The Dream of The Broken Horses

by William Bayer

  This is too much. I call for a break. When Robin goes into the kitchen to fetch beers, I sit there reeling with anger.

  Barbara Fulraine wanted Mark to provoke me! Was thrilled to hear he'd bloodied me up, that her beautiful brave blond boy had beaten her Jew-shrink's son!

  By the time Robin returns, I'm calm again, realizing I was but a sacrificial-pawn in the complicated game she was playing with Dad – a realization, however, that does not warm the cockles of my heart.

  Robin, beer in hand, examines my drawing.

  "You caught me all right."

  "Not much more to do."

  "Can I have it when you're finished?"

  "Of course. I'm making it for you."

  "You're a nice guy, David. Hope what I said didn't upset you too much. It happened so long ago."

  "It's okay," I tell him, as he resumes his position on the couch. I start shading his face and upper body, working to give the drawing a proper finish.

  "I feel we share something," he says, "on account of how we both lost a parent at an early age. Not to mention that our parents were involved."

  "When I pointed that out to Mark, he didn't seem to like it much."

  Robin nods. "Of course not."

  Drawing his torso, I note the scrawniness of his build, the thinness of his arms. No wonder his belly punch didn't hurt me. He's really in lousy shape.

  "I think my father was dazzled by your mother," I tell him. "She came to him in pain. He tried to help her. I know Mark doesn't like hearing that because he thinks my dad failed her. But that isn't how those shrink things work."

  "Mark's an asshole," he says.

  He goes quiet then, meets my eyes. I take the opportunity to finish drawing his.

  "The other day I told you I have Mom's diary." He spoke shyly.

  Finally! Maybe now we'll get somewhere.

  I apply some accent strokes, then put my pencil down. The drawing's finished.

  "Why'd you tell me that?" I ask.

  "I don't know," he says. "Mark doesn't even know it exists."

  "Does it?"

  Robin nods. "Mom kept it hidden inside one of her equestrian trophies. After she died, all her stuff went into storage. About ten years ago, Mark and I went to the warehouse to look it over and divide it up. When we got to the trophies, we each took half. I found it in one of mine, a little notebook held closed by a rubber band.

  "Of course I immediately started to read it. Then I found I couldn't. Who wants to read about his mother's intimate affairs? I sure as hell didn't, so I put it aside." He shrugs. "I guess I've brought it out a couple times over the years, tried reading it, never got very far. Just too painful. Not the kind of stuff I want to know. But still I could never bring myself to destroy it. That would be like… burying her again. Anyway, there's stuff about your dad in there, David, and a lot of other stuff besides. Surprisingly little about Mark and me. I guess in her busy life we didn't count for much."

  He shrugs again. "I wish I could give it to you… but I can't. Like I said, it's too intimate. It's be like showing you pictures of my mom having sex."

  "I understand," I tell him, "but if you ever change your mind…"

  I detach the drawing from my pad, present it to him, watch him as he studies it.

  "This is better than just nice, David. It's excellent. I'm grateful. Thank you."

  As we get up I notice a piece of furniture in the corner, a beaten-up Windsor-style chair. It's missing half an arm, with several radiating spokes broken on the back. What catches my eye is a fading Latin slogan and crest on the rear support.

  "Is that a Hayes chair?" I ask.

  Robin smiles. "Wondering when you'd notice. It's from the Trustees Room. When Dad died they offered it to Mark and me, a memento of the years he served on the board. I call it ‘the hot seat’ because it's where I usually sit when I shoot up."

  I glance at him, note the gloat in his eyes, the pleasure he takes in his desecration of the precious heirloom. Perhaps the chair reminds him too of happier days back at Hayes – days of bullying, making other boys cry, and all the wicked satisfaction derived from such as that, the schoolboy schadenfreude we all used to feel.

  He walks me out to my car.

  "Do you really like living like this?" I ask.

  "It's not so bad. I'm comfortable. I wish I had a girlfriend sometimes."

  "Why don't you clean this place up, get rid of the dog crap, lay off the drugs, and get yourself in shape?"

  "Think that would help?"

  "I think you'd feel better."

  "I'd probably look a little better but I doubt I'd feel better." He speaks sadly now. "You see, David, the crappy way I live – it pretty much sums up the way I feel."

  *****

  I fret about that diary on my way back to the hotel, wondering if there's some way I can convince Robin to let me read it. Then, when I walk into my room, other thoughts intrude.

  The moment I enter I sense something wrong, that someone's been inside and my things have been touched.

  I make a quick inventory. My drawings posted on the walls are as I left them, but those piled on my desk are ordered differently. My drawing of Dad in his car surveilling the Flamingo, previously at the bottom of the pile, is now on top.

  I check the closet to see if my briefcase, containing Dad's paper, is still in the bottom of my garment bag. It is, and thankfully, still locked.

  I walk back to the center of the room, then turn slowly, looking carefully at everything. Beside the disorder of my drawings, what makes me think someone beside the room maid had been in here? It's the air, I decide. There's a scent. Trying to define it, I come up with the aroma of stale cigarette smoke permeating the fabric of a cheap suit.

  I call down to the desk. Five minutes later, two guys from hotel security show up. Soon all three of us are sniffing around the room. To me the scent's obvious, but the security guys aren't sure. They agree there's a trace of something and that's odd since my room is on a nonsmoking floor. Then they point out that sometimes smoke from other units gets circulated to nonsmoking areas through the ventilation ducts.

  They examine my door lock, declare it hasn't been touched, but change the code anyway and issue me a new key card. Finally, apologizing for any inconvenience, they advise me to store my valuables in the hotel safe downstairs.

  After they leave, I open the room minibar, pull out a beer, sit in my easy chair, and sip.

  Yes, Robin ambushed me, but this isn't his work, which can only mean one thing: Mr. Potato Head, the guy who was asking about me at the Flamingo, must be working for someone else.

  13

  Sunday morning

  I had hoped to sleep in, but so many things nag at me, so many loose ends. I wake up at 6:00 a.m., and, unable to get back to sleep, do the unthinkable and go up to the rooftop gym.

  There's no one around. At this hour my jock media colleagues are in their or their lovers' beds below sleeping off another drunken Saturday night.

  I mount the Stairmaster, work out hard for twenty minutes, until, panting and sweating, I'm too exhausted to go on. Then I go back down to my room, shower, order breakfast, and look over the Sunday papers, which the hotel had kindly left by my door.

  Finally, nurtured, rested and well-informed, I take up Dad's old agenda book, lay in on my hotel room desk, and see what I can make of the entries.

  It's one of those one-day-per-page leatherette bound datebooks with a separate line for each hour increment. In it he lists all his appointments with patients: Mr. L; Dr. K; Mrs. M; Mrs. F; etc.

  Mrs. F, I note, was scheduled, starting in late April, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:30 a.m.. After the Flamingo killings on August 27, Dad drew a line through her name whenever it appeared, this being his way to designate cancelled appointments. In fact, I discover, he had scheduled her at her usual hour through to the end of the year.

  There are other appointments noted: medical conferences; Psychoanalytic Institute meetings; lunches with
colleagues including a regular Tuesday lunch with Izzy Mendoza; various social engagements including the April 17 Parents Day at Hayes where he encountered Mrs. F; the April 22 Parents Day at Ashley-Burnett attended by my sister; and June 6, the day of my graduation from Hayes Lower School.

  Yes, it's all fairly straightforward. This is a doctor's appointment datebook, not a personal diary. Still, looking at the pages pertaining to the summer months, I find several intriguing entries:

  On July 11, a Friday, he writes: Difficult session. Headache. Cancel tennis/?

  On July 14, the following Monday: Very difficult day. No sympathy from I (which initial, I reason, must stand for Izzy).

  On Friday, July 18: Another tough week. See L about headaches/?

  On Thursday, July 24: Call MHHC re show/G/?

  And on Sunday, July 27, one of the very few weekend notations in the book: Attend show MHHC 2-5.

  Monday, July 28: Very difficult session with F. Worried. Consulted I at 6:00 p.m..

  Friday, August 1: Idea for new approach. Consulted I. Negative!

  Monday, August 4: Implemented idea. Backfired. Will try again.

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, August 14, all his regular sessions with clients are marked cancelled. A week later on August 20, he does the same thing, again freeing up his afternoon. At the end of the day, there's a cryptic notation: F/F.

  On August 27, the day of the Flamingo killings, he sees all his regular Wednesday patients including Mrs. F at 10:30 a.m.. At the end of the day, he notes the calamity with a single word: FLAMINGO!

  I sit back, reflect. The killings, I know, took place between 3:40 and 3:50 that afternoon. Dad had successive appointments with patients at 2:30, 3:30, and 4:30 p.m.. If he kept those appointments, he couldn't possibly have been at the Flamingo at the time Kate Evans thinks she saw him there.

  Did he keep them? No way to know; his billing records were thrown out years ago. And though I have never really believed Dad was the Flamingo shooter, who did Kate see that afternoon?

  I try to decipher his other entries. I'm pretty sure I know what he meant by MHHC: the Maple Hills Hunt Club, which, mid-summer every year, held a Sunday afternoon horse show. But why would Dad, who didn't much care for horses, be interested in attending such an event? Because it was at a dance there that Barbara Lyman met Andrew Fulraine? Perhaps… but I think his notation CALL MHHC re show/G/? gives the reason. G was the letter Dad used in his paper to designate Barbara's old instructor in dressage, the man who asked her to slap him and with whom she had her first experience of oral sex. But why would Dad want to see G? To validate Barbara's story? Or, God help him, did he view G as a rival, and like many a man pining after his beloved, feel a need to see his imagined rival in the flesh?

  August 1, it's clear, was the day he decided to ‘enter into’ Barbara's seduction fantasy. He consulted Izzy about it, Izzy counseled against it, but the following Monday, August 4, he went ahead. It seemed to backfire when Barbara masturbated during the session, but despite that setback, he resolved not to give up his plan.

  The two Wednesday afternoons he cancelled all his afternoon appointments suggest that on one or both days he followed Barbara to the Flamingo. But why twice? One reconnaissance would have been sufficient to verify her affair with Jessup. Why go back again? Could he have been so obsessed he took to stalking her? Or was there some other reason? Could F/F stand for Fulraine/Flamingo? If so, did she lure him there or did they meet there by prearrangement? Did they actually go to bed together there, and if so, was that the day Kate Evans saw him, an encounter Kate later mistakenly transposed to the day of the killings?

  *****

  10:00 a.m.

  My room phone rings. It's Mace.

  "Good news. I found Jessup's neighbor in the rooming house. Her name back then was Shoshana Bach. Now she's Dr. Shoshana Bach, Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Women's Studies Department at Calista State."

  "You're sure she's the girl?"

  "Positive. She was the only young woman living in the house at the time. I checked with the university. Her campus office hours are Wednesday and Friday, 3 to 5 p.m.. I'm going to drop in on her Wednesday afternoon. Thought you'd like to tag along."

  "I'd love to."

  "I'll pick you up at the courthouse quarter of three."

  "Thanks, Mace. I appreciate your including me in this."

  "My pleasure." He pauses. "So who was it jumped you the other night?"

  "Robin Fulraine and a couple of his buddies."

  "Barbara's son – Jesus!"

  "Yeah, he and his brother heard I was sniffing around, they didn't like it, so they tried to scare me off."

  "Going to bring charges?"

  "No. I confronted them and they confessed. At least Robin did. Apologized, too. There's still a core of decency there."

  "I think you're the decent one to let them off," he says.

  *****

  Middle of the afternoon

  The phone rings again. It's the long-awaited call from Pam.

  "I'm in my car on Route 684," she says. "Just left Susan Pettibone. She really opened up. We talked four hours straight. It was like she'd been wanting to talk about all this for years."

  She tells me Susan has vivid memories of her phone conversations with Tom Jessup those final weeks, far more detailed than the summary I found in the police file.

  "I got the impression," Pam tells me, "that in some way Tom was the love of her life. He was the first man she ever lived with, her first real long-term lover. She's led a full life since, been married, divorced, raised kids, and developed a high-powered career, but I think in her mind Tom's almost mythical, the handsome long-lost lover of her youth."

  "In their long phone conversations those last weeks, Tom told her he'd become involved with an older woman who was beautiful, wealthy, and socially prominent. He told Susan he was crazy about her, but that she had problems, was involving him in them, and this involvement had begun to frighten him."

  "He wasn't specific, but Susan got the impression that the deeper his involvement, the more frightened he became. By the time he called her and virtually begged her to come out to Calista, she thought he sounded desperate."

  "Tom also told her about the girl in his rooming house. When I asked if Tom ever characterized her as a stalker, Susan said no, Tom found her intelligent and sweet. He was only troubled because she made it clear she was attracted to him and he wasn't attracted to her at all. In fact, Susan said, Tom considered this girl and Hilda Tucker his only real friends in Calista, at least until he fell in love with Barbara Fulraine."

  "What about that last conversation when she called Tom and he thought she was someone else?"

  "That was the most interesting part. You told me that in the police report Tom's quoted as saying: ‘Hi, did you really do it?’ Susan says that's not right, that Tom said, ‘Did he do it yet?’ When I asked her how she could be positive after twenty-six years, she said she's never forgotten his words, that she can still hear them in her head as if he spoke them yesterday."

  "There's definitely a difference between ‘Did you do it?’ and ‘Did he do it?’"

  "Right! And later in that same conversation, Susan asked Tom what he'd meant. She says he mumbled something about ‘putting an end to some really bad business,’ and that he was expecting a call that night that would tell him it was ‘finally done with.’ Then he said something like ‘I think there's going to be a fire.’"

  "Fire?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't get it. Why didn't she tell any of this to the cops?"

  "I asked her that. She said that at the time she didn't think it was connected to the murders. Also that the detective who called her told her their interview was pro forma, that the Sheriff's Department already knew who'd ordered the killings, that it was Barbara's gangster boyfriend and that very soon he'd be arrested."

  "You did great," I tell her. "How're things going with the job offers?"

  "I'm sticking ar
ound tomorrow morning for the finish. I'll fly into Calista tomorrow afternoon. Let's meet in Waldo's at seven, hoist a margarita or two, celebrate my deal however it turns out."

  *****

  Downstairs, discovering it's raining, I step into Waldo's for a quick lunch and a beer. While I'm eating, I ask Tony if he knew that Waldo Channing may have done a little blackmailing on the side.

  "There're rumors about everyone," Tony says. "It's a regular wasp's nest, this town. But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. C had more class in his little finger than the whole bunch of ‘em put together."

  "And Spencer Deval – does he have class?"

  "Now that's another story," Tony says. "Let's put it this way – he'd like you to think he does. He and Mr. C were always afraid someone would find out they met." Tony smiles, brings his mouth close to my ar. "Spence used to work the DaVinci strip."

  He's referring to the strip of porn shops and cheap whore's hotels on DaVinci Road where it runs along the edge of Gunktown.

  "Deval was a hustler?"

  Tony nods. "For years, Mr. C kept it quiet. In his set, it was okay to be gay. You sowed your wild oats in Europe or New York, then met someone from your own class and settled down. But if people found out Mr. C'd picked up his boyfriend on DaVinci – well, that would've been something else. Now, of course, everything's different. A thing like that can even be a plus. After Waldo died, Spence told a couple of his friends and they spread it around. Now people are fascinated he hast that in his past."

  Which leaves me with no clear answer to my original question, whether Waldo, with his arch manner, malicious wit, and flaunted superficiality, was, beneath it all, a bit of a cheap crook. And though my first impression, upon hearing this from Chip's mother, was that if it were true it made Waldo scum, I now take a gentler view. In fact, I decide, it's the first thing I've heard about Waldo that makes him truly interesting… as does the fact that his boyfriend was a hustler. And perhaps, I think, since Waldo obviously didn't need to blackmail people for money, perhaps he did it as a kind of social service, his way of ripping the masks off the people he wrote about, a confirmation also of his world view – that everyone was some kind of hypocrite.