The White Flamingo (10 page)

The Detective tapped a finger on Hale’s wrist. Hale spun as if he had been bitten by a snake. “Didn’t know that you actually touched people. This is almost friendship.” Hale waved a hand towards the bar. “Two more drinks for the Detective. I think he may be human after all. A pulse has been found!” 

“
Shut it, Hale. I’m going to start with a history lesson. Your job is to listen. I know you find it difficult, but listen good. London. 1888. Whitechapel. A port town slum. Much like Fun City but without the fun. Hookers on every corner. Horny sailors purchasing their diabolical wares. It was not a nice place and not a nice time to be there. Infant mortality. Workhouses. Life expectancy of a short and brutal kind. It is commonly known that the Whitechapel murders were five in number. The killer killed the third and fourth victims on the same night. Do you know who the Whitechapel killer was?”

The sky darkened as a gaggle of four street transvestites called out to passing tourists. The tourists hurried on, heads down, hands in pockets.

“Jack the Ripper?” Hale said.

“Precisely.” The new drinks arrived and the Detective set about his. He picked up the glass gracefully, put it to his lips,
and drank. “This is a copycat killing. A copycat killing in the tropics. I shouldn’t be drinking. I made a promise.”

“You keep making promises.”

“I keep breaking them.”

“The way I see it, promises are made to be broken.”

“I seem to think better when I drink. At least at first,” Joe took a bite and gazed out across the sea.

“What’s the connection, Sherlock? That they were prostitutes
? That two have been killed? That you think that there may be more killed? Come on, Mr Detective, this is the 21
st
century.”

“It was the mutilations, Hale. I’ve seen some of those old photographs and what Jack did and what this bastard did, has, how shall I say
, the hallmarks of the same handiwork. The diagram on the body carved with a knife clinched it.”

“Motive?”

“Well, Jack had no motive. Just speculation. Some say he was a rich whoremonger who went east to get what he couldn’t get west.”

“Like our friend here,” Hale smiled.

“His sport was what he enjoyed. Sport being the old word for whoring. The excitement. Some say that he was crippled from syphilis and he took his illness out on the whores that gave it to him. Fewer still, speculate that Jack was a black magic occultist who murdered the women on the specific points of a map and took body parts to make satanic candles. Once all murders had taken place and the candles made, he became immortal. Whatever his intensions, we know that they were unhealthy, and I get the same feeling about our little friend out here.”

“You don’t think, Sherlock, that your imagination is running away with you on this one?”

“It’s not a thought, Hale. More of an impulse, instinct. An idea with wings. To understand something intellectually is one thing. To understand it spiritually is another. I need a map of Fun City and I need a pen. I need these things soon, Hale. Get them for me,” The Detective said. “In the meantime, I am going to visit Mrs Bell.”

“You like her don’t you?” Hale said.

“I like her money. If it’s real. We have to eat.”

“And drink.”

TWENTY
-ONE

TAYLOR MADE
the walk to the harbour. The sun hurt his eyes and the traffic noise was overwhelming. He took quick, unsteady steps, stopping once at a small shop where he bought a can of beer and drank it. His mood improved and his anxiety level decreased as he walked further, making it to a beachfront bar, where he ordered two beers, sat, drank, and watched the tourists walk past. Their eyes, some of them, were accusing and predatory. Some of them were dull and underwater like. Some were full of the joys of love. An eastern European couple ate ice creams and whispered romantic words to each other as they sat on the beach, not a care in the world, not a murderer in sight. As he watched a lone swimmer far away from the shore, his mind drifted back to the last night they had spent together.

The restaurant was dimly lit
with Chinese lanterns. Dancing dragons decorated the four walls. They were celebrating the publication of Taylor’s first short story, a story about a boy who disappeared while playing chequers. The boy had magical powers; he was special. Taylor had studied all he could on telekinetic phenomenon, condensing the material into the story idea. The story had come to him in a dream and fully formed. Taylor had dedicated the piece to Jimmy.

“So, now you are a big shot writer,” Faith joked
, “do you still have time to talk with me?”

“The magazine paid twenty-five dollars
. Don’t think I’ll give up the day job.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” she said picking up a spring roll and biting a piece from it.

“It’s a start,” he said.

“Malcolm, do you love me?” Her eyes widened.

Taylor remembers what he said. It was: “Love is a madness, a psychotic condition that can make a human being capable of anything, and not usually anything good.”

“Oh,” she replied, heartbroken.

“It’s true…” he had stumbled on like a bull in a china shop.

Why couldn’t he have simply said ‘yes’ or ‘of course I do’, or anything but that spill about madness. She was already mad, he loved her, and he loved her madness. If she wasn’t mad, then she wouldn’t have been with him. Madly in love. Why couldn’t he have just said ‘yes?’ 

TWENTY-TWO

A WAITRESS
awoke him from the daydream. “One more drink, sir?”

“Sure,” why not. Taylor noticed a drunken homeless man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and tatty shorts speaking with two foreigners
. He watched as they gave the derelict man cans of beer and listened to him speak, and then the two of them wandered off towards the bar. The drunk sat drinking the beer in the distance, watching the tourists walk along the beach road. Taylor had heard that he had once been a London police officer. That he had come to Fun City to drink himself to death. Well, a man had his choices to do anything, and normally those choices, left unchecked, led to darkness and descent.

The two men took a table two away from Taylor’s and ordered cocktails. The main speaker was a man who Taylor took to be Joe Dylan, private detective. Taylor listened to the conversation
, mentally making notes and comparing the story with his own. Either they were both crazy, or they were both reading from the same hymn sheet. He watched the detective stand and put a bill on the table, while the other man sat and ordered another drink, then watching the sun disappear behind the coastline.

His thoughts turned to Faith, to Jimmy, and then to the long walk home.

TWENTY-
THREE

THE HOUSE
stood on a hill overlooking the beach, the town, and the harbour. Electric lights, both neon and orange, twinkled in the night skyline below. The Detective walked along the crushed shell driveway. A pond with a wall built around it. There may have been fish, but it was too dark to see.  He guessed that there were at least fifteen rooms inside that house, and perhaps as many fish inside the pond. Most of the rooms were probably furnished with the kind of furnishings that were made in Sweden and sold to the upwardly mobile. Maybe a few paintings, sculptures, and figurines that appreciate in the buyer’s mind, rather than the actual market. These fixtures and fittings the rich clung to with one hand, while mocking the ground below with the other, like a proud gibbon at the top of the tree in all its glorious, posturing, cock-swinging, ass-scratching magnificence.   

Constructed from cheap local block
, the house on the hill was pained a brilliant white. He walked along the U-shaped driveway to the front and peeked at the backyard beyond. A kidney shaped swimming pool and a pair of sun loungers. A few plants and a coconut palm.

Two plastic flamingos and a concrete giraffe.

He walked up to the entrance and rang a bell. A dog barked and a light switched on inside. He waited ten barks. The front door opened. She was prettier in the dark. Most women were, and most men certainly were. Yet, there was something in the way that she held the door ajar. Something suggestive, provocative even. Hell, he didn’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the booze inside his body and the booze inside her glass that made stepping into the cougar’s den like floating into an adolescent’s wet dream.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Dylan. Please step inside,” she smiled warmly. A cocker spaniel sat beside her and looked at Joe with its head slanted. The dog looked like it wanted something that the
Detective wasn’t prepared to give.

To hell with the dog.

Marble floor tiles and white walls. He followed her through the hallway and into the living room. Floor to ceiling windows with a view over the beach. Neon lights flickered from the main walking street. A few boats lit up far away from shore. Gambling ships, perhaps, after hours floating gin palaces. The pier looked good. Safe, even. The room was sparsely furnished with two sofas placed far away enough from each other to allow for social gatherings, tense enough to be aborted early. A flat screen television hung from the wall as a piece of decoration rather than a functional utility. With a view like that, television seemed both crude and surplus. A risqué surrealist painting by a modern American artist hung to one side of the wall-mounted television. He recalled an invite to a show that the artist had held in the capital. The price tag was a cool ten thousand. He had shared a glass of Chilean red with the ambassador of Bhutan. Spoke with the defence secretary. The Detective guessed that she had it on a long-term lease. The house that was. There was a bookshelf with a few crime novels by local authors, and bestsellers by writers who had never put a foot in Fun City. A pot plant close to exhaustion, thirst, and hunger, withered next to a wooden carving of an elephant. The room had probably been designed by a limp-wristed interior designer who chartered his creative mind by the hour. No matter who put it together, wealth filled every nook and cranny of the room with the typical haze of neglect and abandon, characteristic of the insecure rich.

“Nice place,”
the Detective said.

“It does one well from time to time, to have a view. Do you like it, really? We are only here for a few weeks every year. I have a business here
, but it more or less looks after itself nowadays. The rest of the portfolio’s in London.”

“The view is fantastic, Mrs Bell. I have only ever lived street level. A nice view for me is a streetlight. Close up, a streetlight is a work of art.”

“Sounds like you’ve lived in the gutter, Mr. Dylan.”

“I’m staring at the stars.”

“Somebody famous said that.”

“Oscar Wilde.”

“Right,” she said, “wit is dying on the vine.”

“The stars are in the street. Foreigners who live above ground level have been known to jump. I don’t like to take the risk. I guess I’m a failure. Places like this give me something to aim for. I’m just not ready for it yet.”

“Scared that you will jump?”

“Scared that I won’t.”

“A man needs direction. Please, sit down,” she motioned toward the sofa.

The Detective sat on it. A white leather sofa. She sat next to him. She had long hair and a smile, a suggestive, seductive smile that reminded him of the dangers of high living.

Black and whites framed on the walls, all were nudes, artistically shot, and developed in a dark room. The body was long, slender, and slim. The breasts were firm with unusually long pronounced nipples. The face was always out of the shot. That along with the black and white colour was what separated art from pornography. Porn was stapled, colour, and personal. Art was remote, faceless, and black and white.

“I take it these aren’t digital?”

“I used to pose for photographs, fifteen, twenty years ago. I had grace, they said. Some of the writers and photographers called me The White Flamingo. I guess I was famous for some time. Fame is such nonsense. I came here to escape it.”

“You still have it,” the Detective said. 

A hand fell on his thigh. “Sweet mouth. Would you like a little something to drink?”

“
The bottle to me is like a beautiful woman. It’s the worst and the best thing that can happen to a man. I know she will take everything if I give her half the chance. I fell off the wagon this afternoon.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s a yes.”

“Good,” she clapped her hands twice and a slim woman padded into the room. The maid wore a gold sarong above bare feet, one of which
had a gold ankle chain. Her hair reached the small of her back. The White Flamingo ordered two cocktails. The maid walked over to a drinks cabinet gracefully and began to pour. She walked over and the older western woman caught the Detective looking at the younger Asian’s doll-like face. The White Flamingo frowned playfully as they sipped the bitter gin and lemon cocktails.