The Dream of the Broken Horses (15 page)

Witness stated that victim thanked him for warning and offered to compensate him for his trouble. Witness stated he was reluctant to accept money from victim since this would create conflict of interest. Witness stated that as he and victim continued discussion it was clear to both that if witness withdrew from assignment, victim's ex would simply hire someone else to carry it out because he was intent on collecting negative information on victim's lifestyle.

Witness stated that at end of discussion, he and victim reached an understanding: Witness would only report personal information that was already common knowledge, namely that victim and Jack Cody were having an affair. According to witness, victim told him: 'I'm not married and neither is he, and I'm not a nun and he's not a priest. I'm entitled to have a love affair same as anybody else. So don't worry about reporting it. It won't harm me a bit:.'

Witness stated that victim went on to say there were matters in her life that were none of anybody's business and she'd prefer to keep them that way. Witness stated victim offered to pay him an amount equal to fee he was receiving from her ex, in return for which he could be a little careless in his investigation. Witness recalled victim's exact words. 'She said I should, you know, "fudge it a bit, since, after all, if you don't see me doing something you can't very well report it then, can you?" '

Witness stated out of respect and admiration for victim, he agreed to consider her proposition. Witness stated that he met victim at same location two days later at which time he proposed that victim hire him to look further into abduction case. Victim agreed and paid him $12,800 in cash.

Witness stated: 'To cover my ass, I brought in Jerry O'Neill who's an even bigger drunk than I am.' Witness cleared hiring of O'Neill with client who agreed to pay an additional $5,000 to cover O'Neill's wages. Witness stated: 'I knew O'Neill would fuck up good, and that's just what I wanted. Meantime, I was going to clear twenty-five grand on the deal.'

Witness stated there were several important things he wished to add. First he wanted it understood he felt terrible about what happened to Mrs. Fulraine, 'as I liked her and respected her very much.' Witness stated that even if he'd been
surveilling
her day of killings, he doubted he could have prevented murders. Witness stated: 'At best I might have seen something and been able to give you some leads on who did it, license plate numbers, stuff like that. But who knows? I could just as easily have been asleep. Nothing more boring than sitting in your car in a motel parking lot with nothing but a goddamn bag of stale potato chips while folks are making whoopee upstairs.'

Witness stated he wanted it on the record that he did not meet with victim in order to extort money, that payment was entirely her idea. Witness stated: 'I never solicited a bribe.' Witness stated that of course he was happy to accept money since 'I live pretty close to the edge these days,' but that money was not his primary motivation. Witness stated: 'All I wanted to do was help the lady who'd been through a hell of a lot and didn't deserve to lose her kids.' Witness stated that when he accepted cash at second meeting, he told victim: 'I owe you plenty for this, and I intend to work my ass off going back over ground we covered when we tried to find out what happened to your little girl. Who knows? Maybe something will turn up after all these years.' Witness stated that when he said this, tears formed in victim's eyes. Witness stated: 'She took my hand and squeezed it and said, "I thank you with all my heart." '

Witness stated it was always his intention to honor pledge to victim and he still intends to do so. Witness stated: 'Soon as the custody case was finished I was going to go back to work on the Fulraine infant abduction. That's what she paid me for. That was our deal. So, see, I didn't take her money to screw Mr. Fulraine. I took it to do an additional job for her. Meantime, I gave her a warning and offered to do my best to see she wasn't screwed by her ex along the way.' Witness stated he still intends to carry out assignment on his own time, 'because she paid me to do it and when something terrible happens like this, no one should be allowed to get away with it.'

Amazing! I put the papers down. The web of interlocking agendas is growing dense and I've only just started reading through the documents.

Time to take a break. I step out into the corridor, refresh myself at the water cooler. The Sheriff's Department is quiet this time of night. Down the hall the pebbled glass panel in Mace's office door is still lit up.

Returning to the conference room, I decide to examine some of the physical evidence. I pull on a pair of latex gloves, open the first big carton . . . and am horrified! It contains the bedding from room 201 —blanket, sheets, pillow slips—discolored, bullet-rent, encrusted with rust-colored stains, which I take for residue of the victims' spilled blood and guts, even possibly of their sex.

I reel back from the table. One thing to imagine the scene, quite another to be confronted by its effluvia.

I close the first carton, open the second. This one contains the victims' clothing and personal possessions recovered from the crime scene: a woman's white tennis shirt, long khaki shorts, underwear, and sandals; a pair of men's jeans and blue denim work shirt, underwear, socks and sneakers; assorted men's and women's rings, watches, wallets, and keys.

Just seeing this stuff makes me feel strange. Suddenly the victims are all too close. In my imagination, I realize, I've endowed them with mythic stature. Now, looking at these humble garments, they seem smaller and ever so vulnerable.

I open a third box, find it filled with numerous glassine envelopes identified by neat handwritten labels. Some contain fingerprints lifted from room 201: exterior and interior doorknobs, phone receiver and dial, water glasses, faucets, bureau drawer handles, even the handle of the toilet. Others contain samples of hairs, fibers, various sweepings, scrapings and swabs, four red, ejected empty shotgun shells, and, most distressing, numerous shotgun pellets recovered from the room. There is a treasure trove of forensic evidence here — DNA samples, possible identifiers such as shoe and weapon material — all carefully preserved for presentation in a court of law, still available for analysis by forensic technologies that at the time of the murders did not exist.

I examine the crime scene photographs. Like everything else in the case file, I find them meticulously keyed in Mace's hand to numbers inscribed on the lower right corners: (1) VICTIMS VIEWED FROM FOOT OF BED; (2) VICTIMS VIEWED FROM NORTH WALL; (3) VICTIMS VIEWED FROM BATHROOM DOORWAY. . .the list goes on.

The pictures are brutal. It's the harsh colors that makes them so, and their total lack of artistry. It's clear no effort was expended on lighting or composition. These are straight-on, flash-lit police photographs that rob the victims of anything heroic. I barely recognize the neat and undistinguished motel room where I executed my moody drawings. The room, depicted in these photographs, appears smaller, more confining, and totally befouled. I sense the photographer's distaste, his wish to quickly do his job and get out. In one shot I note a reflection in the mirror above the bureau of young, eager Mace
Bartel
holding a handkerchief to his nose, wincing with disgust.

Enough!
I prefer my own drawings, my imagined romantic renderings of the scene. When I drew the slain lovers, I wrapped them in gloom; in these pictures, their bodies are etched by a pitiless strobe.

I turn back to the file folders, start reading through eyewitness statements. There isn't much of substance.

Motel office clerk Johnny Powell thought the shots were backfire noises. By the time he turned to look, all he saw was the back of
 
man in a black raincoat running toward the street.

A Mr. Jeff Slade, vendor of kewpie dolls and other amusement park prizes and giveaways, was returning to his room on foot after a taxing negotiation with the managers at Tremont Park, when he saw a man rush from the Flamingo Court into the adjoining parking lot. He didn't think much about it until a few seconds later when, entering the courtyard, he saw a number of people wearing dazed expressions standing on the motel balconies. Perhaps, Mr. Slade surmised, it was on account of his military training that he turned just as a dark car pulled rapidly out of the lot. He identified the car as a late-model Olds and caught a quick glimpse of the driver. The product of this sighting accompanies the interview report, a crude
Identi
-Kit portrait that resembles a classic square-faced cartoon thug. At the bottom, the interviewing officer notes that he doubts the reliability of Slade's account as two other persons independently identified the suspect car as a four year-old Chevrolet.

A Mr. and Mrs. Albert Cranston from Buffalo reported a fleeing black-hatted, black-
raincoated
man, as did a Miss Bonnie
Lanette
, known to local police as a prostitute who worked the grounds of the amusement park and frequently brought her johns to the Flamingo for fun and games.

Two small children were interviewed, a boy and girl who'd been frolicking in the pool at the time. Neither could offer anything beyond the fact that a man had run down the exterior stairs then out toward the parking area just after the shots.

All four of the ejected shotgun shells had been wiped clean of fingerprints, suggesting a well-thought out professional hit. It was also conjectured that since the shooter had worn a long coat and wide brim hat, he was also probably wearing gloves.

Mr. Andrew Fulraine, through his attorneys, offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter. Later this offer was raised to $75,000 and still later to $100,000. Investigators passed on word of this offer, huge for the time, in the hope of prying information from snitches. In fact, according to an advisory from the FBI, only two men in the entire Midwest were suspected of specializing in hit man work, neither of whom had recently been sighted in the Calista area.

A search of public trash barrels, private garbage cans, and construction debris Dumpsters within a quarter-mile radius of the Flamingo yielded no sign of weapon, hat, coat, or gloves. A thorough but fruitless search was made of trash-collection points within Tremont Park on the theory that the car seen leaving the motel parking lot might not have been an escape vehicle driven by the shooter. Rather, according to this alternative theory, the shooter had left the scene on foot, then merged into the crowds that thronged the amusement park that hot, humid afternoon.

Fliers were printed up and placed beneath the doors of all rooms at the Flamingo, also posted on telephone poles and lampposts surrounding the motel, soliciting information about anyone seen hovering suspiciously in the vicinity of the motel as far back as a week before the killings.

Six people responded to this solicitation. None was able to provide any information beyond the fact that they'd seen a man (described by some as "tall and thin," by others as "medium height and stocky") either gazing at the motel from a booth in Moe's Burgers across the street or strolling by the motel at a suspiciously slow speed.

A thirty-two-year-old black man named Ralph "
Snooky
" Vaughan, former employee of the Flamingo fired three months before for petty pilfering of soap, toilet tissue, and other room disposables, was interviewed by Detective Joe Burns for six hours. Vaughan had a criminal record for minor crimes going back to his early teenage years. A search of his room in a
Gunktown
rooming house produced a black raincoat and black fedora-style hat. Vaughan swore he'd been nowhere near the Flamingo Court since the day he was fired and had been engaged in a game of pick-up basketball on a housing project court the afternoon of the shootings. Nine witnesses verified his alibi. When his coat proved negative for powder burns, he was released.

Seven of Barbara Fulraine's former lovers were interviewed, culled from a list provided by her ex. Of the seven, five were married. All begged investigators not to leak their names.

Charles Maw was associate director of the Calista Repertory Theater Company. He stated that he had been a longtime friend of Barbara Fulraine, that they'd been lovers prior to her marriage, and had resumed their affair approximately six months after the Fulraine child was snatched.

Maw stated he had acted as intermediary in a bizarre encounter in connection with the earlier crime. According to his account, about a year and a half after the snatching, Mrs. Fulraine, desperate to find her daughter, was actively consulting gypsy fortune-tellers around town. One, a card reader who worked out of a storefront at Danvers and 36th, told her that her child was dead and promised to provide information on the whereabouts of the body in return for $15,000 cash, $5,000 to be paid up front, the balance on delivery of the girl's corpse.

A late night meeting was arranged. Charles Maw, acting for Mrs. Fulraine, placed the $10,000 final payment in a locker at the Central Bus Terminal, then followed a chain of complicated instructions that led him, in the style of a treasure hunt, from a public phone booth to a message secreted in the men's room of a
Gunktown
bar to another message hidden beneath a rock on the east bank of the Calista River. Finally, he was picked up by a van with blacked-out windows, driven around town for a while, then into a garage at an unknown location.