The Dream of The Broken Horses

6

A different feeling in Waldo's tonight. People seem to be in a rotten mood. I learn that an hour ago a CNN cameraman and a local soundman got in a fistfight.

Tony the barman fills me in. Seems that while competing for position to pick up the day's crucial sound bite, the local stepped on the network guy's foot.

"It wasn't about his foot."

Tony and I look up. This offering comes from Sylvia Browne, the black reporter from Chicago under contract to write a book. She's perched on her usual stool at the end of the bar.

"What was it about, Sylvie?" Tony asks.

"A woman," she says.

Tony rolls his eyes. "Isn't it always?"

"What woman?" I ask.

"Actually your girlfriend."

"Pam?"

Sylvie grins. "More than one girlfriend, David?"

"What'd it have to do with Pam?"

"This afternoon she elbowed the local station's girl reporter aside. The foot stamping was retaliation."

"How do you know this?"

Sylvie beams. "I observe. What's interesting here isn't the trial, it's the media battles surrounding it. It's all going into my book. By the way, David – you better watch out. This morning CNN fired Henderson. I hear they're bringing in Washburn. He's good." She giggles, then turns away.

I step out to the lobby to call Pam on my cell phone.

"Where are you?" I ask when she picks up.

"Production suite."

"Hear about the fight?"

"Yeah. Boys'll be boys."

"Is it true Henderson's out and Washburn's in?"

"You've got good sources, David. I'm with Wash now."

You really call him that?"

"Hey, Wash!" she says. "It's David Weiss. He doesn't like your nickname."

I hear a male voice mutter something in the background.

Pam conveys the message: "Starrett says Wash'll cream your ass."

So… Pam, her producer, Jim Starret, and their new courtroom artist hire, Lee Washburn, are in a strategy meeting upstairs plotting my professional demise. Chastened, I return to Waldo's for a second Margarita.

Washburn, I know, could be a serious competitor. One of the two or three top courtroom artists in the country, he's known for his powerful compositions and incredible speed. Well, he may draw faster than me, but I'm confident I'm better at characterization. Since this'll be the first time we've covered the same trial, I also know I can expect a battle. And no mercy from Pam, though she's been especially sweet and ingratiating since I dressed her down for snooping in my room.

I'm fairly well lubricated by the time they come downstairs – Pam, Starret, and the famous Wash whom I recognize from photographs that accompanied a profile in TV Guide. He's got himself up like an artist – long, black hair, drooping black mustache, black pants, and black silk shirt billowing around his cadaverous arms.

Pam gives me a quick peck on the cheek.

"Hi," Wash says, extending his hand. "Really love your work."

I nod. We shake. His eyes, I note, are soft and liquid, sensitive artist's eyes.

As Starret pulls him toward a table across the room, Pam perches beside me and orders a margarita.

"Nice guy," I tell her. "All he lacks is a beret."

She grins. "You're not worried, are you?"

"I wish you'd told me you were bringing him in."

"Starret's decision. Anyhow I try to keep my private life separate."

"Yeah, I understand. I do that myself. Which is why I haven't told you my secrets yet."

"I know something's going on with you," she says. "I even think you enjoy cutting me out. You've got that smug, cut-out look."

I flip open my sketch pad, press a pencil to the paper. "Describe it."

"What?"

"That look."

"Oh… you know." She shrugs. "The knowing little twinkle in the eye. The secretive little curl to the lip."

I quickly draw a pair of eyes and lips. "Like this?"

"No, worse," she says. "The tight I'm-going-to-scoop-you grin."

This girl's not only smart, she's got me psyched.

"What's the matter, David? Can't draw it?"

"Show it to me."

She makes a couple of awful faces, then sticks out her tongue. "Nya-nya-nya!" She drains off half her margarita. "If you really want to know what I'm talking about, take a look in the mirror."

At that she lightly pats my shoulder, picks up her glass, and saunters off toward the CNN table across the room, giving me just the flimsiest little wave before sitting down with Starret and Wash, my new rival in the courthouse drawing wars.

Four hours later, after dinner at a seafood restaurant in Irontown and a bout of lovemaking that leaves us sweaty and spent, I turn to her, ask if she's ready to hear my story.

She perks up immediately, props her head on her elbow, and tells me, yes, she's ready.

I lie back, stare up at the blank ceiling of her hotel room, and spill.

"There was a double murder here when I was a kid. I went to a private day school out in the country. Turned out one of my teachers was having an affair with the mother of a classmate. One hot summer afternoon, when they were making love at a sleazy motel, someone burst in with a shotgun and blasted them both to bits. Huge local scandal. The woman was a socialite and a great beauty, divorced in-law of one of the richest families in town. The prime suspect was another man she'd been having an affair with, a guy who owned a nightclub across the county lien. No arrests, nothing was proven, and the nightclub guy himself was gunned down within the year. That was more or less the end of it. Interest wound down. But me and my best friend at school were fascinated by the crime. For one thing, we'd been particularly fond of the teacher. He was a gentle guy – or so we thought. Also because his death was so shocking to us, we spent a huge amount of time talking the murders through, thinking we could solve them like you can solve a puzzle in a mystery novel."

"There was other stuff. Everyone at school was upset by what happened… as was everyone in Calista society. But the murders seemed to affect my parents to an unusual degree. It was about that time that my family came apart. My mom and dad were at dagger points. Dad was a doctor, a shrink. Turned out he was treating the victim, Mrs. Fulraine. Turned out he'd met her the same day she met the teacher, spring Parents Day at our school. There's the coincidence – this incredibly glamorous woman appears at Parents Day and, within a couple hours, meets a shrink with whom, shortly thereafter, she begins a course of psychoanalysis, and a young teacher with whom, shortly thereafter, she starts a tumultuous and ultimately tragic affair."

I turn from the ceiling to look at Pam. Fascinated, she peers into my eyes.

"What happened?"

"I told you – they were killed."

"I mean with your folks."

"They separated. A few months after the murders. Mom decided she wanted to move back to California where she'd been brought up. I didn't want to leave my school and friends, but Mom was determined. We – Mom, my sister Rachel, and me – left Calista that January in the middle of a blizzard. The following week, I started at a new school in L.A. Six weeks later, Dad committed suicide."

"They say he lingered in his office after his last appointment of the day, then, a couple hours later when it was dark, leapt out his office window. It was a medical building on Gale Avenue. The window faced the back so no one saw him fall. He landed in the doctor's parking lot. They didn't find him till the next morning. He didn't die immediately, might have been saved if there'd been someone around to call for an ambulance. Instead he lay there all night, body broken, bleeding to death in the snow."

"My mother brought us back for the funeral, held, coincidentally, in a synagogue in Van Buren Heights for which the son of a man who took a haunting, erotic photo of Mrs. Fulraine is now creating a sculpture for a Holocaust memorial. A couple years later, Mom married another doctor, an internist. My father's last name was Rubin; Mom's second husband's name was Weiss. When he adopted me, I took his name. David Rubin became David Weiss."

Pam seems moved. "Thank you for telling me this, David."

"You've been so good lately about not asking me to spill my guts, I figured it was finally time for me to spill them. You see, for years I believed, and still do, that everything that happened – my parents' breakup, Dad's suicide, the fact that I now have a name different from the one I started out with – had something to do, tenuously or directly, with the strange woman whose life I want to understand, the murder victim, Barbara Fulraine."

Pam nods, lies back, again exposing her wondrously freckled chest. She's glad, she tells me, that I finally opened up to her.

"I know it's hurtful to talk about these things. I'm touched you've shared them with me."

"So you see I'm not working on something newsworthy behind your back. It's a private inquiry. Time-consuming too. I guess now that Washburn's in town, I'm going to have to spend more time at the trial."

"You can always quit, do your own thing."

"And pay for my own hotel room and car."

"Is that the only reason you stick with the trial?"

I admit it isn't, that the real reason I don't quit and spend full time on the Flamingo killings is that then I'd have to face the fact that I'd given myself over to a ruling passion, that I'm not just conducting a hobby investigation but am on an obsessive personal quest.

"Why did you wait so long?" she asks. "You could have looked into this years ago… before the trail went cold."

"I wasn't ready. But this spring, when my mom died, some new material came my way. Then a couple months later the Foster trial and the offer from ABC. Everything seemed to gel. The message was clear. It was time to go home and face my demons." I glance at her. "Such as they are."

"Oh, they definitely sound like demons," she says.

No mention from her this evening about having to get her ‘beauty sleep.’ Rather, I'm invited for the first time to spend the night.

Later she says, "Let me help you, David. I've got free time. We could backtrack your story together."

"Boy-girl investigative team. Nice idea. But I work best on my own." I look at her. "You wouldn't be trying to distract me now, so Wash can put out better drawings?"

She laughs. "Life isn't always a media war." She places her hands on my cheeks, stares into my eyes. "I like you, David. Don't you get it? I really do."

There a health club on the top floor of the Townsend Hotel. If you're coming or going from there in workout clothes, you're supposed to take a special elevator lest guests in business attire be offended by the exposure.

Pam and I head up there at 6:00 A.M. to join other lean-mean media folk into physical fitness and self-torture. Gym workouts aren't my thing, but when Pam asks me to join her, I tag along lest she take me for a wimp. The exercise room is spacious, with plate-glass windows facing the city skyline and several rows of equipment – treadmills, StairMasters, Nautilus machines – all gleaming chrome and sleek black leatherette, shiny and welcoming in the brilliant early morning light.

Pam starts on a Nautilus circuit. I mount an exercise bike. An NBC reporter, Cynthia Liu, is pedaling furiously on an adjacent machine. I give her the once-over. She's already slick with sweat. She wears black Lycra tights and a sports bra, the kind with a little porthole in back. She's a skinny girl, her spine protrudes, and her frail shoulder blades stick out. She stares straight ahead at a TV monitor set to the daybreak program on the local NBC affiliate.

News of the early morning commute: expressway jam-up due to an accident. Promise of another sweltering day: one hundred percent humidity with a projected high of ninety-one degrees. No end in sight to the Forger's losing streak; team in the cellar for the third straight week. As the attractive, youthful, blow-dried anchors slip into casual morning happy-talk, I catch myself panting, slow my pedaling, then wipe myself down with the towel hanging from my handlebars.

"Kinda out of shape, aren't you?" Cynthia Liu comments, pedaling away, still looking straight ahead.

"Excuse me?"

She glances at me. "Whatsamatta? Girlfriend wearing you out?"

Annoyed, I shake my head. "I thought you were supposed to be nice."

She smirks. Our eyes lock. Suddenly I feel like putting her down.

"Tell me," I ask, "are you bulimic?"

For a moment she holds the smirk, then her face squeezes up as if she's sucking on a lemon. She stops pedaling, shows me a hard gaze of hatred, dismounts, and stalks out of the gym.

Pam mounts the StairMaster on my other side. "What was that about?"

"Little Miss Perfect made a personal remark. I chose to respond in kind."

"Good for you, David! Now pedal up. Want an aerobic effect, you gotta work for it."

She spends the next twenty minutes sweetly putting me through my paces, enjoying her new self-assigned role as my personal trainer: "Faster, David! Faster!" "Go for the burn!" "Give me another, David. Another!" And, most sweetly of all: "Hey! Don’t' pussy out on me… please!"

At 6:30 we step into the gym elevator. She snuggles with me on the descent. Her body, warm and most, turns me on. Alas, she informs me sadly, she doesn't have time now to make love. Too much to do, a meeting with Starret and Wash, then over to the county courthouse for her early stand-up. She smooches me as the doors open, steps out of the elevator, turns to face me, and grins. The doors close, the elevator descends. Still excited, I head down to my room for a shower.

Wash and I exchange polite nods in the courtroom corridor. Inside he take seat four down from mine. Then, lest he think he's got me outgunned, I make a point of sketching furiously.

It's a good day for courtroom drawing. The prosecutor and defense counsel get into a snit, the judge becomes impatient, and soon the three are glaring at one another with anger and disgust. Meantime, defendant Foster shows the jury a beatific smile. Out of this conflict I create a stunning four-face portrait, which Harriet loves, and which, when broadcast on the early evening news, puts Wash's first-day efforts to shame.

Slam-dunk for the good guy… which is not to say that Wash won't soon snag a few baskets himself. Still I've out-psyched him his first day and can count on holding my lead a while. He'll start becoming dangerous when he gets the player's physiognomies clear. Until then I'll rule the court.

During one of the afternoon breaks, I phone Mace Bartel and ask if I can have a photocopy of the Flamingo file.

"The whole thing? There're thousands of pages."

"I'll gladly pay copying charges."

"It's not the money, David. It's the time and effort. I can't spare anyone for the job."

"I'll do the scutwork." Long pause. "I don't see myself as a rival investigator on this, Mace. After all, it's been twenty-six years."

"It's not that."

"What is it then?"

When he goes silent, I start feeling guilty."

"Listen, Mace, I wasn't a hundred percent straight with you out at The Elms the other day when you asked why I was so interested in the case."

"I figured."

"I have a very personal reason for being interested."

"Which is?"

"My father was Mrs. Fulraine's shrink."

"Well," he says, "that's very interesting. I appreciate your telling me."

"I should have told you the other day, but I didn't feel like discussing it. Dad committed suicide, and…"

"I know. One of my guys interviewed him. Couple months later I wanted to do a follow-up, but then… well, it was too late. I spoke to his secretary. She couldn't find his file on Mrs. Fulraine. For a while I wondered if maybe there was a connection. You'll find our notes on the interviews when you come over."

"You're saying-?"

"Sure, you can look at everything we got, make copies too if you like." A pause. "See, David, long as you're straight with me, I'll be straight with you."

Pam wants to visit the scene of the crime, so tonight after dinner I drive her out to Tremont Park. As we pass through Delamere, she oohs and ahs.

"Seems people here are very rich."

"The Fulraine's were." I slow as I pass their house. "It's an institution now. Old folks home or something."

"I'd like to take a look."

I tell her I'll try and set it up.

"What I don't get," she says, as we approach the motel, "is why they chose to meet out here."

"It was convenient for her. Less than ten minutes away from her house. And it was a place they weren't likely to be seen. They started meeting secretly in the amusement park. She liked the idea of their meeting in a place so scummy and low class."

"How do you know what she liked?"

"Just a guess," I lie. "When I draw, I try to get inside peoples' heads. How did the actors get from here to there? How did the fateful intersections take place?"

She asks me to describe the old Tremont Park. It's a pleasure to do so. I tell her about the sounds – hubbub, hurdy-gurdy music, swish as the toboggans went over the falls, roar of the rollercoasters, pings from the shooting gallery, raucous laughter of the oversize automatons that guarded the Fun House doors. The smells too: horses, taffy, sugared popcorn balls, cotton candy, suntan lotion, perfume on summer-heated skin.

"The Fun House was my favorite," I tell her. "It was a labyrinth filled with tricky corners, weird slanted floors, floors made of moving rollers, holes in the floor through which air sporadically shot up. The air would hiss right up your pants leg or blow up a girl's skirt. There were strange sounds and funny mirrors that made you look fat, thin, or just plain grotesque. There was one point where you turned a corner and this huge black spider came rushing at you from the dark. Everything was set up to make you scream."

"I imagine Barbara and Tom meeting there one hot summer afternoon. Stumbling through the Fun House would have aroused her. She'd grab hold of Tom's arm, squeeze his bicep, scream out in fright. Then they'd double over with laughter, clench, and kiss. It was dark as hell inside. No one would see them. Even if someone did, no one would care. Teenage couples went through there all the time. It was a rite of passage to take a girl in there, get excited, then fool around in the dark. What a thing for Barbara Fulraine – country club tennis champ, symphony box-holder, wearer of Harry Winston jewels and Saint-Laurent gowns – to be groped in the Fun House by her earnest, attractive, secret lover, so adoring of her, so stricken, so madly in her thrall. How could they resist one another after an hour spent like that? They would emerge holding hands, wondering where they could go to be alone. There was only one choice: the Flamingo Court across the road, so convenient and anonymous, with a reputation as a ‘hot sheets’ motel. She'd have reveled in the humbleness of it, the notion that no matter how privileged, highly placed in the social order, she had her needs, was flesh and blood, carnal and horny as any lubricious teenage girl finally giving in to the panted entreaties of her boyfriend."

"Whew!" Pam says. We're parked now in the Flamingo lot. She turns to me. "Was it really like that?"

"Maybe. I think so. Sure. A wild, passionate adventure. Think about it. She comes out here to make love with Tom Jessup after spending an hour or so at midday in Jack Cody's bed. She's a fastidious woman. She showers in between. Then, again ready for abandon, she drives here telling herself that no matter the elegant mask she shows the world, she's a reckless virago in pursuit of her pleasures. Consider how much fun it would be for her to feel she was leading a secret double life! And remember, too, she had the added luxury of being able to study her excitement with her new, brilliant, respectful psychoanalyst. In effect she becomes the center of her own universe. And so privileged, so very privileged… for she is always perfectly groomed, beautifully dressed, driving the finest make of car, living in a luxurious home amidst splendid things where she's waited upon by loyal servants. She's loved, admired, perhaps best of all from her point of view, wildly envied by her rivals. With all that, how could she not feel she was living at some rarefied peak level of human experience? And yet… still… she would tell her devoted analyst how devastatingly miserable she was, riven by guilt for allowing her infant daughter to be kidnapped and believing in her heart of hearts that at best she's a self-indulgent fake, at worst a fancy whore."

We sit still in the car. To break the silence, I point out the windows of room 201 where the killings took place.

"If the blinds were open," Pam observes, "someone sitting down here could see inside."

"Only at night. Anyhow, I'm sure they kept the blinds closed while they made love. Or partially closed so the shadows would stripe their bodies."

"Still, from here, the shooter could see them arrive, park, go up to the room. Then he could sit here and make his plan, wait for the right moment when no one was coming or going so he wouldn't be seen. Maybe wait till the pool area cleared, then coolly get out, walk across the courtyard, mount the stairs, smash his way into the room."

"He didn't have to smash his way in. They left the door unlocked. All he had to do was fling it open and fire."

"The gun – how did he hide it?"

"Beneath a dark raincoat."

"I thought you said it was a sweltering afternoon."

"It was, yes, but then there was a summer storm. It rained hard earlier. Would you take any notice if you saw a man coming up the stairs wearing a raincoat? You'd just give him a glance then turn away."

Pam scans the motel walls. "Everything must look different here in daylight."

"You don't notice the neon piping on the roof. The pastel colors leap out. Surfaces are bright, shadows deep. The pool area smells of chorine."

"Seems to me whoever was on duty in the office would have seen him when he came in."

"Unless the desk clerk was waiting on a client or watching a baseball game on the lobby TV."

"He must have heard the shots?"

"He thought he heard a motorcycle backfiring."

"Weren't there other witnesses?"

"Several. But they didn't see much. Just a guy in a dark raincoat with a dark hat pulled down to his eyes, rushing down the stairs, crossing the street, then jumping into a dark car and taking off."

"I think you're right about it not feeling like a jealous lover's hit," she says. "From what you tell me about Cody, he sounds like the kind who'd take on something like that himself. To vent his anger, get it out of his system. What would be the point of hiring someone else to take them down?"

"And how would killing her teach her a lesson? Beat her up, throw acid at her, gouge her face – but kill her because she's two-timing you? Doesn't make sense."

"Still his alibi sounds awfully pat."

"Unless he made a practice of lunching with judges. The guy was connected, not just to the mob but also to the local political establishment."

"So if Cody wasn't behind it, who was?"

"Other people might have wanted her dead."

"Or Jessup."

"Or both of them."

Maybe it was a mistake. The shooter mistook them for another couple."

I tell her I hadn't thought of that.

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

"We'll come back sometime and have a look."

"Not now?"

"I'd rather not, Pam. I was in there last week. Anyhow, it's getting late."

"You think I want to make love to you up there?"

"Do you?"

"I'm not that kinky!" She cuddles against me. "This is so interesting. How're you going to develop new information after so many years?"

"I probably won't. Anyway, what I find out doesn't have to be new. I just want to get it right, feel it the way it happened. Otherwise it's just an exercise."

"Feeling it – that's how you do your drawings, isn't it? Get into peoples' heads, then draw what they've seen."

On the drive back downtown, she asks me about the Zigzag Killer. She's familiar with some of the tabloid details: that the press called him that because of the zigzag knifework pattern he left on his victims' torsos. Also that he attacked men in the gay enclaves of San Francisco, and that unlike most serial killers, who murder at an increased rate of frequency, he struck only rarely and sporadically over a period of years.

"The knifework was curious. Lots of speculation about it, that it carried a cryptic meaning, that he was trying to cut lightning bolts, leaving a calling card, trying to obliterate his victims, sending the police some kind of message. None of that concerned me. My job was to draw his face. Only two people were known to have seen him – a middle-aged female resident apartment house manager, who spotted him briefly as he left her building after killing one of the tenants, and a guy who saw the killer leave a gay bar with another victim two years later. Both had worked with good police artists, yet the resulting pictures had nothing in common. In fact, they were so different they canceled each other out. Other artists were brought in to try and reconcile the descriptions. When they couldn't do it, the cops began to think at least one of their witnesses wasn't reliable."

"So then they brought in the great David Weiss."

"Who hadn't yet been deemed ‘great’."

"But who became ‘great’ when he managed to reconcile the two irreconcilable witness descriptions."

As we speed up Dawson Drive, the skyline of Calista comes into view. The city shows a strong signature at night – a cluster of variegated buildings dominated by Lindstrom's spectacular twin towers, lights on inside for the night cleaning crews, poised against the moonlit sky. The heart of the city casts a light gray glow that surrounds it like a nimbus. Calista seems almost heroic tonight, with a hard, urban beauty rarely noticeable when walking its streets during the day.

Yes, I tell her, my Zigzag Killer drawing made my name. I spent hours with the two witnesses, trying to exact details each had forgotten, acting always as if I believed everything they told me even while trying to determine whether one or the other had fantasized what each claimed to have seen.

"It had been six years since the woman saw the guy. Four for the man. The sightings were brief, yet each claimed the guy's face was clearly etched. There was just something about him, both said, that made him unforgettable – a look in his eyes, a confidence, possibly even a smirk… though neither of them ever used that word.

"My approach is different from most forensic artists. They ask questions about the shape of the suspect's face, hair, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and ears. I do it another way. I want to know how they felt when they saw him, their angle of vision, even the cast of the light. Most important, the set of his face, his expression, because for me that's what best conveys character."

"I took the male witness back to the bar where he made the sighting. We found the very bar stool where he'd sat. We got the positions right, then reenacted the scene."

"Seems he was cruising the victim, then was disconcerted when he realized the victim was interested in someone else. So he viewed this other man as a rival. Right away that told me a lot about his mindset."

"We talked the whole thing through, or rather I let him talk, because what I do best is get a witness going then listen closely to what he says. We narrowed down his viewing time. Turned out he got his only clear look when he checked the guy out in the mirror behind the bar. Then he remembered there was something unattractive about him – an asymmetry in his face. Seems the killer looked quite different in the mirror than when my witness observed him straight on."

"We were getting somewhere. We went back to his place and I started to draw. I had him sit beside me. Together we shaped the picture. Within an hour we came up with three different views."

"Next I went to work with the woman. Again we reenacted the scene. The way the cops reconstructed it, he'd just finished his kill. She got a good look at his profile for about a second and a half and from a very narrow angle of view. She'd been sitting in her apartment with the door partially open. He was sort of ‘sliding’ his way out, she said, and his face was set into a rather memorable grimace. When he realized someone was watching, he glanced her way. When he did that, she responded the way most people would – she looked away."

"At once I understood what was wrong with the other artists' drawings. They'd taken her description then tried to extrapolate a frontal view. I stayed with the profile. We worked on that, trying to get the grimace and set of the eye on the left side of his face as she'd remembered it. When we were done, I showed her the drawings I'd made with the other witness. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘That's him, that's the guy.’ And the male witness said the same thing when I showed him the drawings I made with her."

We're off Dawson now, driving on city streets. There's a loneliness to downtown Calista at this hour. The business district's deserted, and the night wind, funneled through the valley, is transformed by the spaces between buildings into whirlpools, miniature tornadoes, that lift and whirl scraps of paper and debris.

"Sot that's how you came to draw that famous triple view."

"Turned out to be my trifecta."

"I remember how when they caught him everyone was so amazed. He had the same weird lopsided face you'd drawn. When I saw live shots of him as the cops hurried him along, he wore the same gloating expression."

"The best part," I tell her, "was that my drawings led directly to his arrest. That rarely happens. He was arrested twenty-four hours after my sketches appeared on the front page of The Examiner. Soon as they were published, people recognized him and started calling in."

I pull up in front of The Townsend, turn my car over to the car valet.

"Have you thought of trying to work with the Flamingo witnesses?"

"I've thought about it. That's why I've asked to see the file. But it's been twenty-six years. I've never heard of a case where an artist worked with witnesses on something so far back."

In the lobby, Pam pauses outside the glass doors to Waldo's. "Nightcap?" she asks.

The bar's half filled. Spencer Deval is mesmerizing Cynthia Liu, my dear friend from the gym, doubtless with one of his well-worn high society sagas. Raucous laughter issues from a corner table where six cameramen trade journalists' war stories. Tony the barman stands straight in his characteristic pose wearing his best world-weary expression.

We take a pair of stools before him, order cognacs.

"You look especially pale tonight, Tony," Pam says.

"Pale as death," Tony agrees.

"What'd you think about as you stand here?"

"This ‘n’ that. Also about him."

Tony nods at the opposite wall. Pam and I turn. The eyes of Waldo Channing gaze back at us out of the portrait.

"He looks very ‘period,’" Pam says.

"Oh, he was," Tony agrees.

She's too young to have firsthand memories of columnists like Channing, but I recall the man quite well. He was a type; most big cities possessed one – a local writer celebrated because he wrote about local celebrities. Such men seemed actually to rule the societies about which they wrote. They inhabited their cities' upper crusts but were capable too of writing about the common folk. A sentimental vignette about a humble laundress might be juxtaposed with scathing notes about a nouveau riche couple on the make. Each strove to glamorize his town, waxing poetic about it even when the place was ugly. They were social arbiters, insiders, walkers, party animals, name-droppers, star-fuckers who would gush like schoolgirls over visiting celebrity singers, actors, entertainers. But if the celebrity wouldn't kiss butt, they'd get him/her really good – belittle her singing, mock his performance in order to proclaim that even us ‘rubes out here in the sticks’ knew the difference between ‘class and trash’. And if you inhabited one of the great cities of the American plain, you dared not cross the one who ruled your town lest you earn his enmity and ever after suffer the poisonous bite of his pen.

When Tony leaves us to fill drink orders, I tell Pam I didn't like Waldo Channing much.

"He was small time and a snob. I also think he was anti-Semitic. He wrote some mean things about my dad before and after my parents broke up."

"Anti-Semitic stuff?"

"He couldn't get away with that, though genteel anti-Semitism was an unspoken given in his set. No, he ran a gratuitous item about ‘a well-known local shrink’ whose marriage was ‘on the rocks.’ And just weeks before the killings, he ran a blind item implying my dad was having a closer than professional relationship with Barbara Fulraine. He didn't name names, didn't have to. If you were in the know, it was obvious whom he meant. I wish he were still alive. I'd ask him about that item, whether Barbara planted it. They were great pals. I'm sure he knew all about her affairs."

"But why would she plant something mean about your dad?"

"Maybe to divert attention from her affair with Jessup. Jack Cody wasn't stupid. He had to know something was going on."

"Why didn't she just break it off with Cody?"

"She was afraid of him. At least that's what she said."

"Seems to me that if he was that dangerous, it was riskier to have an affair behind his back than to break it off."

"He had some kind of hold over her."

"The kidnapped child? If she was so smart why didn't she see through that game?"

"Maybe it wasn't a game. Maybe he was on to something. If the au pair did turn the kid over to her pornographer friends, Cody had the resources to track those people down."

"But surely the kid was dead."

"Yes, according to the odds. But a grieving mom will hold on to even the slenderest of threads."

Since I revealed myself to her two nights ago, I've been itching to spill the rest – my strange ambiguous intersection with the Fulraine kidnapping that filled me with guilt through my youth.

Back up in her room, Pam turns to me: "If you're obsessed with the Flamingo case, David – and I believe you are – there must be more to it than that you knew the teacher, went to school with the Fulraine kids, caught occasional glimpses of their mom. You told me about your dad's connection, but I still have a feeling that you left something out."

She's shrewd, I'll give her that. She's also gotten to me in a way I hadn't expected. But then, I wonder, what did I expect? A simple location affair? That we'd each serve the other as bedmate without complications for the duration of the trial?

That kind of shallow relationship usually suits my nature. But I'm really starting to like this girl. She turned out to be a lot more than a routinely ambitious reporter. I view her now as both generous and compassionate.

"Come on, David. Let me help you."

"I told you, I do better on my own."

"I don't mean as co-investigator. I mean as your friend. Talk to me. You'll feel better if you do."

Which is what I myself often tell eyewitnesses when they start to close down on me during an interview. But confession comes hard for me. Tonight, I decide, will not be the night.