“How many other bags were present in the alcove when you put yours there?”
“Oh, I didn’t see. Jonny stashed my bag for me that night,” Cherries replied.
“Hmph,” Officer Bronx said. “And when did you first notice that...”
This went on for a while. Bronx sounded like she was trying to get Cherries to confess to a closer proximity to the alcove than she was currently admitting. Cherries, in response, rambled on so much that by the end it wasn’t clear whether or not she in fact knew what a bag was.
Eventually the questions petered out. Bronx wrapped the interview up by handing Cherries a business card and saying, “If you see or hear from Mr. Porkpie, you should call us immediately.”
“Oh, of course, Officer. Of course I will.”
Officer Bronx twitched her head at Brooklyn, who followed her out into the hallway. He’d been unusually quiet during this interview, and I could count the reasons why on one chest.
Cherries walked after them, and watched from the doorway until they started down the stairs.
When they were out of earshot, she shut the door and turned to the blimp.
“Oh, the humanity!” she said.
“Oh, shut up,” I replied.
CHAPTER 16
“This is a very good disguise,” Filthy said, as she sat down opposite me. I glanced around the café, a halfassed bistro in Greenwich Village. Not a lot of style to the place and not a lot of room, either—but it did have a few tables tucked into nooks and crannies, where I could hole up out of view of the street and do the right thing by a cup of coffee or eight.
“An excellent disguise,” Filthy continued, “for a man on the run. Very subtle. The call goes out over the police radio: ‘Be on the lookout for a suspect named Jonny Porkpie.’ ‘But how will we recognize him?’ says our hapless officer. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the radio replies, ‘maybe look for the guy wearing a porkpie hat.’ Brilliant.”
I took off the hat. Honestly, I wear it so often, I had forgotten it was on my head.
“Here. You can change the rest, too.” She tossed a bag across the table, knocking over my coffee cup. Luckily, it was empty, but the clatter caught the attention of the waiter, who started walking in our direction. I signaled for a refill, and he rolled his eyes. He was probably justified in doing so. I’d been sitting there for hours.
I opened the bag and glanced inside, where Filthy had crammed a half-dozen changes of socks and underwear, a pair of pants, and a couple of shirts.
“You think I’ll be gone this long?” I said.
“I was a fugitive,” Filthy said, “from Justice. Yeah, Justice. That dame had it in for me, I could tell, and you don’t want to get on the bad side of a blindfolded chick with a sword. Don’t get me wrong. Even though she was on my ass like a hot potato, I had it bad for that babe—how can you not like a gal who strolls around town with one boob flapping in the breeze? But—”
I interrupted her. “Really? Now? Now seems like a good time for that?”
“Why not? Hey, maybe I should do a Lady Justice number. Nah, it’s probably been done. Maybe I’ll just walk around with one boob hanging out.”
“Seriously, though, Filthy—”
“So now, honey, tell me. Why are the nice police stalking you? And me? I had just a bitch of a time shaking the guy who was tailing me. I had to pull a reverse Hammett with a half-Houdini and a Cincinnati twist.”
“You’re making that up.”
“I am making that up. Actually, I just jumped on the F train as the doors were closing. Who would have thought it would be so easy?” Filthy waited while the waiter refilled my cup. When he left she said, “So tell me, darling, what exactly have you been up to since... oh, was it only yesterday?”
I outlined, in as little detail as possible, my activities since she had last seen me, limping out of Jillian’s dungeon. As I told the story, Filthy’s expression changed from amused to annoyed. By the time I got into the Hindenburg, she was clutching her head in her hands.
“I knew I shouldn’t have let you out of those shackles,” she interjected as I was describing Cherries’ cop-distracting tactics. She must genuinely have been worried. Under normal circumstances, she would never interrupt a story that involved one of her friends taking off her shirt.
“And you actually bought a bottle of the exact same poison that killed Victoria?”
I shrugged. Filthy shook her head.
“So let me guess what happened next,” she said. “After Cherries flashed the cops and they left, you snuck out of Cherries’ building—”
“I didn’t sneak out of Cherries’ building,” I said. “I escaped from her building despite a veritable phalanx of police surveillance. It was pretty impressive, actually. See, what I did was—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Filthy said, looking in my eyes. “You’re actually starting to have fun with this, aren’t you?”
It set me back for a moment.
Fun? No. I wasn’t having fun. I was bruised, battered, exhausted, and anxious.
But I had to admit it was kind of exhilarating. Over the years, I’d played a lot of different roles for our burlesque shows—a chef, a priest, a cowboy, a superhero, a starship captain, a teetotaler, a self-help guru, and the president of the United States, to name a few. Hell, I’d even played a detective. But that was on stage, and this was for real. On the run from the cops, the threat of life in prison or worse hanging over my every move, wondering which of the women I was interrogating might suddenly decide to do me in...it was more than enough to get the adrenaline pumping and the heart beating faster.
As was the siren I suddenly heard screaming toward the café. I dropped to the floor and scrambled under the table.
“Again,” Filthy said, as the noise passed us and faded into the distance. “Subtle.”
“Dropped my, you know, fork.” I said, reclaiming my chair.
“Right,” she said, mentioning neither that I had risen from the floor with no fork in hand, nor that there had been no fork on the table to begin with. “So after leaving Cherries, you executed a brilliant and no doubt immensely exciting escape from the cops. Skip that part. What did you do next?”
“Called you, came here, and sat on my ass until you arrived.”
“Smartest thing you’ve done in days. And now maybe you’ll lay low until this blows over?”
“This isn’t blowing over, Filthy. For crying out loud, you had to shake a police escort just to meet me here.”
“So instead you’re going to—?”
“Take another crack at the other four suspects. Or rather, five...there’s one I haven’t talked to at all yet. Hey, you don’t happen to know the name of a guy with a beard who wears an overcoat to burlesque shows, do you?”
“Which one?”
“How many do you know?”
“At least one for every show I’ve ever been in. But come to think of it, I’ve done my best to make sure I don’t know any of their names.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Where are you performing tonight?”
“Bottoms Up.”
“Do me a favor? Keep an eye out for a guy like that, and if one shows up, send me a message? If you can take a picture of him, that’d be even better.”
Filthy sighed. “And what will you be doing?” she asked.
“Hitting as many other shows as I can, to see if I can spot the guy myself.”
Filthy took something out of her pocket. She pressed it into my hand. “You might need this,” she said. I looked at it. It was a wad of cash. “Just in case,” she explained. I took it, but before I could put it in my wallet, Filthy grabbed the back of my head and pulled my face towards hers. She stopped when her lips were the merest fraction of an inch away from mine. I could feel her breath on my chin as she spoke. It was hot, and angry.
“I’m not going to kiss you,” she said. “And I’ll tell you why not. If you ever want this kiss, the one that you’re not getting right now, you’re gonna have to
do something for it. Do you know what that is?” I shook my head. “You’re going to have to get out of this alive. And that means you’re going to have to do your damnedest to keep yourself alive. Understand?”
She let go of my head, and stood up.
“But—” I said.
“Alive,” she said, and left.
CHAPTER 17
I tapped the man in the overcoat on the shoulder.
I’d seen him coming from a block away, headed straight for the Tiki Lodge. With the police looking for me, I figured it was a better idea, instead of actually attending the shows in question, to observe from a safe distance. So I had been lurking in a doorway across the street from the club, wearing an impenetrable disguise: a baseball cap instead of my usual porkpie, with my long, beautiful hair tucked up inside it. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly impenetrable, but it was enough to make me look different to a casual observer.
So there I was, watching the audience members trickle into the Lodge, when I saw this guy headed in the direction of the venue. Right outfit, right facial hair, right attitude. I ran across the street to intercept the guy and tapped him on the shoulder.
As the man turned around, I realized instantly I had the wrong creep. Other than the superficial qualities of the beard and overcoat, this guy was nothing like the one I had seen at Topkapi. “Sorry,” I said. “Thought you were someone I knew.”
He walked away, down the block, passing the venue. He wasn’t even headed for the show.
This had been my first stop of the night, and it was a bust. Not literally; those were inside the venue. But I had been lurking in that doorway for an hour, and I’d seen neither hide nor hairy beard of my overcoated creep. Now it was 8:30, which meant that the 8:00 show was about to start, and even the latest of latecomers was already inside.
My next stop was Bar Fantastic, to see if my creep liked the bump and grind at the Slap & Tickle Show. He didn’t—at least not tonight. There wasn’t an overcoat in sight. I moved on.
At the third venue of the night I got a shock. The doorway in which I would have chosen to lurk was already occupied. By a dark figure. A dark and officiallooking figure. A dark, official-looking, and Officer Brooklyn-shaped figure.
What was he doing here? I could only imagine that he was waiting for me. He had tracked me down at the Gilded Heel the night before, and now he was waiting for me at another burlesque show. But why this particular show? The sandwich board outside the venue gave me my answer: Jillian, Eva, and Angelina were all performing here tonight. Obviously, Officer Brooklyn had pegged this as an event in which I might have a vested interest.
And damn it, it should have been. A show that put so many of my suspects in one room should have been at the top of my list, but I guess the lack of sleep was addling my brain. One of the possible motives I had ascribed to my overcoated creep was that he was an obsessed fan, killing Victoria to get revenge on behalf of one of the performers she had screwed over. If that were the case, the show he was most likely to attend would be a show his favorite performer was in. And with three possible objects of his obsession in one place, the odds were in favor of the creep showing up here.
Well, it didn’t matter. I was here now. But with Officer Brooklyn already lurking in my doorway of choice, things got more difficult. There were other hiding places, but where lurked an Officer Brooklyn, there was probably also an Officer Bronx, keeping an eye out in case I tried to do exactly the stupid thing I was currently trying to do.
If I were smart, I’d walk away. Move on to the next show. But three Dreamland performers in one place... it was just too good an opportunity to pass up. So I found another doorway. I stood as far back in it as I could, kept my head tilted down and the brim of my cap in front of my eyes, and hoped that neither Brooklyn nor Bronx would notice me there.
And I watched the crowd.
But my creep didn’t show.
Half an hour later, with a final glance towards Officer Brooklyn, I snuck out of my doorway and hightailed it very quietly out of there. I’d risked getting caught for nothing.
The next event, titled simply Raunch, attracted a very specific audience. Overcoat types regularly outnumbered the normal audience. It was like a creep convention was in town for its annual meeting. My particular overcoat might be amongst them, but in order to find out I’d have to look each and every one in the face, and that would be difficult to do without making myself a good deal more obvious than I thought prudent. I gave it a shot—did a quick pass through the crowd waiting on the sidewalk, examining the people as well as I could with the baseball cap pulled down over my eyes—but with no result. My guy might have been there—but if he was, I didn’t see him.
The creep search had turned out to be a waste of three hours of my life, hours I couldn’t afford. On the other hand, it wasn’t like I had alternate plans— the only other thing I could think to do was talk to all the suspects again, to see if they had alibis for the two hours before the show. And since they were currently onstage or waiting to go on, they were unavailable.
But maybe I could still salvage the night. After all, they might be performing right now, but after the show, I had a pretty good idea of where they would probably end up...
It’s the habit of New York burlesque performers, when finished with their various Saturday gigs, to converge on the Daybreak Diner. It’s roughly equidistant from several major venues, and the food is neither too greasy nor too expensive. You never know who you’ll run into—that’s part of the fun—but Jillian regularly stopped in, and I’d seen Eva there few times as well. Angelina was less likely, but given the fact that the three of them were in the same show tonight, and they had plenty to talk about, I thought it was a fairly good bet that she’d tag along this time. If Brioche was working tonight, she’d probably head over as well. And Brioche usually worked on Saturdays.
And it occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one stone. In addition to checking their alibis, I could ask about the creep—maybe one of them had seen him on Wednesday and could identify him.
I headed over, hoping to beat them there. If Officer Brooklyn saw three of his suspects—no matter how little he seemed to suspect them—heading out of the venue together, he would have to follow them as a matter of course.
I scoped out the Daybreak from across the street before I walked in. Thanks to the floor-to-ceiling plate window that served as the street-side wall of the diner, I had a clear view of everyone inside, and there wasn’t a performer in sight. So far, so good.
The bell jangled as I opened the door. I kept my head down, hoping the late-night staff wouldn’t recognize me in the disguise, though they had recognized me in more improbable getups than this. The fewer people knew I was there, the smaller the likelihood of my cover getting blown. I looked around the room for a quiet spot to hide myself while I waited. The booths were no good, and neither were the tables, because as I’d just seen a few moments ago, anyone standing outside could see anyone sitting inside through that window.
I could sit with my back to it, but that meant everyone inside the diner would see me.
Which left only one option. It was somewhat un- savory, but I doubted that even the most diligent police officer would follow a woman into the bathroom. I’d be out of the way of the windows, and come to think of it, it wasn’t a bad place to wait for my suspects— chances were that each of them would need to use the facilities at some point.
I sauntered not at all sneakily to the back of the diner. I took a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching me, then walked into the ladies room quickly but confidently. If anyone was inside, I’d apologize profusely, claim confusion, skedaddle, and try again when I saw her leave.
The restroom was empty.
Excellent. But a man standing in the middle of the ladies room would definitely arouse suspicion, if not harassment charges, so I needed a place to hide.
I took the “Employees Must Wash Hands” sign off the mirror and carefully peeled off th
e tape that had been holding it up. I scribbled “out of order” on the back of the sign, and taped it to the door of one of the stalls. The reused tape was slightly precarious, but it would hold.
That brilliant diversion in place, I ducked inside the stall, locked the door, and put my eye to the crack. Through it, I could see who was walking into the bathroom. If it was someone I wanted to talk to, I would emerge. If it wasn’t, I’d hop up on the toilet seat so my feet couldn’t be seen under the stall door and keep as quiet as I possibly could while the visitor powdered her nose.
So there I was, at one in the morning, squatting on the toilet in a stall of the ladies room at the Daybreak Diner. However exhilarating my life was these days, it had certainly become less glamorous.
Ten minutes later, I figured out the major flaw in my strategy: it wasn’t one. Squatting on a toilet and hoping the right people would just happen to walk in couldn’t be described, even in the loosest terms, as “a plan.” I was going to need assistance.
I took out my phone and sent a text message.
And I waited.
Twenty minutes later, in she walked.
“Need help, meet me in Daybreak ladies room,” Filthy said as she entered the bathroom, reading from her phone. “You, my darling, are a hopeless romantic.”
I told Filthy what I needed.
She grinned. “You want me to figure out how to get four women into this bathroom with you?”
“One at a time,” I said.
“Well, that’s not as much fun. What should I do, force-feed them water?”
“You’re a resourceful gal. You’ll figure something out.”
“And you’ll be alone in the room with each of the possible murderers? Didn’t we discuss this?”
“You’ll be right outside. If anything happens, I’ll scream like a girl and you can come running.”
The Corpse Wore Pasties Page 13