The Corpse Wore Pasties (19 page)

“This guy spent more time near Victoria’s bag than anyone else. Nobody else had the opportunity to plant that poison.”

“Well, sure. If he’s real. But you know, the laws of the City of New York are pretty clear on the fact that I can’t arrest a guy you made up. Why did you say this mysterious pervert wanted to kill the girl, again?”

I hadn’t said, because—given that I hadn’t actually managed to track the creep down—I had no idea. The truth was, I knew no more about him than Officer Brooklyn did...well, maybe slightly more, because I knew that he existed, and Brioche would back me up on that point. But I had a feeling that she wouldn’t make a very credible witness.

Brooklyn leaned over the table and looked me in the eye. “Senator, I’m gonna give it to you straight. You’re in a bad way. I’ll tell you what we got on you, and then you can decide whether you want to make it easy on yourself. There’s the motive, check. There’s the fingerprints on the bottle, check. There’s the fifty witnesses who saw you hand it to her. There’s all the harassment of the other women in the show, doesn’t look good. There’s that convenience store you stopped into on Friday. You buy a bottle of the exact same poison that killed the girl—the only bottle of that poison in that store, and you toss it in the trash right outside. Why? I don’t know. But it don’t look good. And then the kicker, Senator, the kicker is you ducking out on us Friday night. Oh, yeah—your bartender friend told us you were in there. That just screams guilty. In large, capital letters.”

He tapped the table with his finger.

“So I’m gonna tell you again, Senator, what I told you the first time you were down here: give it up, and it will go easier on you.”

“Have you ruled out suicide?” I asked.

“Oh, come on, Senator.”

“No, really,” I said. “What if Victoria found out she was being set up to be humiliated. She finally realized her career in burlesque was over. Too many people knew what she’d done. So maybe she decides to go out with a bang, take revenge on the people who she blames for her situation, by making us all suspects in her murder. She buys the poison, gets me to hand it to her, drinks it, and dies with a smile on her face, knowing she was putting all of us in hot water.”

“Does that look like a smile on her face?” Officer Brooklyn asked, pushing the photo of Victoria’s corpse towards me. It didn’t.

“The smile isn’t the point. The point is—”

“Hey, here’s one,” Officer Brooklyn suggested, “I don’t believe you didn’t think of this. Maybe alligators crawled up from the sewer and put the poison in that bag. But they didn’t stay for the show because they went off to sell someone the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Okay, then,” I offered, “What about the accident angle? That she packed the wrong bottle by mistake?”

“Oh, yeah. That might hold some water, but only if we hadn’t already searched the apartment she was staying in, from top to bottom. Not a single bottle to be found, real or fake. Any other crackpot theories, or are you ready to confess?”

“Listen,” I said. “Whoever switched Victoria’s fake poison for real poison had to know in advance that she was going to do Angelina’s poison number. I didn’t. I’d never even seen Angelina do it, never mind Victoria. Hell, I didn’t even know Victoria was going to be in the show that night until two seconds before she walked in the room. Don’t you think that makes it a little difficult for me to be the killer?”

Brooklyn shrugged.

“Nice try, Senator, but truth is, it don’t matter how you found out Angelina was doing the number—”

“Victoria.”

“What?”

“You meant to say, ‘how you found out Victoria was doing the number.’ Victoria, not Angelina. Angelina is the one Victoria stole the number from. Victoria is the one who...” My voice trailed off. Something had just clicked into place in my head, like a bra being fastened.

“Angelina, Victoria, Titsy McGee, don’t matter. You know who I meant,” said Officer Brooklyn. “The dead girl. I don’t know how you knew she was doing the number that night, and frankly it don’t matter one little bit. It ain’t gonna make or break my case. You found out, you brought the poison with you to the show, you killed her in front of fifty witnesses. Now why don’t you—”

“Hold it,” I said.

“Excuse me? Hold it? You want me to hold it?” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Oh, I’ll hold it all right.”

“No, I mean—” What I meant was that Brooklyn’s slip of the tongue had finally made the whole thing come together. “What would you say to one more crackpot theory, Officer?”

Brooklyn’s eyes narrowed. He sat down again.

“Make it good, Senator,” he said. “Make it good.”

“It will be,” I said. “And you’ll want to listen closely. Because if I’m right, the murderer is going to strike again, and soon.”

He snorted.

But a minute later, he leaned forward and started taking notes.

So, there I was, lying on the stage, straddled by a beautiful and completely naked woman. I rocked back and forth with her as she bounced on top of me, our bodies locked together, thrusting, thrusting. A sound was coming from the back of her throat—something between a moan and a growl. Me? I was grunting with each thrust, too, but couldn’t manage much more in terms of vocalization, because one of her hands was pressed firmly to my mouth.

It’s
exactly
as exciting as it sounds.

But not in the way you think.

Music started.

The curtains peeled back, revealing us to the audience.

A packed house.

When they saw us, they began to cheer. And hoot. And holler. And whistle.

Great way to open a show.

If only I hadn’t been fighting for my life.

The naked woman, of course, was Victoria’s murderer.

The thing she was thrusting was a knife.

Twenty minutes earlier, that same naked woman was looking at me in the dressing room mirror at the Gilded Heel.

I stood on the stage, right outside the door of the dressing room. It was just the two of us. The other performers hadn’t arrived yet. The murderer was getting herself ready for the pre-show go-go set. According to the Gilded Heel’s website, she wasn’t scheduled to perform that night. Yet here she was, as I suspected she would be. How did I know? Because I knew the identity of her next victim, and that next victim
was
scheduled to perform. My murderer had no doubt traded bookings with another performer to be here.

Which meant that, some time later in the evening, if things went as she planned, a homicidal ecdysiast would be in this cramped little dressing room with her intended victim.

I’d worked out my entrance line on the way over— the first thing I’d say when I saw her.

I had just said it: “You set me up.”

She stiffened when she heard my voice.

“Didn’t they arrest you?” she said.

“They let me go when I told them who the real murderer was.”

“Let me guess, Porkpie...I’m supposed to say ‘Oh, who’s that?’ and then you, in a voice rich with drama and pity, reply ‘You.’ ”

Sadly, that was exactly what I’d planned. I guess when you open with ‘
You set me up
,’ the rest of the conversation is fairly predictable.

“Very dramatic, Porkpie,” she said. “Unfortunately, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I wish that were true,” I said.

She turned to face me.

I was treated to the last full-frontal view of LuLu LaRue that I would ever enjoy.

I adjusted the brim of my porkpie.

“But you’re the one who killed her, LuLu. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to jail for it.”

The DJ popped his head through the curtains. “Ready to go-go in five minutes?” he asked.

LuLu nodded her head, curtly, and he retreated.

“You’re not going to be ready to go-go in five minutes,” I told her. “You might be available in twenty-five to life. But I doubt anyone’s going to want to watch you then.”

“You’re a real piece of work, Porkpie, you know that? Accusing me of murder to try to cover your own ass. And here I thought we were friends. It’s ludicrous. I was
out of town
, or did you forget? That’s the whole reason you were running my show in the first place.”

I shook my head. “Here’s the problem I had,” I began.

“Oh, that’s it? That’s all? You’re not even going to acknowledge the fact that there’s no possible way I could be the murderer?”

“I’m not,” I said, “because you are. Here was my problem: the murder weapon. A prop in an act. In order to plan a murder using a performer’s own prop, you have to know in advance that she’s going to be using the prop on the night you’re planning to kill her.

In this case, no one did. No one knew Victoria was doing that act; except for you and Cherries, no one even knew she was in the show.”

LuLu chuckled. “Look at you, Porkpie. Standing onstage, doing the grand finale. It’s like your murder mystery show—you’ve got the killer cornered, or you think you do, and you’re all ready for the big reveal. It’s cute, Porkpie—but if ‘no one’ knew she was doing that act, that includes me.”

“True,” I said. “But I realized something as I was talking to the cops: The murderer didn’t have to know
Victoria
was doing that act. She just had to know that
someone
was doing that act.”

“Someone,” she said. “Some mysterious act-doing person.”

“Three people knew that act was going to be performed that night. Angelina knew Angelina was doing the original version. Victoria knew Victoria was doing the plagiarized version. And you knew...not about Victoria, but about Angelina. You knew the odds were excellent Angelina was going to do that act. Because you set her up to do it
by telling her not to.”

“Wow,” said LuLu. “Reverse psychology. What a devious criminal mind I have.”

“Look, Angelina and I aren’t exactly close, but even I know her well enough to guess how she’d react if someone told her she could do any act but one. And, sure enough, that’s how she reacted. She brought the number you told her not to.”

“So?”

“So when you got to Topkapi on Wednesday night—”

“We’re forgetting, then, that I was out of town? I still have my train ticket, punched by the conductor and everything.”

“I’m sure you do. You’re not stupid. Which is why you know that’s no alibi at all. There are a thousand ways you could have returned to the city for the show. And as soon as the police start digging, they’ll find how you did it, even if you were smart enough to make the trip wearing the disguise you had on when you showed up at Topkapi. Keeping them strapped down for all that time must have been pretty hard on the boobs, huh?”

LuLu started. She had unconsciously been massaging a breast. She looked at me, and for the first time I saw a crack in the façade. I went on.

“You put on an overcoat to hide your hips, glued on a beard to cover your face, added a wig to conceal whatever the beard didn’t and a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes. Not even the people who have seen you perform in Allan Schmuck drag would recognize you in that get-up. And the final touch: the character himself, the sort of guy no one wants to examine too closely. You know from personal experience that most performers will go out of their way to avoid eye contact with a creep like that.

“You fooled me, that’s for sure. Even when you tried to force your way in early—risky, but a nice touch. It really sold the character. I didn’t suspect for a minute. Neither did Brioche, and she
talked
to you—that must have been a tense few minutes, but you pulled it off. You’re good, LuLu. Always have been.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said. Her voice was tight. “Coming from a man trying to set me up for murder, that’s a real compliment.”

“So,” I said, “you show up at Topkapi in full creep drag. No risk there—if anyone does recognize you, you just tell them you’re there undercover to see how the show runs when you’re gone, or some such nonsense. When you arrive, you look around to make sure Angelina is there, and you see her canoodling with her blue-mohawked girlfriend.”

I watched LuLu carefully as I said this. She kept her face completely still, but there was a slight, involuntary twitch of her eye.

“You wait until I stash Cherries’ bag for her, and then you duck behind the curtain when no one is looking. There are four black drag-bags in the alcove, all of them more or less identical. No problem, you think, the contents will tell me which one I’m after. And that was your big mistake. Because there was no way you could have known—no way anyone could have known—that two of these nearly identical bags would also have nearly identical contents. You open them one by one until you find the prop bottle you’re looking for, and then you replace it with the real poison and slip back out to mingle with the crowd at the bar. How could you possibly know that you’d tampered with the wrong bag?

“The suitcase you opened first was Victoria’s,” I said. “But the person you were trying to kill was Angelina.”

LuLu smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile.

“Your first inkling that something might be wrong comes when Victoria’s walks onto the stage. There you are, sitting in the front row, waiting to observe the results of your handiwork, and all of a sudden someone else is doing the act you expected Angelina to do, with a prop identical to the one you sabotaged. Or is it in fact the very one you sabotaged? It’s a fifty-fifty chance. Maybe you were tempted to stop the act before it went too far—but you couldn’t, not without revealing what you’d done. So instead you just sat there. Sat there and waited to see what would happen...

“And what happened, happened.”

LuLu’s face was still expressionless, but there was something in her eyes. Something I’d never seen there before.

“So there it is. There’s really only two questions left. The first, of course, is why you were trying to kill Angelina. I think I’ve got that one figured out. The way you talk about her, the way she talks about you, the way you reacted a couple minutes ago when I mentioned her canoodling with her new girlfriend— the whole thing reeks of bad breakup.”

LuLu said nothing, but she pursed her lips.