A Touch of Dead

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 Claudette 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 Claudine told him to hush.
    “And why didn’t you like Claudette?”
    “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 Claudette?”
    “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 Claudette?”
    “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.”
    “And then you went back to do this shaving?”
    He nodded.
    “How long does it take you?”
    “Usually about thirty, forty minutes. So scheduling two was kind of chancy, but it worked out. I do it in the dressing room, and the other guys are good about staying out.”
    He was getting more relaxed, the thoughts in his head calming and flowing more easily. The first person he’d done tonight had been a woman so bone-thin he’d wondered if she’d die while he did the shaving routine.
She’d thought she was beautiful, and she’d obviously enjoyed showing him her body. Her boyfriend had gotten a kick out of the whole thing.
    I could hear Claudine buzzing in the background, but I kept my eyes closed and my hands on Barry’s, seeing the second “client,” a guy, and then I saw his face. Oh, boy. It was someone I knew, a vampire named Maxwell Lee.
    “There was a vamp in the bar,” I said, out loud, not opening my eyes. “Barry, what did he do when you finished shaving him?”
    “He left,” Barry said. “I watched him go out the back door. I’m always careful to make sure my clients are out of the backstage area. That’s the only way Rita will let me do the shaving at the club.”
    Of course, Barry didn’t know about the problem fairies have with vamps. Some vamps had less self-control when it came to fairies than others did. Fairies were strong, stronger than people, but vamps were stronger than anything else on earth.
    “And you didn’t go back out to the booth and talk to Claudette again?”
    “I didn’t see her again.”
    “He’s telling the truth,” I said to Claudine and Claude.
“As far as he knows it.” There were always other questions I could ask, but at first “hearing,” Barry didn’t know anything about Claudette’s disappearance.
    Claude ushered me into the pantry, where Rita Child was waiting. It was a walk-in pantry, very neat, but not intended for two people, one of them duct-taped to a rolling office chair. Rita Child was a substantial woman, too. She looked exactly like I’d expect the owner of a strip club to