The White Flamingo (15 page)

When the locations are placed on a map and joined with a simple pencil line, the occult symbol of the devil is observed. It has been agreed by several scholars that the Whitechapel murders of 1888 were the work of an educated person who had studied the occult and believed that the slaying of fallen women in specific locations could invoke a spell to achieve a longevity serum. One suspect in the Jack the Ripper inquiry, was in fact, an occultist who had travelled to India and West Africa and had written extensively in magazines and journals about the findings he had discovered in the art of black magic.   

FORTY-ONE

TAYLOR CAREFULLY
spent time writing and researching Jack the Ripper. His food was brought to him by telephone delivery service. The fear of going outside grew more intense the longer he stayed in the room. It grew and grew until it was a physical weight pressing on his door. The last time he had made it around the block, he returned in a heightened state of panic, his heart beating, mind racing, hands clammy. His entire body tense with anxiety.

The knock at the door was a surprise.

Joe stood there. “Well, are you letting me in or not?”

“Please…” Taylor stood there with his arms out and palms open.

“Well, what is this story about you not wanting to go outside?” Joe quizzed him taking in the neat and tidy apartment. There was little sign of life apart from a couple of watercolours and a cheese-plant that was withering beneath the wall-mounted lighting.

Taylor told him about it. Taylor had first experienced the panic after the
accident; the doctors had diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and had subscribed a course of tranquilizers, followed by SSRIs and then cognitive behaviour therapy.

He
was a shrink.

W
asn’t that a laugh? 

Not a very funny one.

“I have much more research to do,” Taylor said.

“Well, first, you’re coming on a little trip with me.”

“Well, I couldn’t. Not this time. Maybe tomorrow…”

Joe took the man by the hand and led him out into the corridor. They rode the lift down and walked through the lobby and out onto the street. “If you are writing about these attacks
, you need to see where they happened,” Joe flagged down a taxi and the pair of them got into the back seat.

Taylor’s hands massaged his head as the car pulled away. He felt the bones creak in his neck as he turned to look out of the side window. The city flashed by like a vivid nightmare.

Joe took the journalist shrink to each of the sites, Slim Jim’s, The Beach, the short time hotel room and the alley. Taylor was silent as Joe pointed out the sites and explained the circumstances of each event.

“You know these places, right?”

“Well, maybe?”

“Look
, if you had to kill, where would you do it?”

“I didn’t do it
.”

“Yeah?”

“Then why are you so interested in the case?” Joe said.

“I lost my wife, my son, I’ve made mistakes.”

“I’m sorry. Tell me about it.”

“The killer is following the path of Jack the Ripper.

“Shit, you think I don’t know that?”

“Well, perhaps I know more than you do…”

“When I was a younger man
, I was always bothered about people knowing more than I knew. Now, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass who knows what.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Where were you the night the killings took place?”

“In my apartment. I never go out. I told you already,” Taylor smiled.

“I like you for the job, you have an interest.”

“So do you.”

“True, but I have a client.”

“As do I.”

“Who?”

“Who? The Fun City Express. I get paid by the word,” he smiled.

“Well, I guess that gets you off the hook?”

“There is no hook.”

“No?”

“No. The killer is not me, Joe. I don’t have what it takes.”

“I believe you, for now. I had to ask the questions.”

“I understand.”

“That’s good. I’m not sure I do.”

The taxi shot through two lanes of traffic, neon lights glittered across the street. They reached
Taylor’s apartment. The car screeched to a stop. Joe opened the passenger door. “This is where we say goodbye.”

“Thanks.”

“There, you’re home. Don’t you feel better now?”

“Well…”

“Of course you do. Stay in touch.”

“Thanks…”

“Think nothing of it…” The Detective watched Taylor on the sidewalk stumble and disappear into the Fun City night. He told the driver to take it to the seventh road.       

FORTY-TWO

THE BLUE ROSE
.

The Detective found her drinking with a Russian client in the bar. He took a table in a bar called The Pelican on the street opposite
, and ordered a beer, watching Kelly through the dirty window. Her hands brushed through her hair and twice she playfully pinched the Russian’s nose. She smiled and held his hand in hers, pretending to read his palm. She stood up from the chair and danced to Nancy Sinatra.

These boots were made…

Joe looking through the window thought for a moment that he was Scrooge - The Ghost of Bargirl Past. She lifted up two fingers, negotiating a price, Joe thought.

That’s just…

She had her routine nailed down to the finest detail. How many had come before, too many, far too many to count.

On two fingers.

What they’ll do…

The Russian meant business. He was a huge hunk of white muscle, probably spent his free time lifting weights, injecting steroids
, and eating jars of baby food. He paid the bar and they both stood. Kelly looked like a dwarf next to him. He would destroy her, or she would destroy him.

The Detective couldn’t decide who would be victorious.

Maybe neither.

Maybe both.

The Detective trailed them to a mid-range hotel called The Mermaid. He waited across the road in an all-night bar that sold beer and noodles. He ate the noodles and sucked on the beer. At 4.32, she appeared in the doorway of the hotel. He followed her to her room on the eighth road.

Lived another night.

Back in the apartment, The Detective, slightly junk sick, took the last remaining shot. He fell into a restless dream. He was with a girl named Helena at a party in his hometown, back west, she fell asleep in his arms, he remembered a great feeling of loss. A life he could never go back to. A large Victorian red brick house and an open fire. Her hair was a mousey blonde, and her eyes suggested an escape, a way out of the race. A sanctuary from the monsters that had populated his life since the insane asylum, the self-medication, and the pain of displacement. How he longed to travel back through the avenues of misadventure and the perilous crossroads of his past to that moment in that red brick house. The fire, a cat asleep on the sofa, Helena’s head resting in his lap. There was no turning back. Fun City had him trapped like a rat in a trap. Once you crossed over, you never came back, your innocence and belief burned by the neon lights and the catalogs of mistruths, brushes with lady death in cheap hotels and run down bars.

That picture of Christ looked down on him.

If you did return to the West, Joe figured, it was only as a shadow of your former self. The body going through the motions, yet the soul, the heart, trapped in that jungle.

The jungle that was known as Fun City.   

He awoke junk sick and made it to the hospital. A taxi. An emergency ward. The doctor saw him for what he was: a
drug seeker,
but also saw he was in bad shape, and the cash sealed the deal. A nurse administered a heroic dose of morphine and then Joe felt a little better. His stomach began to rumble, reminding him of the days spent without solid nourishment. The doctor wrote a prescription for codeine and Joe figured he could bring himself down gently using the tablets. He ate steak and eggs on the Seventh Road and found the AA meeting.

He sat in the circle and listened to the stories. Pete, heartbroken and hung-over, had thrown himself from a fourth floor balcony and had landed on the roof of a Honda Jazz. Seeing this as an act of
God, he decided to quit the juice and hit the meetings. Another was a biker named Ivan, from some obscure Norwegian motorcycle gang. He had seen more shit than a compost salesman, and was sixteen days clean after spending thirty years drinking around the clock.

All eyes turned to Joe’s
, and he gave It to them:

“Hello,
my name is Joe, and I’m an alcoholic, drug addict, compulsive personality type. I’m also a private asshole.”

Laughter filled the room. The laughter was kind, like the way grandparents laughed at their grandchild stumbling, attempting to walk on two feet for the first time.

“Hi, Joe.”

“Last night my room was filled with ghosts.”

“Well, we’ve all been there,” a Canadian Christian called Colin smiled. “Haven’t we?”

All in the room agreed that they had spent the night with ghosts, and whether these phantoms were real or imagined
, was a moot point. Each soul in that room had been tortured; haunted by the terrible memory of the hurt and pain that they had caused to those that they loved most. They had all spent nights with ghosts. Everybody had. 

“These were the ghosts of the women that were killed in this city. They spoke to me,” Joe said.

“What did they say?”

“Well, one, the transsexual offered me a sexual favor. The rest just kind of mocked me for my inability to find their killer. Another did a striptease, swinging her intestines like a windmill as the final act. It was as real as this table and this chair I am sitting on.”

“It takes time to recover, Joe. You are still in the transitional stage. These hallucinations will calm down and then disappear entirely the longer you stay clean.”

The Detective nodded, stood, held hands with the group, and said the serenity prayer. He agreed to change the things he could and accept the things he couldn’t
, and confirmed that he did indeed seem to have the ability to know the difference.

Not for the first time had he made such a promise.

This time he meant it.

Maybe.

FORTY-
THREE

STORM CLOUDS
threatened to break open and shower down on the house above the house on the hill. The Detective walked up to the door, stealing a glance at the plastic flamingos. He knocked on the door. It opened immediately as if someone was waiting on the other side for a visitor. She was dressed in a white sarong and purple bohemian blouse, neither garment sufficient to hide the shape of her long slender legs and generous bosom beneath. He noticed for the first time that her neck was extraordinary long and slender like the bird that gave her the moniker.

“Enter,” she said and turned on her flat heels. Her shoes were the type ballerinas wore in the 1920’s in Paris, between the wars. A time when being an artist was something to be
, rather than something to study and pretend to be, while sucking on the trust fund.

While
The Detective followed The Flamingo through the hallway and into the living area, he admired for the second time, the surrealist painting hung on the wall. He figured it would fetch at least five thousand dollars on the open market. “Were you at the show?” he asked, pointing to the painting, a wondrous arrangement of neon lights recreated Fun City, perfectly capturing the intensity and density. 

“I had a boy bid by proxy,” she said as she sat down at the dining table and began to slice a fresh pineapple into chunks.

“Do you have many boys?”

“Not nearly enough, dear,” she said while spearing a chunk of pineapple on the tip of a kitchen knife and putting it in her mouth. “Would you like some?”

“Boys?”

“No, pineapple.”

“Thanks.” Joe walked over and took a wooden cocktail stick from a dispenser on the dining table, picked at two chunks of pineapple, popped them into his mouth and chewed. His stomach accepted the sweet acidic taste. His stomach begged for more. He sat opposite her with the table between them, nervously chewing the fruit.

“Please
, help yourself. You look absolutely famished, you poor thing.” 

“Tell me about
Mr. Flamingo?”

“Why?” A sudden icy wall grew around her.

“I think it might explain why your boy is mixed up. It may help to spring him.”