The Corpse Wore Pasties
Read The Corpse Wore Pasties Online
Authors: Jonny Porkpie
Eva sat me down. As a new song started, she untied her top, dropped it on the seat, and began to grind her hips in my direction. With each thrust, my head banged into the vinyl behind me.
“I told him, let the bitch have the name,” Eva said. “Let the bitch have the show. Let the bitch have the entire city of brotherly love, for all I care. I got the hell out of town. Had to go into debt to make the move, but I get to New York, score some bookings, start rebuilding my rep, and everything’s going pretty well...and then...” Eva’s voice trailed off. She took a deep breath, and when she looked at me again there was a fire in her eyes that made me nervous. “Then she walks into that goddamn bar last night. I got out of her life, she could at least have the decency to stay out of mine. But no. She can’t just let it go.”
“And when you saw her walk in, you were ready to kill her?”
Eva dropped to the bench, straddling my lap. She pressed her chest against mine, and leaned in close. Her lips brushed my cheek, and I could feel her breath in my ear.
“Porky, honey, baby, sweetheart, be careful what you accuse me of, especially in here,” she whispered. “You could be on the sidewalk and bleeding in five seconds. All I have to do is nod...”
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CORPSE
Wore
PASTIES
by
Jonny Porkpie
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-062)
First Hard Case Crime edition: December 2009
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London SE1 OUP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2009 by Jonny Porkpie
Cover painting copyright © 2009 by Ricky Mujica
Cover models: GiGi La Femme and Nasty Canasta
Author photograph copyright © 2009 by Don Spiro
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Print Edition ISBN 978-0-85768-361-8
E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-797-5
Cover design by Cooley Design Lab
Design direction by Max Phillips
Typeset by Swordsmith Productions
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Printed in the United States of America
Visit us on the web at
www.HardCaseCrime.com
For Nasty, without whom I’d still have my clothes on.
And for Lolly, who wouldn’t have read it, but would have liked that I wrote it.
Dear Charles,
Well, here it is, as requested, in all its obscene glory: a complete and mostly accurate account of the events that led to the closing of a certain bar on Eleventh Street. I’ve played it as close to the truth as I can, but you know me; I might have thrown in some slight exaggerations, the odd embellishment or two, and several completely fabricated erotic scenes. I just couldn’t resist.
In other words, it’s all true except for the stuff I lied about.
Best regards,
Porkpie
WEDNESDAY NIGHT
The heel of the stiletto caught on the strap of the black lace bra she had dropped a few moments earlier. She kicked it out of the way without looking. It skittered across the stage.
She held the bottle next to her breasts, so the audience could see that the pasties covering her nipples matched the skull-and-crossbones on the label. Then she lifted it to her face, and licked the large yellow letters on the label that spelled out the word poison. She tilted her hand. Bright green liquid flowed out of the bottle and down across her chest. Green dripped between her breasts, over her ribcage, around her navel, and soaked into the cloth of her panties.
She threw her head back, and lifted the bottle to her mouth. A strange look crossed her face as the liquid flowed past her lips. A trickle of green dripped out of the corner of her mouth, down her cheek, and along the sinews of her neck.
Cherries whispered something.
The woman on stage seemed to swallow, then suddenly stopped moving. Her eyes widened. She grabbed her throat, and spit the liquid all over the front row of the audience. The bottle fell from her hand, hit the stage with a dull thunk, and rolled in a lazy circle around her feet, liquid pooling in its wake.
Great. Forget paper towels, I was going to need a mop to clean up after this act.
She made a strangling sound, as if trying to scream, but instead started gagging.
I looked at Cherries Jubilee, standing next to me as I watched the act from the wings. She shook her head. “Not this part,” she said. “At least, not exactly. She drinks from the bottle, but...” The sentence trailed off.
The woman on stage stuck out her tongue and scraped at it with her fingernails, her mouth stretched in a convincing grimace of terror. Judging it purely on the basis of the performance—and I can’t tell you how much I hated to admit it, even to myself—this bit was actually quite good.
The music ended, but the number didn’t end with it. She kept going, flailing about the stage, pounding her chest, reaching out to the audience with a pleading look in her eyes. She jammed a finger into her mouth, two fingers, three fingers, and gagged again. She smeared the green across her face. Then her body went stiff and she fell to the stage, landing with her face in the cup of the brassiere she had just removed for our entertainment.
Great finale.
The audience thought so too. They clapped, cheered, whistled, hooted and hollered. A couple people were actually standing up.
But she wasn’t done. Throughout the ovation, she stayed where she had fallen on the stage.
Not completely immobile; every few seconds, she would toss in a death spasm, which would set the audience clapping again, even louder.
Finally, having milked the bit for all it was worth, she lay still. The applause died down. She stayed where she was.
It took us all a minute to realize that it wasn’t part of the act.
By the time we did, she was dead.
Half an hour earlier, I was completely surrounded by naked women, wearing only my boxers and porkpie hat.
It’s not as exciting as it sounds.
In the first place, I was at work—we’ll get back to that in a minute—and second, there was a distinctly chilly atmosphere in the room. An atmosphere that had nothing to do with the air conditioning, mostly because the air conditioning (as usual) wasn’t working. This was the sort of chill that comes from a cold shoulder, and even though I wasn’t personally on the receiving end—
Oh, right. Me. I should probably introduce myself. I’m Jonny Porkpie, known to audiences as the Burlesque Mayor of New York City. It’s not an elected position—I’m self-appointed—but I do take my duties very seriously. I try to spend as much time as possible pressing the flesh and polling the electorate—
Sorry about that. Habit. That sort of gag usually gets a laugh when I’m onstage, hosting a show. But you’re probably hoping for a more literate tone in your lurid paperback novel, so I’ll do my best to keep the double entendre to a minimum.
But I’m not making any promises.
See, I’m a burlesque performer. And when I say “burlesque performer,” I’m not talking baggy-pants comedian. Some have called me a no-pants comedian, but that’s not entirely accurate either. My acts tend toward the humorous, sure, but when push comes to shove, and bump comes to grind, I’m the same sort of burlesque performer that Sally Rand was, or Gypsy Rose Lee—though they had certain assets that I lack. And that particular pair of assets might, to an audience, be the ones more likely to inspire lust than laughter.
