The Pink Flamingo Murders (7 page)

Suddenly a wild-eyed, white-faced Kathy came rushing out of her house. “Come quick, come quick,” she cried, and clamped her hands on my arm like it was the last lifeboat off the
Titanic
. “There’s been a
terrible accident. It’s Dale! It’s awful.” She was near tears and could not tell me what was wrong, except to repeat that it was Dale and it was awful. I had horrible visions of broken ladders, broken necks, and bloody electric saws. She threw open the front door and began crying again. “I can’t look,” she said. “It’s too awful.”

I entered slowly, wondering if I’d find Dale drowning in a pool of blood. I heard him groaning near the staircase. Okay, Francesca, I told myself, get it together. These people need help. I walked over there on hundred-pound rubber legs. Dale was squatting on the floor, staring at the gritty wood. I didn’t see any blood. “I can’t believe I was that stupid,” he said in a flat voice, and then he stood up. All the major parts seemed to be moving.

“What happened? Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” he said, but he didn’t sound happy about it. “I’ve ruined our staircase.” With that, Kathy let out another heartrending wail. Then I saw the damage—huge scooped-out gouges on the upstairs floor and three steps, then a football-size hole through the spindles on the staircase. It looked like a small flying saucer had gone through it.

“I did that,” Dale said. “I rented a sander to do the second floor and it must have overloaded our electrical system. It tripped the circuit breaker and shut the electricity off. So I went downstairs to turn it back on, but I forgot to turn off the sander and . . .”

I could see its path of destruction carved into the wood. When Dale flipped the circuit breaker back on, the machine began merrily sanding the upstairs floor by itself, cutting potholes into the floor. Then it bounced down the steps, taking more chunks of wood, and finally flung itself through the staircase spindles. I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “I’ll get Margie,” I said. “She’ll know what to do.”

Margie answered her door in her pink bathrobe. The egg stains were gone and her green eyes were unclouded and alert. “Those kids,” she said, when I told her the problem. She smiled and shook her head and followed me back to Kathy and Dale’s house, where she was all sense and sympathy. “Don’t cry,” she rasped to Kathy. “It can all be fixed, and it won’t cost that much, either. There’s a shop on Cherokee Street that sells these spindles. I wish you had talked to me, anyway, before you started. You shouldn’t sand these upstairs floors. The wood is too soft. I know where we can get you some nice wall-to-wall carpet to cover them.”

Poor Dale. He must have felt like some sitcom boob. Yet I’d had a glimpse of his and Kathy’s restoration in the bedroom, and the work seemed carefully crafted. And from the way those bed sheets were rumpled, he could perform well there, too. But rehabbing was a kind of modern frontier, where one slip could bring disaster. Still, Margie the urban pioneer assured us the damage looked worse than it was. By the time Margie and I left ten minutes later, Kathy had dried her eyes and Dale looked sheepish but cheerful.

“Amazing,” I said to Margie. “You’ve solved a crisis before eight o’clock.”

“Correction,” she said. “It’s eight exactly. Here comes Hawkeye.” We paused to watch the magnificent jogger skim down the boulevard before he made his usual turn up the alley at exactly eight-oh-five. The motion was so fluid, he seemed to glide over the grass.

“Makes your heart—or some other body part—positively twang,” Margie said.

Our conversation was interrupted by an unearthly screech.
“Get off my grass. Get off now. You’re ruining it. You’re ruining everything.”
It was Caroline, a short, sturdy tower of outrage, clutching a wheelbarrow filled with fertilizer.

Hawkeye stopped dead. “Your grass? Your ass!” he said, sounding disconcertingly ordinary. “Listen, lady, this boulevard is city property, not your private park, although you seem to think you own everything around here. It’s not new sod. It’s just grass.”

“It’s not just grass,” Caroline said, as if she was pleading for the life of each blade. “Do you know how hard it is to grow grass on that boulevard? I put it there with my sweat. I watered it with my blood. Day after day and night after night. While everyone on this block watched me and didn’t lift a finger. You have no right to run on it, or walk on it, or even look at it. None at all.” Her tanned face was blotched white, and she was literally trembling with rage. She clamped her hands on the handles of the wheelbarrow to stop the shaking and took some deep breaths. Was she going to hyperventilate, right there on the boulevard? Hawkeye stepped backward, then plucked three blades of grass from where he had been standing.

“What are you doing?” Caroline shrieked, as if they’d been plucked from her own hide.

“Showing you that I am not hurting your sacred grass,” Hawkeye said. He held out the grass blades on his palm. “See? No damage. No cuts. No bruises.” He jabbed his finger at her to punctuate each sentence. “Believe me, lady, I plan to run here every single morning. I am never changing my route now. It is set in stone. You can look for me at eight tomorrow.”

Their loud voices were attracting a crowd. Tall, lean Patricia came running from her backyard, a pronged garden tool in one hand and grass stains on her knees. Today her T-shirt said she was saving the manatee, which was definitely endangered in Missouri. At least, I’d never seen one. Dina came out of her house wearing a tailored pale-gray power suit with a silver cat pin on the lapel. Her cat Stan was not with her. Caroline saw the women, plus Margie and me, and softened her
tone. To me, this soft insinuating voice seemed scarier than her anger.

“Besides,” she said to Hawkeye, “I’m worried about you. You could get hurt. Kids have been doing prankish stuff around here lately. They’ve been setting traps to trip people. I think it’s the boys who live in that rundown house behind us. I’m just giving you a warning. Be careful. Runners get killed that way. Maybe you should vary your route.”

“And stay off your fuckin’ grass?” Hawkeye said, his voice a harsh bray. “Is that supposed to scare me? Well, it doesn’t, lady.”

They had squared off and looked like a confrontation between a fireplug and a heroic bronze statue. The fireplug was determined to have the last word. “I’m warning you, stay off—or I can’t vouch for your safety,” Caroline snarled.

Before she could stop him, Hawkeye reached over and broke off a yellow flower on a plant near the angel fountain. He stuck it rudely under Caroline’s nose. “Why not take the time to smell the flowers, instead of covering them with horseshit?” he sneered. Then he grabbed her wheelbarrow and upended its load of manure into the angel fountain. Caroline’s mouth was a perfect 0 of surprise, but no sound came out. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. We all did: Margie, Dina, even Caroline’s defender, Patricia. We knew it was mean. We knew Hawkeye the Hunk shouldn’t have done it. But he’d stopped the female tank in her tracks and we all enjoyed it.

“Do you put up with that bullshit all the time?” the jogger said, turning to us. Sigh. Hawkeye was losing his appeal with every word he spoke. But that was only my opinion. Margie, Patricia, and Dina seemed dazzled.

“Well, your ass is grass with Caroline,” said Dina, flirting outrageously. Once again, her striped sweet
heart Stan was forgotten. So much for cats replacing men. Patricia frowned, but I didn’t know if she was unhappy because of what Dina said or the way she was carrying on with Hawkeye. I could tell Caroline heard them. She pretended she didn’t, but I saw her square her shoulders.

“That woman has taken over the neighborhood,” Margie said, her rasp cutting into their conversation. “She won’t let us do anything. Do you know she complained when Dina and I were standing on the parkway talking? We were just standing there—and she told us not to. She said it
looked
bad. She chases away kids who want to play ball on the parkway and goes ballistic if anyone walks on the grass.”

“The bitch is nuts,” Hawkeye said, not sounding like Daniel Day-Lewis at all. I wished he wouldn’t open his mouth. He was destroying all my illusions. “I’m going to run down that boulevard every day now, just to make her crazy. Right now I’m going in that alley she warned me about. Traps for joggers, what a crock. This should send her right over the edge.” And off he went, such poetry in motion, so prosaic when he opened his mouth.

Caroline was over the edge. She was standing inside the angel fountain, water up to her sturdy calves, shoveling the last of the wet manure into her wheelbarrow. Then she stiffly wheeled the barrow to the other side of the fountain, making a wide detour so she could avoid us. But I knew she’d heard every seditious word.

“It’s time to fight back,” said Dina, who didn’t sound like her fluffy, friendly self anymore. The shrewd political strategist, suited up in power gray, was making her first public appearance in my presence. “We need to take back our turf. No one asked Caroline to be the unpaid monitor of North Dakota Place. Or the gardener, either. We need to rebel with a party in the parkway.”

“We need to have a Take Back Our Own Place party. And damn soon,” Margie said. “How about this Saturday? We can dance all over her precious grass.”

“I’ll go skinny-dipping in the angel fountain,” Dina said.

“Let’s fill the fountain with tea and have a modern-day Boston tea party,” Margie said. From that rasp in her voice, I was sure she had no interest in tea.

“Why don’t we go to my house and discuss the party plans?” Patricia said. That surprised me. Patricia had always looked uncomfortable when anyone criticized Caroline. Maybe she was fed up with her, too. Or maybe Patricia thought she could contain the malice in her own home. “I have homemade gooey butter coffee cake,” she said.

Patricia the health food nut had gooey butter cake? This was the city specialty that made St. Louis one of the nation’s centers for heart bypass surgery. Gooey butter coffee cakes, with their soft butter-rich centers and snowdrifts of powdered sugar on top, had been clogging St. Louis arteries for generations. Janet Smith had shown me her recipe for gooey butter, which is as close as two friends can get short of swapping husbands. The one-layer cake had two sticks of butter, a package of cream cheese, and a whole box of powdered sugar, which made a sweet, sugary swamp. Rich? Bill Gates should be so rich. SnackWells would never make a low-fat gooey butter. There was no such thing. I was glad. Some things are worth dying for.

None of us could resist the lure of gooey butter. Besides, I figured I’d get a column out of the party plans. North Dakota Place was becoming a continuing soap opera, and I didn’t want to miss an episode. We followed Patricia to her house, a well-kept three-story brick-and-stone next door to Caroline. After we admired her organic garden and compost heap, we went inside. Patricia was rehabbing her house in stages, but
the kitchen was definitely finished. The cabinets and woodwork were a rich gold. The countertops had deep-blue ceramic tile, and the floor was a rough, peachy Mexican tile. The underpaid peasants who made it would probably have killed for linoleum. Herbs were growing in the windowsills. Tall, lean Patricia looked precisely in proportion in this long, high-ceilinged room. She was truly at home here.

Fried eggs were my sole culinary accomplishment, but even I had to admit Patricia’s kitchen was impressive. Countless kitchen machines were on display. I recognized a blender, a food processor, four-slice toaster, assorted steamers, pasta and bread makers, and stainless steel items I couldn’t identify if you beat me until stiff with an egg whisk. I watched Patricia fill a streamlined stainless steel tea kettle that looked like it came off the Space Shuttle.

“Do you really use all these things?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “But not all at once. Caroline and I have a good arrangement. She has all the tools I need to borrow to rehab my house, and I have the cooking utensils she needs. We share all the time. I run into her garage to take tools, and she comes into my kitchen for things. Neither door is locked during the day, because Caroline is always watching the street.”

Dina was examining a pantry filled with home-canned vegetables, jams, jellies, and relishes, each jar labeled by hand. Green beans. Peas. Peaches. Green tomatoes. Red tomatoes. Cucumber pickles. Cha-cha relish. “Look at that,” she said, awestruck. “Did you do all that yourself?”

“I grow most of my own vegetables and some fruit,” Patricia said. “The rest I get at the Soulard farmers’ market. But here’s what I’m most proud of.” She threw open the door to the old butler’s pantry, revealing a huge recycling center, with compartments for newspaper, white paper, foam trays and cartons, and three
colors of glass. There were places for aluminum foil, cardboard and plastic jugs, and lots more I couldn’t see. “There is absolutely no need to throw anything into a landfill,” Patricia said. “It can all be recycled properly.”

“Even aerosol cans?” Dina asked.

“There is no excuse to buy aerosol cans. Not ever. They . . .” But then the tea kettle started making a racket and cut off the lecture. Patricia made herbal tea and poured it into handmade blue pottery mugs. Then she cut huge squares of gooey butter cake and put them on blue plates. We sat down at the round oak kitchen table to plan the protest party. Three bites into the cake, we all had powdered-sugar mustaches, which we all ignored.

Patricia insisted that Caroline be invited to the party and that her invitation be a gracious recognition of her work. “I am not comfortable criticizing Caroline,” she said. “I must ask you not to do so in my presence. She’s done a lot for this neighborhood. But I agree she needs to relax.”

I admired Patricia for her little speech. I’d seen too many hatchet sessions at the
Gazette
to be comfortable with this one, even if I didn’t like Caroline.

Dina was ready to bury the hatchet—right between Caroline’s shoulder blades. “You bet she needs a rest,” she said. “Caroline’s obsessed. I heard a noise last night and went out to investigate. I saw her wheeling a barrow full of mulch. At three in the morning! She must have been really working, because her clothes were dripping sweat and filthy black. She was . . .”