Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

I thought about offering mine, but I didn’t know if my eyes had stopped glowing. We didn’t want to spook her. Newman wasn’t wearing his, but he didn’t offer them to her. Maybe it was that awkward moment of asking for them back that he wanted to avoid.

Giselle, in her jeans, Nikes made for fashion not exercise, and a T-shirt tied in a side knot at her waist, squinted up at Newman. She also wore a checked flannel shirt that looked

big enough to belong to one of the men in her life. It could have been a boyfriend or even her father. Not all strippers live wild lives offstage. She looked like a college student named Becky or Jennifer who had rolled out of bed and thrown clothes on to make an early-morning class. There was almost no trace of the exotic Giselle from the promotional photos on the strip club’s website, but then, how many performers actually look like their head shots?

Even after we’d both introduced ourselves as marshals, Giselle still kept her attention on Newman, as if I didn’t count as much. She wasn’t the first person to discount the woman in the group of badges, but it answered one question for me: She preferred men to women offstage. If she’d been more bisexual except as part of her act, she would have looked at me more. She played it like the college-age woman she appeared to be: Newman was the cute guy, and I was something to be ignored like an obstacle to his attention or maybe less. Welcome to girl world, where there are no friends and all that matters are who’s more attractive and who gets the man. I was glad for the umpteen-millionth time that I hadn’t been indoctrinated into typical girl culture.

“I felt so bad for Jocelyn when I realized she was here, maybe even onstage with me, when her father was killed.” Giselle gave a little shiver and hugged herself through the flannel. I debated whether her reaction was real or acting, and decided it was real. I didn’t think she had the acting chops to fake her skin going even paler in the light.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Newman agreed.

Giselle shivered again. “It was such a good night, and then to go home to . . .” She looked up at Newman. “Is it true that she found the body?” Her voice lowered on the last part as if she was afraid to say the words too loudly.

“It was a shock for her, as you can imagine,” Newman said.

Giselle nodded and hugged herself again.

“Did you have to clear it with Barry that you were going to take a customer or customers up onstage with you?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes, her pretty face looking sour and unhappy. “I cleared it with him.”

“Why did you have to clear it with Barry?” Newman asked.

I answered, “Customers can get more unruly when you drag other women onstage.”

Giselle looked at me as if I’d said something interesting and nodded. “How do you know that?”

“I’m engaged to a dancer.” I said it just like that, no explanation that it was male, or more than one.

She gave me her first real smile. “You must have spent a lot of time in the club back home.”

“Enough,” I said, and smiled, letting her make of it what she would.

She was friendlier after that, more relaxed. We learned that the night had been planned a couple of months out, because of Jocelyn having to coordinate with her two married friends. Lap dances were planned for all, but only Jocelyn had planned to get onstage.

“It must have rained money,” I said, smiling again.

Giselle nodded, face happy and satisfied like the cat that ate a big fat canary. “Best night I ever had.”

“Jocelyn must be a regular for you to trust her up onstage like that,” I said.

She nodded again. “She’s here at least a couple of times a month.”

“Always a lap dance with you?” I asked.

Giselle frowned then. “No, not always. Sometimes I’m busy when she comes in, and then she’ll find another dancer, but she always comes to me before she leaves for the night.”

“I’ll bet she does,” I said, and again let her turn my smile into anything she wanted it to be.

Newman started asking timing questions, but like Phoenix, Giselle confirmed that Jocelyn’s alibi was solid. Most normal people rarely have good alibis when they need them, because they aren’t planning on needing one. It’s actually more suspicious sometimes when the alibi is too good, like this one, but two strippers and an entire club full of people had watched Jocelyn all night. There was no way to put her at the scene of the murder. Strike one murder suspect, which put us back to Bobby as our prime. Fuck.

Giselle had gotten so comfortable that she bumped her shoulder against mine as if I’d been another dancer, and then she said, “All the other dancers were so jealous of me that night. You get women in the clubs, and they usually take the attention away from us, but these were all mine.”

“The other dancers must have been pissed.”

She nodded happily as if it were the best thing.

Newman said, “Let me walk you to your car.”