The Corpse Wore Pasties

by Jonny Porkpie

  “When this is all over, remind me to bring you back to Jillian’s dungeon and leave you there.”

  “Now who’s the hopeless romantic?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Filthy said, and left.

  I resumed my perch on the toilet and waited.

  The door creaked and swung open. Through the gap in the stall door, I saw Jillian walk into the bathroom.

  “Hi, Jillian,” I said, stepping out into the open.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said.

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Filthy told me there was something in the ladies room I might find amusing. I figured it was you.”

  “Glad you find me amusing.”

  “Well, I’ve seen you naked. Mind if I pee?”

  “Be my guest. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Shoot,” she said, and stepped into one of the stalls.

  “You know the creepy guy who was at the Dreamland show?”

  “Creepy guys? I know ’em all. I didn’t notice one in particular on Wednesday, though. Describe him.”

  “Wore an overcoat. Had a beard. Sunglasses. A little bit shorter than me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can name ten guys who fit that description. They’re probably all over at Raunch right now.”

  “More like twenty. And you have no idea which of them was at Topkapi that night?”

  “Sorry, Jonny, I just didn’t see him.” She stepped out of the stall and went to the sink to wash her hands. “Is that all you wanted to know?”

  “About him,” I said. “Let’s talk about you.”

  “One of my favorite subjects.”

  “What were you doing before you came to Topkapi on Wednesday?”

  “Why? Never mind, I can guess why. I was teaching a class. My fan dance workshop.”

  “With students?”

  “That’s why they call it a class.”

  “They can verify that?”

  “Every one of them. Want a list of their names?”

  “When did the class start?”

  “At 7:30, but I was meeting with a couple of the students for at least a half hour before that. And before you ask, the class normally ends at 9:30. I wrapped a bit early so I wouldn’t be late for the show.”

  “So when you left the class, you went straight to Topkapi?”

  “Dragged my suitcase door to door. You saw me arrive.”

  “And the walk took you how long?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “How do I know you didn’t take a cab?”

  “Because I got there on time,” Jillian said. “You know what the traffic is like in that neighborhood at that time of night. It would have taken me twice as long by cab.”

  “And your students will confirm that you were in that class from 7:30 to 9:30?”

  “Why wouldn’t they? It’s the truth.”

  It probably was. I would verify it later, but let’s face it: if you’re going to lie about where you were, you don’t involve an entire class full of students. If she had tried to use an S&M client as an alibi, I would have been suspicious; I already knew she could get those guys to do anything she wanted.

  Jillian wished me luck, dried her hands on her dress, and left.

  I went back into my stall.

  The next one in was Eva. When I stepped out of the stall, she laughed and said: “Porky, baby, if I’d known this is the sort of thing you were into, I’d have given you a very different kind of lap dance.”

  “I’m only here to ask you a few questions.”

  “Sure you are.” She stepped closer to me and started swaying her hips back and forth.

  “Eva, I’m serious. Stop that. I’m still a murder suspect, for crying out loud.”

  “I know,” Eva said, “that’s what makes it sooooo sexy. Did he or didn’t he? Will he or won’t he? Is he going to stick something sharp in me?”

  “Right. Anyway. I was wondering—” I shut up because the bathroom door was opening again. “Crap. Quick, into the stall.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Eva said. She slammed me against the wall and in one smooth motion unbuttoned and unzipped my pants, pulled them down, shoved her tongue into my mouth, hiked up her skirt to her waist, and began to grind against me.

  The woman who walked in was a stranger, thankfully, and seemed flustered to discover a pair of folks en flagrante in el baño. “Oh, uh, sorry,” she said, “I didn’t, um...” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her looking at the stalls, as if considering whether to make use of them anyway, but Eva cleared her throat demon- stratively, and the visitor lost her nerve and scurried out. As soon as the door was closed, Eva pulled away and lowered her skirt.

  “See?” she said. “No problem.”

  “You’re the best murder suspect ever,” I observed, pulling up my pants.

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” she said. “So, what did you want to ask me?”

  “Do you know the name of the creep in the overcoat who was at the show on Wednesday?”

  “What creep?”

  “In the front row? He was also standing right by the curtain before the show. Tried to push his way in when we went backstage”

  Eva shook her head. “Sorry, Porky,” she said. “I wasn’t there when the rest of you headed back—I was in the bathroom, remember? Just like right now.”

  “You don’t remember seeing him earlier, though?”

  “Honestly, I don’t pay a lot of attention to guys like that at shows. I see enough of them at my other job.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “Okay, then, on a completely different topic: In the two hours or so before you arrived at Topkapi, what were you doing?”

  Eva smiled, licked her lips. “Now you’re getting personal.”

  “I am?”

  “In this case. Because what I was doing was...” She leaned close and whispered it in my ear.

  “Ah,” I said. “For the whole two hours?”

  Eva shrugged.

  “That’s quite a long time to be doing that.”

  Eva shrugged again.

  “So you don’t have an alibi for those two hours.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you were doing what you said you were doing, it’s pretty much by definition a solitary activity. For something to count as an alibi, you need to have people who can back it up.”

  “Oh, I do. Witnesses.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Sure—the cameraman, the lighting girl, the sound woman, the director, the—”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “I’ll give Filthy a copy of the DVD when it comes out. For your birthday.”

  “That’s very sweet,” I said, crossing Eva off my mental list. “Thanks.”

  “That’s it? I’m free to go?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  Eva headed toward the door.

  “Wait,” I called after her. “Don’t you need to use the facilities?”

  Eva chuckled. “No, Porky. I just came in because Filthy told me you were here. I can’t wait to tell her what we did,” she said, and left.

  I went back into my stall. This had to be the most ignominious series of interrogations ever conducted in the history of murder investigations.

  When Brioche came into the bathroom a moment later, I didn’t bother to ask her about the creep—I’d gotten as much out of her on that subject as I suspected I ever would. So I went right to the question of what she’d been doing before the show. She offered the oldest answer in the book and the weakest I’d heard yet.

  “I was washing my hair,” she said.

  “Your hair,” I said.

  “Yes, Jonny Porkpie. My hair. In what way is the statement confusing?”

  “Were any of your roommates home? Can they verify that you spent two hours washing your hair?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t in my house. The hair-washing is a ritualistic statement about the fallacies of the industrial
beauty myth as contextualized in contemporary American civilization. I am performing it as an installation piece every night this month at the Miskin Gallery. It’s entitled ‘Uncleansed Locks: The Sham of Shampoo.’ I walk through the crowd, completely naked, and seat myself in a bathtub in the center of the gallery, which represents the internal conflict between representation and essence—”

  I’ll skip the rest. I didn’t need to hear it and neither do you. What it boiled down to was that Brioche, too, had a roomful of people who could verify her whereabouts from six o’clock until ten minutes before she arrived at Topkapi.

  One more woman out of the running.

  That left only one. The one I’d suspected it might come down to: the victim’s own most recent victim, Angelina.

  About ten minutes later, she walked in. She was back in character—or rather, back out of character. I was pretty sure that the Angelina of burlesque was closer to her real personality than the one I’d seen in the offices of the trade magazine fulfillment services company. The thick black eyeliner was back on, the long black hair was down again, and the outfit was black and gothic again.

  This interview was going to be trickier than the others, both because Angelina was now my number one suspect and because she was the least positively disposed toward me of all the women in the show. If any of these women were likely go running to the cops to get me arrested, it was her. I decided that the best plan was to put myself between Angelina and the exit before she realized who I was.

  I was almost quick enough. But I guess something about the way I was moving made her suspicious, or maybe it was the fact that I’d stepped out of a stall with an “out of order” sign on the door. She stuck a foot out as I was attempting to sneak by. I tripped on it and fell face down on the tile floor.

  I rolled over quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid the knee that pressed itself to my throat. I felt her fishnets against my neck.

  “Hi,” I squeaked.

  “You,” she said.

  “Yeah. Hey, could you...?” I said, tapping on her leg. She shook her head, but eased up enough that I could breathe again.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” she said.

  “I want to ask you a couple more questions, Angelina. Then I’ll leave you alone.”

  She snorted. “I suppose it’s easier on my girlfriend’s knuckles then having her beat the crap out of you again.” She swung her knee off my throat and I pulled myself up. “You have lipstick all over your face,” she said.

  I wiped my mouth on the back of my arm.

  Angelina crossed her arms and waited for me to talk.

  “There was a guy in an overcoat at the show on Wednesday—do you know who he was?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No.”

  “He was hanging out by the curtain.”

  “Didn’t see him.”

  “How long were you at Topkapi before I arrived?”

  “Didn’t see you come in.”

  “Before Cherries arrived, then.”

  “I don’t know, five minutes. However long it takes to stash a bag, order a drink, and sit down.”

  “First time you were at the venue that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Dinner.”

  “Where?”

  “Midtown. Near my office. Krash met me after work.”

  “When’s that?”

  “I get out at 6:30.”

  “Can the people at the restaurant verify that you were there?”

  “I have the credit card receipt. You want to see that? Shall I show you that?” She dug in her purse, pulled out a black leather wallet, rifled through it, snatched out a slip of paper and shoved it in my face. “There. Happy?”

  I looked at the date on the receipt—this past Wednesday—and the time. Then I looked at the address of the restaurant.

  “How did you get downtown?” I asked. Instead of answering, she shoved another receipt at me. This one was for a taxi. A taxi that had dropped her off at Topkapi at exactly the time she claimed to have arrived.

  “Are we done?” said Angelina.

  “Soon. Look, tell me this: Why did you insist on doing the show that night?”

  “I’d been booked for months.”

  “But LuLu asked you to switch dates. Why wouldn’t you do it?”

  “LuLu never asked me to switch dates. I wouldn’t have done it even if she had—I’m not inclined to do that woman any favors—but she didn’t.”

  “What do you mean you’re—?”

  “Enough,” she said, pushing me out of the way. “You said a couple questions, that was over a dozen. I’ll use the men’s room.”

  The door creaked shut behind her.

  Would she call the cops? All I could do was hope not. I couldn’t do anything to prevent it, since I was stuck in this bathroom until I knew for a fact there were no longer any cops watching the Daybreak.

  I washed my face in the sink and reclaimed my perch in the stall. My theory was, rather appropriately for my surroundings, down the toilet, so I needed to come up with a new hypothesis, and quick. There was still the creep in the overcoat, but nobody who might have seen him had any idea who he was, and if I hadn’t been able to track him down on a Saturday night packed with shows, I wasn’t optimistic about my chances of finding him at all. And if all I had to work with was my original five suspects, I was going to need to come up with a version of events that didn’t require the murderer to have seen Victoria walking into the venue at the time she stowed her bag. Who was the philosopher who claimed he did his best thinking on the can? Archimedes? Or was that in the bathtub? At any rate, it wasn’t working for me. When the door opened again a few minutes later, the only thing that had come up was a cramp in my leg.

  “You still in here?” Filthy’s voice echoed off the tile walls.

  “Where would I go?” I kicked open the stall door.

  “Step into my office.”

  “You get what you needed?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s not what Eva said.”

  “Filthy—”

  “Nice girl. We should really have her over for dinner sometime.”

  As enjoyable as the suggestion sounded, I just wasn’t in the mood right now. “Everybody had alibis,” I explained, pacing back and forth across the bathroom. “All of them. Still need to be verified, but I’ve got a feeling they’ll all check out. They seem pretty damn solid.” I stopped in front of Filthy and looked her in the eyes. “Unless you’re lying about that dinner, Filthy, and Cherries did it. With you. You and Cherries. Together.”

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re really that desperate?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “All I’ve accomplished tonight is to investigate myself right back into being the main suspect. Oh, except for a creepy guy no one but me and Brioche seems to remember.”

  What she didn’t say was I told you so. I could tell that she wanted to, but she didn’t. It’s one of the reasons our marriage has lasted as long as it has. Instead, she said: “Buy you a drink, sailor?”

  “Buy me a bottle.”

  She shoved me back into my stall. “I’ll come get you when the coast is clear,” she said, and left the bathroom. I closed the door and reclaimed my perch.

  A couple minutes passed, but Filthy didn’t come back.

  Five minutes.

  Ten minutes.

  Fifteen.

  It made sense. People tended to linger after they ate. She was just waiting for people to clear out before she came back for me. The delay didn’t mean anything, I told myself. It didn’t mean anything at all.

  Twenty minutes.

  Twenty-five.

  Finally, I heard the creak of hinges. I pulled my legs up, just in case it wasn’t Filthy coming back, and peeked through the crack.

  The bathroom door was opening slowly, slowly. That was weird.

  And no one was walk
ing in. That was weird, too.

  Then I saw the movement—it was hard to make out with the limited visibility the gap in the stall allowed, but I thought I could see a hand coming through the door. It was reaching into the bathroom, feeling around on the wall.

  Why?

  The light switch. The hand was looking for the light switch.

  And it found it, and flipped it.

  Blackout.

  Usually, to a guy like me, a blackout signals the beginning of a show...or the end. I was hoping this particular blackout wasn’t indicating the latter.

  The door swung open. A figure was briefly silhouetted against the light of the diner behind. It wasn’t a woman’s figure.

  The door groaned closed, leaving the room completely dark.

  A faucet was dripping, across the room. I hadn’t noticed it before. In the dark, it echoed eerily. Ominously. It was dripping ominously.

  Drip. Drip.

  The echo was louder than the footsteps were.

  Drip.

  The footsteps were very quiet.

  Drip, drip.

  And they were making their way toward my stall.

  Creeping in my direction. Very very slowly.

  The air conditioning fan kicked in. It hummed, a throbbing rusty whir, not quite drowning out the dripping. But drowning out those footsteps.

  I’d felt better when I could hear them.

  Whuh whuh whuh. The AC fan, overhead. Drip. The faucet. Outside the bathroom, the muffled sounds of a diner doing normal business. Silverwear on dishes. Plates clattering. The low hum of conversation.

  Hours passed.

  Seconds passed.

  Days passed.

  No time passed at all.

  Whuh whuh whuh whuh.

  Drip drip, drip drip.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  That last sound—the tapping—was on my stall door. A light but insistent knocking. I held my breath.

  The knocking kept going. And I could hear the breathing of the person doing it. The breathing of someone either overweight or perhaps wearing a heavy overcoat in the middle of summer. A sinister breathing.

  An evil breathing.

  Another knock.

  I stayed where I was.

  Drip...drip...thump—CRASH!

  Hardware ripped from the frame as the door swung in at me. I jumped back, hitting my spine on the pipes behind. The door banged against the wall. The figure stepped towards me, and I heard a—