The Pink Flamingo Murders (8 page)

Patricia interrupted Dina firmly. “Caroline’s been working almost around the clock, and I’m concerned that she is stressed. Maybe if we hold the party to celebrate our street in a positive way and invite her to share our enjoyment, she won’t feel so threatened.”

I thought Caroline was more interested in control
than celebration but said nothing. It wasn’t my street. I was just scrounging for a column. Margie looked like she was biting her tongue until it was bloody, but she stayed civil. For about twenty minutes everyone discussed plans for the celebration. The rebellion fizzled out, and soon Dina, Patricia, and Margie were figuring out how many lawn chairs, cold-cut platters, and carrot cakes they’d need. The anger toward Caroline was dissipating like a summer shower.

“I have to go to City Hall today—that’s why I’m wearing this suit—but I’ll be home the rest of the week to help with the details,” Dina volunteered, sweet and fluffy again.

“Time for me to go,” I announced, suddenly eager to be away from the shifting moods of North Dakota Place. “Can I use your kitchen phone, Patricia?” Of course I could. I called Cutup Katie, my pathologist friend in the city medical examiner’s office. She would have the last word on Otto’s death.

“Can’t talk now, I’m busy,” said Katie, sounding genuinely rushed. “Just finished carving up another one of your neighbors. Two murders in two days are a bit much, don’t you think? Gotta go.”

Two murders?

“Wait! You can’t do this. What murders? Otto? He was murdered? I thought he had a heart attack. And who’s the other one? We have to talk.” Patricia, Dina, and Margie were clearing the table and pretending not to listen.

“I came in early and I’m off in an hour,” Katie said. “Meet me at the city golf course in Forest Park. Two of our usual foursome canceled at the last minute.”

“I don’t golf,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “You can be a golf babe. Wear leopard Spandex, gold sandals, and lots of nail polish, and you can ride around in a cart and cheer Mitch and me on. Practice saying ‘Ooooh, you’re so strong.’”

“Over my dead body,” I said.

“That can be arranged,” Katie said with an evil cackle. Then she hung up.

“Was Otto murdered?” Margie asked, not bothering to hide that she’d eavesdropped.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll find out.” It looked like I was meeting Katie at the golf course or not at all. I called the
Gazette
and told Scarlette, one of Charlie’s former afternoon delights who now answered our department phones, that I was on assignment. I just hoped no one from the
Gazette
saw me in the park on a nice day.

Katie acted less like a doctor than any doctor I knew. She was a country girl, with a practical attitude toward death. She didn’t have any of the standard doctor trappings. She drove a pickup and she had a big old used hound—his previous owners sent him back to the pound and she saved him from death row. Her one medical weakness was golf, but she refused to join a country club. Instead, she played on the public golf course at Forest Park, an old city park about the size of Liechtenstein. She was waiting by the clubhouse with her friend, Mitch, another doctor who worked on some research project at Washington University he wasn’t anxious to discuss. Mitch was a big gray-haired guy who didn’t say much, which was okay because Katie talked for two. Both wore jeans and golf shirts, instead of funny-colored outfits. Before I could say anything, they grabbed me and ran for the tee.

“We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to tee off as a twosome,” said Katie. “This
never
happens on crowded public courses. We’ve got to get going before they change their minds and pair us with a couple of geeks. Mitch and I usually walk, but we’ll rent a cart for you.”

“I’ll walk,” I said. “I can use the exercise.”

“Good. We move quickly,” Katie said. “A round takes us about four hours for eighteen holes.”

“Four hours! How do you stand the boredom?” I was never going to make four hours. The grass looked short and dry, and there were heat waves shimmering on the course. And this was a cool day.

“You were never in med school,” she said. “Besides, I like golf. Mitch and I are relatively closely matched, but I’m the better driver.”

“I thought you walked,” I said.

“Drives,” she said. “As in long shots. He drives about two hundred yards and my good drives are two-twenty. We shoot between eighty-six and ninety-five. I’d rather play with old guys like Mitch, because they’re not intimidated by a good woman golfer.” The fifty-something Mitch acknowledged this with a snort. “The young guys get into arguments and accuse you of being a lesbian if you beat them, and want to bet for big money. We bet for beer.”

She proceeded to explain a complicated betting game where the first time someone three-putt they were “holding the snake.” This sounded like something a lonesome teenage boy did, and the rules were too complicated for me to follow. I did figure out the loser bought beer for everybody.

I never understood how people as interesting as Mitch and Katie could play something as dull as golf. I know Tiger Woods has made the game cool again, but before him the nation’s best known golfer was Dwight Eisenhower, which said it all for me. Forest Park was very crowded, so we waited on every shot, broiling in the sun like hot dogs. I wanted to set my buns down somewhere. I kept wishing I was in a cool booth at Uncle Bob’s. Not only was golfing dull, it was dangerous. While we stood around and talked, there was a
whump!
noise, and some fool lobbed a golf ball right in the middle of us.

“He could have beaned us,” Katie said.

Mitch looked disgusted. “All because he’s too impatient
to wait for us to move,” he said. “Some idiot shot with people around. He should be banned from the course.”

“I’ll fix him,” Katie said. She picked up the ball and wrote “Nice shot, asshole” on it with a Sharpie pen, then put it back down. “He can play it where it lays. I gave him a little souvenir.”

I figured I better start asking about Otto and the other murder before one of us got killed in action. Or nonaction. I paced around while we waited, to make more of a moving target. “What’s this about two murders in two days? Didn’t Otto die of a heart attack?”

“That’s what I first thought,” Katie said. “But then I saw the small, telltale marks of electrocution—a black hole in the palm and sole. That’s where the current entered and came out. The victim broke his arm and one leg falling off the ladder, but he was probably dead before he hit the ground because there are marks on his face. Live victims—at least the ones who are alive before they land—put out their hands to protect their face.”

She was right. I remembered a South Side friend who was painting his gutters forest green and his window trim white—the only acceptable neighborhood colors—one Sunday. His ladder went over backward. Out of respect for the Lord’s Day, he yelled, “Oh, SHOOOOOOT,” on the way down. He broke a wrist when he put out his hands to protect his face.

At last, Katie got to make a shot. She whacked the ball soundly a good long way and looked pleased. Mitch looked impressed. Then he did the same thing, but he wasn’t as happy about it. We walked on a little more, stood around like we were in a checkout line, and then Katie and Mitch made a bunch of short shots. I gathered some of those short shots should have been long ones, because neither one was very
happy. I was going to have to sit through four hours of this. Good thing there were two doctors present. I might die of boredom. When we started walking again, I started my questioning.

“I still don’t understand why it’s murder,” I said. “Otto was standing on a metal ladder, getting ready to paint metal gutters. They were festooned with a cheap set of Christmas lights he’d bought on sale at Kmart at Gravois Plaza. He left those lights up all year. I’m not surprised the wire frayed and electrocuted him.”

“That was
not
normal wear and tear,” Katie said. “After we found he’d been electrocuted, the police went back and looked at those lights. The plastic coating had been peeled down to the wire. It was murder.”

“So Otto was the first murder,” I said. “Who was the second? I didn’t know someone else was killed. When did it happen?”

“Last night. A drug dealer with the imaginative name of John Smith. His friends called him Scorpion. He died wearing a gold-and-diamond scorpion necklace valued at two thousand dollars. That thing had a gold rope chain and a gold pendant the size of a small candy bar with a diamond scorpion on it. His family tried to claim the necklace and his three gold-and-diamond teeth before EMS even got his body out of the ambulance. They had their priorities straight.”

“Not exactly grieving, were they?”

“No. But Mr. Scorpion Smith should get the usual bang-up drug dealer’s funeral.”

“He was shot?”

“He was an arson death,” Katie said. “Fire investigators say someone set fire to his house. The arsonist got up on the flat roof, probably used the fire escape belonging to the rooming house next door, walked across the roof, and poured gasoline down all the vents. Got a little careless and dribbled a little gas on the roof, so
the investigators saw the burn pattern and figured it out. Mr. Smith died trapped inside. Nasty way to go.”

So was drug addiction. I wasn’t wasting much sympathy on him. As far as I was concerned, one less drug dealer was no loss. Katie and Mitch stopped to take a few more short whacks—excuse me, putts—and from what she said, Mitch was buying the beer. Maybe I wasn’t getting the point to this game, but at least I was getting information.

“How do you know something inside the house didn’t start the fire?” I asked. “Those guys don’t work under the safest conditions.”

“Yeah, but an explosion looks different. And drug dealers also don’t padlock their own door on the outside. Mr. Smith had a hasp on his back door, because that’s the method he probably used to secure the door when he left the house. His back door was padlocked and there were burglar bars on his front door and all the first-floor windows.”

“I don’t see how he got trapped. Most houses around there are at least two stories. Were the second-floor windows barred, too? Couldn’t he run up and climb out those windows—or get up on the roof?”

“It was a gasoline fire,” Katie said, “and gas is a really fast accelerant. Fire races up staircases. It looks like he tried to get out the back door, then headed for the front when he couldn’t get the back door open. By that time smoke inhalation got him. Most burn victims die of smoke inhalation. I found soot in his trachea, so he was alive when the fire started. If he were dead before the place was set on fire, I wouldn’t find that soot.”

“Do you remember where that drug dealer lived in my neighborhood, so I can check out the location?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure, it was a weird name,” Katie said. “He lived on Ratley Street. I don’t remember the address,
but the house should be easy to find. It was badly burned.” A fire in my neighborhood. That explained the haze and the burned smell this morning and the sirens in my sleep. They weren’t dreams. They were real.

A little cart driven by a little blonde in little shorts headed toward us. “It’s Bev Cart!” Mitch and Katie said together and started laughing, although I couldn’t see what was so funny.

“That’s a beer wench dead ahead,” Katie said. “They are mostly college women, who drive around the course in little carts, selling beer and other refreshments and flirting outrageously with the male golfers. We were at this course where one golfer kept calling the beer wench Bev. The beverage cart had the license plate Bev Cart, and he thought Bev was her name. This is one area where golf needs to improve its treatment of women. We need more male beer wenches.”

“A male wench?”

“Okay, a beer stud, or a beer hustler. I want to see cute college guys in tight shorts riding around selling beer and flirting outrageously with me for big tips. Buying beer is one of the great golf rituals, and we women are denied participation in it by our fellow women.”

I thought I knew what she meant. “You watch now,” she said. “Little Bev here will act like I’m invisible.”

Bev the beer wench looked more like a beer cheerleader. The word “wholesome” was made for her, from her blunt-cut hair that was almost natural blond to her bouncy little body. Bev pulled up in her cart and giggled at Mitch. “I bet you’re thirsty,” she said. “I have beer, Powerade, bottled water, and soda.”

“I bet she never asks me,” Katie muttered.

Bev got Mitch a beer and asked about his game. Finally Bev said, “Oh, does she want something?”

“Respect,” Katie shouted. “Equal time. I’m a doctor just like he is. My wallet is as big as his.”

“She’ll take a Bud,” Mitch said. “Can I get you anything, Francesca?”

“See,” Katie said to me. “We need male beer wenches. Beer studs, if you will.”

“It would definitely improve the view,” I said. “The average golfer here is about the same as the temperature—somewhere in the high seventies.” Mitch snorted again.

Male beer hustlers would give me something new to watch. We weren’t even to the third hole yet, and I’d seen more grass and trees than I wanted. Now I saw some kind of commotion up ahead. Katie broke into a lope and Mitch moved pretty fast for a fifty-something guy. I brought up the rear. Soon we were close enough to see three middle-age guys flapping their arms and a fourth one lying motionless on the ground. Even from this distance he looked unnaturally white and clammy. One of the standing and flapping guys was yelling “Is there a doctor on the course?”

“Shit, Mitch, look at that guy in the fairway,” Katie said. “I bet he’s had a heart attack. We’d better check him out and see if he’s still alive. He could be gone by the time EMS can get in here.”

Gee, I thought, that was heartwarming.

“God, I hope he’s not dead,” Katie said fervently. “I’m on call. I’d have to cut him up on my day off.”

My freshly warmed heart chilled pretty quick. But I saw a chance for escape. I had almost all the information I needed, anyway. “Listen,” I said magnanimously as she and Mitch galloped along the pathway, “if this is an emergency, I’d just be in your way. I can walk back to my car.”