Straight Silver

Billie sucked silently, for the second time showing no surprise. With her pipeline to the police, she probably knew more details about the murder than I did.

“Kind of an eloquent statement.” My English comp acted up again.

“Or a practical one if the killer needed a weapon.” If Billie did know anything about the murder, she wasn’t telling.

The phone rang. I stood. Billie motioned me to sit as she glanced at the number on the caller ID screen. “The machine can get it.”

I stayed standing. I only had one question left—who killed Della Divine? Billie either didn’t have the answer, or if she did she wasn’t sharing.

“I’ve got to go, Billie.”

She leaned her impressive bulk back against her chair and nodded as if she understood, just like the first time I’d told her I had to go. She got up to walk me out.

“How’s school? Getting straight A’s?”

“I’m getting by.” I wasn’t ready to admit that a dyslexic going to college is equal to a stripper wearing her thong backward onstage–fully exposed and no idea what the hell you’re doing.

“Good girl. You do my taxes after you become legit?”

“If you give me the real set of books.”

Her laughter became richer. “Still one of my girls, Silver.”

She made my name sound like a symphony.

We embraced at the back door. “You hear anything about this thing with Della, you give me a call?” I asked her.

Billie put her hands on my shoulders as if to steady me. “Sometimes, chère, a thing like this happens. And there’s nothing you or I could have done to stop it.”

I left, my body still warm from Billie’s embrace, the faint sweet smell of her breath in my nostrils. And an unsettling sensation that she had just lied to me.

I WAS CHECKING the temperature of the chocolate when Adrienne came in. If the chocolate was too cold, you got splinters. Too warm and you got mush. I drew my knife across the square’s surface. With a satisfaction like a long sigh, I watched the chocolate curl. Adrienne eyed the orange chiffon cheesecake. “What’s wrong?”

I used to drink when I worried. Now I bake. Adrienne scooped a dollop of whipped cream from the mixer bowl and sucked it off her finger while I told her about Della’s death. She pulled her finger slowly out of her mouth when I finished. Her lips stayed set in an O. Adrienne is a university student and the daughter of my divorced dentist, Herb Bloomberg. Last year Momma had finally made good on her threat to sell Great-Great-Grandma LeGrande’s gorilla of a house and head to Biscayne Bay, and for the first time, I got sentimental. I’d worked the circuit for eleven years, eleven very profitable years, but the town of Snake Fish twenty-two miles south of Memphis was home. Sentimentality isn’t cheap. Adrienne rents the finished basement. I get a little extra cash to keep this hulk of a house and my childhood illusions alive plus twice-annual free dental cleanings and checkups. Adrienne hasn’t had to buy herself a drink in a bar since she moved in with an ex-stripper. We were a match made for the Memphis suburbs.

I placed chocolate curls around the cake’s top with a finesse I don’t usually possess. Adrienne was seeking comfort from a beater off the mixer when the back door slammed. Great-Aunt Peggilee came in from her pool aerobics class at the Jewish senior center, singing Frankie Laine. She was either still in the throes of exercise endorphins or Charley Diamond had worn his Speedo again.

She eyed the orange chiffon cheesecake. “What’s wrong?”

Auntie came with the house. She teases her hair so high it could be a way station for migrating geese. She also favors heavy eyeliner, clip-on earrings, male crooners and fake fur…in Memphis. If Barbie needed a great-aunt, Auntie Peggilee would have been the prototype.

“One of the girls Silver used to work with is in a bad way.” Adrienne extended the other beater to my great-aunt. The mutual adoration between Adrienne and her I could only credit to their complete antithesis of each other.

“Pregnant?” Auntie’s eyes narrowed, slid to my waist while her tongue flicked at a blob of cream.

“Dead.”

We weren’t a subtle household.

Auntie licked the beater. Her slitted gaze on me didn’t say, “That could have been you.” Her eyes with their turquoise lids had seen enough to know it could have been any one of us instead of Della laid out on cold steel this morning.

“That for after the funeral?” Auntie nodded toward the cake. Practicality was Aunt Peggilee’s way of coping.

“I guess it could be,” I answered, not realizing it until now.

“When is it?”

“I don’t know. The police are looking for family. Della had a younger brother in the military, but he was killed in a train accident a few months ago.”

“Train accident?”

“He was on the tracks after a heavy night on the town. Not far from the base. They think he was walking home and either fell and knocked himself out or plum passed out. They couldn’t stop the train in time.” I handed them each a chocolate curl.

“And now the sister is dead?”

Auntie shaved her eyebrows and painted on new ones. They headed beehive level. Auntie doesn’t believe in coincidence.

“Strangled.” Adrienne supplied, moving on to a spatula.

“Della never really mentioned anybody but her brother, and a grandmother who raised them in Pittsburgh. I suppose if they don’t find anybody, the girls at Billie’s will take up a collection. Bintliff should give us a fair price.”

“You want me to go with you to the service?”

“I don’t see any reason.”

“Neither do I.” Aunt Peggilee put the licked-clean beater in the bowl soaking in the sink, took a swig of her sport drink. “But I will.”

I adored my great-aunt Peggilee, too.

I CHECKED IN with Luxury Limousines after my class in fundamentals of info processing, but midweek was always slow. Any jobs that came in went to the old-timers. They didn’t need me until the weekend. Adrienne was at her summer job at the university science library where she spent most of her time scouting out premeds. Auntie would be leaving for salsa class followed by Margarita Mania at the Elks. I headed into Memphis, going against the tide of rush-hour traffic. The Oyster Club was in a corner of the city that made respectable folks shake their heads, and campaigning politicians favor for catchy photo ops. But an upward transformation had begun, thanks to a new condominium complex three streets over, whose towers could be seen from the T-shirt stalls on the corner. Come in from the east, and you’d pass a freestanding zone of new construction that took up almost the whole street. The centerpiece was the residential towers that included a health club and underground parking. Enter from the west and you’d see the transvestite hookers, the homeless waiting for St. Francis’ shelter to open for lunch, and the exotic dancer marquees, the largest of which was the Oyster Club.

The club was quiet. Peak patron time was hours from now. A thin-haired man sat at the bar, stirring his drink with his pinkie, more interested in the clear liquid than the women dancing on the catwalk. A woman in her cruel forties slapped a cardboard coaster down as I slid onto a stool.

“Ginger ale.” Elixir of the reformed.

She brought the drink, cast me a resigned look and waited. Thirty-one-year-old community college coeds, even ex-strippers, don’t stop in at Club Oyster at the end of the day for a soft drink.

“I was a friend of Della Devine’s.” I held out my hand. “Silver LeGrande.”

A flash of recognition sparked in her pale eyes. She took my hand, didn’t give me her name, but she left my money on the bar. “I heard you left Billie.” Her gaze took me in and spit me out. “You looking for a gig here?”

I shook my head. “I’m going to college.”

She nodded, no expression. Enough years behind a bar and you heard it all. She wiped the counter. “Sorry about your friend.”

“Were you here this morning?”

Her eyes lifted to mine. “My shift doesn’t start until noon. As it was, by the time the cops got done scouring this place, we didn’t open until four.” She looked around. “Not that it matters. Something like this scares people. Business will be off for a while.”

“Police said the cleaning woman found her.”

“Cindy.”

A calico cat jumped on the bar. I started. The bartender backhanded the cat off the counter with a surprisingly elegant swat.

“Damn stray. Throw it out every night, but the girls keep feeding it, leaving it milk.” The bartender moved away and, with a similar grace, grabbed a bottle, poured another several clear inches into the empty glass of the man at the bar with the pinkie swizzle stick.

“Cindy works mornings. She doesn’t know many of the girls,” the woman said as she came back to me. “Couldn’t reach the manager. Called 911.

“Police said the woman saw the tattoo. Made her remember Della’s name.”

“Della Devine.” The woman smiled, her bridge work not bad. “I liked that name.”

I smiled back. “Me, too.”

“Police had Cindy find her file to see if there was family, friend, somebody to contact.” The woman paused. “Silver LeGrande,” she pronounced with the same surprising elegance she’d used to backhand the cat off the counter.

I sipped my ginger ale. “Did you know Della?”

“I knew her, but I usually work the early shift. She danced second shift. Better money.”

“How ’bout the other girls?”

The woman shrugged. “Sure, the late-night girls knew her. They’ll be coming in all shook up for a while, sipping something strong between sets. The ones that called in to see if we were open tonight said she was a good kid.”

“I heard she had her problems.”

The woman’s second shrug said, “Don’t we all?’

“Some of the girls will be here in a couple hours. They might be able to tell you more.” I couldn’t fault the woman for clamming up. Self-preservation comes before sympathy.

“What about them?” I looked at the girls working the poles. “They know Della?”

“Lucy worked with her.” The bartender tipped her head toward a blonde, her breasts disproportionate to narrow hips and fireplace-poker legs. “The other girl hasn’t been here that long.”

“Anybody else called? Been by? Family maybe?”

“You and the cops. That’s it.”

I finished my ginger ale and felt forlorn even with bubbles up my nose.

“Get you something else?”

I snapped the rubber band against my wrist. Two years ago I’d been on the cusp of being a drunk. Some people twelve-stepped their way out. I’d snapped myself sober. Today the skin above my pulse was a mean black and blue.

“Thought I’d wait around, maybe talk to Lucy when she goes on break.”

“I’ll send her over.” The woman walked away.

“The girls have lockers? Some place to store their stuff in the dressing room?”

The woman turned back to me. “There’s a few lockers. Not enough for everyone on the busy nights. The girls share.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Don’t know that you’ll find much, but go ahead. Police have already been in there, but that don’t mean squat. Strung-out stripper strangled with her own G-string. The boys downtown have probably already chalked it up to karma.”

She was probably right. I doubted even Officer Serras with his sheet-smoothing hands would lose any sleep tonight over Della Divine.

The back room smelled of smoke and hairspray. Three wooden tables with large rectangle mirrors were covered with makeup bottles, hairspray cans, brushes. A stained couch occupied one corner. The coffee table in front of it was littered with overflowing ashtrays. The lockers were a line of five, industrial brown and scratched. The first held an oversize man’s shirt, a black bowtie and a cowboy hat. Two whips and a dog collar hung in the second one. It was a stroll down memory lane. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. If there had been any clues, some cop in the crime lab was earning his daily wage going over them now. I opened the third locker, peered inside. It felt better than doing nothing. On a hook hung a long red wig.

“Jane said you wanted to see me.”

I jumped, hit my head on the door edge, and swore like a sailor. A girl slumped into a seedy-looking chair in the corner, lit a cigarette, exhaled. She crossed her bony legs, her foot swinging. She’d seen me jump like a scared rabbit. She was one up on me, and she knew it.

“Silver LeGrande.” Emergency contact.

“Lucy.” She didn’t give a last name. “Jane says you knew Della?”

“We worked together at Billie’s.”

“You dance at Billie’s?”

“Used to.”

“Where do you dance now?”

“I don’t. I’m going to school.”

“What for?”

“I want to be an accountant.”

The girl studied me with a half-lidded gaze. Her robe was loose, adding an untidy air about her. She was much younger up close than on the stage. She inhaled, exhaled, didn’t offer up anything.

“How well did you know Della?” I asked her.

“We weren’t bosom buddies.” The words were tough. So was the girl’s face. Caring cost you in a club.

“You work the second shift?”

“Usually. I’m pulling a double tonight, filling in for one of the regular girls who got spooked by the whole deal.”

“What happened didn’t scare you?”

“I got three kids to feed.” The girl inhaled hard. “The show goes on.” She tapped an ash, ground it into the worn carpet with her foot.

“I heard she was pretty broken up about her brother’s death.”

“First I heard about it.”

“He was run over by a train few months back. Over near Fort Grant where he was stationed.”

The girl dragged on her cigarette until the end burned hot orange.

“Something like that, well, it could make a person…” I waited for Lucy to fill in the blanks. She didn’t. I tried to make it easy for her. “She was using when I knew her.”

The girl shrugged. “I’d seen worse.”

So had I. “You know why she came here?”

“The ambiance.” The girl gave a tight smile, proud of herself.

“Anybody she was seeing?”

The girl stood and went to the washroom.

“Maybe somebody special?”

“Yeah, they line up at the door here to sweep us off our feet.” I heard a small hiss as she pitched her cigarette into the toilet.

“How about any of the customers? Maybe one of the regulars? Someone who likes to get rough?”

Lucy came back into the room, plopped herself down at a dressing table, started applying blush with force. She caught my gaze in the mirror. “I already answered all these questions earlier for the police. What are you looking for anyway?”

I told her the truth. “I don’t know.”

I had surprised her this time. She smiled. For a moment she was just a young girl enjoying a grin. She reached for a hairbrush. “We worked together, that’s pretty much it. She was pretty tight-lipped, didn’t go around giving you her life story like there was some fat chance you’d be interested.”

“How about the other girls? Anyone she hung out with outside of work?”

“This is a strip club. Not a sorority house.” Lucy got up, went over to the lockers. “Listen, I wish I had something to give ya, but I don’t. There’s a lot of freaks out there. It happens every day.”

She opened a locker door, took out a fresh pack of cigarettes.

“So last night just happened to be Della’s turn?”

The girl glanced at me over her shoulder. No one had thought of me as naive for a long time…until now. “You got a better explanation?”

“Not yet.”

The girl gave a crooked smile, slammed the locker door. “I gotta get to work.” She opened the fresh pack of cigarettes, tapped one out and lit it. She didn’t move.

“Della was always bumming cigarettes off everybody at Billie’s. She do that to you?”

The girl went to the couch, sat on its edge. She crossed her legs and eyed me through the smoke. “Yeah, she was a pain like that.”

“She was always trying to quit.” I went on, hoping I’d hit a nerve. “Thought if she didn’t buy ’em, she wouldn’t smoke ’em.” Della flashed too real in my memory.

“Yeah, she did that here, too. Never helped her none. Don’t matter much now, anyway, does it?”

I couldn’t hold my gaze anymore on the girl with the swinging foot and the slack robe. I turned to leave.

“She used to let a lot of the girls borrow money though. She do that at Billie’s?”

I stopped, nodded.

“She’d never harass them about paying her back. She was good like that.” The girl tapped the ash off her cigarette and looked at me. “It was as if she didn’t care about the money.”

“You know anything she did care about?”

Lucy leaned forward and set the cigarette in the ashtray. She picked up a cosmetic bag, took out a lip pencil. “She was meeting someone last night. After her shift.” She lined her lips as she talked.

“You know who?”

She smacked her lips together twice. I snapped my rubber band.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything like that. I came into the dressing room and heard her talking on the phone. Whoever it was, she was telling them she’d meet them after work.”

I schooled my features, concealing any excitement. Lucy could be playing me, after all. Some girls have a natural mean streak.

“Did you tell this to the police?”

“I’m telling you.”

“Why?”

“You go to college. You’re a smart woman.” Lucy picked up her cigarette. She took a long draw, stubbed it out and stood.

I found a pen, ripped a blank page out of my pocket planner which was easy since all the pages were blank. I scribbled numbers down. “This is my cell, this is my house.” I heard the hope in my voice and didn’t even care. I held out the paper to Lucy. “Just in case you or maybe one of the other girls wants to get in touch with me.”

She folded the paper, slipped it inside the cigarette pack’s cellophane wrapper. Ten chances to one it’d be thrown away with the empty pack, but those odds were all I had. I’d take them.

On my way home, I called the number Serras had given me.

“Serras.”

“LeGrande.” I answered as an equal. “What’s the current status on the Devine case?” Lesson I learned long ago—fake it and most people will follow your lead.

“We’re about to crack it wide open, doll face.”

Serras wasn’t most people. He was police.

“You find any family?”

The pause told me Serras was deciding exactly where I fit in. Not easy to waylay a cop. They’re paid to see right through you.

“How ’bout you?” He came back at me.

“What about me?”

“You got something for me? You learn anything at the Oyster you’d like to share?”

So they were cruising the Oyster. Good for them, although the manpower and case’s stature wouldn’t let it go on for more than a day or two.

“Yeah, I got a lecture on ‘life is a bitch’ from a chicken-legged number named Lucy.”

He chuckled. “You’re one up on us.”

“Trying to make me feel better?”

“No.”

I hadn’t thought so. I debated telling him about the phone call Della had made. Only because he’d tucked Della in as if wishing her sweet dreams.

“I did learn one thing.” Or maybe because I remembered his backside rumba and appreciated the effort. Still I was going to make him bite. A girl had to have standards.

Two seconds of silence passed until I heard “I’m here.”

I’d take it. “Della was heard making plans to meet someone after work.”

Another silence. “And?”

“That’s it.”

Serras wasn’t the type to sigh. He was the type to swear. Professionalism prevented him from doing either. Maybe Billie was wrong. Maybe Serras had decided to play by the rules. Damn waste of man if that was the case.

“I appreciate the vital information, Ms. LeGrande.”

He had a right to sound sarcastic. The tip had lost something in the translation. Still it was something for an ex-stripper, dyslexic, college coed on her first murder case.

“What do you got for me?”

He chuckled. He was warming up.

“There was a brother—”

“I knew that by lunch.” I took a turn at the sarcasm.

“Then you know he was recently killed.”

“A train hit him.”

“Investigation ruled it an accident.”

“This one won’t be so neat and tidy, though, will it, Detective?

“We’re trying to locate the grandmother through Social Services. If the adoption was never formal, there’ll be no formal record of it. We did find the victim’s birth record. No history found yet on the name listed under father.”

“What about the mother?”

“Last-known address showed nothing. No other listing has come up yet. She might have remarried, moved away. We’re still looking.”

“So far, a dead end, then?”

He shouldn’t have hesitated.

“C’mon, Serras, I gave you something.” I said it as if I believed that would work.

“You gave me nothing, LeGrande.”

“Okay, if I do find out something more, you get it first. Deal?”

“What exactly is your interest here?”

“Emergency contact.”

I liked his laugh.

“All right. One of the neighbors saw a guy leaving the victim’s apartment this morning. We ran the description of the man and the make of the car. We’re talking to him now.”

“Who is he?”

Serras didn’t answer.

“I could know him. Might know something about him that you guys could use.”

I was thinking up another lure to get Serras to give up the information when he said, “Name is Paul Chumsky.”

It was my turn to pause.

“You know him?”

“Sort of.”

Serras waited. I was becoming impressed by the man’s patience.

“I was married to him.”

Chapter Three

I figure everyone is entitled to one major mistake per lifetime. Mine was Paul Chumsky.

I got to the station and found Serras. He was looking as if he should have one of those warning stickers on him: Caution: Extremely Flammable Contents. May Spontaneously Ignite. Obviously Serras didn’t like surprises.

“You were married to Paul Chumsky?”

“I kept my own name.” Nobody queues up for strippers named Silver Chumsky. “You think Paul had something to do with Della’s death?”

“We’re asking him a few questions.”

Della may have been on a downward spiral, and Paul could have been riding shotgun, but murder? It wasn’t Paul’s style. Too messy. The final residue of the matrimonial sacrament kicked in. “Paul’s not a murderer.”

A drunk, yes. An unfaithful husband, definitely.

“That’s what he says. Says the victim and he had dinner at her place before her shift. She suggested he hang out. If it was a slow night, she’d get off early and they could get together back at the apartment. She’d give him a call from the club.”

“You already knew she was planning on meeting someone after work?” So much for my hot tip.

“I figured you were trying to impress me.”

“Would it be that easy?”

“No.” Serras’s glance told me I was getting under his skin. At this point, a win-win situation any way I looked at it.

“Said he waited at her apartment. Said he was pretty tired.”

Interpretation: Paul’s happy hour had started at noon instead of three. Youth, brashness and a slightly above-average talent had gotten my ex-husband to the semipro golf circuit, but he’d lacked the discipline and true genius to go further. When I met him, he’d had one mediocre season and knew it was his last. When I found myself pregnant, he proposed to me in what I always figured was one last desperate stab at immortality. He wasn’t with me when I lost the baby, but when I told him, it was the first time I’d seen a man cry. We lasted two years. We weren’t friends but we weren’t enemies. We just weren’t meant to be. Last I heard he was the resident pro over at the Meadows, a country club for Memphis moneybags. An ex-stripper with an ex-husband who’s an ex-semipro. If life were a tic-tac-toe game, I’d have it made.