The Pink Flamingo Murders (14 page)

“Now the owner will take anything. He grabbed this low-ball offer and was grateful. He’ll do all right. Better than he deserves, renting to a drug dealer and ruining that street.”

“You sound angry,” I said.

“I am,” she said. “The owner lives in Chesterfield, did you know that? One of the richest parts of St. Louis county, and he has slum property in the city. The county is killing the city. Some of the worst city real estate is owned by people like him. Greedy doctors and lawyers and executives. They consider themselves good family people, too. They wouldn’t rent to a
drug dealer on their nice street in Chesterfield, but it’s okay for city people to live next door to them. It’s okay for city people to live in substandard housing. And it’s certainly okay to collect those rents. There’s a guy who comes into my South Side neighborhood in a Mercedes, to collect rents on a four-family flat with no hot water.”

“Maybe if the city enforced the code,” I said, “he wouldn’t be doing that.”

“How?” Tracy asked. “If he’s cited for bad tuck-pointing and hauled into court, the most he’ll get is a five-hundred-dollar fine. Replacing the washed-away mortar on that old brick building would cost him between two and three thousand dollars. Guess which one he pays?”

I took another sip of my drink. “Look, Tracy, I’m not going to defend scum like that. But since the tax laws changed, maybe that’s the only way you can make money with those old buildings. Maybe there’s no money in renting out a place that’s fixed up nice.”

Tracy snorted in a way that hurt my sinuses. “That’s the irony,” she said. “You can make money rehabbing, but only if you spend money. You have to do a quality rehab. Most people think of rehabbing the way it was in the seventies and eighties. Back then some naive young couple would buy an old house, teach themselves how to strip the wallpaper and the woodwork, patch their own plaster, and refinish their own floors. It was all trial and error. Then they’d move on and sell the house to another nice young couple.”

I immediately thought of Kathy and Dale, the sweet young rehabbers.

“That’s not how you make money,” she said. “You need to know what you’re doing these days. First, you buy the property cheap. Then you gut it and fix it up first class. You put in a new kitchen. You put in new bathrooms with period-accurate fixtures. The old plaster
is removed and new drywall put in. The floors are either refinished or new ones put in. Outside, the wood trim is stripped or you buy new trim that’s milled just like the old. Then, when it’s finished, you don’t rent it cheap to drug dealers. You charge good money, you do background checks, and you bring in first-class renters. Or you sell at high prices to quality people. Again, no cash deals to drug dealers.

“This kind of rehabbing is expensive, and it’s time consuming, and it takes a lot of knowledge. But you can make good money. I know a couple who bought a derelict place from the city for one dollar, then spent a hundred and twenty thousand on a first-class rehab—and still made a hundred thousand when they sold it. Everybody did well on that deal. The rehabbers made money, and the home buyers had a fabulous house that would have cost half a million in the county.

“But this kind of rehabbing is risky. I also know people who lost their shirts because they did a quality rehab but misjudged where the DMZ was—the outer limit in the drug wars, where nice folks won’t cross. They couldn’t sell the building for six years. It ruined them. Rehabbing is a high-stakes gamble now. But there’s no money in slumlording, as the Ratley Street owner can tell you. It’s a dead end. He rented that place to that drug dealer for two-fifty a month, as is, because he was too cheap to make any repairs. He didn’t even want to fix the toilet. If the owner had any sense, he’d have gut-rehabbed the property and fixed it up right. The good landlords are getting a thousand to fifteen hundred a month rent. But he was too cheap. And too prejudiced. He thought only black drug dealers lived in the city, so that’s who he rented to.”

“You really hate him,” I said.

“I hate what he did to my neighborhood,” she said. “The new buyer is shrewd and plans to do a quality rehab. And the house is on the right side of the DMZ.”

“So who has the house under contract?”

“I’ll ask the seller if he wants to reveal that information,” Tracy said.

“You just can’t tell me?” I asked.

“No, it wouldn’t be ethical,” Tracy said. “I can’t reveal who has it under contract without the seller’s permission.”

“Come on, you can tell me. I’m the woman who helped you when your speaker didn’t show.”

“Sorry, Francesca, I can’t. I just can’t tell you.”

“Okay, if you can’t tell me, how about if I tell you? I’ll name a name. If that’s the right person, you don’t have to say anything. If it’s not the buyer, you can say I’m wrong.” I knew I was pushing my luck as Tracy studied the ice melting in her almost-empty lemonade glass. “It’s Caroline, isn’t it?” I said. Her silence was louder than the laughing children.

Finally Tracy looked at me and said, “We’re even, Francesca.” Her voice was flat and her gray-blue eyes were angry. I knew she felt used. I thanked her, put on my shoes and jacket, and let myself out of the pool gate. Tracy did not say good-bye. I hoped that was because she was distracted by Michelle’s latest “Mommeee, look!” I also hoped Tracy wouldn’t stay angry with me. But I didn’t feel too guilty. I was right. Caroline was buying the Ratley Street house. She had profited from Scorpion Smith’s death. That was two murders she’d made money on.

Even going to the
Gazette
didn’t dampen my mood. I was right, I was right, I was right, I told myself on the long, fast highway drive back downtown. I was right, I was right, I repeated, as I walked from the parking lot to the
Gazette
office. The sidewalks were as hot as a grease-joint griddle, and just as dirty, but I didn’t care. I was right, I was right.

My song of triumph carried me into the
Gazette
. It was two-thirty, and most of the staff was still at lunch.
The Family section was deserted, except for O’Hara, a burned-out feature writer, sleeping off another liquid lunch at his desk. I could hear him snoring, and that cheered me up, too. He wouldn’t be listening to any phone conversation I had with Lyle. The
Gazette
phones were bugged, but if the buggers wanted to listen to the spicy details of last night, that was fine with me.

“You were wonderful last night,” I said to Lyle, my voice low and breathy.

“Yes,” he said. His voice had a satisfied, purry sound to it, too.

“Modest, too,” I said.

“Nothing to be modest about,” Lyle said, teasing me. “But since we’re handing out compliments, you were pretty good yourself.”

“Only pretty good?”

“Who’s being modest now? You were spectacular.”

“So, want to see if you can exceed my expectations tonight?” I said.

The bantering tone stopped. “I’d like to, Francesca,” he said seriously. “I can’t tell you how much I want to be with you tonight. But I have to work late again, and it’s important, or I wouldn’t put you off. If we were married, we wouldn’t have these conversations. I wouldn’t have to drive across town to see you. You’d be there, waiting for me when I got home.”

“Don’t bet on it,” I said, “I might be working late, too.” I hung up the phone hard enough that O’Hara, dozing at his desk four cubicles away, popped up like a gopher out of his hole. I smiled and waved at him, and he popped back down and went to sleep again.

In the stack of letters and press releases on my desk was another bizarre postcard from Erwin, the motherless mother-worshipper. The spiky handwriting looked like daggers. The words themselves were even more threatening. “Nobody cares and nobody understands,
not like my Mother. You don’t understand. You don’t care. You don’t deserve to live in the same world as my pure angel Mother. You got lucky, but you don’t deserve your luck. My lovely Mother saw the invisible people and made them real. She made me real. Now that she’s gone, I’m one of the invisible ones. I’m not here. If my Mother isn’t here, you don’t deserve to be here, either.”

Erwin was getting seriously strange. I started to stick this postcard in the Weirdo file, too. But then I grabbed all three and stuffed them into my briefcase instead. Maybe I should show them to someone. It was too early to leave for my four o’clock interview, and there was no point in hanging out at Uncle Bob’s, since it wasn’t on the way. I couldn’t fall asleep like O’Hara, and with Nails holding court in the newsroom, I didn’t want to be wandering around out there. Why be a moving target for that woman? I was so desperate, I read the
Gazette
. It wasn’t as much fun, now that the spell check had been fixed so it no longer changed black to African American. The publisher’s gracious living campaign continued, so the major front-page story was about the symphony conductor’s contract. There was another long piece about the new art museum show. Amazing. The
Gazette
had eliminated crime and corruption. I flipped to the business pages and checked out my sister columnist, Nails. What was this? Nails had written another story about babies. This one was a puff piece about a new organic baby food company in St. Louis. Two baby stories in a few days. Ah-hah! Now I had news.

The newsroom was still almost deserted, so I risked going to Georgia’s office. She was wearing one of her squared-off gray suits and eating a matching square gray-meat sandwich. She was frowning, but not at the sandwich. She was still reading the journalism tome
Ensheathe and Ensnare
and expected me to share her
misery. “On page three-twelve, this so-called expert says, ‘The individualization of the essential ideation has created an identifiable communications vacuum between the news generator and the news consumer.’ Any idea what the fuck that means?”

“Why doesn’t the guy speak plain English?” I said.

“Because then we’d know for sure he’s not saying anything,” she said. Then she fixed me with a knowing look. “I heard someone’s been doing some plain speaking. You had a little run-in with Cruella.”

“She started it,” I said, sounding like a third grader.

“Why are you so eager to make another enemy, Francesca?” Georgia asked.

“Do you think she’d like me better if I let her butcher my column? The woman is a bully. The only way to deal with bullies is to bully them back.”

“There are other ways. Now she’s bad-mouthing you to management. You’re getting a reputation as difficult.”

I shrugged. To change the subject I said, “Nails is pregnant.”

“Get out of here,” Georgia said. “She’s too smart to be pregnant.” Georgia had a jaundiced view of motherhood.

“Nope, she’s passed my infallible pregnancy test. Two baby stories in a week. When a newswoman is pregnant, she starts writing stork stories. She can’t help herself.”

“She has no interest in children. Why would she get pregnant?” Georgia asked.

“So Charlie will marry her—the oldest reason in the world. I’ll bet you twenty bucks.”

“You’re on,” Georgia said. “But I want proof before I pay up.”

Proof was just around the corner. I almost stumbled over it, when I walked out of Georgia’s office. “Baaabbbbe,” a voice like a lost sheep said. “Baaabe,
come here. I have something I want to show you.” It was Babe, our gossip columnist, looking like a cod with a secret sorrow. He stuck a letter in my face. It was on Charlie’s personal
Gazette
stationery, covered with Charlie’s personal hen-scratching. “Dear Babe,” it said. “Thank you for your sensitivity in the matter of my forthcoming nuptials to Nadia. We both understand that there is no need to mention in your column that my bride is expecting.” Expecting? How Victorian for a sleazy affair in a minivan.

“You were going to print in your
Gazette
column that Nadia got knocked up?” I asked Babe. I was astonished.

“Even though he is the managing editor, I had to treat Charlie like anyone else,” Babe said piously.

“Did you write that little item yet?” I said.

“No,” Babe said, looking slightly shifty. “I felt I owed him the right to discuss it with me.”

“Just like anyone else?” I said acidly.

Babe didn’t have to explain the rest. He’d blackmailed Charlie. If Charlie had booted Babe out of his office during their little discussion, Babe would have written a column mentioning Charlie’s pregnant bride. Once that explosive topic was in the computer system, the whole staff would know about it, thanks to the newsroom hackers. Of course the item would never make the
Gazette
. Any editor with a rudimentary sense of self-preservation would kill it. Then someone on the staff, maybe even Babe himself, would slip the killed item to the
St. Louis Media Critique
, the media watchdog, which would gleefully make it public. The resulting scandal would get more attention than if the item had actually run in Babe’s column, in between the fertile doctors and salon-jumping hairstylists. It might even make the national journalism journals. Charlie couldn’t risk that. It was shrewd of Charlie to respond to Babe quickly, but it was stupid of him to put it in
writing. Usually he was too crafty to leave a paper trail. His brains must have leaked out between his legs. He’d just guaranteed Babe employment as long as Charlie was in power. Now Babe was bragging a bit by showing it around. I couldn’t wait to get back to Georgia with the good news. She was still struggling with page three-twelve of
Ensheathe and Ensnare
, the unending journalism tome, and not happy about it. “What the hell do you want now?” she asked.

“Pay up,” I said. “I have confirmation,” and told her the whole Charlie and Babe story.

“I’ll be damned,” Georgia said. “The woman is fuckin’ pregnant.”

“Usually how it happens,” I said, and held out my hand for the twenty. Georgia paid up, and I shoved the bill into my jacket pocket just as Smiley Steve, the assistant managing editor for scummy stuff, walked over to us with a big insincere smile on his face. That wasn’t his real title, but Steve handled all the nasty jobs at the
Gazette
, and from his extra-wide smile, this one must be particularly unpleasant.