The Pink Flamingo Murders (16 page)

I showered at Margie’s house and changed into my suit, a sleek Donna Karan white-on-white stripe. “You look terrific,” Margie said. “Let me walk you down to the door.”

She unlocked her heavy oak and beveled glass front door. I walked out and saw two police officers on the sidewalk at the young rehabbers’ house. “What are the police doing at Kathy and Dale’s?” I said, pointing. We looked at each other and, without a word, started running toward their house. The police officers were just getting into their car and leaving.

Kathy was standing on the front porch, looking white-faced and woebegone. “Someone stole our gutters and downspouts,” she said.

“The bastards!” Margie cried.

“Why would anyone steal gutters?” I asked.

“They’re copper,” Margie rasped. “Worth a fortune as scrap. On these old houses, you can yank the downspouts off in a few minutes. Most people who still have copper gutters paint them so the thieves won’t get them.”

But Kathy and Dale hadn’t gotten around to painting their porch. Or their gutters. Margie’s words hung there like an unspoken accusation. I started talking, to fill in the awkward silence. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about them. Copper thieves are bold. They stole the gutters off a house on Michigan while an eighty-year-old woman was inside. They stole a copper garage roof in Compton Heights. They climbed a slippery slate roof to take the copper cupola off the old City Hospital. And they stole yours in broad daylight, Kathy.”

“I saw them, too,” Kathy said. “They were pulling away in a rusted red pickup just as I walked up. Two men in khaki work clothes. I thought they were working on someone’s house. I didn’t pay much attention to
them. Then, when I got to our front door, I realized something was wrong with our house. The bracket that holds the downspout alongside the porch was hanging halfway off. I looked at it and realized our gutters were gone. They took the downspouts, too. Do you think our homeowner’s insurance will cover this?”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Kathy and Dale with their chocolate-syrup eyes and caramel hair and their gingerbread house were so cute. Even their problems were cute. How do you get wallpaper off a bathtub? What do you do when your sander flies through the staircase? Were stolen downspouts covered by homeowner’s insurance?

“Too bad you didn’t come home half an hour earlier. You could have caught them,” Margie said.

“Too bad I wasn’t downsized quicker,” Kathy said. “But it takes longer than you’d think to be told you’re let go.” Her lower lip wobbled and her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t cry.

“Oh, baby, you were fired?” Margie said, full of motherly sympathy. She took Kathy in her arms and patted her back. “I am so sorry. When did it happen?”

“Eight o’clock this morning, as soon as I got into work. I had this note to report to the human resources department. I had no idea the company was in trouble, or I would have never taken a job with them. They downsized sixteen of us. I haven’t told Dale yet. I just took the bus home. What are we going to do, Margie? We’re spending so much rehabbing the house, we can barely make the house payments with two salaries. And now Caroline is pressuring us to paint the porch.” Two big tears escaped from her pretty brown eyes, then her face crumpled and she was crying in earnest. Suddenly Kathy’s problems didn’t seem so cute.

I guess I was already in a bad mood, but it didn’t get any better at Uncle Bob’s. For one thing, I didn’t see
Mayhew, and I needed to talk to him. There’s never a cop around when you need one. Marlene said Mayhew hadn’t been in yet. She delivered my one egg scrambled, peppered with her usual sarcastic remarks, poured me enough decaf to drown three customers, and sat down with me at break time. Good. Maybe Marlene could help. The bar and restaurant world is a small one, and she might know Johnny Hawkeye, the dead jogger.

“I don’t know him, but I’d heard of him,” she said. “I knew some of the people who worked with him, and they didn’t have a lot of good things to say about him. Johnny was one of those bartenders who put on a show for the customers but fudged on the tip-outs. He was supposed to tip fifteen percent to the staff who carry out the liquor, ice, glasses—the bar back—but Johnny stiffed them and only tipped ten percent. He also didn’t do his clean-up. He expected the day shift to pick up after him. In other words, Johnny was all show and no substance. I didn’t know him personally. Wet T-shirt and Shake Your Booty contests at the Meet Rack are not my scene.”

“Is it a bad place? Drugs? Selling booze to minors? Other problems?”

“I didn’t hear anything bad about the place,” Marlene said, “unless you think selling Jell-0 shots ought to be illegal. Sorry, can’t help you any more than that.”

“Then maybe you know something about Erwin, the man with the angel mother.” I showed Marlene Er-win’s spiky-print postcards.

“This guy is definitely one brick short of a load,” she said, and shook her head. “Hope he doesn’t come in here.”

“All that talk about his angel mother gives me the willies,” I said. “Sounds like Norman Bates in
Psycho
. I bet Erwin’s got Mom stuffed and sitting in a rocking chair. Or buried in the basement.”

Marlene stared at me. Uh-oh. She was warming up for a lecture. Sometimes she could sound remarkably like my mentor Georgia. “Francesca,” she said severely, “please don’t tell me you’re planning to dig up this guy’s basement looking for her body.”

“There’s something wrong with Erwin,” I said.

“Oh, I agree. But you have this habit of going off half cocked.” She sighed. “This guy lives in your neighborhood. Why don’t you ask someone about him?”

“Pam Klein,” I said. “She would know. She knows everybody. I’ll call her later today.”

“That’s better,” Marlene said. “It would be pretty embarrassing if you showed up with a shovel to dig up his basement and his mother answered the door.”

I was saved from having to have a snappy comeback when Mayhew walked in the door. I waved him over to my table. It was a pleasure just to watch that man move. He was a one-man fashion show. He had a beautifully tailored tan jacket, the color of a golden retriever puppy, black pants, and black shoes. Nice choirboy face and a wicked grin. Nice wife and two kids. We were friends now, but we had a little history between us that I wasn’t particularly proud of. On the other hand, I did know what was under that exquisite tailoring. But from what I heard, that wasn’t a well-kept secret. Nobody ever called Mayhew Old Faithful.

Mayhew interrupted these thoughts with “Why the frown, Francesca? Things not going right?” Marlene came by to pour him coffee, and he said he’d order in a minute.

“I’m worried about my neighborhood. Folks are dropping like flies,” I said. “Cutup Katie told me the jogger was murdered.”

“He was. Have you solved the crime yet, Nancy Drew?”

I didn’t like his tone. “No,” I said. “But I know who did it.”

“Oh, do you now? Let’s hear the great detective’s theory.”

“It’s Caroline,” I said. “It has to be. She fought with all three victims and, a day or so later, they turned up dead.”

“Do you have any proof she killed them?”

“Proof?” I said.

“Yeah, proof. Evidence. Hairs and fibers. Fingerprints. Witnesses. Little things like that. The courts are picky. They won’t let me arrest people because the neighbors don’t like them.”

“I have a witness. Dina saw Caroline working late the night of the drug dealer’s murder.”

“I already know that,” Mayhew said. “But from what I heard, it would be suspicious if Caroline
wasn’t
out late at night. Did Dina see Caroline waving a gasoline can and carrying a book of matches?” He was sounding increasingly sarcastic. And my suspicions were sounding pretty lame, even to me.

“No, but Caroline argued with all three victims.”

“Francesca, she argued with everyone on that street, and they’re still alive. She’s a real pain in the ass, I’ll grant you that, but the neighbors think she’s a hero when she harasses the city government. When she starts harassing them, that’s different. Then she’s a murderer. Some of those same thoughts about Caroline occurred to me, too, but when the victims are a drug dealer and crooked City Hall clerk, there are a few other suspects. Unlike you, I can’t just jump to conclusions.”

I’d had enough of his condescending tone. “You especially wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions when the suspect is a major contributor to the mayor’s reelection campaign,” I said.

Mayhew slammed his cup down and slopped coffee into the saucer. Hah. I’d hit a nerve. “Yes, she is,” he said slowly. He always spoke slowly when he was
angry. “Caroline is also a respected citizen who’s done a lot of good for the neighborhood.”

“I didn’t expect to hear you take up the local mantra. ‘Caroline’s done a lot of good for the neighborhood,’” I said in a singsong voice.

“This isn’t a game, Francesca.”

Furious blood rushed to my face. “Well, if you’d been doing your job last time, you would have figured out who the murderer was before I was attacked.”

“If you’d stayed out of it like you were supposed to, nothing would have happened. We figured it out, but we had to go a little slower, because we couldn’t take all those nice, illegal short cuts.”

“Maybe if you’d spent less time chasing skirts, you’d solve this case quicker,” I shot back, and wished I hadn’t. Mayhew grinned, but it was not his nice little-boy smile. I tried to think of something to wipe that smirk off his face, but before I could answer, Marlene materialized with a plastic pitcher of ice water, which I thought she was going to throw on both of us.

“Are you ready to order?” she asked Mayhew.

“Sorry, Marlene, I lost my appetite,” he said. He threw some money down on the table and left.

“I can see that went real well,” Marlene said, pouring me ice water. “But maybe I can help out. I’ve been thinking about your bartender.”

“You know him after all?” I said hopefully.

“No. I just have a question. The guy lives in the Central West End and works at a bar on the Landing, right?” Marlene said.

I nodded.

“So what’s he doing jogging in your neighborhood?”

Trust Marlene to figure it out. Hawkeye—I still had trouble thinking of him as Johnny—lived in the Central West End. So why would he drive fifteen or twenty minutes to the South Side to jog when he had all of
Forest Park practically on his doorstep? It didn’t make sense. His West End apartment was in a grimy red brick building with a bright-blue awning and a narrow entrance hall. A hand-lettered sign said
MANAGER IN BASEMENT APARTMENT, RING BELL
. I did, and a heavyset woman came out, moving slowly with the help of a cane. She wore jeans, a loose smock top, dangling Indian silver earrings, and long straight gray hair, parted in the center. She said her name was Judith. An old hippie, for sure. I told her who I was and why I was here. Judith invited me in and settled herself into a well-worn easy chair, with two bed pillows piled on the seat cushion. A large orange tabby curled up in her lap. I took the couch, covered with a tie-dyed throw, and moved several fat candles aside on the coffee table to make room for my briefcase. Judith said Johnny had had an apartment there for four years.

“Wasn’t he a hunk?” Judith said. “Until he opened his mouth. Then you saw what a calculating hunk of shit Johnny was, especially if he wanted something, and he usually did. There was a man who got through life on his looks. Lived off women—discreetly, of course—and his tips from bartending. Liked the plain ones. Didn’t want competition, I suspect, and he knew women who weren’t pretty would be easier to impress.”

I thought of poor Patricia, her stringy looks transformed into real beauty by some attention from Johnny Hawkeye.

“Did he have any close friends?”

“Johnny?” She snorted. “The man was too much on the make to have friends. He brought a lot of women up to his room, but they all disappeared fairly soon. There was one guy he hung out with—another bartender at the Meet Rack. Name’s Vinnie. Vinnie’s another beautiful hunk with an ugly interior. Two of a kind, they were. Vinnie is a piece of work. It’s worth
the trip to the Landing just to meet him. He might help you, too. If anyone knew Johnny, it was Vinnie.”

I called the bar from Judith’s. “Yeah, Vinnie’s here, who wants to know?” a voice said. I told him who and why.

“Then that’s me. Come on by, sweet lips, if you look as good as you sound,” Vinnie said. Oh, boy, this was going to be fun. The Landing wasn’t far from the Central West End, but the highways around it were torn up for a massive construction project, and there were long waits on dusty, car-clogged streets. Construction trucks spilling dirt and gravel pulled out of nowhere and left clouds of dust and cursing drivers in their wake. After a frustrating half-hour crawl, I paid five bucks and left Ralph in a parking lot two blocks from the Meet Rack.

The Landing was right on the Mississippi River, literally in the shadow of the Gateway Arch. It was one of the oldest sections of St. Louis, set at the base of the steel and stone Eads Bridge. The streets were paved with cobblestones, which looked quaint but were murder on high heels. The handsome nineteenth-century brick and iron-fronted buildings were once warehouses that outfitted the wagons going west. Now they housed bars and restaurants for tourists and the young, moneyed downtown business crowd.

The Meet Rack seemed to be made entirely of neon and steel and black laminate, and there was a large inlaid dance floor. It looked like the kind of place where you could meet the
Saturday Night Fever
John Travolta. But at three-thirty in the afternoon you weren’t likely to meet anyone but the beer delivery man. The place was deserted, and Vinnie was getting ready for happy hour, slicing limes and lemons. Vinnie wore skin-tight jeans and a muscle shirt, and the man had muscles to show. He should have been running with Johnny Hawkeye, though. Vinnie was starting to
get a substantial beer gut above those tight jeans. Must be taking his work home.

“Whadda ya have?” he said, in a real “deese, dem, and dose” accent.

“Club soda with lime,” I said.