Catch a Falling Knife

by Alan Cook

  “How did you get along with Lefty?” Burt asked.

  Donna hesitated. “You mean the owner? Fine…we got along fine.”

  “But you didn’t give him your correct name. And you asked to be paid in cash.”

  “That was…I didn’t want people to know I was doing it.”

  “It also allowed you to avoid paying taxes on your earnings.”

  “I…”

  “We’re not going to rat to the IRS on you,” Detective Johnson said, irritably, looking at Burt. “We just want the truth. Could you please put on your wig and mask?”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mrs. Morgan saw you dance. We just want to verify that it was really you.”

  Donna looked at me, warily. “I’ve already put on my mask and wig for her.”

  “I’d like to see you in them again,” I said, trying to placate her. If she refused, could Detective Johnson force her to wear them?

  Donna hesitated, and said, “I’m not going to take off my clothes.”

  “That’s okay,” Burt said, with a smile. “We have good imaginations.”

  Actually, I wondered if I would be able to verify her identity better with her clothes off, but when she turned and went into the bedroom I figured we’d take it one step at a time.

  Donna returned two minutes later with the mask and wig in place and she did bear a striking resemblance to the Shooting Star from the neck up. Below the neck she wore jeans and an oversized sweatshirt and that completely spoiled the picture. I wished Burt hadn’t said it was all right for her to leave on her clothes.

  “Can you play the music you used?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure where the CD is.”

  Donna stalled, but the three of us looked at her, expectantly, and the force of our wills eventually impelled her to search through a stack of CDs until she found the correct one. She placed it in the player and soon the up-temple notes of Perry Como filled the room: “Don’t let the stars get in your eyes, don’t let the moon break your heart...”

  “Do some of your routine for us,” Burt said.

  “There isn’t enough room.”

  “Would you like to do it outside?” Detective Johnson asked.

  “No.”

  This was like pulling teeth. I could understand Donna’s embarrassment at doing a strip routine under these circumstances, even with her clothes on, but we were trying to find out the truth and didn’t have time for sympathy. Again the force of our collective will did battle with hers.

  “Okay, okay. The kitchen. I’ll do it in the kitchen.”

  The kitchen was small, but at least it wasn’t cluttered with furniture. The three of us crowded into the doorway to watch. Donna kicked off her sandals and started doing some dance steps in time to the music. I had to admit that she looked plausible. She did know something about dancing and she did have a sense of rhythm. Still, it would have been much easier to compare her performance with what I saw at Club Cavalier if she hadn’t been wearing all those clothes.

  This was a strange situation because since she had taken her clothes off in front of men before, it shouldn’t be a big deal, but the clients of Club Cavalier were anonymous and there had at least been a psychological distance between her and them. Maybe if I shooed Burt and Detective Johnson out of the apartment….

  I said, “But can you do a split while hanging upside down on the pole?”

  Donna immediately went into a split on the floor.

  “I could never do that,” Burt said, with a shiver.

  She wasn’t on a pole, but still…. I had another idea. I said, “Do a back-flip.”

  “A what?”

  Donna stopped dancing and stared at me. So did the others.

  “A back-flip, like you did at Club Cavalier.”

  “You’re out of your mind. I never did a back-flip at Club Cavalier. You’re trying to get me because I told what I knew about Dr. Pappas. You won’t admit I’m the Shooting Star. Well I am the Shooting Star, damn it. You want me to take off my clothes and prove it? Okay, I will.”

  Donna grabbed the bottom of her sweatshirt with her arms crossed and started to pull it over her head. Detective Johnson took hold of her arms and stopped her, probably thinking of the trouble he could get into for having a witness strip.

  “Is this your idea of a joke?” Detective Johnson asked me.

  In the background, the song “Don’t Let the Stars Get Into Your Eyes” ended, and Perry launched into another star song: “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, never let it fade away...”

  I was on to something. I tried to remain calm as I said, “Hundreds of people have seen the Shooting Star dance at Club Cavalier. They include my son and the owner and the other dancers. And thanks to Eric Hoffman, we have the license plate numbers of many others. It would be easy to find a dozen witnesses who will tell you that the Shooting Star did two back-flips in her routine. All I’m asking is that you do one for us now.”

  “I can’t do a back-flip in here,” Donna said, her voice suddenly reasonable. As you can see, the apartment is too small. And the ceiling’s too low.”

  “How about outside on the grass?” Burt said.

  “I need a firm surface to take off from.”

  “Okay, the sidewalk.”

  “It’s too uneven.”

  “This is what we’re going to do,” Detective Johnson said, reaching the end of his patience. “We’re going to the field-house, where Crescent Heights plays its basketball games. A basketball court has the same kind of floor as the stage at Club Cavalier, right? Or at least it’s close enough.”

  “Or we could go to Club Cavalier, itself,” I said. “Then you could show us how you work on the pole. There aren’t many patrons at this time of day and I’m sure Lefty would be glad to see you again.”

  A look that might have been panic briefly crossed Donna’s face. It passed, but she remained silent for a bit. When she spoke her voice was soft. “I did it for her,” she said. “I did it for Elise. Mr. Hoffman was so into this morality thing with strip clubs that I couldn’t let him remember his daughter as a stripper.”

  “So Elise was the Shooting Star and not you?” Detective Johnson demanded.

  Donna nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  Detective Johnson turned to Burt and me. “Out,” he said. Both of you, out. I want to talk to her alone.”

  Chapter 23

  “But I had a lot of questions to ask her,” I said from the back seat as Burt pulled away from the curb.

  “Let Detective Johnson do his job,” Burt said, laughing. “At least give the poor guy a chance. He’s not going to be very cooperative if you take over the case from him.”

  “What’s happening?” Mark asked, sleepily from the passenger seat in front. He had been dozing when we returned to the car, not having had much sleep in jail.

  “Lillian proved that Donna wasn’t the Shooting Star,” Burt said. “Elise was the Shooting Star.”

  “Oh,” Mark said, trying to grasp the significance of this information. “That means…”

  “That means Elise danced at Club Cavalier the night she died. She couldn’t have been out with you.”

  Mark whistled. “Lillian, I owe you one.”

  “You’re not out of the woods yet,” I said. “Donna can still contend that she saw your car drive away when she came home from wherever she was that evening. That’s something we’ve got to find out.”

  “Hopefully, Detective Johnson will find that out,” Burt said. “Donna isn’t going to stand in line to talk to you again soon.”

  “How did Elise get to and from Club Cavalier if she didn’t own a car?” Mark asked. “If somebody drove her home, isn’t it possible that person is the murderer?”

  “It’s certainly possible,” Burt said. “If not, that person may have been the last to see Elise alive, aside from the murderer, that is. And Elise may have smoked some weed with him…or her, which means they knew each other pretty well.”

  “
I’d like to talk to the guy who owns Club Cavalier,” Mark said.

  Burt glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to be getting back to the office.” He stopped for a red light. “On the other hand, Lillian probably saved me several days’ work by uncovering Donna’s lie about the Shooting Star. If I can make a couple of phone calls, I should be all right. How do we get to Club Cavalier?”

  “Turn right at the next corner,” Mark and I said, in unison.

  We arrived at Club Cavalier in under five minutes. Bethany is not a big place. The parking lot was almost empty. I warned Burt that if he parked in the lot he might find his license plate number on the Internet, but he just laughed. He parked the Lexus and made a couple of calls on his cell phone while Mark and I waited outside the car.

  “I won’t ask you if you’ve ever been in a place like this,” I said.

  Mark chuckled. “In my misspent youth I did a lot of things. And I’m not sure I’ve outgrown my misspent youth.”

  Burt joined us and said, “This looks high class compared to some of the dumps I’ve seen. But hey, this is a college town and everything is high class.”

  Music blared as Mark opened the door. One of the dancers gyrated onstage. I hoped the men wouldn’t be embarrassed by having me with them. The usual guy was selling tickets, but if he recognized me he didn’t let on. I yelled at him, “We need to talk to Lefty,” hoping to avoid paying the cover charge.

  He yelled something back; I assumed he was asking my name so I said, “I’m Lillian, the friend of the Shooting Star.”

  This seemed to impress him. At least he picked up the phone and had a brief shouted conversation, which I couldn’t hear. Then he motioned for us to follow him. Our path took us near the stage. I recognized the blond dancer as the girl named Cherub. She did some impressive things with the pole, but she didn’t have the fluid movements of the Shooting Star. Perhaps nobody would ever be that good again.

  Our guide led us through the doorway into the area where they did the lap-dances. I saw some movement coming from one of the cubicles and averted my eyes. Burt and Mark had lingered slightly behind, watching Cherub. I hurried past the lap-dancer, who gyrated on some invisible man inside the cubicle, before they got there.

  We passed the dressing room door, but it was closed. A knock on the door of Lefty’s office brought a “Yeah” from the other side. Lefty sat at his desk inside the cramped room, but the older lady who had been running figures the last time I was here was nowhere to be seen.

  Lefty stood up as I entered and stretched out both hands across the desk. He wore another beautiful, multicolored tie. For that reason alone I would have gone out with him.

  “Lillian, right?” he said, capturing my hand with both of his. “It’s good to see you again. “And who are these, your bodyguards or your groupies?”

  I introduced them. After they shook hands Lefty offered us seats. There were only two chairs in front of his desk so Mark sat in the old lady’s chair at the other desk.

  “I’ve been following the case of Elise in the newspapers,” Lefty said. “I read that some guy was arrested for her murder. Guy named Mark, or something like that.” He turned to Mark. “You. You’re the guy. What are you doing here?”

  “He’s out on bail,” Burt said, hastily. “I’m his attorney. But he didn’t do it.”

  “He better not have or I’ll kill him with my own hands.”

  Lefty demonstrated a chokehold with his big hands and I had no doubt they could do the job. Mark leaned back in his chair, away from Lefty.

  “Elise—the Shooting Star—was the best dancer I ever had. She didn’t have a voluptuous figure, but she sure packed them in. An innocent girl-next-door body, but how she could move it. Erotic poetry. What a combination.”

  “For a while we thought the Shooting Star was another girl,” I ventured.

  “No way. After you came here I started reading the newspapers. One story described her as having a tattoo on her lower abdomen—a little heart with an arrow through it. Just like the Shooting Star.”

  I hadn’t seen the tattoo on the Shooting Star, although I did have a vague recollection of reading about it in the newspaper. I must have figured from the description that her g-string would hide it.

  “Elise danced here the night she was killed,” Burt said. “We’d like to find out how she got home.”

  Lefty shrugged. “Beats the hell of out me. She always took off right after her number. I figured she had a friend waiting for her someplace. Either that or she had a car. Whether she went in her car or somebody else’s, it was never parked in the lot.”

  “She didn’t have a car,” I said. “And she would leave, even if she was dancing again later the same night. At least, that’s what she did the night I was here.”

  “Yeah, she did that most of the time. Occasionally, she hung around the dressing room between shows, but she wasn’t very friendly with the other girls and she never took off her mask.”

  “Did she do lap-dances?” Mark asked.

  “She was too high-class for lap-dancing,” Lefty said, but not as sarcastically as I would have thought. “She said it was demeaning.”

  “But you tried to get her to do them?”

  “Hey, I’m here to make a buck. A lot of guys wanted her. She could have made big money.”

  The door opened. Cherub stuck her head in and said, “Hi, Grandma. Ain’t you the one who was here looking for the Shooting Star a couple of weeks ago?”

  “Cherub, how many times do I gotta tell you to knock?” Lefty growled.

  Cherub ignored him and squeezed into the room. She wore a thin robe over her costume—or lack of costume. She looked at Burt and Mark and said, “You got good taste in men, Grandma. I would do a lap-dance for either of you—for free.”

  She was standing right next to Burt. She plopped herself down on his lap before he had a chance to react and put her arm around his shoulders. He sat there, embarrassed, wondering what to do with his hands. I could feel the warmth emanating from her body, generated by her dancing.

  “You see the usual class of broad I get in this place,” Lefty said. “That’s why the Shooting Star was a breath of fresh air, even if she wouldn’t do lap-dances.”

  Cherub gave Lefty a death-stare and said, “What I want to know is, did they find the asshole who killed her?”

  Cherub looked at me and then at Lefty. Apparently, everybody at Club Cavalier had been sure that that Elise was the Shooting Star.

  “Did Detective Johnson ever talk to you?” I asked Lefty.

  “He came about a day after you did,” Lefty said. “He didn’t seem convinced the murdered girl was the Shooting Star, even after I told him I was sure of it. He said it was her roommate. I told him to bring the roommate down, that I could tell by talking to her, but he didn’t seem to think it was important.”

  “I could have told him, too,” Cherub said. “I talked to her a few times. But the detective never asked me.”

  “So who killed Elise?” Burt asked of the room in general, with as much dignity as he could muster, considering that Cherub was playing with his tie.

  “Whoever drove her home that night,” Lefty said. “It sounds like the work of a lover. Did she have a lover? I didn’t see anything about one in the papers.”

  “She had a boyfriend,” I said, “but I would hardly call him a lover. He didn’t believe in sex before marriage.”

  “Yegods!” Cherub exclaimed, jumping up from Burt’s lap. “No wonder she was so skittish. A boyfriend who doesn’t believe in sex.” She went out the door, but then stuck her head back in and said, “Let me know when you find the asshole. The Star acted strange, but she danced good and she didn’t deserve to die.” Cherub shut the door behind her.

  I said, “Excuse me. I’d like to go talk to her for a minute.” I stood up and followed Cherub out the door and to her dressing room. I caught up with her inside. Nobody else was there.

  “You’re doing all right, Grandma,” she said, turning aroun
d when she heard my footsteps. “I hope I have handsome men to escort me when I’m your age. Like Mae West.”

  I smiled and said, “I want to ask you a question, Cherub. Did you know about Elise’s—the Shooting Star’s—tattoo?”

  “Lefty told me about it. That’s why he was sure that the murdered girl was the Star.”

  “But you never saw it?”

  “No, it was covered by her g-string.”

  “Then how come Lefty knew about it?”

  “Lefty? You can’t keep a secret like that from Lefty. He probably got in her pants.”

  “But…”

  “But what? But she was a good girl? Listen, Grandma, on a night when you’re dancing good and you’ve got the guys eating out of your hand and ready to die for you, it makes you horny as hell. And if all she had to look forward to was a boyfriend who didn’t like sex, she needed something more.”

  “But she always left right after her number.”

  “Not always. Sometimes she’d go to Lefty first to get paid. Did you see the door in the corner of his office? That leads to a small room with a bed in it. He says it’s so he can take naps. Ha. I know what it’s for because I’ve been there.”

  I was learning more than I wanted to know.

  “One other thing,” Cherub continued. “The Star and I, we didn’t talk that much, but she did tell me one thing I can relate to. She told me the only time she felt in control of her life was when she was dancing.”

  Chapter 24

  “I have a confession to make,” Mark said between two bites of bacon as we were eating breakfast the next morning.

  Uh oh, I thought. I said, “It’s too early in the morning for confessions.”

  “You’ve been so good to me, I’ve got to tell you this. I know one reason you’re helping me is because you hope that Sandy and I will get back together, and I hope with all my heart that we do, but I don’t want you helping me under false pretenses.”

  Having said that in one breath, Mark’s body collapsed in his chair like a ventriloquist’s dummy without the ventriloquist.

  Get it over with. I said, “I can see that you’re not going to be happy until you say whatever it is that you want to say, so go ahead.”