The White Flamingo (11 page)

“A little something for the pain,” she said.

Joe figured that she’d had a few something’s for the pain in her time, but he kept quiet. He raised the glass and took a bite.

It tasted like victory.

Sharp, acidic, victory.

He guessed The White Flamingo was no stranger to a cocktail. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Miss Bell’s vices. She was the client. The client could roll up her sleeve and shoot a load of china white straight into the main line right there and then. She could smoke crystal meth through a bong made of human bones. She could take two tabs of L.S.D. and place one on each of her eyeballs. She could blink. Stand on her head. Dance the cha-cha. The client was the client. Called the shots. That was the way it worked. Always had been.

But she wasn’t like that.

He was.

That was the problem.

“I don’t normally do this sort of thing,” she said. Sure, she didn’t. He had met women like her in the past. They lived in luxury palaces and hated men. They fell in love with their psychiatrists and practiced Tai Chi. They had ideas about changing the world and empowering homeless street dogs. They flittered around on the fringes of artistic circles and wrote bad poetry. They dug illiterate men twenty years younger than their years. Men with bad mothers and romantic notions. They had strange ideas about sex and meditation. She broke no mould. Nobody did. Or if they did
, they flew away from Fun City.

The Detective couldn’t fool himself.

That was the problem.

The White Flamingo was an original.

“What sort of thing?”

“Invite men, here, at night,” she said
, lighting a Mild Seven cigarette. She inhaled. Blew the smoke upwards. She looked directly at the detective. “What are you thinking about?” she said. 

“People don’t normally ask me that, Miss Bell. Well, I guess your boy is innocent, Miss Bell, we just need a little time to let the cops open the gates. I’m overwhelmed by your hospitality.”

“Can you grease the wheels?”

“Sure. It’s what I do.”

The White Flamingo put the cigarette to her lips. Took a miniscule puff. 

“It’s fascinating isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Death,” she said.

“I guess so, if you like that kinda thing.”

“The idea that one minute you are here
, drinking a cocktail, smoking, listening to music, making love, dreaming, swimming, sleeping, playing chess, making cheesecake, and the next moment you are just, dead. Dead. A closed book. Dead. A dream. Blackness. Isn’t it fascinating how one can go from one stage to the other, so quickly, so randomly? Life is so short, don’t you think?” Her hand was on the thigh again, moving up and down. “What a way to go?” She put out the cigarette in a marble ashtray. “Sliced up like that.”

“It’s my belief that each and every one of us has a time and a place to go
, and there’s no use cheating it. I figure that it is predetermined, Miss Bell. From the day that we are born, someone, somewhere, writes it all out for us with a sick sense of humour and an eye for detail. Life is a story. All stories must end. All stories require conflict. Some holy men claim to live without desire, but it’s not something I’d strive for.”

“How fatalistic. How sad. You think everything is prescript?”

“Yes.”

“Well, was this in the script?” The White Flamingo unbuttoned the detective’s pants with one hand while draining her glass with the other. She put the glass down on the table and gracefully lowered herself to the floor.

She kept eye contact at all times as the larvae inside the Detective’s head broke from their cocoons and grew wings. The butterflies flew around inside his skull as the White Flamingo weaved her magic.

“The locals have a saying,” he said.

“Mmmm,”

“
Krueng Sawan
.”

“What does it mean?”

“To go up to heaven.”   

TWENTY-FOUR

THEY DID
.

Near empty cocktail glasses and dawn were threatening, like an angry promise, to end the show. The sun slowly rose above the harbour, beams of light glimmering above the water. A house lizard languidly climbed the wall toward a light where flying insects hovered. Miss Bell kept the conversation alive. “I read a story in one of those television listing magazines. It was a true story. There was a young girl abandoned in a collapsed building in Czechoslovakia. The authorities thought that she was dead. She wasn’t dead. She was two years old and was saved by a pack of feral dogs. The dogs brought her food. She lived with the dogs for four years. She learned how to bark and she walked on all fours like the dogs that had brought her into their world. She grew up thinking she was a dog. Imagine that? When she was discovered by the authorities
, she was taken into care and taught how to walk on two feet, how to eat, and talk. Fate and genetics are not important in establishing adult behaviour. Who wrote that script for her? How could that life be predetermined?”

“Most writers I’ve known would be thrilled with imagining such a story.” The Detective took a bite on the lemon. “Including the hack that wrote the article.”

“The article went on to explain that nurturing was the most important consideration in human behaviour. I feel that we are a victim of our environment. This city was not the place to let Sebastian live. I have failed as a parent. Yet, part of me is afraid that he is in some ways troubled, not at peace with himself. And this can only be my fault. This episode will remain with him unless you can find out who is really killing these women. We need closure. We need to find out who this woman hater is so that we can move on with our lives, to somewhere better.”

“Every boy is innocent in his mother’s eye, Miss Bell.”

“On the contrary, every child is guilty, of something, somewhere in his mother’s eye. We keep a record, a score. We mothers know it. Whether we choose to ignore it or forget it is another matter entirely. Find the beast that did this. Find him and make him suffer.”

“I’m working on it, Miss Bell.”

“Good. A strong man like you ought to be able to…” Her words stopped. She placed a hand around his head and brought his lips to hers. They kissed. Tongues like two snakes tangling in the night. The dog on the floor began to make a whining sound. She grabbed the Detective by the hair and brought his head back, away from hers. “You will do this for me?” she said.

“The killer will be found, Miss Bell.” He stood up. His feet led him to the door. He opened it. The sound of a cigarette lighter flicking. He closed the door and walked past the pond and down onto the road. A flock of birds flapped in a sky dark with something besides dawn.

His thoughts turned to Kelly.

TWENTY-FIVE

HE FOUND
her drinking in the bar on the seventh road. Kelly’s head was slumped on the table. Her make-up was smeared and her hair was like an abandoned rat’s nest. He walked over and sat opposite her. She gazed up at him with drunken hateful eyes. He ordered a bottle, two glasses, and a bucket of ice. “I thought I told you to get out of town,” he whispered gently to her.

Her head whipped up like a threatened snake and she looked at him. “Up to me what I do.”

The Detective thought about it. He nodded. No argument there. He took a bite of the drink.

“The killer is still out there,” he said.

“Yeah. Maybe it is you. Maybe you like to kill people, huh, Mr. Detective?” She looked at him directly.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. Get out of town.”

“I don’t have money.”

“The two hundred?”

“Gone.”

“Where?”

“Up to me what I do.”

“Sure, honey. Up to you. Play a game of cards. Buy a boyfriend a motorbike. Sure, up to you. Or is it. Is it really up to you?”

Kelly looked at him as if he was the devil’s sidekick. He was the father that left her as a baby. He was the father of her baby that left her and the baby as a teenager. He was every customer that had short-changed her. He was all that was bad about men, personified in one male body. Every other male; brown, white, red, yellow, fat, thin, rich and poor who had disappointed her during her short stay on the planet, were all inside him searching to gain advantage over her.

She grabbed the bottle from the table and lifted it up high above her head. Her once beautiful face became that of a snarling animal, one that had grown up fighting and would go down fighting. She brought the bottle down on The Detective’s head.

It cracked open.

The bottle.

The head.

Glass flew across the bar. He felt the blood drip down the side of his face, stood, and walked toward the exit. Too drunk to feel the pain, if there w
as any, he turned around and looked at her. She stood with the broken bottle still in her hand.

He stood on shaky legs. Walked to the sidewalk. He hailed a taxi and got inside. The taxi drove him to the hospital. Seven stiches. The nurse smiled at him as she picked out the shards of glass and then stitched up his head. “Why you have friends like this?” she said.

“Everyone is like this. It’s just a matter of where and when,” he said.

“I think you move in the wrong circles,” she said.

“I think you might be right. How about me moving in your circle?” he asked.

“No chance,” she said.

“Well, now you see my problem.”

“Yes,” she said
, “I see it.”

He paid the bill and took a taxi back to the hotel. The alcohol was wearing off and every cell in his body demanded more. He hit a seven eleven and bought a bottle of Tiger Sweat – a local rum. Back in the
room, he drank quickly. He drank like a man who would never drink again.

But men who drank like that always did.

Nature’s greatest gift was sleep.

There were no hungers, addictions, anxiety. In
dreams, there were no desires. It was the realization of dreams that brought with it desire. He looked at his works and looked at the bottle. One of them would have to stay.

He cooked up one last shot.

Found a vein

H
it it.

The last shot.

He chose the bottle.

Drank it.

Slept.   

TWENTY-
SIX

SAVOY HOTEL

LONDON.

1984

Taylor had noticed the way that she floated through the crowd, a nod here, a smile, a sniff kiss
, and then she floated away to another group of film producers, literary agents, all men with a definite place to be and a short time to get there. He sat at the bar, toying with a glass of Jack and Coke. Yes, he reminded himself he had drunk heavily after the double blow of loss and success.

Suddenly she was beside him.

“You are the guy that wrote the book. About the boy in the window?”

“True,” Taylor said taking in those big green eyes, the white dress, legs that went on forever.

“Charmed to meet you,” she held out her hand. He held it for a moment, unsure of what to do with it.

“And you are the White Flamingo,” he said.

“Please, call me Susan.”

“Susan, tell me
, what do you do for a living?”

“I marry millionaires,” she chuckled.

“I’m afraid I’m not quite there yet. You sure you have the time to speak to me?”

“You’re a novelist,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’
ve never slept with a novelist,” she touched his hand playfully.

He drank his drink and ordered them both another.

The three-piece jazz band played a slow number.

They danced.

TWENTY-SEVEN

SLIM LIVED
in a two-storey house far away from the beach. It was as close to squalor as you could get before the stench of the slums clenched the stomach, grabbed the throat, and threw your junk on the dark side of the train tracks. Off the beaten track, the roads were narrow unpatched streets with squares selling barbequed chicken and fried grasshoppers; the stench of cooking oil, chilli, raw sewage; faces both hideous and beautiful, mutually littered and lit up the area.

The morning sun was unforgiving for that time of year, it would become steadily hotter for the next five months until the monsoon came bringing the floods, cool winds, and the relief from the heat. Fun City had three seasons, hot, hotter, and wet.

Four children from the ages of six to nine played with a deck of cards in the yard at the front of Slim’s hovel. The Detective walked up to the front door. His head felt like it was being held in a vice. The Tiger Sweat was still in the system and the last shot only left the hunger for another. His nerves jangled. His throat was dry. His mind was a nest of rats scratching to be released from the confines of his cranium and the bandage on his head. The children ignored him. He was just a crazy foreigner that had been smashed over the head with a bottle by a bargirl. He rang the bell. Jim’s wife was a local woman of about thirty-seven with worry-lines that the cigarette in her mouth didn’t appear to resolve. She wore a T-shirt with the picture of a tiger, and one thin gold bracelet decorated her left wrist. The Detective asked her if her husband was home.