Dream of The Broken Horses, The Page 8

"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."