Dove slips her hand inside the waistband of Jurgen's pants.
'I'm all cramped out from lying so still.'
She leans against him, whispers something into his ear while probing her hand deeper.
'Dove wonders if you'd like to party with us,' Jurgen says.
I look at her. She's grinning at me, sassy and kittenish.
'That's very sweet,' I tell her. 'I'm flattered, but I think I'd better pass. Time for the lonely artist to be on his way.'
Dove shrugs slightly to show disappointment. Jurgen looks relieved.
Dove offers me her hand. 'Thank you, David. You made a beautiful picture.'
'Easy,' I tell her, 'when the sitter's so beautiful.'
We embrace, all awkwardness past, everyone happy now.
Outside the building. I decide against walking back to the hotel. The streets are too empty, the night too ominous. I slip the doorman a couple of bucks, ask him to call me a cab. When it comes and we take off for the Townsend, I notice headlights come on in a car parked across the street. The same car does a U-turn, then follows us back to the hotel. It slows when I get out, then, before I have a chance to see who's driving, picks up speed and rounds the corner.
I pause in the lobby. Am I imagining things? Investigating a twenty-six-year-old murder could hardly be a threat, especially as all my prime suspects – Jack Cody, Andrew Fulraine, Max Rakoubian, and Dad – are dead.
I open the door to Waldo's, check the room, survey the Monday night media crowd. Conversation seems more active than usual, perhaps because with the start of the defense presentation, the Foster trial is finally picking up.
I spot Foster's attorney sitting with Spencer Deval and an aggressive female reporter from The Star. Judge Winterson has forbidden the lawyers to talk about the case, but there's nothing to prevent them from socializing with journalists, then leaking information with little eyebrow moves and nods.
I take a seat at the bar, order a beer, ask Tony where Sylvie is tonight.
'She was here, then got bored. I think she went out to a jazz club with the guy from Rolling Stone.'
I ask him about Waldo Channing's demise, whether he was working the bar the day Waldo dropped.
Tony nods. 'It was ten years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was standing right where I'm standing now. He was sitting in his usual spot, the table beneath the painting. ‘Course the painting wasn't up there then. Anyhow, it was a little after 5 p.m.. Mr. C was sitting there alone like he often did afternoons, finishing up his column on a yellow legal pad. That's how he wrote it, longhand right here in the hotel lounge, then he'd call The Times-Dispatch and they'd send over a runner to pick it up. Mr. C was nursing his usual, a dry vodka martini with a twist. Suddenly he calls out to me: 'Tony! I look over at him, see him rise up out of his chair, then he drops there on the carpet. Died instantly. Heart attack. None of us could believe it. The man was so alive. You'd feel his energy whenever he walked into the room. I was the first one who got to him. Was me who closed his eyes. A sad day, one I'll never forget. ‘Course a month later we had a big party here like he said we should in his will. That's when management decided to rename the lounge to honor the memory of the man.'
Tony squeezes shut his eyes. When he opens them, I detect a little moisture.
'You know, he left his entire estate to Spencer Deval, the house, cars, all his art and furniture, but he also left mementoes to all the people he liked – pens, watches, cuff links, stuff like that. And not just to important people, to the little people, too, folks he loved and wrote about – copy boys, shoeshine boys, cabbies, ushers, cabbies, ushers, doormen, even the restroom attendants here at the hotel. Me, I got what he used to call his lucky piece. I'll show it to you.'
Tony reaches into his pocket, pulls out a gold coin about the size of a fifty-cent piece, and places it gently on the bar.
'that's a 1918 Double Eagle, year of Mr. C's birth.'
I make a quick calculation. If Waldo was born in 1918, he was seventy-two when he died, fifty-six when Flamingo took place. It seems a stretch to imagine a man that age, no matter how angry or threatened, coldly executing Barbara and Tom.
Tony flips the coin in the air, calls out ‘heads,’ catches it, smacks it down on the back of his hand.
'Heads it is,' he says. 'Yeah, Mr. C's lucky piece.' As Tony repockets it, he nods at the glowing portrait across the room. 'Mr. C always had good luck. He lived a charmed life, he truly did.'
Tom told Susan: I think there's going to be a fire.
I put in a full day's work at the Foster trial, produce four drawings, hand them off to Harriet, then walk swiftly to the Calista Public Library across from Danzig Park, arriving just an hour before closing.
In the periodicals room, I pull microfilm of issues of The Times-Dispatch from the week of the Flamingo shootings, take the spools to a microfilm reader, and start searching for news of fires.
In Tuesday's paper, I find two house fires – one in Covington, another on Thistle Ridge in Van Buren Heights – plus a three-alarm brewery fire in Iron City.
On Wednesday, there's mention of an explosion in a machine tool factory on Danvers and 18^th and a grease-trap fire that started in a neighborhood Italian restaurant on Torrance Hill.
Discouraged, I unroll down to the Thursday morning edition to read once again the first accounts of the Flamingo murders. Then it occurs to me that if a fire took place Monday night, it might not have been reported for several days, and even if it was the sort of fire that would have been significant on a normal news day, on that particular Thursday it would have been eclipsed by the huge scandal of Flamingo.
Fifteen minutes before closing, I start searching the single-paragraph stories that appear in vertical columns in the Metro section of Thursday's Times-Dispatch.
A hit-and-run on Thorn Street; a man found dead in a parked car near the corner of Wales and Lucinda; a house fire on Tarkington near Tremont Park; another fire on Indiana; a street holdup on Gale, and, a few minutes later, a similar holdup on Pear. None of these stories is promising, but then, just as the librarian flashes the ten- minute warning, I come across a follow-up on the Thistle Ridge fire:
Arson inspectors, examining the remnants of the house at 1160 Thistle Ridge Road that erupted in flames Tuesday night, told reporters that the charred bodies of two persons, a male and a female, were found bound to iron beds in the basement.
'There's clear evidence of arson,' Fire Inspector James Halloran said. 'And with the discovery of these bodies, a strong inference of murder.'
Halloran said that the County Sheriff's Department had been brought into the case and that the Calista County Coroner's Office will autopsy the bodies.
'We're not in a position to say yet who these people are or what they were doing,' Halloran said. 'The faces of both victims were burned away.'
The house, according to county records, is owned by Mr. Vincent Callistro of 1492 Laverne. When called for comment, Mr. Callistro stated that the house has been rented for the last four years through the Lee-Hopkins Agency in Van Buren Heights.
A person answering the phone at Lee-Hopkins said the agency, due to privacy concerns, would provide no information on the names of the tenants, however, he did confirm that the house was rented and that it was fully insured.
A source close to the County Sheriff's Department, told The Times-Dispatch that there is preliminary evidence that the victims may have been tortured prior to the fire. This same source affirmed that the cause of the fire was arson, that empty gasoline cans were found behind the house, and also that there were items of a ‘sordid nature’ found at the site. The source refused to describe these items or speculate further about the fire and apparent homicides.
The librarian approaches to tell me I must leave. I insert a dime into the built-in photocopier, print out the article, then walk back to the Townsend to wait for Pam, due in on the late afternoon flight from New York.
