The Corpse Wore Pasties (18 page)

Eva shrugged.

“That’s quite a long time to be doing that.”

Eva shrugged again.

“So you don’t have an alibi for those two hours.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you were doing what you said you were doing, it’s pretty much by definition a solitary activity. For something to count as an alibi, you need to have people who can back it up.”

“Oh, I do. Witnesses.”

“Witnesses?”

“Sure—the cameraman, the lighting girl, the sound woman, the director, the—”

“Ah,” I said.

“I’ll give Filthy a copy of the DVD when it comes out. For your birthday.”

“That’s very sweet,” I said, crossing Eva off my mental list. “Thanks.”

“That’s it? I’m free to go?”

“That’s it,” I said.

Eva headed toward the door.

“Wait,” I called after her. “Don’t you need to use the facilities?”

Eva chuckled. “No, Porky. I just came in because Filthy told me you were here. I can’t wait to tell her what we did,” she said, and left.

I went back into my stall. This had to be the most ignominious series of interrogations ever conducted in the history of murder investigations.

When Brioche came into the bathroom a moment later, I didn’t bother to ask her about the creep—I’d gotten as much out of her on that subject as I suspected I ever would. So I went right to the question of what she’d been doing before the show. She offered the oldest answer in the book and the weakest I’d heard yet.

“I was washing my hair,” she said.

“Your hair,” I said.

“Yes, Jonny Porkpie. My hair. In what way is the statement confusing?”

“Were any of your roommates home? Can they verify that you spent two hours washing your hair?”

“Oh, I wasn’t in my house. The hair-washing is a ritualistic statement about the fallacies of the industrial beauty myth as contextualized in contemporary American civilization. I am performing it as an installation piece every night this month at the Miskin Gallery. It’s entitled ‘Uncleansed Locks: The Sham of Shampoo.’ I walk through the crowd, completely naked, and seat myself in a bathtub in the center of the gallery, which represents the internal conflict between representation and essence—”

I’ll skip the rest. I didn’t need to hear it and neither do you. What it boiled down to was that Brioche, too, had a roomful of people who could verify her whereabouts from six o’clock until ten minutes before she arrived at Topkapi.

One more woman out of the running.

That left only one. The one I’d suspected it might come down to: the victim’s own most recent victim, Angelina.

About ten minutes later, she walked in. She was back in character—or rather, back out of character. I was pretty sure that the Angelina of burlesque was closer to her real personality than the one I’d seen in the offices of the trade magazine fulfillment services company. The thick black eyeliner was back on, the long black hair was down again, and the outfit was black and gothic again.

This interview was going to be trickier than the others, both because Angelina was now my number one suspect and because she was the least positively disposed toward me of all the women in the show. If any of these women were likely go running to the cops to get me arrested, it was her. I decided that the best plan was to put myself between Angelina and the exit before she realized who I was.

I was almost quick enough. But I guess something about the way I was moving made her suspicious, or maybe it was the fact that I’d stepped out of a stall with an “out of order” sign on the door. She stuck a foot out as I was attempting to sneak by. I tripped on it and fell face down on the tile floor.

I rolled over quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid the knee that pressed itself to my throat. I felt her fishnets against my neck.

“Hi,” I squeaked.

“You,” she said.

“Yeah. Hey, could you...?” I said, tapping on her leg. She shook her head, but eased up enough that I could breathe again.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” she said.

“I want to ask you a couple more questions, Angelina. Then I’ll leave you alone.”

She snorted. “I suppose it’s easier on my girlfriend’s knuckles then having her beat the crap out of you again.” She swung her knee off my throat and I pulled myself up. “You have lipstick all over your face,” she said.

I wiped my mouth on the back of my arm.

Angelina crossed her arms and waited for me to talk.

“There was a guy in an overcoat at the show on Wednesday—do you know who he was?” I said.

“No.”

“Did you see him?”

“No.”

“He was hanging out by the curtain.”

“Didn’t see him.”

“How long were you at Topkapi before I arrived?”

“Didn’t see you come in.”

“Before Cherries arrived, then.”

“I don’t know, five minutes. However long it takes to stash a bag, order a drink, and sit down.”

“First time you were at the venue that day?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Dinner.”

“Where?”

“Midtown. Near my office. Krash met me after work.”

“When’s that?”

“I get out at 6:30.”

“Can the people at the restaurant verify that you were there?”

“I have the credit card receipt. You want to see that? Shall I show you that?” She dug in her purse, pulled out a black leather wallet, rifled through it, snatched out a slip of paper and shoved it in my face. “There. Happy?”

I looked at the date on the receipt—this past Wednesday—and the time. Then I looked at the address of the restaurant.

“How did you get downtown?” I asked. Instead of answering, she shoved another receipt at me. This one was for a taxi. A taxi that had dropped her off at Topkapi at exactly the time she claimed to have arrived.

“Are we done?” said Angelina.

“Soon. Look, tell me this: Why did you insist on doing the show that night?”

“I’d been booked for months.”

“But LuLu asked you to switch dates. Why wouldn’t you do it?”

“LuLu never asked me to switch dates. I wouldn’t have done it even if she had—I’m not inclined to do that woman any favors—but she didn’t.”

“What do you mean you’re—?”

“Enough,” she said, pushing me out of the way. “You said a couple questions, that was over a dozen. I’ll use the men’s room.”

The door creaked shut behind her.

Would she call the cops? All I could do was hope not. I couldn’t do anything to prevent it, since I was stuck in this bathroom until I knew for a fact there were no longer any cops watching the Daybreak.

I washed my face in the sink and reclaimed my perch in the stall. My theory was, rather appropriately for my surroundings, down the toilet, so I needed to come up with a new hypothesis, and quick. There was still the creep in the overcoat, but nobody who might have seen him had any idea who he was, and if I hadn’t been able to track him down on a Saturday night packed with shows, I wasn’t optimistic about my chances of finding him at all. And if all I had to work with was my original five suspects, I was going to need to come up with a version of events that didn’t require the murderer to have seen Victoria walking into the venue at the time she stowed her bag. Who was the philosopher who claimed he did his best thinking on the can? Archimedes? Or was that in the bathtub? At any rate, it wasn’t working for me. When the door opened again a few minutes later, the only thing that had come up was a cramp in my leg.

“You still in here?” Filthy’s voice echoed off the tile walls.

“Where would I go?” I kicked open the stall door.

“Step into my office.”

“You get what you needed?”

“Not really.”

“That’s not what Eva said.”

“Filthy—”

“Nice girl. We should really have her over for dinner sometime.”

As enjoyable as the suggestion sounded, I just wasn’t in the mood right now. “Everybody had alibis,” I explained, pacing back and forth across the bathroom. “All of them. Still need to be verified, but I’ve got a feeling they’ll all check out. They seem pretty damn solid.” I stopped in front of Filthy and looked her in the eyes. “Unless you’re lying about that dinner, Filthy, and Cherries did it. With you. You and Cherries. Together.”

“Wow,” she said. “You’re really that desperate?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “All I’ve accomplished tonight is to investigate myself right back into being the main suspect. Oh, except for a creepy guy no one but me and Brioche seems to remember.”

What she didn’t say was
I told you so
. I could tell that she wanted to, but she didn’t. It’s one of the reasons our marriage has lasted as long as it has. Instead, she said: “Buy you a drink, sailor?”

“Buy me a bottle.”

She shoved me back into my stall. “I’ll come get you when the coast is clear,” she said, and left the bathroom. I closed the door and reclaimed my perch.

A couple minutes passed, but Filthy didn’t come back.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen.

It made sense. People tended to linger after they ate. She was just waiting for people to clear out before she came back for me. The delay didn’t mean anything, I told myself. It didn’t mean anything at all.

Twenty minutes.

Twenty-five.

Finally, I heard the creak of hinges. I pulled my legs up, just in case it wasn’t Filthy coming back, and peeked through the crack.

The bathroom door was opening slowly, slowly. That was weird.

And no one was walking in. That was weird, too.

Then I saw the movement—it was hard to make out with the limited visibility the gap in the stall allowed, but I thought I could see a hand coming through the door. It was reaching into the bathroom, feeling around on the wall.

Why?

The light switch. The hand was looking for the light switch.

And it found it, and flipped it.

Blackout.

Usually, to a guy like me, a blackout signals the beginning of a show...or the end. I was hoping this particular blackout wasn’t indicating the latter.

The door swung open. A figure was briefly silhouetted against the light of the diner behind. It wasn’t a woman’s figure.

The door groaned closed, leaving the room completely dark.

A faucet was dripping, across the room. I hadn’t noticed it before. In the dark, it echoed eerily. Ominously. It was dripping ominously.

Drip. Drip.

The echo was louder than the footsteps were.

Drip.

The footsteps were very quiet.

Drip, drip.

And they were making their way toward my stall.

Creeping in my direction. Very very slowly.

The air conditioning fan kicked in. It hummed, a throbbing rusty whir, not quite drowning out the dripping. But drowning out those footsteps.

I’d felt better when I could hear them.

Whuh whuh whuh.
The AC fan, overhead.
Drip.
The faucet. Outside the bathroom, the muffled sounds of a diner doing normal business. Silverwear on dishes. Plates clattering. The low hum of conversation.

Hours passed.

Seconds passed.

Days passed.

No time passed at all.

Whuh whuh whuh whuh.

Drip drip, drip drip.

Tap, tap, tap.

That last sound—the tapping—was on my stall door. A light but insistent knocking. I held my breath.

The knocking kept going. And I could hear the breathing of the person doing it. The breathing of someone either overweight or perhaps wearing a heavy overcoat in the middle of summer. A sinister breathing.

An evil breathing.

Another knock.

I stayed where I was.

Drip...drip...thump—CRASH!

Hardware ripped from the frame as the door swung in at me. I jumped back, hitting my spine on the pipes behind. The door banged against the wall. The figure stepped towards me, and I heard a—

Click.

The dark was less blinding than the light.

The flashlight was directly in my eyes. I put a hand up to block my face, but the spots still swam in my retinas. The light traveled down my body, rested for a moment on the toilet, and then crept slowly back up to my face.

I heard a chuckle. A triumphant chuckle.

I was going to die on this toilet.

“Am I interrupting something?”

The voice of Officer Brooklyn was large enough to fill the entire ladies room of the Daybreak Diner.

“ ’Cause if I’m interrupting somethin’,” he said, putting the flashlight under his arm as he reached for the pair of handcuffs on his belt, “I can always come back later.”

“So lemme get this straight,
Senator,
” Officer Brooklyn said, leaning back in his chair. I had already reminded him several times that my title of choice was “the Burlesque Mayor of New York City,” but he had decided he preferred “Senator of Striptease,” and he wasn’t the type to let things go. “You were tryin’ to track down some creepy guy in an overcoat with scraggly hair, a scraggly beard, and sunglasses. A guy who just happened to be at the show that night, and who you claim is the only person who could possibly be the murderer.”

The interrogation room of the Ninth Precinct was every bit as charming as it had been when I was last here, though the intervening days had left it a bit dingier. But then, so was I. I’d never been invited to a slumber party in a New York City precinct house before, and hoped never to be again. Officers Brooklyn and Bronx had taken me out of the cell in the early hours of the morning and shoved me back into this room with a stale donut and a surprisingly good cup of coffee. The case file was spread out on the table in front of me, with a photo of Victoria’s corpse on the top of the pile of papers, where, I imagined, they hoped it would tweak my conscience. The two detectives had taken turns trying to convince me that I was a murderer. Brooklyn was currently at bat.

“That’s right,” I replied.

Brooklyn shook his head. “That’s a pretty flimsy premise. For a creative guy, you ain’t too creative.”