“I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out before,” I said. “You have a dragon tattoo! I mean, you’reliterallythe girl with the dragon tattoo. You got revenge against a sexual predator who more than deserved it. Only he didn’t hurt you. He hurt your daughter.”
All color drained from Zhang Xiu’s face and her knees buckled. I helped her to my mom’s old Eames chair dupe.
Zhang Xiu stared at me. “Is Connor—is he... all right?”
“If by ‘all right,’ you mean ‘dead,’” I said, “then yes.”
Zhang Xiu let out a strangled noise. “I just wanted him to be violently ill. For a minute. To be afraid. To suffer a little. He deserved that, at least. I didn’t mean to—”
I wanted to judge her. But when I thought of my own daughters, I couldn’t.
“We won’t tell,” Gucci said. “But I have to know how you did it.”
Zhang Xiu covered her face with her hands, then brushed them back through her hair. “Like I told you, before my daughter got sober, she metthis guy at a bar. The Dutch Goose. He said he wanted to walk her to her car. But instead he—” She choked up. “He’d drugged her.”
“Oh, Zhang,” I said, sinking down to the edge of my bed. Gucci was already cross-legged on the floor and Layna joined her there.
“She didn’t call me until two days later,” Zhang Xiu said, speaking as if in a trance. “The police said there was nothing they could do. She’d spent hours in the shower by then. But she knew his name. I looked him up. I’ll never forget that face. That was three years ago. Tilly, the instant I saw you fighting with him in Huckleberry’s, I knew. Knew it was him.”
I barely dared to breathe in case it broke the spell.
“I was driving Peony’s car that night, since my Kawasaki was in the shop,” Zhang Xiu said. “She always has drug samples in her trunk. Swag hypodermics that sayAllergantoo. To give to doctors. While you all were having another round, I went out front. He was still out there, staggering around, holding his head, ranting about Salma hitting him with a beer bottle. I was like, ‘I remember you! We had fun that night? Do you still like to party?’ I could see him thinking he didn’t remember me, that I was too old. But I convinced him to meet me in the alley. I grabbed Botox out of Peony’s trunk, peeled off the label. I told him it was morphine and I watched him inject himself. He shot it right into the big blood-draw vein.”
Miranda would be so relieved to know for sure what happened. That she truly hadn’t been responsible for Connor’s death. This was a secret just for Pole Virgins, but Miranda (aka Pumpkin Spice) might be joining us in classes soon enough.
“How’d you know how much to give him?” Gucci said.
“One time I was joking with Peony about Botox being a toxin. She said it’d take a couple bottles of the stuff to kill someone. She said it in passing. But I remembered. She must’ve been wrong, though.”
“Then how’d you get away from him?” Layna said.
“I pretended I’d eaten a bad fish taco.”
“Bad fish taco!” I said. “The holy grail of excuses!”
“After that night, I got so anxious,” Zhang Xiu said, rubbing her hands on her thighs. “But I read theIdaho Statesmanevery day.The front page. The obituaries. There was no mention of him.” She paused as if groping for a shot of denial. “I told myself he was fine.”
“Yeah, not fine,” Layna said.
“Like he went home and maybe slept it off,” she pressed.
An eternal sleep, I wanted to say. Instead I gently covered her hands with my own. “I know it’d be more evolved to say that there are better ways to heal, to move forward. But if some scumbag did that to one of my daughters, I’d chop off his dick and make him eat it like a Vienna sausage.”
“Amen,” Layna said.
Zhang Xiu squared her shoulders. “Then at Pole Kisses, when you asked if anyone had seen anything weird out back at Huckleberry’s, it made me nervous again. Real nervous. But I put everything that happened in one little box and buried it in the back of my mind.” She hesitated. “I can’t believe I killed him.”
“You didn’t,” Gucci said.
Zhang Xiu, Layna, and I all looked at her as if she’d said our Salma Hayek was the real Salma Hayek’s long-lost daughter.
“The corpse had near-lethal levels of botulinum toxin,” Gucci said.
“Exactly!” I said.
“Near lethal!” Gucci said again. “Near lethal is not lethal. My new grad-school mentor warned me civilians never hear what the experts are saying when it comes to cause of death. And she’s right!”
“Then what killed him?” Zhang Xiu asked.
