Who Killed the Pinup Queen?

by Kelner, Toni, L. P.

  There was nothing about Sandra, so Tilda quickly composed a message.

  TILDA: I have bad news. Sandra Sechrest, A.K.A. Sandy Sea Chest, was found murdered in her Boston apartment last night. The police have no suspects at this time.

  She added the link to the online version of the Boston Globe article and posted it along with her message, then went on to check her e-mail. Though there was nothing urgent, it took her half an hour to read through and deal with the accumulation. Then she couldn’t resist doing a little Web surfing to see if there’d been any news about Sandra’s case, hoping that maybe an arrest had been made. No such luck.

  While she’d been hunting for info, a wave of messages had come through on the Lost Pinups site, and she found the group abuzz with the news. Unsurprisingly, there were already warring theories about the murderer. The most popular contender was a serial killer going after former pinups, which also explained why the group had been having so much trouble finding the women—the killer had struck first. Next in line were vague conspiracy theories involving either the mob or the radical Right. Joe himself figured the killing was a normal, random crime—a phrase that made Tilda wince—but suggested that the police ought to look at this “friend” who’d found Sandra’s body. Tilda wasn’t sure whether or not she should tell them she was the friend or not, but finally decided not to. She didn’t want to have to answer a lot of questions. In fact, she didn’t want to think about the woman, at least not for a while.

  Tilda figured the only way to get her mind off the murder was to get to work. Unfortunately, the first thing on her agenda was to write up the interview with Sandra and send it to the editor who was waiting. But even if she’d been up to writing, the police still had her camera. Eventually, she was going to need to call about getting it back, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it yet. It just sounded too callous.

  Besides, she didn’t think the editor would want the story anymore. It was a how-to journal for Web entrepreneurs, not a true crime magazine. She called the editor to explain the situation and asked if he wanted her to interview another formerly famous actor who was using the Web to sell memorabilia, possibly Mike Teevee from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but wasn’t surprised when he said he’d pass. He did offer a kill fee, a phrase that made Tilda wince, and she accepted it gratefully.

  With that off her docket, she was free to contemplate a subject guaranteed to provide plenty of distraction: tracking down guest stars from Cowtown. The Ambrose brothers wanted ten interviews and had given her the names of ten actors they were particularly interested in locating, people who’d been in more than one episode or whose episodes had been particularly well received. It was exactly the kind of challenge Tilda liked.

  Her first step was to create a spreadsheet to keep track of basic information about each of the ten actors. Then she hit the Internet Movie Database, her favorite site for information about movies and TV shows. Though Tilda had quite a list of contacts for current actors and more recently forgotten stars from the 1970s and 1980s, the further back a show went, the harder it was to find people involved.

  According to IMDb, two of the guest stars were already dead, but she wrote a note to herself to check out obituary sites for verification. Though the movie site was usually accurate, occasionally mistakes were made. Besides, the circumstances of the actors’ deaths might make for interesting stories, too.

  That left eight, and since she already had permission to find replacements, she flipped through her copy of Cowtown Companion to pick two other guest stars. She found one who’d gone on to work in a soap opera, which would draw crossover interest with soap fans. Since she was currently playing the matriarch on A Life Worth Living, it would be easy to find her.

  For the other, Tilda chose a character actor who’d worked steadily for years without ever making it big. She’d found that actors like him knew everybody, and since they weren’t dependent on any one show for their bread and butter, didn’t mind dishing the dirt. To add to his appeal, Tilda had interviewed the guy once before because of a red-shirt appearance on Star Trek, which is to say that he’d been cast as a security officer and then killed six minutes into the episode. So she already had enough of a rapport to ensure a good interview.

  With her list back up to ten, she was ready to start hunting.

  Had Cowtown been a more recent show, she might have been able to track down actors via the paper trail of residuals paid for reruns. But it had been produced before anybody anticipated the long life a TV show might have, which meant that residual payments had stopped after the sixth broadcast of each episode. So even if she’d been able to access studio records, those records would have been so out-of-date as to be nearly useless.

  Tilda was going to have to get creative. She knew that the secret to finding anybody in the entertainment industry was connections. Actors rarely stayed with one show for long—the average show didn’t even make it through the first season and even the most successful shows only lasted a few years. Even if an actor was with a series for an entire run, that would still be only a slice of a career, so actors ended up working with a whole lot of other actors, plus behind-the-scenes people like producers, directors, agents, casting consultants, makeup artists, script writers, lighting people, and people with titles she didn’t completely understand. That meant her next job was to find convergences between her targets and people she already knew.

  Next she looked to see if any of her other targets were still working regularly. Those would be the easiest to find, either via their agents, casting directors, or the networks for the shows on which they worked. That gave her strong links for a couple more. Then came the painstaking process of reading the credits for each of the remaining actors, trying for more connections with people she knew or people she knew how to find.

  By five thirty, she had a pretty good idea of how to locate most of the ten.

  She might have worked a little longer had the doorbell not rung. She was hoping it was the UPS delivery man with her latest eBay splurge, but it was Cooper.

  Chapter 8

  A pard sticks till hell freezes over, then goes as far as he can on the ice.

  —PARDS BY TEXAS BIX BENDER

  “DUDE! What brings you out to the wilds of Malden?” she asked, knowing that he regarded anything farther from Boston than Cambridge as untamed wilderness. Malden was two whole towns beyond Cambridge.

  “Jean-Paul had another gig tonight, so I’ve come to rescue you from the terrors of leftover takeout pizza.”

  Tilda checked the front of her shirt for pizza crust crumbs, but she was clear. “In other words, you came to make sure I was okay.”

  “Which I could do a whole lot better from inside your apartment.”

  She stepped back to let him in, and they went into the living room. It was small, saved from being cramped by having a large archway that opened onto the dining room. In one of the compromises of living with a roommate, the couch, lamps, and TV were Tilda’s, while the easy chair, coffee table, and end table were Colleen’s. Unsurprisingly, the styles didn’t mesh even a little bit.

  Cooper said, “I hope you respect the fact that I manfully resisted the impulse to check on you today, thinking that you’d be catching up on your sleep. But when I got home there was no Tilda, just an uninformative note.”

  “Sorry, I should have called. I just got restless and decided to head back here. Then I got working on my Cowtown research.”

  “So how are you doing?”

  “I’m fine. Been working hard on the Cowtown story.”

  “Did you get any sleep today?”

  “I napped a little this morning. Woke up ready to get going on my—”

  “Yes, on the Cowtown story. Are there a lot of research facilities on Denial River?”

  She sighed. “Okay, I’m freaked out, Cooper, and yes, I had more bad dreams. But sitting around being freaked out isn’t going to make the problem go away.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”


  She hesitated, not sure if conversation would help or make it worse. The decision was made for her, at least temporarily, when she heard the front door open and a voice called out, “Tilda, are you home?”

  A second later, Colleen stuck her head into the room. When Tilda had first met the wide-eyed brunette, she’d had high hopes for their rooming together. Colleen was younger than Tilda, and they had almost no interests in common other than a desire for affordable housing and similar standards of cleanliness. Tilda had expected this to lead to a cordial but distant relationship in which each went her own way, with as few encounters as possible.

  Unfortunately, Colleen found Tilda’s life both exotic and fascinating, and wasn’t shy about asking questions about her work, her friends, and pretty much everything else. Tilda, on the other hand, had limited interest in Colleen’s life, and even less in talking about her own.

  After having gone through far too many roommates, Tilda was seriously starting to contemplate becoming a hermit. The problem was making enough money to be able to afford a roommate-free hermitage. Of course, she knew what Cooper would say, that once she went to work for Entertain Me!, her regular salary would help her save up enough for a place of her own, maybe even a condo. He had a point, too, or he would have if she ever actually told him what she was thinking.

  “Hi! You must be a friend of Tilda’s,” Colleen said brightly.

  Tilda wanted to say, “Why no, we’ve never met. I just let a stranger come in and hang with me,” but that would not have been conducive to congenial roommate relations. So what she actually said was, “Colleen, this is my friend Cooper. Cooper, this is my roommate Colleen.”

  They exchanged hellos. Then Colleen asked, “Where were you last night?”

  Tilda tried not to wince, because it really wasn’t any of Colleen’s business. “Did somebody call? You can always give people my cell phone number if they’re bugging you.”

  “No, it’s not that. I was just worried.”

  “You’re welcome to call my cell phone, too,” Tilda said. Then, because Colleen looked hurt, she added, “I was out later than I expected, so I crashed at Cooper’s place.”

  “Really?” Colleen said meaningfully. “Are you two, you know . . .”

  “No,” Tilda said. “How was work?”

  “Oh my gosh, you would not believe it!” Colleen launched into a convoluted and seemingly endless anecdote involving coffee, a package that had been left in the snow, and a stray cat.

  Though Tilda didn’t bother to pay enough attention to determine the connection between the three elements, Cooper really was trying to follow along, but even his eyes glazed over after a few minutes. So she made a show of looking at her watch. “Oh, shit, look at the time. We’ve got to run! Cooper, I’ll be ready to go in a minute.” She bustled down the hall to the bedroom, ran a brush through her hair, and grabbed her bag.

  When she got back, Cooper was already in his coat and edging toward the door as Colleen came to what Tilda could only hope was the climax of her story. While Tilda tried to get into her outdoor gear as swiftly as possible, Colleen chirped, “Where are you guys going?”

  “Dinner,” Tilda said, which was a safe bet. “We’d love to take you with us, but it’s business. Bye!”

  They were out the door fast enough that Tilda thought it was reasonable to pretend she hadn’t heard Colleen asking, “When will you be back?”

  “Oh. My. God,” Cooper said. “Is she always like that?”

  Tilda nodded sadly.

  They discussed dinner options while they brushed off the accumulation of snow that had fallen on Tilda’s car since the last time she’d driven it, and decided that fajitas at the Border Café in Saugus were just what they needed, particularly if preceded by margaritas.

  The restaurant was boisterous enough that Tilda didn’t even consider talking about Sandra. Instead they stuck to safe topics like movies and cowboy stars and which was the cutest Border Café waiter.

  Tilda was willing to continue avoiding the dead elephant in the room even after they’d left the restaurant and were driving back toward Malden, but as they were passing Johnnie’s Foodmaster, Cooper said, “Can we pull over there?”

  “You need some groceries?” Tilda asked as she parked the car.

  “No, but you need to talk. I know you didn’t want to spill your guts where your current roommate from Hell could hear, and you didn’t want to talk in the middle of the restaurant, but now it’s time.”

  Tilda took a deep breath, meaning to tell him that she was fine, but the breath caught in her throat and before she knew it she was half sobbing as she described the scene and how awful it was and that it just didn’t seem real and did he know that people peed on themselves when they died and other total inanities that probably every person who’d ever found a dead body before had thought.

  Cooper mostly kept quiet as he listened, only putting in enough comments so she’d know he was there, and pulled tissues from his pocket as needed.

  “I cannot believe this is happening again,” she finally said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Me getting people killed.”

  “Excuse me!?”

  “Sandra had a nice life before I interviewed her. Then I tracked her down and showed up at her door to ask her about her modeling, and I put her in a magazine. If that weren’t enough, I told her how much money she could make selling her pictures on the Web, something she’d never even thought of before, and suddenly she was a cottage industry.”

  “Boy, she must have hated you for it, too, making all that money.”

  “No, she liked me. That’s what makes it so awful. She liked me, she did as I suggested, and she ended up dead. And it’s not like this is the first time.”

  “Back up!”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Cooper. Holly Kendricks from Kissing Cousins. And it was just luck that the others didn’t die, too.”

  “We’ve been through this, Tilda. It wasn’t your fault then, and it isn’t your fault now.”

  “No? After I put enough information in the article that anybody with half a brain could find Sandra? Half a brain. That’s about what she had left.”

  “Stop it! Number one, you didn’t kill her, and number two, you didn’t lead anybody to her. You cannot be responsible for some psycho finding her, if that’s what it was. Maybe her death had nothing to do with the Website or the article. We won’t know for sure until the cops find the killer.”

  “If they ever do. They don’t solve all cases, you know.”

  “I’m sensing another Murder, She Wrote moment. Didn’t we go through this before? You’re not a detective, and all that?”

  “It worked out last time, didn’t it?”

  “So if you cross Boylston Street once with your eyes closed and survive, it’s okay to do it again?”

  “I know, you’re right. I just-I just don’t want to have bad dreams again.”

  Normally Tilda and Cooper weren’t hugging friends, but this once, she didn’t mind when he put his arm around her. It made it that much easier for her to pretend that she wasn’t crying, and for him to pretend he hadn’t noticed.

  After that, he tried to talk her into coming back to Boston with him, but she wanted to sleep in her own bed. If she woke up again, she’d much rather disturb Colleen than Cooper and Jean-Paul. So she drove him to the Malden Center T stop before going back home herself.

  Luck was with her. When she opened the door, Colleen was on the phone, so she got away with grabbing a glass of Dr Pepper before retreating into her bedroom.

  She was exhausted, but made a quick e-mail check. It was a good thing, too. The Ambrose brothers wanted her to come to a meeting the next morning, something about a promotional event for the Cowtown project. After a look in her closet to make sure she had a semiprofessional-looking outfit, she crossed her fingers and got into bed. Then she remembered something she’d seen in the closet and got back out to get it. It had been a while since s
he’d slept with her stuffed cat, Pyewacket, but this seemed like the perfect time to resume the habit.

  Maybe it helped. She managed a full five hours of sleep before she woke with Colleen shaking her, telling her she’d been screaming.

  Chapter 9

  Episode 48 : A Tisket, A Tasket, Arabella’s Basket

  In order to raise money to build a schoolhouse, the single ladies of Cowtown fill picnic baskets with their finest goodies to auction them off. Each winner gets the company of the lady who prepared his basket, but since nobody knows whose basket is whose, the cowboys in town go crazy trying to figure out which one is Arabella’s.

  —COWTOWN COMPANION BY RUBEN TIMMONS

  FORTUNATELY, Colleen was sleepy enough that she didn’t push for details about Tilda’s nightmare before stumbling back to her own bed. As for Tilda, she found that forty-five minutes of playing Bejeweled on her computer was enough to hypnotize her back to sleep, and she made it through the rest of the night. It wasn’t enough sleep, but it was more than she’d had the night before. With the judicious application of makeup, she looked reasonably good as she stepped into the Ambrose brothers’ suite at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel.

  Tucker greeted her with a hearty handshake before taking her parka to hang in the suite’s coat closet, which Tilda noted wistfully was roomier than the largest one in her apartment. When she came into the living room—which was as big as all the rooms in Tilda’s apartment put together—she saw Hoyt, Miss Barth, and a very attractive man she didn’t know.

  Miss Barth nodded graciously and Hoyt shook her hand as if he was afraid to hurt a woman’s dainty fingers. Then he took her over to the stranger, who had sandy blond hair, green eyes to die for, and a suit that should have been retired at least five years before.