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.
Entering Waldo's. I spot her right away deep in conversation with Tony. She looks good tonight, blond hair gleaming, eyes and face aglow, the confident flush of a winner.
"There he is!" She beckons. "Please, Tony, a margarita for the gentleman."
Tony grins, starts making me a drink. I kiss Pam on the lips, then perch on the bar stool to her right.
"I get the feeling, don't ask me why, that things worked out well for you today."
She shows me her warmest smile. "Oh, they did." She lowers her voice. "CNN's tripling my salary, I'll be based in L.A., and, best part, I'm going to have my own show, an afternoon interview show, The L.A. Report with Pam Wells."
"Congratulations! We should order champagne."
Tony's delighted to make us a pair of champagne cocktails.
Pam fills me in. Monday morning Fox offered her great money for a political reporting job in the Washington bureau. She was tempted until this morning when CNN counteroffered with an even better package plus the concept for the new show.
"It'll be soft content mostly – celebrity interviews, West Coast lifestyle pieces. But I don't mind. A talking heads show's how you make your name."
She tells me she'll stay in Calista till there's a verdict, then relocate to L.A.. It'll take her a couple of months to set the show up. She hopes to be on the air by Thanksgiving.
As we click glasses, I notice Deval, sitting beneath Waldo's portrait, speaking into a cell phone. I turn to Tony.
"Isn't that where Waldo used to sit?"
Tony raises an eyebrow. "He thinks he's Waldo reincarnated."
"How did he come to inherit the column?" Pam asks.
"He was Waldo's gofer, so it was a natural promotion."
"He's definitely got that gofer look," she says.
Tony grins. "Waldo used to call him ‘lickspittle’ behind his back. When he wanted Spence to feel good about himself, he'd call him ‘my Man Friday.’
"How ‘bout that phony British accent?"
"Is that what it's supposed to be?" Tony conjures an ultra-haughty expression. "‘How you doin’ old boy, old boy, old boy?’"
We laugh. "Very good, Tony!" Pam tells him. "Excellent impersonation."
"He's not that hard to imitate," Tony says, moving away.
"Listen," Pam says, draining her glass, "I'm starved. Can we go to that Sicilian place? I feel like pasta. I think I need a carbohydrate fix."
As we drive over to Torrance Hill, I check my rearview mirror. In night traffic, I can't tell whether anyone's following or not.
En route I tell Pam about the extraordinary experiences I've had over the few days she's been away – the ambush on Riverwalk, my encounters with the Fulraine brothers, my meeting with a retired dominatrix, and last night's drawing session with J u rgen Hoff and Dove Hanks.
"I've got a new suspect, too," I tell her. "A sleazy ex-cop named Walter Maritz. Seems he and Waldo Channing had a little blackmail business going. Also, at the time of Flamingo, he was working as a private investigator for Andrew Fulraine, tracking Barbara to find evidence Andrew could use against her in their custody battle. But according to Jurgen, the story Maritz told the cops about not informing on Barbara because he liked her was a pack of lies. Seems a couple years before Flamingo, Maritz, playing on Barbara's obsession about her daughter, conned her out of a lot of money. When Barbara took up with Cody, the first thing Cody did was have Maritz beaten up. I'm talking multiple broken bones. So it's occurred to me that Maritz, on Barbara's trail, despising both her and Cody, could have decided to kill her to avenge the beating. He'd know Cody would suffer, too, when he found out his girlfriend was killed in a motel room with another lover. Maritz might even have counted on Cody becoming the prime suspect… which, in fact, he was."