Death by Pantyhose (9 page)

"Oh, my God!" Regan cried out. "Somebody
stop her!"

"Yeah," Spiro said, racing over to the fracas.
"I'm not insured for this kind of thing."

Funny how nobody else was all that eager to
save him.

Finally, Pete the bartender said, "Oh, well, I
suppose somebody's gotta do it," and leapt over
the bar.

But he needn't have bothered.

At that moment, Dorcas released her grip on
Vic's neck. She stared down at her hands, puzzled, as if waking from a bad dream. Whatever
rage had taken hold of her had drained away.
The volcano was dormant again.

Vic, however, was not nearly so calm.

He glared at her with undisguised loathing.

"You're going to regret this," he hissed.

And indeed, she would.

No way was I going to let Dorcas drive home;
the woman had chugalugged enough scotch to
open her own distillery.

"C'mon," I said, as I led her outside, "let's walk
over to Pinky's and get some coffee."

"Wait!" She stumbled over the doorjamb. "I
forgot my idea book."

Her "idea book" was a loose-leaf binder filled
with half-baked notions for her act. She'd taken
it out for our work session, only to ignore it with
the arrival of her first scotch.

"I'll go get it," I said.

I propped her up against the door and hurried back inside.

A desperate comic was struggling onstage for
the audience's attention but nobody was listening; most of them were still buzzing about the
dramatic scene they'd just witnessed.

At the bar, Manny was staring morosely into a
glass of cream soda. Allison, her face blotchy
with tears, was sitting with Hank, who held her
hand, patting it sympathetically. Although the
expression on his face was one of concern, I
couldn't help but notice a look of longing in his
eyes. I thought about what Vic had said, that he
was doing Hank a favor by breaking up with Allison, and wondered if Hank was secretly happy
at this recent turn of events.

I headed over to where Dorcas had been sitting. Her idea book was on the bar where she'd
left it.

Pebbles the barmaid was behind the bar, taking a surreptitious slug of beer.

As I reached for the notebook, I heard her say
to Pete, "Too bad she didn't go through with it."

"Yeah," Pete laughed. "For once Dorcas gave
people something they wanted to see."

I returned to the entrance and picked up
Dorcas where I'd left her, still propped up
against the door. Somehow I managed to steer
her over to Pinky's, where I spent the next hour
pouring coffee and bacon and eggs into her,
waiting for her to sober up. On the plus side, I
finally had an order of those fries I'd been lusting after all evening.

"I don't know what got into me," Dorcas kept
moaning.

Three double scotches and a strawberry margarita,
that's what.

"Vic got me so mad," she said, spearing a piece
of bacon, "something inside me just snapped."

"I understand."

Frankly, I didn't blame her for what she did.
Not the strangling part, of course. But the knocking Vic to the ground and putting the fear of God
in him part. He needed a dose of that.

"You should've seen the look on his face," she
said, sopping up the last of her eggs with a piece
of toast. "For once, the little rat looked scared."

Then she grinned.

"True confession: It felt great."

"I'll bet it did."

She sat up straight. All that coffee and animal
fat seemed to have revived her.

"I was a fool to let Vic get to me. Some day
he'll be punished for all the rotten things he's
ever done. I believe that what goes around
comes around. Don't you, Jaine?"

I couldn't have disagreed with her more.
Plenty of people went unpunished for their sins.
People like Lucrezia Borgia, Ivan the Terrible,
and the guy who invented spandex bike shorts,
to name just a few.

But I just smiled and nodded.

"Meanwhile," she said, "I'm going to show Vic
how funny I can be. I'm going to show everybody." By now her eyes were shining with determination. "I'm going to be a star, Jaine. And
you're going to help me!"

Talk about your Mission Impossible.

I signaled to the waitress.

"Check, please."

I walked Dorcas back to her car, then forked
over five bucks I couldn't afford to retrieve
Wheezy from the wise guy teenage valet.

"You going to be driving it home?" he smirked.
"Or pedaling?"

By the time I staggered home to my apartment, I knew there was no way on earth I could
work for Dorcas. I simply couldn't make her
funny. Not without a brain transplant.

I'd have to turn down the job. So what if I
didn't have the money for a new car? If I had to
ride around town on a bicycle, so be it. All I
needed was an excuse, some way to let Dorcas
down gently. Maybe I'd tell her I was entering a
convent. Or going on an unexpected honeymoon. Or joining the Peace Corps and moving
to the Fiji Islands.

Okay, so they weren't exactly believable, but it
was after midnight, and I was exhausted.

But I needn't have bothered thinking up excuses. As I was about to learn the next morning,
I wasn't going to have to write jokes for Dorcas
after all.

Not unless she planned on doing her act
from jail.

To: Jausten

From: DaddyO

Subject: Good Luck Gone Forever

Dearest Lambchop-

Now that Mom has given away my lucky shirt,
my life is a shambles. Here's a list of what's
gone wrong in the past twenty-four hours:

My computer crashed.

I lost eighteen holes of miniature golf to Ed Peters.

I sat on my prescription sunglasses.

And you know how I've always had great luck
finding parking spaces? Not anymore. I can't find
a parking space to save my soul. Yesterday I
had to park five blocks away from the post office
when I went to mail you that painting of dogs
playing poker.

What can I say, lambchop? Thanks to your mom,
my good luck is gone forever.

Your desolate,

Daddy

To: Jausten

From: Shoptillyoudrop

Subject: It's All in His Mind

Jaine, darling-

Daddy has been driving me crazy! He's
convinced that he's living under a black cloud of
bad luck. Of course, it's all in his mind.

I sneaked a peek at the e-mail he wrote you, and
it's all nonsense!

First off, his computer didn't really crash. When
the repairman came out to fix it, he discovered
that Daddy had accidentally knocked one of the
cables loose. That's all. Nothing was broken.
The big computer "crash" was just Daddy being
his usual clumsy self!

And all that moaning and groaning about losing
at miniature golf to Ed Peters. Ed always beats
him at miniature golf. That's what started the
whole Sunday brunch food fight that got Daddy
kicked out of the clubhouse. Now Daddy's convinced himself that he never lost to Ed when he
was wearing his "lucky" shirt.

And I don't care what he says. Daddy's never
had any luck finding parking spaces. Why, he'll
circle around till he practically wears out his tires
before he finally breaks down and pulls into a
parking lot.

As for his prescription sunglasses, Daddy's always sitting on them. In fact, the last time he sat
on them, he was wearing his "lucky" shirt!

But worst of all is something Daddy didn't write
about. He's convinced he's lost his ability to "perform" in the boudoir. You know I don't like to talk
about these kinds of things with you, darling, but
you can guess what that means-no dipsy doodle.

Oh, dear. If only I hadn't given away that silly
shirt of his.

Your frazzled,

Mom

P.S. I sent away for a male potency vitamin from
the Shopping Channel called "Vita-Mans."
They're Fed-Exing it overnight. Maybe that'll
help.

.almost choked on my rice cake when I saw the
-headline in the paper the next morning:

LOCAL COMIC STRANGLED
WITH CONTROL-TOP PANTYHOSE
ANGRY RIVAL ARRESTED AT SCENE OF THE CRIME

Under the headline was a publicity photo of
Vic, baring his teeth at the camera in a chemically whitened grin.

According to the paper, after he drove Regan
to the airport for her red-eye to New York, he returned home to the bungalow he shared with
Allison and started packing his belongings.
Only he never finished. Somewhere between his
dress shirts and his jockey shorts, he got murdered.

The cops found him sprawled out in the living room, strangled with a pair of pantyhose.
What's more, they found the apparent mur derer kneeling over him, still clutching the
pantyhose.

And that apparent murderer was Dorcas.

I blinked in disbelief. When I last left Dorcas,
she was upbeat and hopeful. What on earth had
happened? Instead of going home to plan her
rise to stardom, she'd obviously decided to
switch to Plan B and strangle Vic instead.

"Omigosh," I said to Prozac, who was hard at
work sniffing her genitals. "The comic I was
working for just got arrested for murder."

Whatever. Got any anchovies?

Shaken by the news, I headed to the kitchen
for a refill on my coffee and another rice cake.
(Okay, so it wasn't a rice cake. It was a cinnamon
raisin bagel. With butter. And jelly, too, if you
must know.)

Not that I was surprised that Vic had been
killed. This was a guy begging to be murdered. I
just had a hard time believing Dorcas did it.
True, she'd almost strangled him at the club. But
I remembered the look of bewilderment on her
face when she realized what she'd just done.
She simply didn't seem like a cold-blooded
killer to me.

Then it occurred to me that with Dorcas in
jail, at least I wouldn't have to write jokes for
her. But on the minus side, it meant I was back
at square one, in desperate need of a writing assignment.

So reluctantly I put Dorcas out of my mind
and shuffled over to my computer to look for
work. I checked the postings on Monster and
Adweek. Nothing. Not unless I wanted to be a fry
cook, a scuba instructor, or a male exotic dancer.

With a weary sigh, I opened my parents' e-mails. What did I tell you? I knew Daddy would
drive Mom crazy over that silly shirt.

I blushed when I read the part about their
"dipsy doodle" problems. I couldn't imagine my
parents having dipsy doodle, let alone having
problems. In fact, all medical and biological evidence to the contrary, I prefer to believe that I
was brought into this world by a cartoon stork.

But I couldn't worry about my parents and
their newly acquired dependence on Vita-Mans.
Not now. Not with "Buy a Car" at the top of my
To Do list.

Then, just as I popped the last of the bagel in
my mouth, I had a brainstorm. Why not call Andrew Ferguson? After all, his bank had offered
me a job last year; maybe they had something
available now.

I reached for the phone but then got cold
feet. What if Andrew thought I was using my job
search as an excuse to call him? I didn't want to
look like a dating desperado. Which I was, of
course. But still, I didn't want to look like one.
Oh, who cared what I looked like? I needed a
job, and I needed it badly. Appearances be
damned.

I picked up the phone and dialed.

"Union National," a receptionist chirped.

"Andrew Ferguson, please."

I was on hold listening to a spiel about Union
National's friendly personal service when a
clipped secretary's voice came on the line.

"Sam Weinstock's office."

Damn. The last person I wanted to talk to was
Sam.

"I must have the wrong extension. I was looking for Andrew Ferguson."

"You have the right extension. He's working
with Ms. Weinstock. Whom shall I say is calling?"