Read Online The White Flamingo by James A. Newman - Free Book Online Page B

wine, body massages, minor wives, iPads, and Belgium chocolate drizzled over rich Swiss alpine berries. The chief had yet to set foot inside the station. He had a place on the hill with a moat, a dozen Siamese–salt-water hybrids, and fifteen dancing Mademoiselles, two from each continent and one exotic woman of mixed race who had once been a star on both stage and screen; the stage revolved and the screen was blue.
    Inside the station, it was as cool, dark, and quiet as entering a cave after hours under the Fun City sun. A blank room with four walls, two doors, two desks, and a plastic fig tree in one corner. The paint, although recent, had already begun to flake away from the concrete rendering owing to the shoddy workmanship and fluctuations in room temperature.      
    A Chinese-looking Thai sat behind the desk with a toothpick in his mouth. A toothpick moved around his teeth as he listened to Hale speaking. His eyes narrowed, bored, just another crazy, lost foreigner. The police officer looked at the clock on the wall; he looked at the watch on his wrist. If the town clock tower were visible from the station window, he would have stolen a glance. The cash for its erection had already been pocketed by a fulcrum in the council years ago: it had never been built.
    Joe stepped forward and casted a line about the UK embassy and an international investigation. The sergeant’s expression changed to one of alarmed congeniality. Like most officious fucks, this one backed down under the threat of responsibility. Permitted Joe and Hale fifteen minutes to speak to Sebastian in the holding cell.
    They walked through a courtyard to the cell.
    A skeletal thin man stood behind the bars. His skin was pale and his eyes danced to the tune of fear. He looked like a murderer, Joe thought. That is to say, whatever murderers looked like, they looked like Sebastian. Yet, there was something feminine about him. Not that he was gay. It was just whatever it was that made a man a man; he didn’t have it. He was very thin. Long-limbed and uncomfortable in his skin, anxious, like a boy actor cast as a man in a demanding role. His hair needed cutting and his furtive eyes gave some clue to the darkness behind them.
    “I didn’t do it,” he said.
    “Do what, Geezer?” Hale said.
    “Tammy. I didn’t kill the girl, I promise. On my mother’s life, I promise I didn’t do it. You have to get me out of here, Hale. I’ll do anything.”
    “Well, as far I can see it , Sunshine, they have you bang to rights. I mean, with the computer pornography stuff and your reputation for, amongst other things, choking the chicken, it seems you have been caught on a sticky wicket, dear boy. You must know you can’t simply sit around jerking off to that kind of material, Sunshine. Not somewhere like this. Not in God’s pure and clean moral city?”
    Sebastian smiled like a little boy who had murdered his mother’s cat and then buried it in the garden. The shovel in his hand, cat hairs covering his shirt.
    No remorse, no shame.
    Nothing.
    Nothing resembling human emotion. Just a little smile that was as painful to the recipient as it was to giver. The Detective pitied him as he had never pitied anyone before or since. Whatever conjuncture of circumstances that had led him here, it hadn’t been a picnic. You could figure out a man’s childhood by the way he held himself and the words he chose. Those men that seemed too stiff or too loose had been praised or resented too often and at the wrong time. The ones that spoke too much had been neglected, and the quiet ones had been dejected. He figured the boy hadn’t murdered Tammy.
    He didn’t have it in him.
    “Sebastian, this is my friend, Joe Dylan. He is a detective. He is going to be asking you some questions and you are going to be answering those questions without any of your normal bullshit. Do you understand?”
    “Yes.”
    “Sebastian. Do you consider yourself religious?” The Detective