The Corpse Wore Pasties (5 page)

“LuLu LaRue.”

Officer Brooklyn snorted. “You strippers and your names,” he observed.

“So why were you running the show tonight?” Officer Bronx said.

“If you want to know about that,” I said. “I’ll have to start further back.”

“Hey, take your time,” said Officer Brooklyn. “It’s not like there’s anyone else we gotta talk to tonight, is there?”

“Last I checked, he’s the only one here,” said Officer Bronx.

“It was about a month ago,” I began.

Filthy Lucre and I were sitting at the bar enjoying a post-show drink when LuLu LaRue wrapped an arm around each of us.

“Can you guys do something for me?” LuLu said.

“Right here on the bar?” asked Filthy. “Both of us?”

“
For
me, sweet cheeks, not
to
me. Not tonight, anyway. I just found out I have to leave town next month for a couple days, and I need someone to cover Dreamland for me when I’m gone. I’ll book it, make the setlist, publicize, and all that, just like I always do. All you’d have to do is host and make sure the night runs smoothly. Casey takes care of most of it, actually.”

“When?” Filthy asked, taking her calendar out of her gig bag.

LuLu told her the date.

Filthy shook her head. “I’m booked at the Gilded Heel that night. But Jonny is available.”

“Am I?” I said. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“Ha ha, Jonny,” said LuLu. “Seriously, will you do it? I’d feel a lot better.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“So you’re claiming,” said Officer Brooklyn, “That LaRue asked you to run the show?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re sure
you
didn’t ask
her?
”

“Why would I do that? I have my own shows to produce. I don’t look for additional stress. It was a favor for a friend.”

“Favor...for a...friend,” echoed Officer Bronx, as she wrote the words in a little spiral-bound notebook.

“So you and this LaRue are pretty close, huh?”

“Close enough to do each other this kind of favor, sure,” I said.

“Way things worked out, bet she won’t be asking you again, though, huh?” Bronx said.

Brooklyn chuckled.

Hilarious. And it reminded me that I was going to have to call LuLu on her trip and break the news to her. I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.

“So, then, tonight.” Brooklyn said, interrupting my train of thought. “You said you got there early. When, exactly?”

“I don’t know
exactly
—it was after 8:30, I’m sure of that.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The comedy show had just started.”

Bronx flipped through her notebook. “Comedy show is supposed to start at eight o’clock,” she said.

“And that,” I replied, “is how I know it was after 8:30...”

I got to Topkapi early because I was running the show.

It wasn’t a dive bar. Not quite. But it sure wasn’t a Broadway theater. Still, Topkapi wasn’t a bad place to do burlesque, and the Dreamland show was always a fun gig.

The venue is basically two big rooms. The one you walk into off Eleventh Street is designed for drinking. It’s fairly standard for the neighborhood—a long wooden bar lined with stools along one wall, a banquette against another, and a few tables scattered about between. If you were there when no show was happening, you might never know that behind the black curtains at the back of the room was a pair of French doors. And that through those French doors was a rather spiffy little performance space.

When I got there, the first thing I did was make my way to the back of the room and duck behind those curtains. Between the fabric and the French doors is a small alcove in which performers can store their bags until the comedy show lets out and we can get into the dressing room. There were a couple suitcases there already, so I added mine to the pile and headed back out into the bar. I glanced around to see which of the performers had arrived before me, and saw Angelina Blood sitting in one of the darker corners. Which didn’t surprise me because—

Angelina Blood—Officer Brooklyn interrupted—she was the one doing the same act as the victim?

Probably be more accurate to say that the victim was doing the same act as her, I said.

Another friend of yours? Angelina?

I wouldn’t call her a friend. I know her. Not well. But it—

—didn’t surprise me that she was in one of the darker corners because that’s the way Angelina likes it. Dark. And by dark, I mean the lighting conditions, the hue of her clothes, the tone of her acts, everything about her. She doesn’t wear a lot of what you might call colors, and the numbers I’ve seen her do have all had something to do with the devil, dismemberment, or death. Don’t get me wrong, they’re some of the best devil, dismemberment, and death acts in the business. She’s good at what she does, and I respect that, but she’s not a person you’d invite to a tea party.

Plus, she seemed to be in the middle of an intimate conversation with a girl with a spiky blue mohawk and a leather jacket, so I decided I’d put off saying hello until later. There was no one else there I knew except the bartender, so I sat on a stool and ordered a whiskey.

A few sips into my drink, Cherries Jubliee showed up. She pushed open the front door with her ass because she was trying to talk on the phone, write in her calendar, hold a cup of coffee, and drag her suitcase all at the same time. Once inside, she attempted to wend her way through the rapidly growing crowd. An officious looking brunette with a clipboard in hand got out of the way, pulling with her a blonde girl nervously clutching a bag from the sex toy shop a few blocks away, but others were less accommodating; a ratty guy in an overcoat who walked in after Cherries glanced around quickly before shoving past her and heading towards the back of the room. And when Cherries had said ‘excuse me’ for the third time to a pair of fashionably unshaven boys feigning disinterest in their surroundings, I took pity on her and decided to lend a hand. I pushed between the boys, grabbed her bag, and brought it through the curtains to stash it in the alcove with the others. When I emerged, Cherries was sitting on my stool, and Angelina and her friend with the blue mohawk were walking in her direction.

I joined them. The mohawk shook my hand and introduced herself as Krash, with a K. She had quite a grip. “So, dude, you’re, like, hosting this show?” she asked.

“Sure am,” I said, and she shoved a flier into my palm.

“My band,” she said. “Playing tomorrow night. Gonna rock. You can plug us, right? I mean, on stage? Tonight?”

I explained that we usually only announced events featuring performers in the show.

“No, no,” Krash interrupted. “It’s cool. My girl Angel’s gonna be doing a cameo tomorrow.” Angelina looked vaguely surprised by this news, but nodded her head, so I promised them I’d do my best to remember, and stuffed the flier in my pocket. Behind their backs, Cherries rolled her eyes and hung up her phone.

Then Jillian Knockers walked in. After stowing her suitcase, she joined us at the bar and immediately baited me back into an ongoing argument we’d been having about whether or not a burlesque act needs to have “an arc” to be successful. We had discovered some time ago that we were actually in complete agreement on the issue, but we kept the debate going both because we enjoyed pushing each other’s buttons and because it was an amusing way to kill time before a show.

Eva arrived next. By way of greeting, she kissed us all on the lips—everyone except Angelina, who doesn’t really invite that type of casual intimacy—before she dropped her stuff behind the curtain.

Brioche was the last of the performers in the show to arrive...at least, that’s what I thought at the time. “Order me a Sauvignon blanc,” she shouted out as she headed towards the alcove with her bag. It took me a couple minutes to get the bartender’s attention, and when I rejoined the discussion, Jillian had convinced Eva and Cherries to take her side in the debate, which made it three on one. I liked those odds, mostly because they sounded so sexy, so I jumped back into the fray and was in the middle of a defense so impassioned it had set Cherries giggling, when the wine and Brioche arrived at the bar simultaneously. After hearing both sides of the argument summarized, she agreed with me, but did so in a typically unhelpful way, quoting some French philosopher I’d never heard mentioned outside my freshman theater history class. Eva threw her hands in the air, claimed there was only one place she would be able to compose an appropriate rebuttal, and stormed off towards the bathroom.

I remember that I was smiling, because I was starting to have a good feeling about the night. Some nights you just know are going to go well. LuLu had booked a great mix of excellent performers. This, I thought to myself, was going to be fun.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, a fact that would become very apparent in less than a minute.

The doors to the back room opened and the audience for the comedy show filed out looking vaguely depressed. We gathered our belongings from the alcove and headed backstage. As I held the curtains open for the other performers, the guy in the overcoat who had pushed by Cherries earlier tried to follow them in, but I stepped in front of him and explained the situation:
The house isn’t open yet. It will be another half an hour. Feel free to enjoy a drink at the bar.
I thanked him for coming and pulled the curtains closed in his face. Even then, I had a feeling this guy was probably going to end up in the front row. He was just that type.

I made my way down the aisle and towards the door to the dressing room, but stopped halfway there when DJ Casey called out for me.

“Mr. Mayor!”—Casey always calls me Mr. Mayor—“Your speech!” He came out from behind the DJ booth and handed me the setlist for the night, together with a note from LuLu. At least, it seemed to be from LuLu; the handwriting was hers. But it said something I didn’t think LuLu LaRue would ever say: that there was an addition to the lineup of tonight’s show, and that addition was Victoria Vice.
I know it shakes things up a bit,
LuLu had written, the understatement practically dripping off the page,
but I’m sure you can make it work.
I started to ask Casey if this was for real—LuLu had been known to pull the occasional prank—but was interrupted when Eva Desire threw open the French doors and stormed into the room. She was clearly pissed off. Casey and I cleared the aisle as Eva blew past us, yanking her bag behind without regard for her surroundings. Her suitcase rattled back and forth, the wheels never quite catching the floor at the same time, careening into the seats with such force that one teetered precariously. Eva stormed past the stage, through the open curtain, and into the dressing room. The chair swayed on two legs for a moment before crashing to the floor.

“You’ll never guess who I just saw out there,” I heard Eva say, her voice loud enough to carry into the house where Casey and I stood, and perhaps even out into the bar. Before anyone had a chance to guess, she blurted it out: “Victoria. Victoria Goddamn Vice is here to see the show. I wish I was kidding.”

“Hold onto your acts, girls,” Jillian said. “She’s on a fishing expedition.”

“Do we have to let her in?” Eva said.

Casey picked up the fallen chair. I headed back to break the news that the situation was in fact much worse: Victoria wasn’t here to see the show, she was here to perform in it.

The reaction was about what you might expect, a cacophony of obscenity that would make a lot full of construction workers blush. There wasn’t much time to get used to the idea, either, because a few seconds later, Victoria herself burst through the French doors and strolled down the aisle and into the dressing room, dragging her little black suitcase behind her.

We all got undressed in silence, an experience I’d never had in a burlesque show dressing room before, and hoped never to have again. I had just dropped my pants when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to find Victoria with a copy of the setlist in one hand, a can of spray tan in the other, and an insincere smile on her face...

As I continued telling my story, I watched the cops’ faces. If I was reading them correctly, my narrative didn’t seem to be diminishing their suspicion of me one iota. And any doubt about that observation was erased with the next question they asked me.

“That bottle you handed her,” Officer Brooklyn said, scratching his eyebrow casually. “Here’s the thing about it: only two sets of fingerprints on it. One of them belonged to the victim. That second set...well, whose do you think they’re going to turn out to be?”

Subtle, he wasn’t.

“Mine,” I guessed.

Both officers feigned surprise.

“Oh, yeah?”

“You seem pretty sure about that.”

“Maybe there’s something you want to tell us?”

“Tell us now, things’ll go a lot easier for you.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” I said, “Between your blatantly accusatory tone and the fact that I’m the only person you invited on this little field trip, I figured I was probably the only person other than Victoria that anyone saw touching that bottle.”

“Oh, yeah, Sherlock? So what does that tell you?”

“It tells me that I’d have to be a complete idiot to attempt murder in that manner with fifty people watching.”

Bronx shrugged. “You said it, I didn’t.”

Brooklyn said, “Maybe you’re too clever for your own good, what about that?”

“Or maybe,” I said, “just to propose an alternate theory that doesn’t involve me in any way, Victoria simply put the wrong bottle in her bag when she packed for the show that night. A real one instead of the prop one. How does that grab you?”

Brooklyn’s smile turned into a full-blown grin. He seemed to be under the impression that I was digging myself a deeper and deeper hole. It made me nervous.

“You know what’s funny about that?” he said. “We sent—”

He stopped abruptly when the door to the interrogation room opened to reveal a man wearing a suit that probably cost him more than I make in a year. His hairpiece was one of the best I had ever seen, and unless you were looking very closely, you would never have noticed the facelift. He looked at me, nodded, then turned to the officers.