raises herself from the chaise and marches authoritatively to the end of the diving board. As she does, I notice endearing pink marks on her back form lying against the plastic straps. After another quick glance at me, she makes a beautiful swan dive into the water. If I were an Olympic judge I'd give her a 9.5.
Two-oh-one is a decent-sized room, not a confining shoe box the way they build them today. The moment I enter I feel like an intruder. Since I know sketching will calm me, I go to the bed, sit on it, set the pillows behind my back, then prop my sketchpad against my knees. I check my watch. 3:30 P.M.. It was a little before four in the afternoon when the killings took place, just this time of year.
I gaze around, look carefully at everything, then close my eyes trying to imagine how it happened that day, what it was like.
I've been sketching for an hour. I finish up my drawing: the open doorway filled with light, the broken figures on the bed lost in shadow. I set down my sketchpad, lie back, my heart beating wildly in my chest.
I'm exhausted. Perhaps, I think, this project will prove to be a mistake. Then I tell myself: It's no mistake. Difficult at times, sure; fraught with the pain that often accompanies necessity, but that's the point, it is necessary if I'm ever to obtain peace of mind.
I get up from the bed, go to the open door, and peer down over the balcony at the pool. The two boys are now playing in the shade, while their mother, once again on the chaise, bikini top untied, bare back to the sun, turns her head slightly to engage my eyes.
I quickly shut the door, cutting off the light, then return to the bed to rest a while in the gloom. This room, I think, was the Scene of Blood, and thus it is well that I have come here to breathe the air, take it all in with my eyes, understand how sounds reverberate in the space and the particular way the light cuts across the floor. I scan the walls knowing there is impacted in them echoes of the death throes of Tom Jessup and Barbara Fulraine, whose agony, in some deep sense I cannot understand, seems still present in the room.
Waldo's
7:00 P.M.
I sit at the bar, sipping from a margarita beautifully made by Tony, awaiting the arrival of Pam Wells.
The usual suspect are out in force. The CBS group. The NBC group. Spencer Deval, at his regular table beneath the portrait, holding forth to a different media contingent tonight. The slinky black female reporter from Chicago, who, Tony had told me, has a contract from a New York publisher to do a book on the trial, regards me curiously from the far end of the bar.
I hear there are two other reporters' books under contract, but I doubt it'll matter much whose book comes out first. The way I see it, this time next year the Foster trial will be deader than dust.
'There you are.' It's Pam.
'Hi. Want a drink?'
'Sure.' She grins. 'Then let's go upstairs. I've been thinking about you all day. There're all sorts of nasty things I want us to do.'
She takes a sip from my margarita while waiting for Tony to make one for her. 'What'd you do this afternoon anyway?'
'Went out sketching.'
'In this heat?'
'I found a cool place.'
'You like to keep busy, don't you? Keep your hand moving. Now why do you feel you have to do that, David?'
'I think it keeps me sane.'
She thinks that one over. 'You're a pretty interesting guy.' She smiles. 'I have a hunch about you.'
'What's that?'
'That you've got a story.'
'Everyone's got a story.'
'Sure. But yours is special. You're up to something here. That's what I think. I trust my hunches too.'
Tony presents her with her drink. She clicks her glass against mine, then sips.
So she thinks she's got me psyched-out after one session in the sack. Well, two can play at that game, I think.
'If I tell you my story you might lose interest.'
'Try me and find out,' she challenges.
'I'll think about it. You know what they say about you, Pam?'
'What?'
'‘She's a real bitch.’'
She stares at me a moment, then laughs. 'Well, maybe I am,' she says. 'And maybe I've met my match.'
Having nicely cleared the air, we finish our drinks, then ascend to her room where we nearly tear off one another's clothes.
An hour later, showered and refreshed, we step out the front door of the Townsend, stroll along the night streets of downtown Riverwalk, then on to a neighborhood of bars and restaurants along the Calista River, an area locals call Irontown.
Calista, in fact, is a very interesting city, as special and atmospheric in its way as Boston or Miami. It's a true river town with all the trappings that description implies – bridges, docks, barges, boats. It has a sultry richness, a plenitude of trees, and a locally much-spoken-of 'Athenian' aspect, Calista's self-image as an oasis of culture in the culturally barren Midwest. Beyond all that, it's the kind of city that, long after you've left it because you thought it wasn't your rightful place, continues to haunt your dreams.
There was enormous wealth here as there was in all the great rust-belt cities of the American plain, wealth on a scale that people from the East rarely understand. People here have formed fabulous art collections. Growing up, I played with kids whose parents had Rembrandts in their houses, in one case an El Greco hanging in the dining room. The rich here built distinguished cultural institutions: churches, temples, a magnificent art museum, fine symphony orchestra, world-class university and medical center, ballet company, repertory theater company, champion sports teams, elegant, gracious suburbs.
They also built great factories and mills that were among the most hellish places on earth, polluting the river to the extent that at one point it literally turned red from the iron precipitate runoff from the smelters.
As befits a city of great wealth and power, Calista too became a city of great crimes and, sometimes, punishments: the Wandering Strangler killings, the Heller-Hinton murders, the Barton Paint Factory explosion… and a good fifty notorious murders and disasters more. Some were solved, others not, some still haunt the populace, while others obsess only those whose lives they touched. In the latter category, I would place the double murder at the Flamingo Court of Tom Jessup and Barbara Fulraine, which the local press dubbed simply 'Fulraine,' because in this city Fulraine was a name to be reckoned with, while poor Tom Jessup was pretty much a nonentity.
Pam Wells and I are standing in one of the semicircular overlooks on Riverwalk. The snaking Calista River glows below us, its surface, reflecting the night sky, smooth like slick, black oil, broken only by the girder bridges and jackknife drawbridges that cross it at odd and varying angles.
'So this is the famous river that turned red?' Pam shakes her blond hair free, sniffs the air. 'Doesn't smell bad at all.'
'The redness was a warning call. They knew they had to clean it up. See that?' I point south toward a cluster of slag heaps and the ruins of a steel plant.
'Looks like a bunch of old dinosaur bones.'
