The Dream of The Broken Horses

8

This morning, Judge Winterson's clerk beckons me aside.

"Judge likes the way you're drawing her," he tells me. "She says you make her look wise."

"She is wise."

"On the other hand, she doesn't much like the way this fella Washboard's-"

"Washburn."

"-doing her. Angles her head like she's stuckup. Makes her shadowy like she's a dark presence. The woman's a judge for Christ's sake, not some goddamn Aunt Jemima."

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum!

"Wash is probably just being artistic," I tell him.

When the trial breaks early at 3 p.m., Pam suggests we drive out to the Fulraine mansion for a look. I phone ahead and obtain permission to tour the grounds though not to enter the house.

"Our residents don't like being disturbed," the snooty manager tells me.

The place is now called LAKE VIEW EAST, the words engraved on a brass plate discreetly attached to a stanchion at the driveway gate. Ten years ago, it was converted into a ritzy assisted-living establishment for six wealthy elderly residents, each of whom now occupies a luxury suite.

We drive slowly down the long gravel driveway, park in the turnabout before the graceful beige stone house. It's a perfect copy of a Palladian villa, a tall central section, arched doorway embracing a great room, and two symmetrical wings on either side. There are loggias and arcades, curved windows and columns, with clusters of rhododendra softening the base of the facade. As we stroll around the west side, past the greenhouse and garages, I tell Pam about the last time I was here, twenty-eight years ago, at Mark Fulraine's tenth birthday party to which I and Jerry Glickman were probably invited only because to leave out the two Jewish kids in the class would have been too obvious a slight.

Mark and I were never friends. Our sixth-grade boxing bout was but the culmination of years of mutual dislike. Now, standing out on the main terrace, facing the tennis court, pool, and great lawn that slopes down to Delamere Lake, I recall for Pam my main memory of that party, the reason I had such a lousy time.

"Birthday parties were usually fun," I tell her, "especially when the kid's parents had a place like this. They'd set up tents, bring in ponies, hire a couple of clowns, then we'd go wild, have ourselves a ball. But this time when we arrived, Mrs. Fulraine wasn't here, though she did turn up at the end. Instead we found Mr. Lafferty, Hayes Lower School athletic director, waiting for us in his coach's outfit – faded football pants, red baseball cap, and chrome whistle dangling from his neck. Immediately Lafferty started ordering us around. He organized us into teams, then made us play touch football, not the fun, free-for-all way, but his way by school rules. Suddenly the party wasn't a day off, it was like compulsory athletics. I guess Mrs. Fulraine felt she had to bring him in since she didn't have a man in the house."

Pam smiles. "Maybe Mrs. Fulraine was fucking Mr. Lafferty. Maybe Jessup was just one of several lovers she recruited from you fancy school."

I snort out a laugh. "Jessup was young and good looking. Lafferty was a gnarled old guy with a white sidewalls haircut and stick-out ears." I pause. "But there was something else, something we'd all forgotten – that it was three years before at Mark's seventh birthday party when Belle Fulraine and the au pair disappeared. I think that's why Mrs. Fulraine wasn't in the house that day. It was not an anniversary she'd want to recall.

Pam's impressed with the estate. "It's beautiful here," she says, turning back toward the house, scanning the long protected arcade furnished with groupings of tables and wicker chairs. Several times she's described her own background, growing up working class in south Jersey where her father ran a gas station and her mother worked as a practical nurse. Now it occurs to me she may be fascinated with the trappings of wealth.

"That kidnapping – I think it was the key," she says. "It's like everything stemmed from that – the breakup of Barbara's marriage, her affair with Cody, her fear Andrew would get custody of her boys. You told me about watching the Fulraines on TV, begging and weeping at their gate. Think of what it must have been like here then – the terror they must have felt!"

She shakes her head. "After seeing the Flamingo, I had a lot of questions. I thought maybe Tom Jessup was intimidated by the house. After all, with her kids away at camp, Barbara and Tom could have screwed away there afternoons here. So why the Flamingo? You said she liked the scumminess of it. Funny enough, I can relate to that… once, twice, three times maybe. But on a regular basis – I don't get it. I think the low rent appeal would wear pretty thin. Then she'd start longing for the luxury to which she was accustomed. But now, hearing why she wasn't here for Mark's tenth birthday party, I have another theory. I wonder if she thought screwing Jessup here, where her daughter was kidnapped, would somehow, you know, defile the place."

An interesting perception, making me glad Pam had come along.

We stroll down to the pool. It's a big, old-style turquoise-bottomed rectangle lined up lengthwise with the lake, framed by Moorish tiles. There's a pool house with cupola built in fantasy Arabian style, with a portico that protects a line of bar stools and an exterior bar.

Pam savors the setting. "Those Fulraine boys had it good. Gorgeous house, servants, private tennis court, coach, and pool. For them this must have been a paradise."

She turns to me. "I suppose with the boys away at camp, there was no excuse to have Tom over anymore. The servants might talk. Andrew could use them against her at the custody hearing. So she decided they should meet at the motel and made the best of it, turning it into something romantic and dangerous." Pam pauses. "But still I think if she was into danger, she could have courted it in other ways. The motel was too drab to keep her excited. She needed more. I think they did other things, David. Extraordinary things. She was too stylish to be satisfied with just the tacky, old Flamingo Court."

I like her approach, thought I can't imagine what kind of extraordinary things they might have done.

As we walk back up the slope to my car, I try to remember my departure from Mark's tenth birthday party, whether it was Mom or Dad who picked me up.

"If it was Dad, then Barbara may have met him before that Parents Day at Hayes. But then I think it was probably some other kid's parents who took me home.

Pam wants to take another look at the Flamingo, see it in hard daylight, she says. She clocks the drive. As we pull into the motel lot, she tells me it has taken just nine minutes to get here from the Fulraine house.

"This time I want to see the room," she says.

At the pool, I spot the same woman and kids who were hanging around when I visited two weeks ago. The woman's wearing the same yellow bikini and sunning herself on the same orange strap chaise and the kids are splashing around the shallow end as before.

As we walk into the courtyard the woman looks up, pulls off her sunglasses, is about to speak, then apparently recognizes me and settles back.

"She's the owner-manager," I whisper to Pam. "Her dad ran the place at the time of the killings. When I came by before, she gave me the once-over like I was some kind of ghoulish crime buff come to jerk off in the murder room."

"Well, you are ghoulish," Pam says.

Johnny Powell's on duty in the office, and, just as before, his geezer's eyes are riveted to a baseball game on the lobby TV.

"Howdy," he says, looking p. "I figured you'd be back."

"Johnny, this is Pam Wells."

"Howdy, Pam. Here to check out old two-oh-one?"

When I nod, he slaps the key down on the counter. Then he looks at me and squints. "Someone's been around asking about you, Mr. Weiss."

Pam and I exchange a look.

"Who?"

A fella. Didn't give his name. Seemed like a cop, but didn't show me a badge or nothin’."

"What did he want?"

"Asked whether I'd seen you. Said your name then showed me your picture. When I shrugged, he flashed the inside of his palm to show me a folded fifty-dollar bill. Being in the motel business, I know better than to talk about other people's business. I told him I didn't know fifty bucks worth of nothin’ and to please leave me alone so I could do my work."

"Then what?"

"He smiled like he understood it was going to take more than fifty to open me up. Then he irked me, started calling me ‘old-timer,’ like ‘He went to 201, didn't he, old-timer? Asked a lot of questions about the old days? Yeah, I figured that. What I want to know is what kinda questions and now much time did he spend up there in the room?’"

"That's an odd thing to ask."

"I thought so. When I told him to get lost, he winked at me like he was onto me somehow. ‘You'll talk to me yet, old-timer,’ he said. Then he turned and shuffled out."

I thank Johnny for keeping my confidence, tip him fifty bucks to make up for what he lost on my account, and ask him to please call me if the nosy guy comes around again.

I feel Ms. Evans's eyes on us as we move across the courtyard. When we're up on the balcony, I glance down. She got her dark glasses back on, but I can tell she's still watching. She smiles slightly and I smile back.

Pam unlocks the door, hesitates, ten walks in. I glance back at Ms. Evans. Though I can't read her eyes, I sense the intensity of her gaze by the set of her mouth and the erect position of her head. She sits still as if interested to observe what I'll do next, whether I'll enter swiftly or with trepidation. There's a moment between us as if each is daring the other to look away, broken by the shrill cry of one of her kids.

"Hey, Mom! Watch this!" the smaller boy shouts, taking a running cannonball leap into the middle of the pool.

I find Pam inside seated on the bed.

After a long silence, she ventures an opinion. "It's just so ordinary." She glances at me. "Or is it, David? Do you feel something weird?"

"I did before, probably because I was alone and I'd done a lot of imagining about this room. I think I'll leave you here a while, give you a chance to take in the vibes."

Pam nods, then starts studying her reflection in the big mirror above the dresser. I quietly slip out, close the door, then lean over the exterior balcony. Ms. Evans, sensing my presence again, looks up at me from her chaise. Again I meet her sunglass-shielded eyes.

Obviously something's on her mind. I nod to her, move quickly to the staircase, descend, then stride over to where she's lying. To my surprise, she doesn't react or sit up, rather continues to lie back as if expecting the intrusion.

"Pardon me – I'm David Weiss," I tell her, crouching beside her, extending my hand.

"I know. I'm Kate Evans."

We shake, then she invites me to sit on the adjacent chaise.

"I couldn't help but notice you've been checking me out."

She smiles slightly. "The other day I asked Johnny who you were. It's been years since anyone asked to see the murder room."

She reaches into her pool bag, pulls out a pack of L amp;Ms and an elegant, thin, gold lighter. She takes her time lighting up, inhales deeply, then exhales in long, steady plume that hangs like the exhaust trail of a jet in the still, humid air.

"I saw him, you know -the man who did the shooting, saw him clear for a second or two. Then for a long time I saw him in my dreams, not every night or anything like that – maybe two, three times a year for… six, seven years. Scary dreams." She exhales again. "Kinda dreams you wish you could forget."

She points to her boys. "Me and another kid were playing here, splashing around like them. then suddenly – BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!" She smiles, takes another long drag from her cigarette, then crushes it out against the concrete beneath her chaise. "He came running down the stairs, then he saw us. That's when our eyes met." She smiles slightly again. "It was like… we locked. Then he scooted off under the archway and out into the street. I told the cops I saw him. They were nice, asked me to describe him. I did, but then they never showed me any suspect pictures or anything like that."

I feel a surge of excitement bolting through my body.

She saw the shooter! Even after twenty-six years she remembers his face, saw it in her dreams.

"I'm a forensic artist," I tell her casually, though my mind's racing and my heart's thumping away.

"So Johnny said. He said you've been making drawings at the Foster trial."

"Following the case?"

Kate shrugs. "Doesn't interest me much. But I did watch ABC a couple nights just to see your work. Pretty good. Made me feel like I was there."

"Eyewitness drawings are my specialty," I tell her. "The courtroom work's a sideline."

She nods politely.

"Would you be willing to work with me on a sketch of the Flamingo shooter?"

She shrugs, again shows her restrained half-smile. "It's been such a long while."

Though my heart's still pounding, I try my best to appear cool. Having stumbled into this one-in-a-million opportunity, I warn myself not to blow it.

"Your girlfriend's watching us." She says the words so softly that for a moment I don't react. Then I glance up to find Pam leaning over the balcony gazing down at us, curious.

"Hi!" I wave to her.

Pam hesitates, then unenthusiastically waves back.

I introduce them. "Pam – this is Kate. Pam's a reporter for CNN," I tell Kate. "Kate owns the joint," I call up to Pam.

Kate calls up to her. "Wanna swim? I can loan you guys suits."

Her offer seems to melt Pam's frost. "Great kids," she says, indicating Kate's boys. Then she starts toward the stairs.

Kate turns to me. She speaks very softly but with an intensity she hasn't used before.

"Call me in a couple days. If I decide to work with you, it'd be just the two of us, okay?"

"Sexy little number back there," Pam says. "Blondes like her don't take well to the sun. Couple more years of it and she'll start looking like a prune."

We're in my car driving back toward the city, having declined Kate's offer of a swim.

"Are you being catty?"

"She was flirting with you, David."

"She says she saw the killer. She was in the pool during the shootings. Their eyes met when he ran out."

"Okay, that's a different story. Will she work with you?"

"She's going to think about it. It's a real longshot. I don't know of a case where a witness recalled a face after twenty-six years. Even Holocaust survivors. Some, who were able to identify their abusers in court years after the fact, couldn't assist with forensic sketches prior to trial."

"If she saw him, I know you'll come up with a face."

Something about the way she touches me then, touches my arm, the smile on her face as she does it, makes me want to open up to her.

I pull over to the side of the road.

"When we were at the Fulraine house, you said something that really hit me," I tell her.

"About Barbara not wanting to defile the house?"

"Yes… because, you said, that's where the kidnapping took place. I was there twice actually. I told you about Mark's tenth birthday party, but I was also there for his seventh. That's when I saw Belle with Becky, the English au pair, the one who took her, whose torso later washed up on the beach."

Pam is studying me now, her face creased with interest.

"I didn't take much notice of them. We were whooping around like typical seven-year-olds and they were kinda watching from the fringes. But then I wandered into the house to find a bathroom, and that's when I saw them, heard them actually… through an upstairs bathroom door. Becky had one of those British accents that's hard to understand unless you're used to it, so I'm not sure I heard exactly what she said. But her tone was clear. She was balling Belle out. ‘You'll do what I say, understand, Missy?’ – something like that. And Belle protesting: ‘But Mommy says not to do that – it's wrong!" Then a sharp sound like a slap, then Belle crying out in pain. I remember cowering back, upset. Then I heard Becky say something like, ‘Now wipe your face, dearie, we're going back outside.’ Belle was still whimpering. Then Becky said, ‘Come on, dearie. It's not as bad as all that. We'll go out for a drive, meet Ted, have some ice cream -’ or maybe she said ‘Ed’ or ‘Ned’ or some similar name. To which Belle said something like, ‘They're going to serve ice cream here. Cake too.’ ‘Well, then we'll have ice cream twice, nothing wrong with that, is there? And it'll be better this time with Ted’ – or whomever. ‘This time you'll like it, Belle, you'll see.’"

"Jesus!"

"Yeah! Still chills me to the bone. Anyway, when I hear them coming out, I ran into a bedroom and hid there till they passed by the door.

Then I went into the bathroom to do my business. I remember there was some Kleenex or something in the toilet, which, of course, I flushed away." I meet Pam's eyes. "That was the day they disappeared, while Mark's seventh birthday party was going on in the garden. I may have been the last person to ‘see’ them that afternoon."

"Oh, David…"

"They never returned from wherever they went and by the next morning it was all over school – Belle Fulraine and the Fulraines' English au pair were missing and there may have been a kidnapping, though that wasn't clear yet and never would be since there never was a ransom note or even a call. They found the car Becky'd used in a shopping center parking lot a mile away. After that, till Becky's torso washed up, it was like they disappeared off the face of the earth.

"I told my parents what I'd overheard, and of course they called the cops. A tough, old Irish detective came out to the house. I went over it again and again with him, my parents sitting beside me on the couch. He kept asking me questions, circling my story, poking around at it for holes: ‘You never really saw anything, did you?’ ‘If you hid, how could you have seen them pass by the door?’ Questions like that. I guess I started to cry because at one point my father stepped in and stopped the interview and the detective said something like, ‘Well, doctor, I'm sure you can understand we have to make sure the boy's not fibbing to attract attention.’ My father said, ‘My son doesn't lie!’ The detective raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and shortly after that he left."

"That night Dad came into my room. He asked me the same questions the detective asked, in his own gentle, fatherly shrink's way, of course. But no matter how loving he was about it, the subtext was the same – there were inconsistencies, maybe I hadn't really heard what I thought I'd heard, maybe I'd exaggerated or embellished the story. I was after all a highly imaginative kid prone to visualization. No doubt I heard something, then maybe ‘visualized’ it into something else. I loved watching cop shows on TV. Wasn't it a little implausible that Becky slapped Belle without Belle running out to her mother to complain? And wasn't the mysterious ‘Ted’ a standard TV bogeyman and the ‘ice cream’ right out of a TV movie bogeyman story? And did Belle, who was only three, really talk like that?"

I wasn't embellishing or visualizing, at least I didn't think I was, but when I realized people including my own dad thought so, I stopped protesting, bottled it up, admitted maybe they were right, maybe my imagination had gotten the better of me. After that I didn't talk about it anymore. But still I was convinced I'd been a witness – you know, ‘a witness before-the-fact’ – and that made me feel awful. Like I should have told someone what I'd heard right when I heard it, should have gone straight to an adult, Mr. or Mrs. Fulraine, then they would have stopped Becky and Belle wouldn't have been taken."

Oh, David-!" she moans again.

"Thing is, I still don't know whether that's the way it happened or whether I did imagine or embellish it. I do know I visualized it, because I started seeing the scene in my dreams. I dreamt about it for years – seeing all sorts of details, the expression on Becky's face when she slapped Belle, the tears pulsing out of Belle's eyes. And, crazy as it is, there's still a side of me that believes I could have saved her. You’ve accused me of being secretive. Maybe that's the reason. I'm still afraid I won't be believed. That's also the reason I'm so attentive when I work with witnesses. No matter what I feel, I always act as if I believe them, believe totally in everything they tell me. I do that because I never want to undermine a witness's confidence… as mine was undermined.

"So, you see, my involvement with the Fulraine family goes beyond the coincidences that Barbara's sons were classmates, Tom Jessup was a favorite teacher, and my dad was Barbara's shrink. Like you said back at the house, looking at it a certain way, everything that happened can be traced back to the kidnapping. Belle's disappearance, to which I was a naive, unwitting, and perhaps even an untrustworthy witness, was the seminal event."

Today I move about in a daze. My confession to Pam, if I can rightly call it that, has served to cleanse my soul. She says she understands me better now – my need to draw, imagine scenes, trust witnesses, relive their experiences, get inside their heads. And now the possibility of producing a drawing of the Flamingo shooter is so exciting I can think of nothing else.

I sit at the bar in Waldo's, oblivious to the swirl, relishing the prospect, fantasizing the result: By an incredible stroke of fortune, I'll fulfill Jerry Glickman's and my childhood dream – solve the Flamingo case, surpassing even my achievement on the Zigzag.

Hold on! I tell myself. Kate may decide she doesn't want to help. And even if she does, I may not get a decent ID.

To distract myself I focus on work, turning out a series of sketches that seriously challenge Wash. This effort creates a crisis of loyalty in Pam, who, though my lover, owes a professional allegiance to CNN.

"Why're you suddenly working so hard?" she asks me in the courthouse corridor during afternoon break. "I thought you didn't give a shit about this case."

"Professional pride," I tell her. "I can't let myself be bested by an asshole."

"Wash is a good guy. Everybody likes him."

"Not the judge," I whisper back.

When Mace picks me up at the Townsend, he's more relaxed than at earlier encounters, especially when I hand him a cop of Dad's draft case study of Barbara Fulraine.

"Heavy," he says, weighing it in his hand.

"But unfortunately unfinished," I remind him.

"As he drives, I make an effort to match his affable manner while trying to force the prospect of working with Kate Evans from my mind. But it keeps intruding. After all, I ask myself, how can I not think about it?

Mace drives us out to Covington along the Gold Coast, the south a couple of blocks to Indiana Street, a trendy area of boutiques, artisan shops, bars, coffee houses, and little restaurants. I pick up the scent of affluence here, straight and gay young urban professionals. I also observe the same twinkle in Mace's eyes that Pam detected in mine last week – a smug have-I-got-something-in-store-for-you look.

Fine, I decide, let him play his hand.

The restaurant's called the Spezia. It's a cute storefront place with a three-star review taped to the door. Inside, visible from the street, happy diners are seated at crowded little tables tended by friendly servers.

A tall, lean, erect maitre d' with thick, gray, brush-cut hair greets us at the door with a sad, world-weary smile.

"Well… if it isn't our old friend, Inspector Bartel! We've missed you, Inspector. Nice to see you again."

He speaks with a generic continental accent and exhibits an ultrasuave manner that doesn't go with the lack of pretension of the place.

"Our best table, perfect for discreet conversations," he says, showing us to a table in the rear. "You see, Inspector, even after a long absence, we don't forget our clients' special needs."

He whispers something to a waiter, then moves away. Half a minute later, two kirs are delivered. "Compliments of the house," the waiter says.

"Jurgen's the owner," Mace tells me. "You probably ran across his statement in the file."

I glance again at the man, now greeting a group at the door.

"Jurgen Hoff of The Elms?"

Mace nods. "Funny, isn't it, the way he acts? Like he's still running the Cub Room out there. They young crowd here seems to like his style. Makes them feel like their in Europe… or at least New York."

The waiter takes our order. After he moves away, Mace lowers his voice.

"Jurgen's the reason I brought you here. I always thought he was the key. He was close to Jack Cody, a lot closer than people knew. Cody left him some stuff in his will including his watch, an expensive gold jobbie – I saw it on his wrist when we came in. Twenty-five years and he's still wearing the damn thing."

"Isn't he the one supposedly killed a man in Mexico?"

"I think Cody started that rumor. Still I don't doubt Jurgen could've done it. Those Foreign Legion guys played rough. There's something grave about him, isn't there? Something in his eyes like he's seen stuff he doesn't want to talk about. He's a bachelor. Never had a live-in girlfriend far as I know. Dates classy black call girls. Interesting they're always black."

"You seem to know a lot about him. What makes you think he's the key?"

"If Cody ordered the killings, Jurgen knows. Maybe even carried them out."

"If I recall, he had an alibi."

"A call girl, Winnie something. She was probably lying. Actually I don't think Jurgen did it. But he could have. I wonder sometimes. With Cody dead and so many years gone by, I can't think why else he won't tell me what he knows?"

"You've asked him?"

"I ask him regularly. I'll ask him again tonight before we leave. He always gets a little nervous when I come in because he knows I'm going to ask. It's this game we play. I ask, he smiles and shrugs. What he wants is for me to think he doesn't know anything but that it amuses him to string me along."

Now, studying Mace, I start seeing him in a different light.

"I know what you're thinking," he says. "‘Hey Mace, get a life!’"

"You do seem a little obsessed."

"I am. I've had other cases that didn’t get solved, but this is the only one that still haunts me late at night."

He eats several forkfuls of chicken, wipes his mouth.

"There was this girl back in high school, Stephanie Beer. Great-looking kid, enigmatic, you never knew what she was thinking. I had a crush on her, but every time I asked her out, she'd smile mysteriously and shake her head. I've known a lot of girls since, married a couple too, but the only one I still think about it her… and to this day I don't know what she was about." He takes a sip of wine. "It's the same with Flamingo. It's the only case that still drives me nuts."

Well, I think, we all have our ruling passions. But what I'm learning tonight is that though Mace and I share an obsession, we do so for entirely different reasons.

"It'd probably be easy for you now to track her down."

He chuckles softly. "Sure… and find a bloated-up cow with a hair salon called STEF'S. Tell you, David, far as Stephanie's concerned, it's better for me not to know. I get too much pleasure savoring my regret. That's what's different about Flamingo. I want to keep open the possibility of Stephanie, but I want closure on Flamingo, because the way that stirs me isn't fun. It's like an ache in a back tooth."

We discuss the case through dinner. When I mention how struck I was by Susan Pettibone's account of Tom Jessup's agitation ten days before he was killed, Mace shrugs that off as just the telephone impression of a tangential witness.

Over dessert, Mace asks if I brought along the whip picture. I pull it out of my sketchpack, hand it to him. He adjusts his granny glasses and studies it.

"Yeah, it's her all right. Great tits." He shakes his head. "Amazing! Though I don't know why I think that… or what it really means." He looks at me. "Okay if I show this to Jurgen?"

"Go ahead."

Mace turns the picture face down on the envelope, summons the waiter, asks him to send Jurgen over.

A couple minutes later, Jurgen appears. Mace invites him to sit down.

"Just for a minute." Jurgen sits. "Busy night. Lots of clients requiring attention."

Mace introduces me without mentioning my connection to law enforcement. "David's come up with an interesting artifact. I'd like to get you take."

He pushes the picture, still face-down, toward Jurgen. Jurgen smiles slight, then turns it over. Mace and I watch him as he studies it. If Jurgen feels anything, he doesn't show it."

"Very artistic," he says finally. "Looks like Max Rakoubian's work."

"You knew Max?" I ask.

Jurgen nods. "Max was one of the best." He turns to Mace. "Brings back lots of memories."

"Of Barbara Fulraine?"

"Of Mrs. Fulraine, Jack Cody, The Elms, people and places from another time." He glances at the photo again, smiles solemnly, and pushes it back toward Mace. "We're all getting older, Inspector. The years pass… and, well… perhaps some things are best left behind."

He smiles again, offers his hand. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Weiss." He stands. "Gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed your dinner. And please, Inspector, don't be a stranger here. We treasure our loyal clients."

We're on the interstate heading downtown.

"Damn!" Mace slaps the steering wheel. "I played a good card and still he trumped me. I'll say this for Jurgen, he's quick on his feet."

Mace is frustrated. He didn't even get a chance to ask Jurgen the usual question – whether Cody ordered the Flamingo killings. When I tell him I think it's interesting Jurgen knew Rakoubian, Mace says Maitre d's know thousands of people, that's what the job's about.

He turns to me when we reach the Townsend. "You in a rush?"

I shake my head.

"Let me show you where Barbara Fulraine was brought up. I think you'll find it interesting."

He turns west on Proctor. "Everyone thought she was well-born. In fact, she had a plain background, certainly to Old Money. Her father deserted early. Her mother brought her up alone."

Soon, I realize, we're going to pass the medical building where Dad kept his office, a block that so far I've carefully avoided on my various jaunts around town.

"Barbara's mom's name was Doris Lyman," Mace continues. "Doris made her living as a gambler. A good enough living to give her only child the best of everything – nice clothes, private schools, tennis and riding lessons, fancy summer camps, Vassar College. Doris was a regular at Woodmere Downs. She liked to play the ponies. She also played cards like a demon – poker, bridge, gin, you name it. She had a fantastic memory and a computer-type mind, so she could remember long runs and rapidly calculate odds."

He pulls up in front of a gray concrete apartment building in the Danvers-Torrington area, one of many in town constructed in the 1920s. This one has the name FAIRVIEW APARTMENTS cut into the stone above the door. Above that there's a molded escutcheon, an empty shield crossed by two long swords.

"Neighborhood's the same," Mace says. "Ordinary, middle class, lots of elderly. In these buildings there's always an old crab who complains about the kids, and a faint smell of cabbage and cat piss in the halls."

I gaze at the building, trying to imagine Barbara's childhood. What must it have been like for her to depart this place every morning for Ashley-Burnett, sister school to Hayes, where the girls all came from big houses in Delamere, Van Buren Heights, and Maple Hills? Her only choice would have been to outdo them, be smarter, prettier, more athletic, and display such savoir-faire that her classmates, rather than looking down on her, would vie for her favor.

"Barbara's mom knew everybody out at the track," Mace says. "All the owners, trainers, jocks. Early on, she had Barbara up on horses. The kid was a natural. Started winning trophies when she was six. When we went into her house after she was killed, we found a room full of them, hundreds of blue ribbons and silver cups. It was her horsemanship that got her into society. It was at a Maple Hills Hunt Club Christmas dance where she met Fulraine. She was back on holiday from her junior year at Vassar. He was home from his senior year at Yale. He fell for her right away, but she didn't make it easy for him. There were lots of young men interested in Barbara Lyman. Took three years of courtship before she agreed to get engaged."

So it was by her excellent horseback riding that she won her station in life – wealth, social position, her magnificent house. By her charm too, no doubt, also her beauty, her intelligence, ambition, and, of course, her smoldering sexuality. Then tragedy! Her infant daughter was abducted. It's from that point, the point of the abduction, that her life started turning strange.

"I met Doris Lyman at the funeral," Mace tells me.

We're heading back up Gale now, passing antique shops, galleries, trendy bars.

"She'd moved down to Florida. Barbara had bought her a little place in Coral Gables. She still looked pretty good. Had a few facelifts, no doubt. She told me she still played the ponies, got herself over to Hialeah two, three times a week. I gave her my typical homicide investigator's speech about how we weren't going to rest until we found her daughter's killer. Then she said, ‘I had a feeling it would end for Barb like this.’ I was so surprised I forgot to ask her what she meant. When I called her a couple days later, she played hard-ass, said she didn't remember saying that, I must've misheard or misunderstood."

Mace turns to me. "But I hadn't. No mistake. I'd heard her perfectly. I can even remember the expression on her face."

I stop at Waldo's, find the usual crowd of journalists and network people. No sign of Pam. I'm about to leave when I notice Tony standing in his usual meditative position behind the bar.

"How's it going, Tony?"

"Same as usual," he says.

I take a stool across from him. "You've been around, Tony. You know this town pretty well."

"Well as any barman, I'd say."

"Over the years ever hear of a guy named Max Rakoubian?"

Tony grins. "Sure, I remember Max. Been a while. He kicked the bucket a few years back."

"What'd you know about him?"

Tony strokes his chin. "Max was kinda slimy as I recall. Took pictures, some of ‘em nice, some not – now what I mean?"

"He did porn?"

"Not porn exactly. More like bust-in stuff."

"‘Bust-in’?"

"You know, say a gentleman's looking to divorce, he doesn't want to get taken to the cleaners, so he needs proof his spouse is shacking up. Pictures make good proof. To get pictures he needs a bust-in guy, guy who'll bust in on the spouse and lover, take a few shots. That's bust-in stuff."

"Max did that?"

"His specialty. This'll probably surprise you – he and Mr. C. were fairly tight. I think they had some deals going. Max'd tip Mr. C off on stuff. There was also talk Max did bust-ins freelance, busted in on folks without being hired to. Then he'd try to sell the pictures back. Those were the rumors anyway."

"Blackmail photographs?"

"You could call them that."

"Jesus!"

"Don't think badly of him, Mr. Weiss. Max was a gent. Knew how to talk to the ladies. Could sweet-talk ‘em into taking off their clothes, not for any reason but to let him record their God-given beauty – or so he used to put it."

"Doesn't sound like much of a gent to me, Tony."

"Well, each to his own I always say."

But in guy, bust-in stuff – seems to me that's exactly what the shooter did at the Flamingo Court, burst in on Barbara and Tom, not with a camera but with a gun. I'm thinking about that, working myself toward sleep, when I hear knocking at my door. I open up to find Pam looking sexy, swaying in the doorway.

"Hi, loverboy!" she purrs in her sexiest voice. "Mind if I come in?"

This morning, after Pam goes up to the gym for her workout, I phone Kate Evans, ask if she's made a decision.

"I've given it a lot of thought," she says. "I don't know if I can help, but I'm willing to try."

Great!

We agree to meet at the Flamingo at 2:00 p.m.. She'll leave her kids at her mother's for the afternoon. I'm to come directly to her suite above the office.

"I'm a little nervous about this," she tells me, "but I guess it's something that's gotta be done."

For me, an ID interview is an exploration into another person's mind. I don't do so-called cognitive interviews or employ standard forensic techniques. I also don't put such techniques down. They work well for most forensic artists. However, I'm interested in probing deep, plumbing the unconscious of my informants. In this respect, I'm following in the footsteps of my dad. As I often remind myself, plumbing the unconscious is the family trade.

At exactly two o'clock, sketchbook in hand, I climb an exterior staircase on the Dawson side of the Flamingo, then follow a narrow walkway to the owner's apartment. One side of this walkway is demarcated by the back of the large neon Flamingo image that proclaims the name of the motel to passing cars.

It's another hot, humid Calista summer afternoon. Standing before Kate Evans's door, I feel my shirt sticking to my back. I knock, then hear footsteps. The door opens and Kate peers at me out of the gloom. She's wearing sandals, tight shorts, and a skinny, ribbed tanktop. The blinds in the room have been pulled.

Her eyes seem to glow in her face. They're large eyes alive with curiosity, perhaps some trepidation, too. I've been made uneasy by her scrutiny before – on my first visit to room 201 and two days ago when we spoke. I like the fact that she makes strong eye contact; that's usually a lifelong trait. If her vision was as direct when she was a girl, she may have seen the shooter clearly.

She invites me in, offers me a beer. I opt for a Coke. While she fetches it, I check out her living room: basic furniture with tough fabric upholstery, the kind of indestructible stuff one expects to find in a residence inhabited by a couple of rowdy kids. The carpeting's wall-to-wall, the pictures are conventional. The only striking characteristic, the single feature that differentiates the room from American Motel, are the shelves crammed with paperback editions of self-help books – books about how to get along, make money, build self-esteem, find success, analyze your own dreams, become your own best friend. Books too about wicca, tarot, astrology, and the occult.

This tells me that she's a troubled soul in search of easy remedies. It will be my task not to let her stray into the mystical, keep her in the here and now.

"I see you're a New Ager," I tell her, gesturing toward the books.

"Can't seem to get enough of that stuff."

"Are you a witch, Kate?"

"Not quite." She lights a cigarette, perches on her couch, then draws her tanned legs beneath her like a swami. "I'm an aspirant goddess. Not so easy with two boys roughhousing all the time."

She's a single mother. Her sons' father lived with them for a while, left when things didn't work out. "And I think now we're the better for it," she says.

To relax her, I ask about her boys, where they go to school, what their interests are. Then I ask her what's it like being owner-manager of a motel, the joys, pains, special problems of the job. We chat about the old amusement park, the rides and games, especially the Fun House, how weird and spooky it was. We talk about Calista, the changes that've taken place, the new Natural History Museum, and how the old stuff, like Lindstrom's magical twin towers, still look good as ever. As we gab, I realize we're fairly close in age – she was seven the summer of the killings; I was twelve.

I tell her about my work, my ID sketches of the Zigzag Killer, the Kansas City kidnapper, and the serial murderer dubbed the Saturn Killer because he drew wide concentric rings around the bodies of his victims. In each case, I emphasize that I worked with my witnesses. Rather than taking personal credit for my portraits, I make it clear I regard them as collaborations. In each case, I give her a little background so she'll understand that the amount of time between a sighting and production of a sketch varies greatly and needn't be an issue.

"In your case," I tell her, "the fact that you were seven at the time probably works in your favor. Often kids engrave their early memories, especially when they're traumatic. Also the fact that afterwards you saw his face in dreams tells me it registered pretty well."

"I don't know," she says, squashing out her cigarette. "I tried to draw him myself last night. Didn't get too far."

Damn! I should have told her not to try that. Now it's too late. I'll have to play along.

"Still have the sketches?"

She nods, uncurls herself from the couch, retreats to another room, returns with a child's sketchpad. I move to the couch, sit beside her so we can look at what she drew together.

She shows me a pair of drawings on facing pages. Soon as I see them, I start feeling better: Her sketches are rudimentary egg-shaped outlines of a man's head with the features schematically portrayed in a childlike hand.

"As you can see, I'm no artist."

"You don't have to be," I assure her. "That's my job."

I suggest we use her sketches as a base from which we'll develop more refined portraits as we go along.

"First," I tell her, "I want you to set the scene. Close your eyes, imagine yourself back then, recall what you were doing before you heard the shots."

She starts by describing the heat. "It was like today…," she says.

A hot, humid summer afternoon, the kind of sweaty, buggy afternoon typical of a Calista August.

The noises around were also typical: the hurdy-gurdy sounds of Tremont Park drifting from across the road; the high pitch of kids whooping it up out on the sidewalk in front.

She spent a lot of afternoons that summer playing in the pool, splashing around, meeting kids whose parents were motel guests, forging new friendships that would flourish over a couple of hours then dissolve the following morning when the visiting family checked out and drove away.

Even back then Johnny Powell manned the desk weekday afternoons. He was in his cubicle watching a ball game just like he probably is today. She could hear the sounds of the game, the commentary of the announcers, the roar of the crowd when there was a hit. She was also conscious that her father was around, probably doing maintenance and repairs, and that every so often her mother appeared in the window of the owner apartment to check up on her, make sure she was all right.

"This window," she says, pointing at it.

I ask her why she's drawn the blinds.

She tells me she finds the summer light too harsh. "Even with the air-conditioning, it makes the room too hot."

This causes concern about her vision. "Were you wearing glasses, Kate?"

"No. I see very well."

"Sunglasses?"

She shakes her head.

"So the harsh light might have made you squint?"

Yes, she remembers that. She used to squint a lot. "Id get these sunburnt wrinkle marks from squinting all the time."

Her mother was always after her to use sun lotion. Sometimes she'd come down to the pool area and massage it into Kate's back.

She remembers the swimsuit she wore that summer, one piece, bright yellow, with straps that crisscrossed her back. She still likes yellow swimsuits, she says. She remembers the smell of chlorine from the pool, the sting of the cold water when the little boy she was playing with splashed her to induce her to jump in. She remembers slipping in a few times and the feeling in her arms when she held onto the rungs of the pool ladder to pull herself back out. She remembers the energy she had, the tiredness, the way her skin tanned, the sun marks left by her swimsuit straps. She remembers sitting on the edge of the pool with just her feet in the water, swishing the water around, kicking at it, kicking it in the face of the little boy.

"That summer the pool was my life." She smiles. "I guess it still is. I'm out there most every afternoon now with my boys, reading, watching who's coming and going, whether guests look okay or whether they're the type I'd rather not have in-house."

She was always aware of the motel guests, she tells me, even as a little girl. Her father taught her that, to always be on the lookout, keep track because some folks weren't decent. "A lot of people who go to motels are up to no good," he used to say. Guests, she tells me, sometimes do the most amazing things. There's one regular the chamber maids call "Mister-Piss-on-the-Bed." Then there are the people who steal stuff – toilet paper, shower curtains, pillows, mattresses, even the locks on the doors. Often they'll try to steal TVs. They'll check in with a box of tools, unscrew a room set from its stand, then lower it out a back window to a confederate in the middle of the night. Her father's policy was not to confront the crooks, just get their plate numbers and phone them into the cops.

"Of course now we have a security system with round-the-clock videotape surveillance." If they'd had that back then, she tells me, the killings probably wouldn't have taken place… at least not at the Flamingo Court.

She remembers people coming and going through the afternoon, though she doesn't recall any of them individually.

I ask her if she was in the pool before the thunderstorm.

She shakes her head. "Mom wouldn't let me swim when a storm was coming on. Too dangerous, she said. Lightning could strike and electrocute you right there in the water."

"How would she know a storm was coming?"

"The sky would get dark. It was dark that day and the storm was wild. It came in fast and fierce."

"How long did it last?"

"Ten, fifteen minutes. Pounding rain. Then the sky cleared, fast too. It was right after it cleared I asked Mom if I could go down to the pool. She said sure, go down, enjoy."

"Was the concrete wet?"

"It was slick. But it dried fast. When the sun came back out, it got real hot."

"This was about-?"

"Three, maybe a little past."

"And the little boy – was he there when you went down?"

She thinks for a moment. "No, he came down later. Maybe he saw me fooling around in the pool and asked his folks if he could go down and play."

"So you played a while, then the man came into the courtyard?"

Kate nods. She thinks she remembers seeing the man in the raincoat came in through the arch. It was nearly four o'clock. That's when folks usually start checking in, so there was always someone coming and going around that time. She thinks she remembers him, that he seemed to know where he was going – right up to room 201. Maybe because of that she assumed he was a guest. Maybe that's why she didn't pay him much attention. The raincoat didn't register because a lot of people wore raincoats when it rained. But of course it had stopped, was muggy and hot, so maybe the raincoat did register. In fact, she does remember him coming in. In that kind of heat, the raincoat didn't fit and neither did the hat. Most people caught out in the rain would carry their raincoats on their arms in heat like that. And a hat was for autumn, not a steamy August afternoon.

Kate's trying hard to work for me now, putting her story together. And if she's distorting her recollections a bit, imposing adult logic on childhood memories, that's okay too. I've deliberately put off asking her to describe the shooter, wanting first to get her into a proper recollective state.

"I remember the shots," she says. "To me they were loud, a lot louder than people said. Some folks said they sounded like firecrackers, but down there in the pool – I was in the water, not on the concrete – they came to me like roars. I even think they made the water shake. So of course we looked up."

"We?"

"Me and the boy, Jimmy. It's coming back now. Jimmy was his name. We were right next to each other in the water, splashing around. That was the game – to splash the other kid, try to make him duck."

She didn't see the man come down. She was probably still turning around. But she remembers him appearing at the bottom of the stairs. That's when their eyes locked and she got a good look at his face.

He didn't look urgent or upset, surprising considering what he'd just done. He seemed calm. She thinks he may even have smiled at her. There was kindness in his eyes, at least that was her impression. He had a kind man's face, the face of a man who listened to you, listened to your troubles, cared about you, cared about how you felt.

My heart sinks. How is that possible? How could the shooter have presented himself like that just seconds after committing murder?

She insists on her description, that no matter what he'd done he had a kindly face. A certain amount of insistence can validate a description; too much will tend to impeach it. But if he really looked so kindly, I wonder, what was he doing in her nightmares?"

He had large, sensitive eyes. Nice eyes, she says. His eyebrows arched above them. He was clean-shaven, his cheekbones prominent, his cheeks slightly sunken, making him look somewhat gaunt. His chin was sensitive, too. He was probably in his late thirties. She couldn't see his hair – he was wearing a fedora – but she had the impression it was full…

"I'm sketching rapidly now, working from her impressions, altering features as she refines her memories.

"The eyes were bigger… the nose a little longer, I think… lips fuller. No, that's too much. A little less… yeah, like that… I don't think you got his eyebrows right. They weren't so heavy. Lighter, nicer… Can't remember anything about his ears. Maybe his hair curled down over them. Which means I saw his hair, doesn't it? So I ought to know what color it was. Brown, I guess…"

I assure her hair color isn't important, only its lightness or darkness since I'm working in a range of grays.

I ask her to show me his smile, imitate it for me. She tries, screws up her face several times before finding the right fit. In the end, she shows me a friendly half-smile. So… perhaps his face did show kindness. Perhaps he was the kind of sentimental killer who related well to children, a psychotic hitman who loved his mother, visited her religiously on Sundays, went all teary-eyed over the plight of orphans, broken-winged birds, and mangy, three-legged dogs.

There was nothing furtive about him, she says, no attempt to hide his face. His gaze was penetrating and direct, without challenging her or trying to force her to look away.

His skin was smooth. His teeth were even.

There was nothing mean about him, nothing predatory. His eyes and smile were warm.

"He was almost…"

"What?"

"Pleasant."

"Show me what you mean."

The face she shows me is almost sweet.

She didn't see the gun. Must have been hidden under his raincoat, though she doesn't remember a bulge. Could he have gotten rid of the gun before he came down the stairs? Impossible, of course, since the gun was never found.

"Oh, that's close!" she says. "I think you're onto him now. Maybe loosen the skin a little beneath the eyes. I don't remember him so young, so tight."

Seeing him in my drawing doesn't make her afraid, she says. She was never afraid of him, she says.

If that's true, I ask, why was he so fearful when she saw him in her dreams?"

"Because of what he'd done," she says. "He killed that couple, blasted them to bits. It was all the more scary that he didn't look like a man who would do a thing like that. My mom used to warn me about men who seemed nice but weren't. She said never get in a car with one, especially when he acts nice and seems to like kids. He'll trick you, she said, give you candy and stuff, then take you away with him, and you'll never be seen again."

I know what to do now. I start to sketch on a fresh page. No erasures this time, no changes. I work rapidly, drawing him just as she's described him from start to finish. She lights a cigarette, inhales, watches intently as I draw, fascinated as the face emerges out of the whiteness of the paper.

"This is amazing," she says. "You draw so quickly. I can't believe the way you make him come alive."

She nods when I've finished. "Yes!" she says. "That's the man! That's him, that's him!"

And then I know she never saw the man she's been describing so fully to me this afternoon. I have drawn a self-portrait. The face that stares back at me out of the paper is… my own.