The Dream of the Broken Horses (35 page)

He walks me out to my car.

"Do you really like living like this?" I ask.

"It's not so bad. I'm comfortable. I wish I had a girlfriend sometimes."

"Why don't you clean this place up, get rid of the dog crap, lay off the drugs, and get yourself in shape?"

"Think that would help?"

"I think you'd feel better."

"I'd probably look a little better but I doubt I'd feel better." He speaks sadly now. "You see, David, the crappy way I live—it pretty much sums up the way I feel."

I
fret about that diary on my way back to the hotel, wondering if there's some way I can convince Robin to let me read it. Then, when I walk into my room, other thoughts intrude.

The moment I enter I sense something wrong, that someone's been inside and my things have been touched.

I make a quick inventory. My drawings posted on the walls are as I left them, but those piled on my desk are ordered differently. My drawing of Dad in his car
surveilling
the Flamingo, previously at the bottom of the pile, is now on top.

I check the closet to see if my briefcase, containing Dad's paper, is still in the bottom of my garment bag. It is, and, thankfully, still locked.

I walk back to the center of the room, then turn slowly, looking carefully at everything. Beside the disorder of my drawings, what makes me think someone beside the room maid has been in here? It's the air, I decide. There's a scent. Trying to define it, I come up with the aroma of stale cigarette smoke permeating the fabric of a cheap suit.

I call down to the desk. Five minutes later, two guys from hotel security show up. Soon all three of us are sniffing around the room. To me the scent's obvious, but the security guys aren't sure. They agree there's a trace of something and that's odd since my room is on a nonsmoking floor. Then they point out that sometimes smoke from other units gets circulated to nonsmoking areas through the ventilation ducts.

They examine my door lock, declare it hasn't been touched, but change the code anyway and issue me a new key card. Finally, apologizing for any inconvenience, they advise me to store my valuables in the hotel safe downstairs.

After they leave, I open the room
minibar
, pull out a beer, sit in my easy chair, and sip.

Yes, Robin ambushed me, but this isn't his work, which can only mean one thing: Mr. Potato Head, the guy who was asking about me at the Flamingo, must be working for someone else.

S
unday morning: I had hoped to sleep in, but so many things nag at me, so many loose ends. I wake up at 6:00 A.M., and, unable to get back to sleep, do the unthinkable and go up to the rooftop gym.

There's no one around. At this hour all my jock media colleagues are in their or their lovers' beds below sleeping off another drunken Saturday night.

I mount the Stairmaster, work out hard for twenty minutes, until, panting and sweating, I'm too exhausted to go on. Then I go back down to my room, shower, order breakfast, and look over the Sunday papers, which the hotel has kindly left by my door.

Finally, nurtured, rested and well informed, I take up Dad's old agenda book, lay it on my hotel room desk, and see what I can make of the entries.

It's one of those one-day-per-page leatherette bound date-books with a separate line for each hour increment. In it he lists all his appointments with patients: Mr. L; Dr. K; Mrs. M; Mrs. F; etc.

Mrs. F, I note, was scheduled, starting in late April, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:30 A.M. After the Flamingo killings on August 27, Dad drew a line through her name whenever it appeared, this being his way to designate cancelled appointments. In fact, I discover, he had scheduled her at her usual hour through to the end of the year.

There are other appointments noted: medical conferences; Psychoanalytic Institute meetings; lunches with colleagues including a regular Tuesday lunch with Izzy Mendoza; various social engagements including the April 17 Parents Day at Hayes where he encountered Mrs. F; the April 22 Parents Day at Ashley-Burnett, attended by my sister; and June 6, the day of my graduation from Hayes Lower School.

Yes, it's all fairly straightforward. This is a doctor's appointment date-book, not a personal diary. Still, looking at the pages pertaining to the summer months, I find several intriguing entries:

On July 11 ,
 
a Friday, he writes:
Difficult session. Headache. Cancel tennis!?

On July 14, the following Monday:
Very difficult day. No sympathy from I.
(which initial, I reason, must stand for Izzy).

On Friday, July 18:
Another tough week. See L about headaches!?

On Thursday, July 24:
Call MHHC re show/G/?

And on Sunday, July 27, one of very few weekend notations in the book:
Attend show MHHC 2-5.

Monday, July 28:
Very difficult session with F. Worried. Consulted I at 6:00
P.M.

Friday, August 1: Idea for new approach. Consulted I. Negative!

Monday, August 4: Implemented idea. Backfired. Will try again.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, August 14, all his regular sessions with clients are marked cancelled. A week later on August 20, he does the same thing, again freeing up his afternoon. At the end of the day, there's a cryptic notation:
F/F

On August 27, the day of the Flamingo killings, he sees all his regular Wednesday patients including Mrs. F at 10:30 A.M. At the end of the day, he notes the calamity with a single word:
FLAMINGO!

I sit back, reflect. The killings, I know, took place between at 3:40 and 3:50 that afternoon. Dad had successive appointments with patients at 2:30, 3:30, and 4:30 P.M. If he kept those appointments, he couldn't possibly have been at the Flamingo at the time Kate Evans thinks she saw him there.

Did he keep them? No way to know; his billing records were thrown out years ago. And though I have never really believed Dad was the Flamingo shooter, who
did
Kate see that afternoon?

I try to decipher his other entries. I'm pretty sure I know what he meant by MHHC: the Maple Hills Hunt Club, which, mid-summer every year, held a Sunday afternoon horse show. But why would Dad, who didn't much care for horses, be interested in attending such an event? Because it was at a dance there that Barbara Lyman met Andrew Fulraine? Perhaps . . . but I think his notation
Call MHHC re show/G/?
gives the reason. G was the letter Dad used in his paper to designate Barbara's old instructor in dressage, the man who asked her to slap him and with whom she had her first experience of oral sex. But why would Dad want to see G? To validate Barbara's story? Or, God help him, did he view G as a rival, and like many a man pining after his beloved, feel a need to see his imagined rival in the flesh?

August 1, it's clear, was the day he decided to "enter into" Barbara's seduction fantasy. He consulted Izzy about it, Izzy counseled against it, but the following Monday, August 4, he went ahead. It seemed to backfire when Barbara masturbated during the session, but despite that setback, he resolved not to give up his plan.

The two Wednesday afternoons he cancelled all his appointments suggest that on one or both days he followed Barbara to the Flamingo. But why
twice?
One reconnaissance would have been sufficient to verify her affair with Jessup. Why go back again? Could he have been so obsessed he took to stalking her? Or was there some other reason? Could
F/F
stand for Fulraine/Flamingo? If so, did she lure him there or did they meet there by prearrangement? Did they actually go to bed together there, and if so, was that the day Kate Evans saw him, an encounter Kate later mistakenly transposed to the day of the killings?

1
0: 00 A.M. My room phone rings. It's Mace.

"Good news. I found Jessup's neighbor in the rooming house. Her name back then was Shoshana Bach. Now she's
Dr.
Shoshana Bach, Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Women's Studies Department at Calista State."

"You're sure she's the girl?"

"Positive. She was the only young woman living in the house at the time. I checked with the university. Her campus office hours are Wednesday and Friday, 3 to 5 P.M. I'm going to drop in on her Wednesday afternoon. Thought you'd like to tag along."

"I'd love to."

"I'll pick you up at the courthouse quarter of three."

"Thanks, Mace. I appreciate your including me in this."

"My pleasure." He pauses. "So who was it jumped you the other night?"

"Robin Fulraine and a couple of his buddies."

"Barbara's son—Jesus!"

"Yeah, he and his brother heard I was sniffing around, they didn't like it, so they tried to scare me off."

"Going to bring charges?"

"No. I confronted them and they confessed. At least Robin did. Apologized, too. There's still a core of decency there."

"I think you're the decent one to let them off," he says.

M
iddle of the afternoon the phone rings again. It's the long-awaited call from Pam.

"I'm in my car on Route 684," she says. "Just left Susan Pettibone. She really opened up. We talked four hours straight. It was like she'd been wanting to talk about all this for years."

She tells me Susan has vivid memories of her phone conversations with Tom Jessup those final weeks, far more detailed than the summary I found in the police file.

"I got the impression," Pam tells me, "that in some way Tom was the love of her life. He was the first man she ever lived with, her first real long-term lover. She's led a full life since, been married, divorced, raised kids, and developed a high-powered career, but I think in her mind Tom's almost mythical, the handsome long-lost lover of her youth.

"In their long phone conversations those last weeks, Tom told her he'd become involved with an older woman who was beautiful, wealthy, and socially prominent. He told Susan he was crazy about her, but that she had problems, was involving him in them, and this involvement had begun to frighten him.

"He wasn't specific, but Susan got the impression that the deeper his involvement, the more frightened he became. By the time he called her and virtually begged her to come out to Calista, she thought he sounded desperate.

"Tom also told her about the girl in his rooming house. When I asked if Tom ever characterized her as a stalker, Susan said no, Tom found her intelligent and sweet. He was only troubled because she made it clear she was attracted to him and he wasn't attracted to her at all. In fact, Susan said, Tom considered this girl and Hilda Tucker his only real friends in Calista, at least until he fell in love with Barbara Fulraine."

"What about that last conversation when she called Tom and he thought she was someone else?"

"That was the most interesting part. You told me that in the police report Tom's quoted as saying: 'Hi, did you really do it?' Susan says that's not right, that Tom said, 'Did he do it yet?' When I asked her how she could be positive after twenty-six years, she said she's never forgotten his words, that she can still hear them in her head as if he spoke them yesterday."

"There's definitely a difference between 'Did
you
do it?' and 'Did
he
do it?'

"Right! And later in that same conversation, Susan asked Tom what he'd meant. She says he mumbled something about 'putting an end to some really bad business,' and that he was expecting a call that night that would tell him it was 'finally done with.' Then he said something like 'I think there's going to be a fire.'"

"Fire?
"

"Yeah."

"I don't get it. Why didn't she tell any of this to the cops?"

"I asked her that. She said that at the time she didn't think it was connected to the murders. Also that the detective who called her told her their interview was pro forma, that the Sheriff's Department already knew who'd ordered the killings, that it was Barbara's gangster boyfriend and that very soon he'd be arrested."

"You did great," I tell her. "How're things going with the job offers?"

"I'm sticking around tomorrow morning for the finish. I'll fly into Calista tomorrow afternoon. Let's meet in Waldo's at seven, hoist a margarita or two, celebrate my deal however it turns out."

D
ownstairs, discovering it's raining, I step into Waldo's for a quick lunch and a beer. While I'm eating, I ask Tony if he knew that Waldo Channing may have done a little blackmailing on the side.

"There're rumors about everyone," Tony says. "It's a regular wasp's nest, this town. But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. C had more class in his little finger than the whole bunch of 'em put together."

"And Spencer Deval—does he have class?"

"Now that's another story," Tony says. "Let's put it this way—he'd like you to
think
he does. He and Mr. C were always afraid someone would find out they met." Tony smiles, brings his mouth close to my ear. "Spence used to work the
DaVinci
strip."