How about that, Filthy?
I told you so.
CHAPTER 12
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.
So M rushes off to one of the local bodegas and purchases an identical bottle of Pest-Aside Liquid Rat poison. And when she gets back to Topkapi, she switches it for the prop.
It was simple, it was feasible, and it was a scenario that could easily apply to any of the women in the show. But in order for the theory to work, I needed to know two things for sure: that it had definitely been Victoria’s bag in the alcove with Angelina’s when I arrived (I had been assuming it was, but in a court of law my assumptions would carry about as much weight as a diva with back problems) and, if the bag was indeed Victoria’s, that she had dropped it off herself. (If someone else had delivered her suitcase to Topkapi for her, that meant I had another brand-new suspect to consider.)
There was one person I could think of who probably knew the answer to both questions.
I stepped up to the velvet rope. The big guy behind it moved his eyes. Barely. Just enough to get me into his peripheral vision. He blinked, judgmentally. Can a blink be judgmental? From a New York City club bouncer, absolutely. A streetlight buzzed above me.
“I’m a friend of Casey’s,” I said.
He blinked.
“Casey, the DJ,” I explained. “DJ Casey?”
In addition to running the sound and lights for Dreamland Burlesque and the comedy show preceding, Casey picked up DJ gigs at dance clubs around the city, his specialty being parties with a 1980s theme. I’m not talking mainstream 80s—Casey was fully alterno, several notches left of the dial, and just a few decades too late. When at these parties, he always wore the same blue leather jacket with squared shoulders, and you could be certain that at least one of his eyes would be covered by his bangs at all times.
“Casey,” I repeated. “He’s DJ’ing tonight.”
The streetlight flickered overhead. This club, like so man
y of its kind, was in a defunct warehouse on a run-down industrial block—no residents means fewer noise complaints. The music pumping out of the doors right now was shaking the glass on a car parked across the street.
The bouncer blinked again, then broke into a wide smile.
“I’m just messing with you,” he said. “Don’t you recognize me, Porkpie? It’s Roc. I used to do the door over at the Ukraine.”
“Roc? You look different in a suit. Where’s your hair?”
“Shaved it off. Better bald than balding, you know? Good to see you, though, dude, good to see you. Go on in. Hey, Stevey, that’s Jonny Porkpie, he’s okay, let him through.”
The guy in the ticket booth waved me by and I walked into a wall of flashing lights and a barely recognizable techno 80s remix blasted at a volume far in excess of comfort or comprehension. The DJ booth, to my dismay, was all the way on the other side of the dance floor. I squeezed into the crowd, which throbbed vaguely to the music. The place was packed ass to elbows, and making my way across it required a delicate balance of dexterity, politeness, and good oldfashioned shoving.
Finally, I arrived at the DJ booth. I knocked on the plexiglas. Casey was wearing headphones and didn’t hear me, so I made my way around till I was standing in front of him and waved. Vigorously.
He waved back, held up one finger, changed the record, then leaned over the booth to shake my hand.
“Oh, um, hey—Mr. Mayor!” he said.
“Hi,” I shouted.
“Is Filthy with you?”
“No, I’m here alone.”
“What?” Casey put a hand to his ear.
“I said,” I yelled, “I’m alone!”
“Well...‘hi’ to...for me.”
“What?”
“Say ‘hi’ to Filthy.”
“Sure. Hey, can I ask you some questions about the night that girl died?” I said.
“What?”
“I said, can I ask you some questions about the night that girl died?”
“Oh...that.” He shook his head. “That really kinda...”
“What?”
“That really sucked!”
“Right. Can I ask you some questions about it?” I yelled.
“What?” He cupped a hand to his ear.
(And like that. For the purposes of moving the things along, and my own sanity, I’ll cut all the “what”s and repetitions from the rest of our conversation.)
“Can I ask you a few questions about Wednesday?” I repeated.
“Oh, um, yeah, sure.”
“Victoria—the girl who died?”
“Oh. Her.”
“When did you first meet her?”
“That night.”
“You never saw her before Wednesday?”
“No.”
“Ever hear anyone talk about her?”
“No, um, I don’t think so. Not that I remember, anyway.”
“So the first time you met her was when I saw you talking to her? When she told you to play her music loud?”
“No, I met her earlier. But it was that night. She got there before the comedy show—”
“She did?” I couldn’t quite hide my excitement. “When?”
“I don’t know. Pretty soon after the bar opened. Seven? Seven-thirty?”
“What did she do when she got there?”
“She tried to go backstage, and when I told her ‘not yet’ she was, um, annoyed, I guess. I said she could put her bag in the alcove, and she did, and then left.”
Excellent. So far, my theory was solid. And if Casey saw someone else arrive at Topkapi before I got there, I might just have my murderer.
“What about the other performers?” I said. “Did any of them come in around the same time as Victoria?”
“I didn’t see anyone, but I was mostly in the back setting up for the comedy show.”
“How about a guy in an overcoat, with a big bushy beard?”
“What about him?”
“Did you see him? He spent a lot of time by the curtains.”
Casey shrugged and shook his head. “Oh, um, sorry,” he said. “Don’t remember him. Hold on.” He turned back to the board and cross-faded the song that was ending into another song that sounded nearly identical.
I suppose it had been too much to hope that Casey would solve the whole thing for me. But—with the exception of my eardrums—I was still in better shape than I had been when I walked in. I thanked Casey and made my way back through the throng.
As I hit the sidewalk it struck me that I should probably add Casey to my suspect list. But it would only be for completeness—I didn’t think there was a chance in hell he had actually done it. Other than the Dreamland show, he had no connection to burlesque, and he really seemed to have no idea who Victoria was, or what she had done, other than die onstage. Of course she had treated him like crap the night of the show, but...it certainly wasn’t the first time a performer had given him a hard time, and he was a little too laid back to be driven to murder by that sort of thing.
I headed back to the East Village. There was one more piece of my theory that needed a plausibility check. And there was still some time left before LuLu would be done with the show at the Gilded Heel.
There are no fewer than eleven bodegas, delis, markets, groceries, and convenience stores within a fiveminute walk of Topkapi. Expand that to a ten-minute walk and the number triples. Which means that there were plenty of places that a would-be murderer, after discovering what was in Victoria’s bag, might go to look for a bottle of Pest-Aside Liquid Rat Poison.
But would she be able to find one?
I started at Topkapi and worked my way out. The first dozen places I stopped into didn’t stock anything of the sort. I quit asking at the counter after a few tries because it occurred to me a guy who tried to buy rat poison at every store on First through Third Avenues might attract some negative attention. So I scoured the aisles myself. No luck.
It was at the thirteenth stop that I hit the jackpot. Tucked into the back corner of a run-down bodega, between roach traps and boxes of stale pasta, sat a single lonely bottle of Pest-Aside. I picked it up. It wasn’t much, one bottle in thirteen stores, but it was enough to confirm that my theory was plausible.
I looked up to find the cashier staring at me. I smiled at him. I held up the bottle and asked, “Good for rats?”
He grunted and shrugged, which was probably an appropriate response to such an inane question. But now I had called attention to the bottle. Could I put it back down and walk out? No...my least suspicious course of action was probably to buy the damn thing.
“That all?” the cashier said when I brought it to the counter. I nodded, and he rang me up.
As I gave him the cash, I considered asking the guy if any burlesque performers or men in overcoats had also bought a bottle of the stuff in the last few days, but I thought better of it. It didn’t seem like a good idea for a murder suspect buying a bottle of poison to make more of a spectacle of himself, especially when he was purchasing the same product that had put a woman in the morgue just two nights ago. The guy was already watching me suspiciously. So I took my change and headed outside.
When I hit the sidewalk, I realized that poison was also not the smartest thing for a murder suspect to be carrying around. So I tossed the bottle in the trash and glanced at my watch. The bodega crawl had taken more time than I’d intended, and LuLu’s show would be almost over by now. If I wanted to catch her before she left, I was going to have to shake a leg. I stepped out into the street, hailed a cab, and told him to step on it.
CHAPTER 13
LuLu LaRue had developed a bunch of different hosting personalities over the years. As producer and host of a weekly show, it was one way she kept her regulars coming back for more. Sometimes she was a stern German nurse, sometimes a vintage movie star, dah-ling, sometimes a deep-voiced butch with a guitar who sang raunchy lesbian folk songs. The character she was playing when I walked in the door of the Gilded
Heel was, I have to admit, my least favorite of her personae—an over-the-hill borscht-belt comedian named Allan Schmuck, with a wide black moustache, a penchant for Yiddish, and a repertoire of jokes straight out of a Catskills reject pile. She did the character well, don’t get me wrong—sold it completely, and audiences were buying, but I still thought it was a bargain basement routine from such a talented woman. The accent was a bit too thick and the humor a bit too broad—and coming from me, that’s saying something. The schtick worked best with a drummer to back her up, putting stings after her clunkers to let the audience know when to laugh, but tonight she was working solo.
“...just back in the dressing room mit the goils. I try to give every goil a kiss on each cheek before she goes on stage... If there’s enough time, sometimes I make it all the way up to her face! Oy!”
Oy, indeed. LuLu finished the set, bringing all the performers on stage for a final bow, and bid the audience a fond farewell (and, somewhat embarrassingly, but in keeping with the character, a “good yontif”) as the curtains closed.
I found a stool at the bar—the whiskey was there waiting for me almost before I sat down—and waited for LuLu to emerge. But she didn’t. All of the other performers in the show did, one after another, dragging their gig bags behind them. But no LuLu. Had she slipped out the side door when I wasn’t looking? I didn’t think so—I’d been keeping my eyes open.
I polished off my drink and slipped through the gap in the curtains, thinking I’d find LuLu in the dressing room. I was wrong. There she was, sitting in a chair on the stage. She was still wearing the full Allan Schmuck drag, which was strange—I knew from past complaints that the getup could get pretty uncomfortable after a long night, and that she usually liked to get out of it as quickly as possible after the show ended.
She had her head in her hands. I touched her shoulder, and she looked up.
“So you heard what happened?” I said.
“Yeah.” She dragged herself to her feet. “I swear, Porkpie, I leave the show with you for one night...” She shook her fist in the air melodramatically.
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