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.
An 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.
Making 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.
The Foster Case: Another 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, black and whites, maintenance and postal workers, with a couple of college grads thrown in;
The Defendant, Kit Foster – waiflike with off-center eyes, heart-breaking 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 quarreling 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.
Frankly, I don't care a damn abut it and am totally neutral as to its outcome.
Calista in summer: The air hangs heavy here, fraught with high humidity and heat, while the river gives off pungent fumes. I love this kind of weather. It reminds me of the summers of my youth -sweating on baseball diamonds beneath relentless sunshine broke only by occasional fierce summer thunderstorms.
We had one last night. Thunder boomed. Great sheets of rain lashed the streets. Calista's landmark mid-century twin towers, hometown architect Eric Lindstrom's heroic Tower of the Great Plains and Tower of the Great Lakes, stood stark and lonely against the lightning-torn sky.
The residue is still upon the city this hot, damp Tuesday morning, as I make my way along rain-slick sidewalks to the welter of video units and trucks parked at the rear of the ornate beaux-arts Calista County Courthouse.
I've come in search of Pam Wells, hoping to discern whether she regards me as but a one-night stand. Also to see if, indeed, she slept well last night, or, like me, tossed and turned during the storm, unable to expel the memory of our coupling from my mind.