The Corpse Wore Pasties (6 page)

“Representing Mr. Porkpie. Is he being charged?” he said.

Officer Brooklyn shook his head.

“Come on,” said the suit, grabbing my arm.

I stood up and smiled at the cops.

“Well,” I said, “It’s been nice—”

“Mr. Porkpie has nothing further,” said the suit.

“Tell your
client
,” said Officer Brooklyn, “that he shouldn’t leave town.”

“Noted,” said the suit.

“Tell your
client,
” said Officer Bronx, “that he might want to keep his plans open for the foreseeable future.”

“I’m sorry?” said the suit. “Can you clarify that statement?”

Officer Bronx shrugged. “Like the next twenty-five years to life.”

The suit opened the door and indicated that I should follow him.

I did, but stopped at the threshold.

“Officers,” I said, “I’d—”

“Shut it,” said the suit. He pulled me out of the room. Too bad. I had a great exit line.

I followed him in silence through the station house, picked up my belongings at the front desk, and headed out of the Ninth Precinct.

“Thanks,” I said as we walked down the steps to the sidewalk. I held out my hand. “And nice to meet you. I’m Jonny Por—”

“Don’t care,” he said. “Never mention this to anyone.” He ducked into a black car that was idling in the street. It pulled away with a screech even before the door closed.

“Weird,” I said to myself as I watched the sedan disappear down Fifth Street.

I wondered who—

“I did,” said the redhead, stepping out of the shadows.

I gave the redhead the once over. It was pretty clear why she was keeping to the shadows—you didn’t want to be caught looking like she did standing outside a police station in the East Village at this time of night. She wasn’t wearing a damn thing under that piece of clothing you would only call a dress if you were in a particularly generous mood. It barely covered a pair of petite and perfectly shaped breasts and hugged every curve of her body down to her improbably round ass, where it came to an abrupt stop just below the level of decency. Red lipstick sparkled in the streetlight. So did the glitter in her eye shadow.

“I’m afraid I’m low on cash tonight,” I said, “but I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a—”

“Oh, shut up,” said Filthy Lucre, and kissed me.

Filthy Lucre: my partner, co-producer, co-victim of Victoria’s larceny, roommate, and various other things too numerous to mention, including wife. As I’d already explained to the officers, she wasn’t at the Dreamland show that night because of her other gig, but she was for damn sure the person whose number I had dialed first after being invited to the precinct.

When she took her tongue out of my mouth, I said: “You got my message.”

“Yeah. Halfway through getting dressed. Can you tell?”

“Where did you get that lawyer? He didn’t look cheap. Unlike you.”

“Kiss my ass. He was free. Unlike me. He did it as a favor.”

“Really?” I grinned. “What have you been doing with yourself that a guy like that owes you a favor? Other than wearing that outfit?”

“Not a favor to me. To Jillian. He’s one of her... clients.”

“Ah,” I said. She said “clients” in a way that made it clear that she wasn’t talking about the Gotham Academy of Ecdysiasts, but rather Jillian’s other job.

“Right,” Filthy said. “I left my bag at the Gilded Heel when I rushed over here to save your ass from jail. Let’s go pick it up.”

On the walk downtown, I tried LuLu LaRue’s cell number. There was an excellent chance that someone had phoned her about the Dreamland debacle already, but since she’d entrusted the show to me, I felt I owed her the courtesy of the call.

It went straight to voicemail. “Hi, you’ve reached LuLu LaRue and the Dreamland Burlesque. Leave a message—”

It was the middle of the night. She was probably asleep.

I hesitated for a moment, deciding if this was the type of news I should leave in a voicemail, then said “Hey, Lu. Urgent. Call me back ASAP. Sooner,” and hung up.

The F Train rattled as it took us towards Brooklyn. I was looking at the ads above the windows without really seeing them. When we’d stopped in to pick up Filthy’s bag, the bartender at the Gilded Heel had put a generous bracer in my hand and one on the bar for backup, but an hour later they were wearing off, and all the events of the night were buzzing around in my head like the inevitable sex-shop-sponsored vibrator given away in every burlesque show’s raffle.

I was distracted. It’s not every day that I end up being the prime suspect in a murder investigation. And with the evidence as it stood, it seemed to me that even a mediocre DA could make an excellent case against me. Means, motive, opportunity, fingerprints on the murder weapon—I had ’em all. And even though there was an angle for every curve in the dressing room that night, the cops didn’t seem all that interested in pursuing them. (The angles, that is. Not the curves.) For instance, Cherries had the same issue with Victoria as I did. Angelina, too—after all, it was her number Victoria had been in the process of stealing when she died. And based on that comment Jillian had made about the show being a Who’s Who of performers Victoria had screwed over, I was guessing that Brioche and Eva also had some sort of bone to pick with the girl. As did Jillian, of course.

But the cops didn’t appear to care about any of that. Their only focus appeared to be...me. Which meant things probably weren’t looking so good for the Burlesque Mayor of New York City.

I mentioned this to Filthy. She expressed the opinion that the police, as a matter of course, were probably looking into every appropriate suspect.

“You weren’t in that interrogation room,” I said. “They seemed pretty convinced they had their man. I think maybe I’d better look into—”

“Oh, great,” Filthy said.
“Jonny Porkpie investigates.”

“What?”

Filthy put on her noir-est film noir voice.
“I couldn’t get the dame out of my head,”
she said.
“That thieving brunette with gams up to her ears and a rear bumper that could activate any man’s turn signal. Sure, she was dead now, but who wasn’t? Well, me, for one, and that’s why I could spend all my time obsessing, instead of talking to the sizzling-hot redhead sitting next to me. She was dangerous, that redhead. If I didn’t do what she said, I’d have to suffer another beat-down at her perfectly self-manicured hands. But the image of that naked-ass corpse lying on the stage was burned into my brain with the force of a thousand raging footlights—”

Maybe I was obsessing, but at least I wasn’t getting quite so prolix about it.

“Look,” I started, but once Filthy gets going, she’s a hard woman to rein in.

“I decided it was time to make my move,”
Filthy said
. “To take to the streets, to pound the pavement, to hit the bricks, to flap my gums, to yank my chain. Because the police, with all their training and years of experience, couldn’t possibly do it as well as me, Jonny Porkpie, the burlesque detective of NYC, who never solved a mystery in his life. But if I can drop my drawers onstage, I can drop a dime on a murderer. So I grabbed my porkpie hat and pulled it down over my long, beautiful hair and oversized ears—”

“All right, enough,” I said. That was going too far; my ears are quite a nice size, for my face. Though it’s sometimes hard to tell, because they’re frequently covered by my long, beautiful hair.

“I get it,” I said. And she wasn’t wrong.

But here’s the thing: I was the one that killed Victoria. Not deliberately; I’m not saying that. I’m not that kind of guy, however much I disliked the woman. But I
was
the one who’d handed her that bottle and watched, along with an audience full of people, as she drank from it. And then watched, along with an audience full of people, as she died. However innocent I was in theory, I could hardly deny that in literal terms she had died by my hand, and that didn’t sit right. Neither did the prospect of spending time in jail—or worse—for the crime while a killer walked free.

Which brought up the question: Who was that killer?

I was starting to think that under one of the sequined pasties worn backstage tonight beat a heart trimmed with black lace; that one of those perfectly coiffed wigs hid a devious criminal mind; that one of those beautiful, naked women—maybe even one of those beautiful, naked women I thought was my friend—had made me an accessory to murder.

And I don’t particularly like being an accessory.

I don’t go well with your outfit.

So I had no other choice. It was up to me to—

“
Murder, he stripped!”
Filthy said.

“Filthy—”

“Let’s assume, for the sake of argument,” she said, “that this was in fact homicide, and not just some freak accident. Let’s also assume, for the moment, that you’re not the killer, because I honestly don’t think you’ve got it in you. If you go off and start trying to expose the murderer—and, given the list of suspects, I do mean
expose
—what do you suppose that murderer might do to you?”

“I don’t—”

“
Murder
you, maybe? It’s part of the job description, after all. Whereas the police, unlike you, are licensed to carry loaded firearms, and fully trained in the use thereof...”

“But if they’re carrying those loaded firearms,” I said, “as they attempt to gather more evidence against me, it doesn’t help get me off the hook, does it? If I leave it to the police, there’s an excellent chance I’ll end up in prison.”

“That’s better than being dead. If you’re dead, you don’t get conjugal visits. At least, not from me. I’m not into necrophilia.”

“What if I don’t go to prison—what if I get the death penalty?”

“You can’t. Not in New York State.”

“Are you sure?”

Filthy sighed. “Please, Jonny. Just let the damn cops do their damn job, okay?”

“Sure,” I lied.

So here’s how I wound up running at top speed across the Brooklyn Bridge, half-naked, in the middle of the night, pursued by all five members of a heavy metal band.

A full moon sparkled off the East River, its light shimmering on the midnight tide.

But I didn’t give a damn.

The bridge was floodlit in the dark, its stones sharp with shadows cast. Its gothic stanchions loomed dramatically ahead of me and above, pointed arches grey and bright against the clear black of the sky, supporting the cobweb of cables that in turn supports the bridge. But I didn’t give a damn.

Behind me, the Woolworth Building, for two short decades two turns of a century ago the tallest building in the world, towered still over City Hall, a single white cloud framing its spire—

But you get the point. It was all eerily, quietly beautiful, and I just didn’t give a damn.

When you’re running across the Brooklyn Bridge, and you look down, the gaps in the wooden slats of the pedestrian walkway run together—for you film nerds, it works on the same principle as the zoetrope—and the boards fade away under your feet, until you seem to be running on air with nothing to prevent you from falling down, down, to the streets of lower Manhattan, or the East River, or the streets of downtown Brooklyn, whichever of those three happens to be hundreds of feet below you at the time.

If you have any fear of heights, the view as you run can be downright dizzying.

I hoped that some of the members of the heavy metal band chasing me were looking down.

I know what you’re thinking: Where did I find a heavy metal band to chase me across the Brooklyn Bridge—the 1970s? No, the truth is, just like they say, metal lives. Wherever you can find five guys with long hair and a grudge against the world, you’re going to find heavy metal. In most places, five is exactly the number of that kind of guy you’re going to be able to find, but those five will inevitably gravitate towards each other and form a musical experience guaranteed to drive you out of any open mic night.

But hey, who am I to judge? I work in burlesque, the top entertainment ticket of 1939.

And this is New York, where the rules are slightly different. In New York, you can find far more than five of that (or any) particular type of guy, and they don’t all conform to the cliché. In fact, one of the five guys chasing me right now didn’t even have long hair. She wasn’t even a guy. She was about 5’2” in boots, and sporting, of all things, a bright blue mohawk. Of the five, she was the one I was most afraid of.

A sudden breeze came up off the water, blowing my porkpie off my head. I made a grab for it and missed. The hat bounced back down the bridge, towards Manhattan, towards my pursuers.

I stopped. I turned around.

I like that hat.

“You
hated
her,” I was saying to Cherries, several hours earlier.

I had decided to make Cherries my first visit that Thursday because I figured I needed the practice. She was, after all, my closest friend at the Dreamland show that night. If I was going to question everybody about the murder (and it seemed like that was exactly what I was going to do, despite Filthy’s attempt to dissuade me), I might as well start with the person I was most comfortable talking to.

It wasn’t going well.

“Oh, I get it,” she said. “Cops suspect you of murder, and you want to share the joy with your bestest buddies. Classy, Porkpie. Trés classy.”

“I’m just saying—” I said.

“Yes, I hated her,” Cherries said. “You hated her. Everyone hated her. She was hateful.”

“But you had a particular reason—”

“So did you. And what about Angelina, for crying out loud? Whose number was Victoria stealing when she bit it? Angelina isn’t exactly, you know, wellhinged in the first place.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said, and sat down on Cherries’ couch. Her apartment was...well, how shall I describe it? New York apartments, especially on the Upper East Side, are not designed with the active burlesque performer in mind, especially an active burlesque performer with the imagination of Cherries Jubilee. Where in a 600 square foot apartment does one store such things as a two-yard-tall replica of the Empire State Building or a wearable scale model of the Hindenburg? The answer is: everywhere. Two dozen different acts were dropped, dangled, or draped on every available surface, shelf, outcropping, and inch of floor in Cherries’ apartment. I’m sure there was some grand organizing principle behind the piles of stuff that filled the living room, but it wasn’t obvious to the casual observer. Her storage techniques were as innovative as her performances; for instance, the shoulder pads and helmet from her football number, when not in use, served as the antenna for her television. “I’m just gathering information,” I said. “As much as I can. Yes, fine, you’re right, I didn’t like her either. Which is why I know exactly how you feel. But come on, Cherries, you can’t deny that you had even more reason to hate that woman than I did. When Filthy and I told you we’d seen her do your football number at that convention, what did you do?”