” he said.
“I want you to help Miss Kilkenny understand the wisdom of selling the Land Run. Find out how much she’s willing to take. She’ll end up with a nice little nest egg, and I’ll be able to honor my brother’s memory.”
An OU receiver shook the coverage and caught a bomb in the corner of the end zone. The band played the fight song for—Wyatt’s conservative estimate—the one-millionth time.
“Ms. Kilkenny will want a much bigger egg if she knows about the tax initiative,” Wyatt said. “Sorry. The alleged tax initiative.”
The groove between Eddy’s eyebrows deepened. His
lips disappeared. And then he recovered with a chuckle.
“We’re still sitting here talking about this,” he said. “You know what that tells me? That tells me you’re a businessman.”
Sitting there talking to Jeff Eddy—Wyatt was going to need a hot shower with lots of soap. On the other hand, he knew that Candace would really, truly kill him if he spent all evening drinking beer at a football game and came back with nothing to show for it. Wyatt decided to play along.
“Do you know that old joke?” he said. “A man goes up to a lady, a very prim and proper lady, and he says, ‘Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?’ I don’t know what that would be nowadays, adjusted for inflation, but you get the idea. And the lady thinks about it and blushes, and finally she says, ‘Yes, I suppose I would.’ And then the man says, ‘Okay, would you have sex with me for five dollars?’ And the lady is just, like, terribly affronted. She says, ‘How dare you! What do you think I am?’ And the man says, ‘Oh, we’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over your price.’ ”
Eddy grinned. “I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”
Wyatt
CHAPTER 15
Wyatt fled the game at halftime, after promising—for a figure to be determined later—to help bring the interests of Jeff Eddy and Candace into their natural alignment. On the way back up I-35, Wyatt had plenty of time to weigh the probabilities. Did Jeff Eddy’s attempt to buy him off—and shut him up about the new MAPS—make it more likely that Eddy was behind what had happened to Candace so far? Or less?
Wyatt couldn’t decide. He made it back to the city at about nine and drove around Bricktown. The area consisted of several square blocks of old warehouses east of downtown that had been renovated and converted into restaurants, clubs, shops. It was hopping tonight—there was a Thunder game at the arena on the other side of Broadway—and Wyatt knew that whoever had been in on the ground floor of the Bricktown MAPS development had made a killing.
Jeff Eddy wanted to get in on the ground floor of the new MAPS development. Wyatt didn’t blame him for that. He blamed him for being such a sneaky, sleazy tool about it.
