“Right up to the time of Jenna’s murder?”
“No—it was over months ago. They still roomed together, but Jenna told me, in no uncertain terms, that she and Tera were history. Still friends! But history.”
“Because of Ray Lipton.”
Hensley nodded. “Jenna fell hard for the guy…. You mind if I start putting on my makeup?”
“Not at all.”
Hensley turned her back to the detective, began applying her makeup, and talking to Conroy in the mirror. “I can see why Tera didn’t like Ray, though.”
“Because he stole Jenna away?”
“Well, yeah, I guess, but…”
“Because he was a hothead?”
“That, too—though Lipton was mostly talk. I saw him do stuff like grab Jenna, by the wrists, y’know? But never hit her or anything.”
Conroy kept trying. “What else didn’t Tera like about Ray Lipton?”
“He looked down on Tera…he was very, what’s the word? Provincial in his thinking. To him, it was perversion, girls with girls.”
In the dressing room mirror, Pat Hensley was turning into the garishly attractive Belinda Bountiful. Conroy asked, “Pat…Belinda—this is important. Are you sure Jenna and Tera were involved, romantically? Sexually?”
A laugh bubbled out of the stripper. “Oh, yeah—I know for a fact!”
“Are you saying…”
Now the stripper turned and looked at the detective dead on. “Don’t spread this around, okay? I got a husband, and two kids. But I work in a kinda bizarre line of business, you might have noticed, and I don’t always see things, or do things that…conventional society would put their stamp of approval on.”
Knowing the answer, Conroy asked, “How do you know Tera and Jenna were involved, Belinda?”
And Pat was Belinda now, when she said, “’Cause one horny drunken afternoon, girlfriend, I let the two of ’em make a Belinda Bountiful sandwich…that’s how I know.”
Taking a long swig from her coffee, Detective Erin Conroy smiled.
“You like our Dream Dolls coffee, huh? It’s not bad, for a dive.”
“Not bad at all,” Conroy said, rising, placing the empty coffee cup on the dressing table. “Delicious, in fact.”
Almost as good, Conroy thought, as catching Tera Jameson in another lie.
In the dimly lighted, smoke-swirling cathedral of skin that was Showgirl World, Catherine Willows—in a black leather coat, canary silk blouse, and black leather pants—stood at the mirrored bar and waited, her silver field kit on the floor next to her.
The music pounded and a blonde pigtailed dancer in a schoolgirl micro-mini-skirt outfit was up on stage, toward the start of her set, and a few other girls in lingerie were meandering through the audience, even though the place was barely a quarter full, an early evening lull.
The bartender, a fiftyish guy in gray-rimmed glasses, came back from the telephone. “Mr. McGraw will be right out.”
“Thanks.”
A blade of light sliced into the darkness from the left, bouncing like a laser off the mirrors, and then as quickly disappeared. Stocky Rick McGraw—in a dark blue suit and lighter blue shirt without a tie—emerged from his office.” “What can I do for you, Detective?”
“Crime scene investigator,” she said, handing him the search warrant. “I’m here to search the dressing room.”
The stocky club manager slipped the folded paper into the inside pocket of his suit without a glance. “Sure.”
Catherine lifted one eyebrow and showed him half a smile. “You told Detective Conroy you wouldn’t let her search the place without a warrant.”
A small shrug. “And you brought one.”
“Tera Jameson been in today?”
“Here now, but doesn’t go on for a while. Wasn’t scheduled—filling in for a sick girl.” He gestured. “She’s working private dances. You need her?”
“No. The night Jenna Patrick died, over at Dream Dolls—Tera worked that night, right?”
“Yeah. I told the cops all about it.”
“Tell me again.”
“Well, she was here, all right. We were kind of shorthanded, and she wound up doing sets at the top of every hour, for a while there.”
“Do you have any kind of record of that? Is there a sheet that logs which dancers went on and came off when…that sort of thing?”
“What do you think? They sign in, they sign out; that’s the extent of it.”
“But you would testify she was here all night?”
McGraw nodded. “Six P.M. to three A.M.”
Shaking her head, Catherine sighed and asked, “Dressing room in the back?”
“Yeah.” He gestured toward the back with his head. “Don’t you want me to round up Tera for you?”
Glancing this way and that, not seeing the Jameson woman anywhere, she shook her head. “Just the opposite. I wasn’t planning on her being here…. Keep her out, while I’m in there, if you can.”
“See what I can do…. No promises.”
Only two dancers occupied the dressing room when Catherine—lugging the silver field kit—entered. Back here, the accommodations weren’t much better than those of Dream Dolls. It didn’t matter how nice a club was, the dressing rooms were all the same.
The nearest dancer was touching up her makeup. She gave Catherine a noncommittal nod in the mirror, her wide brown eyes sizing up the competition.
Catherine asked, “Tera Jameson’s table?”
The dancer nodded toward the back. “She has the whole rear stall—she’s a star, y’know.” Turning from the mirror to look Catherine up and down, rather clinically, she added, “I didn’t know she had a new squeeze.”
Catherine said, “I’m with the police,” and flashed the CSI I.D.
“And that makes you straight?”
Catherine arched an eyebrow. “The Jenna Patrick homicide?”
Now the woman got it, but she didn’t seem to much care. “I didn’t know her,” she said, turning to herself in the mirror.
The other dancer had flopped onto one of the sofas, on her back, and was smoking a cigarette; she looked bored beyond belief.
At the far end, Tera had given herself some privacy by moving in a small clothes rack of her own, which she’d positioned as a wall between her and the next station. A window onto the rear parking lot was next to her table and obscured from view of the rest of the dressing room by that same clothing rack. Her makeup table and mirror was at right, while across the way—where there had once been another makeup station—another small rack of clothes was hanging with shoes below.
Tera’s station itself was neatly organized. The chair was pushed in under the table, makeup case closed and sitting on the left side of the table, a box of tissues on the right corner nearest the mirror, a towel folded in quarters in front of it, another draped neatly over the back of the chair. The routine was readily apparent to someone who had once been in the life. Catherine eased into the latex gloves and went to work.
The makeup kit looked more like a jewelry box with a lid that flipped up and three drawers down the front. The top opened to reveal some small jars and brushes, and lipsticks laid in a neat row in a padded section on the right side.
But among the jars of nail polish and makeup, Catherine found a bottle of spirit gum.
Pleased, she bagged that and moved to the top drawer, where she found more lipsticks, rouges, bases, and powders. The second drawer contained much the same thing and Catherine wondered how much makeup one dancer needed. In the bottom drawer, she saw a stack of fashion magazines; she almost shut it again, then stopped and removed the magazines, and—crammed down under them—found a fake mustache and beard.
The beard/mustache combo looked as though it could match the rayon fibers they had found at Dream Dolls. With a satisfied sigh, Catherine bagged this major find and set it on the makeup table.
Catherine casually flipped through the garments on the rack nearest the station. She knew how
it improbable it was that the Lipton Construction jacket would be hiding out here in plain sight, but she had to look. The circumstantial evidence was mounting, but she could already hear some lawyer saying Tera had decided to imitate her friend Jenna’s old man act, and that’s why she had spirit gum and blah blah blah.
But if that jacket turned up here, that would really sell a jury….
She tried the other clothes rack and found nothing but stripper attire; however, when she checked down below, looking through the shoes, hoping to find a pair of man’s boots, she noted a small suitcase and a matching train case. Pulling them out from where they’d been tucked away, Catherine snapped the suitcase open and found various street clothes; the train case held, among other things, the cosmetics that had been missing from Tera’s bathroom this morning.
Suddenly Catherine knew this was Tera’s final night at Showgirl World. The woman would gather her last night’s wages—and this week’s check, due tonight—and book it out the window to the parking lot.
Catherine punched Sara’s number into her cell phone.
“Sara Sidle.”
“It’s me. I found spirit gum and the fake facial hair. There’s even a damn window right by Tera’s dressing table, for her to slip out of.”
“Wow! Why did she keep that stuff around? Why didn’t she dump it?”
“She’s here now,” Catherine said. “Maybe I’ll ask her. You touch base with Conroy lately?”
“Yeah, I’m in the car with her now, heading your way. Conroy wants to question Jameson.”
“What do you have that’s new?”
“Greg’s done with the tests on the evidence from the woman’s apartment,” Sara said. “Seems the sex toy has Jenna’s DNA on it, and the menstrual blood stains from the mattress? They’re from both women—Tera and Jenna, sharing a bed.”
“So Tera’s lover dumped her for a guy,” Catherine said. “Ray Lipton, a homophobic hypocritical hothead. Tera decides to get even and kill her unfaithful lover, then frame the interloping boyfriend.”
“She could have it all,” Sara said.
“It’s a motive,” Catherine said, “but we still need something to tie her directly to the killing—beard isn’t going to be enough.”
“Look,” Sara said, “keep Tera there till we get there.”
“I had better,” Catherine said. “She’s a definite flight risk. Bags are packed here at the club…next to that window.”
“Give us ten minutes. Oh yeah, one more thing Greg found—rug fibers from the lap-dance room at Dream Dolls turned up on jeans we took from Tera’s apartment.”
“Okay. I’ll see you…” Catherine’s voice trailed off. Then she said: “We’ve got her. She did it.”
“Huh? How so?”
Catherine smiled into the cell phone. “If there were fibers from the private dance room at Dream Dolls, on Tera’s clothes? She’s guilty.”
“But Tera worked there, too!”
“Yeah, she worked there before that carpeting was laid. Tera left Dream Dolls three months ago, and hadn’t set foot in the place, since—or so she said.”
“And the carpeting went in two months ago!”
“That’s right. We’ve got her.”
Sara spoke to Conroy, bringing her up to speed.
Suddenly Conroy was on the phone. “Keep Tera busy, if you can. Don’t play cop: I’ll make the arrest.”
Cell phone back in her purse, Catherine returned to the makeup station to gather her things, but the plastic bag with the beard had slipped to the floor.
When Catherine bent to retrieve it, she looked under the table and saw a vent in the wall near the floor. Pulling out her Mini Maglite, she shone the beam at the screws and saw that the paint on them had been freshly chipped. From her field kit she got a small screwdriver, and crawled under the table to unscrew the four screws; then she pulled off the grate.
Inside the vent lay a dark garbage bag. She pulled it out and allowed herself a little smile as she opened it. In the bottom of the bag were the Lipton Construction jacket and the men’s boots Tera had worn that night.
And now Catherine could see it happening, in her mind’s eye…
…back in her quiet corner of the dressing room, Tera tapes down her breasts and dresses in clothes similar to Lipton’s. She shoves her hair up under a ball cap, glues on the fake beard and mustache, and dons the dark glasses and the Lipton Construction jacket that she’d obtained from either one of his workers or a customer. She opens the window, watches for a quiet moment, drops into the parking lot where her car waits. Then, in drag, she drives to Dream Dolls, and somehow coaxes Jenna into the back room—either the disguise fooling the dancer in the dim lighting, or Jenna titillated by her former lover’s masquerade.
Once in the lap-dance cubicle, Tera slips the electrical tie around Jenna’s neck and yanks it tight. She watches the woman who betrayed her squirm in pain, then die.
Leaving the club, Tera returns—still in drag—and parks in the Showgirl World rear lot, waiting for the right moment to slip back through the window into the club, where she removes the disguise and hides the beard under some Vogue’s and the jacket and boots in the vent. Soon she is to be back on stage, entertaining the masses, never having left the club.
When the police come to her apartment, she puts on the act of the grieving former roommate, certain that the plot will work and Ray Lipton will spend the rest of his life in prison.
In building her alibi, Tera had run so tight a timetable that the damning evidence—the fake facial hair, the jacket, the boots—had been stowed away at Showgirls, for future disposal. But with cops coming in and out of the club, and all these eyes on her, Tera hadn’t yet dared sneak them out.
Catherine bagged the jacket and the boots, and then she closed up her field kit and gathered everything—it was quite a haul—and set them on the floor next to Tera’s station. Toward the front of the dressing room, the black dancer was about to go out in a silvery nightgown over silver bra and thong.
“Are you on next?” Catherine asked her.
“In about half an hour. I’m gonna go out and stir up some business, first.”
Catherine showed her a five-dollar bill. “A favor?”
The dancer snatched the fivespot out of Catherine’s fingers, then asked, “What?”
“Just go out there and see if Tera’s occupied.”
The dancer shrugged, went out, came back in less than a minute.
“She’s giving a private dance. Way down on the end—it’s a separate room, but no door. Slip out past the bar during a song, and she probably won’t see you. Between songs, she might.”
“Thanks.”
Catherine lugged the evidence outside and locked it in the Tahoe. As long as Tera hadn’t seen her, Catherine wasn’t worried about the woman splitting—she was giving a private dance, and still had no idea that Catherine was even on the premises, let alone what evidence the CSI had found.
With the Tahoe locked, Catherine checked the magazine on her pistol and reholstered it. Maybe she wouldn’t be making the arrest herself, but Catherine knew she was dealing with a killer. She glanced up the street, saw no sign of Conroy and Sara, and decided she better get back inside.
Inside again, she stopped at the bar where that fiftyish bartender was using a damp cloth on the countertop. She said to him, “Detective Conroy tells me you’re an ex-cop.”
The guy nodded.
“You know who I am?” she asked him.
“CSI.”
“That’s right. If there’s trouble, what are you going to do?”
He eyeballed her for a long moment. “Call 911.”
“Right answer.”
He absently wiped his cloth over the bar. “Is there gonna be trouble?”
Shrugging elaborately, Catherine said, “Anything’s possible.”
“I’ve heard that theory.”
Catherine instinctively liked this guy—not too excitable, no nonsense, just the sort of mentality n
eeded in a place like this. “Detective Conroy and another CSI are on their way here now.”
The bartender waited for the rest.
“When they arrive, tell them I’m in the private room.” She pointed at the doorless doorway down on at the far end.
“No problem…Tera’s in there now, y’know, with a couple patrons of the arts.”
“Yeah.”
“She in trouble?”
“Oh yeah.”
Again he wiped the towel over the bar. “Wish I was surprised.”
“But you aren’t? Everybody else seems to like her.”
He shook his head. “They’re not paying attention. She’s a wrong chick, and I’m not talkin’ about her sexual inclination. It’s just…her train don’t run all the way to the station.”
Catherine smiled. Cops never stopped being cops, retired or not. “Can you make something happen?”
“Try me.”
“I don’t want any other dancers and customers going in that room. Not till I come back out, or Detective Conroy goes in.”
“I can do that.”
Several moments later, Catherine slipped inside the private-dance room, which was much bigger than the closet at Dream Dolls. It was actually more semi-private, able to accommodate two “private” dances at a time; the music in here was strictly from the outer club, leaching in through the doorless doorway—“I’m Not That Innocent,” Britney Spears. Two black faux-leather booths without tables were in there, so a dancer could essentially enter the booth and entertain; mirrors covered the walls, and right now no one occupied the table nearest Catherine.
In a red jeweled g-string and nothing else, Tera danced in front of the other booth, though her image danced on all of the mirrored walls. Catherine stepped forward so that the two guys sitting at the table could see her. They were burly guys wearing cheap suits, blue-collar bozos at a bachelor party maybe, one with a buzz cut, the other with longish dark hair. Tera turned her backside to her audience, looked at Catherine, nothing registering on the exotic features, and kept dancing.
“You want to join in, honey?” the longhaired guy asked when he spotted Catherine.
“You’re a little overdressed, ain’t ya?” the buzz cut wondered, and laughed drunkenly.
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