The Dream of the Broken Horses by William Bayer Page B

enough time to truck his stuff out. All they'd find when they got here would be a couple of old geezers shooting pool."
    Mace leans against the wall, lights a cigarette, and smokes it while I start a quick sketch of the gaming room. Later, I'll insert Jack Cody, Barbara Fulraine, and perhaps Jürgen the maitre d', if I can find a photo of him.
    "They used each other," Mace says. "She slept with him so he'd keep looking for her daughter, and he told her he was getting closer to finding the kid so she'd continue to sleep with him. The part I could never figure was her stealing off to sleep with Jessup. Was she turned on by the notion of crossing Cody or did it just turn her on to sleep with different guys?
    "Oh, there'd been plenty of lovers over the years—we found that out soon enough. Even when she was married to Fulraine, she had lovers on the side. She may have been classy, but she liked sex, so there was a carload of secondary suspects. Including Fulraine, who had a private investigator tailing her butt. He wanted custody of his boys and was looking for evidence to have her ruled unfit."
    I tell him about the Fessé photograph.
    "Doesn't surprise me," he says, stroking his goatee. "She was a complicated woman.
    He suggests we go upstairs to look at Cody's office. It turns out to be a handsome room paneled in fine mahogany. Mace feels around, then slides open a panel to reveal a concealed wall safe.
    "He kept the gaming receipts in here along with his private files. By the time we got a search warrant, he'd cleaned everything out."
    Cody, as prime suspect, had what amounted to a perfect alibi: At the exact time of the Flamingo shootings, he was lunching at the Downtown Athletic Club with a municipal judge. Mace wasn't surprised. In his view the alibi only served to confirm Cody's involvement.
    "It was too pat, like he went to a lot of trouble to make sure his actions were accounted for that afternoon. That told me he'd ordered the hit, which from an investigative point of view was happy news. When whoever killed those people was picked up, he'd have something valuable to trade. And hit men eventually are picked up, or else they boast to a pal or girlfriend. Then when the pal develops a grievance or the girlfriend gets dumped, he/she's got a way to get payback."
    Cody's old living quarters are down the hail, with a one-way glass viewing window set into the floor so he could observe the action in the gaming room.
    "This is where they fucked," Mace tells me. "The bed was over there."
    He gazes almost wistfully at the empty space as if imagining Jack and Barbara making love. Watching him, I wonder if he fell a little in love with her back when he was actively working the case.
    "Did she spend nights here?" I ask, wondering too whether I'm starting to fall a little in love with her myself.
    Mace shakes his head. "She always went home. She had live-in help, but even years after the kidnapping she was afraid for her sons. Two or three times a week she'd drop in here for lunch, then she and Cody'd come up here and screw. But she'd always leave in time to meet her boys when they got home from school.
    "That final summer, when the boys were away at camp, she started meeting Cody here at night. That gave her free time in the afternoons to hook up with Jessup. Everyone knew she was sleeping with Cody, but no one knew about Jessup. To keep it that way, keep Cody and her ex from finding out, they'd meet secretly at that crummy motel. Except she wasn't so secretive. She drove a Jag. People spotted her turning into the motel lot. Still boggles my mind—she had such a tremendous amount to lose and still she risked it."
    We descend the main stairs, exit the house, then circle round back to look at the gardens. Mace tells me that all the trees near the house were strung with lights, creating a magical effect outside the club windows at night.
    "I've been waiting years for someone to come forward, say he knew who did the Flamingo