The Pink Flamingo Murders (31 page)

I could hear Dina knocking on the kitchen door. I stood there, woozy and stupid with horror, watching the blood bubble out of Patricia’s throat. Her skin was gray, and she was clawing at her throat, smearing the blood on her neck and her white blouse. I never could stand the sight of blood, and now it was everywhere. The place looked like a bunch of hellish kindergartners had been playing with red fingerpaint. There were bloody handprints and gory splotches on the walls. Long drips of blood ran down the cabinets. There were more smears and handprints where Patricia had flopped around and tried to grab onto things.

I noticed weird little details: A single red blood spot on a black-and-white ceramic cow cookie jar looked quite decorative. A long bloody drip was lined up exactly under the numeral six on the round pantry clock. The floor was covered with splashes, spatters, and pools of blood. I saw my footprint in one red pool, grabbed onto a cabinet handle to keep upright, and left a bloody handprint on the handle and a long smear on the counter when I steadied myself. My hand was next to the broken beer bottle, its jagged edges bright with blood. The room started to close in black around me. Then the black pulled back from around the edges, and my head cleared.

Where had that footprint come from? I couldn’t move my legs, much less take a step. I knew I should run to get help for Patricia, but my legs felt like a couple of concrete posts. I couldn’t get them to move in time. Time. That was the problem. I wasn’t inside time any more. The clock in the butler’s pantry said it was noontime, but it seemed like days since I’d attended Caroline’s memorial service and then cut carrot cake for a killer. Now the killer was going to die, too. She was still thrashing around on the floor. Her head hit something, the cabinet or the floor, hard, and she quit flopping around quite so much. But I could hear Patricia making a horrible sucking gurgle. I wished she would stop that nightmare noise, except when she did she’d be dead. I wondered how long she would keep trying to breathe.

“Patricia!” Dina’s voice was louder and more insistent. She rattled the door handle. “Patricia. I just want to drop off your flowered plate. I know you wouldn’t want it broken. I’ll just leave it on the kitchen counter.” I heard the back door open. Then Dina said, “Oh, my god,” in a slow, shocked voice, and there was the sound of china hitting the floor and smashing to pieces. Patricia’s precious plate had joined the other broken crockery in the kitchen.

Dina did a crunching run across the kitchen floor and found Patricia and me in the bloody butler’s pantry. She didn’t scream. She ran over to Patricia, disregarding her navy power suit, Ferragamo pumps, and ten-dollar panty hose, and knelt in the blood and glass to examine her wounds. Dina thought we’d fought off an intruder. “Who did this, Francesca?” she asked. “Who attacked you and Patricia?”

“We did this to each other,” I told her. “Patricia killed Caroline and tried to kill me when I figured it out.”

“Patricia?” Dina was stupefied. “But why?”

“Because Caroline killed Johnny Hawkeye. And the drug dealer and Otto, too, but Patricia didn’t care about them.”

Dina listened, her mouth hanging open. She kept saying “Patricia? I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.” The more she repeated it, the more it sounded like some weird bird cry—the North Dakota loon, maybe.

Fortunately, the police believed it. The kitchen phone was shot through the heart, but Dina found a working phone in Patricia’s living room, hit 911, and soon the house was swarming with EMS paramedics and police, including Mayhew. The police were very interested in the bloody “Walk for Wildlife” T-shirt and the jammed automatic with Patricia’s fingerprints on it. They also took the wire out of Caroline’s toolbox, although I wasn’t sure what good that would do. Patricia was in no shape to make any statement. She was loaded on a stretcher and hauled off by ambulance to the emergency room. It left with its lights flashing and siren screaming, so the EMS crew must have believed Patricia was going to live long enough to try for the hospital.

The uniformed officers and Mayhew asked me what happened. Then they made me go to the hospital, too. I thought an ambulance was a little dramatic. I was able to walk and talk, even if I did look like an extra in
Friday the 13th
. But they insisted. Once inside the ambulance, I was scared. I’d killed a woman. The ambulance rocked and swayed and the siren shrieked and I craved a drink, really craved it, and begged the paramedics for a shot of bourbon. I guess I had my parents’ alcoholic blood after all. The paramedics promised that the hospital would give me shots of something better than bourbon if I could hang on a little longer.

I calmed down once I got to the hospital. I wondered if I’d be charged with manslaughter—or woman-slaughter. I didn’t much care right now. My left elbow
throbbed and I couldn’t bend that arm. It was turning an ugly red-purple, too. I was “stabilized,” which made me feel like a wobbly table with a matchbook shoved under the short leg, and given a shot of something that made me feel comfortably woozy. Then Mayhew came into the examination cubicle and questioned me. He made me tell my story again and again and again, but no matter how many times he asked the questions, I gave basically the same answers. I felt like I’d talked for hours, but I hadn’t. I still didn’t have a proper sense of time. Finally Mayhew said the physical evidence supported my version. I figured I didn’t have to worry about Patricia horning in with her side of the story.

After four hours I was released, with my arm strapped uncomfortably to my chest. I had a broken elbow—the end of the ulna was snapped off, if you want to get technical—plus minor cuts and major bruises. I had some antibiotics and a bottle of pain pills. Later that night, when my arm was really hurting, I discovered the bottle had a child-proof cap, and I had to break it open with a hammer.

Dina had waited for me, and she drove me home from the emergency room. She kept saying “Patricia? I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”

I couldn’t, either. I mean, everything added up. The evidence was there, although a lot of it would not be admissible in court. But I’d seen the way Patricia had looked at Johnny Hawkeye when he jogged down North Dakota Place. She worshiped that man. Maybe if she’d had a chance to spend more time with him she would have realized what a sleaze he was. Maybe if Johnny hadn’t tried so hard to charm her, she would have seen the ugly little man inside that gorgeous Greek god exterior. But he didn’t. Johnny had fatal charm, all right. It killed a woman.

He was Patricia’s dream lover, and when she found out that Caroline had killed him, she lashed out at Caroline
in fury and hit her with the pipe wrench. I wondered if Caroline knew what hit her—or why. If she was in any kind of afterlife, it must infuriate her to know she had to leave this world for someone like Johnny. All her grand plans for North Dakota Place and all her clever financial dealings were undone for a dumb guy with a good body. I wondered if knowing that was her own particular hell. I certainly didn’t think she’d spend eternity dancing with the angels in showers of rainbows. Not after she killed three people and a dog.

Patricia wasn’t dead, thank God. She wasn’t even hurt too badly. The beer bottle didn’t cut anything vital. She had a sore throat for a while and talked kind of raspy, so she almost sounded like Margie. But she healed up fine. For her court appearances, she wears high collars and scarves to cover my slash marks on her throat. There were no scald scars, so I don’t have that guilt. Patricia had enough guilt for two. She was arrested in the hospital and she refused to deny that she’d killed Caroline, no matter how often her family’s lawyer told her to shut up. She seemed relieved to have been caught.

I wondered why I didn’t know Patricia was a murderer. I couldn’t believe I’d eaten carrot cake with a hot-blooded killer. I sat there and talked with her and didn’t have a clue. Some judge of character I am. My only consolation was that Mayhew didn’t know, either. I felt better when he said “Damn, you got me that time, Francesca.” We were back on our old friendly footing, but we weren’t too friendly, either. Except for one period of temporary insanity, I avoid married men. Our relationship was professional. He no longer treated me like a bumbling civilian. Well, not too much.

Mayhew agreed that Caroline probably murdered Johnny Hawkeye, Otto, and Scorpion Smith, although
Otto’s case remains officially open. There wasn’t enough evidence to close it. Still, it gave me some satisfaction to know I was right about Caroline, even if all her murders would never be officially acknowledged.

I found out what happened to those missing casings, when Patricia fired at me in the alley. Mayhew told me one morning when I was eating my usual at Uncle Bob’s. Scrambled eggs and toast may be boring, but I can get them down with one arm in a sling.

“Patricia said after she took those shots at you, she ran between the houses and got into her vehicle, which was parked on North Dakota Place, and drove after you in a careless and reckless manner,” he said in copese.

“That was the understatement of the year,” I said. “She was driving the wrong way down the boulevard and nearly sideswiped a car. But did she get a ticket? No. Just me.”

“Be glad you got those tickets,” Mayhew said. “Patricia planned to follow you, cut you off in the alley, and shoot you. It was Fourth of July, remember, and nobody would have noticed a shooting with all the firecrackers going off. She just might have gotten away with it. But when she saw the police stop you, she figured she wouldn’t have a chance right then. She said she was going to kill you later.”

“Then she got Margie drunk the next day and found out I was on the wrong track, so she didn’t try again,” I said.

“Right. While you were getting those tickets, she went back to the alley and picked up all the casings she could find, then threw them down the corner sewer. It’s been a dry summer, so we recovered most of them.”

“Find anything else down there?” I said.

“Yeah, three purses, five credit cards—all canceled—and
a plastic Ziploc bag of pot, ruined by the water,” Mayhew said.

“The local thugs have been busy,” I said.

“Here’s what I want to know,” Mayhew said. “What dweeb would buy a twenty-two pistol on the street when it wasn’t fully automatic? Why did she waste her time getting it from those kids? She could have bought the same thing at any Wal-Mart and paid a lot less for it.”

“Gee,” I said. “Thanks for that bargain hunter’s tip, Officer Friendly. Patricia didn’t know anything about guns, and she’d probably never been in a Wal-Mart in her life. The kids at the trouble house took advantage of her ignorance. Besides, Patricia always bought used if she could. It was one of her recycling principles.”

“Good thing she didn’t know anything about guns,” Mayhew said. “That saved your life. Those cheap semiautomatics are easy to jam. She pulled the trigger too fast too many times, and a casing got hung up in the slide that’s supposed to spit them out.”

This conversation about how close I came to getting killed wasn’t doing much for my appetite. I was glad when Mayhew’s beeper went off and he had to go. It was odd to think that I was alive because a cop who hated me was eager to write me a fistful of tickets and the kids at the trouble house had ripped off Patricia. I ordered a second round of buttered wheat toast and crunched on it for consolation.

Patricia’s family got her a fancy lawyer, and she’s trying to plead insanity. It’s harder to get away with insanity these days in Missouri, but in my opinion—and remember, my degree is in journalism—Patricia was battier than a barn owl. Of course, she did have the presence of mind to shove that flamingo into Caroline, to make it look like Margie was the killer. Maybe Patricia wasn’t so crazy after all. I’ll let a jury figure it
out. Personally, I don’t care what they do with her, just so she doesn’t get out and get me.

Patricia did enough damage. I had eight weeks of boring physical therapy before I could move my elbow properly again. It still doesn’t bend quite right, but it’s not like I’m a relief pitcher for the Cardinals. It does enough for me to get by. It got me off the recycling section, too. So it was almost worth it.

And that was that. Except my life hasn’t been the same since. I miss Lyle terribly and think about him all the time. Once, in an elevator, I saw a man whose hair curled over his collar like Lyle’s does, and I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Another time I thought I heard him talking at a table behind me in a restaurant, but when I turned around, it was a fat, bald man who somehow had Lyle’s voice. He seemed puzzled by my look of disappointment. I would remember little things Lyle did, little funny kindnesses. I wondered if his living room, so beautifully furnished with family antiques, still had the beat-up UPS box sitting next to the couch. His cat Montana loved sleeping in that box, and Lyle refused to move it.

I missed his hands and his lips, and I missed his smell of coffee and sandalwood soap, and most of all, I missed our conversations. He was my best friend as well as my lover, and he always understood me. Except for that one thing. He couldn’t understand how I felt about marriage. Sometimes I have to literally hold one hand with the other to keep from calling him, but I don’t. I’m strong. He’s not blackmailing me into marriage. I don’t need to get married. I’m through with men. Forever. Who needs them? Dina had the right idea with Stan the cat. I’d keep a cat, too, but I like to sleep alone. Lyle’s cat, Montana, really knew how to take over a bed. I wondered how he was doing. I’m talking about Monty, of course, not Lyle.

Mrs. Indelicato won’t forgive me for breaking up
with Lyle, so I keep away from her confectionary. I could get frostbitten, going into Mrs. I’s store. It’s not as convenient, but I shop more at Schnucks these days, because there isn’t room in the confectionary for me, Mrs. I, and all her disapproval.

When I need company, I walk over to North Dakota Place and break a lemon bar with Mrs. Meyer on her screened-in porch. We sit and rock and listen to the sad end-of-summer sound of the cicadas, and she gives me all the neighborhood gossip. She’s the one who told me that Sally married the nice accountant after her face-lift healed. “Although I don’t know if he married her because of it or in spite of it,” she said. “Sally is a very attractive young woman, and that face-lift has left her skin stretched too tight, in my opinion. I don’t think she needed it, not that she asked me. I don’t understand young people. Always talking about the natural look, except when it comes to their own appearance.”