A half hour after that, Tony whispers that he's heard Deval was drowned.
"The cops were in his house this morning going through 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 myself. "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 the 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 its truth. Driving his vintage Jag off a cliffâthat's consistent with what he thought of as 'high style.' I think for him going to prison would've been worse than 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 hit man?"
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:
FSI Corp., formerly known as Fulraine Steel Industries, last night released the following statement by CEO Mark Fulraine, son of the more prominent of the two Flamingo Court Motel victims:
"Speaking for the Fulraine family, we do not accept the notion that our father plotted our beloved mother's death. This latest attempt to foist the killings upon a man no longer here to defend himself is one more painful chapter in an awful family tragedy."
Near the end, on the follow-up page, I come upon this:
Sheriff's Department Chief Inspector Mace
Bartel
mentioned the important contribution of freelance forensic sketch artist David Weiss, currently in Calista covering the Foster trial for ABC News.
Weiss, a Calista native, is the son of the late Dr. Thomas Rubin, a local psychoanalyst who was treating Mrs. Fulraine at the time of the Flamingo shootings.
According to
Bartel
, Weiss has been obsessed with the case since he was a child. It was one of Weiss' sketches,
Bartel
said, that persuaded investigators that Spencer Deval was the actual triggerman at the Flamingo Court Motel.
Weiss,
Bartel
added, is well-known for his work in a number of high-profile murder cases, including drawings that led to the arrest of the Zigzag Killer in San Francisco and the Saturn Killer in Omaha.
Obsessed since he was a child. Yeah, I think, they got that right. . . .
C
alista County Courthouse, 10:07 A.M. We in the courtroom hold our collective breath as Judge Winterson asks defendant Foster to rise and face the jury.
"We find the defendant not guilty."
My eyes, of course, are fastened onto Kit. The low-key demeanor, sadly hung head, and glazed eyes all suddenly disappear. In a flash, her body straightens, her head cocks up, her eyes bug out, and a wide haw-haw grin stretches her mouth. The meek, soulful waif-defendant becomes the gleeful scam artist. She throws her arms about her lawyer and whirls him around.
At last I have something to draw! I sketch furiously, trying to catch the scene in all its horrible splendor, knowing that if I can get it down right, create a three-frame series of close-ups of Kit's transformation, I'll be able to tell the story of a murder trial gone terribly wrong.
Except for Wash,
Starret
, Harriet, and me, the courtroom empties fast. Harriet waits respectfully until I finish up my drawing, takes one look, purrs with delight, then rushes out. A moment later, Wash finishes his and hands it off to
Starret
.
Wash and I glance at one another, then smile.
"It's over," I tell him. "Let's have a drink?"
E
ven though Waldo's is full this afternoon, people standing two and three deep at the bar, the mood in the barroom is subdued. Harriet and I, Pam, Wash, and
Starret
sit together at a corner table.
The buzz surrounding us is uniform:
Foster got away with murder; not only is she free, she'll end up with Caleb Meadows's fortune. The only astonishing turn, everyone agrees, was the way she revealed herself at the end.
"I've covered murder trials for twenty years and I never saw a move like that," Wash tells us.
Most surprising to me, nobody in the room appears to be talking about Deval.
I'
m sitting on Pam's bed watching her pack, waiting for the evening news. She's flying to D.C. tonight on the eight o'clock, then on to L.A. over the weekend. Since I'm booked on a morning flight to San Francisco, it seems we won't be spending a final night together. Or, viewing it another way, we already did that last night.
Her movements are rapid as she pulls clothing out of drawers and stows it in her bags.
"I wonder if I'll ever get back here," she says. "What about you?"
"I doubt it."
"Make you
sad
?"
"Not really. I don't have family here anymore."
She stuffs a sports bra into a side pocket of her overnight.
"Anyway, you accomplished what you came here for."
"Yeah, I did."
"And now you're feeling let down."
"Pretty much," I agree.
She finishes packing, sits beside me on the bed, gently takes my hand.
"So a rich, screwy young woman and a rich, decadent old man both got away with murder. So it's an imperfect world. Nothing new about that."
A
fter we watch our respective news shows back to back, we descend to Waldo's for a farewell drink.
Tony's strangely cool when we take our stools at the bar. He refuses to make eye contact, barely nods when Pam requests our usual, a pair of margaritas.
"Something bothering you, Tony?" she asks.
"You better believe it," he mutters without looking up.
"Why don't you tell us?" She speaks gently. "We like you. Be a shame to end things on a sour note."
"I got no problem with you, Miss," Tony says, his eyes sallow, face pale as snow. "It's Mr. Weiss here's got me peeved."
"Because of what I told the papers about Waldo doing blackmail?"
Tony doesn't bother to nod or even to look at me, simply faces Waldo's portrait as he speaks his mind:
"Mr. C was a great man. You and some others here would like to tear him down, but the people who really knew him know he could never have done what you say. He was a great man and he will always be great. And now please excuse me, this is my busy time. Lots of clients waiting for drinks. . . ."
Pam and I exchange a look, I leave a hundred dollars on the bar, then we move to a table. A few minutes later, a waiter returns the money on a tray along with a brief explanation: "No gratuity necessary, Tony says."
Pam shrugs. "He still loves the guy. What can you do?"
E
ven in the morning I can still taste her final salty kiss upon my lips, the kiss she bestowed when I dropped her at the airport, along with her parting words: "I hope you call."
I check out of the Townsend early. There's a place I want to revisit before I return my car. I drive out to Van Buren Heights, pass the Pembroke Club, then stop in front of 2558 Demington, the house where I was brought up.
The place looks different than on the night I drove here from Izzy Mendoza's. It appeared moody then, spooky even, hulking and only vaguely outlined in the darkness. This morning the sun is out full force, sharpening the edges and brickwork, polishing the dark timbers recessed in the facade.
I look more closely. The front door has a dark reddish hue . . . just as it did the morning my mother, sister, and I left twenty-five years ago. It was winter then, a blizzard was raging through the Calista Valley, but there came a moment when we were seated inside our taxi, I in the front seat, Mom and Rachel in back, that I turned to look at the house a final time and sunlight suddenly broke through the slate gray sky and glinted off the cordovan panels of the open door.
Tears spring to my eyes as I recall the image of my father in his shirtsleeves shivering in the icy wind, standing lean and tall and lonely in the doorway, a stricken look upon his face.
Peering at him through the passenger window, I wondered when I would see him again. Then he moved a little, the sun caught the water glistening in his eyes, and suddenly I felt hollow and turned away to face the windshield. A few moments later we were on our way to the airport, to our new life in Southern California, leaving Dad to face the winter alone and the demons raging in his heart.
S
an Francisco: I've been back here a week, sleeping poorly, trying to impose order on everything I discovered in Calista, wondering too how the end of my quest will now affect my life.
Thinking has never been my best route to understanding. For me drawing works better, mapping my discoveries and insights on human faces. And so I have been drawing since seven o'clock last night, working at my drafting table surrounded by windows overlooking the city and the bay.
The sun was shining when I set to work. I paused at twilight to watch as darkness began to coat the buildings, bridges, and surrounding waters, draining away the colors, turning my view into a nightscape of grays and blacks. Then I set to work again, and, without my willing it, the planchette effect took hold. Once that happened, time had no meaning. With a good thirty or more Calista faces stored in my memory, I drew and drew, covering sheet after sheet, depicting scenes between the actors in the overlapping dramas nearly as rapidly as I could imagine them being played:
My shocked expression, as, seven years old, I stand outside a bathroom door hearing the sound as Becky
Hallworth
slaps little Belle Fulraine across the face;
Max
Rakoubian's
jolly smile while photographing Barbara Fulraine in his Doubleton Building studio, counterpoised with the crafty expression on his face as he betrays her by installing a camera behind the grate above her love-nest bed;
Barbara's grimace of ecstasy while making love with Jack Cody in his bedroom above the gaming room at The Elms;
Waldo Channing, left eyeball twitching, telling police investigators that Barbara Fulraine was some kind of slut;
Andrew Fulraine, cold as ice, promising Spencer Deval a fortune if he will but do him the kindness of committing murder;
My father, Dr. Thomas Rubin, pausing outside the door to room 201 at the Flamingo, hesitating, then discovering he has no choice but to knock;