or employ standard forensic techniques. I also don't put such techniques down. They work well for most forensic artists. However, I'm interested in probing deep, plumbing the unconscious of my informants. In this respect, I'm following in the footsteps of my dad. As I often remind myself, plumbing the unconscious is the family trade.
At exactly two o'clock, sketchbook in hand, I climb an exterior staircase on the Dawson side of the Flamingo, then follow a narrow walkway to the owner's apartment. One side of this walkway is demarcated by the back of the large neon Flamingo image that proclaims the name of the motel to passing cars.
It's another hot, humid Calista summer afternoon. Standing before Kate Evans's door, I feel my shirt sticking to my back. I knock, then hear footsteps. The door opens and Kate peers at me out of the gloom. She's wearing sandals, tight shorts, and a skinny, ribbed tanktop. The blinds in the room have been pulled.
Her eyes seem to glow in her face. They're large eyes alive with curiosity, perhaps some trepidation, too. I've been made uneasy by her scrutiny before – on my first visit to room 201 and two days ago when we spoke. I like the fact that she makes strong eye contact; that's usually a lifelong trait. If her vision was as direct when she was a girl, she may have seen the shooter clearly.
She invites me in, offers me a beer. I opt for a Coke. While she fetches it, I check out her living room: basic furniture with tough fabric upholstery, the kind of indestructible stuff one expects to find in a residence inhabited by a couple of rowdy kids. The carpeting's wall-to-wall, the pictures are conventional. The only striking characteristic, the single feature that differentiates the room from American Motel, are the shelves crammed with paperback editions of self-help books – books about how to get along, make money, build self-esteem, find success, analyze your own dreams, become your own best friend. Books too about wicca, tarot, astrology, and the occult.
This tells me that she's a troubled soul in search of easy remedies. It will be my task not to let her stray into the mystical, keep her in the here and now.
'I see you're a New Ager,' I tell her, gesturing toward the books.
'Can't seem to get enough of that stuff.'
'Are you a witch, Kate?'
'Not quite.' She lights a cigarette, perches on her couch, then draws her tanned legs beneath her like a swami. 'I'm an aspirant goddess. Not so easy with two boys roughhousing all the time.'
She's a single mother. Her sons' father lived with them for a while, left when things didn't work out. 'And I think now we're the better for it,' she says.
To relax her, I ask about her boys, where they go to school, what their interests are. Then I ask her what's it like being owner-manager of a motel, the joys, pains, special problems of the job. We chat about the old amusement park, the rides and games, especially the Fun House, how weird and spooky it was. We talk about Calista, the changes that've taken place, the new Natural History Museum, and how the old stuff, like Lindstrom's magical twin towers, still look good as ever. As we gab, I realize we're fairly close in age – she was seven the summer of the killings; I was twelve.
I tell her about my work, my ID sketches of the Zigzag Killer, the Kansas City kidnapper, and the serial murderer dubbed the Saturn Killer because he drew wide concentric rings around the bodies of his victims. In each case, I emphasize that I worked with my witnesses. Rather than taking personal credit for my portraits, I make it clear I regard them as collaborations. In each case, I give her a little background so she'll understand that the amount of time between a sighting and production of a sketch varies greatly and needn't be an issue.
'In your case,' I tell her, 'the fact that you were seven at the time probably works in your favor. Often kids engrave their early memories, especially when they're traumatic. Also the fact that afterwards you saw his face in dreams tells me it registered pretty well.'
'I don't know,' she says, squashing out her cigarette. 'I tried to draw him myself last night. Didn't get too far.'
Damn! I should have told her not to try that. Now it's too late. I'll have to play along.
'Still have the sketches?'
She nods, uncurls herself from the couch, retreats to another room, returns with a child's sketchpad. I move to the couch, sit beside her so we can look at what she drew together.
She shows me a pair of drawings on facing pages. Soon as I see them, I start feeling better: Her sketches are rudimentary egg-shaped outlines of a man's head with the features schematically portrayed in a childlike hand.
'As you can see, I'm no artist.'
'You don't have to be,' I assure her. 'That's my job.'
I suggest we use her sketches as a base from which we'll develop more refined portraits as we go along.
'First,' I tell her, 'I want you to set the scene. Close your eyes, imagine yourself back then, recall what you were doing before you heard the shots.'
She starts by describing the heat. 'It was like today…,' she says.
A hot, humid summer afternoon, the kind of sweaty, buggy afternoon typical of a Calista August.
The noises around were also typical: the hurdy-gurdy sounds of Tremont Park drifting from across the road; the high pitch of kids whooping it up out on the sidewalk in front.
She spent a lot of afternoons that summer playing in the pool, splashing around, meeting kids whose parents were motel guests, forging new friendships that would flourish over a couple of hours then dissolve the following morning when the visiting family checked out and drove away.
Even back then Johnny Powell manned the desk weekday afternoons. He was in his cubicle watching a ball game just like he probably is today. She could hear the sounds of the game, the commentary of the announcers, the roar of the crowd when there was a hit. She was also conscious that her father was around, probably doing maintenance and repairs, and that every so often her mother appeared in the window of the owner apartment to check up on her, make sure she was all right.
'This window,' she says, pointing at it.
I ask her why she's drawn the blinds.
She tells me she finds the summer light too harsh. 'Even with the air-conditioning, it makes the room too hot.'
This causes concern about her vision. 'Were you wearing glasses, Kate?'
'No. I see very well.'
'Sunglasses?'
She shakes her head.
'So the harsh light might have made you squint?'
Yes, she remembers that. She used to squint a lot. 'Id get these sunburnt wrinkle marks from squinting all the time.'
Her mother was always after her to use sun lotion. Sometimes she'd come down to the pool area and massage it into Kate's back.
She remembers the swimsuit she wore that summer, one piece, bright yellow, with straps that crisscrossed her back. She still likes yellow swimsuits, she says. She remembers the smell of chlorine from the pool, the sting of the cold water when the little boy she was playing with splashed her to induce her to jump in. She remembers slipping in a few times and the feeling in her arms when she held onto the rungs of the pool ladder to pull herself back out. She remembers the energy she had, the tiredness, the way her skin tanned, the sun marks left by her swimsuit straps. She remembers sitting on the edge of the pool with just her feet in the water, swishing the water around, kicking at it, kicking it in the face of the little boy.
'That summer the pool was my life.' She smiles. 'I guess it still is. I'm out there most every afternoon now with my boys, reading, watching who's coming and going, whether guests look okay or whether they're the type I'd rather not have in-house.'
She was always aware of the motel guests, she tells me, even as a little girl. Her father taught her that, to always be on the lookout, keep track because some folks weren't decent. 'A lot of people who go to motels are up to no good,' he used to say. Guests, she tells me, sometimes do the most amazing things. There's one regular the chamber maids call 'Mister-Piss-on-the-Bed.' Then there are the people who steal stuff – toilet paper, shower curtains, pillows, mattresses, even the locks on the doors. Often they'll try to steal TVs. They'll check in with a box of tools, unscrew a room set from its stand, then lower it out a back window to a confederate in the middle of the night. Her father's policy was not to confront the crooks, just get their plate numbers and phone them into the
