The Dream of the Broken Horses (38 page)

"I guess not. Also I kept hoping I'd open the paper one day and read that they'd solved Flamingo. It was years before I realized that if that's what I wanted, I'd have to come back and make it happen myself."

A
s we drive back downtown from Torrance Hill, I again check my rearview mirror. There are a lot of cars, it's difficult to tell, but one set of headlights seems to be sticking with us.

"Hold on tight," I tell Pam. "I'm going to make some moves."

"What's going on?"

"I think we're being followed."

I swerve into the right lane of Thurston, do a hard turn onto Lester, make another right onto
Fairlane
, then do a quick U-turn, pull in front of a paint store, stop, and cut my headlights.

"Hey! Is this a joke?"

"The guy who was asking about me over at the Flamingo—I'm pretty sure he's been in my room poking through my drawings."

"I can't believe—"

"
Shhhh
. Here he comes. Slide down in your seat."

As the car, a dark, nondescript sedan, sails toward us, I can't decide whether its headlights show the same signature. As it passes, I try to get a look at the driver, but I can't make out anything except the silhouette of hatted figure hunched over the wheel. After he's gone, I try to make out his license plate, but by then he's too far away.

"Shit! I guess I should follow him, get his plate at least."

"Sure, go for it, David! This is fun!"

I make another U-turn, then speed up, hoping to catch him at the next stop sign. But the car, which should be ahead of me, isn't there.

"Where is he? Do you see him?"

Pam twists in her seat. "Could be him," she says, indicating a car parked in the opposite direction across the street.

"Jesus! He did the same maneuver!"

"Well, you got him now. Make another U and pull up behind."

But I keep driving. I don't like the neighborhood, it's dark and lonely, and I don't feel like playing games.

"You're sure that was him?"

"I'm not sure, no."

"Do you think I was cowardly not to double back?"

"I think you played it smart. But if he was following you, now he knows you're onto him."

"I wish I knew how long this has been going on. He could've been tracking me for weeks. If the folks at Flamingo hadn't told me, I never would have noticed."

I
t feels good to be back in Pam's arms, feel the warmth of her body, inhale her fresh sand-and-sun scent, run my fingers along her silken skin. It does my soul good to make love to this gorgeous woman, whom, I'm certain, is going straight to the top.

"How far is L.A. from San Francisco?" she asks, when we settle back.

"An hour by plane. Six by car."

"So you could visit me anytime."

"And you could visit me."

"But will either of us do it, that's the question?"

She goes silent. When she speaks again, it's in a different voice.

"I'd like this not to be over so soon," she says. "I'd like this
not
to be, you know, my 'Calista affair.' "

"Yeah, that could definitely sour it for you—thinking of me whenever Calista comes to mind."

"You really hate this place, don't you, David?"

"How could I? It's the Athens of the Midwest."

"This is where your early life came apart."

"Please, let's not talk about it. Let's talk about you and your brilliant future."

"I'd like it if you'd be part of it."

"God, that's so sweet—" The ironic pose I've been assuming dissolves in an instant. Tears spring to my eyes.

"I wish I could learn to love," I whisper to her.

"You already know how. It's just a matter of allowing yourself."

"I don't get it. You're supposed to be the hard-assed reporter and I the cool forensic artist. So now here we both are talking about not wanting this to end. Pretty funny, huh?"

"Maybe it is funny," she says, "but the thing I've discovered about out-of-town affairs is that you can't accurately evaluate them till you're back on your home turf. Then, back in the rhythm of your life, you either miss the person or you don't. Truth is I've never missed 'the person' very much, though I've almost always thought fondly of him if he happened to come to mind. But after just a few days in New York, I started missing you. That tells me something. And soon, when this stupid trial's over and you go back to San Francisco, it'll be your turn to discover how much you miss me . . . or not."

E
arly in the morning when Pam goes up to the hotel gym, I borrow her tape recorder, take it down to my room, and listen to her full interview with Susan Pettibone.

The content is just as Pam described, as is Susan's emotional investment in memories of Tom. No question she loved the guy. I don't dare hope any of my old girlfriends will speak so kindly of me. What comes through most keenly is her regard for his personal integrity. "He had integrity to
burn,"
she says.

Seeing Tom through her eyes, I shiver at the thought of him falling into that nest of Calista vipers—Barbara Fulraine, Jack Cody, Waldo Channing, and God-knows-who-else—a fall that cost him his life.

W
ednesday,
 
2:30 P.M., I gesture to Harriet to follow me out of the courtroom, tell her I have an appointment, and ask her to cover for me. If anything extraordinary happens, I tell her, she's to call me on my cell phone. Then I'll execute drawings based on her reporting and get them to her in time for broadcast.

"Where do you go all the time?" she asks, annoyed.

"I'm not a journeyman sketch artist, Harriet. I can't sit here all day on the off chance something's going to happen."

"I understand, but—"

"Listen, am I mopping the floor with the competition?"

"You're definitely mopping the floor with them."

"So what more do you want?"

She waves her hands. "You're right! Go wherever you go, do whatever you have to do."

I
meet Mace in the courthouse lobby and accompany him to his car in the Sheriff's Office parking lot.

"This is going to be interesting," Mace tells me. "Professor Bach has no idea we're coming."

As we drive over to Calista State, I tell him about Mr. Potato Head, the disordered drawings in my room, and my feeling that I've been followed.

He pulls the car over. "Let's have a look."

He smiles when I show him the drawing. "Hmm, you're right, could be anyone. Get me a plate number and I'll get you a name. Except I think your girlfriend's probably right—now he knows you're onto him he'll stay a lot farther back."

C
alista State's a sprawling urban campus, a jumble of old stonework academic buildings, Victorian houses, modern steel and glass additions, a magnificent granite library, and a fifteen-story tower housing labs, lecture halls, and offices. The dorms, such as they are, are renovated old apartment buildings in the neighborhood. Most students live off-campus, either at home or in rooming houses like the one on Ohio Street where Tom Jessup lived when he taught at Hayes.

We find the Women's Studies Department in a yellow-shingled cottage behind the
Toland
Engineering Building. There's no one in the reception area, though a half-eaten carry-out container of Asian noodles sits open upon the desk. Across the room, a bulletin board is covered with overlapping notices—meetings, lectures, readings—as well as sheets with tear-off tabs posted by people looking to find a roommate, rent a garage, give away a kitten, or sell a musical instrument.

"May I help you?" A young Asian woman, chopsticks in hand, approaches the noodle container on the desk.

"We're here to see Professor Bach," Mace tells her, handing her his card. "This is a homicide investigation so we'd appreciate it if she'd see us right away."

The woman rushes out of the room, chopsticks still in hand.

A minute later she returns.

"Dr. Bach will see you now."

We follow her through a rabbit-warren of cubicles occupied by busy young women, then up a flight of stairs to the doorway of an office where a thin woman in her fifties, gray hair cut short in the manner of
 
Roman senator, greets us with cool reserve.

"Shoshana Bach," she says extending her hand. Dr. Bach, I note, is all business and doesn't like to get too close.

"Now, gentlemen," she asks, "what is this about?"

"The Flamingo murders," Mace says. "Okay if we, sit down?"

She waves us to chairs. As soon as I sit, I bring out my small sketchpad and start to draw.

"I don't understand," she says. "It's been years."

"The case is still open. The homicides were never solved."

Mace asks if she's the same Shoshana Bach who lived next door to Tom Jessup in a rooming house on Ohio Street.

"I am. But surely you don't—"

"You weren't properly questioned back then so today we're going to do it right. That is if you're willing to cooperate?"

"Yes, of course." Shoshana stares at me. I smile back. "May I ask why the gentleman is drawing my picture?"

"The gentleman is a forensic sketch artist. Do you object to being sketched, Dr. Bach?"

"No, of course not. This is so unexpected. I really don't understand. . . ."

It takes her a while to loosen up, but once Mace gets her going, she seems eager to talk. As I draw her, I'm impressed by her sense of herself, the way she holds her head. This is a very dignified woman, I think.

"Back in those days, my grad school days, I was pretty much a mess," she says, showing us a grim smile. "Then Tom Jessup moved in. I thought he was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. As I'm sure you can imagine, I was probably
not
the most beautiful girl
he'd
seen."

It's as if she's speaking of another person with whom she now feels only a tenuous connection.

"We liked each other, clung to one another the way two lost souls will do in a city like this. We were both new here, neither of us knew anybody, and Calista, though a lovely town, can be pretty inhospitable at times."

She says she realized soon enough that Tom wasn't romantically interested in her, but for whatever reason—her neediness, loneliness—she couldn't bring herself to stop trying to attract him. Thinking back on her feeble ploys, she tells us, she still feels a flush of shame.

"I'd press close to him whenever I got the chance, breathe into his ear, lick my lips, make sure he caught me in my underwear, stupid girlish tricks like that." She shakes her head. "I was such a mess! But back then some of us young women didn't understand ourselves very well. We paid lip service to feminism, but beneath the rhetoric all we really wanted was a boyfriend."

Shoshana smiles. "Pretty pathetic. But I'll say this for Tom, he was always a gentleman, never took advantage of me . . . and he could have. God, how I wanted him to!"

She tells us that Tom deflected her come-ons by telling her he was gay. She believed him, had no choice. She decided then that if she couldn't have him as a lover, he would be the loving older male sibling she'd always wished she'd had.

"We had fun together. We'd go out to movies, eat at cheap restaurants, share gripes and confidences, talk about everything—literature, art, politics. On Saturdays we'd pile all our dirty clothes together into a wicker basket, then lug it Hansel-and-Gretel style down to the
laundromat
at the bottom of Ohio Street. Some evenings I'd wander into his room in my pajamas, sprawl on his bed, and read, while he, in just a pair of gym shorts, would grade his students' papers at his desk. On Sundays he'd drive us out to Hayes, where we'd play tennis on the deserted school courts. Other times we'd pack a picnic lunch, then go hiking in the hills. We'd find a shady spot, spread out a blanket, eat, then move the blanket into the sun, then just lie there side by side soaking up the rays . . ."

One summer afternoon about a week before the killings, she wandered into his room looking for a notebook she thought she'd left inside. Tom was out on one of his private tutoring jobs, so there she was, looking for her notebook, when something in a half-open bureau drawer caught her eye.

Shoshana blinks. "Actually, that isn't true. The truth is I was still crazy in love with him and sometimes when he wasn't there I'd feed my obsession by going through his stuff."

She dabs at her eyes.

"I knew I had no right. We'd exchanged keys in case one of us was ever locked out, a trust I broke numerous times. I hated myself for being such a sneak. I vowed each time I came out of his room I'd never go in unauthorized again. But still I did. I couldn't seem to help myself.