One summer afternoon about a week before the killings, she wandered into his room looking for a notebook she thought she'd left inside. Tom was out on one of his private tutoring jobs, so there she was, looking for her notebook, when something in a half-open bureau drawer caught her eye.
Shoshana blinks. "Actually, that isn't true. The truth is I was still crazy in love with him and sometimes when he wasn't there I'd feed my obsession by going through his stuff."
She dabs at her eyes.
"I knew I had no right. We'd exchanged keys in case on of us was ever locked out, a trust I broke numerous times. I hated myself for being such a sneak. I vowed each time I came out of his room I'd never go in unauthorized again. But still I did. I couldn't seem to help myself."
"Anyhow... I was looking through his drawers when I came upon this big manila envelope hidden beneath his shirts. I opened it curious to see what was inside. Then I was shocked." Shoshana grimaces. "It was child porn."
The stuff was crude, she tells us, poorly printed, the photos poorly reproduced, and it was all so blatantly uncompromisingly obscene — lewd, smutty, foul. And then, even as she sat down on his bed to study the material, she felt a terrible pain as if her stomach were suddenly tied in knots.
"I was appalled. Also bowled over by grief. I remember perching there on the side of his bed looking at that stuff, then realizing I was sobbing tears for the children in the pictures and for Tom that he could possess them. The thought that this might be his secret vice hurt me to the quick. ‘So this is what my friend is into! So this is what he is!’"
Shoshana shakes her head. Watching her, I can feel her hurt and outrage. And, too, I gain a glimpse of what this revelation means: that Tom Jessup had been acting as Barbara Fulraine's agent provocateur in her quest to find the people who'd kidnapped and probably killed her daughter, Belle.
"...I was still sitting there when he came in. He saw me on his bed, saw that horrible stuff in my hands. He came beside me, put his arm around me, begged me not to judge him too quickly, said there were things going on he hadn't been able to speak about. But now that I'd found his stash, he would tell me everything. But first I must promise never to tell anyone, not another living soul."
She promised, of course, and then he confided that he'd undertaken an undercover investigation on behalf of a wealthy woman, a Mrs. Fulraine, who'd hired him to tutor and coach her sons. This woman's daughter had been snatched by her au pair years before and never seen again. Because the au pair had performed in pornographic films, there was reason to believe pornographers had been behind the snatch. Tom told her that basically he was pretending to be a pedophile purchasing pedophiliac material, letting it be known to contacts he made along the way that he was interested in commissioning a home movie of a little blond girl performing sexual acts on adults.
It was a dangerous mission, first because the people he was meeting were extremely suspicious, and second, because, being a teacher, he was putting his career on the line. If the pornographers decided he was a penetration agent, they might kill him to keep him from talking. And if anyone connected with Hayes found out what he was doing, he'd probably be blackballed from teaching for life.
"But how can you do this?" Shoshana demanded. "Why you and not the cops? And who is this woman to you that you'd take such a risk for her?"
He lied to her then, told her the woman was paying him a large sum for his help. Also that the police had failed her and so had the private detectives she'd hired, and that she felt that on account of his manner and looks he had a better chance of getting inside than a pro.
"He told me the people he was meeting with, a couple in their forties, looked like ordinary folks leading conventional suburban lives. It bothered him that they didn't look as he'd expected, weren't the sleazy types you imagine when you think of kiddie porn. When he'd started his search, haunting the porn strip on DaVinci, he'd met his share of the latter — burly, bearded, intimidating guys who wore soiled tanktops and flaunted tattoos. But the couple he'd linked up with, serious purveyors of hardcore child porn, looked and talked like teaching assistants at Calista State."
"In fact they ran a legitimate business making promotional films. Their whole approach was highly professional. They asked him to describe exactly which acts he wished to see performed. Their manner appalled him — sympathetic smiles, soft, inquiring voices conveying their eagerness to create a customized filmed fantasy for his ‘viewing pleasure.’
"They inquired whether he'd prefer moody lighting or hard, raw light; whether he wished the little girl's hair to be curly or straight; whether he wanted to see her eyes while she performed or would be content just to see the back of her head; whether the girl should act slutty and wear lipstick, or behave like a little schoolgirl, stripping guilelessly out of a jumper or school uniform."
"After he made his initial deposit, ten thousand dollars supplied to him in cash by Mrs. Fulraine, he was shown an album of photos of underage girls from which he was to choose one to play the starring role. Hoping against hope, he asked if he could take the album home to study the pictures before making a decision. ‘Sorry, he was told, ‘the casting album is super-sensitive; it never leaves the premises.’"
"Casting album! The blandness of that phrase made the transaction all the more horrifying. Better, he thought, to deal with the burly porn shop proprietors than this smarmy, cinema-savvy couple. And yet he desperately needed that album, for if it contained a photo of Mrs. Fulraine's stolen child, then everything he was going through would be justified."
He was now at the point, he told Shoshana, where he had to choose a girl from the album and also make a large second payment. The couple was pressuring him. Just the previous week, they'd told him that the moment had passed when he could back out. ‘It's what we call pay-or-play,’ they explained.
"Tom told me he'd passed all this on to Mrs. Fulraine, told her he'd gone as far with it as he could. It was now up to her to bring in the police. But if for some reason she didn't or didn't provide the thirty-thousand-dollar balance due on the film, then he would be in terrible trouble, for the couple had let him know that their backers could be pretty unpleasant when collecting an unpaid debt."
"I remember how, after we talked, we went out to the garage behind the house, sat against the back wall, and shared a joint. I don't think we ever felt closer. I was just so relieved he wasn't a pedophile it didn't occur to me to question his story. I remember we got really stoned, hugged one another, and then both of us wept."
I sit back. Tom's mysterious utterances to Susan Pettibone when she called him late at night suddenly started making sense: ‘Did he do it yet?’; ‘Putting an end to some really bad business’; ‘Finally done with’; and ‘I think there's going to be a fire.’ All this fits with the Times-Dispatch article about the house fire on Thistle Ridge, the two bound-to-the-bed bodies in the basement and ‘the sordid nature’ of unspecified items found at the site. Suddenly various disparate thoughts I've had snap together into a pattern, like iron filings on a piece of paper suddenly arranging themselves when a magnet is passed beneath.
Shoshana continues: "I was in my living room studying when I heard about the killings. It was a little after 6 p.m.. One of the other kids in the house came rushing up the stairs. ‘Tom Jessup's been killed!’ he yelled. ‘It's on TV. He and some society lady were shot together in a motel!’
"I ran downstairs. Everyone in the house had gathered in the living room. The scene on TV was chaotic. Reporters were shoving microphones into peoples' faces. A detective was being interviewed. He said the two were lovers, that their naked bodies had been found entwined, that they'd been meeting afternoons at the motel for months. Also that the woman was related to the family that owned Fulraine Steel and that the young man had been her sons' teacher at the exclusive Hayes School."
"I think that's when I started to go crazy." Shoshana's voice is level-steady now. "I mean really crazy, not just nutty like before. I remember standing in the ba
ck of that room watching that incredible report, suddenly understanding that Tom had lied to me for months — that he wasn't gay, never had been, that he'd been involved with this woman, that they'd been fucking in some sleazy motel. Also that whatever he'd done for her with the child pornographers had been done not for money but for love."
"I don't remember much after that... except that I didn't stay glued to the TV like everybody else. Instead I went right up to Tom's room, let myself in, went straight to his bureau, pulled out all the kiddie-porn material, gathered it all into a garbage bag, took it downstairs, then stuffed it into the trash pail outside the kitchen door.
"I think I was in some kind of trance state. Instinct took over. I felt this need to protect Tom, make sure no one could ever say that he was bad. Going into his room all those times I'd betrayed his trust, just as he'd betrayed mine with his lies. In some strange way, I felt I'd now squared our accounts. I couldn't hate him for his deception without also hating myself. But what I could do was protect him, protect his reputation, his good name."
Two days later, she suffered a complete mental collapse. She wept uncontrollably, refused to eat, screamed in the middle of the night, and in the morning couldn't bring herself to get out of bed. Someone in the house phoned her parents. Her father, an accountant, drove down from Detroit, packed up her stuff, helped her into his car, and drove her home. A week later on the advice of her family doctor, Shoshana Bach was admitted to the Rand-Barloff Clinic, a private mental hospital in Bloomfield Hills.
She spent a year there recovering her sanity and sense of self. She underwent a regime of electroshock treatments and intensive individual and group psychotherapy. She took classes in pottery making and expressive dance, also took up croquet and became clinic champion. She met a young man her age, equally fragile, and embarked upon an affair. The best part of the year were her sessions with Dr. Deborah Barloff, a Jungian analyst, daughter of the clinic director, who helped her work through her feelings of guilt and betrayal while providing her with a feminist perspective, a prism through which she eventually came to view herself as attractive and her alleged ‘inadequacy’ as bogus.
When she left Rand-Barloff, she felt reborn — armed with a strong identity, ready to resume her studies. She returned to Calista State, completed her doctorate, wrote her dissertation on the metaphor of mirror and mirroring in her novels of Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. When she was thirty-one, she published her first book, Dickinson and Plath: Studies In Alienation, a seminal work of feminist criticism that led to her appointment as a tenured professor at C.S.
Shoshana stops, peers at me, then at Mace. "I know what you're thinking. Why didn't I come forward with what I knew about Tom and child pornography?"
She shrugs. "It didn't seem relevant. My old housemates kept me abreast of the rumors, that Tom had been part of a love-triangle and that it was Mrs. Fulraine's other boyfriend, a gangster, who'd killed them out of jealousy. That seemed as good an explanation as any. I was trying to forget about Tom, put him out of my mind. I told Tom's story to Dr. Barloff, asked her advice on whether I should break my pledge of secrecy. We discussed it in terms of trust and betrayal, how I was possibly setting up an ethical dilemma as a way of holding onto my anger at Tom, not allowing myself to let him go. I came to understand that I'd used Tom just as he'd used me, as a crutch against the bitter melancholy of my loneliness. What good would it have done to bring all that out? And how did I even know he'd told me the truth? He hadn't given me any names or addresses. He'd lied to me about being gay, so maybe he'd also lied to me about this. Finally, I'd have to explain why I'd destroyed all the evidence. It didn't seem worth the trouble, especially when I learned that the alleged killer had been killed himself."
She spreads her hands, a gesture of completion, a signal she's told us everything she knows.
Mace nods. "This Dr. Barloff — is she still in practice?"
"Very much so. I spoke with her just a couple months ago."
"Would you be willing to sign a form releasing her from patient-doctor privilege?"
"Of course I'll sign it. You can ask Dr. Barloff anything you like." Shoshana sighs. "So... it wasn't the gangster who killed them, is that what you're saying?"
Mace tells her he'll fax over the release form as soon as he gets back to his office.
"Gentlemen," She rises, "I must get back to work." She gestures at my sketchbook. "May I?"
I show her my sketch.
She peers at it for a moment. "Interesting," she says. "A taut face, a little wan, I'd say... but I do like the eyes, sparkling yet full of anguish..."
* * * * *
Mace and I walk over to Leland Avenue, the main street that bisects the campus, then into a dark coffeehouse appropriately named Café Noir. As soon as we sit down, I show him the Thistle Ridge fire story I photocopied at the library. As he reads it, I explain how I believe it fits with Susan Pettibone's account of her final call to Tom and now Shoshana's account of Tom's confession.
Mace stares at me quizzically. "You think Cody burned these people out?"
"Jürgen says he thinks Jack knew about Barbara's affair with Tom, that he may even have been all right with it. He also says Jack was working hard on finding out what happened to Belle Fulraine and that around the time of Flamingo he told Jürgen he was finally getting close. Suppose Barbara passed on Tom's information to Cody, who then administered what Jürgen calls ‘Jack's own kind of justice.’ Make sense?"
Mace shakes his head. "I'll look into this fire story, see what we got on it." He squints at me. "Gotta hand it to you, David, you're quite the investigator... even if it turns out you're wrong. But suppose you're right, what then? How does this connect with Flamingo? Were Fulraine and Jessup killed for revenge by the porn couple's backers?" He runs a hand through his hair. "I'll tell you, I'm having trouble with all this. A possible connection to some other horrible crime committed just a couple days before — how the hell did that get by me?"
"Flamingo was so big it obscured everything else that week."
"That month, that year... the whole fuckin' decade. Just thinking about it makes me crazy."
"Well, what's making me crazy is that someone's following me."
"Oh, yeah, Mr. Potato Head," Mace says.
* * * * *
He wakes me with a call at seven in the morning.
"Shoshana signed the release. I got through to Dr. Barloff last night. She confirmed Shoshana's story, remembers the child porn angle very well. Also that she and Shoshana discussed the pros and cons of coming forward. So Shoshana was telling the truth."
I tell him I'm not surprised.
"Me neither, but I had to be sure. I've been up most of the night going through the file on that old fire/homicides case on Thistle Ridge. The victims' names were George and Doris Steadman. The zinger — they ran a little industrial film company out of a building on Bailtown Road. After the fire, there wasn't much left up at the house, but our guys found some film cans containing porn in the garage. Not child porn, just the regular kind. No one made too much out of that. As for the fire/homicides, they were never solved. Our guys chalked it up to the mob, the theory being that the Steadmans were producing porn films and the people who controlled the porn market didn't like them infringing on their territory."
"Follow what I'm saying, David? Catch the drift? Suppose Cody, like you said, brings down a torture/hit on the Steadmans, who have special ‘friends’ who know how to collect a debt. Now let's say those same ‘friends’ live up on Torrance Hill. Six months later Jack Cody gets whacked. There's been a falling out between him and the Torrance Hill boys. So our guys were wrong, it wasn't the mob who killed the Steadmans, it was Cody, who tortured them first to make them tell what they new about the Belle Fulraine kidnapping. Later the mob found out and whacked Cody for messing in their business. See how it comes full circle?"
"I see all right... but something's missing."
"Yeah, Flamingo. But supp
ose the Torrance Hill boys ordered the Flamingo murders as retaliation three days after the Steadmans were killed, targeting Tom Jessup because they figured he was responsible for the Steadman massacre?"
"In that case, Tom was the target and Barbara was killed just ‘cause she was there."
"Or because the Torrance Hill guys knew Barbara was Cody's mistress. What better way to retaliate than kill her and Tom-the-squealer at the same time?"
"They would have known about Tom since he'd ordered the film, then stalled making the final payment. They could easily have followed him to the motel, seen Barbara and figured out the connection to Cody." I pause. "Is that what you think happened?"
"Could be." Mace laughs. "Maybe so-and-so did such-and-such to whomever, and then what's-his-name did whatever-it-was to you-know-who. It's too complicated. Been too many years. It's a fuckin' ball of snakes. How the hell can I ever unravel it?"
Mace is right, he can't unravel it, there are too many variables, too many supposes, too big a cast of characters, most of whom now are dead. A hitman acting for the Torrance Hill mob — sure, that could be. As good an explanation as any I guess. But in no way conclusive.
So what does this all mean? That the Flamingo killings must forever remain unsolved? That it will become one of those old murder-mystery puzzles like the Black Dahlia case in L.A.; the ‘Il Mastra’ sex killings in Florence, Italy; the Zodiac killings in San Francisco; and a hundred cases more — turning up from time to time as filler in the back pages of newspapers, there to be pored over by obsessives, amateur criminologists, and adolescent boys?
Dream of The Broken Horses, The Page 28
