I tell him, Sure, anything for the cause...
I'm trying to relax, thinking about what I've set up — tomorrow evening questioning ‘Ma'am’; Sunday evening questioning Jürgen while drawing his naked girlfriend sprawled on her bed — when my thoughts turn to Robin Fulraine. I'm about to call him, when my phone rings. It's Pam, excited. Thins are going gangbusters for her in New York.
"Two networks want me. The money being offered is huge! Meantime CNN's upping their offer. My agent says Monday'll be The Day."
She tells me she could fly back to Calista tonight, but she's decided to sweat things out in New York.
"If I'm going to leave CNN, they'll keep me off the air till my contract runs out. The idea being, ‘If she's going to work for a rival network, why give her more exposure?’"
When she gets around to asking how things are going with me, I tell her I've located Susan Pettibone in Connecticut.
"Would you be willing to interview her?" I ask. "You're barely an hour now from where she lives."
Pam goes for it. I fill her in, tell her about Susan's report of what Tom said when, awakened by her call, he thought for a moment that she was Barbara.
"According to Susan he said: ‘God! Did you really do it? or ‘Did he really do it?’ The cop who questioned her didn't follow up. Maybe there's something else she'd have remembered if he'd pushed. Also what hints Tom might have given her when he asked her to come out to Calista. Also whether he ever mentioned the girl who lived next door in the roominghouse."
"Gee, David, how is she going to remember any of that?"
"People often remember their last conversation with someone who died."
"If she remembers, I'll get it out of her," Pam promises.
* * * * *
I set up a Saturday afternoon portrait session with Robin. He seems pleased by the prospect.
"I've always wanted to be drawn by a real artist," he says. "Also it'll give us a chance to talk."
Relieved that he's willing to see me again, I go back down to Waldo's to consider the postures I'll be assuming over the next several days:
The Respectful Supplicant with Chip's mother.
The Empathetic Portraitist-Therapist with Robin.
The Master Draftsman-Interrogator with Jürgen.
So many roles, subterfuges, hidden agendas. Will I be able to stage-manage these performances, keep them straight? Most important, will I be able to achieve my goal... and do I even know what my goal is? Solve the Flamingo killings? Absolve Dad? Discover what it was that tore my family apart? Or is it something deeper, such as understanding the strange woman at the center of the web of conflicting motives and warring loyalties, and, by doing so, perhaps come to better understand myself?
* * * * *
Waldo's is humming tonight. Every table filled. I find a stool at the bar, nod to Tony, my signal I'd like a margarita, then whip out my sketchpad and start making studies for Sylvie's book.
I notice Deval observing me, then turning back to his tablemates, probably to deliver a clever putdown at my expense. I consider trying to make things up with him, then reject the idea. Whatever damage he can do to me has doubtless already been inflicted. Instead I start a caricature of him as Grand Pontificator and Buffoon.
In this respect my pencil has always served me well, sometimes gotten me into trouble, too. It was a caricature, after all, that earned me the enmity of Mark Fulraine... and many others since. Call it my equalizer, for a clever drawing can cut most anyone down to size. Others may brawl with their fists or, like the Flamingo shooter, settle accounts with a gun. I look across the room at the portrait of Waldo Channing. He jousted with his typewriter and cruel wit. The media folks now drinking and laughing in the bar wage war with their dispatches. And I, like artists through history, going back to the days when men first drew with ends of burnt sticks upon the interior walls of caves, know that with a line here, a line there, I can puncture any man's pomposity, wither any man's ego with my scorn.
12
Friday, 5:00 p.m.
The Rathskeller's humming with end-of-the-work-week bliss. Business types sip martinis, working stiffs guzzle beer, and the waitresses in their dirndls pirouette from booth to booth blithely balancing refills on their trays.
Chip looks at me, raises his mug, licks head foam off his brew.
"I brought along Dad's fessé proof book," he says, handing it across the table. It's a thick, heavy, black leatherette album with the words Studio Fessé embossed diagonally in silver across its front.
I turn the cover. The first picture shows a handsome woman, imperious in manner, dressed in tight-fitting black leather bustier, sitting on a richly carved wooden chair flexing a riding crop. From the way she presents herself, one would think she was seated on a throne. The shooting angle's low, as if the photo were taken from the level of her knees. She's stout, her features are strong, and her expression's filled with disdain.
"That's Ma," Chip says.
I flip through the pages, transparent envelopes, each containing an 8x10 proof sheet of a woman in a dominant pose. There are quite a few of Chip's mom, clearly Max Rakoubian's favorite subject, but there are also other women wearing boots or shoes with exaggerated high heels. Some look silly, others stilted as if the required poses make them uncomfortable. But there are several in which the subjects appear to relish their roles.
About two-thirds of the way through, I find the sequence on Barbara Fulraine. One proof sheet is identical to my photo, but there are others, not so perfect, including several in which Barbara appears greatly amused.
No flexed riding crops in these pictures. Rather Barbara grins at Max's lens in the manner of an actress breaking up after failing to deliver an absurdly serious line.
This is a different Barbara from the woman I've been imagining, far different from the Barbara I read about in Dad's paper. This is Barbara enjoying herself, Barbara having fun.
"I'm trying to imagine their photo session, Chip — what it was like."
Chip smiles. "I'm sure Dad was pleased. His pictures of Mrs. Fulraine were the most elegantly photographed in the series."
I know what he means, but of course it's not the elegance of Max's artistry that interests me, it's the spirit of his sitter, the enigma of her many moods.
* * * * *
Millfield. A particularly nondescript suburb west of the city, doesn't seem like a place a dominatrix would choose for her retirement. When Chip turns down a curving street called Tidy Lane, rounds a circle at its end, and stops in front of an ordinary ranch house with a basketball hoop attached to the garage, I wonder if he's putting me on. I'm not sure what I've been expecting — urban warehouse district loft, dark apartment in seedy neighborhood — but surely not an ordinary split-level on a middle-class suburban cul-de-sac.
From the front hall, Chip calls upstairs: "Me, Ma! I'm home."
"You brought the young man?" a deep, cigarettes-and-whiskey voice calls back down.
"He's with me, Ma."
A woman in a wheelchair appears in dim light at the top of the stairs, swings herself into a staircase chair elevator, flicks a switch, and the device begins a slow descent.
As she floats down into view, I recognize the woman depicted throughout Max's Fessé album. She looks a good twenty years older now, makeup thick, lipstick heavily applied, hair tied a too-vibrant red. But what's most striking about her is the ruination of her face: a fallen eyebrow on the right, a drooping lower eyelid on the left, creating a disconcerting lopsidedness that, along with deep furrows in her brow, tells me I'm facing a person suffering from severe arthritic pain.
"So this is the young man interested in Max?" she says, looking me up and down."
"His name's David, Ma."
She squints at me. "Hello, David."
"Hello, Ma'am."
She smiles. "Polite too! I like that in a young man! Wheel me into the parlor, Chip, fetch us drinks, then go about your chores."
Chip winks at me, lifts her i
nto a second wheelchair, then wheels her, me trailing, into a front room that amazes me even more than the conventional exterior of the house.
The little room has been done up with great style in ever-so-fancy reproduction Louis Seize — tapestry upholstered gilded chairs and couch, mirrors in gilded frames, faux Aubsson carpet, even a gilded reproduction bombeé commode. Such nouveau riche élégance would be laughable, especially in a little tract house like this, but Ma'am so clearly revels in the theatricality of the room that she brings it off as a kind of ironic statement about her former profession.
"So you want to know about Max?" she asks, after Chip, serving us cocktails, retreats into the kitchen to perform his duties. "He was a gent, fine companion, good father. I take it Chip's filled you in on my lifestyle?"
I nod.
"There wasn't anything Max wouldn't do for me, nothing I wouldn't ask him to if I had a mind. He'd clean my garage on hands and knees if I wanted him to. But I don't take advantage of people's kinks, never have. His devotion was enough."
As she continues in this vein, extolling Max for his support and loyal service, I study her face and also the room, committing both to memory. I want later to draw this woman in all her spectacular peculiarity, and though I would love to begin such a drawing now, I'm afraid to broach the idea lest she start posing for me the way she did for Max. For it's not the dominatrix in her that interests me, it's the wounded look of one who once inflicted pain and upon whom now pain has circled back.
"‘Bust-in guy!’ What a hoot!" As the mirth bubbles out of her, I begin to understand her attractiveness. There's a vibrancy in her gestures, an aliveness that shows itself even now that she's crippled and old.
"Max Rakoubian never busted in anywhere. He was much too shy and meek. Which isn't to say he didn't take naughty pictures to hold over people's heads. But he would never bust in, especially not on lovers. He got his candids the old-fashioned way — by drilling holes in walls. H head a bunch of little spy cameras and he build equipment so he could operate them by remote. That's how he got the pictures he took for Walt Maritz. And for all the work he did for Walt and Waldo Channing, he never received more than his day rate. They're the ones who cleaned up on it. Max just did it for the challenge."
I'm having trouble believing what she's just said. "Waldo Channing hired Max to sneak pictures?"
Ma'am laughs. "Waldo and Walt had a neat racket going. Two peas in a pod. Not many knew about that business. They were so different, Waldo so high and mighty, Walt so sleazy and low. They could barely stand one another, but, as they say, ‘beezeness eze beezeness.’ Max was just the go-between. Such was his lot. Some folks are destined to get rich, others just to work and sweat and plow the fields..."
There's something odd about the way she speaks, a strange combination of fancy language and down-and-dirty whore talk. Listening to her, my impressions of several of the players begins rapidly to change: Waldo, whom I've hitherto regarded as a snob gossip columnist, is now revealed to be a blackmailer in league with scummy Walter Maritz; and Max Rakoubian, whom I've been thinking of as guy who kicked in doors, is now revealed as a photographer-sneak poking little spy-camera lenses through tiny holes drilled into bedroom walls.
"Max never cared much for Walt, but he did odd jobs for him. As for Waldo, Max was in awe of the guy. Waldo would throw him a bone from time to time, recommend Max to cover a society wedding or introduce him to one of his rich women friends who needed a portrait done. It was Waldo, by the way, who introduced him to the one you're interested in — everyone's favorite murder victim, Barbara Fulraine.
"Max, sad to say, was taken in by the bitch. Chip tells me you have his portrait of her, the one of her flaunting her titties. Pretty, I admit, but nothing to get that excited about. Still, according to Max, she was a natural dominant. I'm sure he jerked off over her picture. Men are such fools! Except my sons, I brought them up to respect women. Still they're boys, so heaven knows what they do behind my back..."
She's tiring now. Perhaps all this passionate discourse has worn her out.
"Chip says you're interested in those old murders. Wish I could help you, but I can't. Max knew a secret about them, something he wouldn't tell me no matter how many times I asked. I could have tortured it out of him, but I never did stuff like that. It was just a game, you see, our mistress-slave routines. If there was something Max didn't want to share, fine, it stayed outside our game. I always respected boundaries. Without them SM's just assault. Max and I had fun. That's what I miss now, all the fun we used to have..."
Just as she goes silent, Chip reappears. I have a feeling he's been listening through the kitchen door.
"Time for David to go now, Ma. Time for you to rest."
He tenderly extends her legs so she can lie full length on the couch.
"In half an hour, I'll bring you dinner. Lamb chop, salad, baked potato."
"You're a good boy, Chip," she says, closing her eyes. Then to me: "Good-bye young man. I've enjoyed our chat. Come again if you want to hear more, though I doubt I've got more to tell..."
* * * * *
Saturday
3:00 p.m.
I pull up in front of Robin Fulraine's house in Gunktown. The dried dog turds decorating the browned-out yard give off a particularly pungent aroma this summer afternoon, while the old machinery scattered about exudes the stink of gunk.
Robin, wearing just a pair of baggy jeans, greets me at the door. His skin is dark like Blackjack's, his chest is sunken, and his ribs show prominently through his nearly hairless flesh. There's a piercing in his navel and an elaborate tattoo of abstract Celtic design that mounts his right shoulder then descends down his shoulder blade to the center of his spine.
"Since you're going to draw me, I figured I should show some skin," he says.
I set him half-reclining on his decrepit couch, one dog curled at his feet, the other stretched out parallel on the floor. I'll have no trouble sketching his mutts, I tell him, so they're free to come and go. But I ask him to please lie still a while, at least until I've roughed him in.
He's looser today than when I visited him with Mark. Perhaps our exchange of hugs assuaged his guilt over threatening to pulverize my hands. We converse easily. He seems to appreciate my attention.
"I liked you for what you did the other day," he says.
"What was that?" I ask, outlining his shaven skull.
"Turned down my check."
"Oh, yeah, the reparations check. I told you, I didn't suffer serious damage. A little psychological and spiritual pain, that's all."
"That really shook Mark up." Robin grins. "He's not used to people refusing money."
"He should get used to it."
"He thinks we can buy off anyone."
"Isn't that kind of immature?"
"My father was like that too."
"Tell me about your father." I start work on his eyes. I want to get the hollows right.
"He didn't have Mom killed if that's what you're asking. I know that was a theory going around. Sure, he wanted custody, but he would never resort to violence. His method of getting his way was to bring a lawsuit then fight it out in court."
"How did he die?"
"Heart attack. I shouldn’t say this, but I don't miss him much. He was an okay dad, I guess. Not his fault he was the way he was. Mom, on the other hand — I do miss her. Not a day goes by I don't think of her."
"What about your father's second wife?"
"Margaret — she's okay. Their kid, my half-sister Cassie, she's finishing up med school next year. Wants to be an obstetrician. More power to her. About time a Fulraine did something useful in the world."
"I gather you're not all that keen on your family."
His eyes, I'm finding, are uncannily bright today. Perhaps he's high on something, heroin or coke.
"My paternal grandparents were rich snobs. Dad's uptight crap was hard to take. Look, I'm not complaining. Thanks to the Fulraines I've got plenty of money, more than I'
ll ever need. And I'm grateful to Margaret and Dad for all their efforts. Mark and I were in pretty bad shape. Funny how things worked out. Mark did everything to please them, while I upset them every chance I got. Like flunking out of school — except hard as I tried Hayes wouldn't flunk me. After graduation, instead of going to college, I signed up with the Marines. Got discharged for drug abuse. That's a dishonorable discharge. Sent Dad up the wall. All part of the rebellion, as is living here in Gunktown. That really drives Mark nuts. He shits in his pants every time he stops by. He despises my choices, but he's afraid to confront me, scared that if he pisses me off I'll sell my FSI shares. He knows if I do, he'll last about fifteen seconds. He's a lousy CEO. If anyone else gets control, they'll bounce him out in a Calista minute..."
Listening I get the impression that his choices have been determined more by contempt for his brother than anything else.
"Mark's like Mom in one respect. He enjoys hurting people sometimes."
I tell him I'm surprised to hear that since everyone I've spoken to has praised his mother for her kindness.
"She was kind, but on her own terms, nice with servants, especially gentle with horses. She was a great hostess. Had incredible charm. But she had a mean streak, too. Not that I suffered from it. I was too small, too cute, her darling little second son. Mark bore some of the brunt of it, I guess, and, of course, Dad took it from her full force.
He pauses, glances at me, grins.
"I'll tell you a little secret." Is he finally going to broach the diary? "Concerns you, David. Want to hear?"
"Sure."
"But you won't ask me straight out?"
"I won't grovel for it if that's what you mean."
He smiles. "That's another thing I like about you. You don't kiss ass. Anyhow, here's the secret. I don't think you'll like it much. But you earned the right to hear it the day you fought Mark at Hayes. Remember that mean cartoon you drew of him?"
Dream of The Broken Horses, The Page 24
