The Dream of the Broken Horses (20 page)

"Neighborhood's the same," Mace says. "Ordinary, middle class, lots of elderly. In these buildings there's always an old crab who complains about the kids, and a faint smell of cabbage and cat piss in the halls."

I gaze at the building, trying to imagine Barbara's childhood. What must it have been like for her to depart this place every morning for Ashley-Burnett, sister school to Hayes, where the girls all came from big houses in Delamere, Van Buren Heights, and Maple Hills? Her only choice would have been to outdo them, be smarter, prettier, more athletic, and display such savoir-faire that her classmates, rather than looking down on her, would vie for her favor.

"Barbara's mom knew everybody out at the track," Mace says. "All the owners, trainers, jocks. Early on, she had Barbara up on horses. The kid was a natural. Started winning trophies when she was six. When we went into her house after she was killed, we found a room full of them, hundreds of blue ribbons and silver cups. It was her horsemanship that got her into society. It was at a Maple Hills Hunt Club Christmas dance where she met Fulraine. She was back on holiday from her junior year at Vassar. He was home from his senior year at Yale. He fell for her right away, but she didn't make it easy for him. There were lots of young men interested in Barbara Lyman. Took three years of courtship before she agreed to get engaged."

So it was by her excellent horseback riding that she won her station in life—wealth, social position, her magnificent house. By her charm too, no doubt, also her beauty, intelligence, ambition, and, of course, her smoldering sexuality. Then tragedy! Her infant daughter was abducted. It's from that point, the point of the abduction, that her life started turning strange.

"I met Doris Lyman at the funeral," Mace tells me.

We're heading back up Gale now, passing antique shops, galleries, trendy bars.

"She'd moved down to Florida. Barbara had bought her a little place in Coral Gables. She still looked pretty good. Had a few facelifts, no doubt. She told me she still played the ponies, got herself over to Hialeah two, three times a week. I gave her my typical homicide investigator's speech about how we weren't going to rest till we found her daughter's killer. Then she said, 'I had a feeling it would end for Barb like this.' I was so surprised I forgot to ask her what she meant. When I called her a couple days later, she played hard-ass, said she didn't remember saying that, I must've misheard or misunderstood."

Mace turns to me. "But I hadn't. No mistake. I'd heard her perfectly. I can even remember the expression on her face."

I
stop in Waldo's, find the usual crowd of journalists and network people. No sign of Pam. I'm about to leave when I notice Tony standing in his usual meditative position behind the bar.

"How's it going, Tony?"

"Same as usual," he says.

I take a stool across from him. "You've been around, Tony. You know this town pretty well."

"Well as any barman, I'd say."

"Over the years ever hear of a guy named Max Rakoubian?"

Tony grins. "Sure, I remember Max. Been a while. He kicked the bucket few years back."

"What'd you know about him?"

Tony strokes his chin. "Max was kinda slimy as I recall. Took pictures, some of 'em nice, some not—know what I mean?"

"He did porn?"

"Not porn exactly. More like bust-in stuff."

"'Bust-in'?"

"You know, say a gentleman's looking to divorce, he doesn't want to get taken to the cleaners, so he needs proof his spouse is shacking up. Pictures make good proof. To get pictures he needs a bust-in guy, guy who'll bust in on the spouse and lover, take a few shots. That's bust-in stuff."

"Max did that?"

"His specialty. This'll probably surprise you—he and Mr. C were fairly tight. I think they had some deals going.
Max'd
tip Mr. C off on stuff. There was also talk Max did bust-ins freelance, busted in on folks without being hired to. Then he'd try and sell the pictures back. Those were the rumors anyway."

"Blackmail photographs?"

"You could call them that."

"Jesus!"

"Don't think badly of him, Mr. Weiss. Max was
a gent
. Knew how to talk to the ladies. Could sweet-talk 'em into taking off their clothes, not for any reason but to let him record their God-given beauty—or so he used to put it."

"Doesn't sound like much of a gent to me, Tony."

"Well, each to his own I always say."

B
ust-in guy, bust-in stuff—seems to me that's exactly what the shooter did at the Flamingo Court, burst in on Barbara and Tom, not with a camera but with a gun. I'm thinking about that, working myself toward sleep, when I hear knocking at my door. I open up to find Pam looking sexy, swaying in the doorway.

"Hi,
loverboy
!" she purrs in her sexiest voice. "Mind if I come in?"

T
his morning, after Pam goes up to the gym for her
workout
, I phone Kate Evans, ask if she's made a decision.

"I've given it a lot of thought," she says. "I don't know if I can help, but I'm willing to try."

Great!

We agree to meet at the Flamingo at 2:00 P.M. She'll leave her kids at her mother's for the afternoon. I'm to come directly to her suite above the office.

"I'm a little nervous about this," she tells me, "but I guess it's something that's gotta be done."

For me, an ID interview is an exploration into another person's mind. I don't do so-called cognitive interviews or employ standard forensic techniques. I also don't put such techniques down. They work well for most forensic artists. However, I'm interested in probing deep, uncovering repressed material, stripping away protective layers, plumbing the unconscious of my informants. In this respect, I'm following in the footsteps of my dad. As I often remind myself, plumbing the unconscious is the family trade.

At exactly two o'clock,
sketchpack
in hand, I climb an exterior staircase on the Dawson side of the Flamingo, then follow a narrow walkway to the owner's apartment. One side of this walkway is demarcated by the back of the large neon Flamingo image that proclaims the name of the motel to passing cars.

It's another hot, humid Calista summer afternoon. Standing before Kate Evans's door, I feel my shirt sticking to my back. I knock, then hear footsteps. The door opens and Kate peers at me out of the gloom. She's wearing sandals, tight shorts, and a skinny, ribbed tank top. The blinds in the room have been pulled.

Her eyes seem to glow in her face. They're large eyes alive with curiosity, perhaps some trepidation, too. I've been made uneasy by her scrutiny before -on my first visit to room 201 and two days ago when we spoke. I like the fact that she makes strong eye contact; that's usually a lifelong trait. If her vision was as direct when she was a girl, she may have seen the shooter clearly.

She invites me in, offers me a beer. I opt for a Coke. While she fetches it, I check out her living room: basic furniture with tough fabric upholstery, the kind of indestructible stuff one expects to find in a residence inhabited by a couple of rowdy kids. The carpeting's wall-to-wall, the pictures are conventional. The only striking characteristic, the single feature that differentiates the room from American Motel, are the shelves crammed with paperback editions of self-help books—books about how to get along, make money, build self-esteem, find success, analyze your own dreams, become your own best friend. Books too about
wicca
, tarot, astrology, and the occult.

This tells me that she's a troubled soul in search of easy remedies. It will be my task not to let her stray into the mystical, keep her in the here-and-now.

"I see you're a New Ager," I tell her, gesturing toward the books.

"Can't seem to get enough of that stuff."

"Are you a witch, Kate?"

"Not quite." She lights a cigarette, perches on her couch, then draws her tanned legs beneath her like a swami. "I'm an aspirant goddess. Not so easy with two boys roughhousing all the time."

She's a single mother. Her sons' father lived with them for a while, left when things didn't work out. "And I think now we're the better for it," she says.

To relax her, I ask about her boys, where they go to school, what their interests are. Then I ask her what's it like being owner-manager of a motel, the joys, pains, special problems of the job. We chat about the old amusement park, the rides and games, especially the Fun House, how weird and spooky it was. We talk about Calista, the changes
that've
taken place, the new Natural History Museum, and how the old stuff, like Lindstrom's magical twin towers, still look good as ever. As we gab, I realize we're fairly close in age—she was seven the summer of the killings; I was twelve.

I tell her about my work, my ID sketches of the Zigzag Killer, the Kansas City kidnapper, and the serial murderer dubbed the Saturn Killer because he drew wide concentric rings around the bodies of his victims. In each case, I emphasize that I worked
with
my witnesses. Rather than taking personal credit for my portraits, I make it clear I regard them as collaborations. In each case, I give her a little background so she'll understand that the amount of time between a sighting and production of a sketch varies greatly and needn't be an issue.

"In your case," I tell her, "the fact that you were seven at the time probably works in your favor. Often kids engrave their early memories, especially when they're traumatic. Also the fact that afterwards you saw his face in dreams tells me it registered pretty well."

"I don't know," she says, squashing out her cigarette. "I tried to draw him myself last night. Didn't get too far."

Damn! I should have told her not to try that. Now it's too late. I'll have to play along.

"Still have the sketches?"

She nods, uncurls herself from the couch, retreats to another room, returns with a child's sketchpad. I move to the couch, sit beside her so we can look at what she drew together.

She shows me a pair of drawings on facing pages. Soon as I see them, I start feeling better: Her sketches are rudimentary egg-shaped outlines of a man's head with the features schematically portrayed in a childlike hand.

"As you can see, I'm no artist."

"You don't have to be," I assure her. "That's my job."

I suggest we use her sketches as a base from which we'll develop more refined portraits as we go along.

"First," I tell her, "I want you to set the scene. Close your eyes, imagine yourself back then, recall what you were doing before you heard the shots."

She starts by describing the heat. "It was like today . . . " she says.

A hot, humid summer afternoon, the kind of sweaty, buggy afternoon typical of a Calista August.

The noises around were also typical: the hurdy-gurdy sounds of Tremont Park drifting from across the road; the high pitch of kids whooping it up out on the sidewalk in front.

She spent a lot of afternoons that summer playing in the pool, splashing around, meeting kids whose parents were motel guests, forging quick friendships that would flourish over a couple of hours then dissolve the following morning when the visiting family checked out and drove away.

Even back then Johnny Powell manned the desk weekday afternoons. He was in his cubicle watching a ball game just like he probably is today. She could hear the sounds of the game, the commentary of the announcers, the roar of the crowd when there was a hit. She was also conscious that her father was around, probably doing maintenance and repairs, and that every so often her mother appeared in the window of the owner apartment to check up on her, make sure she was all right.

"This window," she says, pointing at it.

I ask her why she's drawn the blinds.

She tells me she finds the summer light too harsh. "Even with the air-conditioning, it makes the room too hot."

This causes concern about her vision. "Were you wearing glasses, Kate?"

"No. I see very well."

"Sunglasses?"

She shakes her head.

"So the harsh light might have made you squint?"

Yes, she remembers that. She used to squint a lot. "I'd get these
sunburnt
wrinkle marks from squinting all the time."

Her mother was always after her to use sun lotion. Sometimes she'd come down to the pool area and massage it into Kate's back.

She remembers the swimsuit she wore that summer, one piece, bright yellow, with straps that crisscrossed her back. She still likes yellow swimsuits, she says. She remembers the smell of chlorine from the pool, the sting of the cold water when the little boy she was playing with splashed her to induce her to jump in. She remembers slipping in a few times and the feeling in her arms when she held onto the rungs of the pool ladder to pull herself back out. She remembers the energy she had, the tirelessness, the way her skin tanned, the sun marks left by her swimsuit straps. She remembers sitting on the edge of the pool with just her feet in the water, swishing the water around, kicking at it, kicking it in the face of the little boy.