The Pink Flamingo Murders (6 page)

“What the fuck is it now?” she snarled when she saw me.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said.

“It’s afternoon and nothing in this day has gone right. Charlie has just started a fuckin’ book club,” she said.

“Like Oprah Winfrey?”

“I wish. We have to read some goddamn college professor’s ramblings on journalism, then discuss it with Charlie. He says it will give us perspective. I’ve got a newspaper to put out. I don’t have time for this crap. This professor guy’s never been in a daily newspaper in his life. Look at this title.”

She pushed a fat book the size of a St. Louis phone book at me. The cover had a typewriter and an American flag on the front. I read out loud:
“Ensheathe and Ensnare: Equitable Essence of Power in the Press Corps in Post-Modern America
. What’s that mean?”

“Beats me,” Georgia said. “I’m on page two-ten and still can’t figure out what this asshole is saying.”

“Where’d Charlie get that idea?”

“From his latest squeeze, Nails. She said it would improve the tone of the paper. So now we’re doing book reports. I sure hope he breaks up with this bimbo soon.”

“Listen,” I said a little desperately, “that’s what I came to see you about. Have you seen this memo she
wrote and the stuff she said about me? I’m worried, Georgia.”

“You been shootin’ your mouth off again?”

“Well, maybe a little,” I said.

“Francesca,” Georgia began, eyeing me shrewdly, “how many times have I told you to shut up? But I wouldn’t worry about the snippy opinions of one of Charlie’s many girlfriends. You sell newspapers, she doesn’t. She’ll be gone by next week. And you should be gone now. Shoo. I have reading to do.”

I found something gray and soggy in the office vending machine and ate it for lunch. The label said “turkey,” but if you work at the
Gazette
, you don’t believe everything you read. At least I could look forward to a good dinner at Lyle’s tonight. I turned Marlene’s discourse on waiters and adultery into a funny column. Maybe the subject wasn’t politically wise, but I slyly enjoyed the discomfort I knew it would cause Nails and Charlie. At four-thirty I called Tina, to see if she found out anything.

“I need to take a walk,” she said. “Want to come with me?”

This must be sizzling news if she couldn’t say it over the phone. The
Gazette
phones were all bugged and the computers monitored, but usually we ignored that, figuring management spies couldn’t be watching and listening every minute. The
Gazette
was too cheap to hire enough people for that. It was serious if Tina wanted to walk in downtown St. Louis in the hottest part of the afternoon. I stepped outside, and the heat made me catch my breath. Downtown had the seedy, bleached look that comes after days of high temperatures. If the heat kept up like this another week, some TV station would start frying eggs on the sidewalk.

We walked half a block to a Burger King and got two large sodas. The counterman couldn’t keep his eyes off Tina. I didn’t blame the man. She was a sight.

“Sit down,” Tina said. “You’ll need to be seated when you hear this. Charlie filed for divorce more than sixty days ago. It slipped by our court reporter, as usual. Charlie is dumping his long-suffering wife. Something is up.”

“Inside his pants,” I said.

“Nope, this is serious. I’m serious, too. So you be serious.”

“Maybe his wife wised up and left him,” I said. “Do you even know that woman’s name? He’s always called her the Wife. Is ‘the’ her first name?”

“Wife isn’t her name, it’s her job,” Tina said. “My theory is he needed a wife to protect him from his predatory girlfriends. Not only did he have someone to cook, clean, and keep house, but he could tell his current squeeze that he couldn’t leave his wife. He used her as an excuse. A wife was the perfect protection for a philanderer like Charlie. If he’s dumping her that means only one thing.”

The thought was too horrible to contemplate: “Charlie is going to marry Nails,” I said. As soon as I said it out loud, I felt a sickening sensation, as if some awful truth had been revealed. We dumped our drink cups in the waste barrel and walked back to the paper in silence. There was nothing left to say.

I was determined to leave the office at a decent hour, after two weeks of working until past eight every night. I was having dinner with Lyle tonight at his town house in the Central West End. At five-thirty I packed my briefcase and walked through the newsroom. There was a bouquet of flowers on Nails’s desk big enough for a mob funeral. I didn’t see any card, but one look at her smug face and I could guess who sent them. She and Charlie were going public.

About thirty feet from Nails’s desk, the newsroom had developed a kind of black hole. Everyone suddenly avoided it, as if they’d be sucked in. The spot was the
desk of Geraldine, Charlie’s official mistress, a rather lumpy-looking blonde. Charlie may have played around on Geraldine with his many girlfriends, but he always came back to her. Geraldine wasn’t my favorite person. I got irritated at any woman stupid enough to admire a slimewad like Charlie, but right now Geraldine looked pretty pathetic. She was packing notebooks and papers into a cardboard box. Tears ran down her face and left eyeliner tracks as black as her roots, but despite her obvious distress, no one in the newsroom would go near her. I hated that most about my colleagues. If you were in trouble, they acted like you had Ebola. Cowards. Well, hell, I couldn’t be in any more trouble than I already was. I might as well talk to her.

“Is something wrong, Geraldine?” I asked.

“I’m being transferred,” she said, her voice watery with suppressed sobs. “To the Ellisville bureau.” Out of sight and out of mind. The Ellisville bureau was a grand name for a cheap storefront office equipped with a phone and an ancient, cranky IBM 386 portable computer. Ellisville was a far west suburb of St. Louis, forty minutes from downtown on a good day. Geraldine would never cover another important story—it would be school bond issues, Little League news, and church fund raisers from here on. Charlie, that sawed-off louse, had sent her into exile.

“Can I help?” I said. Geraldine shook her head and continued silently packing and crying, like a banished royal mistress.

A few desks away, Nails was queening it, her triumph complete. She was watching her final rival pack up, and she was giddy with malice. Babe whispered little nothings in her ear, and Roberto, our city editor, stared at her as if she was Sharon Stone. Nails amused herself by making snide comments about her colleagues.

“Did you read her column today?” Nails’s voice was nasty and insinuating, and I knew she meant me. Her courtiers dutifully shook their heads no.

“I never read it,” Roberto said, which was interesting. Two days ago he’d told me how much he liked my column. I was particularly proud of today’s column. It was about a woman who had thirteen sure-fire ways to spot a dubious date. I thought it was funny. Until Nails began to read aloud the words I’d labored over. That’s how they sounded now. Labored. Pointless. She interrupted herself to say “You know, if these people ever got a life, Francesca would be out of a job.”

“Francesca Vierling, president of the Get a Life Club,” Roberto sneered.

Then Babe said, “Did you know that she and Lyle . . .”

I didn’t stop to find out what awful half lie Babe was spreading now. I didn’t confront Nails. I didn’t stop her with a snappy comeback. I fled. I hated myself for my cowardice, but I couldn’t stay there any longer.

“What do you think, Lyle?” I asked over dinner that night.

“Huh?” he said. “Oh, yeah, sure, probably. Charlie will marry her. He’s capable of anything. Do you think this mango pork is too dry?”

Lyle had picked up sesame green beans, mango roasted pork, and gingered sweet potatoes from his local deli. I thought it was all luscious. “I think we need a stronger wine,” he added. “Maybe I should have gotten a merlot.”

Despite the food, dinner with Lyle was not a success. He seemed distant and preoccupied, and bored by my endless speculations about who was doing what to whom at the
Gazette
.

“You’re brooding,” Lyle said, kissing my forehead.

“You are, too,” I said, kissing him back.

“I wanted you with me tonight, not at the
Gazette”
he said. This time, when he kissed me, all thoughts of the
Gazette
went from my mind. We went upstairs to his bed, trailed by his enormous gray cat, Monty. For a while, Charlie and Nails and Babe and Roberto did not exist. It was just Lyle and me. And then he ruined everything.

“Francesca, will you marry me?” Lyle asked. I rolled over in bed and looked at the love of my life. He had a slightly crooked nose, pale blue eyes, and a cowlick in his blond hair that gave him a little-boy look I loved.

“Are you proposing to me in bed?” I asked. “That’s a fine thing to tell our grandchildren.”

“Francesca, I’m serious. I’ve asked you before, but you’ve never said yes or no. I want to marry you. I want to set a date.”

I wanted to forget the whole thing. I loved Lyle. I even lived with him most of the time. But marriage was the last thing on my mind. My parents’ marriage had been miserable, and all my friends who got married when we graduated from college were divorced now. Then there was Charlie and his band of buddies, every one of them a liar and a cheat. Who was I to escape the odds?

“Why can’t we just live together happily ever after?” I said. I tried to distract him with jokes. I wrapped the white brocaded Ralph Lauren sheet around my waist like a train and stood up. “Can you imagine me as a bride? I’m getting a little long in the tooth for a white wedding.”

“You’d make a beautiful June bride,” he said. “Let’s get married this month.”

“June is almost over,” I said. “I don’t want to rush into this.”

“Okay,” he said, “what about August?”

“In St. Louis? We’d swelter,” I said.

“October then. It’s a beautiful month. We could
have a wedding in Tower Grove Park, your favorite place. The ginkgo trees are gold. It would be lovely to get married in a Victorian gazebo.”

“I can’t get any time off in October,” I said.

“December then. Well have a winter wedding.”

“Too cold. I hate cold.”

“We’ll get married in the Caribbean, on an island on the beach. It will be warm and romantic.”

“But my family couldn’t be there.”

“Your cheap West County cousins would be relieved they didn’t have to buy you a present. But if you don’t want to get married in the winter, we could get married in the spring.”

Spring sounded comfortingly far away. In fact, it might never happen. “Spring has possibilities,” I said, gathering up my underwear and heading for the shower.

“So name a date,” he said.

“I need to check my calendar and make sure there’s nothing going on in spring.”

He sounded exasperated. “Dammit, Francesca. You know there’s nothing. You just don’t want to marry me.

Lyle was right. I didn’t want to marry him—or anyone else. But I didn’t want to lose him, either. And besides, he always looked so cute when he was angry.

“No,” I said, dropping my drawers for what wasn’t the first time that night. “I can’t give you a date this minute. But there is something I would like to do right now.”

I didn’t stay the night. I was afraid he’d try to get me to set a wedding date again. So I told him I had an early appointment near my house, and it would make sense to go home. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he let me go. As I went out the door, I heard him playing that sad Jim Croce song about how we never have enough
time to do the things we want to do, once we find them. The song sounded even sadder when I realized that Croce was dead. Time had run out for him. Maybe it was running out for us, too.

I drove home in a night black with storm clouds, with an ominous cool wind under the heat. The wind whipped the street trash in circles. Tornado weather. I spent a restless night, filled with the sound of tornado sirens, then police sirens and wind and rain. My sleep was so full of screaming sirens, I couldn’t tell if they were real or in my dreams.

The next morning I awoke to a day so deliciously cool, I wondered if I’d had a blackout, climbed aboard an airplane, and flew to some other city during the night. La Jolla, maybe, or San Diego. St. Louis in mid-June does not have perfect days like this, and usually we’re glad we don’t. Otherwise, everyone would want to live here. The city would be overrun with tourists, prices would go up, and there would be no parking.

But this California weather was a little different. There was a haze and a curious burned smell in the air, like someone had had a huge campfire. I wondered about that. Was there a fire nearby? I remembered vaguely hearing sirens in my dreams. Maybe they were real. Instead of heading straight for work, I wandered over to North Dakota Place. All the trouble these days seemed to be centered on that street, so maybe a stroll there would find the source of the sirens.

But the place looked like the entrance to paradise. The angel fountain was wrapped in fresh rainbows. The trees rustled like taffeta petticoats. The leaves were a tender yellow-green. Lord, this was a pretty place. How could anyone who lived here be unhappy?