The Corpse Wore Pasties Read online

  “And now...” I said.

  Big pause.

  “...Victoria Vice.”

  There was scattered applause from the people in the audience who didn’t know any better. Too bad. If they were expecting another act of Eva’s caliber, they were about to be sorely disappointed.

  I stepped off the stage and passed Victoria in the wings. “Thanks for the intro,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. She pulled something out of her suitcase and pressed it into my hand.

  Right. Her damn prop.

  “Just give it to me when I reach for it,” she said, and scampered past me. The way she’d been guarding it, I half expected her to drag that suitcase on stage with her, but no. She left it sitting in the wings next to me. Whatever she had been trying to protect was probably on stage with her right now.

  Or in my hand.

  I looked down.

  The prop I was holding was, according to the yellow letters (and skull and crossbones) on the label, a bottle of poison.

  On the bright side, that meant she wasn’t doing Cherries’ football number.

  But was she stealing from another performer? Did I know anyone who did a number with a bottle of poison in it? Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of any. So maybe, just maybe, this was an original creation. Which probably wasn’t great news for the people who had to watch the act, but at least it meant the show would run more smoothly.

  Victoria walked out to center stage and threw off the purple cape to reveal a gothic black ballgown. Her music began playing—louuuuud (actually, a bit too loud, probably Casey exacting a minor revenge for her behavior)—and she began to dance.

  She wasn’t the complete embarrassment I thought she might be, but...meh. Even if she hadn’t been a plagiarist, Victoria just wasn’t a great performer. I hoped she would take the prop off my hands soon, so I could stop wasting time watching her and get back to my whiskey.

  As the music crescendoed, she reached under her dress, gasped (unconvincingly) as if with pleasure, and pulled a black rose from the folds of the fabric. She smelled the flower, caressed her cheek with it, licked it, growled at it, and bit all the petals off.

  The bit was getting a pretty vocal reaction. Not from the audience, though. From behind me, in the dressing room. A perturbed mumbling, but that was to be expected. As long as they kept the volume low enough so the audience couldn’t hear, the performers backstage could make whatever comments they wanted.

  Victoria spit out the rose petals all over the first row of the audience, then unzipped her gown and let it drop to the floor. She kicked it to the side of the stage, danced towards me, and extended her arm.

  She wanted her prop. Fine. I shoved the bottle into her hand, glad to be rid of it, glad her act was almost over. I turned away, planning to spend the rest of Victoria’s number talking to people who didn’t turn my stomach. But what was happening in the dressing room stopped me in my tracks.

  Through the open door I saw Angelina Blood standing, frozen, in the middle of the room, wearing a gothic ballgown, clutching a bottle of poison in one hand and a black rose in the other. Her raven-black eyes stared past me. From where she was standing she had a clear view of the stage. A clear view of what I now realized was Victoria Vice in the process of ripping off her act. The very act she was planning to do later in the show.

  I’d been wrong earlier, and Cherries had been right. Victoria was stupid enough, or maybe just plain crazy enough, to do a stolen number in the same show as the person she stole it from.

  I glanced back at the stage. Victoria was displaying the bottle to the audience—Pest-Aside Liquid Rat Poison, same as the one currently gripped in Angelina’s shaking fist. You’d think she would at least change the brand. But no. Not Victoria. When she steals an act, she goes whole hog.

  And, damn her, that was the reason she had asked to be moved earlier in the lineup—not because she had another gig, but because in the original order, she was scheduled to perform after Angelina. Victoria must have seen Angelina unpack her bag, seen the props in it, and known that Angelina was planning to do the same number she was planning to steal.

  And Victoria wanted to do her stolen version first.

  I just stood there, looking back and forth from the stage to the dressing room. I didn’t know what else to do. Around Angelina, the room was a flurry of activity. Eva, naked except for her shoes, was trying to comfort her, with no success. Brioche was elbows-deep in her gig bag, pulling costume pieces out one by one and offering them to Angelina along with suggestions about how she might improvise a replacement number. Jillian was holding the setlist. “You don’t have to go on,” she said. “There’s enough people in the show tonight, we can just skip your number.”

  Cherries, top half a football player, bottom half wearing only a thong, was pacing back and forth. When she saw me looking in at the door, she came over.

  “Why in the hell would you hand her that bottle?” she said, poking me in the chest.

  “Because I didn’t know,” I whispered. “Damn it, I’ve never seen Angelina do that number.”

  We looked at the stage. I considered walking out and stopping the act...but no. I couldn’t, because of the audience. It wasn’t their fault they’d paid to see a show with a thief in it. And whatever happens—if the lights go out, or your music doesn’t play, or your props don’t work, or your pants get stuck on your hat—you find a way keep it going. You find a way to make it seem like everything was part of the act. The show must go on. The clothes must come off.

  Cherries knew it as well as I did. Everyone in that dressing room did. So we did the only thing we could do. We stood and watched.

  “I don’t believe it,” Cherries whispered. “It’s exactly the same. Everything that bitch is doing, exactly the same as Angelina’s act.”

  This was the final straw. We’d let it go on too long. Victoria would need to be dealt with. If I knew anything about the women in that dressing room, she would be, the moment she stepped offstage. But I couldn’t just let the audience sit there thinking they had seen an original creation. So I decided that when Victoria finished I would give her the outro of a lifetime. Performing an act created by Angelina Blood, I would say, the consummate mimic, Victoria Vice! Thanks for the sneak preview, but don’t worry, folks— you’ll get to see the original and best version of that act a little later in the show. That is, if Angelina decided to do it.

  On stage, Victoria turned her back to the audience and took off her bra, tossing it to the side. From where we stood, Cherries and I could see that her pasties were in the shape of a skull and crossbones.

  “Even the pasties,” Cherries said.

  Victoria pressed an arm pressed across her chest, concealing the pertinent bits. She turned to face the audience.

  Cherries was muttering murderously. And hey, I would add, if you want to see Victoria do more of other people’s acts, she’s also ripped off Cherries Jubilee!

  She took her arm away slowly, holding the skulland- bones on the label next to the skull-and-bones on her nipples. She held up the bottle, licked it, and let a deadly looking green liquid flow from it over her collarbone. It ran down her breasts, covering one pastie at a time, turning the white skulls bright green.

  Victoria tipped the bottle to increase the flow. The green dripped down across her ribs, over her belly, to her black lace panties. Still pouring, she brought the bottle up to her mouth, where it filled and overflowed those red lips, ran down her chin, and dripped onto the stage.

  “And then she dies,” Cherries whispered.

  And then she did.

  CHAPTER 2

  “So this was what, exactly? That you were doin’? Some kinda strip show?” said Officer Brooklyn.

  “Some kinda titty show?” echoed Officer Bronx.

  The audition was going great. If I were looking for a parody of New York City cops to cast in a burlesque show, I couldn’t do better than these two. One male, one female, both short, stocky yet m
uscular, and the accents were dead on. The set was perfect as well, if low-budget: a folding table and a couple of chairs in a dank room illuminated by a single fluorescent. Flickering, naturally. The only alteration I might make would be to the lighting: I’d prefer a naked electric bulb swinging slowly back and forth for the duration of the scene.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t an audition, I wasn’t the casting director, and the people in front of me weren’t character actors. It wasn’t a set, either. I was talking with two genuine officers of the genuine NYPD, and this was a genuine back room of the genuine Ninth Precinct, conveniently located just a few genuine blocks away from Topkapi. Which meant we didn’t have far to go when the friendly policeman asked me, very nicely, if I’d like to take a little ride with him in his genuine squad car.

  And so here we were.

  “Burlesque show, actually,” I answered. I was still wearing my tux, which offered an elegant and whimsical counterpoint to the gritty modern realism of my surroundings.

  “Oh, yeah?” said Bronx. She attempted a bemused expression.

  “And what kinda thing goes on in your, uh, ‘burlesque’ show?” said Brooklyn. Those weren’t the officers’ names, by the way. Those were their accents. The names were unmemorable, but the accents stuck with you.

  I said, “Burlesque.”

  Brooklyn: “What’s that, like comedy?”

  Bronx: “Comedy, or something?”

  Me: “Among other things, yes.”

  Since I seemed to be the only person the police had invited on this field trip to the precinct, I figured I was currently in a final round of auditions myself. For the role of main suspect. I had plenty of lines, which I usually like, but I wasn’t all that thrilled about the direction the plot seemed to be taking.

  Bronx: “Among what other things?”

  Brooklyn: “Stripping?”

  Me: “Dancing, performance art, that sort of thing.”

  Bronx: “Performance art, eh?”

  Brooklyn: “Anybody ever, you know, take off their clothes during this ‘performance art,’ or what?”

  Me: “Yes. You’ve got me. I confess: People performing in a burlesque show usually take off their clothes.”

  Brooklyn: “So, then, they strip.”

  Bronx: “Me, I’d call it stripping.”

  Brooklyn: “They take off their clothes, they’re stripping.”

  Bronx: “Lemme go get my dictionary, look up stripping, see what it says.”

  This was shaping up to be a fine comedy routine, but I’d heard it all before. I decided to derail it by getting garrulous.

  “You can call it stripping if you want,” I said. “I don’t have a problem with that, it’s just not entirely accurate...”

  The ‘stripping vs. burlesque’ conversation happens often enough that I, like most professional ecdysiasts, have a standard speech with which to respond. People assume that we don’t want to be called “strippers” because we’re artsy snobs who refuse to be associated with such a gauche occupation. That’s just not the case. We’re linguistic snobs who refuse to be associated with words used incorrectly. It’s a matter of accuracy, not pretension. In fact, quite a few burlesque performers were (or are) in the stripping business as well. They’ll be the first to tell you: stripping isn’t burlesque, and burlesque isn’t stripping. For one thing, I hear stripping is a lot more work.

  “...you see, officers, stripping and burlesque are indeed both forms of performance in which one takes off one’s clothes. But they’re not the same thing, any more than writing, say, a police report and a lurid pulp novel are the same thing. Sure, they both involve the act of composing text on a page, but the final result—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Brooklyn.

  “It’s about intent, as well,” I continued. “The audience for burlesque—”

  “I said okay.”

  Bronx chimed in. “So you’re running your little strip show,” she said, “oh, I’m sorry, your burlesque show...”

  “And you’re in the show too, are you?” said Brooklyn. “As what, the emcee?”

  “Often,” I said. “But more frequently as a performer.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Brooklyn.

  “Oh, yeah?” echoed Bronx.

  “So you, uh, strip, too?” Brooklyn chuckled.

  “Any chance I get.”

  “Oh, I gotta go see me that show,” said Bronx.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I think you’d enjoy it.” I wasn’t lying—people who walk in skeptical usually leave with a smile on their face.

  “Yeah, right. I’ll put it in my diary,” said Bronx.

  “You make a lot of money doing that?” asked Brooklyn.

  “It’s a living,” I said.

  “And maybe there was someone there tonight who was getting in the way of you making your living?” said Brooklyn.

  “Maybe a certain performer there tonight stole something from you? Something to do with your livelihood?” said Bronx.

  “Like one of your acts, maybe?” said Brooklyn.

  Ah.

  This is where it got tricky.

  The thing is, Cherries Jubilee wasn’t the only one in the dressing room that night who’d had an act stolen by Victoria. A couple of years earlier, Victoria had also added to her repertoire a number that bore an uncanny resemblance to an award-winning act created by the famous Miss Filthy Lucre. The act is called “Miracle Grow” and in it Filthy plays gardener to a wilting sunflower. Nothing will perk the flower up—not water, not plant food—until Filthy starts shedding clothes to encourage it to bloom.

  And I’m the wilting sunflower.

  Or, rather, my arm is. The sunflower is a puppet, and I’m the puppeteer.

  So, yeah, as far as motives went, I had one. A fact that someone at the Dreamland show must have shared with the police.

  “Look,” I said. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but nobody liked Victoria.”

  “But you had a special reason, right?” said Bronx.

  “Lots of people had a special reason. She had a real talent for pissing people off. It was probably her only talent.”

  “But you’re the only one who handed her a bottle of poison,” Brooklyn observed.

  “You can’t deny that,” Bronx added.

  “I’m not trying to deny it,” I said.

  “Fifty people saw you do it.”

  “Handed it right over.”

  “Not just the audience. Your stripper friends saw it, too.”

  “Everybody saw you put that bottle in her hand.”

  “So why don’t you save us all a lot of time and tell us why you did it.”

  I sighed and said: “She asked me to.”

  Officer Brooklyn’s face lit up. “She asked you to kill her?”

  “Assisted suicide is what you’re saying?” Officer Bronx asked, in a transparently leading tone.

  “No. Victoria asked me to hand her the bottle. I didn’t know it would kill her.”

  “You didn’t know it would kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I had no idea what was in it.”

  “No?”

  “No idea at all?”

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  “See, that’s weird,” observed Officer Brooklyn.

  “I think it’s weird,” agreed Officer Bronx.

  “I’ll tell you why it’s weird. It’s weird because that bottle says what’s in it,” explained Officer Brooklyn.

  “It says it right there on the side of the bottle,” Officer Bronx elaborated.

  “Rat Poison, it says, in big letters,” clarified Officer Brooklyn.

  “So you can maybe see why,” concluded Officer Bronx, with a note of victory in her voice, “we’re finding it hard to believe that you didn’t know what was in it.”

  Officer Brooklyn scratched his nose triumphantly. I rubbed my eyes.

  “Well, I didn’t think it was real rat poison, did I?”

  “It
says it on the bottle!” said Officer Bronx.

  “Someone hands you a bottle says ‘rat poison’ on it, what do you think is gonna be in there? Rainbows and lollipops?” said Officer Brooklyn.

  “It was a prop,” I said. “Sometimes a label says ‘whiskey’ but it’s really iced tea.” (Not in my acts, of course. All spirits imbibed during my performances are 100% genuine. But more sober types have been known to employ non-alcoholic alternatives.) “So, no, it never crossed my mind that it was real rat poison.”

  Officer Bronx shook her head.

  “All right. Let’s go back to when you got to that bar tonight.”

  “Tell us everything you did from the moment you first walked in,” added Officer Brooklyn. He tapped a finger on the table. “Everything.”

  I got to Topkapi early because I was running the show—

  Officer Brooklyn interrupted: “When do you usually get there?”

  “When I perform? Half hour, forty minutes before showtime.”

  “Every week?”

  “I’m not in the show every week. And even if I’m performing, I don’t usually run it.”

  “Who does?”

  “LuLu LaRue.”

  Officer Brooklyn snorted. “You strippers and your names,” he observed.

  “So why were you running the show tonight?” Officer Bronx said.

  “If you want to know about that,” I said. “I’ll have to start further back.”

  “Hey, take your time,” said Officer Brooklyn. “It’s not like there’s anyone else we gotta talk to tonight, is there?”

  “Last I checked, he’s the only one here,” said Officer Bronx.

  “It was about a month ago,” I began.

  Filthy Lucre and I were sitting at the bar enjoying a post-show drink when LuLu LaRue wrapped an arm around each of us.

  “Can you guys do something for me?” LuLu said.

  “Right here on the bar?” asked Filthy. “Both of us?”

  “For me, sweet cheeks, not to me. Not tonight, anyway. I just found out I have to leave town next month for a couple days, and I need someone to cover Dreamland for me when I’m gone. I’ll book it, make the setlist, publicize, and all that, just like I always do. All you’d have to do is host and make sure the night runs smoothly. Casey takes care of most of it, actually.”