Franki Amato Mysteries Box Set

by Traci Andrighetti

  Shaking myself from my dessert daydream, I approached the tub. But my foot got caught on the birdcage stand, and I went flying. Using my hands to break my fall, I bumped into a six-foot-long oyster shell, and the top opened to reveal an enormous fake diamond.

  "Some stripper doesn't know her gemology," I muttered as I rubbed my aching wrists.

  Since I was already on the floor, I crawled around the tub and examined the exterior. The epoxy was smooth except for a few chips on the lip. Next, I leaned into the tub and noticed scratches down to the cast iron right above the overflow faceplate. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the marks were a crude carving of a mermaid followed by several X's, all of which had circles around them except for the last one. I wondered whether the designs were made by Lili St. Cyr or whether they'd been done more recently, possibly even by Amber.

  The sound of shoes scraping on pavement startled me from my thoughts. I looked up figuring that I'd find Glenda.

  Instead, a bald man stood over me who was so massive that I halfway expected him to shout "Fee-fi-fo-fum!" Only, it wasn't his size that spooked me—it was his eyes. The irises were ice blue, but the whites were as black as coal. And in that moment, they held the same sociopathic stare as Malcolm McDowell's character in The Clockwork Orange.

  They say that your life flashes before you when you die, but all I could see was Bradley's worried face as he told me that strip clubs were dangerous.

  Then everything went as black as the scleras of the giant's demonic eyes.

  8

  The pungent odor of hay assailed my nostrils, and something stabbed at the backs of my arms and legs. I tried to think—to remember where I was—but my mind was in a fog. Am I back in Texas? In a barn?

  I opened my eyes a crack and saw a flesh-colored mass hanging over me. It was coming in and out of focus, but it looked like…an udder?

  Okay. It was one thing to wake up in a barn, but it was quite another to be underneath a thousand-plus-pound cow.

  Convinced that my eyes were playing tricks on me, I squinted at the mass. There were four teats all right, but two of them were covered with…purple peace-sign pasties?

  "She's coming to," a familiar female voice said.

  "Don't let her sit up," another added. "Wait until the whiskey comes."

  I snapped my eyes shut. This was no Texas barn, and that was no udder—it was Glenda and Bit-O-Honey leaning over either side of me in the prop room.

  While I pretended to be passed out, I had to wonder whether those pasties comprised the outfit that Glenda had changed into and whether Bit-O-Honey went through life topless until she had to put on a costume to perform.

  Warm flesh pressed against my leg, and my eyes, understandably, flew open. Glenda had planted her bare bottom beside me on my sickbed, which I now realized was a big bale of hay, and she was coming at me with a feminine hygiene product.

  All of the sudden, I longed to be beneath that cow in that barn.

  "What shook you, sugar?" she asked, dabbing at my forehead with a thong panty liner.

  The giant's face came back to me in a flash. "There was a huge man in here, and the whites of his eyes were black—like a zombie's."

  "Oh, that's Iris," Bit-O-Honey bubbled as her boobs bobbed above me. "You know, our bouncer?"

  "Wait. Stop," I said, shooting a pointed look in the direction of her breasts. "Iris is a man?"

  "It's a nickname," she explained. "Because his eyes are so blue?"

  I massaged my forehead—for so many reasons. "And no one thought the black parts were worthy of a reference?"

  "Those are corneal tattoos, Miss Franki." Glenda flipped her hair and, unintentionally, a breast. "And Iris is sensitive, so we try not to comment on his appearance."

  I closed my eyes instead of rolling them because it took less energy. If you asked me, any man who tattooed his corneas needed to have a thick skin, both literally and figuratively. "So, I take it that this hay is for one of Saddle's acts?"

  "No, it's for The Wrangler," Bit-O-Honey replied.

  Now my eyes were rolling because I felt a VIP Room story coming on.

  "He's another one of our regulars, Miss Franki," Glenda said as she tamped down the edge of a protruding peace sign. "He likes the girls to neigh like horses and stomp around in hay while he tries to lasso them."

  I snorted. "That's not degrading, or anything."

  "It depends on how you look at it." Glenda leaned back on her hands and kicked her legs like a Rockette before crossing them. "Here at Madame Moiselle's, we subscribe to a feminist view of stripping."

  I stared at her and wondered whether my ears were as woozy as my brain. "And what would that be, specifically?"

  "We're exploiting our exploiters tit for twat," Bit-O-Honey explained as she took a seat on the lip of a large stoneware pot labeled "Winnie the Pooh."

  I suppressed a smirk. These strippers might know their feminist theory, but they needed some serious instruction when it came to common objects and expressions. "You mean, tit for tat."

  "No, sugar," Glenda said, batting her purple eyelashes. "She means tit for twat."

  Bit-O-Honey nodded. "Amber used to say that we shouldn't objectify ourselves," she began, balancing with splayed legs on the honey pot, "and that men should pay us reparations for exploiting us for so long."

  I looked at the ceiling and chewed the inside of my lip. Free money seemed to be a recurring theme where Amber was concerned, but the feminist aspect was new. I wondered again whether she'd found someone to fund her.

  "Here's that whiskey," a mousy male voice announced.

  I turned my head and saw Iris holding one of Madame Moiselle's signature "cock-tail" glasses, and I bolted up on my bale despite his Mike Tysonesque tone. But when my eyes crossed and his merged into a Cyclops eye, I had to lie back down.

  "Iris, you gave Miss Franki quite a fright," Glenda scolded as she took the glass from his hand. "You've got to quit sneaking up on people like that."

  "Well, I didn't mean to," he whined, twisting the bottom of his faded Marilyn Manson concert t-shirt. "She didn't see me when I came into the room before because she was looking at Amber's pictures."

  I bolted up again, but this time only to my elbows. "Do you mean those etchings in the claw-foot tub?"

  He opened his eyes wide. "Yes, ma'am."

  I cringed at the "ma'am" even more than at the black scleras. "I didn't realize you knew Amber."

  "I don't. Uh, I didn't," he stammered, rubbing his shaved head. "Another dancer told me that Amber did those drawings. Maybe."

  "Well, did she, or didn't she?" I asked, pulling myself into a sitting position.

  "She did." He gave a lizard-like blink. "That is, Maybe."

  "Wait." I held out a hand. "You mean, Maybe Maybe?"

  Glenda looked from me to Iris and then shot my whiskey. "I'm starting to think that we need to take both of you to the damn hospital."

  "I'm fine," I said looking with regret at the empty glass. "He's talking about a dancer named Maybe. And according to Eugene, she's the friend that Curaçao is staying with."

  Bit-O-Honey blinked. "Are you talking about Maybe Baby?"

  I almost said, "Maybe," but I caught myself in time. "I guess."

  "Well, I know her," Glenda exclaimed. "She lives over in The Marigny by Carnie."

  "That's good, because we need to pay her and Curaçao a visit." I started the process of standing up. "But first I need to go home and take a hot bath and get a few hours of sleep."

  "I'm with you, sugar," Glenda said, rising to help me. "Right now, I'm too pooped to pole dance, much less private investigate."

  As we entered the club, a member of the cleaning crew turned on what the dancers liked to call the "ugly lights," i.e., the overheads that showed all of one's physical imperfections.

  Angling a glance at Glenda's pasties, I asked, "Um, do you need to go upstairs and get your shirt?"

  "Shirt?" she repeated as though it were a foreign word. "Now that yo
u mention it, Miss Franki, I did forget something. I'll be right back."

  Glenda strutted toward the stairs, and I leaned against the stage for support. I was half asleep and still kind of shaken up, which meant that I was in no condition to drive home. Deciding to let Glenda do the honors, I pulled my keys from my bag and promptly dropped them. When I crouched to pick them up, I saw a flash of light reflect off something between the wall of the stage and the pile of the red carpet. After a few minutes of searching, I found the culprit—a tiny glass tube covered in some kind of oil.

  Sitting on my knees, I inserted the tip of my car key into the opening of the tube and lifted it to my nose. It had an earthy odor. As I examined it for branding, I noticed silver stilettos with a stripper-on-a pole heel in front of me.

  "What'd you find, Miss Franki?"

  I looked up to see Glenda in a white, floor-length feather boa. It wasn't a shirt, but it was a start. "Is this container from a product the dancers use?"

  She leaned over and sniffed the tube. "That smells like dirt, sugar. We professionals stick to the basic man magnets—baby oil, cocoa butter, or vanilla perfume."

  "That's what I was hoping you'd say," I said as I wrapped the tube in a tissue and dropped it into a zippered compartment in my bag. Because I had an idea of what it was. It was a long shot, but if I was right, it was going to add a whole new dimension to this case.

  My Mustang skidded into oncoming traffic, and then Glenda swerved back into our lane.

  "I might've taken that turn a tad too fast," she said, taking a deep drag off her cigarette holder.

  I pulled a few of her boa feathers from my mouth and began feeling my head for knots. Because surely I'd suffered a brain injury when I fainted at the club, and that's what had prompted me to ask her to drive. "Would you please slow down and get your foot back inside the car? You're supposed to use it, you know, to brake?"

  Her head retracted into a flock of feathers. "Well, who ever heard of using two feet to drive?"

  "Only everyone who went to driving school," I snapped as I checked my seatbelt. "Where'd you get your license, anyway?"

  "License?" she scoffed as she pulled the car to a stop in front of our fourplex. "What would I do with one of those?"

  That explained the reckless ride. "Oh, I don't know. Abide by the law, use it for ID?"

  "This is New Orleans, sugar." She exited the car and threw her boa around her neck. "Abiding by the law is a matter of personal choice, and everyone knows who I am."

  She had me on both counts. I shook my head and climbed from the car, and I wondered why Glenda had parked on the street.

  Then I glanced at the driveway, and the screechy-scary shower-scene music from Psycho pierced my brain like a blade.

  "Glenda," I whispered, "please tell me that Veronica's boyfriend Dirk drives the exact same car as my mother."

  She squinted and exhaled a cloud of smoke. "No self-respecting single man drives a station wagon, sugar."

  I put my hand to my mouth. "I was afraid you'd say something like that."

  We contemplated the maroon Ford Taurus in silence, and then I crossed myself because I didn't know what the hell else to do.

  Glenda dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out with her shoe. "Family shouldn't stay under the same roof, Miss Franki. Do you want to sleep in my champagne glass?"

  It was a tempting offer. I'd crashed in her glass once before after partying with some pirates, and it was a little cramped but not half bad. "Nah, I'd better go in and face the music," I said, thinking mainly of that Psycho soundtrack. "If my mother is here, then something's up."

  "Whatever," she said with a shrug. "Just remember, my champagne glass is your champagne glass, sugar."

  I watched with envy as she sashayed up the stairs, and then I slowly unlocked the door to my apartment and tiptoed inside. Even though I was thirty years old and had done nothing wrong, I felt like a teenager coming home past curfew—not that I ever did that, of course.

  My mother was stretched out supine on the chaise lounge, snoring with her mouth wide open, and Napoleon was watching me warily from the bearskin rug. Clearly, my mother's unexpected visit had set him on edge too.

  I turned and closed the door.

  Napoleon growled like the traitorous terrier that he was, and my mother jerked awake. "Francesca Lucia Amato!"

  A wave of guilt washed over me. There was something about hearing your mother say your full name that instantly elicited a sense of shame.

  "Where have you been?" she scolded as she sat up in a nightgown that looked like it had come from the set of The Golden Girls. "It's—"

  I waited while she slipped on her bifocals and looked at her watch.

  "—six o'clock in the morning!"

  "I was working," I said, clutching my bag against my chest as though I were hiding cigarettes or booze—not that I ever did that, either.

  "All night?" she shrilled. "I thought that you wouldn't have to work the graveyard shift anymore after you quit the police force."

  "I still work in crime, Mom," I said as I deposited my bag on the coffee table, "so I have to investigate whenever the need arises."

  "Well I don't know how you're going to raise a family working these hours," she said as she adjusted the hairnet that protected her bouffant brown bob.

  I almost replied that the only thing that was going to keep me from having a family was my family, but I held my tongue—between my clenched teeth. "How'd you get into the apartment, anyway?"

  She slid her feet into dingy white slippers. "Veronica let us in."

  My mouth formed a grim line. So, while I was busting my hump for Private Chicks, Veronica was probably busting a gut at the thought of me coming home to find my mom lying in wait like a lioness in my living room. "Why didn't you tell me you were coming?"

  "We wanted to surprise you, Francesca," she said as she struggled to lift herself off the chaise lounge.

  The Psycho screeching sounded again. "We?"

  She pushed past me on her way to the kitchen. "Your nonna came with me, dear."

  Of course, I couldn't see the expression on my own face, but I imagined that it looked a lot like Janet Leigh's did when Norman Bates pulled open the shower curtain dressed like his mother and wielding a knife.

  "We had to share your bed since it's the only one in the apartment," she continued as she opened a can of Folgers.

  There went the sleep I'd hoped to get.

  "But your nonna kept me up half the night going back and forth to the bathroom, so I had to come out here." She pointed a spoon at me. "Then she woke me up at three a.m. and asked me to get her enema bag from the trunk. You know how backed up she gets before a big trip."

  Aaaand there went that bath. "Yeah, so, what's the occasion for the visit?"

  "It's a belated birthday present," she replied, spooning coffee into the filter.

  The gift that keeps on giving.

  "Also," she began, filling the carafe with water, "it's been a long time since your nonna returned to her old stomping grounds."

  My nonna and nonnu had emigrated from Sicily to New Orleans and raised my father and my four uncles there. So, I'd long known that a visit from my nonna was inevitable, but I'd naively assumed that my parents would've given me a heads-up so that I could prepare—i.e., stock the refrigerator, buy an air mattress, attend a few therapy sessions.

  "And the timing couldn't have been more perfect," she added, pouring the water into the coffee maker, "because your nonna can help her old church friends make the bread for the St. Joseph's Day table."

  This time, instead of hearing the Psycho soundtrack, I felt Norman's knife stabbing into my flesh. Now I knew why my nonna was here—it was to make sure that I stole a lemon from that damn altar. "Mom, I'm not going to steal from a church."

  She almost dropped the carafe. "Well, you most certainly are not, young lady."

  To the world at large, I was now a "ma'am," but to my mother I would forever be a "young lady." Was there
no end to the injustices? "Mom, I'm talking about the lift-a-lemon-snag-a-spouse tradition."

  "Oh, that," she said, shoving the carafe into the machine. "It hardly counts as stealing, Francesca. After all, that food is there to be eaten. And besides, at this point, what've you got to lose?"

  Only my last shred of dignity and possibly my spot in heaven. No biggie.

  She flipped the switch to the coffee maker. "I've got to go get your nonna out of that bathroom so I can do my business." She pasted a smile onto her face. "And when I get back, we can all sip our coffee and have a nice mother-daughter-grandmother chat."

  As my mother headed toward my bedroom, I visualized Janet Leigh sliding down the wall of the shower, slowly dying from the multiple stab wounds that Norman had inflicted.

  "Carmela, come out of that bathroom," my mother demanded.

  "It's-a gonna be a while," Nonna shouted.

  A surge of adrenaline shot through my veins. I had to get out of my apartment while I still had some lifeblood left in me—and before my nonna opened that door.

  I scribbled a quick note to my mom telling her that I just remembered an early morning meeting I needed to attend and snuck out the door. I started for the stairs to Glenda's, but then I got a better idea—I was going to give Veronica a piece of my mind for not warning me about the familial invasion.

  Marching over to her door, I raised my hand to knock as a man dressed in black bolted from the side of my house. I spun around and saw that he was wearing a ski mask and gloves just as he jumped into a dark sedan parked in front of the cemetery across the street.

  Because he came from the area of the kitchen window, my first thought was that he was a Peeping Tom who'd been checking out my mom in her granny gown.

  But I knew that couldn't be right.

  As the peeper peeled out and sped down my street, a more sinister thought occurred to me. I'd had the feeling that someone had been following me off and on for the past couple of days. Could he be the perpetrator? If so, who was he, and what did he want from me?