The Dream of the Broken Horses (53 page)

Tom Jessup, possessed by passion and lust, daydreaming of his beloved Barbara when he should have been fairly refereeing my boxing match with Mark in the Hayes School gym;

Scuzzy
Walter Maritz mercilessly beaten in a garage by Cody's henchmen while Cody watches from the shadows, a cruel half smile playing on his lip;

Me sitting hunched over my bedroom desk drawing cartoon after cartoon of happy smiling families, trying to blot out the shouting coming from down the hall as my mother accuses my father of having loved my classmate's murdered mom;

Tom Jessup sitting with the
Steadmans
in the basement recreation room of their house on Thistle Ridge Road, gazing at photos of little blond girls in their casting book, wondering how his life has come to such a turn;

On and on, encounter after encounter, scene after scene, all encapsulated in images . . . until, at last, I reach the double ending, the twin finale of suffering and blood:

A man and woman in a motel room have finished making love.
Now they lie naked on the bed, bodies striped by light cast by venetian blinds, the woman explaining to the man why they cannot meet again, the man listening, feeling a crushing in his chest. . .

A
middle-aged man stares out the open window of his office as late afternoon snow drifts slowly by.
He thinks about a woman he has loved who now is dead, and then how he can barely bring himself to return to the empty house where he and his family once lived in happiness. As the snow settles upon the ledge outside, clings to the bare limbs of trees, carpets the tops of cars below, he considers how he has brought all this grief and sadness upon himself. ...

A
telephone rings in the motel room.
The young man hands the receiver to the woman, watches as she listens, speaks angry words, then hangs up. She points up at the ceiling above the bed.
They put a camera up there!
Her face is panicked.
They have pictures of us! Oh, God! As
he moves toward her, there's a sound outside. Both turn as the room door bursts open. A thin man wearing a dark hat and coat is silhouetted against the blazing light. He raises a gun. Feeling his intent, the lovers cling to one another while squirming back against the headboard . . .

The man steps out the open office window onto a narrow parapet. It's dark outside. The cold night wind batters his face. The falling snow is so thick he cannot see the ground. He shivers in the cold, feeling powerless to resist the mysterious force he has studied professionally for many years, the force he knows as the death instinct,
Thanatos
. Balancing on the ledge like a gymnast on a balance bar, he pauses, spreads his arms, then swan dives ever so gently into the murk of softly falling flakes. . . .

The woman, seeing the gunman's finger tighten on the trigger, understands she is going to die. With that her consciousness blurs and she retreats into a dream state. She barely hears the first explosion, so deep has she withdrawn within herself. When the second shot comes, riddling her body, causing it to spasm against her lover, she involuntarily rises and falls, twists and turns, as the hot steel balls penetrate her flesh. Then this woman, who has loved so intensely and unwisely, imagines herself astride a horse, riding, riding . . . and then she feels the horse breaking, breaking, breaking beneath her, until she and the horse are all broken-broken-broken into pieces strewn like shards upon the dark-shadowed ground. . . .

The man, soaring downward through the mist of perfect hexagons of snow, feels close to the woman in her death throes. He smiles slightly as he falls, imagining himself galloping beside her. He knows this sweet sensation must soon end . . . yet it seems to go on and on. And then he feels himself start to break, and he thinks: The horses broke . . . and broke . . and broke . . . and then he knows that he too is broken . . . that the broken horses mean death . . . and then he feels himself falling into a dreamless state as he lies broken and dying in the soft, soft, cold Calista snow. . . .

T
he drama is over. I put my pencil down. The planchette effect deserts my hand.

It's dawn. My bay window faces east, and the sun, like a great airship catching fire, rises out of the dark foothills of the sierra, projecting scarlet slashes across the morning sky.

A
n hour later, my fax machine spews out a letter. It's from the FBI field office in San Jose. A twelve-year-old girl is missing, last seen hiking in the hills above Los Gatos. A man in a pickup was observed cruising the area. The witness, another child, seems shaky. Will I come down, interview her, try to produce a sketch of the driver?

I'll come right away, of course . . . prepared, too, to believe everything the "shaky" witness has to tell me.

7
:00 AM. Driving south, I pick up my cell phone, punch out a number in L.A.

Pam answers, voice groggy.

I know it's early. Sorry I woke you, I tell her. To say I've been missing you is why I called. You said it yourself— that I wouldn't know how much till I got back home. Well, this is my eighth day back, and now I think I know.

C
alista, of course, does not exist . . . though a side of me wishes it did. It's an amalgam of various Midwestern rust-belt towns of my acquaintance: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, with bits of Youngstown, Akron, Buffalo, and Erie sprinkled in. All these towns have wonderful cultural institutions, and most, after decades of decline, have made strong comebacks in recent years. In a sense Calista (state not specified) is my best fantasy Midwestern "Athenian" metropolis—with a terrific mahogany-paneled hotel bar ("Waldo's") presided over by a great media-savvy, fund-of-information barman ("Tony"), which, if it existed, would definitely be my hangout.

The fictional gambling club, The Elms, does not exist, but the holdup described in the novel is roughly based on the still-unsolved 1947 holdup of the Mounds Club in Lake County, Ohio, as described to me by relatives present that unforgettable night.

Finally, a word about society murders. Just as there is no Calista, there were no Flamingo Court killings, but in several of the real cities mentioned above there were homicides involving members of the "upper crust" that became great local scandals. I have tried to make David Weiss's and Mace
Bartel's
obsession with the fictional double love-nest murder of Tom Jessup and Barbara Fulraine a distillation of the real obsessions of local cops, journalists, members of the victims' social set, and, especially, of kids whose playmates' parents were involved in these awful crimes.

W
ith special thanks to my editor, George Lucas, and to the late Linda Grey for superb editorial advice.

"THE DREAM OF THE BROKEN HORSES"

Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER

Q. How did you come to write
The Dream of the Broken Horses
?

A. I'd been thinking about this story a long time, at least fifteen years. My starting point was always a Parents Day meeting at a posh private country day school for boys between an impoverished teacher and a wealthy mother of one of his students. They would have an affair, and then be murdered together in a shabby motel across the street from a honky-tonk amusement park. It took me a long time to find a way of framing that material. When finally I set my mind to it, the novel quickly came together.

Q. You give the impression that this book is very personal to you.

A. It is. But it's important for me to distinguish between real events in my own life and the stories I write. The job of fiction writer, seems to me, is to draw upon real emotions while depicting fictitious scenes.

Q. Nevertheless, you were brought up in Cleveland, and attended a private day school there. Is Calista, the imaginary Midwestern urban setting of your novel, actually Cleveland in disguise?

A. There are certainly elements of Cleveland in Calista, and elements of my old school in the fictional Hayes School in the book. There was a famous Cleveland amusement park called Euclid Beach. Etc.
 
But I made a decision early on not to get locked into a real place. I didn't want to restrict myself to the literal details of Cleveland, and to receive letters post publication that I had a street name wrong or the street didn't actually run in such-a-such direction. This decision was liberating in that it freed me to fictionalize far more than just a few details. It allowed me to create something entirely new that didn't exist. I made Calista into a river town, much like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, when, in fact, Cleveland in very much a city of the Great Lakes. I was able to turn the school into a rather nasty place, while, in fact, the school I attended,
Hawken
School,
 
was actually quite fine. But I won't deny that there're a lot of very personal things in the book.

Q. Can you give an example?

A. Barbara Fulraine's diary would be one. As a kid I was quite the snoop; maybe that's why I specialize in writing mysteries. Anyway, one day when I was around twelve I was snooping around in my mother's private papers, and I came across a pocket notebook secured with a rubber band. From the way it was hidden away, I understood that it was important to her, and, moreover, secret. Of course I tried to read it. It turned out to be a diary she kept while undergoing a classic Freudian psychoanalysis. The names of people were coded with initials and much of the material was pretty intimate. The diary was painful to read, so I put it back where I found it. Then one day when I was home from college, I looked for it again, and it as gone. I've always wondered what all her cryptic entries were about . . .and that came to be the origin of the entries from Barbara Fulraine's totally fictional psychoanalytic diary that appears in the book.

Q. What about the unfinished case study by Barbara's psychoanalyst, also in the book?

A. That's pure fiction, but the methodology I followed was Freud's. The shrink character, Dr. Thomas Rubin, father of the protagonist and narrator, David Weiss, becomes pathologically involved with Barbara, his patient. He tries to write up her case in the classic manner exemplified by Freud in his famous
The Case of the Wolf Man
. But he becomes lost in the maze of her case and his feelings about her, and his craziness shows in his footnotes. By the way, I've always been intrigued by the kind of character I think of as "the troubled shrink" and by the psychopathology that often creeps into psychotherapist-patient relationships.

Q. There's a fairly provocative photograph on the cover of the original hardcover edition of your novel. Can you tell us anything about it?

A. When I was still thinking through the story, before I actually started writing, I came upon that photo in a book about a photography studio in Vienna between the World Wars. I found it fascinating, very kinky too, and wondered how I could get Barbara Fulraine to assume that same highly provocative pose…thus the sections of the novel dealing with the photographer, Max Rakoubian. Later, when we were discussing jacket art, I suggested adapting this photograph. In a sense, you see, the book is very much a "portrait of a lady." In fact, if I were to add a subtitle, "A Portrait of a lady" is what it would be.

Q. David Weiss, your sleuth….

A. Excuse me, please don't use that word. To paraphrase Hermann G
ö
ring, a thoroughly awful man, "When I hear the word 'sleuth' I want to reach for my revolver."

Q. Then let's say your protagonist, David Weiss?

A. Much better…thanks!

Q.
 
David is obsessed with the twenty-six year old double murder of his French teacher and Barbara Fulraine, the mother of one of his classmates with whom he never got long. It turns out his father was Mrs. Fulraine's troubled shrink. So in a sense isn't David trying to complete his father's unfinished case?

A. That's exactly what he's trying to do, but in a totally different way. His dad wanted to decode Barbara's recurring erotic nightmare, which she called "the dream of the broken horses." David, on the other hand, wants to find out who killed the lovers and why, and, as an exemplary forensic artist, he has the skills with which to do that. He takes a courtroom illustrator job as an excuse to return to his hometown, Calista, and then spends most of his time delving into the old unsolved case. That was the structure I spent so many years trying to develop. As mentioned, once I had that figured out, the novel practically wrote itself.

Q. Which raises a question: why do you write murder stories?

A. I really can't think of anything more appropriate for me to do as a writer. Crime stories perfectly fit the times, not just because we live in a fairly murderous era, but because these kinds of stories often tell us important truths about ourselves. Crime stories, by their very nature, are complete, constructed as they are of beginnings, middles and ends. For that reason I think they not only entertain, but, by imposing order upon chaotic events, they can also help us make some sense out of our chaotic times and lives.