The White Flamingo (3 page)

“There you are,” he said
, his eyes widening.         

FOUR

FUN CITY EXPRESS

December 6
th
.

Early this morning, a female casual migrant worker was found dead atop of a pool table on the upper road. The bar, known locally as Slim’s, has been closed to allow forensic investigations and detective investigations to be led by B.I.B Chief Kult. The woman known locally as Tammy, has been identified as twenty-four year old, Tammy YU, her address registered in New Town province. The woman with no fixed employment record is reported to have been hustling in the red light zone. Police have reported this as an isolated incident and have confirmed that they are following leads that point towards the arrest of the prime suspect, a foreign man living locally and known to frequent the local nightlife zones. Onlookers surrounding the scene this morning were too shocked to comment with any coherence.  

FIVE

TAYLOR
looked older than his fifty-two years, and put this down to a cocktail of nervous exhaustion, a ten-year coke habit, and the five fiction manuscripts, half-started, half-hearted, half-hated, half-loved, and half-baked, slowly deteriorating in a drawer in the tropical heat that his fan cooled room did little to abate. Then there was the houseboat, another lifetime ago. A houseboat in a town in the Kentish countryside, the memories were cruel, kind, and comforting. He had a mane of curly brown hair, constantly matted with sweat, a pronounced roman nose and lips that would have been seductive if not for the tobacco stained yellowing teeth behind them.

Like most
expats, Fun City had become his home by a conjuncture of circumstances that were both complex and commonplace. The dissatisfaction with the materialism of the western world, bored of the western rat race, a tragic loss, and seeking a new spiritual awareness he had unknowingly slid into the most material stretch of land on the face of the earth. A spiritually dead city with rattraps as far as the eye could see. Tragic loss was everywhere. Fun City was a rude peninsular that was mocked by the rest of the world as being the very thing it was: the most corrupt, vile metropolis in human history.

It was home.

At first, he had dreamed of the city, a special faraway land with twenty-four hour neon bars, strange reptiles, palm trees, exotic creatures, a city with millions of mirrors and smoke bellowing from dry-ice machines. A city of arcades, plazas, and dusty squares where cockfights were held before women who scratched out each other’s eyes in competition for foreigners. This dreamlike city where all women had fine teeth, rode motorcycles, played pool and cards for impossible stakes. Once Taylor had arrived, it was as if he had set foot in a dream, or a dream within a dream if that was how the fortune cookie crumbled.       

The Express paid by the word. He wrote excellent book and restaurant reviews for publishers and restaurateurs who paid the newspaper
, and unfavourable reviews for those that didn’t play ball. He wrote articles that were thinly disguised as advertisements for local businesses, he wrote the horoscopes, and covered the news. The editor, an overweight-right-wing-cigar-smoker, routinely used the paper to extort money from local businesses who he threatened to expose as illegal or unethical. Taylor’s talent for fiction was not wasted on the Express, although it was in a period of stasis. His true talent such as it was, was waiting to hatch out when the inspiration or the right publisher made the right sounds. The mutilations led him to believe that the killer would strike again. The editor had told Taylor to follow the story
like a bloodhound on steroids.  

The recent murder had pushed the envelope, widened the goal posts.  He was glad of the chance to cover something of international interest, more killings were sure to follow the first. He had an idea about a connection with a serial killing in London. Like most armchair
historians, his own past was a murky one, yet no matter how much he played over the loss of his son and wife, he could not turn it into something useful. It was his idea to buy the houseboat. Faith had fought over the decision, told him it was dangerous for Jimmy. However, she relented as she always did after the eighth gin and tonic. The coroner had told him she had been drinking heavily that morning; the morning she took Jimmy out in his pram. The morning she had drunkenly let go of the pram while lighting a cigarette. The morning she opened her eyes and watched the pram, along with the child, splash into the canal. The morning she had dived into the canal to try and save Jimmy, six months old, with the world ahead of him, the sunken infant took it with him. All of it. The day that they both died in the Tonbridge canal. He recalls much weeping. He started writing his novel again in a futile effort to rewrite history. It was the little reminders that hurt the most, the unpaid telephone bills, her books left around the houseboat, half-read, gathering dust. She had read his manuscripts and had made pencil notations, corrected grammar and spelling. She had urged him to move forward and write the two thousand words a day. He sold the houseboat, took what he could carry on a flight and gave the furniture, Jimmy’s crib, and the baby clothes to the local charity shop.

A new life.

The journalist’s name was Taylor, he was the only one left in his family with that name. His parents had died young; mother from cancer of the brain, father from the prostate. If he were to disappear suddenly, then nobody would care and nobody would be there to write about it in the newspaper.

He had once written a novel that had caused a stir. He had once been a practising psychiatrist, now he was getting older, his readers had moved on.

Now if he had a novel he could sell, a new book, which might just make it worth brushing his teeth, eating breakfast, and perhaps letting somebody new into his life. The money to return to the west and confront the ghosts that awaited him. The ghosts here were closing in, fast and hungry.

SIX

HALE LOOKED
directly at the Detective and spoke. “He was the hooker’s last client. I was at his place the other night. You should see the state of it. Dirty clothes, old pizza boxes, beer cans. The boy needs to get himself a cleaner or a decent bird. He showed me some of the shit he looks at on his computer. You should see what he’s into, mate. Saw some real sick imagery on there, mate. Women sliced up. Dead bodies, thousands of dead bodies. Each one in a more gruesome condition than the bloody last.”

“Who is this guy?” Joe asked.

The bar was a corridor bar on the seventh road. It was mid-morning. The place smelled of bad perfume and pungent salad. Two middle-aged men sat nursing bottles of beer inside domes of vice and desire. Trying to replay the drunken night to see if any of it made sense in the morning. Topping up the alcohol levels, extending the Fun City dream, until it reached the edge and tipped over into a nightmare. 

“Balcony jumpers,” Hale whispered gazing over at the pair. Joe knew the type. The Fun City
skydivers club had seen hundreds of victims over the past couple of years. Their bodies spread out across the concrete like man-sized pizza. Suicides, the Boys in Brown said. The Boys in Brown were probably right some of the time. Fun City was not the place to run out of money with no ticket home. Especially if there was no home to go back to. Hale took a seat at the bar and ordered a bottle of beer. Joe sat and ordered a soda water. Hale said, “Listen. There’s a Sebastian Bell in every country. He’s a stick-insect, nourishes himself on sweets, lives offa chocolate bars and energy drinks. He has two cars and two apartments, his mother lives up in the hills.”

“Describe his face.”

“He has a face that only a mother could love. No doubt, he was sucking on the mummy’s milk until he was fifteen years old. I know I would ‘av if I were him. He’s never worked a day in his fecking life yet he knows everything about the bubble. Went to some private school in the city. And in his spare time, he enjoys slicing up hookers.”

“He’s educated?” The Detective asked.

“Bell? Educated? Perhaps? But in what? He rarely makes two racks in a fecking row. He can’t see past the next shot. Skinny as a wet whippet, massive hooter, like a beak, strange way of moving, like an insect. Funny thing is, he doesn’t know it. The boy is fecking stupid. His mother has been coming here since ’88. He’s obviously the son of a fecking Boy’s Town rent boy. The local barflies don’t like him. Nobody does. We keep him on the team because he pays the bills and speaks fluent lingo.”

“The kind of person that everybody w
ould like to see disappear?”

“Yeah.”

“The kind of kid who would be easy to fit up in a murder wrap?”

“I see where you’re going
, Sherlock, but it won’t be that easy. He has a mother.”

“Most people do.”

“She came down once to watch him play.”

“He plays on your pool team? Why do you let someone like that on the team seeing as how
you rate him?” 

“Look, Joe. This
Muppet is a fecking lemon, but he has money and to be frank, most of us don’t. When he walks in the door, it feels like somebody just left the room, but when he leaves the room, he has made a few people a little richer, financially. People like Slim, and the hookers.

 
“These people drift towards Fun City and get swallowed up by the vibe. You know what I’m saying? Detestable silver-spoon scum. They leave a trail of disgust and hatred like the way a snail, or a slug leaves a sticky silver trail of pus over the crazy paving in the morning. They also leave their trust-fund fortunes to the whores and the bar-owners who detest them. They pay for everything and take it back in abuse. Their parents pay them enough money to make it through the month. Never enough to cause too much trouble. Could Bell cut up a woman? Why not? My guess is he sliced the bitch from head to toe like the pictures on his computer. Joe, the kid’s a fecking sicko. And you know what?”

“What?”

“The Boys in Brown are looking into him.”

“Looks convincing.”

“That’s what I said. He’s our man.”

The Detective watched a fly land on his glass and rub its filthy legs together. His hand came down
, rubbed it out into its next life as a street cop. He stubbed out the cigarette. Everything seemed broken and disjointed; he hadn’t had a real night’s sleep in months. On the junk, it was dreamless sleep, and off it: nightmares. One recurring nightmare featured a giant centipede that would crawl into the head of the bed at night, over the pillow, down across his face, and then climb down along his spine until it reached the crack of his ass. The centipede’s awful face would begin to nuzzle at the entrance. It was at this point that he always awoke, sweating and shaking with the ceiling falling down upon him and a feeling of impending unavoidable doom.

If there was a shrink in the town
, it might have made sense.

Across the
road, the Boys in Brown were entering the crime scene. They had come to take another look, let them get what they could from it, Joe thought.  Slim Jim stood outside the bar with a glass in his left hand and a cigarette in the other. There was a hawk-faced man standing next to him talking. The Detective figured he was a pressman or a television reporter, whoever he was, Joe had not the desire or the cordiality to go over and introduce himself. He felt safer watching from afar like an old style gumshoe hanging onto the bar for clues.  

“Hale, where did this Tammy like to hook, other than Slim’s?”

“She worked the street a lot.”

“Any bars?”

“The Blue Rose. Seventh Road. Last time I saw her with a tasty bit of skirt with a back tattoo inside the Blue Rose. You should have seen the Bristols on it, mate. What I’d give for a go on that.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I tried. She knocked me back. In high season, the birds can pick and choose mate. Besides, she probably heard about my epic performance. Last thing she’s needs is to be put out of action for the next two weeks,” he chuckled. “You know what the girls call me here?”

“Enlighten me?”

“The Destroyer,” Hale laughed.

“What was her name?”

“Who?”

“The girl with the tattoos.”

“Couldn’t tell you, mate. All I remember is the tattoo and body, man, what a body it is too. Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. I may have another crack when the dough shapes up.”

Joe stood up and laid a purple five on the bar.

“Where you off to in such a hurry?” Hale said.

“Shopping,” Joe said. 

SEVEN

B
EFORE SETTLING
on the houseboat, Taylor floated atop a sea of dysfunctional lives and shattered dreams. He had treated cases of anxiety, depression, drug-dependence, phobias, and eating disorders, all with notable results. He had always considered humans to be too hard wired to be self-obsessional and obvious, their problems inherited from the ones that should had cared for them. When treating the mentally ill, the first place to look is always the family. By using Eastern techniques of objective thought, he had succeeded in having his subjects remove themselves from the Western idea of self. He noticed a remarkable change when the further his patients embraced mindfulness; the less they became attached to what Taylor had called
The
Story
. The Story was the story everyone had of their own lives, fraught with danger, and the characters intent on the protagonist’s destruction. The story never had a happy ending. It was one disaster after another. Taylor had taught his subjects to remove themselves from the story, however, he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the story the longer he wallowed in Fun City.