kitten, or sell a musical instrument.
'May I help you?' A young Asian woman, chopsticks in hand, approaches the noodle container on the desk.
'We're here to see Professor Bach,' Mace tells her, handing her his card. 'This is a homicide investigation so we'd appreciate it if she'd see us right away.'
The woman rushes out of the room, chopsticks still in hand.
A minute later she returns.
'Dr. Bach will see you now.'
We follow her through a rabbit-warren of cubicles occupied by busy young women, then up a flight of stairs to the doorway of an office where a thin woman in her fifties, gray hair cut short in the manner of a Roman senator, greets us with cool reserve.
'Shoshana Bach,' she says extending her hand. Dr. Bach, I note, is all business and doesn't like to get close.
'Now, gentlemen,' she asks, 'what is this about?'
'The Flamingo murders,' Mace says. 'Okay if we sit down?'
She waves us to chairs. As soon as I sit, I bring out my small sketchpad and start to draw.
'I don't understand,' she says. 'It's been years.'
Mace asks if she's the same Shoshana Bach who lived next door to Tom Jessup in a roominghouse on Ohio Street.
'I am. But surely you don't-'
'You weren't properly questioned back then so today we're going to do it right. That is if you're willing to cooperate?'
'Yes, of course.' Shoshana stares at me. I smile back. 'May I ask why the gentleman is drawing my picture?'
'The gentleman is a forensic sketch artist. Do you object to being sketched, Dr. Bach?'
'No, of course not. This is so unexpected. I really don't understand…'
It takes her a while to loosen up, but once Mace gets her going, she seems eager to talk. As I draw her, I'm impressed by her sense of herself, the way she holds her head. This is a very dignified woman, I think.
'Back in those days, my grad school days, I was pretty much a mess,' she says, showing a grim smile. 'Then Tom Jessup moved in. I thought he was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. As I'm sure you can imagine, I was probably not the most beautiful girl he'd seen.'
It's as if she's speaking of another person with whom she now feels only a tenuous connection.
'We liked each other, clung to one another the way two lost souls will do in a city like this. We were both new here, neither of us knew anybody, and Calista, though a lovely town, can be pretty inhospitable at times.'
She says she realized soon enough that Tom wasn't romantically interested in her, but for whatever reason – her neediness, loneliness – she couldn't bring herself to stop trying to attract him. Thinking back on her feeble ploys, she tells us, she still feels a flush of shame.
'I'd press close to him whenever I got the chance, breathe into his ear, lick my lips, make sure he caught me in my underwear, stupid girlish tricks like that.' She shakes her head. 'I was such a mess! But back then some of us young women didn't understand ourselves very well. We paid lip service to feminism, but beneath the rhetoric all we really wanted was a boyfriend.'
Shoshana smiles. 'Pretty pathetic. But I'll say this for Tom, he was always a gentleman, never took advantage of me… and he could have. God, how I wanted him to!'
She tells us that Tom deflected her come-ons by telling her he was gay. She believed him, had no choice. She decided then that if she couldn't have him as a lover, he would be the loving older male sibling she'd always wished she'd had.
'We had fun together. We'd go to movies, eat at cheap restaurants, share gripes and confidences, talk about everything – literature, art, politics. On Saturdays we'd pile all our dirty clothes together into a wicker basket, then lug it Hansel-and-Gretel style down to the Laundromat at the bottom of Ohio Street. Some evenings I'd wander into his room in my pajamas, sprawl on his bed, and read, while he, in just a pair of gym shorts, would grade his students' papers at his desk. On Sundays he'd drive us out to Hayes, where we'd play tennis on the deserted school tennis courts. Other times we'd pack a picnic lunch, then go hiking in the hills. We'd find a shady spot, spread out a blanket, eat, then move the blanket into the sun, then just lie there side by side soaking up the rays…'
One summer afternoon about a week before the killings, she wandered into his room looking for a notebook she thought she'd left inside. Tom was out on one of his private tutoring jobs, so there she was, looking for her notebook, when something in a half-open bureau drawer caught her eye.
Shoshana blinks. 'Actually, that isn't true. The truth is I was still crazy in love with him and sometimes when he wasn't there I'd feed my obsession by going through his stuff.'
She dabs at her eyes.
'I knew I had no right. We'd exchanged keys in case on of us was ever locked out, a trust I broke numerous times. I hated myself for being such a sneak. I vowed each time I came out of his room I'd never go in unauthorized again. But still I did. I couldn't seem to help myself.'
'Anyhow… I was looking through his drawers when I came upon this big manila envelope hidden beneath his shirts. I opened it curious to see what was inside. Then I was shocked.' Shoshana grimaces. 'It was child porn.'
The stuff was crude, she tells us, poorly printed, the photos poorly reproduced, and it was all so blatantly uncompromisingly obscene – lewd, smutty, foul. And then, even as she sat down on his bed to study the material, she felt a terrible pain as if her stomach were suddenly tied in knots.
'I was appalled. Also bowled over by grief. I remember perching there on the side of his bed looking at that stuff, then realizing I was sobbing tears for the children in the pictures and for Tom that he could possess them. The thought that this might be his secret vice hurt me to the quick. ‘So this is what my friend is into! So this is what he is!’'
Shoshana shakes her head. Watching her, I can feel her hurt and outrage. And, too, I gain a glimpse of what this revelation means: that Tom Jessup had been acting as Barbara Fulraine's agent provocateur in her quest to find the people who'd kidnapped and probably killed her daughter, Belle.
'…I was still sitting there when he came in. He saw me on his bed, saw that horrible stuff in my hands. He came beside me, put his arm around me, begged me not to judge him too quickly, said there were things going on he hadn't been able to speak about. But now that I'd found his stash, he would tell me everything. But first I must promise never to tell anyone, not another living soul.'
She promised, of course, and then he confided that he'd undertaken an undercover investigation on behalf of a wealthy woman, a Mrs. Fulraine, who'd hired him to tutor and coach her sons. This woman's daughter had been snatched by her au pair years before and never seen again. Because the au pair had performed in pornographic films, there was reason to believe pornographers had been behind the snatch. Tom told her that basically he was pretending to be a pedophile purchasing pedophiliac material, letting it be known to contacts he made along the way that he was interested in commissioning a home movie of a little blond girl performing sexual acts on adults.
It was a dangerous mission, first because the people he was meeting were extremely suspicious, and second, because, being a teacher, he was putting his career on the line. If the pornographers decided he was a penetration agent, they might kill him to keep him from talking. And if anyone connected with Hayes found out what he was doing, he'd probably be blackballed from teaching for life.
'But how can you do this?' Shoshana demanded. 'Why you and not the cops? And who is this woman to you that you'd take such a risk for her?'
He lied to her then, told her the woman was paying him a large sum for his help. Also that the police had failed her and so had the private detectives she'd hired, and that she felt that on account of his manner and looks he had a better chance of getting inside than a pro.
'He told me the people he was meeting with, a couple in their forties, looked like ordinary folks leading conventional suburban lives. It bothered him that they didn't look as he'd expected, weren't the sleazy types you imagine when you think of kiddie porn. When he'd started his search, haunting the porn strip on DaVinci, he'd met his share of the latter – burly, bearded, intimidating guys who wore soiled tanktops and flaunted tattoos. But the
