Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos ml-3

by Donna Andrews

  "Call Monty," I told Michael. "There's blood on this flamingo's beak."

  "Blood?" Mrs. Fenniman trumpeted. "On one of my flamingos?"

  "No," I said. "You're only paying for twelve, remember? The blood's on the one you're not buying."

  "I haven't picked mine yet," she grumbled. "What if I like that one?"

  I glowered at her and she retreated, clutching one of the unstained flamingos.

  Using some clean rags, to avoid getting fingerprints on the flamingo – or at least any more fingerprints on top of what Mrs. Fenniman and dozens of passing shoppers had already made – Michael and I hauled the bogus flamingo back into my booth. And one of mine, for comparison. Mrs. Fenniman would just have to get along with eleven for a while.

  When Monty showed up, he looked harassed, and not all that pleased to see us.

  "So what's this nonsense about a blood-stained flamingo?" he said.

  "I think I've found the missing murder weapon you've been hunting for," I said.

  "What gives you the idea we're missing a murder weapon, Ms. Langslow?" he said, a little too loudly. "We found the victim with your knife stuck square in his back."

  "Yes, but you've known for quite some time that my knife didn't kill him, haven't you? Probably since about five minutes after the coroner saw the wound. When we were talking about my dad this morning, you said something about how many people were running around with knives and swords and bayonets. Why would you care, if you had the murder weapon? And it's no secret to anyone that you've been scouring the camp and the fair all morning for weapons; hell, you even confiscated some of my dad's surgical instruments for a while."

  "So what makes you think you've found this so-called missing weapon when we couldn't?" Monty said.

  Was it just his typical stubbornness, or was there some more sinister reason for him to act so obtuse?

  "Oh, for heaven's sake, just take a look at the thing, Monty," I said, jerking a thumb at the bird in question. "It won't kill you to look."

  He lost the mocking air when he inspected its beak, keeping his Band-Aid – decked hands well away from it, I noticed.

  "Damn, you made that thing sharp," he said.

  "I didn't make it," I said. "This is one of the ones I made."

  I indicated my flamingo.

  "Looks pretty similar to me," he said.

  "Similar? Are you crazy!" I exclaimed, and I pointed out the finer features of my bird and the shortcomings of the imposter.

  "Still looks pretty much the same to me," he said.

  "They're right," I muttered. "Justice really is blind."

  "But you're right about one thing. This fellow's beak couldn't stab butter," he said, indicating my flamingo with a disparaging air. "You'd have to use him as a blunt instrument. This other one, now – that's a lethal weapon. Where'd you find the damned things, anyway?"

  "Here, in my booth," I said. "They've been here all along."

  A couple of spectators tittered.

  "They couldn't have been," he said.

  "Don't you remember when I was looking for my cash box?"

  I said. "You opened the case they were in yourself, and said there was nothing but birds inside. Then you locked it up again, with the murder weapon inside."

  More titters.

  "You've been searching all morning for something that's been right here under your nose the whole time. Gee, maybe if you'd let me back in my booth a little sooner you'd have found the murderer by now."

  "If I find you've been withholding evidence and obstructing justice – " Monty began.

  "Then you can arrest me," I said. "Do I get a discount if I pay my bail in quarters?"

  Monty's face turned pale, and then went blank and stony.

  "I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to vacate this booth while we check this out," he said, with narrowed eyes.

  I should learn to keep my mouth shut.

  "I guess we should make ourselves scarce for a while?" Michael said. I was glad to see he'd had the foresight to pack the laptop and sling it over his shoulder while I was alienating Monty.

  "Guess so," I said. "Hang on a moment. If I'm going to turn into the wrought-iron-flamingo lady, I don't want to lose sales momentum. Rob, don't get lost."

  I wandered over to Amanda's booth, with Rob and Michael following.

  "Remind me to commit all my crimes down here from now on," Amanda said, as she watched Monty. "If I lived here, I think I'd vote against that sheriff of yours, no matter who was running against him."

  I shrugged.

  "He only got the job because of necrophilia, anyway," Rob said. "It runs rampant down here, you know. You get used to it."

  "You don't say," Amanda said, looking at him over her glasses.

  "He means nepotism, of course," I said.

  I think she believed me.

  "Mind if I put a sign up in your booth for a while?" I asked.

  "Be my guest," she said. "Your booth is already drawing me more traffic than I've ever seen. Need some paper?"

  I took one sheet of the offered paper, wrote "SIGN UP HERE FOR INFORMATION ON THE WROUGHT-IRON FLAMINGOS" and taped it to the front of her booth, then cleared a small space on the table and left the remaining sheets stacked there.

  "Feel free to tell really outrageous stories to anyone who asks where I am," I said.

  "You got it, hon," she said. "Have fun."

  As I walked by, I heard Monty snarling into his police radio.

  "Then send someone out looking for them. No, I don't know his last name. We only have one Horace – "

  "Hollingworth," I said.

  He glared at me, but repeated Horace's full name into the radio.

  "That's right. And the coroner. No, we don't have another dead body; never mind what I want him for, just – "

  Michael, Rob, and I strolled away. We passed through the town square, where Horace was selling tomatoes. I made Rob take his place and told Horace to run along to my booth. We took a detour through the tent where the Lions' Club was advertising a colonial pig roast, interrupted the coroner in his task of dishing out barbecue sauce, and dispatched him to Monty, too.

  "Okay, you're my witness," I said to Michael. "We have now done our bit to help the minions of the law, right?"

  "So now we have some barbecue and relax until Monty's finished at your booth?"

  "No, now we go to see a man about a flamingo."

  We passed by Dad's booth, where I deduced, from the squeals of childish laughter, that he and his troupe of performing leeches were entertaining a crowd of small boys.

  "Doesn't it hurt?" I heard one small boy ask.

  "No, the leech's saliva contains a mild anaesthetic," Dad said. "As well as an anticoagulant."

  I only hoped he and the leeches weren't playing Rogue Elephant, which, according to Rob, involved Dad attaching the longest available leech to his nose and lurching around the room trumpeting like a wounded pachyderm. Rob still swears that Dad did this to entertain him when he was sick with the chicken pox. I prefer to believe that no one from whom I had inherited DNA could be capable of doing such a thing, and have always put the whole episode down to Rob's vivid imagination and the fact mat he was running a fever of 102 degrees at the time. Still, I decided not to peek into Dad's booth. One likes to keep a few illusions intact.

  "Should we ask your Dad along?"

  "He sounds happy," I said.

  "So where are we going?"

  "To see Tony, of course," I said. "The only person at this whole fair with a known history of copying my ironwork. Not to mention the fact that I just realized something about Tony that makes him – well, you'll see. It all points to Tony."

  Well, except for the stuff that pointed to Monty. I'd worry about that later.

  We stopped in the lane, near Tony's booth, and observed him from a distance for a few minutes before approaching. He looked badly hung over, and he didn't have many customers to distract him.

  "Shouldn't we tell Monty about this?" Mich
ael asked.

  "You really think he'd listen?"

  "Okay, so what's our plan?"

  "He's spotted us," I said. "Come on."

  If I hadn't already decided that Tony was guilty of something, I could have guessed from the way he reacted to seeing us. He retreated behind his counter when we drew near, and when we stepped into his booth, he glanced behind him as if planning to duck out the back.

  "Going someplace, Tony?" I asked.

  "I… uh, I need to restock," he said.

  "Good idea," I said. I walked behind the counter and picked up the book Tony had stashed beneath it.

  "The Complete Book of Locks and Locksmithing," I read, holding it up. "Interesting choice of reading."

  "Business is slow; I'm thinking of branching out," he said.

  "I'm sure you are," I said, grabbing his arm. "Come on, Tony, we need to talk. Let's go someplace more private."

  "I can't leave my booth," Tony said, as Michael grabbed his other arm.

  "I thought you were going to restock. Don't you have a CLOSED FOR restocking sign? Well, people will figure it out. Come on, let's talk while you restock."

  His booth was on the outermost edge of the fair, only about eight feet from the lightly wooded area that surrounded the field on two sides. We led Tony a few yards into the trees, where we wouldn't be overheard, and sat him down on a fallen log. I stood over him, hands on my hips, and Michael leaned against a nearby tree, his arms folded, and assumed a fierce, bloodthirsty expression that I recognized from having seen him play Richard III a few months before.

  "Okay, Tony," I said. "The game's up."

  Tony winced and glanced up at Michael, who gave him a lovely menacing smile.

  "We know you went down to my booth after you locked up Wesley," I said.

  "That's ridiculous," Tony said.

  "We know about the flamingo, Tony," I said.

  "Oh, no," he whispered.

  "We know what you did with it," I went on. "So why don't you just go along with us to the police and come clean?"

  "God, no!" he cried. "They'll think I did it! And the killer will know that I know something!"

  Michael and I looked at each other.

  "Yes," I said, carefully. "You could be right."

  "Then you've got to help me!" he said. "I know I shouldn't have done what I did, but when I saw my flamingo sticking out of his back, I panicked; and I thought I heard the guy that did it coming back and – "

  "Slow down, Tony," I said. This wasn't turning out the way I had planned it. Not at all. "Start from the beginning."

  "Start from why you went to Meg's booth in the first place," Michael said.

  "Okay," Tony said. "Okay, I guess you figured out I was trying to make a flamingo like yours."

  "Not very much like mine," I couldn't help saying.

  "Well, what do you expect? – I only got glimpses of it at the last fair, when you were showing it to the old lady," he said. "I knew I had the shape down pretty good – "

  I bit my tongue and nodded.

  "But I was having trouble with the finish. It just didn't look right. I thought maybe I could figure out what was wrong with the finish on mine by looking at yours, or if not, maybe you'd have some notes on how you did the finish. So anyway, after I got your cousin in the stocks, I realized that there was nobody else around, and it was a good time to sneak over to your booth. I pretended to pass out, and then I got up, went over to my booth for my flamingo, and then to your booth."

  "So much for parallel development."

  He shrugged.

  "Anyway, I got into the case with your flamingos, and I took some Polaroids, but I couldn't tell much about the finish from just looking. And I figured anything valuable would be locked up, so I'd brought along my tool kit, and it didn't take me five minutes to open that padlock. You really should get a better lock; I could sell you a – "

  "Later, Tony. Get back to your burglary."

  "I didn't steal anything."

  "What did you do with my cash box?"

  "I didn't do anything. Just took it out of the case when I was searching. Anyway, I didn't find any papers, so I was starting up your laptop. When I heard someone coming, I dived under one of the tables."

  "Just like that?" I said. "You didn't try to hide what you'd been doing?"

  "I put the laptop in the case and shut the lid," he said. "I figured anyone who came in would think the flamingo was yours."

  "Then what happened?"

  "Someone came in."

  "Who?"

  "I'm not sure," he said. "There was a cloth covering the table that went right down to the floor. I found a crack, but all I could see was his shoes."

  "Okay, then what?"

  "Then another guy came in, and one of them said 'What the hell are you doing here?' and they argued for a while."

  "About what?"

  "I couldn't tell. After those first words, I think they tried to keep their voices down, and the tablecloth muffled the sound. I could tell they were angry; that's about all."

  "And that they were both men," Michael put in.

  "Yeah, definitely both men."

  "Go on," I said.

  "Okay, so they were arguing, and I heard one of them say something about 'that damned dog.' I could see both sets of feet heading for the back of the booth, and I heard a lot of clanking and grunting, and one of them came back, and I saw the tablecloth on the other table move, so I figured maybe there wasn't enough room for both of them behind the curtain, and the one guy had lost out and decided to hide under the table."

  "It's like a French farce," Michael muttered.

  "Only they rarely kill people in French farces," I added.

  "Anyway, then that little dog came in and started barking, like he couldn't figure out which one of the three of us to attack. You know, the little hairball that's always trying to bite people."

  "Spike," I said. "I should have known. Where Spike goes, trouble follows."

  "Yeah, well this time that harridan who runs the fair followed."

  "Mom?" Michael exclaimed.

  "Uh… yeah," Tony said. "I could tell it was her. When she reached down to put a leash on the mutt, I caught a glimpse of her face and that big, white, fright wig. And she dragged him out, still barking. You could hear them all the way out of the fair grounds."

  "And you just sat there under the table all this time?"

  "I figured if I sat tight, maybe they wouldn't catch me," Tony said. "And a damned good thing, too, considering that one of them turned out to be a murderer."

  "So what happened next?"

  "The guy under the table came out and looked behind the curtain, and he blew out of there, real fast. I waited a bit, to see if the guy behind the curtain was coming out, and I decided maybe he'd gone out the back of the booth. So I came out, and peeked behind the curtain, and there was this guy, dead, with my flamingo in his back. It was freaky, really, seeing him lying there – I couldn't tell who he was, just that he was wearing a blue coat exactly like the one I was wearing."

  "And that's when you panicked."

  "Yeah. I figured they'd blame me, you know? I mean, it was my flamingo. So I pulled the flamingo out and wiped the blood off its beak with my handkerchief, and put it in the case with yours. And I saw the knife and I stuck it in his back so they wouldn't wonder how he'd died."

  "Great thinking, Tony. Only my knife and your flamingo's beak were just a little bit different in size. They figured out almost immediately that the knife wasn't the weapon."

  "Okay, so I wasn't thinking too clearly," he said. "I really was pretty drunk. And do you have any idea what it's like, finding a dead body like that?"

  "You seem to forget that Meg found the same dead body a little later on," Michael pointed out.

  "Well, she wasn't a witness to his murder," Tony said.

  "Some witness you are," Michael said.

  "Yeah, Tony," I said. "Once you tell the police all of this, everyone in town will know you we
re an earwitness to the murder. The killer will probably go after you, just in case you could identify him to the police, which is a real laugh, because so far you haven't remembered a thing that could possibly help identify him."

  "I know it's a guy."

  "Wow. You just eliminated fifty percent of the human race," I said. "Only – how many billion people left?"

  "Give me a break," he said. "I was pretty drunk. And all I saw was his shoes."

  "Okay, concentrate, then. Tell us about his shoes."

  Tony concentrated.

  "They were dark," he said.

  "Black or brown?" I asked.

  "Yeah," he said. "Or maybe dark blue."

  "What kind of shoes?"

  "I don't know. They had buckles on them; I couldn't see what was under the buckles."

  "Let me guess: one buckle on each foot."

  "Ha, ha," Tony said. "Look, I told you I didn't see anything."

  "No kidding."

  "One of the buckles was kind of odd."

  "Odd how?"

  "It had a kind of a dent in it," he said.

  "Would you recognize that buckle again?" I asked.

  "I don't know," Tony said. "Maybe."

  "Come on," I said. "We're going to find the buckle."

  We went back to Tony's booth, recruited a neighbor to watch it while he was gone, and set out dragging him up and down the aisles of the craft fair.

  At first, we tried to be subtle. We'd wander into peoples' booths, and I'd stand chitchatting with the owners while Michael and Tony inspected their shoes and the shoes of anyone else in the booth. If the crafter was behind a counter, we'd think of some stratagem to lure him out where we could see him.

  Dad joined the party after we passed through the medical tent, and after that, all hope of subtlety went out the window.

  We walked up and down the lanes, our eyes fixed on passing shoes, and we spent a lot of time apologizing to the people we bumped into. Four or five times, when we were all waiting for Tony to make up his mind about a shoe, people jumped to the conclusion that one of us had lost a contact, and within seconds we had a swarm of eager helpers combing the ground.