Deciding there's nothing more to be gained by sitting around, I suggest it's time for me to leave. Mark springs to his feet. It's obvious he hates this house and can barely stand his brother. Robin and I shake hands, then he spontaneously grasps me in a hug.
"You're a good guy, David," he says, holding me tight. "I'm sorry. I really am."
As I hug him back, I catch a smirk on Mark's face. Then just before Robin and I disengage, Robin speaks into my ear in the same raw whisper he used last night: "Mom left a diary and I've got it. Call me."
An awkward moment as the three of us stand silent beside the door. Then Mark and I leave, the brothers not touching or even bothering to say good-bye.
M
ark drops me at the Townsend. From the lobby, I step into Waldo's for a beer.
At the bar, Sylvie Browne, the black reporter, catches my eye.
"How they
hangin
', David?" She picks up her glass, moves to the stool next to mine. "
Deval's
telling everyone you're a rude boy."
"I probably am."
"At the risk of inciting more rudeness, would you be willing to do some drawings for my book? Portraits of the principal media types sitting around in here. You know, different cliques at different tables. Also couples like you and Pam who met and paired off during the trial. Might be fun for you, chance to do a job on certain folks."
I know just the kind of portraits she has in mind. Listening to her, I can see the finished drawings in my head. She's right, they would be fun to do, and Waldo's would make the perfect setting.
"Intriguing notion," I tell her. "I'll see what I can work up."
O
n my way upstairs, I pick up my messages. After a quick shower in my room, I start returning calls.
Jürgen Hoff tells me his lady friend is game to pose.
"She's excited about it. The way I imagine it, she'll be sprawled out on her bed."
"Then the bed should be unmade," I tell him. "Think of
Manet's
Olympia.
I see rumpled sheets."
We arrange to meet at the lady's apartment Sunday evening when Jürgen's restaurant is closed.
Next I return a call from Chip Rakoubian. He tells me he's spoken with his mother and she's agreed to talk to me. Since she's crippled, confined to home, he suggests I meet him at the
Rathskeller
at five tomorrow afternoon. He'll drive me over to the house, introduce us, then leave us alone.
"She's got a little quirk," he tells me. "I think I mentioned she used to be a professional dominatrix. Thing is she still enjoys the role. . . so it'd be nice if you'd be extra respectful and address her as 'Ma'am.'"
I tell him,
Sure, anything for the cause. . .
I'm trying to relax, thinking about what I've set upâtomorrow evening questioning 'Ma'am'; Sunday evening questioning Jürgen while drawing his naked girlfriend sprawled on her bedâwhen my thoughts turn to Robin Fulraine. I'm about to call him, when my phone rings. It's Pam, excited. Things are going gangbusters for her in New York.
"Two networks want me. The money being offered is huge! Meantime CNN's upping their offer. My agent says
Monday'll
be The Day."
She tells me she could fly back to Calista tonight, but she's decided to sweat things out in New York.
"If I'm going to leave CNN, they'll keep me off the air till my contract runs out. The idea being, 'If she's going to work for a rival network, why give her more exposure?' "
When she gets around to asking how things are going with me, I tell her I've located Susan Pettibone in Connecticut.
"Would you be willing to interview her?" I ask. "You're barely an hour now from where she lives."
Pam goes for it. I fill her in, tell her about Susan's report of what Tom said when, awakened by her call, he thought for a moment that she was Barbara.
"According to Susan he said: 'God! Did you really do it?' or 'Did he really do it?' The cop who questioned her didn't follow up. Maybe there's something else she'd have remembered if he'd pushed. Also what hints Tom might have given her when he asked her to come out to Calista. Also whether he ever mentioned the girl who lived next door in the rooming house."
"Gee, David, how is she going to remember any of that?"
"People often remember their last conversations with someone who died."
"If she remembers, I'll get it out of her," Pam promises.
I
set up a Saturday afternoon portrait session with Robin. He seems pleased by the prospect.
"I've always wanted to be drawn by a real artist," he says. "Also it'll give us a chance to talk."
Relieved that he's willing to see me again, I go back down to Waldo's to consider the postures I'll be assuming over the next several days:
The Respectful Supplicant with Chip's mother.
The Empathetic Portraitist-Therapist with Robin.
The Master Draftsman-Interrogator with Jürgen.
So many roles, subterfuges, hidden agendas. Will I be able to stage-manage these performances, keep them straight? Most important, will I be able to achieve my goal . . . and do I even know what my goal is? Solve the Flamingo killings? Absolve Dad? Discover what it was that tore my family apart? Or is it something deeper, such as understanding the strange woman at the center of the web of conflicting motives and warring loyalties, and, by so doing, perhaps come to better understand myself?
W
aldo's is humming tonight, every table filled. I find a stool at the bar, nod to Tony, my signal I'd like a margarita, then whip out my sketchpad and start making studies for Sylvie's book.
I notice Deval observing me, then turning back to his tablemates, probably to deliver a clever putdown at my expense. I consider trying to make things up with him, then reject the idea. Whatever damage he can do to me has doubtless already been inflicted. Instead I start a caricature of him as Grand Pontificator and Buffoon.
In this respect my pencil has always served me well, sometimes gotten me into trouble, too. It was a caricature, after all, that earned me the enmity of Mark Fulraine . . . and many others since. Call it my equalizer, for a clever drawing can cut most anyone down to size. Others may brawl with their fists or, like the Flamingo shooter, settle accounts with a gun. I look across the room at the portrait of Waldo Channing. He jousted with his typewriter and cruel wit. The media folks now drinking and laughing in the bar wage war with their dispatches. And I, like artists through history, going back to the days when men first drew with ends of burnt sticks upon the interior walls of caves, know that with a line here, a line there, I can puncture any man's pomposity, wither any man's ego with my scorn.
F
riday, 5:00 P.M. The Rathskeller's humming with end-of-the-workweek bliss. Business types sip martinis, working stiffs guzzle beer, and the waitresses in their dirndls pirouette from booth to booth blithely balancing refills on their trays.
Chip looks at me, raises his mug, licks head foam off his brew.
"I brought along Dad's
fess
é
proof book," he says, handing it across the table. It's a thick, heavy, black leatherette album with the words
Studio
Fessé
embossed diagonally in silver across its front.
I turn the cover. The first picture shows a handsome woman, imperious in manner, dressed in tight-fitting black leather bustier, sitting on a richly carved wooden chair flexing a riding crop. From the way she presents herself, one would think she was seated on a throne. The shooting angle's low, as if the photo were taken from the level of her knees. She's stout, her features are strong, and her expression's filled with disdain.
"That's Ma," Chip says.
I flip through the pages, transparent envelopes, each containing an 8x10 proof sheet of a woman in a dominant pose. There are quite a few of Chip's mom, clearly Max
Rakoubian's
favorite subject, but there are also other women wearing boots or shoes with exaggerated high heels. Some look silly, others stilted as if the required poses make them uncomfortable. But there are several in which the subjects appear to relish their roles.
About two-thirds of the way through, I find the sequence on Barbara Fulraine. One proof sheet is identical to my photo, but there are others, not so perfect, including several in which Barbara appears greatly amused.
No flexed riding crops in these pictures. Rather Barbara grins at Max's lens in the manner of an actress breaking up after failing to deliver an absurdly serious line.
This is a different Barbara from the woman I've been imagining, far different from the Barbara I read about in Dad's paper. This is Barbara enjoying herself, Barbara having fun.
"I'm trying to imagine their photo session, Chipâwhat it was like."
Chip smiles. "I'm sure Dad was pleased. His pictures of Mrs. Fulraine were the most elegantly photographed in the series."
I know what he means, but of course it's not the elegance of Max's artistry that interests me, it's the spirit of his sitter, the enigma of her many moods.
M
illfield
, a particularly nondescript suburb west of the city, doesn't seem like a place a dominatrix would choose for her retirement. When Chip turns down a curving street called Tidy Lane, rounds a circle at its end, and stops in front of an ordinary ranch house with a basketball hoop attached to the garage, I wonder if he's putting me on. I'm not sure what I've been expectingâurban warehouse district loft, dark apartment in seedy neighborhoodâbut surely not an ordinary split-level on a middle-class suburban cul-de-sac.
From the front hail, Chip calls upstairs: "Me, Ma! I'm home."
"You brought the young man?" a deep, cigarettes-and-whiskey voice calls back down.
"He's with me, Ma."
A woman in a wheelchair appears in dim light at the top of the stairs, swings herself into a staircase chair elevator, flicks a switch, and the device begins a slow descent.
As she floats down into view, I recognize the woman depicted throughout Max's
Fessé
album. She looks a good twenty years older now, makeup thick, lipstick heavily applied, hair dyed a too-vibrant red. But what's most striking about her is the ruination of her face: a fallen eyebrow on the right, a drooping lower eyelid on the left, creating a disconcerting lopsidedness that, along with deep furrows in her brow, tells me I'm facing a person suffering from severe
arthritic
pain.
"So this is the young man interested in Max?" she says, looking me up and down.
"His name's David, Ma."
She squints at me. "Hello, David."
"Hello, Ma'am."
She smiles. "Polite too! I like that in a young man! Wheel me into the parlor, Chip, fetch us drinks, then go about your chores."
Chip winks at me, lifts her into a second wheelchair, then wheels her, me trailing, into a front room that amazes me even more than the conventional exterior of the house.
The little room has been done up with great style in ever-so-fancy reproduction Louis Seize-tapestry upholstered gilded chairs and couch, mirrors in gilded frames, faux
Aubusson
carpet, even a gilded reproduction bombe
é
commode. Such
nouveau riche
elegance would be laughable, especially in a little tract house like this, but Ma'am so clearly revels in the theatricality of the room that she brings it off as a kind of ironic statement about her former profession.
"So you want to know about Max?" she asks, after Chip, serving us cocktails, retreats to the kitchen to perform his duties. "He was
a gent
, fine companion, good father. I take it Chip's filled you in on my lifestyle?"
I nod.
"There wasn't anything Max wouldn't do for me, nothing I wouldn't ask him to if had a mind. He'd clean my garage on hands and knees if I wanted him to. But I don't take advantage of people's kinks, never have. His devotion was enough."
As she continues in this vein, extolling Max for his support and loyal service, I study her face and also the room, committing both to memory. I want later to draw this woman in all her spectacular peculiarity, and though I would love to begin such a drawing now, I'm afraid to broach the idea lest she start posing for me the way she did for Max. For it's not the dominatrix in her that interests me, it's the wounded look of one who once inflicted pain and upon whom now pain has circled back.
" 'Bust-in guy!' What a hoot!" As the mirth bubbles out of her, I begin to understand her attractiveness. There's vibrancy in her gestures, an aliveness that shows itself even now that she's crippled and old.
"Max Rakoubian never busted in anywhere. He was much too shy and meek. Which isn't to say he didn't take naughty pictures to hold over peoples' heads. But he would never bust in, especially not on lovers. He got his
candids
the old-fashioned wayâby drilling holes in walls. He had a bunch of little spy cameras and he built equipment so he could operate them by remote. That's how he got the pictures he took for Walt Maritz. And for all the work he did for Walt and Waldo Channing, he never received more than his day rate. They're the ones who cleaned up on it. Max just did it for the challenge."