The Dream of the Broken Horses (2 page)

I finish my drawing, turn the page of my sketchbook, then look around. The Townsend is the media hotel in town; Waldo's, just off the lobby, is the media bar and assembly point. It's a good bar, posh and dark, with mahogany paneling, soft leather seats, art deco sconces, and an excellent barman named Tony who wears a white jacket and an ironic smile.

Tony, his manner announces, has seen it all. Nothing about us or the trial surprises him. Sophisticated journalists from New York, some with famous faces seen often on TV, do not impress him. He has assured me (for he and I have lately become friends) that they would not impress Waldo Channing either, the man whose portrait hangs on the far wall, for whom the bar is named.

"Wasn't he something?"

Tony stands opposite me across the bar. He's stopped to chat, as he often does when he has a free moment. "Noticed you gazing at his picture. Mr. C. knew everybody, you know—all the big stars and personalities. Hemingway and Dietrich, Bogart and Bacall. He wrote about them. They were his friends. He could have lived anywhere—New York, London, the French Riviera—but he chose to stay here. Gotta respect the guy for that. He never gave up on this burg even when most everyone else did. . . ."

Tony moves away to take an order from a slinky black female reporter at the other end of the bar. I make a quick sketch of him shaking a drink. He has sleek silver hair that nicely reflects the light and a complexion so deathly pale I doubt he ever goes out in daytime.

When he returns, he glances at my drawing.

"Not bad," he says. "The guy who painted Mr. C. never knew him." He gestures again at the portrait. "Did it all from photographs. Shows too. Made him look stiff, which Mr. C. wasn't. He was smooth, suave—could turn a mean phrase, too, when he had a mind. Some didn't like him for that, when he made fun of them in his column. But most respected him. He could charm your pants off. First time I saw him I was tending bar at the opera. Came the intermission, all these folks stream toward me, pushing and shoving to get their orders filled. Then I notice this handsome fellow standing among them, smiling at me, waiting his turn. I fill his order first, dry vodka martini with a twist. He thanks me, tips me double. Later I learned he was the columnist, Waldo Channing. So, see, now it's an honor for me to tend bar here."

An honor. Sure, I can see that. For even if the oil portrait of Channing makes him look a little stiff, as Tony says, it also displays his sleek good looks, savoir faire, sense of entitlement, and self-assurance. The brittle quality is there, too, the studied artificiality. And there's a gleam in the painted eyes, the barest trace of his malevolence. I know why Waldo Channing didn't move to London or New York, why he stayed in Calista, where he was born. Because here he could preside not just as society columnist but as social arbiter, a person to whom others revealed their confidences, which he could then preserve or betray as he saw fit.

"Lady wants to meet you," Tony says. He subtly gestures toward a blond sitting alone at a table near the wall. I recognize her at once: Pam Wells, reporting the trial for CNN.

"Interested?" Tony asks.

"Sure."

Tony raises his right eyebrow, slips away. I pick up my drink, pencil, and sketchbook. Ms. Wells observes me closely as I approach.

"Well, hi!" she says, brilliant blue eyes glowing, voice full of good cheer. "Thanks for stopping by."

"Thanks for asking me."

"What a scene!" She indicates the room. "I feel lots of fear and loathing swirling about. I've been sitting here asking myself, 'Pam, what's a nice girl like you doing in a snake pit like this?' "

In person she's looser than on the air. Also she doesn't punch up her words the way they train TV reporters to do. She looks softer, too, blond shoulder-length hair hanging loose, lips unpainted, a good quantity of fun in her lively eyes. Her bust is fine, her scoop neck reveals attractive freckles, and her bare arms show well-tended muscles. I won't have much trouble falling for her if she lets me, I think.

I offer my hand. "David Weiss."

"I know," she says, giving it a nice shake. "I'm Pam—"

"Yeah, isn't it great—we both know who we are."

Her laughter's silver. "I've seen your sketches on the air, David. You're really kicking our butt."

"Henderson's good."

"He's all right, but his stuff doesn't stand up to yours. My producer's looking for someone else."

"Poor Henderson."

"Guy can't cut it . . . what're you going to do?"

Like everyone else in the room, we're talking shop. Two tables away, beneath the portrait, a quartet from NBC are paying rapt attention to Waldo Channing's successor, local society columnist and social guru Spencer Deval. Deval, who wears an ascot and affects a British accent, is short, stout, bald, has a slack mouth, a
smirky
grin, and yellowish bags of flesh beneath his eyes. A habitual name-dropper, he's also a compelling storyteller. Last night he held forth at the same table to a spellbound trio from CBS.

"I hear Westin's flying in for a one-on-one with Kit Foster," Pam says.

I shrug. "I'm just the sketch artist. I don't know anything about network stuff."

"A lot more than 'just the sketch artist.' I've seen your ID drawings, David. They're fabulous."

I make a demure gesture to show modesty.

"Oh, they are!" she says. "The Zigzag Killer—you had him cold. Also the Saturn Killer and that guy out in Kansas City who kidnapped those little girls. When they finally catch the monsters, they look just the way you drew them. Yet you never saw them. Or did you?"

"I saw them in my mind," I tell her.

She peers at me, interested. "How'd you do that?"

"The way everyone else does. Eyewitness interviews."

"But your drawings aren't like everyone else's. They're uncanny dead-on accurate."

I shrug.

"What's your secret?"

"It's not like it's a magic trick."

"I'm just wondering how you pull the memories out. You must identify strongly with your witnesses to get inside their heads so deep."

"Yeah," I agree, "that's pretty much it."

She orders another round. As we talk more about the trial, I notice the way her breasts strain against the cotton of her blouse and the firm, bare, tanned flesh of her arms.

She doesn't have much use for Judge Winterson. "Old battle-ax," she calls her. I tell her if Winterson hadn't been tough and refused to allow cameras in her courtroom, I wouldn't have gotten the gig.

"Courtroom
sketching's
not really your thing, is it?"

"Basically I'm a forensic artist."

"Ever do fine art drawing?"

"Gave that up years ago."

"You're from here, right?"

I nod. "How'd you know?"

"Heard it around. Go to the local art school?"

I shake my head. "They've got a pretty good one, but I went to Pratt."

"Ah!" she smiles. "Midwest boy goes off to the Big City."

"Yeah, that was me, the kid from Calista, desperate to get to New York, seek my fortune. Not like Waldo Channing." I gesture toward the painting. "Tony the barman says old Waldo could've lived anywhere in the world, but he liked it best here. Tony finds that admirable."

Pam Wells gazes at the painting. "Something funny about his eyes." She squints. "Like maybe he wasn't 'nice people.'"

She's got that right,
I think.

A
n hour and two rounds later, we're feeling mellow, interested in one another, flirting. Since she's the one with higher status, I feel it's her place to make the first move.

Finally she glances at her watch. "Almost midnight." She leans forward, smiles, drills me with her sparkling eyes. "Want to come up to my room?"

"That's a very pretty proposition," I tell her.

As we exit, I catch a look from Tony. Again he raises his right eyebrow, his trademark comment on matters of the heart.

M
aking love to Pam Wells, I find, is like driving a luxury racing car, say a Ferrari or Lamborghini—not that I've had much experience with either. The engine purrs. You feel its power. There's a perfect fit between driver and machine. You hug the road even as you take dangerous curves. The ride's oil-smooth, faultless, elegant. Even the sound of the meshing gears is beautiful.

Which is not to suggest that Pam makes love like a machine. On the contrary, I find her tender. Nor does she give off an aroma of fine leather and wood; I smell wildflowers on her skin. She's a gifted lover who makes me feel like the expert lover I've longed to be but never had the courage to believe I am. In short, she makes me feel like a great driver, even though I suspect
it's
she who's doing the driving and me who is the car.

"You're fun," she whispers as we rest. "I had a hunch you'd be good at this."

We share a laugh, then she eases me out, telling me she has to get her "beauty sleep."

"I'd ask you to stay but I know if I do we'll end up playing through the night," she says. "Then I'll look a mess when I do my early stand-up at the courthouse door."

Riding the hotel elevator down to my floor, I realize I've been blown off . . . but in the nicest, coolest, most flattering way.

T
HE FOSTER CASE:
Another one of those sordid celebrity cases that grip the country from time to time. The kind that, just when you think you've had enough of it, along comes a new twist and then, stirred by the media frenzy, you're back in thrall.

I'm here in Calista as part of the pack covering the event. On the very day Judge Stella Winterson banned cameras from her courtroom, I was hired by ABC on an urgent contract basis to make sketches of moments of high drama and conflict during the trial. This entitles me to a reserved seat in the courtroom behind the defendant's table, from which position I have an excellent view of the cast of characters:

The Judge—big, bosomy black woman with white hair, stern demeanor, occasional maternal smile;

The Jurors—usual mix: men and women, blacks and whites, maintenance and postal workers, with a couple of college grads thrown in;

The Defendant, Kit Foster—waiflike with off-center eyes, heartbreaking smile,
punked
-out auburn hair;

The Prosecutor—young, earnest, articulate, organized;

The Defense Attorney—mellifluous voice, expensive cream linen suit, flowing gray hair that curls over the collars of his beautiful made-to-measure pink shirts.

In the most banal terms, the case comes down to this: super rock star Caleb Meadows (he of the whiny attenuated voice) was alone one afternoon this past winter with his girlfriend, performance artist Kit Foster (she of the scrawny, multi-pierced body), in the Dinosaur Room of the new architecturally brutal Calista Museum Of Natural History.

Moments later Meadows was dead. Hearing screams, a museum security man arrived on the scene to find Foster covered with Meadows's blood and an old hunting knife buried in Meadows's chest. Later examination of silent videotape from a surveillance camera showed the couple apparently quarrelling fiercely in the moments just before the knifing.

According to Foster's statement, made just afterwards to police, Meadows pulled out the knife, thrust it at her, and, in the ensuing struggle, stabbed himself. She was vague about the details, couldn't explain how she, at a mere one hundred two pounds, managed to deflect his attack and turn it around. "I've blocked it all out," she said. Ironically or by design, depending on one's point of view, these final contested moments were, on account of the odd place where the parties were standing at the time, invisible to the surveillance camera and thus not recorded on tape.

Friends of the victim subsequently informed police that Ms. Foster was a heroin addict who had threatened Mr. Meadows with violent bodily harm should he break up with her as he'd been threatening to do for several weeks.

Friends of Ms. Foster counterclaimed that Mr. Meadows was a degenerate who'd threatened to carve up Ms. Foster if she ever left him, which, that very afternoon, she'd informed him she was about to do.

Complicating these contesting claims was the fact that Mr. Meadows and Ms. Foster had each named the other sole beneficiary in reciprocal wills executed several months before. It has been estimated that at the time of his demise, Mr. Meadows was worth approximately sixty million dollars.

So there it is, a tawdry case involving selfish, tacky people with too much money and fame. Yet, the commentators keep reminding us, it has all the ingredients of a great crime story: the essential trio of sex (kinky), lies (stupendous), and videotape (incompetent), not to mention drugs (hard),
 
money (huge), and murder (most foul).

Depending on one's point of view, the killing was either accidental as the defendant claims, or calculated and committed for profit as the prosecution wants desperately to prove. In short, a case of no particular consequence that carries no moral lesson or tragic overtone that may illuminate our fragile human condition. A case that would inspire no interest at all except for the celebrity status of the principals and the odd venue of the scene of blood.