The Pink Flamingo Murders (15 page)

“I’m collecting for a wedding present for the upcoming nuptials of our managing editor and Miss Noonin,” he said. “Suggested donations for those in management positions are twenty dollars.”

“Can’t get the troops to shell out for a gift for our beloved leader?” I asked. I didn’t bother to look at Georgia. I could feel her glare.

“The staff has the greatest respect for our managing editor, but many have families to support,” he said.

“Maybe if Charlie paid them more, his staff could afford to give him a gift,” I said. Steve would carry this conversation right back to Charlie, but I didn’t care. My career was trashed anyway if he was marrying Nails.

Georgia handed Smiley Steve two tens. She’d pay anything to get him out of there.

“What about you, Francesca?” Steve asked.

“I’m not management,” I said. “Besides, I don’t have twenty dollars.”

“She has it,” Georgia said, and took the twenty out of my pocket.

When Smiley Steve departed, she added, “Consider that a tax on your big mouth. Maybe next time it will pay you to shut up.”

“Isn’t this heat awful?” Margie said when she met me at her door. “I can’t remember a summer this hot.”

Spoken like a true St. Louisan. We were heading into July. It would be hotter than the hinges of hell from now through September, but we always acted like the heat was a surprise. St. Louis has two nice days a year, and we’d had both of them. The rest of the time the weather was extreme: extremely hot, extremely cold, extremely wet, or extremely dry. It was raining, hailing, sleeting, or snowing, sometimes all on the same day. Just to add color and texture to our weather, we had tornadoes, where the sky turned sickly green and black, and floods, where the Mississippi looked like a roiling river of mud. We were proud of our bad weather. It built character. St. Louisans were convinced that California was filled with wackos, wimps, and weaklings because it had perpetually nice weather. An accurate response to Margie’s question would be “Of course it’s hot. It’s almost July.” But I gave the polite St. Louis answer: “It’s just awful. How did people live here in the summer before air conditioning?” (They didn’t. The rich went to Michigan. The poor went to their basements or slept on blankets in the park.)

Margie looked like a slightly demented Ethel Mertz from the old I
Love Lucy
show. Her hair was tied up in
a jaunty flowered scarf, like Ethel and Lucy used to wear. She wore cutoffs and a saggy, stained T-shirt. I could still read the writing on the shirt. It said “You can’t get rid of me—I’ve tried.” If that wasn’t unnerving enough, her sweaty face was streaked with dirt and she was covered with gritty, gray dust, as if she’d clawed her way out of a collapsed building. Or maybe beat her way out. She was also holding a dusty baseball bat.

“How did you get so dirty by seven
A.M
.?” I asked.

“You’re late to my demolition derby,” she said. “I’ve been up working since five-thirty this morning. You can’t have the air conditioning on when you’re taking out plaster—you need the windows open for ventilation, or you’ll choke on the dust. It’s so hot, you can only do this early in the morning or late at night.”

“It is hot,” I agreed. “Seventy-eight degrees at seven
A.M
. It will be up near a hundred again today.”

“Come on up,” she said. “I’ve got most of one wall out already.”

I’d volunteered to help Margie knock the plaster off the walls in her third-floor bedroom. I knew my friend Jinny didn’t quite trust Margie, but I did. I wanted to talk to her about my suspicions about Caroline, without Dina and Patricia, and this was the only time we both had for the next few days. Besides, I thought clubbing cracked plaster might make a column. I’d never been to what rehabbers called a gutting party. Margie told me the dress code: Wear old clothes, wrap my hair, and I could shower and change for work at her place.

“Bring your weapon of choice for cracking plaster,” she said. “I use a baseball bat and an old pipe wrench.”

I brought a tire iron from the back of Ralph. I hung my work suit in a downstairs closet and then followed Margie upstairs to the third floor. She’d sealed off the landing using masking tape and big sheets of clear
plastic, but the plaster dust still seeped out and drifted all the way down to the first floor. It coated the round table and the parson’s seat, and Margie left gray-white footprints when she climbed the steps to the third floor. Dust-streaked plastic hung like a gray curtain over the door to the room. When we pulled it aside, it was like stepping into a sauna. A really dusty, dirty sauna, with chunks and crunchy piles of plaster on the floor. I took a deep breath, a real mistake. The air was almost solid, there was so much dust. Margie pulled a once-white paper filter mask out of a tool chest. “You can use this, if you want.” I waved it aside. I wasn’t getting much air as it was. Three walls were painted a sickly mint green, set off with brown water stains, kid-size handprints, and light patches where pictures used to hang. The fourth wall, an outside wall, had about half the plaster gone, so the brick was exposed.

“All you have to do is hit this so hard, it breaks,” she said. “Some of it is old and crumbly and falls right off. Some of it, you really have to pound. It’s a great way to relieve anger. I pretend I’m beating someone I really hate. I use the heavier pipe wrench for beating Caroline to a pulp and the lighter ball bat for smashing antique dealers.” She picked up a three-foot pipe wrench that had to weigh ten pounds and slammed it against the wall. A flat, frying-pan-size chunk of plaster fell out. “Take that, Caroline,” said Margie, and swung the pipe wrench. There was a clanging
CRAK!
and a star-shaped crack appeared in the plaster. “Take that!”
CRAK!
“And that, and that and that!” With a noise like a minilandslide, about four feet of plaster slid off the wall. There was a choking cloud of dust.

I chose another outside wall, with a dormer window, and began beating it with the tire iron. With each swing, I imagined I was hitting another Charlie body part. The first shot went right to the managing editor’s wobbly fat gut. Nothing much happened. Next I knee
capped him and got a huge crack in the wall. Then I slammed him across the chest. That felt so good that I hit him on his thick head. I got in a few whacks for the
Gazette
staffers, hitting the wall until all of the plaster had broken off. But I didn’t feel any better: I knew Charlie would be at the
Gazette
forever.

“Hey, you’re really getting into this,” Margie said, admiring the huge hole I’d created. The plaster dust had turned her rasp into a croak. “I need to wet my whistle. Let’s take a break.” We crunched out into the hall and sat on two yellow webbed lawn chairs. Margie opened a box of glazed doughnuts and offered me either coffee from a Thermos or a cold drink from the cooler. I munched on a doughnut and washed it down with bottled water. My mouth was full of grit, my nose was clogged, and I had plaster chunks in my bra.

Margie talked a little about her plans for the room and then the subject switched to Caroline. “Did you hear the latest? Now she’s after those poor kids.”

“Dale and Kathy? What’s she want with the world’s sweetest rehabbers?”

“Caroline wants them to paint their porch. That’s a major job. That paint has to be burned off. I don’t think they can do it themselves. Not at their current skill level. They’ll probably have to hire someone, and they don’t have any money. But Caroline is really pressuring them.”

“Why is she putting the screws to Dale and Kathy?” I asked.

“Remember when she brought those West County real estate people through on the tour?”

“How can I forget? That’s when Otto almost painted his house purple.”

“The real estate agents ate this buffet at Caroline’s and then went up and down the street, making snippy comments about our homes. The plantings around the fountain were outdated. They didn’t like the on-street
parking. Caroline could put in a forest of fountain grass and Japanese maples, and hide all the cars, and you still wouldn’t get those people showing houses on North Dakota Place. They made up a bunch of reasons why our houses wouldn’t sell, because they couldn’t say the real reason: They didn’t like all those black people walking around, not wearing maids’ and waiters’ uniforms. You don’t see any black people walking around their part of West County, and they like that just fine.

“Anyway, one touring real estate agent remarked that Dale and Kathy’s porch needed paint. That set Caroline off. She told the kids they were ruining the street. Caroline gave them until the end of July to fix the porch, or she’ll call the city inspector. The kids are frantic. That house has already eaten every dollar they have, and they were putting off painting the outside until next spring. Dale and Kathy told Caroline they were short of money, and do you know what she said? They didn’t need two vehicles! Caroline said they could sell either their car or their truck, and she hoped it would be the truck. Of course, Caroline claims she’s doing this for the good of the neighborhood. I think she wants to drive them out, so she can buy their house cheap, too.”

That sounded a little far-fetched, but not as wild as what I was about to propose. I tiptoed into the subject carefully. “Did you ever wonder about all the people turning up dead after Caroline fights with them?”

“I think she’s killing them,” Margie said flatly.

My soul sister. “You really believe that?”

“Sure,” Margie rasped. “I told Dina that I thought Caroline had killed Otto, and she thought I was out of my mind. After her reaction, I shut up. But I think Caroline is coming unglued. I think she killed Otto, for sure. It would be easy for her to set up that accident
with the Christmas lights. She’s handy, and she hated Otto.”

“She made money off his death, too,” I said. “She got his house cheap.”

“You saw how she yelled at that drug dealer,” Margie said. “You’d have to be crazy to confront him like she did. And the way she carried on when he broke her trees. She’s lucky that’s all he did. He could have shot her, and us, too. Instead, she said he should be crushed like a cockroach. Here’s something else. Dina told me she saw Caroline out late the night the drug dealer’s house burned.”

“She’s buying the drug dealer’s place,” I added.

“If I had any money, I’d buy it,” Margie said. “It’s perfect for a gut rehab. Maybe she’s crazy like a fox. Two deaths, and two houses cheap.”

“Hawkeye’s murder is the one that doesn’t fit,” I said. “What do you know about the house with the troublesome kids? Caroline warned him about those kids pulling dangerous pranks.”

“The kids are a nuisance,” Margie said. “A lot of bikes have disappeared and cars have been broken into since they moved in, but we’ve never actually caught them at it. I did see the thirteen-year-old waving a gun in the gangway between the houses and I called the police. They took him into custody, but he was back the next day. Nobody likes those kids. I’m not going to defend them. But Caroline is the only one who’s seen their so-called dangerous pranks.”

“Something else I can’t figure out,” I said. “I talked with the medical examiner. Hawkeye’s—I mean Johnny’s—death was staged to look like an accident. The killer strung a wire across the alley to stun him. But why set it up in that alley? If a car came down there, it would pull down the wire. There would be lots of morning traffic, with the neighbors going to work.”

“But that’s just it,” Margie said. “The people on the
upper half of the block drive out the other end of the alley. On this end, Mr. Henderson leaves for work at six
A.M
. Old Mrs. Meyer doesn’t have a car. Dina leaves at eight o’clock on the mornings she goes downtown, but she told us that she’d be staying home the rest of the week. Dale drives Kathy into work and they take their car, which is parked out front. Caroline and I work at home, and unless I’m picking, I don’t leave before ten. So if you live here, you’d know that no cars go down that alley after six o’clock for about four hours. Everyone knew Hawkeye turned into that alley at eight-oh-five. You could set your watch by him.

“Here’s another reason why I think Caroline did it. Johnny Hawkeye’s murder wasn’t an ordinary mugging or shooting. This was a murder made to look like an accident. Caroline wouldn’t want a murder to sully her street’s reputation. It would be bad for property values. An accident would be regrettable but soon forgotten. Nobody would think twice if a jogger tripped and fell in an alley around North Dakota Place.”

“But I still don’t know why Johnny Hawkeye was murdered,” I said. “I don’t think even Caroline would be crazy enough to kill him for running on the grass.”

“I do,” Margie said. “That woman would do anything to protect her precious street.”

We finished our drinks and went back to plaster bashing. I kept thinking about what Margie said. Margie had seemed a little wacky herself, swinging her pipe wrench at the wall and screaming “Take that, Caroline” until she was hoarse. Rehabbers literally sweated and bled to save these old houses. If the neighborhood went bad, they’d lose everything. Maybe they’d lose their minds, too. Maybe Caroline had killed Hawkeye. Talking to Margie only strengthened my belief that Caroline killed Otto and Scorpion Smith. It was time to talk with Mayhew. I checked my watch—
nine o’clock. I might still catch him at Uncle Bob’s, if I was lucky.