The Dream of The Broken Horses

2

Or so I imagine it happening…

I've been sketching this imagined motel room slaughter for several hours, dividing it into scenes, depicting it from various angles. Even now I'm sketching it while seated at the bar in Waldo's, working on the final close-up of the woman. I want to get her face just right – the questioning look in her eyes.

The bar's busy tonight, all the tables are taken. Media people, print and network journalists, are gabbing away, exchanging rumors and gossip, as they have every night since the Foster trial began, which we have all come to town to cover.

I finish my drawing, turn the page of my sketchbook, then look around. The Townsend is the media hotel in town; Waldo's, just off the lobby, is the media bar and assembly point. It's a good bar, posh and dark, with mahogany paneling, soft leather seats, art deco sconces, and an excellent barman named Tony who wears a white jacket and an ironic smile.

Tony, his manner announces, has seen it all. Nothing about us or the trial surprises him. Sophisticated journalists from New York, some with famous faces seen often on TV, do not impress him. He has assured me (for he and I have lately become friends) that they would not impress Waldo Channing either, that man whose portrait hangs on the bar wall, for whom the bar is named.

"Wasn't he something?"

Tony stands opposite me across the bar. He's stopped to chat, as he often does when he has a free moment. "Noticed you gazing at his picture. Mr. C. knew everybody, you know – all the big stars and personalities. Hemingway and Dietrich, Bogart and Bacall. He wrote about them. They were his friends. He could have lived anywhere – New York, London, the French Riviera – but he chose to stay here. Gotta respect the guy for that. He never gave up on this burg even when most everyone else did…"

Tony moves away to take an order from a slinky black female reporter at the other end of the bar. I make a quick sketch of him shaking a drink. He has sleek silver hair that nicely reflects the light and a complexion so deathly pale I doubt he ever goes out in daytime.

When he returns, he glances at my drawing.

"Not bad," he says. "The guy who painted Mr. C. never knew him." He gestures again at the portrait. "Did it all from photographs. Shows too. Made him look stiff, which Mr. C. wasn't. He was smooth, suave – could turn a mean phrase, too, when he had a mind. Some didn't like him for that, when he made fun of them in his column. But most respected him. He could charm your pants off. First time I saw him I was tending bar at the opera. Came the intermission, all these folks stream toward me, pushing and shoving to get their orders filled. Then I notice this handsome fellow standing among them, smiling at me, waiting his turn. I fill his order first, dry vodka martini with a twist. He thanks me, tips me double. Later I learned he was the columnist, Waldo Channing. So, see, now it's an honor for me to tend bar here."

An honor. Sure, I can see that. For even if the oil portrait of Channing makes him look a little stiff, as Tony says, it also displays his sleek good looks, savoir faire, sense of entitlement, and self-assurance. The brittle quality is there, too, the studied artificiality. And there's a gleam in the painted eyes, the barest trace of his malevolence. I know why Waldo Channing didn't move to London or New York, why he stayed in Calista, where he was born. Because here he could preside not just as society columnist but as social arbiter, a person to whom others revealed their confidences, which he could then preserve or betray as he saw fit.

"Lady wants to meet you," Tony says. He subtly gestures toward a blond sitting alone at a table near the wall. I recognize her at once: Pam Wells, reporting the trial for CNN.

"Interested?" Tony asks.

"Sure."

Tony raises his right eyebrow, slips away. I pick up my drink, pencil, and sketchbook. Ms. Wells observes me closely as I approach.

"Well, hi! She says, brilliant blue eyes glowing, voice full of good cheer. "Thanks for stopping by."

"Thanks for asking me."

"What a scene!" She indicates the room. "I feel lots of fear and loathing swirling about. I've been sitting here asking myself, ‘Pam, what's a nice girl like you doing in a snake pit like this?’"

In person she's looser than on the air. Also she doesn't punch up her words the way they train TV reporters to do. She looks softer, too, blond shoulder-length hair hanging loose, lips unpainted, a good quantity of fun in her lively eyes. Her bust is fine, her scoop neck reveals attractive freckles, and her bare arms show well-tended muscles. I won't have much trouble falling for her if she lets me, I think.

I offer my hand. "David Weiss."

"I know," she says, giving it a nice shake. "I'm Pam-"

Yeah, isn't it great – we both know who we are."

Her laughter's silver. "I've seen your sketches on the air, David. You're really kicking our butt."

"Henderson's good."

"He's all right, but his stuff doesn't stand up to yours. My producer's looking for someone else."

"Poor Henderson."

"Guy can't cut it… what're you going to do?"

Like everyone else in the room, we're talking shop. Two tables away, beneath the portrait, a quartet from NBC are paying rapt attention to Waldo Channing's successor, local society columnist and social guru Spencer Deval, who wears an ascot and affects a British accent, is short, stout, has a slack mouth, a smirky grin, and yellowish bags of flesh beneath his eyes. A habitual name-dropper, he's also a compelling storyteller. Last night he held forth at the same table to a spellbound trio from CBS.

"I hear Westin's flying in for a one-on-one with Kit Foster," Pam says.

I shrug. "I'm just the sketch artist. I don't know anything about network stuff."

"A lot more than ‘just the sketch artist.’ I've seen your ID drawings, David. They're fabulous."

I make a demure gesture to show modesty.

"Oh, they are!" she says. "The Zigzag Killer – you had him cold. Also the Saturn Killer and that guy out in Kansas City who kidnapped those little girls. When they finally catch the monsters, they look just like the way you drew them. Yet you never saw them. Or did you?"

"I saw them in my mind," I tell her.

She peers at me, interested. "How'd you do that?"

"The way everybody else does. Eyewitness interviews."

"But your drawings aren't like everyone else's. They're uncanny dead-on accurate."

I shrug.

"What's your secret?"

"It's not like it's a magic trick."

"I'm just wondering how you pull the memories out. You must identify strongly with your witnesses to get inside their heads so deep."

"Yeah," I agree, "that's pretty much it."

She orders another round. As we talk more about the trial, I notice the way her breasts strain against the cotton of her blouse and the firm, bare, tanned flesh or her arms.

She doesn't have much use for Judge Winterson. "Old Battle-ax," she calls her. I tell her if Winterson hadn't been tough and refused to allow cameras in her courtroom, I wouldn't have gotten the gig.

"Courtroom sketching's not really your thing, is it?"

"Basically I'm a forensic artist."

"Ever do fine art drawing?"

"Gave that up years ago."

"You're from here, right?"

I nod. "How'd you know?"

"Heard it around. Go to the local art school?"

I shake my head. "They've got a pretty good one, but I went to Pratt."

"Ah!" she smiles. "Midwest boy goes off to the Big City."

"Yeah, that was me, the kid from Calista, desperate to get to New York, seek my fortune. Not like Waldo Channing." I gesture toward the painting. "Tony the barman says old Waldo could've lived anywhere in the world, but he liked it best here. Tony finds that admirable."

Pam Wells gazes at the painting. "Something funny about his eyes." She squints. "Like maybe he wasn't ‘nice people’."

She's got that right, I think.

An hour and two rounds later, we're feeling mellow, interested in one another, flirting. Since she's the one with higher status, I feel it's her place to make the first move.

Finally she glances at her watch. "Almost midnight." She leans forward, smiles, drills me with her sparkling eyes. "Want to come up to my room?"

"That's a very pretty proposition," I tell her.

As we exit, I catch a look from Tony. Again he raises his right eyebrow, his trademark comment on matters of the heart.

Making love to Pam Wells, I find, is like driving a luxury racing car, say a Ferrari or Lamborghini – not that I've had much experience with either. The engine purrs. You feel its power. There's a perfect fit between driver and machine. You hug the road even as you take dangerous curves. The ride's oil-smooth, faultless, elegant. Even the sound of the meshing gears is beautiful.

Which is not to suggest that Pam makes love like a machine. On the contrary, I find her tender. Nor does she give off an aroma of fine leather and wood; I smell wildflowers on her skin. She's a gifted lover who makes me feel like the expert lover I've longed to be but never had the courage to believe I am. In short, she makes me feel like a great driver, even though I suspect it's she who's doing the driving and me who is the car.

"You're fun," she whispers as we rest. "I had a hunch you'd be good at this."

We share a laugh, then she eases me out, telling me she has to get her ‘beauty sleep’.

"I'd ask you to stay but I know if I do we'll end up playing through the night," she says. "Then I'll look a mess when I do my early stand-up at the courthouse door."

Riding the hotel elevator down to my floor, I realize I've been blown off… but in the nicest, coolest, most flattering way.

The Foster Case: Another of those sordid celebrity cases that grip the country from time to time. The kind that, just when you think you've had enough of it, along comes a new twist and then, stirred by the media frenzy, you're back in thrall.

I'm here in Calista as part of the pack covering the event. On the very day Judge Stella Winterson banned cameras from her courtroom, I was hired by ABC on an urgent contract basis to make sketches of moments of high drama and conflict during the trial. This entitles me to a reserved seat in the courtroom behind the defendant's table, from which position I have an excellent view of the cast of characters:

The Judge – big, bosomy black woman with white hair, stern demeanor, occasional maternal smile;

The Jurors – usual mix: men and women, black and whites, maintenance and postal workers, with a couple of college grads thrown in;

The Defendant, Kit Foster – waiflike with off-center eyes, heart-breaking smile, punked-out auburn hair;

The Prosecutor – young, earnest, articulate, organized;

The Defense Attorney – mellifluous voice, expensive cream linen suit, flowing gray hair that curls over the collars of his beautiful made-to-measure pink shirts.

In the most banal terms, the case comes down to this: super rock star Caleb Meadows (he of the whiny attenuated voice) was alone one afternoon this past winter with his girlfriend, performance-artist Kit Foster (she of the scrawny, multi-pierced body), in the Dinosaur Room of the new architecturally brutal Calista Museum Of Natural History.

Moments later Meadows was dead. Hearing screams, a museum security man arrived on the scene to find Foster covered with Meadows's blood and an old hunting knife buried in Meadows's chest. Later examination of silent videotape from a surveillance camera showed the couple apparently quarreling fiercely in the moments just before the knifing.

According to Foster's statement, made just afterwards to police, Meadows pulled out the knife, thrust it at her, and, in the ensuing struggle, stabbed himself. She was vague about the details, couldn't explain how she, at a mere one hundred two pounds, managed to deflect his attack and turn it around. "I've blocked it all out," she said. Ironically or by design, depending on one's point of view, these final contested moments were, on account of the odd place where the parties were standing at the time, invisible to the surveillance camera and thus not recorded on tape.

Friends of the victim subsequently informed police that Ms. Foster was a heroin addict who had threatened Mr. Meadows with violent bodily harm should he break up with her as he'd been threatening to do for several weeks.

Friends of Ms. Foster counterclaimed that Mr. Meadows was a degenerate who'd threatened to carve up Ms. Foster if she ever left him, which, that very afternoon, she'd informed him she was about to do.

Complicating these contesting claims was the fact that Mr. Meadows and Ms. Foster had each named the other sole beneficiary in reciprocal wills executed several months before. It has been estimated that at the time of his demise, Mr. Meadows was worth approximately sixty million dollars.

So there it is, a tawdry case involving selfish, tacky people with too much money and fame. Yet, the commentators keep reminding us, it has all the ingredients of a great crime story: the essential trio of sex (kinky), lies (stupendous), and videotape (incompetent), not to mention drugs (hard), money (huge), and murder (most foul).

Depending on one's point of view, the killing was either accidental as the defendant claims, or calculated and committed for profit as the prosecution wants desperately to prove. In short, a case of no particular consequence that carries no moral lesson or tragic overtone that may illuminate our fragile human condition. A case that would inspire no interest at all except for the celebrity status of the principals and the odd venue of the scene of blood.

Frankly, I don't care a damn abut it and am totally neutral as to its outcome.

Calista in summer: The air hangs heavy here, fraught with high humidity and heat, while the river gives off pungent fumes. I love this kind of weather. It reminds me of the summers of my youth -sweating on baseball diamonds beneath relentless sunshine broke only by occasional fierce summer thunderstorms.

We had one last night. Thunder boomed. Great sheets of rain lashed the streets. Calista's landmark mid-century twin towers, hometown architect Eric Lindstrom's heroic Tower of the Great Plains and Tower of the Great Lakes, stood stark and lonely against the lightning-torn sky.

The residue is still upon the city this hot, damp Tuesday morning, as I make my way along rain-slick sidewalks to the welter of video units and trucks parked at the rear of the ornate beaux-arts Calista County Courthouse.

I've come in search of Pam Wells, hoping to discern whether she regards me as but a one-night stand. Also to see if, indeed, she slept well last night, or, like me, tossed and turned during the storm, unable to expel the memory of our coupling from my mind.

I find her in the CNN Winnebago being worked on by a frizzy-haired hairdresser.

"Well, hi!" she says, with a cheerful smile. "How're you?"

"Sleep well?"

"I did, yes. Thanks for asking."

Since the hair gal ignores us, I figure it's okay to behave as if we're alone.

"Any chance of a get-together after work?"

"How ‘bout Waldo's, seven o'clock?"

"Sounds good." I turn to leave.

"Oh, David-" I turn back to her. "What I said last night about you being fun – I meant it."

I search her eyes seeking some trace of irony. Finding none, I still can't bring myself to believe her.

"You're a flatterer, Pam!"

The hair-dresser snorts a laugh.

"Millie here knows better. Don't you, Millie?"

"Go away, Mister," Millie instructs. "Pam's having a bad hair day and I got just two minutes to fix her up."

Winding my way back through the labyrinth of cables, past RVs where other star commentators are being groomed, I feel a certain compassion for on-camera reporters. Not, certainly, on account of their salaries, which are scandalously huge, but for the requirements that they always look great and that their clothing always appear fresh and pressed. Unless, of course, they're covering a hurricane or a war, in which case they carefully ruffle their gorgeous manes of hair and sport tailored bush jackets to resemble dashing correspondents of old.

Having no particular desire for fame or fortune, I prefer my sketch-artist's role behind the scenes. All I have to do is make drawings that, when broadcast, speak for themselves. And if a certain point of view should happen to intrude, it will not be my excitement over this or that twist in the tale, rather my fascination with humans in conflict and their grace or lack of same when under stress.

I enter the courthouse, hang my press ID necklace about my neck, get in a line for the metal detector, hand over my sketchpack, endure a frisking, pick up my pack, then head for the elevators and the fourth floor.

The first two weeks of trial here have been hard as I've labored to create an image-bank – portraits of the principals as well as a selection of their facial expressions at moments of excitement, amusement, confrontation, or that great criminal trial standby, the stare of righteous indignation. Now, with these images in hand, I've got the job down to a manageable level, able to quickly build composite drawings that can illustrate most every courtroom situation likely to arise.

Whenever a new piece of physical evidence is introduced or a new witness appears, I immediately sketch it, him, or her, adding same to my store. At which point, unless I sense a fine moment is in the offing, I feel free to go about my business, confident that I can create strong drawings that will please my producer so long as she receives them in time for broadcast on the early evening news.

Courtroom work is not my specialty; forensic ID portraiture is. I've made perhaps a thousand drawings of wanted felons, with an accuracy that has propelled me to the top rank of my profession.

These days, what with Identi-Kits and computer programs that the average cop can operate, we forensic artists are often viewed as relics. But composites generated by systems are never as accurate as freehand drawings made by an artist working closely with an eyewitness. We can introduce emotion, depict characteristic expressions, even create the aura of a subject, his menace, craftiness, joviality, or, if appropriate, that distinctive strange, almost bland, vacant stare so typical of the sociopathic killer.

I enjoy forensic work, the unhurried pace of it, long eyewitness interviews, evoking the original trauma of the crime, breaking through screen memories to uncover real ones, then the drawing itself, the slow accretion of detail that can bring a portrait of a criminal to life.

So why now the courtroom sketching, a business requiring the speedy production of cartoons? For a change of pace, perhaps, a chance to make a few extra bucks, but most especially for the opportunity to revisit my hometown where another homicide, one that took place more than a quarter century ago, grips my interest and fills my dreams with an intensity the Foster trial cannot even begin to touch.

I have come back, you see, to try to resolve my past. Also, hopefully, to complete my father's great unfinished case.

This morning the courthouse seems especially tense. Perhaps it's last night's thunderstorm. Exasperated reporters, having bad hair days, lope morosely along the corridors. Even the bailiffs, normally an even-tempered bunch, appear unduly stressed.

I nod to acquaintances, catching, in the process, a dour glance from Jim Henderson, the CNN courtroom sketch artist whom Pam Wells's producer wants to replace. Just as I'm about to show him a friendly smile, my own producer, Harriet Mills, sidles up.

"Hear about the overnights? We beat the competition again thanks to you." Harriet's a tough go-get-‘em type. She grins at me. "Hear you were seen leaving Waldo's with Pam Wells. What's she like?"

I shrug.

"Well, I hear she's a real bitch," Harriet says.

There's more media baiting and back-biting at this trial than any I've attended, perhaps because the pickings are so slim and the competition so intense. I feel bad for Henderson. He's a nice guy and his drawings are decent enough, but he lacks a feeling for trial-as-theater. I'm pretty sure he dislikes me because he thinks I think I'm slumming. Probably he also finds it disgraceful I don't stay in my seat, but instead wander out of the courtroom on my own business for hours at a time.

Judge Winterson's bailiff appears at the door.

"Okay, folks – you can enter now. Keep it orderly. No shoving like yesterday. Judge was plenty pissed when she heard." Dramatic pause. "Believe me, it's not fun for us when Judge gets pissed."

And with that in mind, we of the media herd file solemnly in to take our seats.

Court lets out early. There are evidentiary issues that require thrashing out. I speedily finish up my drawings, drop them off with Harriet at the ABC suite, plant a kiss on her less-than-tender cheek, then call down for my rental car in the hotel garage.

3:00 P.M.

I'm driving east along Dawson Drive entering the narrow portion where it passes through elegant, shady Delamere.

The old suburb had changed since my day. High-rise condominium buildings have sprung up. But many of the old mansions still stand far back from the road behind walls and gates with enormous well-groomed lawns in front. Long, straight driveways lined with evenly spaced trees lead to these stately homes, contrived to remind the visitor of the approach to a French chateau or English country manor.

The architecture here is European revival: mansard-roofed Normans, brick Georgians, timber-in-stucco Tudors, even a couple of Gothic-style castles with arched windows and crenellated parapets. All were constructed with lovingly lavish detail between the end of World War I and the start of the Great Depression.

I slow as I approach the Fulraine house. Built in the manner of a Palladian villa, it is perhaps the finest residence in Delamere. I pull over opposite the gate, then peer in, able to catch a glimpse of the entryway at the far end of the gravel drive.

Here, I know, there's a turnabout where, in the days when the Fulraines gave parties, limousines would pull up and leave off guests. I also know that on the far side of the house, facing Delamere Lake, lies the tennis court where Barbara Fulraine played steamy matches against her young lover, Tom Jessup, while her sons, my classmates, whom Jessup tutored, frolicked in the vast swimming pool down the slope.

But it's the gate itself that's burned into my memory. As I look at it now the old television images flood back: Barbara and Andrew Fulraine begging for the return of their kidnapped daughter, Belle, s microphones are thrust toward them and cameras mercilessly strobe their tear-streaked cheeks.

I feel my own eyes grow wet as I recall those impromptu press conferences. I will never forget something my father said to my mother as we watched.

"People love this kind of thing. It shows them that even the rich and powerful feel pain."

Oh, yes, I think, Dad was right.. for what happened before this gate was the very substance of tragedy – the anguished bellowings of great lords rolling in the dust.

Once past the great Fulraine place, I pick up speed, arriving a few minutes later at a cluster of apartment towers where Tremont Park once stood.

It was one of the great amusement parks of its era, a complex embracing dance halls, lovers' lanes, penny arcades, cotton candy stands, and numerous rides: Flying Ponies, Flying Scooters, Mill Chute, Roller Coaster, Over the Falls, and the inimitable Laf-in-the-Dark, where, alone in a boat in total blackness on a murky canal, between the barrel of stars and the enormous sliding spider, I imagine Barbara Fulraine and Tom Jessup kissing for the first time.

My destination today is the Flamingo Court Motel situated on the other side of Dawson. It was shabby then and still is today, but not by any means repulsive – a decent enough place for a family to spend the night or a pair of lovers to while away a hot summer afternoon.

The two-story powder-blue facade sports a fading mural of pink flamingos caught in mid-flutter between the trunks of lime-green palms. Looming above is a neon sign depicting a flamingo and, beneath that, another informing weary travelers and./or randy lovers that vacant rooms are still available within.

I pull into the lot across the street between Moe's Burgers and the Shanghai Sapphire Restaurant, then cross the street on foot and enter the motel courtyard. There's a rectangular pool here, its aquamarine interior fading, rust stains on the surrounding concrete, and water that appears less than perfectly clean. Two small boys splash happily at the shallow end. Nearby a woman in the skimpiest possible yellow bikini reads a magazine while taking the sun on an angry orange plastic-strap chaise lounge.

Not many clients at this hour. Perhaps a slew will appear at dusk. I note the configuration of the court – a two-story U-shaped building with exterior staircases and covered open porticos providing access to room doors running along the courtyard sides.

The office is to the right of the entrance. I'm about to turn toward it when I notice the woman on the chaise observing me over the top of her magazine.

"Hi," I greet her.

"Hi, yourself. Help you?"

"I'm looking for Johnny."

"You'll find him in the office," she says, then turns back to her magazine.

I find Johnny Powell leaning on the reception counter gazing at the TV set across the room. A Calista Forgers-Boston Red Sox game's in progress, the score 5-2 in favor of the Sox.

I introduce myself.

"Oh, sure," he says, "been expecting you. You picked a good time. Nothing going on now ‘cept the baseball. Forgers playing like fools today."

"If I've ever seen a person to whom one could apply the moniker ‘geezer’ it would be the old man grinning at me now. He's stooped, thin, gaunt, unshaven, a pair of bright blue eyes in a tanned, cracked-leather face. His voice is cracked too, with a nasal twang. He looks the type who play wily old prospectors in westerns, spouting cracker-barrel philosophy about the lure of gold and how it's akin to the lust stirred by a wicked woman.

He mutes the TV with a remote.

"So you're here to see old two-oh-one?" he said. "Been a couple of years since anyone asked. First year after the killings they came in all the time, curiosity seekers wanting to take pictures and snatch up souvenirs. Mr. Evans – he's dead now, that's his daughter sunning herself outside – he decided not to let the room out or even paint it up. ‘Just leave it be, Johnny,’ he told me. Didn't even want me to scrub the bloodstains off the walls, though of course I did. We charged ‘em five dollars for a five-minute look. Made a bushel of money that way. When stuff started getting swiped – ashtrays, lamps, even one of the pictures on the wall – he had me screw everything down. For a couple years old two-oh-one was our top-producing room. Biggest thing ever happened here at the Flamingo. Biggest thing ever will happen, I betcha."

I ask Johnny if he was here the day of the murders.

"Sure was," he says. "Was afternoon man then, same as now. Knew the couple too, since they were regulars. Knew Mr. Jessup actually. Not the lady. Never exchanged two words with her. He'd come in, register, then wait for her up in the room. Or, if Mrs. Fulraine got here first, she'd wait out in her car till he registered, then follow him up. He always asked for an end room near the parking. That meant one-oh-one or two-oh-one depending on which was occupied.

"He was a nice fella. Soft spoken. Private schoolteacher, you know. Taught out at the Hayes School. Later I heard that's where they met. Seems she sent her two boys there. One day she goes out to meet the teachers. Then – pop! Wow! Flyin' sparks! That whole summer they met here three, four times a week. They say she's the one actually paid since she was rolling in moolah and he barely had a pot to piss in…"

After a brief negotiation, I hand him fifty bucks for a one-hour rental, plus an extra ten for himself.

"Hour's kinds odd length of time," he says, handing over the key. "Won't take you but a couple of minutes to get the feel. ‘Less you're planning on takin' a snooze…"

No napping, I tell him, I'm going to be sketching and that's a slow process, a lot slower than taking photographs.

"You'll find it pretty much the way it was. Furniture and bed frames still original. New mattress, of course. New carpeting. New TV. Maybe nine or ten paint jobs and seventy or eighty changes of shower curtains, but otherwise just the same."

The woman in the yellow bikini watches me as I ascend the exterior stairs. When I pause on the balcony, she raises herself from the chaise and marches authoritatively to the end of the diving board. As she does, I notice endearing pink marks on her back form lying against the plastic straps. After another quick glance at me, she makes a beautiful swan dive into the water. If I were an Olympic judge I'd give her a 9.5.

Two-oh-one is a decent-sized room, not a confining shoe box the way they build them today. The moment I enter I feel like an intruder. Since I know sketching will calm me, I go to the bed, sit on it, set the pillows behind my back, then prop my sketchpad against my knees. I check my watch. 3:30 P.M.. It was a little before four in the afternoon when the killings took place, just this time of year.

I gaze around, look carefully at everything, then close my eyes trying to imagine how it happened that day, what it was like.

I've been sketching for an hour. I finish up my drawing: the open doorway filled with light, the broken figures on the bed lost in shadow. I set down my sketchpad, lie back, my heart beating wildly in my chest.

I'm exhausted. Perhaps, I think, this project will prove to be a mistake. Then I tell myself: It's no mistake. Difficult at times, sure; fraught with the pain that often accompanies necessity, but that's the point, it is necessary if I'm ever to obtain peace of mind.

I get up from the bed, go to the open door, and peer down over the balcony at the pool. The two boys are now playing in the shade, while their mother, once again on the chaise, bikini top untied, bare back to the sun, turns her head slightly to engage my eyes.

I quickly shut the door, cutting off the light, then return to the bed to rest a while in the gloom. This room, I think, was the Scene of Blood, and thus it is well that I have come here to breathe the air, take it all in with my eyes, understand how sounds reverberate in the space and the particular way the light cuts across the floor. I scan the walls knowing there is impacted in them echoes of the death throes of Tom Jessup and Barbara Fulraine, whose agony, in some deep sense I cannot understand, seems still present in the room.

Waldo's

7:00 P.M.

I sit at the bar, sipping from a margarita beautifully made by Tony, awaiting the arrival of Pam Wells.

The usual suspect are out in force. The CBS group. The NBC group. Spencer Deval, at his regular table beneath the portrait, holding forth to a different media contingent tonight. The slinky black female reporter from Chicago, who, Tony had told me, has a contract from a New York publisher to do a book on the trial, regards me curiously from the far end of the bar.

I hear there are two other reporters' books under contract, but I doubt it'll matter much whose book comes out first. The way I see it, this time next year the Foster trial will be deader than dust.

"There you are." It's Pam.

"Hi. Want a drink?"

"Sure." She grins. "Then let's go upstairs. I've been thinking about you all day. There're all sorts of nasty things I want us to do."

She takes a sip from my margarita while waiting for Tony to make one for her. "What'd you do this afternoon anyway?"

"Went out sketching."

"In this heat?"

"I found a cool place."

"You like to keep busy, don't you? Keep your hand moving. Now why do you feel you have to do that, David?"

"I think it keeps me sane."

She thinks that one over. "You're a pretty interesting guy." She smiles. "I have a hunch about you."

"What's that?"

"That you've got a story."

"Everyone's got a story."

"Sure. But yours is special. You're up to something here. That's what I think. I trust my hunches too."

Tony presents her with her drink. She clicks her glass against mine, then sips.

So she thinks she's got me psyched-out after one session in the sack. Well, two can play at that game, I think.

"If I tell you my story you might lose interest."

"Try me and find out," she challenges.

"I'll think about it. You know what they say about you, Pam?"

"What?"

"‘She's a real bitch.’"

She stares at me a moment, then laughs. "Well, maybe I am," she says. "And maybe I've met my match."

Having nicely cleared the air, we finish our drinks, then ascend to her room where we nearly tear off one another's clothes.

An hour later, showered and refreshed, we step out the front door of the Townsend, stroll along the night streets of downtown Riverwalk, then on to a neighborhood of bars and restaurants along the Calista River, an area locals call Irontown.

Calista, in fact, is a very interesting city, as special and atmospheric in its way as Boston or Miami. It's a true river town with all the trappings that description implies – bridges, docks, barges, boats. It has a sultry richness, a plenitude of trees, and a locally much-spoken-of "Athenian" aspect, Calista's self-image as an oasis of culture in the culturally barren Midwest. Beyond all that, it's the kind of city that, long after you've left it because you thought it wasn't your rightful place, continues to haunt your dreams.

There was enormous wealth here as there was in all the great rust-belt cities of the American plain, wealth on a scale that people from the East rarely understand. People here have formed fabulous art collections. Growing up, I played with kids whose parents had Rembrandts in their houses, in one case an El Greco hanging in the dining room. The rich here built distinguished cultural institutions: churches, temples, a magnificent art museum, fine symphony orchestra, world-class university and medical center, ballet company, repertory theater company, champion sports teams, elegant, gracious suburbs.

They also built great factories and mills that were among the most hellish places on earth, polluting the river to the extent that at one point it literally turned red from the iron precipitate runoff from the smelters.

As befits a city of great wealth and power, Calista too became a city of great crimes and, sometimes, punishments: the Wandering Strangler killings, the Heller-Hinton murders, the Barton Paint Factory explosion… and a good fifty notorious murders and disasters more. Some were solved, others not, some still haunt the populace, while others obsess only those whose lives they touched. In the latter category, I would place the double murder at the Flamingo Court of Tom Jessup and Barbara Fulraine, which the local press dubbed simply "Fulraine," because in this city Fulraine was a name to be reckoned with, while poor Tom Jessup was pretty much a nonentity.

Pam Wells and I are standing in one of the semicircular overlooks on Riverwalk. The snaking Calista River glows below us, its surface, reflecting the night sky, smooth like slick, black oil, broken only by the girder bridges and jackknife drawbridges that cross it at odd and varying angles.

"So this is the famous river that turned red?" Pam shakes her blond hair free, sniffs the air. "Doesn't smell bad at all."

"The redness was a warning call. They knew they had to clean it up. See that?" I point south toward a cluster of slag heaps and the ruins of a steel plant.

"Looks like a bunch of old dinosaur bones."

"That's what's left of Fulraine Steel, once one of the great mills here. Last twenty years the steel business has gone to hell. Most steel's imported now or made in energy-efficient plants. But there was a time when those ruins were alive with smelters, when black smoke and cinders poured out of the stacks. The smell pervaded the city. You couldn't walk the route we just took without getting cinders in your eyes. It was dirty here, also rich, a place where wealth was created beyond men's dreams. Iron ore and cola came downriver on barges. Steel was forged, then shipped back out to the world. Steel is what made this town… and for a while ruined it too."

The restaurant we choose is a noisy yuppy hangout, filled with affluent young people talking and laughing – stockbrokers, attorneys, ad execs. As we walk in, a few people, recognizing Pam, follow us both with their eyes. Passing a table, I pick up a snatch of conversation about the Foster trial:

"It's the money. Jury'll see she did it for the money," a young man tells his date.

"She'll walk. Reasonable doubt," his companion replies.

We find a secluded booth in back, order pasta, salad, and a bottle of wine, then gaze into one another's eyes.

"Funny how I keep wanting to flatter you, David," she said. "you bring out the nice girl in me, I guess."

She asks me about past relationships. I describe my brief failed marriage, aimless dalliances, numerous ruptured love affairs. When I ask about hers, she tells me she lived with a guy the last four years, a news producer for another network whom she met when she first moved to New York.

"We broke up this winter. It was pretty traumatic. Lots of quarreling about who owned what and who'd get to keep our great apartment on Riverside Drive. After torturous negotiations, I bought him out, then decided I didn't want to live there anymore. Too many memories. So I took the CNN job in D.C. and put the apartment up for sale. Now he says I only wanted it out of spite."

She asks about my life in San Francisco. I describe my loft on Telegraph Hill, the view over the Bay, and how in the early morning the sun seems to rise in slow motion before my bay windows, radiating light so blinding I'm forced to run away. I tell her about my pair of big World War II-vintage tripod-mounted binoculars installed beside my drafting table in the bay, which I use to watch ships come and go during the day and to scan the city for interesting dramas at night. I tell her I'm something of a voyeur and that she's right, I do have a busy hand. I tell her about my hundreds of sketchbooks, how together they constitute an enormous incoherent diary of my life – places I've visited, people I've met, situations I've observed. It's as if, I tell her, I'm seeking to draw some kind of definitive scene, which, when sketched, will solve a mystery I seem to have spent the better part of my life puzzling out. I tell her I don't know what this mystery is, nor why I feel compelled to solve it, but that I believe its source is here in this city where I was born.

She goes quiet after that, making me think I've spoken with too much candor. Then suddenly her face breaks into the warm smile that makes her so effective on TV.

"I wish like you I'd come here on a quest," she says, "instead of to cover some scummy trial." She locks eyes with mine. "Like I said, David, you're a pretty interesting guy."

We grin at one another, slurp up our spaghetti, devour our salads, work our way methodically through our bottle of wine. The, like lovers, we slowly make our way back to the Townsend along lonely Riverwalk lit by gracefully turned streetlamp candelabra, breathing air that smells of iron and dead flowers, arms loosely embracing one another's waists.