Catch a Falling Knife

cubicle, before they got there.
    We passed the dressing room door, but it was closed. A knock on the door of Lefty’s office brought a “Yeah” from the other side. Lefty sat at his desk inside the cramped room, but the older lady who had been running figures the last time I was here was nowhere to be seen.
    Lefty stood up as I entered and stretched out both hands across the desk. He wore another beautiful, multicolored tie. For that reason alone I would have gone out with him.
    “Lillian, right?” he said, capturing my hand with both of his. “It’s good to see you again. “And who are these, your bodyguards or your groupies?”
    I introduced them. After they shook hands Lefty offered us seats. There were only two chairs in front of his desk so Mark sat in the old lady’s chair at the other desk.
    “I’ve been following the case of Elise in the newspapers,” Lefty said. “I read that some guy was arrested for her murder. Guy named Mark, or something like that.” He turned to Mark. “You. You’re the guy. What are you doing here?”
    “He’s out on bail,” Burt said, hastily. “I’m his attorney. But he didn’t do it.”
    “He better not have or I’ll kill him with my own hands.”
    Lefty demonstrated a chokehold with his big hands and I had no doubt they could do the job. Mark leaned back in his chair, away from Lefty.
    “Elise—the Shooting Star—was the best dancer I ever had. She didn’t have a voluptuous figure, but she sure packed them in. An innocent girl-next-door body, but how she could move it. Erotic poetry. What a combination.”
    “For a while we thought the Shooting Star was another girl,” I ventured.
    “No way. After you came here I started reading the newspapers. One story described her as having a tattoo on her lower abdomen—a little heart with an arrow through it. Just like the Shooting Star.”
    I hadn’t seen the tattoo on the Shooting Star, although I did have a vague recollection of reading about it in the newspaper. I must have figured from the description that her g-string would hide it.
    “Elise danced here the night she was killed,” Burt said. “We’d like to find out how she got home.”
    Lefty shrugged. “Beats the hell of out me. She always took off right after her number. I figured she had a friend waiting for her someplace. Either that or she had a car. Whether she went in her car or somebody else’s, it was never parked in the lot.”
    “She didn’t have a car,” I said. “And she would leave, even if she was dancing again later the same night. At least, that’s what she did the night I was here.”
    “Yeah, she did that most of the time. Occasionally, she hung around the dressing room between shows, but she wasn’t very friendly with the other girls and she never took off her mask.”
    “Did she do lap-dances?” Mark asked.
    “She was too high-class for lap-dancing,” Lefty said, but not as sarcastically as I would have thought. “She said it was demeaning.”
    “But you tried to get her to do them?”
    “Hey, I’m here to make a buck. A lot of guys wanted her. She could have made big money.”
    The door opened. Cherub stuck her head in and said, “Hi, Grandma. Ain’t you the one who was here looking for the Shooting Star a couple of weeks ago?”
    “Cherub, how many times do I gotta tell you to knock?” Lefty growled.
    Cherub ignored him and squeezed into the room. She wore a thin robe over her costume—or lack of costume. She looked at Burt and Mark and said, “You got good taste in men, Grandma. I would do a lap-dance for either of you—for free.”
    She was standing right next to Burt. She plopped herself down on his lap before he had a chance to react and put her arm around his shoulders. He sat there, embarrassed, wondering what to do with his hands. I could feel the warmth emanating from her body, generated by her dancing.
    “You see the usual class of broad I get in this place,” Lefty said. “That’s why the Shooting Star was a breath of fresh air, even if she wouldn’t do lap-dances.”
    Cherub gave Lefty a death-stare and said, “What I want to know is, did they find the asshole who killed her?”
    Cherub looked at me and then at Lefty. Apparently, everybody at Club Cavalier had been sure that that Elise was the Shooting Star.
    “Did Detective Johnson ever talk to you?” I asked Lefty.
    “He came about a day after you did,” Lefty said. “He didn’t seem convinced the murdered girl was the Shooting