The White Flamingo (2 page)

Just like Jack.
 

He
felt the presence before he saw him. A tall man, short fair hair, somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, entered his field of vision.

Lizard skin shoes. Check.

Striped shirt. Check.

Cockney. Check.

The Detective recognized Hale from an insurance scam, somebody’s lifetime ago. The Londoner had a scar on his left cheek, where a transsexual hooker had come at him with a broken bottle on a roadside bar in the capital city a few years back. He had fallen into that broken bottle years ago, and had yet to crawl out. He had the cuts and scrapes to prove it. Fair hair, eyes furtive. A borderline grifter and a bar raconteur. Hale had one hand in the cookie jar most of the time and the rest of the time, he was thinking about ways to half-bake his own. Captain of Slim’s pool team, Hale did some work for the Detective from time to time on a casual basis. Hale had been making sounds about a partnership, sounds the Detective had being doing his best to ignore.

Hale stood with a half-smile and a small hand towel, the type the bargirls kept in the ice box and gave to passing customers
, so they could wipe away the sweat caused by Fun City’s constant heat wave. That wasn’t all they wiped. The towel Hale pressed to his nose as he smiled weakly. That smile could have meant anything. They called Fun City the city of smiles. Some of the foreigners had been in town for such a length of time that they had adopted the Fun City way of smiling in situations of stress, fear, or panic. Two locals could sit smiling at each just before they ripped each other to pieces with homemade machetes. The Detective walked over to Hale and clapped him on the shoulder. “Been a while, James.”

“Long time,” Hale said. “It’s okay. I’ve seen this already. I’ve just come back from being sick to tell you the truth. Lost me breakfast the first time I saw it. There’s something wrong with this, there’s something terribly wrong.”

“What brings you here?”

“Fun City is my home and this is my pool table. Look at it.”

“It’s a tough break, Hale.”

“I’m captain of the team,” Hale looked at the corpse. “Guess we will have to get this table re-clothed.”

“A new table wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Why? You think the Boys in Brown will want this as evidence? Look, mate. They don’t do evidence in Fun City as you well know, Mr. Detective. Some poor fucker will be framed for it, and that’ll be the end of it.
Plus, the locals consider death lucky. We might start winning.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why?”

“There will be more murders.”

“Sure, Sherlock. Two murders on the same pool table.”

“I meant in the city.”

“Sure. Every day. I guess it’s okay to call the bizzies now then, Jim. Get on the blower, call in the B.I.B.”

Jim nodded and walked back over to the bar area, the glass of rum shaking in his mitt. He picked up an old rotary job and dialled the number while nervously taking a bite on the dark juice.

Hale looked at the Detective and scrutinized his pinpoint pupils and his glazed over expression. “Jesus, Joe, you on the brown?”

“Picked up a small habit in the Red Zone.
Wound up in China town kicking around gong. Nothing serious.”

“Never put you down as Junkie, Sherlock. Just shows what a few years in
-country can do to a man.”

“I got it under control.”

“Yeah, of course you have, mate. Everyone has everything under control. Little Miss Tammy had it all under control until she met the lunatic who sliced her open like a Christmas turkey here on my table. Are you shooting every day? Smoking it? Shoving it up your ass?”

“Skip it.”

“What?”

“The part about the Harris.”    

“Touchy, eh? Listen, you been touching that stiff?” Hale said, pointing at the corpse and then the Detective’s hand.

“No.”

“Good,” Hale said, and shook the Detective’s hand. “We’re glad you are here.” He looked at Tammy’s body. “The gig’s up for that wench.” Hale lit a smoke. “Listen, Joe, I think I know who did this.”

“Yeah, well, it might be a bit early in the game for speculation, Jimmy.”

“Don’t call me Jimmy.”

“Now who’s touchy?”

“My father called me Jimmy.”

“Okay, I’m sorry.” 

“Forget it.”

“Okay, Hale. Now, oh wise one
, let’s hear it.”
“I know who was with her last night. A customer.”

“And?”

“And the geezer’s a nutter.”

“He’d have to be t
oo. His name?”

“You’ll like this, mate. His name’s Sebastian Bell,” Hale chuckled taking a drag on his cigarette.

“Nice name. Kinda like a
boy named Sue
.”

“His mother used to be a catwalk model in the seventies. Hung out with Grace Jones, did some film work. Incredible set of pins.”

“Nice.” Joe looked lazily at the body for the last time.

“It was, for her. She married a millionaire. Two years later
, he dies from a heart attack; rumour has it, while on the job with Mrs. Bell. She inherited the lot and built a house in the hills. Her son, she lets play around in Fun City. My guess is he got bored of the normal toys and took things a stage too far.”

“Wild imagination you have there, Hale.”

“Wild city,” Hale said. “Nothing would surprise me here. Did I tell you about the midget on Sixth Street?”

“Does it concern what we see on the table?”

“No.”

“Then don’t tell me about it.”

“Just saying, nothing surprises me here.”

“Not even this?” The Detective said pointing to Tammy’s mutilated corpse.

“Well, it’s a curveball, a sick fucking curveball. That’s for sure. Now, are you gonna let me tell you what happened last night or not?”

“Ok
ay, spill.”

“Well…”

THREE

The night before

SEBASTIAN BELL
looked at the spread on the table.

It didn’t look good.

Danny, his opponent, had one arm. Only one. The other he had lost in an industrial accident, the claim paid for his existence in the land of sin. A nice little disability, thank you very much. 7k a month. U.S. Dollar. Life taught him how to make do. Life taught him to accept what he had. Circumstance had thrown him to a city where women were cheap and easy. Life was great, he woke up in the afternoon, normally with a pair of brown thighs wrapped around his like an appendage, a pair of legs which would remove itself following the exchange of hard currency. Danny liked everything about the town. 

The bright lights.

The dark city.

It was like coming home.

Who needed two arms when you quit choking the chicken the minute you stepped off the big bird? When you had those brown thighs, thousands of them, walking up and down the bars and in and out of your hotel room, yes, Danny had come home.

Danny had a shaved head and no neck to speak of. His face was large and strong like that of a formula one racer. He had tattoos and he had good cuing action for a man with one arm. Strange how the human body compensates for its losses, the blind gifted with excellent senses of smell, the wheelchair basketball player, the runner with prosthetic legs. Danny used his chin to steady a shot off the rail and followed up by spearing with his only arm. The cue ball sailed down the middle. The black ball sunk in the bottom left. The crowd cheered. Bell swore. The bargirl racked the next game. Sebastian remembered the away leg. It was flea-bitten
six-foot bar box thrown inside a shit-hole beer bar on the dark-side of Fun City. Danny used his one arm to break the pack and he took the game and the one after that.

Sebastian was left for dust.

Slim Jim’s team were sitting in fourth to bottom place of the Fun City Monday night pool league. Sebastian looked at the spread on the table. It didn’t mean that much to him. Sebastian had a system. Always go for the pot. Tammy racked up the balls. He watched her graceful movements. He licked his lips, tenderising her in his mind. Her lips pouted as she lifted the triangle and positioned the balls, her bent legs were long and slender. She had a tattoo on her left ankle. Sebastian couldn’t understand the exotic script. She came from some backward village near the border of a neighbouring country. Spoke tribal, regional, and central dialects as well as the bar English. She was just like the rest, maybe worse. Played a few games of pool, hit a few clients, and went back and faked an orgasm. If he smelled like money, fake two. She knew about his mother and the house on the hill. Sebastian watched the one armed man clear up the table. Danny racked the cue and walked over to Sebastian, clapped him on the shoulder with his one hand. “Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said. “I’m sure you will have many more disappointments to come. Watch that bitch, Tammy. I hear she carries a blade. A fucking fruitcake by all accounts. Watch yourself with that one, son. Mark my words. She’s not right in the noodle.”

“Right,” Sebastian mumbled. He hated the jealous
, cynical type. What did Danny know with his one arm?

Slim Jim’s team lost the race to seventeen games. Sebastian paid the bar, rang the bell, and bought Tammy a bottle of Heineken, and a glass of coke for himself. He had to be straight to enjoy it, alcohol blurred experience, gave him a headache the following day. With the headache often came feelings of guilt and remorse
, negative emotions were a symptom of intoxication. Fun City with alcohol made a man paranoid and regretful; both the city and the bottle sapped away energy and ambition.   

“Thank you,” Tammy said, raising the bottle towards his glass. “I
haven’t seen you in many weeks. Where you going?” she sang the usual bargirl patter.

“I wait you,” Sebastian said. He had learned how to communicate with the bargirls after the first few months.  Simplify tense to present, erase all adverbs, ditto articles. Speak back to front. Use your hands. Smile. Never frown. The language of the bars wasn’t a difficult language to get to grips with. It was neither English nor local
, yet it was the bastard child of both. The real language was, of course, money. Money and sex. The ultimate transaction. What was commerce if it wasn’t people in places they didn’t want to be doing shit that they didn’t want to do.

“You want go with me, huh?” she said.

Sebastian felt the old excitement welling up. It was too easy most of the time. “Yes. You are beautiful.”

A motorbike ride, an apartment block, three flights of stairs. A door. Sebastian opened it to reveal an untidy room. Clothes were thrown across the floor
and the bed was unmade. A computer on a desk, he walked over to it and Sebastian clicked the mouse. The screen flashed on and Tammy winced at the image.  Sebastian smiled showing his pointed little eye teeth and scrolled through the portfolio. With each new picture, his smile widened a little more. His lips wet with excitement. Tammy watched, open mouthed, over his shoulder at the computer screen. Police crime scenes, suicides, balcony jumps, a woman being roasted on a spit above an open fire. Images worse even than the pictures published in the Fun City Express. She turned and sat on the bed, gripping a section of the duvet and squeezing it in the palm of her hand. She fought back the urge to cry, her fingers massaged the bridge of her nose. She opened her handbag, took out her mobile telephone and sent a message. She turned off the telephone as the thin man turned around to face her.

“Who are you calling?” he asked.

“Nobody.”

“I expect it’s your boyfriend or your pimp. Don’t worry, this won’t take long.”

She forced a smile as he stood up from the chair. 

Why couldn’t somebody give her a decent customer? One who dressed in smart clothes, spoke politely.
Somebody normal. Somebody who had a job. Had a good job. Any job. Direction. Dreams. The answer was simple. Men like that didn’t need to go with women like her. They didn’t need to go to Fun City. They went with women who had gone to university, who had bettered themselves and had gone to work in offices high up in the nation’s capital sky. Tammy had only the street to work with. And the scum that used it were just that. This was work. Fucking work. She insisted, as all the girls did, that he showered first. To get rid of the smell, the dirt, the disease, the him, the person, the Sebastian. The act of showering made it acceptable to have an old, fat, skinny, diseased, retarded, wrinkled, violent, suicidal, paranoid, sensitive, artistic, autistic, deranged, remote, cynical, unholy, sadistic, crazed, socially awkward, mother-hating body inside yours. She had had all types. All shapes and sizes. She kept things remote and business like.

The customer had to shower.

The shower gave her time to check the room for weapons, video devices, bankbooks, cash, credit cards, photographs of competitors. Yes, the act of showering was always a prerequisite. It was just fucking work. “You shower first, okay, I wait you here,” she watched him pull off his shirt. He was the skinniest man she had seen. Like one of the beggars that sat on Beach Road. Countable ribs. Pronounced anatomy. Skeletal. His chest sunken. He dropped his pants and she looked away. Then she watched him walk into the bathroom. She listened to the sound of water splashing on his insect-like body. She opened her bag. The knife and the pepper spray were inside. Also, a pack of three condoms, some mouthwash, a pack of cigarettes and her mobile telephone. A bottle of pills. She opened the bottle and took two. She took out the pack of three. She placed one condom under the pillow of the bed the other two she hid in her bag. She checked his cupboards, drawers, bags. Her heart hammered inside her chest as she heard the bathroom door unlock.