Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (Cape Island Mystery)

by Randall Peffer

  There is an emotion swelling in her throat.

  “In the beginning … he seemed so sweet,” she says. Big tears are rolling down her cheeks. A sad little smile of recognition grows across her lips.

  She sits facing Alby across a table for two in a private room in an East End Italian bistro. There is accordion music playing. If you count champagne, Tuki is breaking her no-alcohol rule.

  Alby looks good. Ever since she saw the movie The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford when she was about thirteen, Tuki carries a torch for men with freshly scrubbed skin; slick, trim hair; pressed shirts; linen slacks; loafers; and smiles that go over the top with teeth. This is Alby Costelano tonight. She is staring into his blue eyes, wondering whether he could get down with a little safe you-know-what.

  The frutti del mar comes and goes. But she does not even notice. They are talking nonstop. She is cataloguing every dimple in his smile, drinking in the smell of his cologne, picturing yards of holy flesh in that body.

  After another hour goes by, she knows his story, she thinks. He has spent the last twenty years in P-town, buying and selling real estate, watching the price of property and his holdings double almost five times. He is rich. Now he owns Shangri-La, the Painted Lady, and thirty percent of the business property on Commercial Street. But he still puts in twelve hours a day, six days a week at his Commercial Street office, Pink Dolphin Reality, just a shout away from the Painted Lady.

  He says he is addicted to the carnival. She thinks he means queens. He says things that make her think he first fell for the trannies in the bars and clubs of Vietnam, tried to go straight when he got home. Could not hack it.

  The man does not laugh the “ha, ha, ha” of most men, but rather like waves rolling along the beach. And he makes her laugh, too, about their funny accents. He says he comes from Pittsburgh where they say things like “Aoh, moy gawd, Muriel, we ain’t seen yoons guys dawn tawn inna coon’s age. So where yoons bin at?”

  She is staring into Alby’s eyes and starting to wonder how her “la” would fit into a place like Pittsburgh … when he changes the subject. He says she reminds him of someone.

  Her left eyebrow arches. She thinks, please, do not spoil this. Like what else is a drag queen SUPPOSED to do if not remind you of …

  This is not good. Tonight she wants to be attractive as Tuki, not Janet or Whitney.

  Alby reaches across the table, puts his big paw up under her hair, alongside her neck. His fingers whisper to her ear.

  Her eyebrow arches again. She is beginning to smell stale plaa, stinky fish.

  She lifts a hand from her lap and flashes a palm toward his face like, “Stop in the name of love!”

  Maybe it is the champagne, but she does not even try to make her words tip toe. She tells him please, please, do not tell her she reminds him of some girl who broke his heart.

  He slides his fingers from her neck to her lips, silences her. He says that he is trying to tell her that he thinks this might be the best night of his life. But if she wants, they can call it an evening.

  She feels something churning inside her. Then she hears herself asking him if she can come home with him.

  At the Glass House, Alby’s private residence at Shangri-La, he puts Gladys Knight in the stereo. And they rewrite the I Ching, with the help of some of Kama Sutra’s minty lip balm, sex oil, and Pollaner strawberry preserves. She thinks it is like riding the Uptown Express all night long—

  “Stop!” Michael jumps up, waves the bill and his credit card at the waitress. “I don’t need to know about the sex.”

  SEVENTEEN

  When he gets back to Chatham, there is another message from the Thai detective on his machine.

  “This is Varat Samset of the Royal Thai Police calling again, Mr. Decastro. I am very anxious that you return my call, very eager to speak with you about Tuki Aparecio. As you may remember from my first message, I have been looking for her for five years. And now, thanks to Interpol and the computer age, she has resurfaced for me because of certain murder and arson charges in America. She left unfinished business with our office here in Bangkok. But that is not my major concern at this moment. There is something else, something related. More important now. I have reason to believe that she may well be in immediate danger. There is more here than meets the eye. You are my only way of reaching her. This is urgent. Please call me at …”

  He grabs a paper plate, writes down the number on it, skips to the next message on his tape. He heads for the fridge and a can of Old Mil, wonders what time it is in Thailand, what day it is—yesterday or tomorrow. Then he hears Filipa’s voice coming from the machine.

  “Hey, it’s me. I know I told you I’d be down tonight. But it is Monday. Seems like about half the staff blew off work today and I’m way jammed here. I’ve got to stay in the city tonight. I want to hear your voice. Wish you could give me a call, but I’m running around like a firefighter, and you know they make us turn off our cells in here. I’ll try you later if I get a minute. There are some new wrinkles on the wedding front. Love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he says to the machine. The tone of his voice is a mix of exasperation and relief. He has been so buried in the case all day, he totally forgot Filipa was supposed to come down for the night. Well, it is a good thing she’s not going to show. He feels like he has just gone fifteen rounds with the cat lady. He would be rotten company. She would want to have sex, and after a day in the Magic Queendom, he has overdosed on the human fascination with carnal desire.

  Since starting back to Chatham in the Jeep, he has been trying to make sense of the police reports and everything else he knows about his client. Then there are these calls from Thailand, putting huge question mark over his investigation. Everything seems a muddled mess. He still is not getting a clear sense of Tuki Aparecio. But he is trying to put together the bits and pieces she has told him, especially about her life in Bangkok. Sometimes when she talks about it, he can almost smell the curry, the ginger, the sex, the tearing of flesh.

  Dusk in the Patpong. The in-between hour. The only time of the day when the noise of the streets is muted, and you can hear chickens cackling in their cages. Thai love songs echo through the halls of the cheap hotel where chambermaids are still preparing the lala rooms for a night of rendezvous. The combined scent of diced scallions, peppers, steaming rice, roasting peanuts, frying fish, and ginger filter through the hot air of the concrete building.

  Since she does not eat until after the show, this is Tuki’s time to gather herself. So she is wearing just her underwear and a red silk robe, swinging easily in her hammock, painting and drying her nails before a huge pole fan in the little apartment above Silk Underground. Life is easy.

  Then she hears shots downstairs. First two, loud and close together.

  After a couple of seconds, a third. A bit muffled.

  Brandy and Delta, who have been sleeping in their hammocks, jump to their feet, their robes hanging open until they cinch them closed with the belts.

  “Get down. Hide!” They shout at Tuki, point to the clothes closet. “No move!”

  The door to their apartment squeaks open, then clicks shut. Her mothers are gone. She can hear their bare feet padding down the hall, down the stairs that lead backstage in the club. She is alone, curled in a dark corner behind three dozen dresses hanging like a curtain between her and the rest of the world.

  The odor of cheap cologne from the dresses is starting to make her dizzy when she hears the first of the screams. Then the bawling, like cats in the night. Keening in Thai and Vietnamese.

  Suddenly the door to the apartment bursts open. She peeks through the dresses, sees Brandy grabbing an armful of towels.

  “What …”

  “You no come. Stay here!” Brandy’s voice sounds fierce, but her face is streaming tears as she runs back out the door.

  Tuki cannot help herself. She has to know about these shots, this emergency that makes Brandy scream and cry. Slowly, she creeps out of th
e apartment, tiptoes down the hall, descends the back stairs. The concrete chills her feet. And all the while the sobs and the keening are growing louder. Now she hears sirens in the street. People are shouting.

  She is backstage, pulls open the curtain until she can see the main room of Silk Underground where the bar, the tables, and the stage are bathed in faint violet light coming in through the door from the street, the red neon over the bar. The room is empty of patrons, but there is a crowd of queens and B-girls around the far end of the bar. Some are holding their heads, some shrieking and howling, wandering away from the huddle in a daze.

  Suddenly, about six policemen come storming through the front door. The crowd scatters. Tuki sees a figure lying on the floor, leaking blood everywhere. Brandy and Delta are on their knees in this mess, pressing the towels to the figure’s chest.

  When she gets closer, she can see the face. White and ghastly. The eyes are rolled back in their sockets. It is Ingrid’s mother, her blonde hair fanned out around her in a pool of blood. She is dead. Two holes in her chest where her heart used to beat. Not far from her lies a second body, a man. He looks Chinese. There is a pistol in his hand. A big purple dimple on his right temple. The left side of his head is a pulpy mass of hair and blood and brains.

  Tuki feels her head starting to spin. She starts for the stage to sit down for a moment. But her knees are buckling.

  The next thing she knows she is lying on the stage, Delta is pressing a wet towel on her cheeks, forehead.

  “You faint, la. But you okay.”

  She tries to rise up on an elbow. Delta pushes her shoulders back down against the stage.

  “Not for you. No more look. This terrible sadness.” Tears are running down her cheeks.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Delta turns her head and starts to cry. “Not your business.”

  He gulps his beer, hardly tastes it because his mind is racing. If you believe the police reports, she is a cold-blooded killer, a psychopath, an arsonist, and a high-priced escort tied into a nasty nest of tranny prostitutes. But from the stories she is telling him about Bangkok, she seems hardly the type to trade sex for money. Or murder. She does not sound crazy. Maybe a little out of touch with reality, but not nuts. He sees her as loyal and loving, and nearly obsessed with performing. She seems to idolize her surrogate mothers. And she is attached to a homespun morality that she keeps reinforcing with a collection of Thai proverbs.

  He thinks that she is a little sad, definitely in need of approval. Even her deceptions, the shoplifting, the sneaking out in drag as a teenager, seem remarkably innocent for someone who has grown up as she has. Hell, he did a lot worse back in high school in Nu Bej. He and his buddies boosted a beer truck once and threw a party at Horse Neck Beach for a cast of hundreds. But Tuki? She left flowers when she stole from the boutiques. True, she seems to have a tendency toward revenge when she is betrayed, but who doesn’t?

  He tosses down the last of the beer as if he is eighteen again and the police are chasing him down a dark road. He crunches the can in his fist to destroy the evidence.

  “Everybody, back off,” he feels like howling. Prostitution, murder, arson just do not make sense here. Not with the Tuki he knows. Not unless someone has been squeezing her.

  Forget about a restaurant meal tonight. He has got to order out for a pizza again, sit here at his table, and read the cop reports. He wonders how he can get his hands on the videotape that supposedly puts the stolen knife, this dha, that killed Big Al in her hand. He wants to see what the police and the D. A. already think they know, exactly why they charged her. And he wants to see what they have missed.

  He needs to start putting together a list of suspects that does not include Tuki. Other people with motives, opportunities, means to kill Big Al and torch P-town. People who maybe have something against Tuki, too. People who would frame her. Maybe people from the Follies. Maybe from this escort service that she has talked so little about. Maybe business associates of Costelano. Or someone from Thailand. Maybe even some kind of international mob.

  Time to dig in. Do the research, pal. No big deal. Just about six months worth of work in … how long until the trial? Twenty-seven days.

  EIGHTEEN

  He has polished off most of a pepperoni pizza, and still tastes the salt and grease, even after downing a bottle of water. Michael stares out the window at the fog glowing more yellow than ever in the lights of Chatham’s Main Street. He can hear chords seeping from a piano bar up the street, a soft, female voice sings “As Time Goes By.”

  This Thai detective. What the hell’s he mean he has reason to believe that she may well be in immediate danger?

  Maybe the guy is jerking him around. There is something kind of sketchy here. Something about the way the detective talked, like he was reading a speech. But the phone number he left looks real. It has about twelve digits.

  His instinct is to call Tuki, tell her about the second phone message and grill her about Thailand. So he does. But she has shut off her cell. She is probably at the Follies getting ready to go onstage. So now he punches in the number of the Thai dick. It seems to take forever before the phone rings. But it finally does. And before he is ready, there is a voice at the other end, speaking in Thai at first, then English.

  “Hello. Hello. Who there?

  He just listens.

  “Speak … please, speak.” A cough. A grunt. A rough phrase in Thai. The voice sounds hollow, not menacing exactly, but more ragged, less easy with its English than the smooth one on the tape. He pictures an emaciated little ferret, chain-smoking in a window-less, concrete cubicle.

  “Hello?”

  This call seems all wrong. He clicks off. He needs to get control of what the cops already know before he goes wading into a Bangkok swamp. But he better get on the stick. The guy says she is in danger. Start with the escort service. What else did she tell him this afternoon?

  The sun is warming her face as she wakes up in the hammock on the bedroom deck of the Glass House at Shangri-La. There is no noise except bird songs and the light rush of wind in the trees. The water on the inlet is a perfect topaz. Alby is nowhere in sight. But someone has put a knit blanket over her.

  She hears a woman’s voice saying that she likes to see a girl smiling to herself. The voice is Ruby’s, the hostess. She is standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the deck in a sheer burgundy robe, holds a tray with orange juice, coffee, English muffins.

  Tuki stretches her arms over her head, swallows a yawn.

  Ruby says that everybody but Alby sleeps late around here. It is after ten.

  Tuki yawns again, listens while Ruby tells her how Alby said not to disturb her. How she looks like an angel when she sleeps.

  She smiles, takes the tray on her lap. Wonders if she can just stay gently swinging in this hammock, listening to the birds sing … maybe forever.

  Later Ruby sends her off with a cup of coffee for a morning shower in what she calls Bungalow Number Three. Alby is kind of particular about the bathroom here in the Glass House. Let it be.

  Bungalow is not exactly what she would call the little building she finds among the trees near the inlet. Number Three is more like a miniature fisherman’s house along the klongs of Thonburi—but not so rickety and not so poor looking.

  It has a big picture window, a porch with a hammock near the water’s edge, baskets of hanging ferns … everything gray and woody. The shower is a cedar enclosure outdoors on one side, but it has one glass wall looking right back into the cottage. When she takes her shower, she can gaze inside at the studio apartment with potted palms, a giant turtle shell on the wall, a queen-size bed on a low frame, a tiny kitchen. Maybe the best part of all is that she can look right through the house and out the open picture window to watch a family of ducks paddling on the inlet.

  Ruby meets her as she walks back toward the main house, the party place. She is still wearing the burgundy robe. She kisses Tuki on the cheek, asks her if she woul
d like a little tour of Shangri-La.

  After about thirty yards of walking, they come to another little bungalow, identical to Number Three, except that the fabric on the curtains and the bed are all pinks and greens instead of oranges and yellows. Before the walk is over, they have circled around the knob of a small hill, seen two more places just like her bungalow hidden in the forest on the hillside. She notices that these three bungalows are occupied. Women’s shoes are scattered here and there, lots of clothes in the closets. Ruby says she stays in the bungalow nearest the party place. She calls it the Lodge. It is strictly for entertainment. For the first time since she has been here, Tuki realizes that Shangri-La is on a small island. Cars cross a little bridge over a lagoon to get here.

  Ruby says that when Alby is here, he keeps off by himself in the Glass House. But he is hardly ever around to help with the day-to-day needs of the compound. That is Ruby’s job. He is always at the office or flying off in the Lear to one place or another. He rarely shows up at Shangri-La, except on the weekends to throw parties. The long-term guests pretty much have the place to themselves.

  There is a Jacuzzi looking out over the inlet. It bubbles away on one end of the deck at the Lodge. The spa is the size of one of those large wading pools for kids you see on TV. When Tuki sees it, there are two silhouettes that seem to wiggle like fish beneath the waves. Sheryl Crow is whining about leaving Las Vegas over the sound system.

  Silver shoots her a plastic, eff-you smile.

  Nikki gives a little wave.

  Tuki smiles, cannot think of what to say. She cannot figure out what is going on here at Shangri-La. Why are these other queens here? In Alby’s spa?

  Nikki pulls herself up on the side of the Jacuzzi, groans, says that she has had enough of men in the last twenty-four hours to last her the whole summer. She is looking unusually girly in a purple one-piece. Little buds of breasts. She looks at Ruby standing there beside the spa and says she needs a night off. Nikki is not pleading, she is coaxing—or is it flirting?