The Dream of the Broken Horses (4 page)

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 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 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 kinda 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 from 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, lay 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.

W
aldo'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 suspects 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 has 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 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.

A
n hour later, showered and refreshed, we step out the front door of the Townsend, stroll along the night streets of downtown to 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 river town charm and the play of light can be spectacular. There's ethnic 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 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 snakes 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 coal 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."

T
he restaurant we choose is a noisy yuppie hangout, filled with affluent young people talking and laughing—stockbrokers, attorneys, ad execs. As we walk in, a few people, recognizing Pam, follow us 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 says. "You bring out the nice girl in me, I guess."

She asks me about past relationships. I describe my brief failed marriage, aimless dalliances, and 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 turn away. I tell her about my pair of big World War II-vintage tripod-mounted binoculars installed beside my drafting table in the bay that 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. Then, 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.

A
man and a woman are making love. . .

The phrase haunts me, seems to follow me around like a shadow. I want to put faces to these people. All I'm drawing now are their heads lost in shadow. I want to see them clearly, hear their voices, the rhythm of their breathing, the thumping of their hearts. Most of all, I want to see their
eyes.

This morning I ask Townsend Hotel management to move me to a lower floor. The desk is happy to oblige as most guests prefer the upper floors with views. But I want the sound of the streets and the strange play of light that comes from passing traffic in the night.