The White Flamingo

by James A. Newman

  The landlady let the Killer inside and he took the stairs.

  Joe found a room adjacent open and empty, he slipped inside and waited. He heard the footsteps along the corridor, Kelly’s laughter, the Killer’s low voice.

  Joe counted a minute and then knocked on the Killer’s door. Silence answered him, he knocked again. The door was locked. He used a shoulder to persuade it open.

  On the bed, Kelly lay naked, her knees drawn up to her body as he walked into the room. She pointed a finger toward the bathroom. Joe tried the door. It was open. The killer had taken off his disguise and stood with a blade in his left mitt.

  “Slim Jim,” said the Detective. “You should have hired someone less professional.”

  Slim lunged at him with the blade, and Joe ducked, spilling the Killer into the bedroom. The syringe fell from his hand and rolled under the bed. Kelly screamed as she saw the blade, stood up naked and gathered her clothes in a flurry of panic.

  “I guess you have nothing left to lose,” Joe said. “Living out a death sentence.”

  The knife came at him, and took a slice from his shirt, a surface cut. “I was a butcher, by trade,” Slim said as he lunged again.

  “You still are,” Joe rolled back and stood, picked up a vase and threw it at Slim, who shielded himself with a forearm. His eyes turned to Kelly, dressing a few steps away. He moved towards her and grabbed her around the waist. Held the knife against her throat. “She is the last one, Joe, the last. Let me have her.”

  “Put down the knife.”

  “Fuck you, Joe.”

  “Slim, put down the knife, the show’s over. The gig’s up.”

  Kelly winced as the cold metal touched her neck, her eyes lit up with animal fear.

  Flight or fight?

  She fought.

  She brought up the heel of her left foot and caught the killer between the legs, his hands lowered towards the source of the pain as Joe rushed forward, Kelly struggled free from his grip.

  Slim stuck out with the knife once more before exiting through the door, and up the stairs.

  “Call the Boys in Brown, Kelly, I’m going after him.”

  The Detective followed the Killer up the stairs, three flights led to a rooftop. Concrete splattered with pigeon shit and laundry hung out to dry. An immigrant worker lay in the shade sleeping.

  Slim made it to the edge and took in the distance of ten yards to the next rooftop. Below them, six floors down, a busy road flowed with traffic. Slim took the five steps back.

  Jumped.

  Made it.

  “Shit,” Joe sprinted at the gap and leaped over landing in a crouched position. Slim was already over to the next building and Joe followed landing in a sprint.

  The fourth rooftop had a fire escape stairwell and the Killer took it. Joe followed, spiraling down toward the street.

  Ground level, a gang of motorbike taxis sat around playing checkers with bottle tops. The Killer took the first bike and the Detective took the second.

  The traffic was dense and the streets labyrinthine. Joe lost Slim somewhere at the eighth road. He took the bike to the Dark Side of Town, guessing that Slim would have taken the direct route home.

  He parked up and knocked on the door.

  A local dark skinned man answered the door. Joe spoke to him in the local tongue.

  “I’m here to see Jim.”

  “Jim’s not here,” the stranger said.

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m his wife’s brother.”

  Slim’ Jim s old lady came to the door. If there was a likeness between the pair, then Joe couldn’t see it.

  “Is it true? This your brother?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her eyes told a different story.

  “Why’s he half naked?”

  “It’s hot,” she said.

  “Sure, and where’s the kids?”

  “Stay with sister.”

  “Big family you guys got here. One big happy family. Where’s the man of the house. I’m here to see Slim.”

  “Probably gone to see the head doctor,” she said raising her right forefinger level with the side of her head and making a circular motion to illustrate her foreign husband’s madness.

  “Thanks.” Joe could see it. “Poor man probably gone to confess his sins.”

  He looked at the brother’s dark shifting eyes as the final piece in the puzzle fell into place.

  Fell right into place.

  FIFTY-THREE

  THE KILLER slumped onto the couch and lit a cigarette. The psychiatrist offered him a drink of whiskey which he hit back in one, and then waved his glass at his host for a refill.

  “I had only gone and got the wife pregnant,” he said.

  “But, don’t you have three children already?”

  “Yes, and the funny thing is, I can’t remember the conception. You know I work in the bar and come home after a few, but normally I just crash out on the bed, but I must have done it because she was pregnant alright.”

  “Hmmm.” Taylor had his own ideas but was keeping them to himself, for the time being.

  “Well, what happens, happens. As part of hospital procedure, she had taken a HIV test. It came up positive, the baby was aborted. She had been tested three years previously and it had come up negative. She grew angry, told me how I’d given her the virus. How I’d ruined her life, our lives. She was silent and moody and that was when I drank. We were once in love and now it was not like she hated me; it was like I wasn’t there.”

  “Jim, do you know what the opposite to love is?”

  “Hate?”

  “No, to hate someone, you must have feeling. The real opposite to love is indifference.”

  “That’s it. She was just indifferent, like I didn’t exist.”

  “And you think you gave it to her, the virus I mean?”

  “Well, look at her, I mean, she’s no spring chicken.”

  “Well, women can sometimes be untruthful in Fun City, hmmm?”

  “No, she’s at home all day.”

  “And the night?”

  “I was out,” Jim said his eyes dancing around the office, his mind calculating, perhaps considering something for the first time.

  “And you took the test yourself?”

  “Well, I didn’t need to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, if she’s got it, then it’s a dead cert that I have.”

  “Well, maybe not. I have the equipment here, if you would like to check.”

  “What, now?”

  “Just a blood sample.”

  Jim drained his glass “But if she had it?”

  “There are carriers and there are those that have sex with the carriers and get away. Couples have been married for years, where one has had the virus and the other hasn’t.”

  Taylor prepared the needle and moved towards Slim. “Just roll up your sleeve.”

  Slim rolled up his sleeve and waited for the needle to hit the vein.

  His arm shook slightly as it hit.

  A sudden fear gripped the Killer as he heard the sirens below on the street.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  OUTSIDE TAYLOR’S building three police cars and six motorbikes hovered around in a state somewhere between panic and excitement. A news crew spoke into cameras and stopped whomever they could collar for questioning. The Detective saw the figure of Kult standing with his hand over his face to block out the sun.

  “What’s the situation?” Joe said.

  “We have the Shrink’s room bugged.”

  “If he confesses, you let the Bell boy go?”

  “I guarantee it.”

  “Fine. When are you going in?”

  “After we get what we want. There’s a live audio feed over there,” Kult pointed toward an unmarked van.

  “Can I listen?”

  “Sorry, Detective, it would mean…”

  “A loss of face. It’s okay I get it. Well, he’s got nowhere to go but down. We wait for him to come
down once he has spilled his guts to the shrink.”

  “Yes, unless we hear a struggle, then we go up.”

  “Thanks, Officer.”

  Joe stood killing time next to a man with a hawk-like face and a dishonest smile. “This man up there is my client,” the hawk said.

  “You’re Jim’s lawyer.”

  “Right, excuse me. I’m going up there.”

  The hawk spoke to the Boys in Brown and they waved him toward the building. He turned to face the Detective. “I’m going up.”

  “Can I tag along?”

  “I can’t stop you, but they will.” The lawyer waved a hand at five Boys in Brown in front of the entrance.

  “What kind of defense are you looking at?”

  “That will be between Jim, me, and the City.”

  “He didn’t kill anyone connected, that’s gottta help,” Joe said. “Look, there’s a kid locked up for the first murder, push Jim to confess and he goes back to his mummy.”

  The hawk-faced lawyer looked at him: “And what would be in this for me?”

  “Five thousand US and the comfort of knowledge that a little boy is back with his mother.”

  The lawyer handed the Detective a card. “Call me, we can have lunch.”

  “Good luck up there.”

  “Sure,” he said and walked towards the tower.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  TAYLOR LIFTED the syringe from Slim’s forearm. “It will take up to twenty minutes for the result.”

  “Right. I’m feeling a little dizzy. Do you mind if I get some air?” Jim said motioning toward the balcony.

  “Be my guest.”

  As Jim walked out onto the balcony, there was a knock at the office door. Taylor opened it to be greeted with a hawk-faced man holding out a talon-like hand. “I am Mr. Klant, attorney at law.” The man handed the Taylor a card. He looked at it and figured it was the real thing.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “May I come in?”

  “On what business?”

  “I would like a few moments to speak with my client in private. It is important. I trust you will permit us a few moments.”

  Taylor nodded. “A drink?” He fussed with the whiskey dropping two lumps of ice in three glasses and then filling the glasses with golden sunburst.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, you have your work cut out on this one, sir” Taylor said handing over a glass.

  “I deal in criminal law. My client has yet to be arrested and processed. This is why I must be so impolite as to invade on your time now. You see, once they are processed at the station, then it is only a matter of formalities. We have to make a deal now.”

  “I can see it. I know how things work here in the city.”

  “Where is my client?”

  “He went outside to get some air. I drew some blood, he felt dizzy.”

  “Outside?” The hawk faced lawyer looked around the office, repeated. “Outside?”

  “Yes, the balcony.” Taylor took off his spectacles and polished them with a handkerchief.

  “But…” The lawyer put down his drink and walked toward the balcony doors. His hand gripped the handle and pulled. It didn’t budge. “It’s locked,” he said.

  “Strange.” Taylor stood and found a key. He struggled with the lock, while watching Slim on the balcony through the glass doors. He was sitting at a chair and table writing with a pen on a piece of legal paper.

  “I have a good idea what that is,” said Taylor.

  “A will?”

  “Or a suicide note.”

  On the balcony, Slim Jim sat with the pen and pencil writing.

  He folded the piece of paper and placed it on the table. He then placed two hands on the railings. He lifted himself up, one foot, and then two feet on the railings. He stood high on the railings; his arms stretched open, looking at the crowd below.

  “Open the door, quickly, open it,” the lawyer shouted. “For God’s sake, hurry!”

  They grappled with the lock and opened the balcony door.

  “Jim,” both men shouted, “Wait!”

  FIFTY-SIX

  JIM WAS up there on the balcony.

  The Detective stood and watched.

  He didn’t blame the Killer.

  What did he have to live for?

  He watched the thin man stand up there on the railings with his arms wide open. He was on the fourteenth floor. Beneath him were the sidewalk and a noodle stand, chairs and tables with locals eating lunch. Jim shouted something, two words, sounded like fucking whore. His arms stretched out like Christ. He was delicately poised. Balanced like a flimsy scarecrow. A gust of wind. He fell forward. Swan-dived. Thin, harmless, pathetic. The body fell for what seemed a long passage of time, and then a dull thud, as it landed a distance of thirty yards away. The noise it made as it hit the concrete reminded him of a sack of rice being unloaded from a truck and tossed onto the sidewalk.

  THUD.

  The mess it made didn’t.

  The head decapitated on impact, bounced, rolled and came to a stop by a noodle cart. Three women jumped up from their tables. One vomited on the sidewalk. They screamed and stood staring at Jim’s face, staring up at them. The body lay still some ten yards from the head. The ground had mutilated the body.

  It had left the face.

  A crowd gathered around. They pointed at the two parts of the dead corpse and smiled. They talked about lottery numbers, asking what room number he was living in, his date of birth.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  THE HAWK-FACED lawyer came out of the building first. He walked straight up to the Detective and handed him a piece of paper.

  “This should be worth something.”

  “What about the case?”

  “Dead clients don’t pay,” the lawyer said. Joe watched him walk over to a black Mercedes, start the engine, and drive away from the scene.

  He read the note.

  To Joe Dylan

  Re: The White Flamingo

  By the time you read this, I will be gone to wherever it is that bad folks go when they die. Up to the heavens, or down to the ovens, it makes little difference. Either place is better than the hell of the last few weeks. Like you, I have no blood left that isn’t poison.

  Before taking the long drop, I thought that I’d take a few with me. I don’t feel pity as I write this. Not for them and not for me. They were hookers and at least one of them was a killer.

  There are a few things you should know.

  First. Miss Bell. The White Flamingo, paid me a thousand bucks for each hit I made. It seems that her golden boy got a dose of the big one, and with him being so young, she wanted to have some fun, a little bit of revenge on the whores.

  Second. I enjoyed killing those whores and let it be known, that each one suffered more than the last.

  Third. Vern? The poor old drunk bastard watched me mutilate Tammy, but his mind was so messed up and wet with alcohol that he couldn’t recall it straight away. He had to be erased, else he might have spilled. I made sure that his death was painless.

  Then there was the homeless beggar; that one was just for jolly.

  I like to think of The White Flamingo before she married a millionaire, just a little showgirl like all the other whores in this city.

  I hope her end will be quick and painless.

  Like mine.

  Now I have to jump.

  James ‘Slim’ Strand.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  THE FRONT doors to the house on the hill were open. The Detective walked in and made it through the hallway into the room with a view. The White Flamingo sat there. In her glass was a cocktail. On the table in front of her sat a bottle of downers and a .22. He passed her the note and she read it with a sad smile before handing it back to the Detective.

  “I knew you would come,” she said dreamily. Her hand wandered over to the pillbox and opened it.

  He sat on the sofa opposite her. She looked dreadful. Her make-up had run down her cheeks leaving
black smears of eyeliner. Her eyes were bloodshot and bleary. “Could you do it?”

  “They always do. Did I do a bad thing?” She spoke the sentence like a small impolite girl being punished. The smile was distant, cynical, drugged.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” That same voice.

  “Well, I don’t see how anything can be proved. I have the suicide note right here in my pocket. The man that wrote the note is now dead. You knew him.”

  “We went back, another country, another time.”

  “You were lovers?”

  “He stalked me; I never threw him a bone. What do you think I am?”

  “So it’s coincidence he turns up in the same town, what … twenty years later?”

  “I’ll say it again, he…”

  “Look, your kid is free. As far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”

  “You’re so sweet. Such a nice man,” she said drowsily.

  Joe walked over to the table and picked up the bottle of pills. Diazepam, blues. Not your whites or your yellows. Blues, ten milligrams. Ten could knock out an Arab stallion. “How many you take?”

  “Enough.”

  He picked up the .22. “And this?”

  “Pills are risky. Sometimes they wake up and wish they were dead. That’s when the gun comes in.”

  “Your son could live to be eighty. There will be new drugs.”

  “Grandchildren?”

  “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Back to earth. Back to air. Back to fire.” A ghost of a smile crossed her face as her eyes closed. Her face turned blank. The Detective ran to the kitchen, opened cupboard drawers, found what he was looking for. English mustard. He dipped his finger in the jar and went back over to her. Stuck his fingers down her throat, and massaged the tonsils. She reacted, bringing up the contents of her stomach onto the tiled floor. She gasped for air and then mumbled something the Detective couldn’t hear. He carried her to the sofa. He got a wet towel from the bathroom and rubbed her face, neck, and chest. She opened her eyes, sat up, smiled, and pointed toward the door.