The White Flamingo (19 page)

OUTSIDE TAYLOR’S
building three police cars and six motorbikes hovered around in a state somewhere between panic and excitement. A news crew spoke into cameras and stopped whomever they could collar for questioning.  The Detective saw the figure of Kult standing with his hand over his face to block out the sun.

“What’s the situation
?” Joe said.

“We have the Shrink’s room bugged.”

“If he confesses, you let the Bell boy go?”

“I guarantee it.”

“Fine. When are you going in?”

“After we get what we want. There’s a live audio feed over there,” Kult pointed toward an unmarked van.

“Can I listen?”

“Sorry, Detective, it would mean…”

“A loss of face. It’s okay I get it. Well, he’s got nowhere to go but down.  We wait for him to come down once he has spilled his guts to the shrink.”

“Yes, unless we hear a struggle, then we go up.”

“Thanks, Officer.”

Joe stood killing time next to
a man with a hawk-like face and a dishonest smile. “This man up there is my client,” the hawk said.

“You’re Jim’s lawyer.”

“Right, excuse me. I’m going up there.”

The hawk spoke to the
Boys in Brown and they waved him toward the building. He turned to face the Detective. “I’m going up.”

“Can I tag
along?”

“I can’t stop you, but they will.” The lawyer waved a hand at five Boys in Brown in front of the entrance.

“What kind of defense are you looking at?”

“That will be between Jim, me, and the City.”

“He didn’t kill anyone connected, that’s gottta help,” Joe said. “Look, there’s a kid locked up for the first murder, push Jim to confess and he goes back to his mummy.”

The hawk-faced lawyer looked at him: “And what would be in this for me?”

“Five thousand US and the comfort of knowledge that a little boy is back with his mother.”

The lawyer handed the Detective a card. “Call me, we can have lunch.”

“Good luck up there.” 

“Sure,” he said and walked towards the tower.

FIFTY-
FIVE             

TAYLOR LIFTED
the syringe from Slim’s forearm. “It will take up to twenty minutes for the result.”

“Right. I’m feeling a little dizzy. Do you mind if I get some air?” Jim said motioning toward the balcony.

“Be my guest.”

As Jim walked out onto the
balcony, there was a knock at the office door. Taylor opened it to be greeted with a hawk-faced man holding out a talon-like hand. “I am Mr. Klant, attorney at law.” The man handed the Taylor a card. He looked at it and figured it was the real thing.

“Pleased to meet you.”

“May I come in?”

“On what business?”

“I would like a few moments to speak with my client in private. It is important. I trust you will permit us a few moments.”

             
Taylor nodded. “A drink?” He fussed with the whiskey dropping two lumps of ice in three glasses and then filling the glasses with golden sunburst.

“If you don’t mind me saying
, you have your work cut out on this one, sir” Taylor said handing over a glass.

“I deal in criminal law. My client has yet to be arrested and processed. This is why I must be so impolite as to invade on your time now. You see, once they are processed at the station
, then it is only a matter of formalities. We have to make a deal now.”

“I can see it. I know how things work here in the city.”

“Where is my client?”

“He went outside to get some air. I drew some blood, he felt dizzy.”

“Outside?” The hawk faced lawyer looked around the office, repeated. “Outside?”

“Yes, the balcony.” T
aylor took off his spectacles and polished them with a handkerchief.

“But…” The lawyer put down his drink and walked toward the balcony doors. His hand gripped the handle and pulled. It didn’t budge. “It’s locked,” he said.

“Strange.” Taylor stood and found a key. He struggled with the lock, while watching Slim on the balcony through the glass doors. He was sitting at a chair and table writing with a pen on a piece of legal paper.

“I have a good idea what that is,” said
Taylor.

“A will?”

“Or a suicide note.”

On the
balcony, Slim Jim sat with the pen and pencil writing.

He folded the piece of paper and placed it on the table. He then placed two hands on the railings. He lifted himself up, one foo
t, and then two feet on the railings. He stood high on the railings; his arms stretched open, looking at the crowd below.

“Open the door, quickly, open it,” the lawyer shouted. “For God’s sake, hurry!”

They grappled with the lock and opened the balcony door.

“Jim,”
both men shouted, “Wait!”

FIFTY-SIX

JIM WAS
up there on the balcony.

The Detective stood and watched.

He didn’t blame the Killer.

What did he have to live for? 

He watched the thin man stand up there on the railings with his arms wide open. He was on the fourteenth floor. Beneath him were the sidewalk and a noodle stand, chairs and tables with locals eating lunch. Jim shouted something, two words, sounded like
fucking whore
. His arms stretched out like Christ. He was delicately poised. Balanced like a flimsy scarecrow. A gust of wind.  He fell forward. Swan-dived. Thin, harmless, pathetic. The body fell for what seemed a long passage of time, and then a dull thud, as it landed a distance of thirty yards away. The noise it made as it hit the concrete reminded him of a sack of rice being unloaded from a truck and tossed onto the sidewalk.

THUD.

The mess it made didn’t.

The head decapitated on impact, bounced, rolled and came to a stop by a noodle cart. Three women jumped up from their tables. One vomited on the sidewalk. They screamed and stood staring at Jim’s face
, staring up at them. The body lay still some ten yards from the head. The ground had mutilated the body.

It had left the face.

A crowd gathered around. They pointed at the two parts of the dead corpse and smiled. They talked about lottery numbers, asking what room number he was living in, his date of birth.

FIFTY-SEVEN

THE HAWK-FACED
lawyer came out of the building first. He walked straight up to the Detective and handed him a piece of paper.

“This should be worth something.”

“What about the case?”

“Dead clients don’t pay,” the lawyer said. Joe watched him walk over to a black Mercedes, start the engine, and drive away from the scene.

He read the note.

To Joe Dylan

Re: The White Flamingo

By the time you read this, I will be gone to wherever it is that bad folks go when they die. Up to the heavens, or down to the ovens, it makes little difference. Either place is better than the hell of the last few weeks. Like you, I have no blood left that isn’t poison.

Before taking the long
drop, I thought that I’d take a few with me. I don’t feel pity as I write this. Not for them and not for me. They were hookers and at least one of them was a killer.

There are a few things you should know. 

First. Miss Bell. The White Flamingo, paid me a thousand bucks for each hit I made. It seems that her golden boy got a dose of the big one, and with him being so young, she wanted to have some fun, a little bit of revenge on the whores.

Second. I enjoyed killing those whores and let it be known
, that each one suffered more than the last.

Third. Vern? The poor old drunk bastard watched me mutilate Tammy
, but his mind was so messed up and wet with alcohol that he couldn’t recall it straight away. He had to be erased, else he might have spilled. I made sure that his death was painless.

Then there was the homeless beggar;
that one was just for jolly.

I like to think of
The White Flamingo before she married a millionaire, just a little showgirl like all the other whores in this city.

I hope her end will be quick and painless.

Like mine.

Now I have to jump.

James ‘Slim’ Strand.

FIFTY-
EIGHT

THE FRONT
doors to the house on the hill were open. The Detective walked in and made it through the hallway into the room with a view. The White Flamingo sat there. In her glass was a cocktail. On the table in front of her sat a bottle of downers and a .22. He passed her the note and she read it with a sad smile before handing it back to the Detective.

“I knew you would come,” she said dreamily. Her hand wandered over to the
pillbox and opened it.

H
e sat on the sofa opposite her. She looked dreadful. Her make-up had run down her cheeks leaving black smears of eyeliner. Her eyes were bloodshot and bleary. “Could you do it?”

“They always do. Did I do a bad thing?” She s
poke the sentence like a small impolite girl being punished. The smile was distant, cynical, drugged.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” That same voice.

“Well, I don’t see how anything can be proved. I have the suicide note right here in my pocket. The man that wrote the note is now dead. You knew him.”

“We went back, another country, another time.”

“You were lovers?”

“He stalked me; I never threw him a bone. What do you think I am?”

“So it’s coincidence he turns up in the same town, what
… twenty years later?”

“I’ll say it again, he…”

“Look, your kid is free. As far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”

“You’re so sweet. Such a nice man,” she said drowsily.

Joe walked over to the table and picked up the bottle of pills. Diazepam, blues. Not your whites or your yellows. Blues, ten milligrams. Ten could knock out an Arab stallion. “How many you take?”

“Enough.”

He picked up the .22. “And this?”

“Pills are risky. Sometimes they wake up and wish they were dead. That’s when the gun comes in.”

“Your son could live to be eighty. There will be new drugs.”

“Grandchildren?”

“It’s not the end of the world.”

“Back to earth. Back to air. Back to fire.” A ghost of a smile crossed her face as her eyes closed. Her face turned blank. The Detective ran to the kitchen, opened cupboard drawers, found what he was looking for. English mustard. He dipped his finger in the jar and went back over to her. Stuck his fingers down her throat
, and massaged the tonsils. She reacted, bringing up the contents of her stomach onto the tiled floor. She gasped for air and then mumbled something the Detective couldn’t hear.  He carried her to the sofa. He got a wet towel from the bathroom and rubbed her face, neck, and chest. She opened her eyes, sat up, smiled, and pointed toward the door.

The man was thin, with fierce eyes. He shook with rage, his finger pointing at
the Detective.

“What have you done with my
mother?” Sebastian Bell stood in a fit of rage pointing at the puddle of vomit on the floor. His body trembled. He advanced showing animal-like eyeteeth, Joe checked the hands. He had a blade.

The kid ran at them, Joe ducked, and caught a piece of the blade in the stomach. He turned and kicked at the kid, who fell like a sapling in the wind. He felt his side, losing blood, but there was no pain. Stab wounds rarely hurt.

His mother went for the bottle of pills, dry swallowing a handful.

“Stay down,” he told the kid
.

The kid didn’t hear so
well, rose again, and lunged at the Detective, his fingers finding Joe’s eye sockets. He dug his fingernails in, and Joe swore, falling to the ground. The kid dug into his eyes and pulled at his hair.

“You fight like a fucking bitch,” Joe shouted.

“Sebastian!” his mother cried, “Stop”

Joe gripped the kid by the waist, threw him across the tiles and stood. He walked the three steps and body-slammed the punk with his eighty kilos. He kept him to the floor, pinning him down with his thighs. He swung at Bell’s head and cracked the kid’s jaw. He gave him another swift left for luck and stood. His eye caught the painting, the American expressionist.