“Where?”
“That obnoxious pizza place on First.”
“Do you remember when she left the restaurant?”
“Same as I did—in time to get to our respective gigs.”
“And she was with you from six o’clock until then?”
“Yes, we met at the— Who’s the ringing the damn doorbell at this time of night? Hold on. Yes? Who is it—oh. I’ll call you back.” Filthy hung up.
Cherries leaned back on the sofa and played with the button of her shirt. Her eyes were fixed on mine. She was trying very hard to suppress a smirk.
I put my phone back in my pocket.
She snapped the elastic on her underwear and took a sip of her beer.
I lifted my hat and scratched my head.
She cleared her throat.
I put my hat back on.
Cherries sighed. “So?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah, what?” she said.
“She said...yeah.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So...yeah.” I said.
“Am I now cleared of all charges by the Porkpie P.D.?”
“For the time being.” Until I could think of an alternate theory that didn’t require her to be in two places at once. But at the moment, I couldn’t.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Is there, maybe, anything else you want to say? To me? Maybe? You think?”
“I...ah... Did you tell anyone else that Victoria was going to be in the show that night?”
“Really? Out of all the things you could have chosen, that’s what you decided to say?”
“There’s still a murderer running around,” I said.
“Who isn’t me. Agreed?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“Jackass,” Cherries said, and polished off her beer. She rolled off the couch and headed to the kitchen for another. “Fine. What was your question?”
“Who else knew that Victoria was going to be there?”
“Other than LuLu and me? No one.” The beer fizzed over when she opened it. The cap rattled when it hit the sink. Cherries slurped at the spillage.
“You didn’t drop any hints?”
“Yes, fine, I dropped a couple hints.”
“Did anyone pick up on one of those hints, you think?”
“Oh, I really don’t think so.”
“Because Jillian mentioned...”
“I’m sure they were obvious in hindsight,” Cherries said, sitting back down.
I joined her on the couch next to her and massaged my temples. Look, I didn’t want Cherries to be the murderer. And if—as now seemed to be the case—she wasn’t, that was fantastic. I liked Cherries, especially in that shirt. Even if she had set the whole ill-fated evening in motion with her suggestion to LuLu, at least she wasn’t a psychotic killer.
But none of this was good news for a guy who had just ducked out on a couple of police officers. When I believed I was running away in order to deliver them the real murderer, that had seemed like a relatively bright idea. It didn’t seem like such a bright idea now. What could I tell them? What information had I gathered by running away? That I had almost definitely eliminated one suspect? Whom they had never suspected?
“You really thought I killed her?” Cherries was now more bemused than angry. “And you came all the way to my apartment to confront me? Unarmed? Alone? In the middle of the night? A murderous murdering murderer like me? Priceless. You’re priceless, Jonny. And pretty damn ballsy, too. I’m impressed.”
I shrugged.
“Oh, Jonny. You need a drink.”
“I’ve had a few.”
“Have another,” she said, and got up to pour me a whiskey. It was slightly better than my usual brand, but I drank it anyway. “You still think the cops are trying to hang this on you, huh?”
“They didn’t track me down at The Gilded Heel to buy me a drink.”
“The police tracked you...?”
My phone rang. It was Filthy again.
“You’ll never guess who that was at the door,” she said.
“Your boyfriend?” I said. “Your girlfriend? My boyfriend?”
“Close. Couple of policemen with completely improbable accents. They wanted to invite you over to their place for a little chat, but apparently they couldn’t seem to track you down. Requested in the most emphatic terms that I give them a buzz if I heard from you. And furthermore, get this, I peeked out the window a minute ago, and you’ll never guess who’s across the street. Give up? It’s...somebody! Just standing there, hanging out on the corner in the middle of the night for no particular reason, but with a great view of our front door.
“Drug dealer? Not quite the type. Mugger? Little bit too clean-cut. Cop on stakeout? Ding ding ding ding ding. Thought you might like to know, in case you wanted to make other sleeping arrangements. Don’t do anyone I wouldn’t do!”
“Thanks,” I said. “Try to get some sleep.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely,” Filthy said, and hung up.
I put my phone back in my pocket and looked up at my host.
“So...” I said. “This might be a strange question, after all that’s just happened...”
“Yeah?” Cherries said. That twinkle was back in her eye.
“Can I crash here?”
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“Does Filthy need privacy? Using your place for an assignation?”
“Something like that. She’s got a thing for cops on stakeout, and there seems to be one hanging out across the street from our apartment.”
“Kinky.”
“So, can I stay?”
Cherries grinned. Oh, that grin.
“You’re that sure I’m not the murderer?” She said.
“At this point, Cherries, I’m so exhausted I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
Another couple of whiskeys later, as the first rays of sunlight stretched over the borough of Queens, I was curled up on Cherries’ couch and trying to sleep.
It wasn’t going well. My mind was racing. The cops were so interested in talking to me that they were staking out my house. And even if I stayed away from the apartment, in this city, I couldn’t avoid the cops forever.
I was running out of time.
CHAPTER 15
SATURDAY
I woke up to Cherries’ buzzer.
Buzzing.
And buzzing.
Cherries emerged from her bedroom rubbing her eyes. She had on what she called pajamas. Cherries doesn’t wear a lot to bed.
I was pleased to discover that I’d woken up alive. It was further evidence of my friend’s innocence.
“What the hell?” she said. “What time—who the hell would ring my bell at the ungodly hour of eleven a.m.?” She pressed the buzzer. “Yeah. Who is it?”
“Police, ma’am,” said a voice that, though muffled through the intercom, clearly belonged to Officer Bronx.
Cherries released the intercom button and looked over at me. “You didn’t share your little theory about me with anyone else, did you?”
“No.” I sat up on the couch. “I wanted to talk to you first.”
“So what the hell are the cops doing here?”
“You’re asking me? I’m the one who slept on your couch because they were staking out my house.”
“Do I let them in?”
“Do they sound like they know I’m here?”
“Do they sound like—? Yeah, Jonny, those two words she said had a definite Porkpie-awareness about them.”
The buzzer rang again.
“I think I have to let them in,” she said. “You—I don’t know—go out the window. Hold on a minute, sorry.” That last was into the intercom. She jerked a thumb towards the window. “That one’s got the fire escape.”
“I want to hear what they ask you. I’ll hide in the closet.”
“Oh, that’s clever. That’s really clever. The closet. They’ll never think to look there. Plus, Jonny,
have you seen my closets?”
“So, where? Under the couch? In the shower?”
Cherries pointed to the thing that was taking up much of one corner of her living room.
“Hindenburg,” she said. I mentioned earlier that Cherries owns a wearable replica of the Hindenburg, right?
There was a hole in the bottom of the costume out of which Cherries’ legs protruded when she was performing her Hindenburg number. The outfit had been custom made for Cherries, so it was a tight fit squeezing my shoulders in, but once I had cleared the leghole and pulled my entire body inside, I was able to stretch out. A blimp costume has, by its very nature, plenty of extra room to it. I had an obscured but somewhat useful view of the room through one of the armholes.
Cherries went over to the intercom and buzzed the officers in.
Then she went to slip into something less revealing. As much time passed as it takes for two police officers to heave themselves up five flights of stairs.
It felt like a lot longer.
There was a knock on the door.
I was breathing much louder than usual. At least, that’s how it seemed. Maybe it was the shape of the costume that was amplifying my respirations. If I kept inhaling and exhaling at this volume, I was sure the detectives would hear me the moment they walked in, extract me from the zeppelin, and arrest me. I held my breath, but that didn’t last long, and the subsequent exhalation was even louder. Okay, I figured, I’ll breathe slowly instead. I tried it. I sounded like an obscene phone call.
Cherries emerged from her bedroom and opened the apartment door to reveal the two detectives.
“Somethin’ wrong with your bell?” Officer Brooklyn asked.
“Took you a long time to buzz us in,” observed Officer Bronx.
“A very long time,” added Officer Brooklyn.
“Sorry, officers,” Cherries said. “But when you rang my bell, I wasn’t wearing a thing.”
“Ah,” said Officer Brooklyn.
“We won’t take up much of your time, ma’am,” said Officer Bronx.
“Not much at all,” said Officer Brooklyn.
“Just a couple minutes,” said Officer Bronx.
“You’re friends with a Mr. Jonny Porkpie, right?” said Officer Brooklyn.
“Happen to see him at any time in the last twelve hours?” said Officer Bronx.
“Or had any contact with him whatsoever?” said Officer Brooklyn.
Cherries considered the question. “Oh, gosh, I don’t know, officers. Last I saw Porkpie, ummmmm...” Oh, great. Cherries had decided to put on her dumb blonde act for the cops. “His plans were, uh, up in the air.”
Oh, Cherries. She hadn’t been considering the question, she’d been considering the gag.
If she kept sending them subliminal messages like that, one of the detectives was sure to glance in the blimp’s direction sooner or later. I double-checked myself to make sure I hadn’t accidentally left a shoelace or something like that sticking out any of the armholes, legholes, or head hole. I seemed fairly well stashed. All my component parts were firmly and fully in the blimp, from the tips of my shoes to the hat on my...wait a minute.
There was no hat on my head.
I looked out the armhole, angling my head so I could see the couch on which I had slept.
And there it was, on the coffee table.
My porkpie.
For crying out loud, how many detective novels have I read in my life? And yet I go and do a dumb thing like leave clear and tangible evidence of my presence right out in the open where any Officer Tom, Detective Dick, or Plainclothes Harry will see it.
Luckily, not from the doorway in which they were currently standing—I had at least that much going for me. But all they needed to do was take one step into the apartment, and the hat’s out of the bag.
There was no way I could get to it without giving myself away. I couldn’t slip out of the costume without being seen, and I had a feeling that the officers would become slightly suspicious if an entire blimp stood up and walked across the room.
“Oh! Now I remember! I can be so silly sometimes! Jonny dropped in yesterday,” Cherries was saying, “to ask me questions. I thought he was just full of hot air. Why do you want to know? Is he a flight risk?”
Damn it, Cherries. Stop cracking jokes for a second and look behind you...
Wait.
Maybe there was a way I could tell her.
I reached for my pocket, slowly, slowly, keeping my hand close to my body so as not to shake the blimp too much. In the cramped quarters, I didn’t have a lot of room to maneuver, but I slipped two fingers in and managed to extract my phone.
Then—gently, gently—I brought the phone up to my face. Oh, look at that. How clever of me: the ringer was still on. Here I was worried about my feet sticking out when all it would take was one incoming phone call to blow the whole thing sky high. I turned the sound off and typed out a three letter text message to Cherries.
Her phone buzzed. Cherries ignored it.
Officer Brooklyn was wondering aloud if they might be allowed to step inside the apartment for a moment to ask their questions.
I sent the message again. Cherries’ phone buzzed again. She ignored it again, and told the officer that she didn’t see why not.
I sent the message a third time. The phone buzzed. Annoyed, she picked it up and glanced at the screen.
And saw my message. Three letters: “H-A-T.”
Her brow furrowed for a moment, and then she got it. Her eyes widened.
She glanced toward the living room. And she saw it.
Hat.
Cherries stepped in front of the officers before they could cross her threshold. “Um...wait. Do you have a—what do you call that thing?—a warrant?” Cherries said.
“What?” said Officer Bronx.
“To come into the apartment. They always say on the teevee that you have to have a warrant.”
“We don’t need a warrant,” said Officer Brooklyn.
“We’re just here to ask some questions, ma’am,” said Officer Bronx.
“I don’t know...the place is a mess, so, you know, I’m kind of embarrassed,” Cherries said.
“Right.” Officer Bronx wasn’t buying it. She sounded suspicious, and why the hell shouldn’t she? Cherries wasn’t exactly selling it.
“I mean, if you just want to ask some questions, I’m more than happy to have you—” Cherries began, but was interrupted by a riiiiipppp.
The sound of cloth pulling apart. More specifically, the cloth of Cherries’ shirt, which she had somehow managed to catch on the doorknob. From my hiding place, I could see only her naked back as the shirt dropped to the floor. But the expressions on the faces of the detectives as they were treated to a full-frontal view more than made up for what I was missing on the other side.
“Whoops,” Cherries said.
Officer Bronx blinked. Officer Brooklyn licked his lips involuntarily.
“I guess I’d better go put something on,” Cherries said, and slammed the door shut.
She ran to the couch, grabbed my hat, and stuffed it through the armhole of the Hindenburg, hissing the word “Idiot!” as she did. I uncrushed the porkpie and put it back on my head. Then she ran to her bedroom, and emerged pulling on a tank top that only mostly covered what she had just revealed to the cops. Cherries knew her business. Good burlesque performers are experts in sexual misdirection. If your interrogators are so busy looking at the outline of your nipples through your shirt, they’re probably not going to spend quite as much time looking over the rest of the room as they might otherwise have done.
She threw open her door so energetically that one of her breasts nearly popped out of the armhole of the tank top. “Gee gosh, I’m so sorry, officers. That must have been really embarrassing for you,” she said, tucking herself back in. “Come on in. I was just about to make breakfast—Bloody Mary, anyone?”
Officer Bronx walked into the apartment, giving Cherries a hard
look as she did so. Maybe Cherries wasn’t on my own suspect list anymore, but I got the feeling she had just moved up a place or two on Officer Bronx’s. Officer Brooklyn was also examining Cherries closely, but I wouldn’t describe the look on his face as suspicion. At any rate, neither of the cops were looking at the blimp, and that was the whole point.
“Nothing for you guys? Okay, then. Now what were we talking about?” Cherries said, and absentmindedly flicked her hair out of her face as she plopped down on the couch. By sitting there, she forced the officers to stand—if they wanted to face her as they asked their questions—with their backs to the Hindenburg. Clever Cherries. “Oh, right, sorry,” she continued, “I’m such a blonde sometimes. You were asking about Jonny, right? He was here Thursday asking me a lot of questions, almost like he was the one investigating that terrible, awful thing that happened the other night. I don’t know what he’s so concerned about. If the fine officers of the NYPD are looking into it, I’msure you’ll solve the case.”
Officer Bronx said, “What time did you arrive at the venue on Wednesday night?”
“Me? Why?”
“It might be important.”
“I dunno...I had a drink or two before the show started. But I didn’t look at a clock or anything. The show never starts on time, so why bother?”
“Who was there when you arrived?”
“Oh, my, let’s see, well, the bartender, of course, and DJ Casey, I think, though I didn’t really see him until later, and Jonny, if that’s who you’re asking about, and then a couple other people, let’s see, who were they? Well...” Cherries rambled on, using as many words as she could to convey as little information as possible, until Officer Bronx cut her off.
“I understand that there’s an alcove where performers stash their bags before going backstage. Is that correct?”
“Oh, yes. That comedy show runs on and on, I mean, I’m not sure why, no one likes it, but they’re always getting out late and we have to wait in the bar, not that that’s a bad thing, that’s where the drinks are, still it would be nice to—”
I was glad the police were also asking questions about the bags and the alcove. It meant they had probably discovered that Victoria’s suitcase had arrived at the venue before any of the other performers. If it came to a court case, that might introduce what some would call “reasonable doubt.” Of course, the fact that I was currently hiding from the cops in a blimp costume might make that doubt seem slightly less reasonable, but at this point, I was willing to take whatever I could get.
The Corpse Wore Pasties Page 12