else appeared in Apryl Pyzn’s face: surprise; and then she was gone, surfing across the crowd, handed back toward the stage and pushed upright.
She looked around. Marvia spotted Vangie Rhee in the wings, shooting the stage and the audience. Then Apryl Pyzn looked pleased, then she dropped the cordless microphone and slumped to the stage.
Women in the front of the room started screaming. The bass player and guitarist dropped their instruments and ran to Apryl. The drummer, absorbed in her music, pounded away for thirty seconds that seemed like a month before she looked up from her drum-kit, stopped playing, dropped her sticks and tried to run straight toward Apryl, forgetting that the floor-mounted bass drum and top-hat cymbals were between them. The drums and cymbals crashed to the stage. A heavy brass disk bounced once and then crashed into the crowd.
Marvia grabbed the undercover officer she had spotted earlier, yelled, “Get out, get backup,” and headed for the stage. She held her badge in a red-gel spotlight and shouted. “Everyone stay calm. Turn on the house-lights. No one leave, the club is surrounded by police officers.”
There was a stir in the crowd as the fat man with TOD tattooed on his forehead tried to escape from the crowd but he moved too late. He reached the club’s stage door and ran into the arms of half a dozen Berkeley police officers.
* * * *
Sergeant Marvia Plum and Detective Evangeline Rhee sat in Dorothy Yamura’s office; the man with TOD tattooed on his forehead sat in a conference room nearby, talking earnestly with his lawyer. The man with TOD tattooed on his forehead looked dramatically different than he had at the Crash Club. The blood-red word and the simulated drops of blood were gone, washed clean after he had been photographed by police ID techs.
More, he looked oddly shrunken. The belly was gone. His T-shirt hung loose around his torso and his jeans would have fallen off if he hadn’t held them up with one hand. If it hadn’t been for his heavy beard, he could have passed for the brother of Solomon San Remo.
Dorothy Yamura gazed levelly at Marvia Plum and Vangie Rhee. “I thought I’d heard everything, but this one is new to me. The fake tattoos weren’t a big surprise, I’ve seen perps before who put on some bizarre garment or wig to distract attention from their faces, so the tattoo makes sense. Grisly sense of humor, though. Tod.”
“I thought that was his name,” Marvia put in, “or maybe the name of a lost love.”
“That would be Todd with two d’s. Tod with one d is German for Death. And that’s what he was peddling. Good thing your new little camera works, Vangie.”
Computer-generated blowups of the key frames Vangie had shot during Apryl Pyzn’s final crowd-surf lay on her desk. In one of them the tell-tale embroidered sleeve was visible. From it protruded a hand holding a hypodermic needle, about to plunge it into Apryl Pyzn’s leg.
“But that fake belly…where do you think he got the idea for that?”
“Some movie,” Evangeline put in. “They send stills to us at the Mirror and the other papers all the time. They can make a fake anything now, that you can hardly tell from a real one. Including a big roly-poly belly.”
“And Tod—or whatever his real name is—carried his stock of poison inside the fake belly. In the Crash Club it was easy to deliver his drugs and collect cash. Dark, crowded, the place was full of odd characters, most of them anonymous. As for killing Apryl Pyzn—we’re still checking her background, and the rest of PRYZN GYRLZ, but I expect we’ll learn that Tod was their supplier and he got into some kind of fight with Apryl. She wouldn’t pay her bills, or he’d been delivering bad merchandise, or—whatever. We’ll find out. I expect the other PRYZN GYRLZ will be happy to cut a deal and get Tod sent away forever if not longer.”
Dorothy Yamura allowed herself one of her rare smiles. “You think you could work narco again, Marvia?”
Marvia didn’t answer at once. She was thinking of her son, in bed and asleep now. She thought of him in the daylight, running, laughing, alive.
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