When she left Rand-Barloff, she felt reborn – armed with a strong identity, ready to resume her studies. She returned to Calista State, completed her doctorate, wrote her dissertation on the metaphor of mirror and mirroring in her novels of Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. When she was thirty-one, she published her first book, Dickinson and Plath: Studies In Alienation, a seminal work of feminist criticism that led to her appointment as a tenured professor at C.S.
Shoshana stops, peers at me, then at Mace. "I know what you're thinking. Why didn't I come forward with what I knew about Tom and child pornography?"
She shrugs. "It didn't seem relevant. My old housemates kept me abreast of the rumors, that Tom had been part of a love-triangle and that it was Mrs. Fulraine's other boyfriend, a gangster, who'd killed them out of jealousy. That seemed as good an explanation as any. I was trying to forget about Tom, put him out of my mind. I told Tom's story to Dr. Barloff, asked her advice on whether I should break my pledge of secrecy. We discussed it in terms of trust and betrayal, how I was possibly setting up an ethical dilemma as a way of holding onto my anger at Tom, not allowing myself to let him go. I came to understand that I'd used Tom just as he'd used me, as a crutch against the bitter melancholy of my loneliness. What good would it have done to bring all that out? And how did I even know he'd told me the truth? He hadn't given me any names or addresses. He'd lied to me about being gay, so maybe he'd also lied to me about this. Finally, I'd have to explain why I'd destroyed all the evidence. It didn't seem worth the trouble, especially when I learned that the alleged killer had been killed himself."
She spreads her hands, a gesture of completion, a signal she's told us everything she knows.
Mace nods. "This Dr. Barloff – is she still in practice?"
"Very much so. I spoke with her just a couple months ago."
"Would you be willing to sign a form releasing her from patient-doctor privilege?"
"Of course I'll sign it. You can ask Dr. Barloff anything you like." Shoshana sighs. "So… it wasn't the gangster who killed them, is that what you're saying?"
Mace tells her he'll fax over the release form as soon as he gets back to his office.
"Gentlemen," She rises, "I must get back to work." She gestures at my sketchbook. "May I?"
I show her my sketch.
She peers at it for a moment. "Interesting," she says. "A taut face, a little wan, I'd say… but I do like the eyes, sparkling yet full of anguish…"
Mace and I walk over to Leland Avenue, the main street that bisects the campus, then into a dark coffeehouse appropriately named Cafe Noir. As soon as we sit down, I show him the Thistle Ridge fire story I photocopied at the library. As he reads it, I explain how I believe it fits with Susan Pettibone's account of her final call to Tom and now Shoshana's account of Tom's confession.
Mace stares at me quizzically. "You think Cody burned these people out?"
"Jurgen says he thinks Jack knew about Barbara's affair with Tom, that he may even have been all right with it. He also says Jack was working hard on finding out what happened to Belle Fulraine and that around the time of Flamingo he told Jurgen he was finally getting close. Suppose Barbara passed on Tom's information to Cody, who then administered what Jurgen calls ‘Jack's own kind of justice.’ Make sense?"
Mace shakes his head. "I'll look into this fire story, see what we got on it." He squints at me. "Gotta hand it to you, David, you're quite the investigator… even if it turns out you're wrong. But suppose you're right, what then? How does this connect with Flamingo? Were Fulraine and Jessup killed for revenge by the porn couple's backers?" He runs a hand through his hair. "I'll tell you, I'm having trouble with all this. A possible connection to some other horrible crime committed just a couple days before – how the hell did that get by me?"
"Flamingo was so big it obscured everything else that week."
"That month, that year… the whole fuckin' decade. Just thinking about it makes me crazy."
"Well, what's making me crazy is that someone's following me."
"Oh, yeah, Mr. Potato Head," Mace says.
He wakes me with a call at seven in the morning.
"Shoshana signed the release. I got through to Dr. Barloff last night. She confirmed Shoshana's story, remembers the child porn angle very well. Also that she and Shoshana discussed the pros and cons of coming forward. So Shoshana was telling the truth."
I tell him I'm not surprised.
"Me neither, but I had to be sure. I've been up most of the night going through the file on that old fire/homicides case on Thistle Ridge. The victims' names were George and Doris Steadman. The zinger – they ran a little industrial film company out of a building on Bailtown Road. After the fire, there wasn't much left up at the house, but our guys found some film cans containing porn in the garage. Not child porn, just the regular kind. No one made too much out of that. As for the fire/homicides, they were never solved. Our guys chalked it up to the mob, the theory being that the Steadmans were producing porn films and the people who controlled the porn market didn't like them infringing on their territory."
"Follow what I'm saying, David? Catch the drift? Suppose Cody, like you said, brings down a torture/hit on the Steadmans, who have special ‘friends’ who know how to collect a debt. Now let's say those same ‘friends’ live up on Torrance Hill. Six months later Jack Cody gets whacked. There's been a falling out between him and the Torrance Hill boys. So our guys were wrong, it wasn't the mob who killed the Steadmans, it was Cody, who tortured them first to make them tell what they new about the Belle Fulraine kidnapping. Later the mob found out and whacked Cody for messing in their business. See how it comes full circle?"
"I see all right… but something's missing."
"Yeah, Flamingo. But suppose the Torrance Hill boys ordered the Flamingo murders as retaliation three days after the Steadmans were killed, targeting Tom Jessup because they figured he was responsible for the Steadman massacre?"
"In that case, Tom was the target and Barbara was killed just ‘cause she was there."
"Or because the Torrance Hill guys knew Barbara was Cody's mistress. What better way to retaliate than kill her and Tom-the-squealer at the same time?"
"They would have known about Tom since he'd ordered the film, then stalled making the final payment. They could easily have followed him to the motel, seen Barbara and figured out the connection to Cody." I pause. "Is that what you think happened?"
"Could be." Mace laughs. "Maybe so-and-so did such-and-such to whomever, and then what's-his-name did whatever-it-was to you-know-who. It's too complicated. Been too many years. It's a fuckin' ball of snakes. How the hell can I ever unravel it?"
Mace is right, he can't unravel it, there are too many variables, too many supposes, too big a cast of characters, most of whom now are dead. A hitman acting for the Torrance Hill mob – sure, that could be. As good an explanation as any I guess. But in no way conclusive.
So what does this all mean? That the Flamingo killings must forever remain unsolved? That it will become one of those old murder-mystery puzzles like the Black Dahlia case in L.A.; the ‘Il Mastra’ sex killings in Florence, Italy; the Zodiac killings in San Francisco; and a hundred cases more – turning up from time to time as filler in the back pages of newspapers, there to be pored over by obsessives, amateur criminologists, and adolescent boys?