The Corpse Wore Pasties (12 page)

I replied that I had not yet chosen a school, but I planned to apply to several and see where I got in. Brioche smiled, to indicate that she was aware that I was attempting to be amusing.

“Well, whichever you end up embracing, most will tell you that I simply don’t fit the archetype of a murderer. You, on the other hand, frequently display three out of the ten winsome attributes outlined in the writings of the Chinese philosopher—”

“What was your problem with Victoria?” I interrupted. A crash course in Chinese philosophy was not what I needed right now, especially if it was going to explain how I made a better murderer than she did.

“How shall I put this? You are, of course, aware of the underlying metaphor behind contemporary Swedish dramatist’s Nypa Botten’s earlier poetic works, taken as a whole. His version of the Personius myth—removing all references to Personious himself, of course—provides a reasonable analogy for the situation.”

I had a sneaking suspicion that she was making this up as she went along. On the other hand, if anyone would have a working knowledge of obscure Nordic playwrights, it was Brioche. My best course was probably to try to play along. When the need arises, I can shovel it with the best of them. It got me through college.

“I fail,” I bullshat, “to see how the parallel can be contextualized to a modern paradigm, but perhaps that’s because we’ve yet to adequately define our terms. Perhaps you can clarify the essence of your metaphor in contemporary rhetoric?”

Brioche furrowed her brow, but not in a manner that suggested she thought what I’d said made no sense. Rather, her expression was one of serious consideration. “Contemplate if you will,” she said at last, “the central image-slash-paradox of that fable, the conundrum of the lizard and the yew tree. An imperfect correlation, I admit, but to take a step back from it and regard instead a crumbling stone on a wall some three miles distant, and a blade of grass about to be crushed by a single drop of dew, that will give you some idea of how the situation developed.”

I attempted to formulate an appropriate response, but found my ability to circumlocute had atrophied over the years. So it was back to the straightforward approach. “Are you telling me,” I asked, “that you and Victoria used to be friends, but she screwed you over?”

“Hardly, Jonny Porkpie. Hardly. There was always a dissonance there.”

“So she stole one of your acts?”

The look of disdain Brioche gave me would have wilted a block of concrete. “Have you even
read
Nypa?” she said.

“Not since kindergarten,” I said. This was getting me nowhere. I decided it was time to try a different angle. A more practical angle. “Listen. When you arrived at Topkapi, you asked for someone to order you a drink while you went to stash your suitcase— white wine of some sort?”

“A blanc seems not implausible.”

“You and the glass of wine showed up at the bar almost simultaneously, and we both know it takes a few minutes to get a drink at Topkapi. Tossing your bag into the alcove should be a matter of twenty seconds. So what took you so long? Were you looking in someone else’s bag?” I dropped the question quickly, hoping to surprise her, and watched her face to see if her reaction gave anything away.

That reaction was a perplexed stare. Not very helpful. “Another person’s bag? For what reason?”

“Any of several,” I said.

“Such as...?”

“Such as, to discover which act she was planning to perform.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Jonny Porkpie. One must always respect the liminal space inherent in another artist’s luggage.”

“All right, then what
were
you doing that took you so long?”

“I think,” she said. “Or rather, I seem to think...that I was talking to someone. Yes.”

“Who?”

“An archetype. One of those who comes to shows reeking of sweat and desire. One who is by definition the definition of himself, and no more. He was lingering in the vicinity of the curtains. I’m always intrigued by the observations of such men on the art of burlesque. It’s a perspective to which I do not often have access.”

“And what were his observations?”

“If I remember correctly, he expressed an ardent appreciation for the specifics of the unclad feminine form.”

“He said that?”

“Not exactly.”

“What did he say exactly?”

“He said he liked the tits.”

“Classy.”

“Rather.”

“What did this archetype look like?” I said.

“Archetypal. It was dark. I didn’t absorb a lot of detail.”

“In general terms, then.”

“Sometimes a cloud will be split by the wing of a plane. A tangle of briars on a mountaintop. The drip of sordid rain.”

“Less general than that.”

“Are you familiar with the works of the Dutch Master von Snuifje?”

I shook my head.

“Were this man to have been painted, it would have been by von Snuifje. I’m sorry, but that’s as specific as I can get.”

She paused to consider.

“Oh,” she said, “And he was wearing an overcoat.”

Ah, yes. The creep in the overcoat.

As a pretext for her delay, it wasn’t bad. I had seen the guy lurking by those curtains myself, and turned him away when he tried to follow us into the dressing room. And it would be just like Brioche to take an anthropological interest in one of the less palatable members of the burlesque audience.

Of course, she could be lying—she might have remembered my interaction with him at the door and seized on him as a convenient excuse. But then, it wouldn’t be hard to track down a guy like this; based on his behavior, I had a feeling he was a frequent burlesque attendee. Since Saturday—bump and grind’s busiest day of the week—was just around the corner, if I didn’t find him at one show, I’d find him at another. So her statement could be fairly easily proved or disproved, and she would know that. Which meant that for the time being I was going to assume she was telling the truth.

She was still a suspect; she could have tampered with the bottle then talked to the guy briefly to establish an alibi. But on further consideration, that scenario would have required a degree of calculation and practical thinking on Brioche’s part that had not thus far been apparent in my interactions with her.

In other words, my final suspect, while not wholly in the clear, was as unpromising as the first four had—

It hit me then, like a poorly thrown brassiere.

Brioche wasn’t my final suspect.

The man in the overcoat was.

The more I contemplated the idea, the more I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. A suspiciouslooking creep spending a suspicious amount of time right in the vicinity of the alcove where Victoria’s bag was stashed? That same creep later sitting exactly where a murderer might sit if he wanted a front-row seat to the results of his handiwork? This guy seemed tailor made for the part of homicidal maniac, and I had been ignoring him entirely.

Granted, as a candidate for prime suspect, there were two problems with the creep. First, as far as I knew, he had no motive. It wasn’t hard to conceive of possibilities—he was a jilted fan of Victoria; he was obsessed with one of the other performers in the show and exacting revenge on her behalf; so forth and so on. But theorizing and proving are two different things. And cops prefer proof.

The second problem was that I had no idea who he was.

But I had an idea where I might find him. In the same place I was thinking of looking for him when he was merely Brioche’s alibi: at one of the burlesque shows he probably frequented. It wasn’t a perfect plan, I admit. If I couldn’t track him down, I’d be no better off than I was before I tagged him as a suspect. But at least now I had something to work with.

Brioche had been sitting quietly, scrutinizing my face as I worked through the idea. I stood up, thanked her for her time, and left her place eager to track down my new lead.

And, as an added bonus, I wasn’t dead.

How about that, Filthy?

I told you so.

Unfortunately, adding a suspect is a far cry from convicting a murderer, and there was still a triple-D bra full of information I didn’t have. Like an answer to the question that had been bothering me from the moment I got LuLu’s note the night of the show: Why the hell had she booked Victoria in the first place? (As Cherries said: Why would anyone?) If I knew that, I’d know...well, something. Maybe it would lead to a person other than LuLu who knew beforehand that Victoria was going to be performing that night. And that, I realized, would be useful. Because in order to premeditate murder, it helps to know that the victim is going to be in the location at which you premeditate killing her.

The only person who could answer these questions was the person who’d booked Victoria in the first place, and that was LuLu. I was tempted to try calling her again, but I decided not to—I didn’t feel like another heartfelt conversation with her voicemail. Instead, I went to her website. I knew that tonight was the night she was due back in town, and the “Schedule” page on her site confirmed it. She would be hosting the midnight show at the Gilded Heel. I checked the time. Midnight was still several hours away, but that was just as well. It would give me some time to mull over what I’d learned so far.

But the street’s no place for contemplation, and dry’s no way to do it. So I found a quiet bar with a late happy hour, ordered a pint, and sat in a corner with my back to the wall. Still being careful, as promised.

In my head, I went through my newly expanded suspect list: the five performers who were in the show, plus one creepy guy.

All six of them had opportunity, some more than others. Unfortunately, the two with the most opportunity— the creepy guy, who’d spent a lot of time near the alcove, and Angelina, who’d arrived early—were the ones with the least evidence of motive. (Angelina developed a motive pretty damn quick once the show began, but that didn’t mean she had a reason to paw through Victoria’s bag before.) Next up was Brioche. She had lingered near the alcove with only the creepy guy for company, and until I managed to track him down there was no way of knowing how much of that time she had spent chatting and how much she’d had available for potentially more homicidal activities. Then Eva—she might have emerged from the bathroom sooner than she had let on and taken a moment to tamper with Victoria’s bag before rushing backstage to tell the rest of us who she’d seen. Then Jillian, who’d spent barely half a minute behind the curtain with the bags, though that was probably just enough time to switch a fake bottle of poison for a real one. And coming in dead last in terms of opportunity was Cherries, because I had stashed her bag for her. As far as motive went, I figured those last four were pretty much on equal footing, even if I’d need to learn Danish to decipher the exact nature of Brioche’s complaint.

So how to narrow it down?

If LuLu had shared the fact that Victoria was going to be in the show with anyone, that would point pretty decisively in the direction of that person. But what if LuLu hadn’t? What if no one else knew?

I took another sip of my beer. As I watched the bubbles float up from the bottom of the glass, a theory began bubbling up in my brain. By the time nothing remained of my drink but a thin layer of foam, that theory had become a full-fledged supposition, and one that sounded pretty damn good to me. It was pure conjecture, with no evidence to support it, but if true, it provided a more than satisfactory explanation for one aspect of the problem at hand.

It went something like this:

Let’s say Victoria wasn’t the only one to arrive early that night. Let’s say the murderer—we’ll call her ‘M’ for short—did too. Why? Plenty of possibilities: Maybe our Miss M is going out to dinner and wants to drop her bag in the alcove so she doesn’t have to drag it to the restaurant. Maybe she’s meeting a friend (Krash, for example) at Topkapi for a pre-show drink. Maybe she just feels like winding down at the bar before getting up on stage. Any of these explanations would do, and so would about a thousand others. Anyway, the why didn’t matter, just the fact that she got there early.

As she approaches Topkapi, M sees Victoria walking into the bar, dragging her bag. M asks herself: “What the hell? Why is
she
here—and why does she have a gig bag with her?” Rather than confronting Victoria, M watches through the window, staying out of sight. She sees Victoria go into the bar. Sees Victoria talking to Casey. Sees Casey point her towards the alcove. Sees Victoria go behind the curtains with her bag and emerge without it.

“I wonder,” M thinks, “what exactly that bag contains. Is it perhaps an act Victoria has stolen? If only there were some way I could look inside...” As it turns out, M gets the chance to do just that, because the next thing she sees is Victoria leaving the bar. M hides herself in a doorway until Victoria is out of sight, waits until the bartender’s back is turned, and sneaks through the bar to take a quick peek in the alcove. When she opens Victoria’s suitcase, she finds a gothic black dress —so far, not terribly suspicious. Lots of performers have similar dresses. But when M digs further, she finds the black rose and the bottle marked POISON. She recognizes the props from Angelina’s act, either because she has seen Angelina do the number or because she is Angelina. Either way, she’s furious. Maybe she considers stealing the props, or even the whole suitcase, to sabotage the act, but then it occurs to her that there might be a way to put the kibosh on more than just this one incident. Maybe there’s a way to prevent Victoria from stealing acts...permanently.

M knows that the number Angelina performs using these props includes a bit where she drinks from the bottle of poison. And if Angelina does it, it’s a pretty good bet that the plagiarist will do it too. After all, that’s what Victoria does, copies other people’s acts, move for move, beat for beat, bump for bump, twirl for twirl.

But what if the bottle actually contained what it says it contains? What if, instead of whatever harmless beverage she filled it with originally, Victoria found herself pouring actual poison into her mouth while in the process of stealing the act? It would be poetic justice, something that might appeal to any of the five women in the Dreamland show that night.