The Dream of the Broken Horses Read Online Free Page A

will appear at dusk. I note the configuration of the court—a two-story U-shaped building with exterior staircases and covered open porticos providing access to room doors running along the courtyard sides.
    The office is to the right of the entrance. I'm about to turn toward it when I notice the woman on the chaise observing me over the top of her magazine.
    "Hi," I greet her.
    "Hi, yourself. Help you?"
    "I'm looking for Johnny."
    "You'll find him in the office," she says, then turns back to her magazine.
    I find Johnny Powell leaning on the reception counter gazing at the TV set across the room. A Calista Forgers-Boston Red Sox game's in progress, the score 5-2 in favor of the Sox.
    I introduce myself.
    "Oh, sure," he says, "been expecting you. You picked a good time. Nothing going on now ' cept the baseball. Forgers playing like fools today."
    If I've ever seen a person to whom one could apply the moniker "geezer" it would be the old man grinning at me now. He's stooped, thin, gaunt, unshaven, a pair of bright blue eyes in a tanned, cracked-leather face. His voice is cracked too, with a nasal twang. He looks the type who play wily old prospectors in westerns, spouting cracker-barrel philosophy about the lure of gold and how it's akin to the lust stirred by a wicked woman.
    He mutes the TV with a remote.
    "So you're here to see old two-oh-one?" he says. "Been a couple of years since anyone asked. First year after the killings they came in all the time, curiosity seekers wanting to take pictures and snatch up souvenirs. Mr. Evans—he's dead now, that's his daughter sunning herself outside—he decided not to let the room out or even paint it up. 'Just leave it be, Johnny,' he told me. Didn't even want me to scrub the bloodstains off the walls, though of course I did. We charged 'em five dollars for a five-minute look-see. Made a bushel of money that way. When stuff started getting swiped—ashtrays, lamps, even one of the pictures on the wall—he had me screw everything down. For a couple years old two-oh-one was our top-producing room. Biggest thing ever happened here at the Flamingo. Biggest thing ever will happen, I betcha ."
    I ask Johnny if he was here the day of the murders.
    "Sure was," he says. "Was afternoon man then, same as now. Knew the couple too, since they were regulars. Knew Mr. Jessup actually. Not the lady. Never exchanged two words with her. He'd come in, register, then wait for her up in the room. Or, if Mrs. Fulraine got here first, she'd wait out in her car till he registered, then follow him up. He always asked for an end room near the parking. That meant one-oh-one or two-oh-one depending which was occupied.
    "He was a nice fella. Soft spoken. Private schoolteacher, you know. Taught out at the Hayes School. Later I heard that's where they met. Seems she sent her boys there. One day she goes out to meet the teachers. Then—pop! Wow! Flyin ' sparks! That whole summer they met here three, four times a week. They say she's the one actually paid since she was rolling in moolah and he barely had a pot to piss in. . . ."
    After a brief negotiation, I hand him fifty bucks for a one-hour rental, plus an extra ten for himself.
    "Hour's kinda odd length of time," he says, handing over the key. "Won't take you but a couple of minutes to get the feel. 'Less you're planning on takin ' a snooze. . . ."
    No napping, I tell him, I'm going to be sketching and that's a slow process, a lot slower than taking photographs.
    "You'll find it pretty much the way it was. Furniture and bed frames still original. New mattress, of course. New carpeting. New TV. Maybe nine or ten paint jobs and seventy or eighty changes of shower curtains, but otherwise just the same."
    The woman in the yellow bikini watches me as I ascend the exterior stairs. When I pause on the balcony, she raises herself from the chaise and marches authoritatively to the end of the diving board. As she does, I notice endearing pink marks on