The White Flamingo (12 page)

He was.

Walked through a living area with a battered sofa and an old television set. Jim was sitting staring at the blank screen. He had a tumbler on the coffee table in front of him. Inside the glass was a dark liquid that the Detective figured was Tiger Sweat rum.

“Old Vern had a motive.”

“Yeah,” Jim said.

“Said he hated the bitch. She used to tease him with those pins of hers. She tore him up with that body.”

“Vern’s beyond caring about women.”

“Sure, but it must be tragic for a man with no money in Fun City to be teased by the whores.”

“There’s one thing worse than having no money here, Joe.”

“What’s that?”

“Having a shit load and then losing it.”

“How much you lose, Slim?”

“Same as the rest,” he said. “House, car, bits of stuff that don’t really mean much. It’s the stuff you can’t see that hurts most. Respect, pride, honour.”

“Well, you won’t find those in the glass, Slim. And if you do
, only temporarily.”

“
Works better than the shrink.”

“What shrink?”

“The
shrink
.”

“There’s a shrink in Fun City?”

“Yes.”

“Lord knows the city needs one.”

“Works above a shop house near the train tracks. He sees clients for free. Says he made enough cash in his last life.”

“Sounds like an angel.”

“It helps. But since the trouble in the bar, I haven’t been able to leave the house.”

“You been seeing someone else? Meetings? A.A.?”

“No time. I need to work.” He took another bite from the rum. “I need to get back into the bar.”

“The bar can wait.”

“No chance.”

“Where were you before it, happened?”

“What?”

“Tammy.”

“Here, man. I left to open up early. Ask the missus.”

“I guess she’ll vouch for you.”

“She don’t vouch for shit. If she could put me there slicing up the bitch, then she would. She would love to see me behind different kinds of bars.”

“Cozy relationship.”

“The normal. What can you expect from a woman who comes to work
here?”

“What do you know of The White
Flamingo?”

“It’s a wading bird, found in Africa. The plumage is white, it’s the blood in the bird’s veins that make it appear pink.”

“Don’t get cute.”

“I’m not. All Flamingos are white except the black ones. Not pink, like people think.
It has to do with the blood.”

“Blood’s important
, right?”

“Sure.”

“I’m talking about Bell. Miss Bell, who lives on the top of the hill. The police have her son in custody for the Tammy murder. She used to drop her dry goods and do model shoots for lettuce. The woman was once known as The White Flamingo.”

“So?”

“So, she hired me to find the real killer so I can spring her son from the can. You follow?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“And do you see that you were the first to discover the body. That makes you a suspect.”

“Vern saw the body first.”

“Not according to Vern, he says you got to it first.”

“His minds all mixed up. Drinks too much.”

“Not something that you’d know about, Slim?”

“Look
, I might like a livener in the morning, but I’ve got a roof over my head and kids to feed. I see things straight.”

“Yes,” the detective said. His mind was somewhere else. On a shot, the waves of the sea lapping on the dirty brown sands. “You didn’t kill her?”

“Nobody killed her. She killed herself.” 

The
Detective thought about it. “How does that sound in front of a judge?”

“This is Fun City. Anything’s possible. Remember it was me who called you, Joe. Just why would I do that if I killed the bitch myself?”

“Yeah, I see it. Nice angle. See you around, Jim.” The Detective stood and got himself out of there with feet that felt like they were covered in clay. He needed to detox.

Later…

Headed to the nearest bar. It had a sports theme and large screen televisions mounted to the walls. He ordered a pint of cider and watched formula one. The cars whizzed around the track like it meant something to get to the finish line. Maybe it did. What did it mean? It meant cash, a yacht, and a woman with the kind of figure The White Flamingo would kill for. It meant being number one and counting your friends with the fingers on one hand. When one had money, life didn’t touch one. You could simply pay folks to step into line and if they didn’t play ball, cut them loose. What the rich didn’t seem to understand was that the more they controlled others, the less they controlled themselves.

The barman was Scottish with prison tattoos. Joe asked for a tourist map.

“Aye,” he said and passed a map across the bar. “Looks like Red Bull got it again.”

“Aye,
it gives you wings,” Joe said and opened it. He spread it across the table.

The double event.

TWENTY-
EIGHT

FROM
THE
Occult
Killings of Jack the Ripper,
(Dandelion Press, 1984) pages 1-4.

Whitechapel. The East End of London, an area on the north bank of the River Thames comprising of Aldgate, Houndsditch, Shoreditch, Wapping, Limehouse, and Bethnal Green. In 1888, this was a district overrun with poverty, famine, alcoholism, prostitution, and general degradation. There were working houses for the poor and little else in the way of escape for the uneducated. Gin houses lined the streets, pubs, opium dens, laudanum. Gin was preferred by the masses. It was cheaper than clean water. An over surplus of corn had given rise to the production of the alcoholic beverage, first pioneered by the Dutch. A working class nation addicted to alcohol was easy to govern and control. They did not see beyond the next drink.  Poverty was crippling for the poor in the capital of a country that owned a quarter of the world, and whose industrial industries were admired by all nations around her. It was the classical old story of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the women, unskilled, unwanted, often took to the streets in order to survive.

This was the place and time where the infamous killer, known only as Jack
the Ripper, gruesomely took the only thing of value that five street women had. Their only thing of any worth – their lives. For these women, Polly, Liz, Annie, Catharine, and Kelly, they were butchered for want of a bed for the night.

The streets were dark, cold
, and wet, the killer was obviously a man familiar with the area. The women were all destitute and apart from the last victim, Mary Kelly, without fixed abode. Kelly had at least managed to secure a room for the night. Why she let the killer in that night remains a mystery that she has taken to her pauper’s grave, along with the identity of her killer.

She was heard singing shortly before she let the killer into her room. Witnesses have confessed that she was drunk and in good spirits the night that she let Jack into her room. She had also enjoyed listening to the newspaper reports of the crime. A friend had read the articles to her as she brushed her hair and gasped here and there in the morning as she prepared to go out onto the streets to ply her trade.

Some of the pictures and the articles in fact, amused her.  

The idea that Jack wore a top hat and carried a medical bag, like a doctor
, is a simple example of media imagery (Jack the Ripper was the first big media event of its kind, occurring when the printed press was able to cope with huge circulation in and around London). Any man dressed as a doctor or as a professional man with money, would have been set upon by thieves and prostitutes, and stripped of any valuables. The killer would have dressed down (if he were indeed a man of wealth and intelligence as has been indicated) to be able to blend in with the street urchins, prostitutes, and thieves that patrolled the area at that time and place.

“If only I could be so lucky,” Kelly joked as she looked at one of the pictures of the dashing young man, properly dressed, in hat and tails, whizzing through the East End.

Unfortunately she was.

Research into the exact locations of each murder event has led scholars to believe that the killer picked each location
, and carefully planned the killings so that they would be at the specific location. The Hudson papers (Sussex University Press 1979) indicate that when each event was marked and looked at on a map, and when the locations are joined together with symmetrical lines, the occult image of a fish (Vesica Piscis) is formed. Hudson goes on to venture that the body parts taken from the victims were used in an occult ritual. The exact purpose of these occult rituals remains unclear, although evidence suggests that it has something to do with longevity, prolonging life. It has been suggested that the killer may have been suffering from a terminal sexually transmitted disease such as syphilis. His motives, Hudson concludes, were twofold. One, to avenge the women whom he considers fostered upon him this condition. Two, to cure the condition and prolong life through the ritual of black magic.

Perhaps the only thing that remains clear about the
killings is the timing and the place. The first and second victims were killed on separate nights, both in public. The third and fourth killings (the so called
double event
) were carried out on the same evening. The killer was wise enough to cross police boundaries, only a matter of feet from the East End Houndsditch beat, to the Metropolitan City beat. 

The fifth and final killing was carried out
later date and was by far the most gruesome of the killings. Mary Kelly, an intelligent, yet illiterate, and by some reports, a once beautiful and young Irishwoman who had worked in the higher classed establishments in the west End, was found terribly mutilated in her small cold-water dwelling in the East End Spittlefields rooming house.

After her
demise, the killings ceased and the killer was never found, despite almost a hundred years of research, analysis, and speculation, the case remains truly open. Suspects have been quite a mixed bag, whittled down to about a dozen possibilities. These postulations include royal conspiracies, black magic worshippers, the mentally ill, and poor immigrants. One thing is for certain. The man that killed those women did so with a concrete motive and was not without some knowledge of the local area, and would not have been looked upon as less than anything normal by the local people of that place and time.               

TWENTY-NINE

TAYLOR PICKED
up the telephone; it shook in his hand. He was not one to telephone strangers. He dialled the number that the newspaper had given him. The Detective’s mobile.

“
Hello.”

“Hello, is this Joe Dylan, private investigator
?”

“Yeah, you got it, baby.”

“I would like some moments of your time. It is about the killings. I write for the Express.”

“You’re a journalist?”

“Yes, amongst other things. I live in apartment 73F in the City Home building.”

“You want me to meet you there?”

“It’s imperative.”

“Give me twenty minutes. I’m in a beach side bar. You could meet me here.”

“I can’t leave the apartment.”

“Why
, somebody got you hostage?”

“It’s a long story. Twenty minutes.”

“Right.”

Taylor turned off the phone and breathed heavily. He was making the small steps he needed to make. Soon the finish line. He breathed out and in
, and opened the document:

The air by the lake was cool as the sun set, somewhere in the distance the sound of an owl, an eagle owl, she surmised, flying across the waters.

THIRTY

THE KILLER
looked at his reflection in the mirror. The child that once was there in the glass, was now barely visible, worn away with pain and disease. His youth was still barely visible in the grey eyes that looked back at him through years of regret. Evidence of those past defeats were what the whores saw. They looked into his soul, into the deep pool of loneliness and abandoned faith; a life had sailed past like a ghost ship under a stormy sky. The natives claimed that the heart had many rooms; the killer’s was like a maze. Unchartered territory, abandoned attics, condemned cellars, a dank cold living room darker than a suicide’s notebook. He remembered as a child having had a terrible dream. He was lost in a Victorian townhouse, each door, one after the other, led to darker and darker rooms. There were no ways to escape from the house. His heart thundered as he crashed through each door into cold dark rooms filled with shapes in the dark, rocking horses, pianos, cabinets, until he found himself in a coal cellar. He had screamed himself awake, his mattress soaked with perspiration, his hands clenching a ball of blanket.

He had that dream every week for a period of thirty years. The nightmare stopped after the first kill.

A lifetime ago.

A different country.

The police put it down as a missing person.

They got that right.

He had found her staggering back from a village pub, through an alleyway. The killer simply stepped up around her and slit her throat, she was too drunk to realize what was happening. The story made the news for a few weeks and the killer was never found. He had flown to Fun City with a sense of energy and commitment, as if he was living inside a thriller novel or an action movie. Reality was mostly a consensus, rather than something solid, tangible, and real.

              How many years had he left before the final stages closed in alone and ugly, like a child’s worse nightmare?  The news of the diagnosis aged him dramatically. He had grown old. Old and resourceful. With age came wisdom and prudence.

He put on the wig. Long black hair fell down across his che
eks. The hat was large and black.  Strapped on the fake beard. He looked like a Quaker. A religious man in a city of sin. He darkened his eyes with make-up. Eye-liner bought from a pharmacist on  Beach Road. He looked like a murderer, but so did many of the men that walked along  Beach Road. Nobody stood out in a city peopled with freaks. He had made mistakes, many of them, but he would not let the operation go to ground. The killer would not be noticed. He applied some more black eye-liner and gelled his wig. He looked down from the mirror and studied the map. Satisfied, he closed it and put it back into its place inside the old hardback novel in the bookshelf. He opened the bottle and poured some of the liquid into a glass. The killer drank it slowly, letting the alcohol burn his throat. It would be over soon, he would be able to start afresh miles away from all the whores and the liars that had dragged him down into the pool of scum he had found himself in.

Down the stairs and out into the street. He hurried along past the bars and the restaurants. The smell of burned chillies and grilled chicken. The sounds of laughter and conversation from the
open-air bars. A street dog blocked his path. He bent down as if to pick up a stone and the dog trotted off to the other side of the road. A tattooed body-builder carried a bag of dog food, sat the bag down on the street and began to feed the stray dogs. 

He walked to the go-go-bar on the seventh road. He stepped inside
to a blast of air-conditioning. The Killer sat in a booth. There were seven girls dancing and about a dozen men watching. He noticed her at once. Her name was Kim. She had slept with him over a year ago. Her hips were wide. Her lips pouted. She had a small tattoo on her ankle. Could she be the one who gave it to him? He couldn’t be sure, but there was only one way to eliminate her from his enquiries. He called her over and she stopped dancing and sat next to him. She was topless, her nipples erect in the coldness of the air conditioning. He named a price. He asked her if she permitted anal sex. He explained fashioning the thumb and forefinger of one hand into an
O
and inserting the forefinger of his other hand through the hole. She nodded her head in agreement. He stood and offered her his hand. She took his hand and stood. He paid a fee to the bar. He walked to the mouth of the second road and into a short time hotel ran by an old country woman who asked no question. She didn’t recognize him. Just another freak. Long hair, a beard, and a hat. They walked into the room. She asked him to shower. He refused. She headed toward the door. He opened his bag, took out five crisp thousand baht notes, and put them in her hand. She transferred the money into her handbag. The Killer told her to undress. She took off the bra first and the Killer drank in the sight of her small perk breasts. The rest of her clothes followed. Her waist was slim and her rear ample. Her legs were short, yet well shaped. She leant from the waist with her hands on the bed. Her back was faced to him. He drank in her hopelessness. Her frailty was his strength. Her weakness his power. He told her he would put it in her ass. She shrugged. The five thousand safely in her handbag. She waited there bent over, her ass facing him. The Killer opened his bag and took out the knife. He touched the tip very slightly on the lips of her vagina. She gasped with fake pleasure. She moaned for him to do it. She wanted it. So he did. He faintly circled her rose before plunging the blade deep into her vulva, the ovaries, and then womb. For a moment, she was quiet. Shock had taken her and then she screamed. She screamed louder than any woman the Killer had ever heard as he twisted the blade. He withdrew the blade. He leaned over and cut her throat. Blood shot across the wall. An artery. He spun her around and worked quickly to open her. He found the liver and cut it out, shoving the organ, still twitching, inside the bag. He drew the letter on her left thigh and on her cheek. He hacked away the breasts. He opened the refrigerator and put the two breasts inside next to a bottle of water. He closed the refrigerator door. He looked at her face. Decided to remove the head. Eyes open. A snarl of death. He hacked at the tendons and finally twisted the head from the body. This, he put in the fridge next to the breasts. He washed his hands and then he masturbated over her corpse. His mind an explosion of released tensions. He zipped up, opened the door and breathing heavily, took a complex route, on foot, to another bar.          

THIRTY-ONE

ONE-ARMED DANNY
was sitting in a beachside bar with a bargirl either side of him. In front of him, the remains of a Mai Tai cocktail sat. He picked up the glass with his one left hand and sucked at the orange juice through a straw. “Terrible business, this murder. Really shook the girls up, see,” he motioned to the two girls either side of him who appeared completely unmoved by the event. “At least they know that they are safe with yours truly.”

“You were there the night she died?”

“I was, she left with the insect kid, what’s his name?”

“Sebastian Bell.”

“Bell, that’s it. Never liked the look of him much.”

“Did he seem strange that night?”

“The kids’ always strange, mate. Don’t think he has the stomach to go through with it. Plus, he wasn’t the one doing a little bit of cosmetic surgery on the beach neither.”

“His mother has hired me to find the killer.”

“Good luck with that, mate, this town is full of the kind of fruitcakes capable of doing something like that. Keep your head down is my advice, what if you get too close and the killer decides to add you to his list? I’d keep my nose clean if I were you, mate. Safest way, like.”

“Appreciate your concern, Danny. Who else was there that night?” The Detective sat down and brushed away an approaching waiter with the back of his hand. He gazed across the bay, the gambling boats bobbing on the sea horizon, gulls flying ashore to roost.

“Slim, the bar keeper, Hale, a few ways and strays, normal crowd,” Danny said while groping the girl to his left. She was beautiful in an obvious way, lots of makeup, a synthetic nose and by the looks of it, a silicon boob job. “What do you think of this one, eh?”

“Dangerous,” said Joe.

“Not when you know how to handle them,” Danny said. There was a joke about handling and having one arm, but Joe didn’t have the heart to pursue it.

“Anyone, apart from Bell, that was paying a particular interest in Tammy?”

“Nah, she wasn’t hot property.  I hear she carried a knife in her bag, plus there were the other rumours,” Danny smiled knowingly at the Detective. “Always bag up, mate, you know what I mean?”

“Did you ever go with her?”

“Nah, mate, not that I can remember. As I say, I always put a raincoat on, even if it isn’t raining, if you know what I mean.”

“Anyone else you can think of that was involved?”

“The odd tourist, like. And between you and me, I think Slim was riding it many moons ago.”

“Well, thanks. Enjoy your evening, Danny,” Joe slid a banknote on the table and stood up to leave.

“Don’t take your eye off that Bell woman, neither,” said Danny. “Rumour has it that she did her old man in.”

“All wives do,” said Joe.

He stood and left one-armed Danny with his two little helpers.

THIRTY-TWO

THE
MAP.

Fun City.

The locations of the killings. The Detective sat watching Taylor.  He was an extremely nervous man, a hunted man, Joe thought, somebody who was dealing with pain on a complex and untreatable level. They were sitting on either side of a dining table with a map of Fun City spread out between them. Taylor had long hair, he reminded the Detective of a photograph he had seen of Alexander Trochhi,  in Paris, in the fifties.  

“The upper road, the beach road…The
Killer would cross to the Seventh Road.” Joe compared the sketch to the doodles he had made on the map, it was symmetrical.

Just like Jack.

The double event. 

“So
, he will kill twice tonight, I’m going out there, you want to join?” Joe asked the man opposite him.

“I can’t”

“Why not?”

“I have panic
attacks; it’s difficult to go out. I can’t talk about it.”

“The more you talk about it
, the easier it is. The more you go outside, the easier it is, Taylor.”

“I know, I work as
a psychiatrist.”

“I have these dreams.”

“Most people do.”

“That’s cute
, Taylor.”

“I
didn’t tell you my name.”

“I’m a detective.”

“Right.”

“You go
outside. You put one foot in front of the other and then you repeat. One foot in front of the other. You keep doing it until you have walked around the block. Then you do that again.”

“Sure.
I know how it works. ”

“I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll drag you around the block.”

“I deplore violence.”

“Well, you seem to like reading about it.”

“This is research.”

“Research for what?”

“To find the killer, I’m helping you, Joe.”

“And I’m helping you. Until tomorrow.” The Detective stood and let himself out of the apartment. He thought about loneliness and solitude as he rode the elevator down to the ground floor. What was the difference between loneliness and solitude?

One was voluntary.

Everybody has a past and not many of them were rosy. The important thing was to glance in the rearview mirror
, but never to stare. Writers, Joe considered, were probably more likely to suffer from mental illness than those in other professions. Hours spent sitting alone in front of a screen, no human interaction, no life. He had read somewhere that writers spent their youths living life and their adult lives sitting in a chair writing about it. He guessed there was some truth in that analogy. Only the very lucky and the very talented were able to spend time away from the desk.

Joe was one of them.  

He stopped in a bar and threw three Tiger Sweats down his throat. He threw some cash on the bar to settle it and walked across beach road. He took a motorcycle taxi along the second road and then at the mouth of the road, he saw the police motorcycle. He saw the pick-up truck that masqueraded as an ambulance. His first thoughts were for Kelly.

He dismounted the bike and ran over to the
truck; he caught a glimpse of the face of the dead body in the back of the pick-up truck. She had been horribly mutilated, dismembered, but the face was clear, the head separate to the body, it was not a face that he had seen before. Not a body that he had seen before, but that didn’t make it all right. She was number three.