Brandi is doing a few slinky dance moves. ‘Just do it, Dan. Give me five minutes.’
‘Bring her in? Throw her out? Keep the food though, right?’
‘Just wait!’ I shout. ‘Just wait a goddamn second.’
The handset is still beside my ear, and suddenly the beeping is replaced by a familiar voice.
No. Not another one. I slam the phone into its cradle. Not another ghost, no way.
I want to go back in time. I want to steal apples from an orchard in Blackrock and eat them with my little brother on the beach. I want to count the new stars as they switch on and stay out until we’re sure Daddy is passed out drunk.
Connie. Beautiful Connie. Brandi deserves to be dropped in the river.
The look on Brandi’s face tells me I’ve said this out loud. She wants to laugh, but is afraid to.
‘Who’s going in the river, Dan? Not me, right? All I want to do is sell a few hand-jobs. That’s not a crime, is it?’
I try to speak calmly. ‘Jason, please bring Mrs Delano to the back room, tell her I’ll be with her in a minute. Brandi, stay where you are. You take one step towards the door and I swear to Christ you’ll regret it.’
‘But Dan. .’
I am not in the mood for argument, so I simply take my gun from the drawer and place it on the desk. It’s a clear message, hard to misinterpret, but Jason does anyway.
‘Hey, come on, boss. Guns all of a sudden? Did Mike initiate you into the gang? What, you got a shamrock tattoo now?’
It’s a tense situation, so I say something to Jason that I regret before the echo fades. ‘Get out, Jason. Go give Marco a cuddle.’
Brandi shrieks with joy. ‘Finally. Zing. Fuck you, Jason. Tough guy.’
Jason gives me a look like I shot his puppy and I feel like I’ve turned into my own father. He closes the door softly and I start figuring how I’m going to make it up to him. A weekend in Atlantic City at least.
‘The elephant has left the room,’ Brandi crows, her legs doing a little scissors kick on my desk. ‘You need to get rid of that faggot, Danny. He’s bad for business.’
This switches my attention back to her and gives me a nice segue.
‘Like Connie was bad for business?’ I say this ominously, but Brandi’s self-preservation cat sense is switched off.
‘No, not really. I’d say Jason would have no problem with some guy licking his ass. I’d say that’s exactly the kind of thing he’d have zero problem with.’
‘So, you’d get rid of him?’
Brandi winks, her eyelid heavy with crusted glittering eyeshadow. ‘Toss that boy on the street. Marco too. We gotta make some business decisions.’
‘Like you got rid of Connie?’
I don’t expect Brandi to fall into that trap, and she doesn’t, but her eyes give her away. It’s not much, just a quick flicker, but I notice.
‘Got rid of Connie?’ she says, haltingly, drawing her boots off the desk.
This to me seems like a crucial moment in the development of this whole confrontation. For some reason I absolutely believe that if Brandi gets her boots off the surface of Vic’s desk (my desk) then I have lost whatever upper hand I had, which was pretty crappy in the first place.
So Brandi is pulling her boots away from me, knees up around her pirate earrings, but she doesn’t move fast enough. I reach out and grab her right ankle and squeeze it till the patent leather squeaks, which kinda sucks the gravity from the moment.
‘This smells clean,’ I say, gritting my teeth with the effort of holding on to the boot and carrying on a conversation. ‘Real clean. I bet you used a whole pack of antiseptic wipes on this boot.’
‘Gotta keep germ-free, Daniel,’ says Brandi. Her voice is super-innocent, like a girl scout, but her eyes are darting around the office like something or someone is going to pop up with another surprise.
‘You should have burned this pair, Brandi. I know they’re your favourites, but you’ve got others.’
I’m rambling a bit, but that’s because half of me knows that the accusation I’m about to make is at best based on a hunch and at worst based on supernatural intervention.
‘Why the fuck are we talking about my boots? First no booth, now you have something against my boots? Let go of my goddamn leg, Dan.’
‘You should have burned them,’ I say again, using my old trick of repeating myself to buy a second. ‘Because all the blues need is one strand of DNA, caught in a stitch. All they need to do is match your heel to the hole in Connie’s head.’
Brandi is a little pale under her make-up. ‘Let go of my leg, Daniel. You’re hurting me.’
Is this what she should say? Is this what an innocent person would say?
‘Aren’t you going to tell me that you’re innocent? Protest and so forth?’
‘And so forth? Who the fuck are you?’
I admit it. That was a little Dr Moriarty.
‘I’m taking this boot to the cops. If they find nothing, then no harm done and you can jerk whoever’s pecker you like for a month. But if they find some trace, then there won’t be any peckers where you’re going.’
Brandi sees in my face that this isn’t one she can talk her way out of.
‘Get your hands off me, asshole.’
‘What’s the problem? Just give me the boot and you get to rule the roost around here, so long as you had nothing to do with Connie.’
Brandi sneers at the sheer volume of dumbness in my plan. ‘I don’t care if that boot has Connie’s eyeball stuck on the heel, you’re still the one handing it over. The jilted boyfriend.’
That takes a moment to sink in, but she’s right. Even if Brandi owns the murder weapon, it doesn’t mean she did the murdering.
‘I’ll take my chances. The police will look closely at both of us, something I have no problem with.’
Halfway through this last sentence, I try to take Brandi by surprise, standing suddenly and yanking the boot with me, hoping it will come clean off, but Brandi is ready and curls her toes going up with the boot. Now I am in the cartoon situation of holding a grown woman upside-down by the ankle.
‘Shite,’ I say. Seems appropriate.
‘What next, Dan?’ asks Brandi, her hair brushing the floor. ‘I worked the pole for years. I can do this all night.’
I don’t know what next. I really don’t. I cannot believe the situation in which I find myself: standing in my ex-boss’s office, holding the stripper who possibly murdered my potential sweetheart aloft by her ankle. It pains me to say it, but this girl is heavy and my bicep is aching already.
‘Hey!’ says Brandi, having a light-bulb moment. ‘Are you wired?’
This thought freaks her out so much that she does a pretty impressive stripper move and folds herself upwards, swinging her other leg around, and suddenly there is an angry woman on my shoulders. I hear something scrape along the desktop and a quick glance is enough to confirm that she has snagged my gun on the way up. Brandi’s legs are strongly muscled and she’s doing her damnedest to squeeze my brain out of my ears. I feel a metallic ring digging into my scalp through my cap and I realise that I probably have two seconds to live before Brandi composes herself and flicks the safety. Amazingly, I am almost as worried about Brandi damaging the hair grafts as I am about sudden death.
I take two rapid steps forward, around the side of the desk. It’s instinct really; I’m just trying to get away. As I clear the desk, I hear a dull bong, like a bell in a sack, and Brandi goes over backwards. Her legs are still locked but her upper half is dazed. She’s cracked her head on something metal.
The immediate danger is past and so I take a second to assess, to look at myself from afar. I see a middle- aged, craggy-looking ex-soldier standing in the middle of his office, panting like a donkey, with a stripper wrapped around his neck, and it’s not even the strangest situation he’s been in today.
Jason comes through the door and his face is red with choked-down rage. I don’t blame him.
