He steers the big car along River Street, chuckling over the many layers of irony he's laid on. There's something exhausting about him, something in his manner that draws you in then leaves you feeling drained. It's the emptiness, I decide, the hollow core of the man. When you peel away the layers, there's nothing there but the raw hunger.
We follow the twists and turns of the Calista River, covered tonight with mist, then descend to the flat riverbank area where day and night the mills used to roar, belching thunder and eye-stinging cinders which gave the air a sulphurous cast and covered Calista, the would-be Athenian metropolis, with soot.
There's fog down here. The air, I think, has a special aroma tonight, the smell summer air just before a storm. Spencer drives up to the gates of Fulraine Steel, then stops waiting for the night watchman to show himself.
"Evening, Mr. Deval," the watchman says, emerging from his shack.
"Evening, Paul. All right if we go in for a while?"
"You're always welcome here, you know that, Mr. Deval. Just give me a minute to open up."
The watchman, a thin, crusty, unshaven old coot, hobbles toward the gate.
"You're known here."
He smiles. "Oh, I am, old boy. I come here regularly to ponder my past."
He gestures toward the watchman now clumsily working the locks.
"Paul was a steelworker. Worked for the Fulraines since he was a boy. Seventy-six now, long past retirement age, but he can't tear himself away. You don't often find such loyalty these days."
"Tell me something, Deval — why are we going in here?"
He grins. "Because it's dark and spooky, a perfect place to dump a body." He pauses, turns serious. "Actually, can you think of a more appropriate venue for what we have to talk about?"
When Paul pulls the gates open, we drive through, then make our way through the fog into the ruins of the steelworks. The broken buildings loom above us like the skeletons of dinosaurs. Spencer drives directly into an old smelting furnace area, roof now reduced to a girder frame open to the sky.
He parks, we get out of the car, then wander on foot deeper into the ruins. Indeed, I think, this venue couldn't be better chosen. What better stage for recounting terrifying acts? The deserted ruins of Fulraine Steel — crumbling brick smokestacks, shattered ceilings, blasted concrete floors, a virtual theater of ravagement and perdition. What better place for one man to open his heart to another, confess terrible past deeds. But will Spencer confess? Or is this all part of a game? Here amidst fog-bound ruined furnaces and broken Bessemer converters, old brick walls blackened by accretions of fire and smoke, does he intend to reveal himself or does he have something else, something unexpected in mind?
"As we were saying—"
"As you were saying, old boy. It was you, remember, who broached the subject back in the hotel bar."
He stops, inserts a cigarette into a holder, lights it, draws in the smoke, exhales, then crooks his elbow against his side, archly holding out the holder — his signal that he's now in play.
"Now let's suppose," he says smoothly, "that a certain Gentleman did something similar to what you describe... killed a couple in a motel, something ever-so-bad such as that? Someone hearing that story might conclude: ‘Oh, he did the awful deed for his Lover... who was having a bit of a tiff with the Lady at the time. This same someone might think that he, the Lover, I mean, hated the Lady sufficiently to wish her dead. And perhaps that would be true, perhaps the Lover did wish that. But he, the Lover, would never have had the cojones to realize such a wish. Wasn't his style, as they say. No, not the style of the type of man we're talking about, the Lover, I mean. His style would be far more devious. He might, for instance, send vicious letters containing old clippings, used condoms, pubic hairs, that sort of thing. So when you say — and, remember, we're spinning a tale here — when you say, ‘Oh, the Gentleman did it in return for a promise of a gossip column from his Lover,’ well then, old boy, I'm afraid you'd be way off the mark."
"Why did he do it then?" I ask, entering into the game, intrigued that he's opening up to me, repelled too by his arrogance, his apparent belief he can spin his tale harmlessly by concealing it within a stylized fiction. Still, I know, I must appear to believe him.
"Well, old boy — for money, of course!" Spencer chuckles. "Helluva lot of money, too!"
"His lover paid him?"
"No, dammit! Not his Lover! You're still missing the point."
"Set me straight."
"Oh, I shall, old boy, I shall! Suppose someone else paid him, someone who truly had a lot to lose if the Lady actually did as she had threatened."
"I'd think the Lover would've had a lot to lose."
"You mean a besmirching of his reputation? You're right, that wouldn't have been pleasant, but the Lover could have finessed it well enough. Couple months vacation on the Riviera, then home to resume his column with a vengeance. No, not the Lover, decidedly not. You see, vicious as he was, the only way he knew how to hurt was with words."
"Then who?"
"Clever whippersnapper like you should be able to figure that one out."
And then it comes to me, and I feel like a fool for not having seen it. "Andrew Fulraine." Spencer smiles. "But how? I mean — I didn't even know you knew him."
"Knew him? I fucked him! And, believe me, it wasn't all that exciting either. He picked me up on DaVinci, gave me my start, introduced me to what one might laughingly call ‘some of the finer things in life.’ On that subject, by the way, Waldo could be most amusing. ‘Yes,’ he'd say, ‘it's true, the best things in life are free, but I prefer the second best things... and they are very expensive.’ Andrew introduced me to Waldo. Waldo specialized in Andy's ‘leavings.’ But, remember, we're not talking about me here. We're talking about the Gentleman. We're weaving a hypothetical yarn about — what do you call them? — archetypes, I think."
Yes, archetypes...
"So Fulraine wanted Barbara dead because of the custody case?"
"I believe it cut a good deal deeper than that. But first let's get our characters straight. So far we have: the Gentleman, the Lover, and the Lady. Now we introduce: the Husband,. Which brings us to the Husband's peccadilloes, as they used, so charmingly, to call them. Now the Husband, as you can imagine, did not wish his private habits known. He wanted custody of his kids, but even more he wanted his secret kept."
"The secret of his peccadilloes?"
"Yes! Those irresistible desires that sent him regularly to the most sordid sections of our fair city. He most decidedly did not want that exposed. He was, after all, a family man."
"And he knew someone who would take care of the matter."
"Let's say he knew someone willing to take care of the matter if he were paid handsomely enough."
"The Gentleman?"
"Good! Now we're back into our story. And yes, indeed, the Gentleman did do the nefarious deed. A whore, after all, is accustomed to performing special personal services for pay."
"Without remorse?"
"Not much really. A year on DaVinci has a way of toughening a boy up. Live that life for a while, you learn to do what you have to to survive. Of one thing the Gentleman was certain: He wasn't going back where he came from... no matter what."
"Did the Lover know?"
"The Lover did not know. In fact, he found the Lady's demise quite inconvenient. It spoiled all the delicious plans he had in mind, all the ingenious ways he was going to torment her. But, if truth be told, the Lover was a bit of a horse's ass. And the Gentleman was smart enough not to trust him. Not that his untrustworthiness was any kind of secret. The Lover was often heard to say: ‘Never tell me anything you don't want the whole world to know.’ Silly people who didn't take the Lover at his word nearly always came to regret it."
Spencer would like, he tells me, there to be no misunderstanding — personally the Gentleman had nothing against the Lady or her Friend. It was simply a dirty job that had to be done. And the payment was commensu
rate with the difficulty.
Suddenly a bolt of lightning tears the night sky. For a moment, it casts a sharp, crisscross pattern on the concrete floor, shadow of the network of rusted girders above. A moment later the shadow fades, then the sky lets loose.
It's a summer thunderstorm much like the one that broke the afternoon of the Flamingo killings. As the rain crashes down, Deval and I exchange a look. Then, drenched, we seek out shelter, finding it in the alcove of a furnace where, crouching to escape the rain, we find ourselves but inches apart.
More brilliant zigzag tears against the night, cracks of thunder following ever more swiftly. But Deval doesn't stop, he continues to declaim, spewing out his story against the storm.
"You see, it wasn't the money per se, old boy. It was what so much money could do! What you've got to understand is that what the Husband offered the Gentleman was far more than a mere bundle of cash. He offered him a magnificent living. He offered him a life!"
Spencer extracts the wet cigarette from his holder. He turns boastful as he tosses it away.
"Early you proposed the notion that the Gentleman received his Lover's column in payment for the deed. To set you straight, the Gentleman did not receive the column as a gift. Rather he bought it. That's right, bought the column, first receiving a byline in smaller print beneath the Lover's, then little by little making the column his own. Through study and emulation, he learned which knobs to turn, levers to pull, in order to enter society. And, over time, his tongue became tarter, more sharply honed than the Lover's. People found his bon mots more amusing. By the last year of the Lover's life, the old man wore a look of defeat. His sources dried up. People considered him passé. Now they looked to the Gentleman for approval, turned to him for counsel, confided secrets in his ear."
The rain slacks off, the lightning passes, the storm quells as quickly as it came. Deval's voice falls too. We crawl out of our shelter. Now his tone turns brittle.
The Gentleman, he tells me, before agreeing to do the deed, pondered what to do if he were caught. He knew one thing. He would not fall upon his sword. If it became clear he was going down, he'd bring the Husband down with him. And so, clever boy that he was, he took steps to ensure proof of the Husband's complicity. It wasn't just the possibility that the husband would disavow their bargain that drove him; rather something far more serious. For if the Husband was so evil as to employ the Gentleman to slaughter the mother of his children, what insurance did the Gentleman have that the Husband wouldn't later employ another to slaughter him?
Thus certain steps were taken, and a good thing, for over the years the Husband tried several times to renege. Whenever this happened, the Gentleman would remind the Husband of the hold he had, the means to send him to prison. Then as punishment, he'd require even larger payments.
As expected, the Husband would always relent, in the end making the huge final payment as demanded. So in that sense, at least, their pact was not Faustian, not one in which the Gentleman sold his soul to the Devil and then one day the Devil came to collect his note. Rather it was a case in which the Gentleman performed a service for the Devil (i.e., the Husband), then used proof of their bargain to extract ever larger sums.
"You're wondering what that proof was, aren't you?" Spencer's eyes gleam in the night, "Remember how I patted you down? If the Husband had patted the Gentleman down, there would have been no proof. Perhaps even, for that matter, no crime. But in the story I'm telling, the scheme between them was recorded."
"Why're you telling me this?"
He shrugs. "It's just a story after all."
He stops speaking then as suddenly as he began. Storytelling time, it seems, is over. He turns, starts back toward his car. I watch him as he gets inside, then beckons me to the driver's window.
"Well, that's it, old boy." He smiles. "Time now for me to bow out." He starts the engine. "I'm sure you'll manage to find your way home." And then, feigning an afterthought, he hands me an envelope. "A souvenir. I know you'll make good use of it. Well... so long, old boy..." And, with that, he raises his window, switches on his headlights, then drives off slowly into the fog.
I stand there staring after him, amazed at what he's told me, the cool manner in which he's told it, his strange, cool departure too. What is he up to? Why has he left me here? Why has he told me so much? Is this all some kind of complicated taunt?
When he's out of sight, I tear open the envelope, find a tape cassette inside.
If this is the recording of the deal he made with Andrew, why give it to me now? Why go to all the trouble of patting me down, telling me what happened in the guise of a story, then hand me what appears to be hard evidence of his guilt?
In the post storm silence, I can hear the throbbing engine of his car as it makes its way through the ruins, then a short, sharp honk when it reaches the steelworks gate. I move out of the furnace area toward the river, hoping to catch sight of the Jag as it crosses the flatlands then mounts the road to the bluffs above.
I make it out finally, its perfect profile, as, headlights gleaming, it ascends River Street toward the Stanhope Bridge. A fine black shape moving smoothly upward through the night. Then, at the crest above the riverbank, it stops.
Good! Maybe he'll come back for me.
Hearing the roar of the engine revving up across the water, I get a feeling that's not what's going to happen. Then with mounting terror, I watch as the big car suddenly leaps forward toward the railing, crashes through, soars out into space, hangs in the air for a moment like a great falcon poised before attack, then plunges down-down-down toward the Calista River, finally splashing in the water, then sinking slowly into the iron-red muck.
* * * * *
Calista County Courthouse
12:30 p.m.
Closing arguments in the Foster trial are done, the prosecution having methodically summed up its case, the defense having emotionally cast ‘reasonable doubt.’
I've spent the morning distracting myself from last night's trauma by producing a dozen drawings, half of defense counsel ridiculing the evidence, half of the prosecutor pounding home his points. As soon as Judge Winterson completes instructions and sends the jury off to deliberate, all of us in the media circus troupe back to the Townsend to wait in Waldo's for the verdict.
Lots of rumors circulate around the barroom as to possible dispositions of the case. But as the afternoon wears on, another rumor snakes its way in, not about the Foster trial but about local society columnist Spencer Deval.
3:00 p.m.. The first glimmer reaching Pam and me as we sit with Sylvie at the bar is that Deval's car was fished out of the Calista River at dawn.
A few minutes later, Starret stops by to tell Pam he hears Deval was involved in an old local murder case.
A half hour after that, Tony whispers that he's heard Deval was drowned.
"The cops were in his house this morning going through all his stuff," Tony tells us. "‘Course to me it'll always be Mr. C's house. And that car! What a shame! It was Mr. C's pride and joy."
"What were they looking for?" Pam asks.
Tony gives us a ‘search-me’ shrug. "Whatever it was, they found it or they didn't. I hear they stopped early this afternoon."
7:00 p.m.. Just as everyone is chowing down on hotel sandwiches, a new rumor hits the room: the Foster jury has been escorted to Plato's for dinner, all jurors looking relaxed and relieved. This, coupled with courthouse rumors, suggests they've reached a verdict.
* * * * *
8:30 p.m.
Mace appears at the barroom door, spots us, gestures for us to join him outside. We depart Waldo's casually, search him out, discover him on a couch behind a potted palm in a quiet, rear corner of the lobby.
"It's all over," he tells us. "The voices on the tape check out. It's Fulraine and Deval making a murder deal, cold and vile, utterly vile." He strokes his goatee. "What I don't get is why he patted you down, then handed you that tape."
I've been thinking about that all day mys
elf. "I don't think he made up his mind what he was going to do till the very end," I tell Mace. "Then, by giving me that tape, he forced himself to take the leap."
"But surely he knew he didn't have to do anything. He didn't have to talk with you. He could have gotten away with it."
"Of course you're right. But there was an instant yesterday in Waldo's when I saw him crack. One moment he was going to sue me, the next he wanted to talk. At the time I thought he was just playing me, trying out a different tune. Now I think he was making a choice he'd been considering for years. I think he'd gotten whatever it was he wanted out of life. He had wealth and power, but he knew he was a fraud. Then I came along with my accusations, giving him the excuse he needed to self-destruct. But being Spencer, he had to do it the arch-mannered way he'd learned from Waldo, turn it all into ‘a story,’ then make a big flamboyant gesture to certify to its truth. Driving his vintage Jag off a cliff — that's so consistent with what he thought of as ‘high style.’ I think for him going to prison would've been worse that going back to DaVinci. Once he handed me that tape he had no choice, he'd passed the point of no return."
Mace raises his eyebrows. "What gets me is this was a murder-for-hire case and the real killer got home free. Fulraine hires this guy to kill his wife, gets custody of his kids, keeps his secret, lives a respectable life, then dies a respectable natural death."
"Remember what you told me about Fulraine, that he wouldn’t have known how to hire a hitman?"
Mace shrugs. "I was wrong about a lot of stuff. And you know what? Now that this is solved, I hope I never have to think about it again."
* * * * *
I open my room door at 6:00 a.m. and pick up the early edition of the Times-Dispatch. Most of the front page is devoted to the Foster trial, but at the bottom there's a two-column-wide headline:
TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST COMMITS SUICIDE
WAS INVOLVED IN OLD FLAMINGO MURDER CASE
I quickly scan the story, pausing at the eighth paragraph:
Dream of The Broken Horses, The Page 36
