The Pink Flamingo Murders (10 page)

“Why do you think that?” I said. “Have you found many inaccuracies or misspellings?”

“No,” she said. “But I’m interested in quality. This column is not up to our usual standards, Francesca.”

“What’s missing, Cruella?” She frowned when I used her nickname. It was a direct challenge. “If you can tell me exactly what it needs, then I can fix it.”

She couldn’t. I knew it, and she knew it. She didn’t like the column because she didn’t like me. “It made me restless,” she said. “I read hundreds of stories, and I can always tell when something is not well written. I start fidgeting in my chair.”

“And this column caused you to fidget,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And if it happened to me, it will happen to readers, too.”

“So all of St. Louis will be fidgeting while they read my column?” I said. “Could be dangerous, Cruella. Mass fidgeting might set off the New Madrid fault. St. Louis could have a major earthquake, all because my column made you fidget.”

I studied her plump rump hanging over her chair. “Must be nice to have the whole city wired to your ass, Cruella. But if you touch my column, I’ll kick your super-sensitive rear end all the way to the Mississippi River.”

“You heard her,” Cruella shrieked. “She threatened bodily harm.”

Wendy the Whiner, deep into
Ensheathe and Ensnare
, pretended not to hear us, so the rest of the copy desk, a collection of doughlike creatures who did what they were told, acted as if they didn’t hear anything, either. I got out of there and over to the Last Word for the Nails meeting.

The Nails session was in full swing. The inside of
the Word was pitch black, as usual, and that was a good thing. Otherwise, we might see the dirt—and god knows what else. The bar depressed me so much I avoided it whenever I could. It was where the
Gazette
staff went to cheat on their spouses and gripe about their editors. It was a hopeless place. Going there regularly was an admission that you’d given up.

Jasper, my new best friend, waved to me as I entered. Everyone was at four tables pushed together. The tops were littered with beer and Coke bottles, potato chip and pretzel bags. Staffers who ordinarily didn’t speak to each other had agreed to drink together and discuss Nails. Jennifer, a timid young general assignment reporter who looked like a brown baby bird, was sitting next to Jasper. Normally she was terrified of him, but now Jasper was feeding her barbecued potato chips. On Jasper’s other side was the glamorous Tina, whom I knew wasn’t a Jasper fan. Next to Tina was our oldest female reporter and only genuine society type, Endora, handsome in an I-don’t-give-a-damn way. Her hair was scraped back in its usual pony tail, which went well with her horse face. I spotted Matt, a jolly fat guy with a face like a potato, who was treacherous as a snake. I grabbed a chair and squeezed in next to Tina.

Endora was filling everyone in with high-level gossip. She knew the publisher personally. “Nails went to the best schools, Brearley and Vassar,” Endora was saying in that lockjaw accent of hers. “Her father was a fraternity brother of the publisher.”

“Hah! Nails always claims her family connections have nothing to do with her getting hired,” Jennifer said.

“They didn’t, I’m sure,” Endora said, anxious to get off this subject, since her family connections got her the job at the
Gazette
.

“Probably didn’t have anything to do with her making
assistant city editor so fast, either,” Tina said in her don’t-give-me-that-stuff voice.

“You know what an assistant city editor is, don’t you?” I said. “A mouse in training to be a rat.”

Everyone laughed but Matt, who hoped to be a city editor. So many mice, all so eager to find a way out of the maze. Nails saw her chance to escape when she was made head of the Crime Team, as part of Charlie’s new team reporting program. The two women on Nails’s team were Tina and Jennifer. “We definitely got different treatment from the three men, Jasper, Matt, and Austin,” said Tina.

Jasper rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, god, not another women’s lib lecture.”

“I know you guys didn’t notice it, but she treated you better,” Jennifer said. “We aren’t making it up. Nails flirted and giggled with the Crime Team men, and when they turned in their regular assignments she acted like they’d done something special. Nails even brought you chocolates to sweeten you up, Jasper. That’s what she said. Her exact words.”

“So what?” Jasper snarled.

“Do you think she had any chocolates or giggles for the women?” Jennifer asked.

“You tell him, sister,” Tina said.

“We never got any praise,” Jennifer said earnestly. “We never even got an ordinary thank you. Finally I said the women might appreciate some appreciation, too. ‘You’re expected to do your work,’ Nails told me. ‘Your paycheck should be reward enough.’”

My respect for little Jennifer was rising by the minute. The new kid had guts.

“Nails expected the women to work longer hours with no overtime, no time off and no excuses,” Jennifer said. “I called in sick one morning because I was having bad cramps from my period . . .”

“Oh, for chrissakes!” Jasper said. He could tell the
crudest jokes, but he was offended by any mention of female functions.

“Shut up, Jasper,” we women said. Little Jennifer looked terrified but continued. “Anyway, I had these terrible cramps and Nails told me that women should not use their femininity as an excuse to avoid work.”

“But I bet she excused Austin’s hangovers,” Endora said.

“Austin was going through a divorce,” Matt said. “He was having a bad time.”

“And I wasn’t?” Jennifer said.

“Tell them about your evaluation, Jennifer,” Tina said. “That’s where you really saw the difference between the boys and girls. Nails took Jasper, Matt, and Austin each out to lunch to discuss their evaluations. They were
long
lunches, too.”

“Do you think we enjoyed them?” Jasper asked incredulously. “Trying to talk to that simpering twit for two hours was hard work.”

“I’d trade you any time, Jasper. My evaluation was handed to me at the end of the day on a Friday. Nails gave me low scores for almost everything, even though my Westfall series was nominated for the Ripplinger Reporting Prize.”

“You’re kidding,” Matt said. “What did you do?”

“I steamed all weekend. She managed to ruin that, which was what she wanted. But I marched into the office Monday morning and told Nails I refused to sign the evaluation until she explained those low scores when my work was up for a prize. I also asked for an explanation, in writing, of why she took all the men out for evaluation lunches but handed the women sheets of paper.”

“What did she say?” Matt asked, his voice soft and soothing. His interest made me suspicious.

“Nails never gave a reason,” Jennifer said. “She said that she would reconsider my evaluation. Two days
later I got a new, improved one. It wasn’t exactly glowing, but it had enough praise that I was satisfied and signed it. Shortly after that Nails transferred me back to city desk, which was fine with me.”

“I left the team a month later,” Tina said. “I was the token, crime being a ‘black thang.’ Nails and I had serious philosophical differences from the beginning. Nails was your basic white-bread suburbanite, who thought she was a liberal. You know the definition of a liberal, don’t you? If you’re drowning fifty feet from shore, they throw you a twenty-five-foot rope and say ‘I’ll meet you halfway.’ “

There was uneasy laughter. “Because she lived in the suburbs, Nails considered crime solely a city ill. Since St. Louis was mostly black, that made crime a black phenomenon. St. Louis County had more than its share of rapes, muggings, carjackings, and murders, and some of them took place at malls that were the
Gazette’s
major advertisers, but you never read about that in the
Gazette
. Nails knew better than to produce anything that would upset advertisers, not if she wanted to continue her upward climb. But after a carjacking at the fancy Clayton Park Mall in West County went unreported, I couldn’t keep quiet any more. ‘Don’t we report white folks’ crimes?’ I asked her. Nails waved my question away, saying ‘It’s too hard to cover all those little towns. St. Louis County has ninety-one communities. We couldn’t possibly keep track of them all.’ She could, if she hustled. But the Crime Team took the lazy way out and only covered crime in the city. That was a smart move on her part. Kept the advertisers happy and appealed to the popular prejudice—white prejudice. After the Clayton Park Mall incident, I quit.”

“What happened to the Crime Team?” I asked. “Was it ever officially disbanded?”

“No, it just fizzled out,” Jennifer said.

“About the time the Crime Team quietly disintegrated,” Tina said, “Nails latched onto Charlie, so its success or failure didn’t matter anymore. We know what happened after that.”

“Nails was promoted to the head of the business section,” Jennifer said.

“She’s also writing columns, don’t forget,” Jasper said. “I found her first column, due to run in a few days.” Jasper was good at rummaging through the computer for interesting electronic tidbits. He produced a printout.

“Read it!” we all cried.

Jasper cleared his throat and began: “‘A grave injustice has been done to a working woman by the president of the Eichelberg Company.’”

“Wow,” Jennifer said. “She’s certainly going after the big guns, no pun intended. They’re a major defense contractor.”

Jasper continued, “‘Company President Adam Eichelberg allegedly promoted a woman he was having an affair with to the position of vice president and passed over the rightful female candidate for the job. That woman is now suing the company for sex discrimination.’

“This line of Nails’s is priceless,” Jasper said. “‘The moment that he had a sexual relationship with the woman and then promoted her to vice president, he broke the law.’ I think she’s forgotten the circumstances of her own promotion.”

“Oh, Lord, how am I going to hold up my head at City Hall when this gets out?” Tina groaned, and she said it for all of us. If news of the Nails-Charlie affair became public, the
Gazettes
credibility was zilch.

“It’s already out,” said Endora, our most social reporter, and she would know. “It’s all they talked about at the dinner party I went to Saturday night. They even have Charlie and Nails sightings. At the Opera Theatre
he supposedly spilled champagne on her hand and then licked it off.”

More groans.

“And do you know her pet name for him?” Endora added.

“Dimpletoes,” I said, and told them about the Dumpster love scene.

As I talked, I knew I was doing something stupid. I was sure one of my colleagues at this table, listening so earnestly, would repeat every damaging word to Charlie or Nails. I suspected Matt was most likely to sell us out, since he showed the most interest but contributed the least. Also, Matt had managerial ambitions. It could also be Jasper. All he did was read Nails’s column to us, and everyone in the city would read it in a few days, anyway.

It could be either of them. Maybe it was both. Judas would be a team player at the
Gazette
. Betrayal was a way of life. But I couldn’t stop myself. I kept telling the story.

I could not change the
Gazette
, and I could not change myself.

“Lyle, I need you. Please stay with me tonight.”

That’s what I wanted to say when I called Lyle after the meeting at the Last Word. But I didn’t. I am so good at talking at the wrong time and so bad at speaking up when I should. So I didn’t say how much I wanted him. I just sort of casually asked if he wanted to go out that night. Lyle said, “I’m sorry. I have to work late, Francesca, and I’m tired. Let’s make it tomorrow night.”

I wasn’t going to beg a man to spend the night with me. If Lyle said he had to work late, then he did. I’d said the same thing to him dozens of times. So why did I feel so rejected when he said it to me? With no reason to go home, I stayed at the
Gazette
until almost eight o’clock working on another column. And instead of driving straight home when I was done, I made a detour to Ratley Street to see the arson house. I had to know for sure if it was the drug house.

One look told me it was. The place looked worse than ever. The weedy yard was covered with broken glass and unidentifiable blackened litter. A burned couch had been dragged outside. The bars were pried off some of the lower windows by the fire department rescue squad. Window bars looked fierce, but they were surprisingly useless for protection. All they did was delay your rescue in an emergency. Most bars
were attached to rotten, eighty-year-old wood frames that did not hold screws well, so the bars usually popped right out with a prybar. The bars over the illegal plywood front door looked like they had been cut with a rescue power saw. The door itself was blackened and charred.

The windows were boarded up with fresh plywood. Any surviving glass was a grimy, gray-black. The brick structure seemed surprisingly undamaged, but I couldn’t get close enough to see inside. The small square of front yard was festooned with yellow crime scene tape, running from the rusty gate to the front porch. I might have opened the gate anyway to get a better look around, but a thin gray-haired woman came out on her front porch three houses up and stood there with her hands on her hips, watching me. Maybe with the drug house gone, the street’s decent people were once more asserting themselves.