The Pink Flamingo Murders (19 page)

“He’s a good detective,” I said. “He won’t railroad you.”

“Then why is he treating me like I killed Caroline?” Margie wailed. “He says I have the perfect motive since Caroline broke up my marriage.”

“She did?” This was a new one. How could the unlovely Caroline break up Margie’s marriage?

“Why don’t we meet somewhere to talk, and you can tell me about it,” I said. “You can also tell me about anyone else who has a good reason to kill Caroline.”

“Hah,” Margie said. “You got all night? Listen, I
don’t feel like going out anywhere. Everyone’s pointing and staring at me. And don’t say it’s all in my head. I went to the supermarket this afternoon, and the neighbors were staring. Mrs. Rhodemeier, over on Iowa, snubbed me in front of the canned tuna, and she never even liked Caroline. I have lots of food. Come over and I’ll barbecue some pork steaks for dinner.”

Was I supposed to have dinner with Lyle tonight? We’d been canceling and rescheduling so much, I couldn’t remember anymore. “Let me make a phone call and I’ll get right back to you,” I said.

Lyle was in his office and he answered his own phone. “Are we having dinner tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m working late again.” He sounded rushed and eager to get me off the phone. “Why don’t we make it tomorrow night?” he said. “I really miss you.”

“If you really miss me, why don’t you want to see me tonight?”

“Francesca,” he said, “don’t be that way.”

“What way? You mean, don’t be angry because it upsets you. How should I be? Happy that you can’t see me? Do you want to marry me—or do you want a Stepford wife who will do whatever you want?”

“You haven’t so far,” he said. “Please, Francesca, let’s not fight on the phone. Let’s have dinner tomorrow night. You know I love you.”

Did I? Maybe he really did have someone else. Maybe I’d been spending so much time at North Dakota Place, I didn’t even notice the signs that he was straying. Ever since I set foot on that street nothing had gone right in my life. So naturally I made plans to spend more time there. I called Margie and said, “Put the pork steaks on the grill, I’m on my way over. What can I bring?”

“Just yourself,” she said.

I brought myself and a German chocolate cake from
Mrs. Indelicato’s, which I got for ten percent off, with a free load of guilt. Mrs. I didn’t mention that I’d been deliberately going down the back steps to avoid her. She didn’t reproach me at all, which only made it worse. She’s crafty that way.

It was after five when I got to Margie’s. I knocked on the door and no one answered, so I went around back and opened the gate to the privacy fence. Margie was in the backyard, brushing barbecue sauce on four thick pork steaks sizzling on the gas grill. An umbrella table was set with two places. I put the cake down there.

“What are you using for barbecue sauce?” I asked. In St. Louis, barbecue sauce is a hotly debated topic. I hoped she wasn’t one of those Worcestershire-and-butter purists. It made the meat too dry. Or worse, a dieter who marinated everything in low-cal lemon juice.

“I used a bottle of Maull’s tangy sauce doctored with a splash of Budweiser and Worcestershire sauce,” she said. She held up her almost-empty beer bottle, and I figured she drank what didn’t go in the sauce.

“You got it,” I said. “You’ve mastered the official St. Louis recipe. Some people add a little brown sugar, but I think that makes it too sweet. You’ve caught on well for an outsider. Where are you from?”

“Hartford, Connecticut,” she said. “My dad worked for an insurance company and my mom was a housewife. But my ex-husband and I lived in Manhattan for so long, we considered ourselves New Yorkers. You know, I never saw a pork steak until I moved here.”

“You won’t,” I said. “St. Louis is the pork steak capital of the world. Pork steaks are a cheap and tasty meat, cut from the shoulder end of the loin.”

“You can barbecue them in about one six-pack,” Margie said. “But I don’t understand why they’re so popular here.”

“That’s easy. We like barbecue sauce. Now, barbecue
sauce is best on ribs, but ribs are messy and wasteful. After all that work, marinating and barbecuing, you wind up eating a mouthful of meat and wearing a gallon of sauce. St. Louisans are too neat and practical to put up with that. Pork steaks taste like ribs, but they have more meat. They’re also easy to eat, without slopping sauce.”

“I get it,” Margie said. “They’re the seedless grapes of barbecue.”

We sat down to juicy pork steaks, baked beans, German potato salad, and fresh sliced tomatoes. The perfect summer meal. I drank ice water, but Margie had another beer, which I figured would loosen her lips a bit. By the time she cut us both thick slabs of German chocolate cake, she was ready to talk.

“So how did Caroline break up your marriage?” I said.

“She refused to refinance a loan,” Margie rasped, stabbing her cake with her fork. She made the act seem angry and efficient. I hoped she didn’t have to eat before a jury of her peers.

“And your husband left you for that?”

“You have to understand, it was the last straw. Bill and I bought this house from Caroline. I was crazy for this old house. We moved here because he got a job at McDonnell-Douglas. I’d been working for a PR firm in Manhattan. In New York we were living in a one-bedroom apartment about the size of my entrance hall, and when I saw this house with the stained glass, the four fireplaces, and all that space, I had to have it. After New York the price seemed ridiculously cheap. We got a deal on it, or so I thought, because it was only partly rehabbed. Caroline redid the kitchen, the bathrooms, the plumbing, and the wiring, and repaired the slate roof. Then she sold it to us at what I thought was a good price, because I was too dumb to know I was being skinned. Back then I still thought all midwesterners
were simple, honest folks who didn’t understand money.” We both took bites of chocolate cake and chewed on that for a while.

“Caroline wanted three hundred thousand dollars for a house that would cost two million anywhere around Manhattan. I did wonder when we couldn’t get the whole amount financed by the bank. Do you know what comps are?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t, either, back then,” Margie said. “If I had, I wouldn’t be in this fix. They’re comparable prices. The bank looks at the prices of similar houses nearby and bases its loan on what they sold for.

“The neighborhood wasn’t doing quite so well back then. Three blocks away fire-gutted shells of drug houses were going for ten thousand dollars. Fine old two-story brick homes were selling for sixty thousand. The bank laughed at Caroline’s asking price of three hundred thousand. They wouldn’t loan us more than two hundred fifty thousand and said we were lucky to get that. Caroline refused to come down on the price. She said it would be bad for us and bad for the neighborhood. She said the banks were prejudiced against the city, and house prices had to stay high for us all to survive. And I swallowed that load,” she said, swallowing a huge forkful of cake.

“She offered us all sorts of perks to buy the house. I can’t remember them all, but they included a new oven, microwave and dishwasher for the kitchen, a new marble floor in the guest bathroom, complete tuckpointing of the house and garage, free repair of the fireplaces, and free cleaning and maintenance on the fireplaces for five years.

“She also offered to lend us the other fifty thousand dollars. The terms were a little steeper than the bank loan. This was the mid-eighties, remember, when interest rates were ten and twelve percent. And while our
bank home loan was for twenty years, her loan was for fifteen. My husband Bill said not to worry, we would refinance the loan in a year or two, and that would get the payments down. Then we could use the extra money to finish rehabbing the house.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I said.

“It was, but nothing worked out the way we hoped. At the end of two years Bill was laid off at Mac, along with hundreds of others. This house needs two salaries to run it properly. Bill did get the bank to give him a new loan rate—three points lower. We were so excited. We would have a couple hundred a month extra. When we refinanced Caroline’s loan, we’d have even more money. But it wasn’t that easy.”

Margie grew angrier as she talked. She stabbed the air with her fork to make her points.

“First, the mortgage company said they would refinance the loan for thirty years, but they only gave us one hundred twenty thousand dollars, not one-sixty like we’d hoped. Second”—another stab with the fork—“Caroline refused to refinance her share for thirty years. It had to be fifteen years, she said, or she wouldn’t let us refinance at all.”

“She could do that?” I said. I couldn’t believe Caroline was powerful enough to block a bank deal.

“She could and she did. We checked the loan papers. It was right there, in print we never bothered to read—or have a lawyer read—because we trusted Caroline. She was an honest, wholesome midwesterner, and we were a couple of East Coast slicks. Yes, indeed, Caroline could block the bank loan unless she got her way. So she got a double income on her loan payment, and we had no financial relief—we didn’t get lower monthly payments.

“That was the end for us. My husband Bill never really liked St. Louis, not the way I did. I guess we were drifting apart, anyway. I couldn’t leave this
house, so he left me, and moved to California. I wanted the house and I got it. Now it’s a millstone around my neck, dragging me down. I can’t afford to fix it up. If I sell it half rehabbed like it is now, I’ll lose my shirt. So I’m trapped. I rehab a little here and there. I pick for a living and hope to make a big score in the antique business, but I might as well try to win the lottery. You heard me yelling at Caroline about my boyfriend screwing me on the front lawn. But the truth is, I’m not seeing anyone. This house is my life.

“After Bill left, Caroline offered to buy the house for half what we paid. Half! After all those lectures about property values. I refused to sell to her. I could have killed her when she made that miserable offer.”

Margie stopped, realizing what she’d said.

“But I didn’t kill her,” she said. “So now I’m stuck with this house forever. Caroline owns me.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “You’re free.” Jeez, no wonder Mayhew thought the woman had a motive for murder. “Are you the only person Caroline used like that?”

“Nope, there are a lot of us in Caroline’s sucker club,” Margie said.” I’d say at least fifteen that I know about are part of her private loan scheme, and there may be more. I’m sure she took the money she got from us and lent it to some other poor sap.

“Then there’s the Widow Ainslee. When her husband died, she flat out refused to sell to Caroline, because she hated her so much. Instead, she sold it to a nice young couple for a much lower price than Caroline offered her. Then it turned out the nice young couple were friends of Caroline’s, acting as a straw party. Caroline wound up with the Widow Ainslee’s house after all.”

“Would the Widow Ainslee murder her?”

“If she could. But she’s eighty years old, had a stroke, and is in a nursing home. Her children let me
pick her house because I’d been good to their old mother. She had some nice things, too. Dina had a similar version of my story, but Caroline only lent her thirty thousand, and Dina has a little family money. She’s not as trapped as I am.”

“And Patricia?”

“Patricia never bought her house from Caroline. That’s probably why they’re such good friends.”

“What about Dale and Kathy? Were they the sweet young couple who helped trick Mrs. Ainslee?”

Margie looked surprised. “Those two? No, they bought their house from Mrs. Fulton, and she really was a nice older woman. They’re good kids, even though Caroline had them half crazy with worry with her demands. If Caroline hadn’t died, they’d have had to paint that porch, and I don’t know where they’d get the money, especially with Kathy out of work.”

“Do you think they killed Caroline?”

“How?” Margie said. “They can’t even sand a floor. How could they get away with murder?”

But I thought of that pretty bedroom, so carefully refinished and decorated, and those love-rumpled sheets. They were good at some things. How far would they go to protect that pleasant life?

“You can’t believe Dale and Kathy would murder anyone!” Margie said. “Be serious.” But I’d known sweet people who committed murder, and pillars of the community, too, if they were pushed far enough. And Caroline had pushed those kids to the very brink.

“Caroline was heartless with Dale and Kathy,” Margie said. “I think she was jealous of their happiness. You can see how much they love each other. But Kathy and Dale were not heartless. They wouldn’t kill her, no matter how hard she pushed them.”

“Someone killed Caroline,” I said.

“She had more enemies than I have unpaid bills,” Margie rasped. “If you go up and down this block and
the other streets around here, you’ll find people just like me who were cheated by Caroline. Except one of them was angry enough to murder Caroline—and smart enough not to fight with her in public.”

“Doesn’t anyone ever get the better of Caroline?”

“Only one couple that I know of, George and Amanda. They bought a house at Caroline’s inflated price, with all the perks and the private loans, just like Bill and me. Then George got transferred to Arizona and they had to sell, fast. That’s when they learned the sorry truth—nobody was going to pay that kind of money for a house in an iffy city neighborhood, no matter how beautiful it was. They stood to lose fifty thousand, minimum, more if they sold fast. The only possible purchaser was Caroline, who once again offered them half what they paid her. But George and Amanda were clever. They knew Caroline’s weakness: She hates children. Amanda had a lot of family here, and it was a big, noisy family with plenty of kids. She invited them over for a party. She let the little kids run through the gardens and the teenagers play touch football in the parkway and softball on her front lawn. One nine-year-old broke a basement window with a ball, and a toddler pulled all the flowers off an ornamental shrub. The front yard looked like a bad golfer had been carving divots in the grass. The bigger boys lounged on the front porch, playing loud rap music and looking scary. Caroline was beside herself. She finally called the police, but the party was breaking up anyway.