The Dream of the Broken Horses (12 page)

D
uring 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."

P
am 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 Fulraines 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 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 roller coasters, 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 window 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 chlorine."

"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 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 with 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."

O
n 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," I tell her. "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 extract 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 witness ever used that word.

"My approach is different from most forensic artists. They ask questions about the shape of a 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.