The Corpse Wore Pasties (7 page)

“I got pissed. But—”

“And when we told you that she’d won the ‘Most Humorous’ award at the convention for that number, what did you do?”

“I got even more pissed.”

“And when we told you that we’d informed the organizers that the number had been plagiarized, and they said they couldn’t do anything because the judges could only base their decision on what they’d seen and none of them had seen you do the act, what did you do?”

“I wrote her an email.”

“Before that.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. You lost it, is what you did. You lobbied the organizers to revoke the award, and when they refused you blew your freakin’ top. You remember? That night in the bar? The night you got the email from them saying their decision wasn’t going to change, and that if you kept harassing them about it they were going to take legal action against
you
?”

“I was pretty drunk that night. I don’t really remember everything I said.”

“You said you were going to strangle them all, starting with Victoria.”

“Well, I didn’t mean it
literally
, you jackass,” yelled Cherries.

“I’m not sure there’s such a thing as metaphorical strangulation.”

“Well, I didn’t strangle her. Or anyone else. Nobody got strangled. All I did was send Victoria an email telling her to stop doing my number. Which, as you know—and as I know you know because you mentioned it to me just last night—she agreed to do.”

“And you’re blonde, so you believe
everything
she says.” I got a certain perverse pleasure from throwing her words back at her. “And actually, now that you mention it, it occurs to me that I have only your word that you sent her an e-mail and she agreed to stop.”

“Oh, for— You want me to show you the damn email? I’ll show you the damn email.” She pulled her laptop from under a pile of papers and opened it. She logged into her email, scrolled down until she found the one she was looking for, and shoved the computer at me. “Here, look, there it is. Enjoy.”

I read Cherries’ original message, then Victoria’s response. There was something strangely familiar about the reply. I thought I knew what it was. But it wouldn’t hurt to check. I grabbed my phone.

Filthy picked up after one ring. “Where are you?” she said.

“I’m at Cherries’ apartment.”

“You’d better be having an affair with her, then. Because I swear, if you’re quote detecting end of quotation...”

“Did you save the email Victoria sent you when you wrote telling her to stop doing our number?”

“Why?”

“Read it to me.”

“Read it to you?”

“Please.”

Filthy sighed. “Hold on.” The sound of typing. “...here we go. ‘Dear Filthy,’ it says. ‘Oh, no! I had no idea you
also
did a number like that! I was inspired by one of my favorite movies...but I guess the acts really do sound similar. Weird! Now that I know that you do a number like this, too—’ ”

Reading from the screen in front of me, I joined Filthy for the last line.

“ ‘...I’ll
totally
stop doing mine out of respect for
you.
xoxoxo, Victoria,’ ” we read together.

“Yep, that’s what it says,” Filthy confirmed. “Did you hack into my email? If so, why the hell did you make me read it to you?”

“Actually, I was reading from the email she sent Cherries when Cherries told her to stop doing the football number.”

“You’re kidding me,” Filthy said.

“Nope. It’s word for word the same. She plagiarized her own reply.”

“I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you,” Filthy said. “So Victoria had a form letter she used when accused of stealing numbers. Now that you’ve uncovered this vital piece of information, you’ll be coming home, yes?”

“Not just yet. First I need to—” but I stopped there, because Filthy had hung up. Cherries, who had been in the room for the whole conversation, was rereading the email over my shoulder.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

“So. You ready to talk about last night?”

Cherries snorted, took the computer away from me, and closed it. “What can I possibly tell you that you don’t already know? You and I were in spitting distance of each other every second from the moment I walked in until the moment the show started.”

“Not every second. I was out by the stage, talking to Casey, when Eva ran into the dressing room to say that she’d seen Victoria out in the bar. You were in the dressing room.”

“Okay, so we spent one tantalizing moment apart. So?”

“So I didn’t see how the others reacted. Did anyone seem less surprised than everyone else?”

“You know, it’s funny, I had my surprise-o-meter in my bag, but I didn’t think to take it out just then. How stupid of me.”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know, Porkpie.”

“Did anyone’s reaction seem strange to you?”

“Brioche didn’t immediately do an interpretive dance about her feelings. I guess that’s pretty weird.”

“I meant—”

“Some might find it bizarre that we didn’t all rush out and kill her on the spot.”

“What about Victoria’s bag? Did you see anyone touch her bag at any point?”

“Porkpie, don’t ask questions you already know the answers to. You saw her. She had that bag clutched between her legs the whole time—at least, until she went onstage and left it with you.”

I didn’t much like the direction that remark was heading. I decided to try a different tack.

“When was the last time you saw her? Before last night?”

“Other than our weekly coffee date, and oh, every so often we’d take a nice trip to the spa, or a girls’ weekend up in the Catskills?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know. Not recently. Maybe a couple of months before she stole my number?” Cherries stood up. “Listen, Jonny,” she said. “It was great hanging out, and chatting, and all. But I’ve got a couple other close friends who are coming over to accuse me of murder later today, and I’d really like to shower before they get here. So if you don’t mind...?”

She opened the front door, and I made use of it. But I wasn’t done with her quite yet. I knew Cherries pretty well, and the way she was hustling me out of the apartment gave me the sneaking suspicion that there were things she wasn’t telling me.

“Hey, wait a minute.” I put my foot in the way of the closing door, a trick I’d learned in the pages of countless detective novels.

Unfortunately, those books were from a bygone era of hard-boiled men and sturdier shoes.

I gritted my teeth through the pain and attempted a last question.

“You had no idea Victoria was in the show until she walked into the dressing room?”

“How could I possibly have known? Did you know?” Cherries’ fingers drummed impatiently on the door.

“It’s just interesting that you happened to be doing the number she stole from you on the night when she happened to be there. Now, if—hypothetically—you knew she was going to be there...why, knowing you as I do, I’d guess you’d have chosen that act just to prove a point.”

“If, hypothetically, I knew she was going to be there? I’d have found someone else to take the gig for me so I didn’t have to look at the thieving bitch, rest her soul.”

“So was there a particular reason you decided to do the football number?”

“Yeah.” Cherries pushed my foot out of the way with a gentle kick. “I felt like it,” she said, and shut the door in my face.

I limped the five flights from her apartment down to the street.

The first interview hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. I was walking out with not much more information than I’d had when I walked in. The only thing Cherries had been able to definitively confirm was something I already knew: that once Victoria was backstage, there was no way anyone could have gotten into her suitcase to mess around with the prop bottle.

But now that I thought about it, there was one person who’d seen Victoria before that. The woman who was in the bathroom when the rest of us went backstage. The woman who had emerged from that bathroom just in time to see Victoria Vice walk in the front door of Topkapi: Eva Desire.

As I walked away from Cherries’ building, I scrolled through the address book on my phone—
Bambi, Brassy, Bunny, Cherries, Clams, Cookie, Creamy, Dirty, Filthy, Knockers, La Femme, Monkey, Precious, Peekaboo, Ruby, Tigger!, Tim
(and so forth and so on; as Officer Brooklyn observed, we are an industry of interesting names). But Desire wasn’t amongst them, at least not on my phone. As I feared, Eva and I had never exchanged numbers.

But I knew someone who had it. A woman I had overheard, just a few days ago, booking Eva for a gig.

Which meant I was going to have to do something I really didn’t want to do.

I was going to have to call home again.

“Are you having fun playing detective?” asked Filthy.

“I’m not playing detective,” I said. “I’m just asking questions.”

“If you’re a good boy and come home, I’ll buy you a magnifying glass and you can investigate the cats.”

“I need to talk to Eva.”

“Eva Desire?”

“Yes, Eva Desire.”

“She’s not here.”

“I didn’t think she was.”

“She might be here.”

“But she’s not.”

“No.”

“Do you have her phone number?”

“Yes, but...ohhhh. Too bad.”

“What?”

“She won’t answer.”

“Why not?”

“She’s got a gig right now.”

“In the afternoon? Who does a burlesque show in the afternoon?”

“Not a burlesque show. It’s another job. One at which she is unable to answer her phone.”

“Where does she work?”

“Why?”

“I need to talk to her, and I need to do it sooner rather than later. If I can’t call her, I’ll stop by her work—maybe she’ll be able to squeeze in a few minutes to talk to me.”

“Yeah, maybe she’ll be able to squeeze you in,” Filthy said. She sounded more amused than the statement seemed to warrant.

“Can you, Filthy, without additional commentary, please just tell me where Eva works?”

“If you go ‘undercover’ with her, I want pictures.”

“Oh, for—where the hell does she work?”

Filthy told me.

I tried LuLu again on the walk across town. Even though she was due back tomorrow evening, I was hoping to talk to her before she returned, to prepare her for the onslaught that awaited. I got her voicemail again. “Seriously, Lu,” I said, “I need to talk to you. Immediately. Call me. It’s really, really important.”

Dozens of blocks, several avenues, two beefy security guys, and a good portion of the contents of my wallet later, I found myself looking up at Eva Desire. The cost of the beer in my hand—part of the drink minimum required on entry, in addition to the cover charge, which accounted for the anemic state of my billfold—would have purchased me a liter of the cheap whiskey we keep at home. But never mind. It was the cost of doing business, or whatever it was I was doing. Because Eva’s “other job” was in one of those institutions one could frequent if one preferred a little more raunch, a little less irony, and a lot more physical contact with one’s nudity than one is offered at a burlesque show.

“Eva!” I said. Eva is one of the few people I know who uses the same name for every endeavor. She’s Eva Desire on the burlesque stage, Eva Desire in the byline of her articles for
Lick
magazine, Eva Desire topless at the strip club, and Eva Desire in the credits of that film she made, which Filthy insisted we add to our DVD collection. It was a pretty good movie, actually. A little short on plot, but...

Eva winked at me, wrapped her legs around the pole with which she had been dancing, and bent over backwards until we were nose-to-nose and she was thighs-, ass-, and shoulderblade-to-pole. Her nose, unlike mine, was upside down. Which meant that it was in the same state as the rest of her.

“Fancy meeting you here, Porky. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” she said.

“Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Do I look like I have a minute to talk?” The guy across from me slid a twenty into Eva’s thong. She winked at me.

“When do you get off work?” I asked.

“That’s the sort of question, Porky, that could get you kicked out of a place like this. Seriously, though, I’m on until four A.M., and then I’m going home to sleep. If this is a chat that needs to happen before tomorrow afternoon, you’re gonna have to buy a girl a dance.”

“Okay,” I said.

She grabbed the pole with one hand, slid her legs down until her ass touched the ground, and stood up. “It’s a date, Porky,” she said. “You’ll be the first stop when I’m making my rounds.”

She whirled around and put a stiletto heel on the shoulder of the guy across the way.

Twenty minutes (and another hit on my dwindling bankroll) later, Eva was leading me by the belt loop over to one of the vinyl benches that lined the wall of this fine establishment. She 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.

“Eva, you really don’t have to do that.”

“You paid for it, Porky.”

“All I want to do is ask you some questions.”

“The questions I’ll answer for free. But you bought a dance. I’m not going to rip you off.”

“Really—” I began, but Eva interrupted me. In the interests of propriety, I won’t say exactly how she accomplished that.

(I know what you’re thinking.
Propriety?
Don’t get me wrong—I see friends, acquaintances, and coworkers naked all the time. There’s nothing awkward about that. But it is with slightly less frequency that they dance with me as their only audience, and in a manner that brings their mostly naked bodies in frequent contact with my own, clothed though it may be. It created a situation that was slightly more—how shall I put this?—
friendly
than I was perhaps completely comfortable with. To avoid sharing that discomfort, I won’t describe the rest of Eva’s lap dance, and instead will report only the meat—sorry, the substance—of our conversation.)

“Just relax, Porky. It’s okay, loosen those shoulders—this isn’t torture. For that you’ll have to talk to Jillian.” I tried to relax. She wasn’t making it easy. “So,” she said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”