Free The Pink Flamingo Murders by Elaine Viets Page A

ones who are alive before they land—put out their hands to protect their face.”
    She was right. I remembered a South Side friend who was painting his gutters forest green and his window trim white—the only acceptable neighborhood colors—one Sunday. His ladder went over backward. Out of respect for the Lord’s Day, he yelled, “Oh, SHOOOOOOT,” on the way down. He broke a wrist when he put out his hands to protect his face.
    At last, Katie got to make a shot. She whacked the ball soundly a good long way and looked pleased. Mitch looked impressed. Then he did the same thing, but he wasn’t as happy about it. We walked on a little more, stood around like we were in a checkout line, and then Katie and Mitch made a bunch of short shots. I gathered some of those short shots should have been long ones, because neither one was veryhappy. I was going to have to sit through four hours of this. Good thing there were two doctors present. I might die of boredom. When we started walking again, I started my questioning.
    “I still don’t understand why it’s murder,” I said. “Otto was standing on a metal ladder, getting ready to paint metal gutters. They were festooned with a cheap set of Christmas lights he’d bought on sale at Kmart at Gravois Plaza. He left those lights up all year. I’m not surprised the wire frayed and electrocuted him.”
    “That was
not
normal wear and tear,” Katie said. “After we found he’d been electrocuted, the police went back and looked at those lights. The plastic coating had been peeled down to the wire. It was murder.”
    “So Otto was the first murder,” I said. “Who was the second? I didn’t know someone else was killed. When did it happen?”
    “Last night. A drug dealer with the imaginative name of John Smith. His friends called him Scorpion. He died wearing a gold-and-diamond scorpion necklace valued at two thousand dollars. That thing had a gold rope chain and a gold pendant the size of a small candy bar with a diamond scorpion on it. His family tried to claim the necklace and his three gold-and-diamond teeth before EMS even got his body out of the ambulance. They had their priorities straight.”
    “Not exactly grieving, were they?”
    “No. But Mr. Scorpion Smith should get the usual bang-up drug dealer’s funeral.”
    “He was shot?”
    “He was an arson death,” Katie said. “Fire investigators say someone set fire to his house. The arsonist got up on the flat roof, probably used the fire escape belonging to the rooming house next door, walked across the roof, and poured gasoline down all the vents. Got a little careless and dribbled a little gas on the roof, sothe investigators saw the burn pattern and figured it out. Mr. Smith died trapped inside. Nasty way to go.”
    So was drug addiction. I wasn’t wasting much sympathy on him. As far as I was concerned, one less drug dealer was no loss. Katie and Mitch stopped to take a few more short whacks—excuse me, putts—and from what she said, Mitch was buying the beer. Maybe I wasn’t getting the point to this game, but at least I was getting information.
    “How do you know something inside the house didn’t start the fire?” I asked. “Those guys don’t work under the safest conditions.”
    “Yeah, but an explosion looks different. And drug dealers also don’t padlock their own door on the outside. Mr. Smith had a hasp on his back door, because that’s the method he probably used to secure the door when he left the house. His back door was padlocked and there were burglar bars on his front door and all the first-floor windows.”
    “I don’t see how he got trapped. Most houses around there are at least two stories. Were the second-floor windows barred, too? Couldn’t he run up and climb out those windows—or get up on the roof?”
    “It was a gasoline fire,” Katie said, “and gas is a really fast accelerant. Fire races up staircases. It looks like he tried to get out the back door, then headed