The Pink Flamingo Murders (24 page)

Retrained? I’d be destroyed, and he knew it. I’d be thrown into the snake pit, at the mercy of the ambitious incompetents who ran city desk. I’d never have a decent story again, and if I did, the copy desk would go at it like Lizzie Borden went after her stepmom and dad. Charlie’s anger had reached its peak. He was pounding the desk for emphasis as he said, “In the meantime,
[pound]
, you must tell your editor
[pound]
where you are going
[pound]
when you leave the building
[pound]
. The lawyers may want to talk to you
[pound]
. I want to know where you are
[pound]
at all times
[pound, pound, pound].”

He already knew where I was. I was in deep yogurt. There was no way I could get out of this. The best I could hope for was a jury trial, which would prolong the agony long enough so maybe I could get a job somewhere else—like the Mexico, Missouri,
Ledger
. Well, I wasn’t going to hang around the office and watch everyone dance on my almost-dug grave. I had to get out of there—if I could find my editor, Wendy the Whiner. Just tracking Wendy down would add to my workload.

Like most
Gazette
editors, she wasted little time dealing with reporters. She spent the day in meetings
with other editors and consultants, then went to meetings about the meetings, then wrote memos about the meetings. If you wanted a good story, you found your own ideas. Wendy’s stories came straight from the pile of press releases that she received by mail and fax. This morning Wendy was at her desk for a change, and I took great satisfaction in letting her know exactly where I was going.

“I’ll be at the morgue,” I said. “I need to get the autopsy report for the story tentatively called ‘Death of a Neighborhood Activist.’ I’ll be at the funeral, too. This autopsy should be interesting. Caroline’s head was bashed in pretty bad, blood and brains all over the grass, and then the killer stuck a pink flamingo in her chest. I imagine the killer leaned on it, and then pop, those little metal legs went right in between her ribs and . . .”

“Eeewww,” Wendy said, looking revolted. The press releases she got her story ideas from were always upbeat and completely sanitized. “Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to know.” Good. A few more days of disgustingly detailed reports and Wendy wouldn’t care where I went.

Unfortunately, Lyle didn’t seem to care where I went, either. My plans for an impromptu romantic picnic in the park last night were buried when I dug up the dead cat. Lyle still didn’t know about that embarrassing episode, and there was no way I’d leave him a message trying to explain what happened. Now, before I went to see Cutup Katie, I deliberately took time to call him, using a pay phone on the
Gazette
backstairs for privacy. But Lyle wasn’t at the university or at home, and he hadn’t left any messages for me. I couldn’t help but take that as a bad sign.

I’d lost the swagger I’d had around Wendy by the time I got to Cutup Katie’s office. Katie was wearing a semiclean lab coat with only a few light-brown stains
that I told myself were coffee. I was in no mood to make morbid jokes. I asked her straight out how Caroline died.

“The police found a large pipe wrench next to the victim,” Katie said, “and the injuries are consistent with that. She was hit just above the ear, on the temporal lobe. The skull is thin there and easy to smash. She was hit hard, and often, by someone who was very angry. The bone was indented inward and there were extensive brain contusions. The scalp was ripped, exposing bone, blood, and brain gook. The victim was hit so hard her eye socket and cheek bone caved in.”

Oh, man. I wasn’t feeling so chipper. The details I delighted telling Wendy the Whiner made me queasy when Katie said them.

“What an awful way to die, killed by a pipe wrench,” I said.

“Technically, she was killed by the pink flamingo,” Katie said. “She was still alive after the attack, although probably not for long. I found more than a liter of blood in the chest cavity. The killer thrust those metal flamingo legs in the chest between the ribs. The legs pierced the heart and vena cava, and that’s what actually killed her.”

Poor Caroline. All flesh was grass, but hers was a low-rent lawn. Murder made her into a joke. “She would have died of shame,” I said. “She thought pink flamingos were tacky.”

Katie shrugged. “That’s a matter of opinion. This is the first time they were terminally tacky. You usually don’t die of bad taste.”

I thanked Katie and left the morgue, still brooding about this latest death. I knew Caroline. I didn’t like her, but I liked some of the things she did. Caroline was fierce, strong, and energetic—not this helpless, battered creature. Who did this? A lot of people
wanted Caroline out of the way, but could they actually kill her so brutally?

I decided to head back to North Dakota Place for some answers. The street was starting to look bedraggled. The parkway grass was shaggy and dotted with beer cans and other litter, and a
Gazette
was floating in the angel fountain. Caroline was not there to care, and no one on the street was taking over her duties. I saw Dina out on her porch, bringing in her mail. I asked when there was going to be a funeral for Caroline. “I thought Caroline’s ex-husband was taking care of the arrangements,” she said, “but I’d like to know, too. I’ll call him and find out.”

I went to work on my Meet Your Neighbor list again. I started knocking on doors. Three were slammed in my face when I said, “Hi, I’m from the
Gazette”
So much for community relations. Four doors never opened, and from the unlighted silence, I guessed no one was home. At the eighth house I hit pay dirt—or rather dust. The front door was opened by a skinny, sandy-haired guy with a beginning gut—a training gut, if you will. He was covered with a fine layer of plaster dust, like flour. Hanging around his neck was a paper filter mask. He said his name was Ron. He didn’t have to tell me he was a rehabber. Ron wore paint-spattered cutoffs and an Imo’s pizza cap. His stained and sweaty T-shirt celebrated the St. Louis Brews, a beer-making club. “Give a man a beer and he wastes an hour. Teach a man to brew and he wastes a lifetime,” the shirt said.

Ron invited me along to White Castle for lunch, and I was so relieved to see a friendly face I offered to pick up the tab, on the
Gazette
, of course. I figured even they could afford forty-cent hamburgers. And the nice thing about White Castle was that no one would look twice at a woman in a suit lunching with a guy covered in plaster dust. It had seen stranger combinations. My
blue Jaguar followed his blue Chevy pickup to the parking lot—friendly feelings aside, I wasn’t about to get into a pickup with a man I didn’t know. We ordered, I paid, and we sat at a table, wolfing down oniony sliders, salty, fat-soaked fries, and large orange sodas. Yum. Not an ounce of fiber in the whole meal, unless we ate the paper bag. While we ate, Ron talked about Caroline. He seemed grateful for the opportunity, as if he wanted to sort out what he thought of her.

“Caroline didn’t just fix up an old house,” he said. “She loved those old houses. She appreciated their beauty and their irreplaceable craftsmanship. She had real passion, you know what I mean? She cared for that street like it was her child. I liked that about her. What I didn’t like was the way she did business. She was cutthroat, man. She tricked me once and bought a house I’d been negotiating for right from under me. I thought I had the deal sewed up until she wormed her way in, and I lost money big time. I guess she didn’t do anything worse than any businessman, and maybe if she’d been a man, she’d be admired as somebody who cut a hard deal. But people expect women to be different. More caring and sensitive, you know what I mean?”

I knew Caroline had the sensitivity of a hammerhead shark.

“She might have gotten away with being a tough businessperson if she hadn’t tried to run North Dakota Place like a reform school. She never understood that people move to the city because they want freedom. They weren’t interested in living in some tight little suburban planned community. All her rules about where to park and what flowers to plant pissed people off. They weren’t going to stand for it, no matter how much good she did. Caroline couldn’t let people be. She wanted perfection. So the neighbors rebelled and
didn’t appreciate her work. To make it worse, she was always dragging West County real estate people down here, trying to sell them on North Dakota Place as some kind of a luxury community. It wasn’t going to work. This area is too diverse for those white-bread types, you know what I mean? But none of them had the guts to say that. So they kept making cockamamie suggestions about flowers and fountain grass. And Caroline never caught on. After the real estate people left, she’d buy more flowers and fix whatever they said should be fixed, and then she’d show them the street again, and the West County real estate people would find more things wrong. She never understood she was getting the runaround, you know what I mean?”

I did. We dumped our trash. Ron went back to work on his house, and I decided I’d been sufficiently fortified by belly bombers to tackle the dreaded trouble house. If the drug-dealing, gun-selling kids threatened me, all I had to do was burp. I parked my car two blocks away and walked toward the place. It did look threatening. It was also rundown. The porch sagged and the paint was peeling. Bed sheets were tacked over the front windows. The screen door bulged out. There were two kids sitting outside on the porch steps, but I couldn’t tell their ages. They were big as grown men and muscular as prizefighters. They wore baggy gang clothes and the black silk skullcaps known as do-rags. Some kids. The biggest one said something vile to me, and I quit thinking, or feeling, anything except angry. Maybe I was reacting to Erwin, or Charlie, or maybe I just don’t take well to ugly offers of oral sex from strangers, but I turned on him, gave him my deadliest glare, and said, “Watch. Your. Mouth.”

He looked surprised and amused. “You talking to me, cunt?” he said slowly.

“Shut up!” I said. “Just shut up.” What was the matter with me? I could get shot for talking back to young
hoods like these. But right now, I didn’t care. Both kids stood up, smirked, and blocked my way up to the porch.

“Get out of my way,” I said. They didn’t move. What was I going to do next—kneecap them with my briefcase? I wondered if they were armed and when they were going to pull a gun on me. Now I was scared—after I’d opened my big mouth. Too smart, too late. As usual.

I could see out of the corner of my eye that blinds were being lifted in nearby houses. The neighbors were watching. A door opened at one house, and an old man with gray shorts and fishbelly white legs came out with a video camera. He started taping us. A second neighbor, a gray-haired woman in a pink polyester pantsuit, charged out of a second house with her video camera running. The scary kids saw them, turned, smiled menacingly, and walked inside, slamming the door after them. That was it. They were gone. The confrontation was over. Suddenly I was shaky and short of breath. I thanked my rescuers. They introduced themselves as Herman and Dolores.

“We’re two members of the vigilante committee,” Herman said.

“We’ve had enough,” Dolores said, looking tougher than I thought possible in pink polyester. “For a while they were running a drug supermarket, with curb service even. People would pull right up in front and buy. We put a stop to that.”

“We started taping everything they do,” Herman said. “A car pulls up and we tape the license plates, and guess what? There’s no drug buy. Those young thugs start threatening you and we tape it and guess what? They disappear inside. We figure a few more weeks of this, and they’ll be gone. They’ll move where the neighbors don’t watch them so much.”

“Where did you get the idea?” I said.

“From TV,” Dolores said. “We tried everything else. We called the police, but by the time they got here, whatever we called about—the drug sale, the fist fight—would be over. We complained to the landlord, but he just took his phone off the hook. He lives in Chesterfield. All he cares about is the rent money. He doesn’t care what his rental house does to our neighborhood.”

“Videotaping has been done in other neighborhoods,” Herman said. “It works. We always tape in pairs, and we use as many different people as possible, so if they take one of us out, there are others to witness what goes on.” Herman must have gotten his language from the TV, too. But I was touched and proud of my neighborhood. They’d found an ingenious way to reclaim their street. I hoped it worked. I thanked Dolores and Herman again, and my two rescuers insisted on seeing me to my car. They waited until I locked the door. I waved good-bye and wondered where I was going. It looked like I wasn’t going to get the signatures of anyone at the trouble house for my Meet Your Neighbor sign-up sheets. Maybe I’d try some of the houses on North Dakota Place where nobody had been at home. I also wanted to talk to Sally, the former lover of the despicable Darryl. She hadn’t been home when I knocked on her door before. When I parked my car, Dina came out of her house and ran over. This woman was not the funny, fluffy, cat-loving Dina I knew. She was furious. “That scumbag!” she said.

“Which one?” I said.

“Caroline’s ex-husband, James Graftan. Do you know what he did? He told us he’d handle the funeral arrangements. He handled them all right. He had Caroline cremated and dumped her ashes in the parking lot at the Galleria. Like she was a full ashtray. He said it was where she spent her happiest hours—and all of his money. The miserable bastard. It’s unfair.”

“Untrue, too,” I said. “Judging by her wardrobe, Caroline never spent a nickel shopping there.”

“Graftan said there would be no memorial service, that her work was memorial enough,” Dina said. “He’s just too lazy or too mean to honor her memory. He’s not getting away with that. We’ll hold a memorial for Caroline right here at the angel fountain. She deserves better. I’m going to get Patricia, and we’ll get to work on a service for her.”

“Why isn’t Caroline’s family handling her funeral?” I said.