Victor J. Banis

by Deadly Nightshade

  “Waste of time,” Tom said. “All the tenants here must use these stairs every day. We’re just here to look, Stanley, don’t touch anything yet.”

  For the moment, Stanley wasn’t interested in touching; looking was as much as he was ready for. He had never seen a dead man before. Not, at any rate, a corpse, homicide victim type of dead man. He didn’t know quite what he had expected but somehow this wasn’t it.

  “He looks so, I don’t know,” he said, staring down at the body. “So dead.”

  “Well, fuck, yeah,” Tom said. He took his gum out of his mouth, rolled it up in a piece of paper and looked around for somewhere to toss it, deciding finally to drop it into the pocket of his jacket. He looked at Stanley. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look funny, all pasty white. You’re not going to start puking on me, are you?” The coroner, kneeling by the body, looked up at him and moved a couple of inches to the side, as if getting himself out of range.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Stanley said. “It’s not like I haven’t seen corpses before. Well, not like this, exactly, but I’ve been to funerals. Plenty of them.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Dead people are dead people, aren’t they?” Stanley snapped, but the exchange had done him good. He felt less nauseous than he had a moment before. He took a deep breath, pulled his shoulders back, and said to the coroner, “So, what do you think?”

  “I think this guy’s dead,” the coroner said, scooting another inch or two, to be safe.

  “There’s something wrong here,” Tom said. They both looked at him.

  “No, I’m pretty sure of it,” the coroner said. “That bullet hole, for one thing. Plus, he’s not breathing.

  That’s the kind of thing we look for.”

  “The way he’s laying,” Tom said. They looked questions at the dead man, as if he might offer an explanation, and back to Tom.

  “Well, say, we’re standing here, at the top of these stairs, the two of us. Turn facing me,” Tom said.

  Stanley did. Tom took hold of his arm and tugged him a step closer. “And, say I shoot you in the chest,” he made a gun with his fingers and poked Stanley in the chest with it, “like this guy, bang—so, what do you do?”

  “I fall down,” Stanley said. Tom nodded and looked expectantly at him. After a moment, Stanley got the message and let his legs collapse under him—and nearly toppled over the kneeling coroner. Luckily, Tom still had hold of his arm.

  “I fall down the stairs,” Stanley corrected himself, taking a firm grasp of the metal railing that ran up them.

  “Some of them, anyway. Maybe all the way to the bottom.”

  “Right. Only, this guy’s laying nice and neat on his back on the top step. Like he was on display.”

  “So? What do you make of that?” Stanley asked. He hated to admit it, but he thought this had been a clever observation. He wouldn’t have thought of it. Maybe the Neanderthal wasn’t as dumb as he looked. He did wonder, though, how many wads of gum he might have in his pocket.

  “Some kind of message?” the coroner suggested.

  “Probably,” Tom said.

  “But for whom?” Stanley asked.

  “Us, most likely.”

  Stanley waited. When Tom didn’t say any more, he prompted him. “So, what’s the message?”

  Tom stared down at the dead man. “I don’t know,” he said, and added, “yet.”

  The coroner signaled to the waiting techs. “You can cart him away,” he said. “Unless you guys want to see anything more?” He gave Stanley a cursory glance, looked more intently at Tom.

  “No, I’ve seen enough,” Tom said.

  Amen, Stanley added silently. Somehow, it hadn’t really ever quite sunk in before—homicide meant bodies. Dead bodies. Maybe this job wasn’t going to be as much fun as he had thought. They almost never showed the bodies in the Miss Marple movies he especially enjoyed. Not in so much detail, anyway.

  § § § § §

  Their first witness, Jake Acheson, was in the apartment nearest to the stairs, waiting to talk to them.

  Downright eager to talk to them, it seemed to Stanley.

  “It was a drag queen,” he told them right off. “Just like I told the first cops.”

  “What makes you so certain?” Stanley asked. “Some of them are pretty convincing.”

  “Well, she looked like a woman, at a distance, at night. At first, I thought she was.” He paused. “Until he said that, about, she wasn’t real.”

  “Not real?” Tom said. “Who said?”

  “Hartman. He said, ‘Hey, you’re not a real woman.’”

  “‘You’re not a real woman?’” Stanley repeated, puzzled. He was taking all this down on a portable tape recorder—far more dependable, he’d discovered long ago, than writing notes. If you wanted, you could go back over every word. You didn’t have to worry about whether you had missed something, writing fast, or forgotten something. He’d learned that in school.

  “Right. Well, what he said was, ‘You’re not a real…’ and that’s when she shot him. There was this noise, anyway, I didn’t realize at first it was a gunshot. It was kind of muffled, you know.”

  “So, what did she look like?” Tom asked. “This woman who wasn’t real—whatever that means.”

  “Pretty.” He screwed up his face. “Now that I think of it, though, she mostly looked like a drag queen.”

  “What does a drag queen look like?” Stanley asked. “And the correct term is transgender.” He thought of the lovely Ru Paul and the grotesque Rae Bourbon; hard to generalize there. “As a rule.”

  “Oh, she had that, what would you say, that overdone look that drag queens—excuse me,” his voice arch,

  “that transgenders sometimes do—you know, when they try too hard.”

  “Excuse me,” the willowy blond seated on the sofa said. He was wearing a silk robe patterned over-generously with roses, more like a woman’s peignoir, really, but not a particularly good one, in Stanley’s opinion, and sipping from a tall glass, despite the early hour. There was a bottle of Chivas on the table beside him. He crossed his legs, the silk whispering insinuations. Acheson looked at him, at the leg showing through the parted silk, ran a tongue unthinkingly over his lower lip.

  “You know what I mean,” Acheson said defensively. “Some of them, it’s pretty convincing, but a lot of them, it’s like they don’t know when to stop. A little too much makeup, that kind of thing. Actually, this one was wearing way too much makeup, almost a clown face, except she was still pretty.” He paused. “Yes, now that I think about it, everything about her was exaggerated. Even the way she ran across the atrium afterward, knees tight together, like she was afraid her dick would fall out. You know how they are.” He looked at Stanley and then at Tom, who only stared back at him blankly.

  “You must have gotten a good look,” Tom said. “They were just coming up the stairs, you said.”

  The witness grinned a little sheepishly. “Hartman—that’s the dead guy—he didn’t always wait to get them home. Sometimes he put on a real show, right there on the landing. Whenever I heard his voice, I always took a peek through the blinds, just in case something was going to happen.” He caught the looks the two cops exchanged. “Hey, that’s entertainment. The guy had a dick on him like a baseball bat. Seeing a chick giving him a blow job was a sight to behold. Better than watching a porn flick, right?”

  Stanley thought about that for a minute. A baseball bat? Jeez, and someone had shot him dead?

  “ Some people have no sense of propriety,” he said aloud. “I mean, if you think about all the starving queens in the Castro…” he saw the look Tom gave him and lowered his voice an octave. “So, Mister Acheson, if we fixed you up with a department artist, do you think you could help with a sketch?”

  “What, of his dick?”

  “The drag queen.”

  “I guess,” Jake said with a shrug.

  �
�Honey,” the blond on the sofa said, “Would you get me some more ice?”

  “Sure thing,” Acheson said. He looked relieved at the interruption—an odd interruption, it seemed to Stanley, it seemed more than incidental. He and Tom waited while Acheson went into the kitchen, came back with an ice cube, which he dropped into the young man’s glass.

  “And take that away,” the blond said, waving a much ringed hand at a small plate with a half eaten tuna sandwich on it. Acheson hurried to remove the offending dish. Tom looked after him impatiently, and turned to the blond.

  “What about you? Did you catch the show too?”

  Gaylord Huston took a moment to look Tom up and down. Stanley bit back a smile. In the kitchen, the dish dropped into the sink rather too loudly and Acheson came back into the room, hurrying.

  “I didn’t see or hear anything,” Gaylord said, “until Jake came back in and dialed 9ll. I said, ‘what’s the excitement,’ and he said, ‘Hartman’s dead. Somebody shot him.’ So, I went out to look, and sure enough, there he was, dead as a doornail. Seems a shame, doesn’t it? A guy like that. With a baseball bat. Too bad he was straight.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Stanley asked.

  Gaylord turned a pair of wide baby blues on him. “About what? The baseball bat. It’s just what I heard, is all. I never saw it for myself.” His expression was filled with regret. “I guess I won’t, now.”

  “Gaylord,” Jake started to say in a pleading voice.

  “I’m just joking, lover,” Gaylord said. He screwed up his face. “Of course, I could visit the mortuary, I suppose. Does everything stay intact, or do you think they cut them off? Like trophies, you know, something to take home to show the little woman? I heard a joke once…”

  “I meant, are you sure about the straight part,” Stanley said. “It can be hard to tell sometimes.”

  “Oh, please. Not for me it isn’t. My gaydar is state of the art,” Gaylord said. He took another sip of his drink, looking Stanley up and down dismissively. “Anyway, there was that parade of chicks in and out. That’s generally a clue.” He turned to smile brightly at Tom. Who resolutely ignored him.

  “You said,” Tom said to Jake, “‘somebody shot him.’ If the gunshot was muffled, the way you described it, how were you so sure he’d been shot?”

  “Well, you guys are the detectives, of course,” Jake said in a somewhat condescending voice. He paused as Gaylord got up off the sofa with a disappointed glance in Jake’s direction and sashayed toward the kitchen, the flowered silk swishing. All eyes followed him from the room. They heard the tinkle of ice, and then he was back, his glass full, passing close by Stanley and closer still by Tom, before seating himself again on the sofa, like a scattering of rose petals settling. All the perfumes of Arabia, Stanley thought—the cheap ones, anyway.

  Tom turned his attention back to Acheson. “You were saying?”

  “You guys are the detectives, of course,” he picked up where he had left off, as if the interruption had never occurred. “I saw that hole in his chest, and I had a glimpse of the drag queen running across the atrium with a gun in her hand. I just kind of put two and two together, if you know what I mean.”

  Stanley had been studying Gaylord intently. “You ever go in drag?” he asked.

  Gaylord gave him a sly look in return. “You ever been to the Boom Boom Room?”

  “I thought I recognized you. Gaye Dawn, right?”

  “What’s that mean?” Tom asked. “What’s a Gay Dawn?”

  Gaylord gave his head a toss, put a hand over his heart. “Gaye Dawn, the queen of romantic drag, two shows Friday and Saturday, matinee on Sunday. Stop by Saturday night, sugar. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Tom’s face went red. “Thanks, but no thanks,” he said. “Not my style.”

  “You never know till you try it.” Gaylord winked.

  “I know.”

  “Men have been known to change their minds.”

  “Gaye…” Jake started to say.

  “I’m just being hospitable, honey,” Gaye said.

  “What do you do for a living, Mister Acheson,” Tom asked.

  “I’m a bartender.” He looked a little sheepish.

  “At…?” Stanley raised an eyebrow. He found himself resenting Gaylord. He didn’t like the blatant way he was ogling Tom, plus the entire apartment reeked of that cheap perfume, something flowery and feminine, almost sickeningly sweet.

  He must just dump the bottle over his head. And the room they were in was seriously over decorated, way too much imitation period furniture. To his way of thinking, there was nothing tackier than a tacky queen. He was glad to see Tom ignore Miss Gaye Dawn’s crude flirtations. The ape had some taste, at least.

  “The Boom Boom Room,” Acheson said, as if he were embarrassed by the fact.

  “Ah.” Stanley nodded.

  “The pay’s good,” Acheson said, defensive. “I was working at a straight joint before that. Made about half the money.”

  “Queens tip big.” Stanley gave him a nod and a knowing smile, and stood up. He handed each of them one of his new cards, the first he’d made use of them. It felt good, like a real homicide detective. He was beginning to get the hang of this.

  Acheson took the card. Gaylord looked at his as if it might be tainted. For spite, Stanley let it drop into his lap, glad at least that the color clashed with the peignoir.

  “I guess that’s everything,” Tom said, standing too, eager to be gone. “If we think of anything else, we’ll let you know.”

  “We’ll call you about the artist,” Stanley said, and paused. He had turned in time to see a funny expression flit across Acheson’s face. “Think of something?” Stanley asked.

  Acheson thought for a few seconds and shook his head. “No, I… I don’t know, really, it came and went, like one of those things on the tip of your tongue.”

  “I’m sure the nice policemen aren’t interested in what you might have on the tip of your tongue, darling,”

  Gaye said. He winked at Tom.

  Tom scowled at the door, and at Stanley, who scowled back at him, and at the door again. “Well,” he said.

  “Don’t be strangers,” Gaye called after them.

  “We won’t,” Stanley promised, and added, to Tom, in a voice just dripping with honey, “will we, sugar?”

  The door closed after them. Acheson and Gaylord exchanged looks.

  § § § § §

  “Listen, you,” Tom started to say. He was in the lead, practically running. He looked back over his shoulder at Stanley and almost collided with a woman coming up the stairs. She was overdressed for the warmish day: calf length sweater over some kind of sheath dress, big floppy hat, oversized glasses so dark you could only guess at eyes behind them.

  “Did you just come out of Jake Acheson’s apartment?” she asked, pausing on the top step.

  “Bingo,” Stanley said. “That’s where you’re headed?”

  “I was,” she said. She looked from one to the other. At least, the head turned. Stanley surmised that, behind the dark glasses, she was looking at them. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re cops, right?”

  “That’s two points. You should be on Jeopardy,” Stanley asked. “And you are…?”

  She took a minute to consider answering. “Mrs. Acheson,” she said.

  Tom’s mouth fell open. He had been thinking he liked her voice—low, throaty, what he liked to think of as a “blow job voice.” He had been wondering what she looked like under all that regalia. She’d caught him by surprise.

  “He’s married? The pansy… uh, the guy in there?” He found another stick of gum, did the one-handed thing with it, and popped it into his mouth, his jaw working overtime.

  “I know. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” she said. “What can I tell you? He wasn’t always like that.” She looked past them. “Is Princess Twinkletoes with him?”

  Stanley bit back a laugh. “Gaylord? Yes, he’s there.”

  “Shit. Tha
t little placenta.” She looked undetermined whether to go or stay.

  “I’m Stanley Korski,” Stanley said, offering a hand. “This is Tom Danzel. San Francisco homicide.”

  “Moira Acheson,” she said. “And since you’ve already told me Gaylord is in there, presumably alive and well, I will assume that particular prayer of mine has not been answered. So, who died?”

  “The neighbor,” Stanley said. “Gordon Hartman.” He liked her. Of course, he was prepared to like anybody who didn’t like little Gaylord.

  The dark glasses turned toward the apartment across the way. “The baseball bat?” she asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Pity. I was hoping to meet him one of these days.” She made up her mind about her visit, apparently, and stepped around them, on her way to Acheson’s door. “Excuse me. I think I’ll spoil everyone’s fun.”

  Stanley took a card out of his wallet and handed it to her. “My numbers,” he said. “In case you think of anything that might interest us.”

  § § § § §

  She let herself into the apartment without knocking. Gaylord—The Bitch Queen—was seated at one end of the sofa, Jake leaning over him. They turned toward the door as she came in, looking surprised, and embarrassed, like she’d caught them at something. Probably, she thought, they had just shared a kiss. It made her want to gag. That, and the reek of Dollar Store perfume. She waved a hand in front of her face and wrinkled her nose.

  “Moira,” Jake said.

  “It’s good to know you still recognize me,” she said. She tossed the oversized hat on a chair, slipped the dark glasses into a pocket of her sweater. “Hello, Gayborg, hanging around with the humans again, are you?”

  “One thing, at least, we have in common,” he said. The look he gave her was almost as loathing-filled as the one with which she regarded him. Almost, but not quite.

  “We have nothing in common,” she said. She looked at Acheson. “You had company.”

  “Cops,” Jake said. “Someone shot the guy next door.”

  “Hartman. I heard.”

  “I didn’t know you even knew him.”

  “You’re kidding. The wang of the western world? I’m surprised people in the building didn’t sell tickets.