The Dream of The Broken Horses

by William Bayer

  He offers me a glass of Ricard. I watch as he adds water, transforming the liquid from clear to milky white.

  "Not quite absinthe," he says, "but still makes a good louche. I acquired a taste for it in the Legion. You know about my military career?"

  "You're a legend, Jurgen."

  He grins.

  "Actually, all I know is what Mace told me."

  "Inspector Bartel's an okay guy for a cop. And you, Mr. Weiss – are you a cop, too?"

  I explain that though my drawings are used in law enforcement, I'm a civilian in town to cover the Foster trial.

  "And now you want to draw me?" He smiles, strikes a pose.

  "I'd prefer you a little more relaxed."

  He slumps over. "‘The Absinthe Drinker’ by Degas, no?"

  "A little less stagey, if you don't mind."

  "Sure." He assumes a normal posture, then lets his features fall into repose. In those few seconds, his face seems to age a dozen years.

  "That's good. It works better for me when you're comfortable."

  We chat casually as I start to sketch.

  "This drawing – will you be showing it to witnesses?" he asks.

  "If I wanted to show your picture, Jurgen, I'd make things easy for myself and take a photograph."

  He nods. "I've heard photographs lie, that only art can tell the truth."

  "Photographs can also be art."

  "And drawings can also lie, no? Forgive me for asking, Mr. Weiss, but what's the point of this exercise?"

  "I like your face, I'm having fun drawing it. And I was hoping a portrait session would give us a chance to talk."

  "About the Flamingo killings?"

  I start to work on his eyes. "Something you want to tell me about that?"

  "I'm curious why people are still interested after all these years."

  "People?"

  "Inspector Bartel and you."

  "I was a kid here when the murders happened. I knew the teacher, so I've always been interested."

  Jurgen raises his right eyebrow at the same time, making his smile go sweet. It's a characteristic expression, one I want to catch. I set to work on his eyebrows, then his mouth.

  "I think there's more to it than that, Mr. Weiss."

  "You're right, there is. And please call me David."

  "Yes, thank you. Please forgive my formality. It's my European background. Jack Cody always said he liked that about me, the way I made his clients feel so ‘well-served.’

  He tells me he returned to Germany this past winter, his first visit since he ran away from home at age sixteen. His kid sister was dying after fighting breast cancer for two years. It would be his last chance to see her, so he closed his restaurant for two weeks and flew over.

  "My niece met me at the Frankfurt airport. She had crisscross tribal marks cut into her cheeks, a ring in her nose, a tack on her tongue, and a baby perched on her back in a papoose. ‘Yoo-hoo, Uncle Jurgen – it's me, Gisela!’ One look at her and I wanted to get back on the plane. My brother-in-law Hans is a podiatrist. He keeps a scabby pink oversize model of a foot on his desk. My sister, Eva, looked bad. I remembered her as a stout girl. Now she weighed less than a hundred pounds. The time, see the ‘new Germany.’ After a couple days sightseeing, I told them I thought it was pretty much the same as when I left – crappy food, crummy little houses, petty middle-class concerns. ‘Oh, Uncle Jurgen, you're so funny – isn't he Mutter? Vater? But Eva knew I wasn't kidding, that I was thrilled to discover I'd made the correct decision when I left." He pauses, clicks his glass against the bottle of pastis. "She died in April, poor darling! I didn't go back for the funeral. Wired over a big wreath." Jurgen bottom-ups his drink, sets down his glass, and wipes his eyes.

  I've got him down pretty well on paper, I think: the suave ability to appraise others that shows in his eyes, the bittersweet irony in the set of his mouth. Taking a cue from Pam's perception of him as a ‘kinky Bogie,’ I idealize him a little, working to instill the proper degree of cynicism and rue.

  "Nice watch," I tell him, indicating the heavy gold Vaucheron-Constantin dangling from his wrist.

  "Jack Cody left it to me."

  "Do you think Jack had the lovers killed?"

  Jurgen shakes his head. "Not Jack's style. If he'd wanted them dead he would have killed them himself. Anyway, Barbara was the love of his life."

  "She was cheating on him."

  Jurgen shrugs. "They weren't married. He cheated on her, too.

  They had an arrangement."

  "Tell me about Walter Maritz."

  "He was a crooked cop who became a crooked private eye. Jack punished him hard for what he did to Barbara. He deserved everything he got."

  "What did he do to her?"

  "You don't know?"

  "Tell me."

  Jurgen smiles. I start to work on a second drawing. This time I want to catch him in storytelling mode.

  He tells me that after Barbara's au pair washed up headless from Delamere Lake, she and her husband hired a slew of private detectives to find their abducted kid. About two years later, after the Fulraine's were divorced, Maritz approached Barbara out of the blue saying he'd heard rumors there was a little white girl with blond hair living in Gunktown with blacks. Barbara, grasping at the offered straw, hired Maritz and gave him money to spread around the ghetto. Every few weeks Maritz came back, reported what his informants said, and asked for more money to further loosen tongues. This went on for three or four months until Barbara met Jack through a mutual friend.

  "Jack, of course, knew who she was and was taken with her right away. When she told him about Maritz, that she'd given him nearly twenty grand to develop leads, Jack knew right away she was being scammed. He offered to handle it for her. She was relieved. She didn't much like dealing with Maritz. So Jack called in Maritz for a little talk. After ten minutes, he knew for sure Maritz was a liar.

  "That's when he brought me in and a couple of muscle guys who used to handle security around The Elms. We took Maritz to a garage out back. Jack told the muscle guys to beat the truth out of the fuck. Maritz didn't hold out long. About a minute in he was on his knees confessing the scam. Jack told him he had to give the money back. Maritz said he couldn't, he'd gambled it all away. Jack, cold as ice, told him if he couldn't pay in money he'd have to pay in broken bones. Maritz, terrified, begged for mercy. Jack, sick of listening to the fuck, told the muscle guys to give it to him good. They broke both his kneecaps and half his ribs, then I drove him to the hospital. I warned him not to say anything. ‘You're a lucky guy,’ I told him. ‘Mr. Cody could have had you killed.’ Maritz, still whimpering, got the point. I dumped him at the E.R. entrance. Takes a year to recover from a beating like that. He recovered, went on with his life. ‘Live and let live,’ as they say."

  "Next day Jack met with Barbara, explained the swindle, and told her he got all her money back. Then he paid her every cent out of his own funds. That's what brought them together. Soon afterwards they became lovers, and after that their bond was what they did with each other in bed."

  It's a good story and clearly Jurgen relishes telling it. He laughs when I tell him Maritz told the cops he received money from Barbara after Andrew Fulraine hired him to follow her.

  "After what Jack did to him he wouldn't dare go near her. And she would never have met with him. A woman like that doesn't get taken twice. She'd have told Jack and by the next morning Maritz's body would've been rotting in a dumpster."

  "Fulraine hired him to follow her. That was confirmed."

  "Then Maritz scammed Fulraine, took his money, and made up reports. He couldn't have followed her. She'd have spotted him right away."

  "What about his operative?"

  "O'Neill? Another crooked cop. He was good, I'll give him that. He was like a shadow, you never noticed he was there." Jurgen smiles. "Still, bottom line on Maritz, you can't believe a word he says. Inspector Bartel should have known that. But you know what cops are like – they stick t
ogether especially when they lie. Now if Maritz had done the Flamingo job, that would’ve been something else. But like I said, he wouldn't have dared. He knew if Jack found out, Jack would’ve buried him alive."

  Jurgen prefers my second drawing. He thinks my first makes him look too old. I offer it to him. He accepts on condition I let him comp me next time I come in. He says he'll post it among the signed photos of entertainers, ball players, and politicians that crowd the wall behind the bar.

  As I'm about to leave, he asks if I'd be willing to make a drawing of his girlfriend.

  "She's beautiful. You'll like sketching her. Thing is," he winces a little, "I'd like you to draw her in the nude. She's got a great body. I'll pay you well."

  I tell him I'll accept the commission, but it's not money I want in exchange.

  "What do you want?"

  "Information."

  He raises his right eyebrow, showing the same sweet, suave smile. "I'll mention it to the lady," he says.

  *****

  I flex my fingers as I drive back to the Townsend. Five drawings since this morning. I'm done sketching for the day.

  I check out Waldo's on my way through the lobby. The bar's barely half full. I stop by Reception to pick up my messages. There's just one, from Karen Lee.

  Returning her call, I learn she's located Susan Pettibone.

  "Easy search, Mr. Weiss. Your deposit will cover it. Once we got hold of her social security number, tracking her was a breeze."

  I don't ask by what manner of hacking her operative got hold of the number.

  Susan Pettibone, she tells me, now calls herself Susan Ryan, is divorced, has two grown children, is an executive at Pitney-Bowes, and lives in Danbury, Connecticut. Karen gives me her home phone number and street address, then asks me not to reveal where I got them.

  "We deal with out clients in confidence," she says.

  *****

  I watch TV for a while, then go down to Waldo's for a sandwich and beer. Then, missing Pam, I decide to take a walk following the same route we took the first night we went out together to Irontown to eat.

  Approaching the Calista River, I pause to take in the tranquility of the city. It's after nine, a moonless night, and there's hardly anyone around, just an occasional night jogger fleeting along the embankment and sparse traffic heading for the Irontown clubs and cafes.

  The river's glassy tonight, without a wave or visible current, slick like polished black marble reflecting the black, moonless sky. A row of well-spaced streetlamps, shaped like enormous candelabra, cast yellow light upon Riverwalk. In the distance, Eric Lindstrom's amazing twin towers, lit from within, soar like beacons from the cluster of old, granite-faced office buildings downtown.

  I continue along Riverwalk with the Calista flowing silently below me beside abandoned railway tracks. Here finished steel and the components used to make it were hauled by barges day and night to and from the mills.

  A sudden screech startles me. A high-speed train emerges from a tunnel on the other side of the river, then races along a trestle. In the distance I hear sirens, whether police or fire I can't tell. I look ahead. A single jogger's coming toward me. Otherwise the area's deserted.

  As I reach the center of Riverwalk, I hear a car approaching from behind. Then the squeal of brakes. I turn just as a van pulls to the curb. Two men jump out wearing ski masks and black sweats. They grab my arms and drag me back. The jogger is coming abreast. When I call out to him for help, he pushed me roughly from behind. A moment later, I'm pushed and pulled toward an opening in the wall that bounds Riverwalk, entrance to one of the stairways that lead down to the river. I struggle frantically, but the three of them are too much for me. They drag me down a flight, throw some sort of sack over my head, pull it tight at my neck, then spin me around.

  "Take my money," I mumble through the sack.

  No answer. The sack blindfolds me, it smells bad inside, and makes it hard for me to breathe. AS I try to twist free, they suddenly let go of me. Then one of them shoves me forward, another shoves me toward the third, and he in turn pushes me back. I can hear their light laughter as they toss me around, spinning me each time until finally in a fit of dizziness I fall to the concrete, landing on my face.

  But that's not enough for them. They pull me roughly to my feet and start the roundelay again. I'm terrified. What do they want? Why are they doing this? Are they just having sport with me, or is there some underlying purpose?

  Suddenly two of them grab my arms, while the third punches me hard in the stomach. I feel a sharp pain, double over, fall to my knees. I can feel the vomit rising. I choke on it, try to spit it out.

  One of them, the hitter I think, kneels beside me. I can feel his breath as he brings his mouth to my covered ear.

  "Stop nosing around," he says, his harsh whisper cutting to me through the sack. "This is a warning. Next time we'll break your hands. Then you won't be drawing any more pictures."

  He knows who I am! I've been targeted! This isn't a random attack! Then, as a set of memories floods in, I finally understand what this is about.

  He pulls away. I sense the three of them standing above me, looking down. One of them kicks me in the side, then I hear their van take off. I lie still on the pavement until I'm sure they're gone, then pull the sack from my head.

  When I get it off, I gulp for air… except the air around me isn't all that fresh, tainted by the smell of the river and the old iron smell of Calista streets. I sit up slowly, check myself. My side's sore but I'm sure nothing's broken. That final kick in the ribs was half-hearted at best. I taste a little blood, most likely the result of a split lip when I fell. Though grateful to find myself undamaged, I know I won't look pretty in the morning.

  I grope about, get to my feet, make my way carefully up the concrete stairs. Back on Riverwalk, I go to the nearest lamppost and inspect the sack. It's tight yellow mesh, the kind used to hold grain. Two words are printed on it in block capital: BELSONS FLOUR.

  *****

  Back in my room. I clean myself up. The cut on my lip isn't as bad as I thought. What the whisperer said was true – what I got tonight was a warning, not a beating, a warning to ‘stop nosing around,’ I know what that means: Keep my nose out of Flamingo. It's been twenty-six years. I ask myself: Who besides me and Mace still cares?

  *****

  My phone rings early. It's Harriet informing me I have the day off. This morning the jury will visit the crime scene a the Museum of Natural History, no press allowed, and this afternoon Judge Winterson will rule on a defense proffer of new evidence.

  I call Mace, tell him what happened.

  "Can you ID the people?" he asks.

  "No. Two of them were masked. It happened too fast. But I think I know who they are… or represent."

  "Who?"

  "I'll tell you when I'm sure. Meantime, I'm not intimidated. Anyway, I'm calling you about something else."

  I pass on what Hilda Tucker told me about the obsessed grad student girl who lived in Tom Jessup's rooming house.

  "I didn't see anything about her in the file," I tell him. "Do you remember her?"

  "We talked to a lot of people. I don't recall anyone like that."

  "Well, it's occurred to me – if she had such a big crush on Tom, maybe she stalked him, found out he wasn't gay. Then she snapped when she discovered he was seeing Barbara.

  "Sounds like a long shot, but I'll look into it." A pause. "Listen, David, if you think you know who jumped you, you should tell me. There're laws against that. With you being in law enforcement, it could even be felonious assault."

  "Hey, I'm just a freelancer," I remind him. "But thanks for your concern."

  *****

  After breakfast. I head over to where I probably should have gone my first week in town: the austere ten-story triangular steel and terrazzo fortress at the corner of Toland and LaButte, which the discreet letters, FSI, incised in steel beside the main door identify as the headquarters of Fulraine Steel Indu
stries.

  Why, I ask myself, did it take an ambush on the street to finally bring me here? The easy answer is my residual bitterness toward Mark and Robin Fulraine. But I know there's more to it – my old guilt over not having immediately reported what I heard between the au pair and Belle Fulraine the day of Mark's seventh birthday. Even though I know better, I'm still burdened with the belief that if I'd told someone, Belle might still be alive.

  Sitting in the waiting room on the executive floor, I study the corporation's annual report. There's a glossy picture of CEO Mark Fulraine, looking as handsome as I remember him at Hayes. The golden locks are gone now. His hair appears darker, thinner, and is combed back, giving him a sleek, well-tended look. But the smile's the same, the charming grin of the star athlete, lower school student council president, scion of one of Hayes's four founding families. The face of a man born to rule.

  I read an optimistic summary of the company's prospects. A pie graph shows that only seven percent of FSI's revenues now derive from steel. These days the company's into all kinds of other things from manufacturing high-end stereo equipment, operating a chain of retail sporting goods stores, making high-capacity disk drives and assorted Internet ventures. In my admittedly naive view, FSI looks like an incoherent grab bag. I think back to my days at Hayes, trying to recall whether Mark was bright. Jerry Glickman and I were tops in our class in academics. Mark, I remember, fell somewhere in the middle.

  I'm scanning the list of his Board of Directors, when an attractive young woman with a shag cut approaches with a smile.

  "I'm Jane Bailey, Mr. Fulraine's assistant. He's free to see you now."

  As she leads me through the door to the executive suite, she chatters on about how excited Mark was when told I'd stopped by.

  "Soon as he heard, he cut short his meeting and had me clear his calendar for lunch. You'll be eating in our executive dining room. Chef wants to know what you'd like. Lobster, steak, or chicken?"