A Carnival of Killing (19 page)

“Isn’t this just a wee bit better than your apartment?” Kitty asked.

“About the same,” I said. “The only things my bedroom doesn’t have are the windows, the Jacuzzi, the football-field-size bed and the several hundred square feet of floor space.”

“I knew you’d love it when you saw it. Shall I order champagne for two?”

“Only for one. You really don’t want to see me turn into a slobbering, staggering mass of mush.”

“Then I’ll skip it, too. Why don’t we get started with the Jacuzzi?”

“Good idea,” I said. “Why don’t you turn it on while I take a quick pit stop? All that coffee is hitting bottom.”

Kitty kissed me again on the lips, putting some tongue into the action this time, and breathed the word “okay” into that lucky right ear. She headed for the Jacuzzi while I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I pulled out my cell phone and punched in Al’s number. After six rings I got his voice mail. I should have realized that he’d turn off his phone when he went into the closet so it wouldn’t ring at an inopportune moment.

“Damn it,” I said before the beep. “There’s been a change,” I said after the beep, hoping that he’d turn on his phone when we didn’t show up after a reasonable amount of time. “Crowne Plaza room 2112. Get your ass over here to back me up.”

I took off my blazer, loosened my tie, switched on my pocket tape recorder and walked out of the bathroom with the blazer over my arm. Again I said, “Wow!”

Action and Distraction

Kitty stood facing me wearing only a white push-up bra, bright red knee-length bloomers and the red boots. Her blouse, skirt and petticoat were piled in a scarlet and white heap on the floor near the Jacuzzi, which was filling with water.

“You like?” she asked, thrusting a rounded hip in my direction.

“How could I not?” I said. “You’re absolutely gorgeous.”

“There’s lots more to see.” Kitty bent over, tugged at the elastic waist of her bloomers, slid them down her long legs until they covered the tops of her boots and straightened up. My eyes must have popped six inches out of my head because she laughed out loud at my expression.

Looking up at me from the curve of her lower belly and crotch was the face of a brown-and-black striped cat—ears, eyes, nose, whiskers, and a mouth that would open vertically. I had seen this kind of crazy body painting on the Internet because a friend had e-mailed a site with two dozen pictures showing both sexes naked and decorated, but I never imagined that I would come face to female flesh with it. If the word “discombobulated” was illustrated in the dictionary, my photo would have been there at that moment.

“Like my pretty pussy?” Kitty asked. “If you pet her, I bet she’ll purr.”

I realized my mouth was hanging open, so I closed it. Then I tried to form words with it and failed. Finally, I mumbled, “Izza tattoo?”

Kitty cocked her head, indicating that my meaning had not been perfectly clear.

I swallowed, took a deep breath and tried to gather my wits before speaking again. On my second try, I managed to enunciate. “Is that a tattoo?”

She laughed again. “No, silly, it’s only paint. You can’t put a tattoo on pubic hair. I have a friend who does this kind of artwork on people, but not usually on this particular part of a person. It’ll wash off in about a week. I got it special for you to cheer you up. That was the errand I had to run after work.”

“I envy the artist,” I said. “I wish I could paint on a canvas like that.”

Still laughing, Kitty took a step toward me, but staggered and almost fell because her movement was constricted by the bloomers wrapped around the tops of her boots.

Her boots. Damn it, that’s what I was there for. In the literal heat of the moment, I’d forgotten that my reason for meeting this woman was business and not erotic entertainment. I was supposed to quiz her about the goddamn boots, not, as she suggested, make her hand-painted pussycat purr.

I took a deep breath and said, “I’ve got something to show you, too.”

“That’s pretty obvious,” she said, waving a hand toward the tell-tale bulge in my trousers. “Why don’t we get rid of all our clothes and get in the Jacuzzi and pretend we’re a couple of honeymooners?”

Honeymooners? Oh, my god, no! Not here. Not a Jacuzzi honeymoon with Kitty. If there was a honeymoon, it had to be on an island with Martha. “I don’t mean this,” I said, looking where she was pointing. “I need to show you a picture.”

I reached into the inside pocket of the blazer still draped over my arm, pulled out the photo and handed it to her. Al had cropped and enlarged the image so that the red-booted Vulcan was the focal point.

The laughter stopped and Kitty’s eyes turned to green chips of flint. “Where did you get this?” she asked.

“My buddy Al shot this at the Vulcan Victory Dance,” I said. “We wondered if those were your red boots. Are they?”

“What if they are?”

“If they are, I assume that it’s you in the Vulcan costume. Why would you be wearing that?”

“You nosy son of a bitch,” she said. “You were right. You can be as big an asshole as all the other reporters.”

Kitty bent down and the provocative pussycat disappeared as she pulled her bloomers back up around her waist. Then she stooped again, reached into her right boot and brought out something shiny. It was a miniature snub-nose pistol just like the one Sean Fitzpatrick had carried into our office to show us how easily it could be hidden.

“These boots are good for more than walking,” she said. “They’re just roomy enough to carry this little piece of security.”

It was amazing how much bigger that size gun looked in Kitty’s hand than it had in Fitzpatrick’s mitt. The muzzle, which was pointing at my chest, looked big enough to fire a cannon ball, and I took an involuntary step backward. A quick glance over my shoulder told me I was too far from the bathroom door to make a dash and lock myself in.

Kitty saw the move and read my mind. “Don’t even think about running for the john,” she said. “From this range I could put a bullet right between your shoulder blades before you got to the door.”

“Would you like to tell me what this is all about?” I wondered if Al had grown tired of waiting yet and had switched on his cell phone to discover a missed call.

“Why not? It looks like I’m going to have to shoot you because you tried to rape me, so I might as well tell you all about it.”

“My guess is that you put on the suit that night to kill Toni Erickson, and that you wore it the previous week when you killed Lee-Ann Nordquist. Am I right?”

“Give yourself an ‘A,’ Mr. Asshole Reporter.”

“What I can’t guess is how you got the suit and why you wanted to kill those women,” I said.

“Let me start with Lee-Ann, may she rot in hell,” Kitty said. “I’ve hated her guts for two years, and I saw the perfect chance to get rid of the whoring little bitch.”

“Everybody seemed to love Lee-Ann. Why’d you hate her so much?” The longer I could drag this out, the better chance I had of hearing Al knock on the door. I hoped that the sound of his knock would distract Kitty long enough for me to make a grab for the gun.

“Two reasons,” she said. “Number one: remember I told you that when I followed my boyfriend here from Madison I found out that he was banging somebody else? Well, guess who it was.”

“Lee-Ann?”

“Give yourself another ‘A.’ Charlie said he’d discovered that he preferred full-figured women. In other words, he liked big tits and a chubby ass. He got what he had coming two months later when she dumped him and moved on to her next lover boy.”

“Okay, I understand that one. What was your second reason to hate her?”

“The bitch beat me out for Klondike Kate, just because of those big tits and chubby ass. I won the talent show hands down. Lee-Ann had a voice like a chain saw when she sang, but she got the title because I was too skinny.”

“Did you take the office job so you’d have a chance to kill her?” I asked.

“I took the job so I could be around her and mess up her life some way,” Kitty said. “I didn’t plan to kill her until that night, when I saw her drinking in O’Halloran’s with a bunch of Vulcans. I thought how easy it would be to knock her off and have the cops go hunting for one of them.

“I knew the Vulcans’ room would be empty, so I ran back here and got a key from the desk on the pretense that one of my Vulcan friends had left his wallet up there. There were three or four costumes laid out on chairs, and I picked one that fit pretty well. In fact, it probably was the one you wore when you went around with the Vulcans on Friday.”

I couldn’t keep still. “You killed her in the suit that I wore?” That’s why Kitty’s perfume had seemed familiar. I’d smelled a trace of it in the running suit.

“Like I said, it probably was,” Kitty said. “It was a little long, but with the bottom tucked into my boots, who cared? Anyway, I put on the suit and found some grease paint so I could smear on a beard. My only problem was that there weren’t any boots. They’d all taken their boots home to polish. I was wearing my red ones, so I said the hell with it and put them back on. Then I dropped my clothes off at my car, went back to O’Halloran’s and offered to buy the bitch a drink.”

“How’d you fool Lee-Ann?” I asked. “Didn’t your voice give you away?”

Kitty’s response came in a voice an octave lower than normal. “I told you I majored in theater. One of my talents is doing impressions. I do men as well as women. Want to hear me do Darth Vader?”

“You can’t do Darth Vader.”

The voice dropped another half-octave. “Beware, young Skywalker, I’m about to blast off your dick with my light sword.”

I clapped my hands three times and took a step toward her. Kitty backed off a step and warned me not to come any closer if I wanted to hear the rest of her story before she pulled the trigger. I smiled, shrugged and abandoned my plan to creep close enough to tackle the gun. I’d have to wait for Al’s knock on the door.

“Okay, tell me. How did you kill Lee-Ann?” I asked.

“I got her shit-faced on vodka tonics, which only took a couple because she was already half in the bag, and offered to drive her to my place for some sex,” Kitty said. “She’d fuck anything in pants, so she accepted the invitation. I went with her to get her coat, which was hanging way in the back, by the restrooms. When she reached for the coat, I whipped the cord around her neck from behind and yanked it so tight she couldn’t even gurgle.”

“So she was already dead when you were seen helping her out the door like such a gentleman?”

“You bet your ass she was.”

“Why didn’t you wait to kill her until you had her back in your apartment?”

“If I did that, I’d have a body in my apartment to dispose of. This way, I could just dump her somewhere and go home.”

“Why’d you drive way out to Mississippi River Boulevard?” I asked.

“I was looking for a place that was quiet and dark, and I found it out there,” she said. “The people in those houses were all in bed and there’s not much traffic at that time of night. I had time to lay her out and even bruise her crotch to make it look like attempted rape. After that, I went back to the hotel with my clothes, changed back and returned the Vulcan suit. Laid it all out nice for somebody to pick up and put on.”

“And that somebody was me,” I said. I felt my dinner rising a bit at the thought of that, but I swallowed hard and kept the conversation going. “You said something about Lee-Ann, uh, screwing anything in pants. Were you stretching it a bit because of what she did with your boyfriend?”

“No way. I heard the bitch tell one of her buddies that she laid most of the guys on last year’s Vulcan Krewe.”

“I interviewed all the married ones. They all said they barely knew her.”

“Barely knew her? Bullshit! Those bastards knew her … what’s the term? Intimately, I think it is. Some of them, anyway. And I’m not surprised that it’s Ted Carlson that knocked her up. He’s always sniffing around the Kates. Tried to take me out for drinks more than once.”

“You don’t like Ted?”

“I don’t like messing around with married men. Big waste of time if you ask me.”

“You put on a great act after you killed Lee-Ann. Hitting high ‘C’ when I called you and carrying on all teary-eyed about how bad you felt to lose a sister Kate. Standing up at the funeral and announcing the scholarship was really a cute touch. Your college theater director would be proud of your performance.”

“Thank you. It’s too bad you won’t be around to write a review.”

“Okay, so now I understand why you killed Lee-Ann,” I said. “But why did you try to kill Toni?”

“Because the idiot was going around the dance telling everybody she knew who killed Lee-Ann,” Kitty said.

“Are you the caller with the deep voice who threatened her?”

“You got it. Anyhow I thought maybe she really had figured it out, so that night I ran up to the Vulcans’ dressing room, changed into the Vulcan suit and came back to the dance.”

“Were you planning to get her drunk, too?”

“Didn’t need to. Toni has a bladder problem and can’t go more than an hour without peeing. I just slipped into the ladies’ when nobody was around, hid in a stall and waited for her to come in.”

“Toni said she slugged her attacker in the crotch, but it didn’t seem to hurt. Now I understand why it didn’t work the way it should have.”

“Give yourself a third ‘A.’ That punch hurt, but it didn’t do the kind of damage it does to somebody with balls.”

“But still you got caught in the act.”

“I thought that other woman had gone out. Somebody else must have banged the door twice.”

“Speaking of bangs, do you always carry that gun?” I asked, wondering how much longer I could stall. Where in the hell was Al? He couldn’t still be waiting in the goddamn closet.

“Only when I think I might need it,” Kitty said. “When you called and gave me your sob story, I got a little suspicious because you’re a reporter and because you seemed pretty loyal to your girlfriend when I was coming on to you just a couple of days ago. So I took little Ms. Derringer along as insurance and I’m damn glad I did. But I’ve gotta say you were good. You had me thinking that you really wanted to take me to bed until you pulled out that picture.”