'Do you?'
'I'm not that kinky!' She cuddles against me. 'This is so interesting. How're you going to develop new information after so many years?'
'I probably won't. Anyway, what I find out doesn't have to be new. I just want to get it right, feel it the way it happened. Otherwise it's just an exercise.'
'Feeling it – that's how you do your drawings, isn't it? Get into peoples' heads, then draw what they've seen.'
On the drive back downtown, she asks me about the Zigzag Killer. She's familiar with some of the tabloid details: that the press called him that because of the zigzag knifework pattern he left on his victims' torsos. Also that he attacked men in the gay enclaves of San Francisco, and that unlike most serial killers, who murder at an increased rate of frequency, he struck only rarely and sporadically over a period of years.
'The knifework was curious. Lots of speculation about it, that it carried a cryptic meaning, that he was trying to cut lightning bolts, leaving a calling card, trying to obliterate his victims, sending the police some kind of message. None of that concerned me. My job was to draw his face. Only two people were known to have seen him – a middle-aged female resident apartment house manager, who spotted him briefly as he left her building after killing one of the tenants, and a guy who saw the killer leave a gay bar with another victim two years later. Both had worked with good police artists, yet the resulting pictures had nothing in common. In fact, they were so different they canceled each other out. Other artists were brought in to try and reconcile the descriptions. When they couldn't do it, the cops began to think at least one of their witnesses wasn't reliable.'
'So then they brought in the great David Weiss.'
'Who hadn't yet been deemed ‘great’.'
'But who became ‘great’ when he managed to reconcile the two irreconcilable witness descriptions.'
As we speed up Dawson Drive, the skyline of Calista comes into view. The city shows a strong signature at night – a cluster of variegated buildings dominated by Lindstrom's spectacular twin towers, lights on inside for the night cleaning crews, poised against the moonlit sky. The heart of the city casts a light gray glow that surrounds it like a nimbus. Calista seems almost heroic tonight, with a hard, urban beauty rarely noticeable when walking its streets during the day.
Yes, I tell her, my Zigzag Killer drawing made my name. I spent hours with the two witnesses, trying to exact details each had forgotten, acting always as if I believed everything they told me even while trying to determine whether one or the other had fantasized what each claimed to have seen.
'It had been six years since the woman saw the guy. Four for the man. The sightings were brief, yet each claimed the guy's face was clearly etched. There was just something about him, both said, that made him unforgettable – a look in his eyes, a confidence, possibly even a smirk… though neither of them ever used that word.
'My approach is different from most forensic artists. They ask questions about the shape of the suspect's face, hair, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and ears. I do it another way. I want to know how they felt when they saw him, their angle of vision, even the cast of the light. Most important, the set of his face, his expression, because for me that's what best conveys character.'
'I took the male witness back to the bar where he made the sighting. We found the very bar stool where he'd sat. We got the positions right, then reenacted the scene.'
'Seems he was cruising the victim, then was disconcerted when he realized the victim was interested in someone else. So he viewed this other man as a rival. Right away that told me a lot about his mindset.'
'We talked the whole thing through, or rather I let him talk, because what I do best is get a witness going then listen closely to what he says. We narrowed down his viewing time. Turned out he got his only clear look when he checked the guy out in the mirror behind the bar. Then he remembered there was something unattractive about him – an asymmetry in his face. Seems the killer looked quite different in the mirror than when my witness observed him straight on.'
'We were getting somewhere. We went back to his place and I started to draw. I had him sit beside me. Together we shaped the picture. Within an hour we came up with three different views.'
'Next I went to work with the woman. Again we reenacted the scene. The way the cops reconstructed it, he'd just finished his kill. She got a good look at his profile for about a second and a half and from a very narrow angle of view. She'd been sitting in her apartment with the door partially open. He was sort of ‘sliding’ his way out, she said, and his face was set into a rather memorable grimace. When he realized someone was watching, he glanced her way. When he did that, she responded the way most people would – she looked away.'
'At once I understood what was wrong with the other artists' drawings. They'd taken her description then tried to extrapolate a frontal view. I stayed with the profile. We worked on that, trying to get the grimace and set of the eye on the left side of his face as she'd remembered it. When we were done, I showed her the drawings I'd made with the other witness. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘That's him, that's the guy.’ And the male witness said the same thing when I showed him the drawings I made with her.'
We're off Dawson now, driving on city streets. There's a loneliness to downtown Calista at this hour. The business district's deserted, and the night wind, funneled through the valley, is transformed by the spaces between buildings into whirlpools, miniature tornadoes, that lift and whirl scraps of paper and debris.
'Sot that's how you came to draw that famous triple view.'
'Turned out to be my trifecta.'
'I remember how when they caught him everyone was so amazed. He had the same weird lopsided face you'd drawn. When I saw live shots of him as the cops hurried him along, he wore the same gloating expression.'
'The best part,' I tell her, 'was that my drawings led directly to his arrest. That rarely happens. He was arrested twenty-four hours after my sketches appeared on the front page of The Examiner. Soon as they were published, people recognized him and started calling in.'
I pull up in front of The Townsend, turn my car over to the car valet.
'Have you thought of trying to work with the Flamingo witnesses?'
'I've thought about it. That's why I've asked to see the file. But it's been twenty-six years. I've never heard of a case where an artist worked with witnesses on something so far back.'
In the lobby, Pam pauses outside the glass doors to Waldo's. 'Nightcap?' she asks.
The bar's half filled. Spencer Deval is mesmerizing Cynthia Liu, my dear friend from the gym, doubtless with one of his well-worn high society sagas. Raucous laughter issues from a corner table where six cameramen trade journalists' war stories. Tony the barman stands straight in his characteristic pose wearing his best world-weary expression.
We take a pair of stools before him, order cognacs.
'You look especially pale tonight, Tony,' Pam says.
'Pale as death,' Tony agrees.
'What'd you think about as you stand here?'
'This ‘n’ that. Also about him.'
Tony nods at the opposite wall. Pam and I turn. The eyes of Waldo Channing gaze back at us out of the portrait.
'He looks very ‘period,’' Pam says.
'Oh, he was,' Tony agrees.
She's too young to have firsthand memories of columnists like Channing, but I recall the man quite well. He was a type; most big cities possessed one – a local writer celebrated because he wrote about local celebrities. Such men seemed actually to rule the societies about which they wrote. They inhabited their cities' upper crusts but were capable too of writing about the common folk. A sentimental vignette about a humble laundress might be juxtaposed with scathing notes about a nouveau riche couple on the make. Each strove to glamorize his town, waxing poetic about it even when the place was ugly. They were social arbiters, insiders, walkers, party animals, name-droppers, star-fuckers who would gush like schoolgirls over visiting celebrity singers, actors, entertainers. But if the celebrity wouldn't kiss butt, they'd get him/her really good – belittle her singing, mock his performance in
