I quickly shut the door, cutting off the light, then return to the bed to rest a while in the gloom. This room, I think, was the Scene of Blood, and thus it is well that I have come here to breathe the air, take it all in with my eyes, understand how sounds reverberate in the space and the particular way the light cuts across the floor. I scan the walls knowing there is impacted in them echoes of the death throes of Tom Jessup and Barbara Fulraine, whose agony, in some deep sense I cannot understand, seems still present in the room.
Waldo's
7:00 P.M.
I sit at the bar, sipping from a margarita beautifully made by Tony, awaiting the arrival of Pam Wells.
The usual suspect are out in force. The CBS group. The NBC group. Spencer Deval, at his regular table beneath the portrait, holding forth to a different media contingent tonight. The slinky black female reporter from Chicago, who, Tony had told me, has a contract from a New York publisher to do a book on the trial, regards me curiously from the far end of the bar.
I hear there are two other reporters' books under contract, but I doubt it'll matter much whose book comes out first. The way I see it, this time next year the Foster trial will be deader than dust.
"There you are." It's Pam.
"Hi. Want a drink?"
"Sure." She grins. "Then let's go upstairs. I've been thinking about you all day. There're all sorts of nasty things I want us to do."
She takes a sip from my margarita while waiting for Tony to make one for her. "What'd you do this afternoon anyway?"
"Went out sketching."
"In this heat?"
"I found a cool place."
"You like to keep busy, don't you? Keep your hand moving. Now why do you feel you have to do that, David?"
"I think it keeps me sane."
She thinks that one over. "You're a pretty interesting guy." She smiles. "I have a hunch about you."
"What's that?"
"That you've got a story."
"Everyone's got a story."
"Sure. But yours is special. You're up to something here. That's what I think. I trust my hunches too."
Tony presents her with her drink. She clicks her glass against mine, then sips.
So she thinks she's got me psyched-out after one session in the sack. Well, two can play at that game, I think.
"If I tell you my story you might lose interest."
"Try me and find out," she challenges.
"I'll think about it. You know what they say about you, Pam?"
"What?"
"‘She's a real bitch.’"
She stares at me a moment, then laughs. "Well, maybe I am," she says. "And maybe I've met my match."
Having nicely cleared the air, we finish our drinks, then ascend to her room where we nearly tear off one another's clothes.
An hour later, showered and refreshed, we step out the front door of the Townsend, stroll along the night streets of downtown Riverwalk, then on to a neighborhood of bars and restaurants along the Calista River, an area locals call Irontown.
Calista, in fact, is a very interesting city, as special and atmospheric in its way as Boston or Miami. It's a true river town with all the trappings that description implies – bridges, docks, barges, boats. It has a sultry richness, a plenitude of trees, and a locally much-spoken-of "Athenian" aspect, Calista's self-image as an oasis of culture in the culturally barren Midwest. Beyond all that, it's the kind of city that, long after you've left it because you thought it wasn't your rightful place, continues to haunt your dreams.
There was enormous wealth here as there was in all the great rust-belt cities of the American plain, wealth on a scale that people from the East rarely understand. People here have formed fabulous art collections. Growing up, I played with kids whose parents had Rembrandts in their houses, in one case an El Greco hanging in the dining room. The rich here built distinguished cultural institutions: churches, temples, a magnificent art museum, fine symphony orchestra, world-class university and medical center, ballet company, repertory theater company, champion sports teams, elegant, gracious suburbs.
They also built great factories and mills that were among the most hellish places on earth, polluting the river to the extent that at one point it literally turned red from the iron precipitate runoff from the smelters.
As befits a city of great wealth and power, Calista too became a city of great crimes and, sometimes, punishments: the Wandering Strangler killings, the Heller-Hinton murders, the Barton Paint Factory explosion… and a good fifty notorious murders and disasters more. Some were solved, others not, some still haunt the populace, while others obsess only those whose lives they touched. In the latter category, I would place the double murder at the Flamingo Court of Tom Jessup and Barbara Fulraine, which the local press dubbed simply "Fulraine," because in this city Fulraine was a name to be reckoned with, while poor Tom Jessup was pretty much a nonentity.
Pam Wells and I are standing in one of the semicircular overlooks on Riverwalk. The snaking Calista River glows below us, its surface, reflecting the night sky, smooth like slick, black oil, broken only by the girder bridges and jackknife drawbridges that cross it at odd and varying angles.
"So this is the famous river that turned red?" Pam shakes her blond hair free, sniffs the air. "Doesn't smell bad at all."
"The redness was a warning call. They knew they had to clean it up. See that?" I point south toward a cluster of slag heaps and the ruins of a steel plant.
"Looks like a bunch of old dinosaur bones."
"That's what's left of Fulraine Steel, once one of the great mills here. Last twenty years the steel business has gone to hell. Most steel's imported now or made in energy-efficient plants. But there was a time when those ruins were alive with smelters, when black smoke and cinders poured out of the stacks. The smell pervaded the city. You couldn't walk the route we just took without getting cinders in your eyes. It was dirty here, also rich, a place where wealth was created beyond men's dreams. Iron ore and cola came downriver on barges. Steel was forged, then shipped back out to the world. Steel is what made this town… and for a while ruined it too."
The restaurant we choose is a noisy yuppy hangout, filled with affluent young people talking and laughing – stockbrokers, attorneys, ad execs. As we walk in, a few people, recognizing Pam, follow us both with their eyes. Passing a table, I pick up a snatch of conversation about the Foster triaclass="underline"
"It's the money. Jury'll see she did it for the money," a young man tells his date.
"She'll walk. Reasonable doubt," his companion replies.
We find a secluded booth in back, order pasta, salad, and a bottle of wine, then gaze into one another's eyes.
"Funny how I keep wanting to flatter you, David," she said. "you bring out the nice girl in me, I guess."
She asks me about past relationships. I describe my brief failed marriage, aimless dalliances, numerous ruptured love affairs. When I ask about hers, she tells me she lived with a guy the last four years, a news producer for another network whom she met when she first moved to New York.
"We broke up this winter. It was pretty traumatic. Lots of quarreling about who owned what and who'd get to keep our great apartment on Riverside Drive. After torturous negotiations, I bought him out, then decided I didn't want to live there anymore. Too many memories. So I took the CNN job in D.C. and put the apartment up for sale. Now he says I only wanted it out of spite."
She asks about my life in San Francisco. I describe my loft on Telegraph Hill, the view over the Bay, and how in the early morning the sun seems to rise in slow motion before my bay windows, radiating light so blinding I'm forced to run away. I tell her about my pair of big World War II-vintage tripod-mounted binoculars installed beside my drafting table in the bay, which I use to watch ships come and go during the day and to scan the city for interesting dramas at night. I tell her I'm something of a voyeur and that she's right, I do have a busy hand. I tell her about my hundreds of sketchbooks, how together they constitute an enormous incoherent diary of my life – places I've visited, people I've met, situations I've observed. It's as if, I tell her, I'm seeking to draw some kind of definitive scene, which, when sketched, will solve a mystery I seem to have spent the better part of my life puzzling out. I tell her I don't know what this mystery is, nor why I feel compelled to solve it, but that I believe its source is here in this city where I was born.