“Not a vamp?” he asked.
Showed him my teeth. The canines only extend when vamps are excited by blood, battle, or sex, but they’re noticeably sharp even when they’re retracted. My canines are quite normal.
“I’m just a regular human,” I said. “Well, that’s not quite true. I can read your thoughts.”
He looked terrified.
“What are you scared for? If you didn’t kill anybody, you have nothing to fear.” I made my voice warm, like butter melting on corn on the cob.
“What will they do to me? What if you make a mistake and tell them I did it, what are they gonna do?”
Good question. I looked up at the two.
“We’ll kill him and eat him,” Claudine said, with a ravishing smile. When the blond man looked from her to Claude, his eyes wide with terror, she winked at me.
For all I knew, Claudine might be serious. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen her eat or not. We were treading on dangerous ground. I try to support my own race when I can. Or at least get ’em out of situations alive.
I should have accepted Sam’s offer.
“Is this man the only suspect?” I asked the twins. (Should I call them twins? I wondered. It was more accurate to think of them as two-thirds of triplets. Nah. Too complicated.)
“No, we have another man in the kitchen,” Claude said.
“And a woman in the pantry.”
Under other circumstances, I would’ve smiled. “Why are you sure Claudia is dead?”
“She came to us in spirit form and told us so.” Claude looked surprised. “This is a death ritual for our race.”
I sat back on my heels, trying to think of intelligent questions. “When this happens, does the spirit let you know any of the circumstances of the death?”
“No,” Claudine said, shaking her head so her long black hair switched. “It’s more like a final farewell.”
“Have you found the body?”
They looked disgusted. “We fade,” Claude explained, in a haughty way.
So much for examining the corpse.
“Can you tell me where Claudia was when she, ah, faded?” I asked. “The more I know, the better questions I can ask.” Mind reading is not so simple. Asking the right questions is the key to eliciting the correct thought. The mouth can say anything. The head never lies. But if you don’t ask the right question, the right thought won’t pop up.
“Claudia and Claude are exotic dancers at Hooligans,” Claudine said proudly, as if she was announcing they were on an Olympic team.
I’d never met strippers before, male or female. I found myself more than a little interested in seeing Claude strip, but I made myself focus on the deceased Claudia.
“So, Claudia worked last night?”
“She was scheduled to take the money at the door. It was ladies’ night at Hooligans.”
“Oh. Okay. So you were, ah, performing,” I said to Claude.
“Yes. We do two shows on ladies’ night. I was the Pirate.”
I tried to suppress that mental image.
“And this man?” I tilted my head toward the blond, who was being very good about not pleading and begging.
“I’m a stripper, too,” he said. “I was the Cop.”
Okay. Just stuff that imagination in a box and sit on it.
“Your name is?”
“Barry Barber is my stage name. My real name is Ben Simpson.”
“Barry Barber?” I was puzzled.
“I like to shave people.”
I had a blank moment, then felt a red flush creep across my cheeks as I realized he didn’t mean whiskery cheeks. Well, not facial cheeks. “And the other two people are?” I asked the twins.
“The woman in the pantry is Rita Child. She owns Hooligans,” Claudine said. “And the man in the kitchen is Jeff Puckett. He’s the bouncer.”
“Why did you pick these three out of all the employees at Hooligans?”
“Because they had arguments with Claudia. She was a dynamic woman,” Claude said seriously.
“Dynamic my ass,” said Barry the Barber, proving that tact isn’t a prerequisite for a stripping job. “That woman was hell on wheels.”
“Her character isn’t really important in determining who killed her,” I pointed out, which shut him right up. “It just indicates why. Please go on,” I said to Claude. “Where were the three of you? And where were the people you’ve held here?”
“Claudine was here, cooking supper for us. She works at Dillard’s in Customer Service.” She’d be great at that; her unrelenting cheer could pacify anyone. “As I said, Claudia was scheduled to take the cover charge at the door,” Claude continued. “Barry and I were in both shows. Rita always puts the first show’s take in the safe, so Claudia won’t be sitting up there with a lot of cash. We’ve been robbed a couple of times. Jeff was mostly sitting behind Claudia, in a little booth right inside the main door.”
“When did Claudia vanish?”
“Soon after the second show started. Rita says she got the first show’s take from Claudia and took it back to her safe, and that Claudia was still sitting there when she left. But Rita hates Claudia, because Claudia was about to leave Hooligans for Foxes, and I was going with her.”
“Foxes is another club?” Claude nodded. “Why were you leaving?”
“Better pay, larger dressing rooms.”
“Okay, that would be Rita’s motivation. What about Jeff’s?”
“Jeff and I had a thing,” Claude said. (My pirate ship fantasy sank.) “Claudia told me I had to break up with him, that I could do better.”
“And you listened to her advice about your love life?”
“She was the oldest, by several minutes,” he said simply. “But I lo-I am very fond of him.”
“What about you, Barry?”
“She ruined my act,” Barry said sullenly.
“How’d she do that?”
“She yelled, ‘Too bad your nightstick’s not bigger!’ as I was finishing up.”
It seemed that Claudia had been determined to die.
“Okay,” I said, marshaling my plan of action. I knelt before Barry. I laid my hand on his arm, and he twitched. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” he said, but his mind provided me with a different answer.
“That’s not right, is it?” I asked, keeping my voice gentle.
He had a gorgeous tan, almost as good as mine, but he paled underneath it. “No,” he said in a strangled voice. “I’m thirty.”
“I had no idea,” Claude said, and Claudette told him to hush.
“And why didn’t you like Claudia?”
“She insulted me in front of an audience,” he said. “I told you.”
The image from his mind was quite different. “In private? Did she say something to you in private?” After all, reading minds isn’t like watching television. People don’t relate things in their own brains, the way they would if they were telling a story to another person.
Barry looked embarrassed and even angrier. “Yes, in private. We’d been having sex for a while, and then one day she just wasn’t interested anymore.”
“Did she tell you why?”
“She told me I was… inadequate.”
That hadn’t been the phrase she used. I felt embarrassed for him when I heard the actual words in his head.
“What did you do between shows tonight, Barry?”
“We had an hour. So I could get two shaves in.”
“You get paid for that?”
“Oh, yeah.” He grinned, but not as though something was funny. “You think I’d shave a stranger’s crotch if I didn’t get paid for it? But I make a big ritual out of it; act like it turns me on. I get a hundred bucks a pop.”
“When did you see Claudia?”
“When I went out to meet my first appointment, right as the first show was ending. She and her boyfriend were standing by the booth. I’d told them that was where I’d meet them.”
“Did you talk to Claudia?”
“No, I just looked at her.” He sounded sad. “I saw Rita, she was on her way to the booth with the money pouch, and I saw Jeff, he was on the stool at the back of the booth, where he usually stays.”