see that too.'
I pull up at The Townsend a little before 7 A.M.. The network TV crews are loading their equipment into vans. Pam, I figure, is probably in the rooftop gym finishing up her workout. Too weary to search her out, I go up to my room, order coffee from room service, then shave and shower.
I'm standing under the hot spray, reveling in the sensual, stingy aquatic drilling of my flesh, when it hits me: Just ten days before the killings Tom Jessup phoned Susan Pettibone and, apparently agitated, told her problems had arisen in his love affair. What sort of problems? What could Tom have meant? And what did he mean when, on the Sunday before he was killed, mistaking Susan's voice for Barbara's when she phoned him late at night, he muttered, “did you really do it?” or “Did he really do it?” or words to that effect?
Something important there, I think – something Mace should have picked up on and probed. For if there was trouble in the affair, perhaps that same trouble was at the root of the killings. If that was the case, then, it seems, Tom Jessup had an inkling of the coming storm.
8
This morning, Judge Winterson's clerk beckons me aside.
'Judge likes the way you're drawing her,' he tells me. 'She says you make her look wise.'
'She is wise.'
'On the other hand, she doesn't much like the way this fella Washboard's-'
'Washburn.'
'-doing her. Angles her head like she's stuckup. Makes her shadowy like she's a dark presence. The woman's a judge for Christ's sake, not some goddamn Aunt Jemima.'
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum!
'Wash is probably just being artistic,' I tell him.
When the trial breaks early at 3 p.m., Pam suggests we drive out to the Fulraine mansion for a look. I phone ahead and obtain permission to tour the grounds though not to enter the house.
'Our residents don't like being disturbed,' the snooty manager tells me.
The place is now called LAKE VIEW EAST, the words engraved on a brass plate discreetly attached to a stanchion at the driveway gate. Ten years ago, it was converted into a ritzy assisted-living establishment for six wealthy elderly residents, each of whom now occupies a luxury suite.
We drive slowly down the long gravel driveway, park in the turnabout before the graceful beige stone house. It's a perfect copy of a Palladian villa, a tall central section, arched doorway embracing a great room, and two symmetrical wings on either side. There are loggias and arcades, curved windows and columns, with clusters of rhododendra softening the base of the facade. As we stroll around the west side, past the greenhouse and garages, I tell Pam about the last time I was here, twenty-eight years ago, at Mark Fulraine's tenth birthday party to which I and Jerry Glickman were probably invited only because to leave out the two Jewish kids in the class would have been too obvious a slight.
Mark and I were never friends. Our sixth-grade boxing bout was but the culmination of years of mutual dislike. Now, standing out on the main terrace, facing the tennis court, pool, and great lawn that slopes down to Delamere Lake, I recall for Pam my main memory of that party, the reason I had such a lousy time.
'Birthday parties were usually fun,' I tell her, 'especially when the kid's parents had a place like this. They'd set up tents, bring in ponies, hire a couple of clowns, then we'd go wild, have ourselves a ball. But this time when we arrived, Mrs. Fulraine wasn't here, though she did turn up at the end. Instead we found Mr. Lafferty, Hayes Lower School athletic director, waiting for us in his coach's outfit – faded football pants, red baseball cap, and chrome whistle dangling from his neck. Immediately Lafferty started ordering us around. He organized us into teams, then made us play touch football, not the fun, free-for-all way, but his way by school rules. Suddenly the party wasn't a day off, it was like compulsory athletics. I guess Mrs. Fulraine felt she had to bring him in since she didn't have a man in the house.'
Pam smiles. 'Maybe Mrs. Fulraine was fucking Mr. Lafferty. Maybe Jessup was just one of several lovers she recruited from you fancy school.'
I snort out a laugh. 'Jessup was young and good looking. Lafferty was a gnarled old guy with a white sidewalls haircut and stick-out ears.' I pause. 'But there was something else, something we'd all forgotten – that it was three years before at Mark's seventh birthday party when Belle Fulraine and the au pair disappeared. I think that's why Mrs. Fulraine wasn't in the house that day. It was not an anniversary she'd want to recall.
Pam's impressed with the estate. 'It's beautiful here,' she says, turning back toward the house, scanning the long protected arcade furnished with groupings of tables and wicker chairs. Several times she's described her own background, growing up working class in south Jersey where her father ran a gas station and her mother worked as a practical nurse. Now it occurs to me she may be fascinated with the trappings of wealth.
'That kidnapping – I think it was the key,' she says. 'It's like everything stemmed from that – the breakup of Barbara's marriage, her affair with Cody, her fear Andrew would get custody of her boys. You told me about watching the Fulraines on TV, begging and weeping at their gate. Think of what it must have been like here then – the terror they must have felt!'
She shakes her head. 'After seeing the Flamingo, I had a lot of questions. I thought maybe Tom Jessup was intimidated by the house. After all, with her kids away at camp, Barbara and Tom could have screwed away there afternoons here. So why the Flamingo? You said she liked the scumminess of it. Funny enough, I can relate to that… once, twice, three times maybe. But on a regular basis – I don't get it. I think the low rent appeal would wear pretty thin. Then she'd start longing for the luxury to which she was accustomed. But now, hearing why she wasn't here for Mark's tenth birthday party, I have another theory. I wonder if she thought screwing Jessup here, where her daughter was kidnapped, would somehow, you know, defile the place.'
An interesting perception, making me glad Pam had come along.
We stroll down to the pool. It's a big, old-style turquoise-bottomed rectangle lined up lengthwise with the lake, framed by Moorish tiles. There's a pool house with cupola built in fantasy Arabian style, with a portico that protects a line of bar stools and an exterior bar.
Pam savors the setting. 'Those Fulraine boys had it good. Gorgeous house, servants, private tennis court, coach, and pool. For them this must have been a paradise.'
She turns to me. 'I suppose with the boys away at camp, there was no excuse to have Tom over anymore. The servants might talk. Andrew could use them against her at the custody hearing. So she decided they should meet at the motel and made the best of it, turning it into something romantic and dangerous.' Pam pauses. 'But still I think if she was into danger, she could have courted it in other ways. The motel was too drab to keep her excited. She needed more. I think they did other things, David. Extraordinary things. She was too stylish to be satisfied with just the tacky, old Flamingo Court.'
I like her approach, thought I can't imagine what kind of extraordinary things they might have done.
As we walk back up the slope to my car, I try to remember my departure from Mark's tenth birthday party, whether it was Mom or Dad who picked me up.
'If it was Dad, then Barbara may have met him before that Parents Day at Hayes. But then I think it was probably some other kid's parents who took me home.
Pam wants to take another look at the Flamingo, see it in hard daylight, she says. She clocks the drive. As we pull into the motel lot, she tells me it has taken just nine minutes to get here from the Fulraine house.
