Deadly Nightshade by Victor J. Banis

Author:Victor J. Banis [Banis, Victor J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective, gay, mystery, romance
ISBN: 9781934531747
Google: m-_MA6qx5pkC
Amazon: 193453174X
Publisher: MLR Press
Published: 2009-01-03T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was raining again. They never mention that in the travel brochures, Stanley was thinking. Sometimes, in the winter season, it rained for days on end. And when it wasn’t raining, everything was sooted with fog, so that when the sun finally did make a brave appearance, you felt almost drunk on its glow.

The Boom Boom Room was packed, the miniature tables crowded close together, men standing three and four deep at the bar, watching the performer on the stage. The hostess told them initially that there were no tables. Tom showed her his badge and she found them one, crammed into a tiny alcove at the rear. A single candle flickered on the table. Stanley ordered a coke, Tom a bourbon and water.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to drink on duty,” Stanley said.

Tom gave him a dismissive look. “That’s under normal circumstances. Sitting in a drag bar is not normal.”

Their drinks came just as the lights dimmed and a gorgeous woman with a baritone voice announced “The star of The Boom Boom Room, Miss Gaye Dawn.”

The house lights dimmed, a blue spot hit the stage, Gaye Dawn standing in it. Tom hadn’t seen her come onstage, although he had been watching for her. She seemed just to materialize. She was small—she looked smaller than he remembered her as a guy—wearing a dark blue dress that reached almost to the floor, high at the neck and slit on the sides, so that she flashed a lot of bare leg as she moved. Very nice leg, he had to concede. The whole package looked pretty good, really. If he hadn’t known it was a guy…

She was good, too, he guessed. He wasn’t a show tunes kind of guy, but he had to admit, she not only looked utterly convincing, she sounded it too. The performer who’d been on stage when they came in had lip-synched a bit too obviously to a Donna Summer recording. Gaye Dawn, however, sang in her own voice, a kind of whisky baritone that nevertheless managed to sound genuinely womanish.

“The song sounds familiar. Plus, she reminds me of someone,” he whispered to Stanley. “Her voice, I mean, the way she sings.”

“It’s Lili Marlene,” Stanley said.

“Never heard of her.”

Stanley did one of those longsuffering sighs that always pissed the hell out of Tom. “The song is Lili Marlene, dope. It was one of Dietrich’s signature songs. You have heard of Dietrich, one hopes.”

“Oh, sure.” Tom had once worked a case with a Noah Dietrich. He felt pretty sure that wasn’t who Stanley meant, but he wasn’t inclined to say so.

He focused instead on the performance onstage. She had segued into something more upbeat, completely unfamiliar to him, about boys in back rooms. He wondered if that was a, what did they call them, an innuendo. Boys, back rooms? Probably it was, the way the audience was eating it up. Back door stuff, for sure. He smiled to himself, proud that he had worked it out without any of Stanley’s snide cracks.

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