The Corpse Wore Pasties (14 page)

“But why her? I mean, I know why
her,
there’s plenty of reasons someone might want to set her up like that. But why you? I don’t remember you mentioning that she ever did anything to you.”

“She didn’t. Not directly. A lot of my friends. You. But not me.”

“So what made you decide it was your job to teach her a lesson?”

She slipped her arms into a bra, and reached around behind her back to hook it. She adjusted her breasts in the cups, then picked up a t-shirt. “It just sort of happened, really. She emailed me a couple months ago out of the blue, saying she was going to be in town this week and asking for a booking at Dreamland. As if I didn’t know about the things she’d done to my friends. I thought it was good for a chuckle and a quick delete, but the friend I was hanging out with had a different idea: a show called ‘Just Desserts.’ It would star Jillian and Filthy and Eva and as many other people as we could cram in that Victoria had screwed over... and Victoria herself would be the very special guest.”

“If that was the concept, why include Angelina? She didn’t have any problem with Victoria—at least, not until that night.”

“Angelina...” LuLu pulled the t-shirt over her head with a sigh. “She was booked for that night long before we ever came up with the idea. I asked her to switch dates, but she refused. I don’t know if you’ve seen how she gets—”

“I’ve seen how she gets.”

“Right. So I figured, what the hell. One wildcard won’t matter.”

“I see. And why didn’t you at least let the rest of us in on the scheme?”

“I don’t know. Loose lips, and all that, I guess. The fewer people know, the less chance it gets back to Victoria.” She shook her head. “Don’t look at me like that, Jonny.”

“Who was the friend?”

“What?”

“The friend you were hanging out with. The one who suggested ‘Just Desserts’ in the first place.” I had a sneaking suspicion I knew who it was—I could smell that particular acerbic sense of humor from a mile away, but I hoped I was wrong. I desperately wanted to be wrong.

“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

“If she’s the murderer, she’s already in trouble.”

“I don’t think she’d do anything like that.”

“Who was it?”

“I really don’t—” She ran a hand through her hair and pulled at the bottom of her t-shirt.

“Lu, come on. This isn’t a game. We’re talking about difference between the police arresting a killer and the police arresting me.”

“Jonny—”

“Who?”

LuLu took a deep breath.

“Cherries.” She said.

Cherries.

I was right.

Damn.

And after all that crap she’d been giving me backstage. “Why the hell would LuLu book her?” she’d said. My ass. She’d strung me along like a pink feather boa in a sixteen-minute striptease, amused herself by accusing me of the very thing she was doing: withholding knowledge of the fact that Victoria was in the show that night.

Damn it, Cherries was my friend. If she was a murderer, too, I’d kill her.

“Just because the show was her idea, that doesn’t necessarily mean she killed Victoria,” LuLu said.

“Right,” I said. “Sure.” I turned and walked out of the dressing room, across the stage and out through the curtains, past the chairs and to the bar. LuLu followed me. I ordered a round. We drank for a few minutes in silence.

“Hey,” LuLu said, finally. “This is going to sound terrible, and I’m not saying I believe that Cherries would—you know. But if she did, I mean, you know, well...am I an accessory to murder?”

I shrugged. I didn’t have much else left in me. LuLu bit her lip, finished her drink, said goodbye, and went backstage to get her stuff.

It was late. Very late. But I wasn’t ready to head home yet.

So, here’s how I ended up in the Hindenburg.

I was at the bar. I was drinking another whiskey—a double—with a whiskey back, a whiskey on the side, and a whiskey chaser.

I was thinking of ordering a whiskey.

The Gilded Heel was closed for the night, but they sometimes let performers hang around after the doors are locked, until the staff is ready to go home.

Liquid courage, some call it, the brown stuff in my hand. But it wasn’t doing me a whole hell of a lot of good. It’s one thing to accuse a friend of murder in a general sense, as one of a group of potential suspects. But it’s quite another to actually have proof. I had proof. And I’m not just talking about the 80-proof in my glass.

I thought it over. I wanted to be sure. I wanted to be
very
sure.

I was pretty sure. Unless she was lying, and I didn’t see any reason why she would be, LuLu’s revelation had shoved Cherries right up to the top of the suspect list. But pretty sure wasn’t sure enough, not when it could lead to one of us spending the rest of our life in prison.

I took a sip. The more I thought about it, the more things pointed in Cherries’ direction. She certainly had motive enough, and as for opportunity—well, if she had shown up early and tampered with the bottle, it wasn’t hard to imagine her deliberately staging an overblown, hands-full arrival later, to get me to stow her bag for her in order to shield herself from suspicion. Just on a performance level, it was the sort of thing she would have enjoyed.

Then there was the thing she said right before Victoria dropped dead.

“And then she dies.”

At the time, it just seemed like a description of what would happen next in the act. She’d seen Angelina do the original, after all. But like I said, I knew Cherries’ sense of humor pretty well. She loved making oblique remarks that only people in the know would understand. In this case, she would have been the only audience for her own wit, but that had never stopped her before.

But would she go as far as to kill someone? Even someone she hated? I didn’t want to think so. But finding out that someone plagiarized one of your acts—especially one of your best acts—was the artistic equivalent of a punch in the gut. I knew from experience. And Cherries had a temper; the woman held a grudge tighter than an undersized g-string. Who knows what might drive someone completely over the edge?

I took another sip. I was taking my time with the drink, putting off for as long as I could the moment when I’d have to leave the comfort of the Gilded Heel, step out into the warm, dark night and...do what? Tell the cops what I had learned? Go home? Confront Cherries?

Then came the tapping on the front door. The bartender finished wiping the glass in his hand, put it on the rack above his head, and walked around the bar. He pulled the shade on the front door back an inch to peek outside. When he did, I saw a glint of streetlight reflected on something metal. He unlocked the door and opened it a crack—which was strange. They never let people into the Gilded Heel after closing time, not even performers. If you were in, you were in. If you were out, you stayed out. Unless...

Unless the flash of metal had been a badge.

Because a cop was one of the few people for whom the doors would be opened after hours.

I told myself I was being paranoid. It was 4:30 in the morning. This was probably the night porter, just getting to work. What would the police be doing here at this hour? And even if it were the NYPD, there were a thousand reasons they might be knocking on the door that had nothing to do with me.

Then I remembered the bodega. If the clerk had decided to be a good citizen and call his local precinct to report that a long-haired, hat-wearing man had behaved in a suspicious manner while purchasing a bottle of Pest-Aside Liquid Rat Poison, and word had filtered through the building until it reached the desks of Officers Brooklyn and Bronx...

When your top suspect in a murder by poison buys another bottle of the stuff, you might decide that it’s time to hit the local burlesque haunts and try to track him down, see if you can figure out what he’s doing with it sooner rather than later.

But no, I told myself again, I was just being paranoid. And I kept telling myself that until I heard the voice.

There was no mistaking that voice. Even through the door and across the room, the accent came across clearly. If it wasn’t Officer Brooklyn, he had a twin brother who was also on the force. And if the voice wasn’t enough to convince me I was in trouble, what it was saying did.

“...looking for a performer,” the voice said. “Name of Jonny Pork—”

I hopped off my stool and headed towards the back of the room. Before Officer Brooklyn had finished his sentence, the emergency exit door was closing behind me.

Twenty minutes later, I looked up at Cherries’s window and tried to picture how the big denouement was going to play out. My stern accusation, her tearful confession (well, probably not tearful—Cherries wasn’t the crying type), her flirtatious attempt to convince me to keep my mouth shut, my firm and cold insistence on justice, and then perhaps a short bout of attempted murder to prevent me from revealing her secret. What better way to end a Friday night?

I rang the bell.

“Yeah?” her voice sounded tense, even through the intercom. She hadn’t been asleep, I can tell you that.

“Porkpie,” I said. The lock clicked, and I pushed the door open. I still had five flights ahead of me before I could accuse my friend of homicide. I took the stairs slowly.

Not just because my knees hurt, either.

Cherries’ apartment wasn’t locked. I walked in, leaving the door open behind me, which is never done in New York City (except, of course, in sitcoms written by those L.A. writers from Ohio). But I figured, since I was probably no safer inside than out, why not leave myself an unobstructed escape route?

The room was dark. The streetlight threw a dramatic glow through the window, casting sharp and ominous shadows over the clutter of Cherries Jubilee’s living room. The light streaming in from the hallway behind me revealed the star of the scene slumped on her couch wearing nothing but a button-down shirt and a pair of boys’ Y-fronts. The shirt, fastened with a single button, barely covered her body from her neck to her thighs.

“So,” she said when she saw the expression on my face, “you found out.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I found out.”

“I didn’t lie to you,” she said, pointing one finger at my chest.

“What?”

“I was very careful not to lie to you. I mean, crime of omission, sure, but I never flat-out
lied
.”

“You never
lied
to me?”

“Never.”

“Does that matter, Cherries?”

“Look, I know you’re mad at me, and I’m really sorry—”

“
Mad
at you? You’re
sorry?
Are you insane? I mean, of course you’re insane, you killed someone, but...”

“I did what?”

“Killed someone.”

“Bullshit.”

“Oh, come on. You had a grudge against Victoria— justified, absolutely, but still a grudge, so you set up the revenge show with LuLu—”

“What? The show was her idea!”

“That’s not what she says. And anyway, who are you talking to? I know you. You’re a born instigator. You got LuLu to book the rest of us in that show to spread the suspicion around among five equally angry suspects. Or maybe you didn’t even plan to kill her originally, but when you looked in her bag and saw that she was still stealing numbers, you lost it...”

I ran Cherries through the rest of the scenario. I told her about Victoria arriving early with her bag, about the poison available at the nearby bodega. I enumerated the things that pointed her direction, like the comments she had made at the show that no longer seemed innocent. When I was done talking, Cherries stood up.

She walked towards me. I stood my ground. It was clear she wasn’t hiding any weapons in that outfit.

Cherries stepped around me and closed her front door. I heard a lock being locked, then another, and the rattle of a chain.

She strolled over to her kitchen. As she walked, I couldn’t help noticing the bottom of the shirt sneaking up to reveal her...but no—this woman was a killer. An incredibly sexy killer, but a killer nonetheless. She opened a drawer and I heard the rattle of cutlery.

Call me crazy, but it sounded like knives. I don’t know if knives have a different tone than other silverware, but to me, at that moment, it sounded like knives.

I glanced at the front door. With three pieces of hardware to navigate in order to unlock it, it would take longer for me to open than it would for her to stab me to death. The door to her bedroom was closed, as was the door to her bathroom. So my quickest egress was the nearest window. But it was only open a crack. Could I get to it and squeeze through before she could reach me?

Cherries turned to face me. Something glinted in her hand.

She took a step in my direction.

Then turned to her fridge, opened it, and took out a beer. She used the bottle opener she was holding to pry the cap off, then put it back in the silverware drawer. She brushed against me as she walked by again on her way to the couch. She sat down and crossed her legs.

She took a long swig of the beer, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. She wiped a bit of foam off her lip. “So,” she said. “Just to clarify, in order for your little theory to work, I would need to have been in and out of Topkapi long before the time you saw me arrive, is that right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So if I were somewhere else during all that time, would that eliminate me from consideration?”

“If you could prove it, I guess.”

“Here’s the thing, Porkpie. From about six o’clock until about ten minutes before you saw me walk in the door, I was having dinner with a friend.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Who?”

She looked at me.

There was a mischievous twinkle in her eye that was wholly inappropriate given the circumstances.

“Your wife,” she said.

Ah.

An alibi.

Cherries had an alibi. I hadn’t been thinking along those lines. But she was right: my theory required the murderer to arrive at Topkapi initially sometime between seven p.m., when the bar opened, and when I arrived at nine. So anyone who had an alibi for the two hours before the show was out of the running. And Cherries had just presented a doozy of a witness.