“Congratulations! Shall we drink to it?”
“Thank you,” Tilda said, raising her glass to clink against his. “Maybe I’ll be able to stay on this particular horse.”
“And out of the dung!”
They both decided against dessert, and once the check was paid it was time for the next first-date hurdle: what to do next. Since it was a weeknight and they both had to work the next day, it was too late to go to a movie, and a little early in the relationship for your-place-or-mine, so they decided to wander through Borders bookstore, which was in the same shopping center as the restaurant. Tilda noted that while Quentin had zero interest in graphic novels, science fiction, and urban fantasy, at least he didn’t turn up his nose at them. And if his interest in political biography and history books didn’t ring her chimes, neither was it a warning bell. They sat in the store’s coffee bar to discuss books for a while, but then called it a night. Quentin promised to call her, and after his good-night kiss, Tilda was sure he meant it. She was very glad they’d skipped the garlic.
Chapter 15
I like being a pinup girl, there’s nothing wrong with it.
—JAYNE MANSFIELD
NOT only was Tilda’s date with Quentin a pleasure, she only had one bad dream that night, and it was quiet enough that she didn’t wake Colleen. She got back to sleep easily, slept through the rest of the night, and woke up rested and refreshed. She was also eager to continue rounding up Cowtown guest stars, but unfortunately, she had Sandra’s funeral to attend at ten. She recycled the black velvet pants from the previous night, and added a dark red sweater and a black blazer. By rights, she should have carried a nice pocketbook instead of her usual leather satchel, but she would never have been able to fit her pad, pen, laptop, and camera into her good bag. So she went with the satchel, adding a good-but-roomy bag to her mental shopping list. As she once again shrugged into Cooper’s hand-me-down parka, she dropped her friend a quick e-mail to ask if he was available to do some shopping that afternoon. Then it was time to hit the subway to get to the funeral.
Sandra’s funeral was sparsely attended, and Tilda wondered if it was because Sandra had been murdered or in spite of it. Given her distant relationship with Sandra, she took a seat near the back of the chapel, which gave her a chance to watch people as they arrived.
Most of the mourners were strangers, of course, but she did see Lil, and assumed the people with her were family members. One woman looked quite a bit like Sandra had when younger, albeit more thoroughly clothed.
When Louise Silberblatt came in, dressed impeccably in a black Chanel suit, she actually had to politely put off a couple of women who recognized her as Gwendolyn Pearson from A Life Worth Living. Tilda didn’t introduce herself then, deciding it would be more appropriate to wait until they met for their interview.
Tilda also saw Detective Salvatore sitting with a woman, presumably another cop, she thought she remembered seeing at Sandra’s apartment the night of the murder. She didn’t know if it was cop instinct or just coincidence that he turned toward her just as she was looking in his direction, and she hurriedly looked the other way. Damn it, why did she feel so guilty around him? She hadn’t killed Sandra, and she didn’t know who had. Then she glanced back over at Louise, and remembered one piece of information she could be passing on to him. Maybe that was the source of her guilt. She hoped his cop instincts weren’t good enough for him to figure out that she might know something.
The service started, and Tilda was relieved to have something else to occupy her mind, even if it was a relentlessly standard funeral. A pastor read appropriate Bible verses about loss and rebirth in a better place, one family member read a lengthy eulogy from a crumpled piece of paper, a friend gave a short one from memory, and the organist played what were probably two of Sandra’s favorite songs. She was sure it was reasonably comforting, but such a vanilla service didn’t match the woman she’d known, albeit briefly. Then again, would people really want a wildly original and flamboyant funeral?
Tilda knew from Lil’s e-mail that the body was to be cremated, so there would be no burial service. The family formed a receiving line in the hall just outside the chapel, and Tilda went to pay her respects. Lil seemed pleased that she’d come, but when she introduced her to the other relatives, Tilda could see them stiffen as it registered that she was the one who’d found Sandra’s body. If there was a protocol for such a situation, she’d never heard it, so she repeated some of the phrases her mother used at funerals.
“I’m very sorry for your loss. She was such a genuine person.” Lil, seeming to miss the awkward undertones, invited her to join the family at a nearby restaurant, but Tilda pled a previous engagement and ducked into the ladies’ room to hide. She’d have left the funeral home entirely if she hadn’t arranged to meet Louise outside, and when somebody started to come in, she fled into a stall to take care of the obvious physical need.
She peered through the cracks around the edges of the stall’s metal door, and though she couldn’t see the woman’s face, she could tell that it wasn’t one of Sandra’s family members, which was a relief. A moment later the door opened again, and this time Tilda recognized Louise, but didn’t think it would be entirely professional for her to call out to the woman while sitting on a toilet.
Still she couldn’t resist spying on her through those cracks.
The two women nodded at each other, then inspected themselves in the mirror and pulled out compacts and other equipment to effect repairs. Tilda could see Louise’s face clearly, and noticed when the actress started to study the other woman.
“Excuse me,” Louise said. “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so,” the other woman replied.
The funny thing was that though Tilda couldn’t see her, the woman’s voice sounded familiar.
Louise shook her head slowly, as if trying to remember. “You remind me of someone.”
The other woman hurriedly finished with her hair, and started stuffing things into her bag.
Then Louise snapped her fingers. “Glory! Morning Glory!”
The other woman froze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Glory, don’t you remember me? I’m—”
“My name isn’t Glory.” The woman reached for the door, and despite her best efforts, Tilda couldn’t see her face. All she could do was sit and fume that the woman hadn’t hung around long enough for Louise to finish her sentence.
For a moment Louise stared after the woman she had called Glory. Then she went back to work on her makeup. After what seemed an inordinate length of time, but what was probably standard preparation for an actress about to be interviewed, she finished and left. Tilda gave her a few minutes before coming out of the stall, checked her own face, and decided it was ok as it was.
The funeral home had emptied of mourners by the time she came out, which was fine with Tilda. Louise was looking the other way, so she maneuvered around to look as if she were coming from any direction other than the bathroom, and approached her.
“Ms. Silberblatt? I’m Tilda Harper.”
“Tilda, lovely to meet you. I was afraid I’d missed you.”
“I had to take a call,” she said to explain her absence. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes, let’s.” As they stepped outside, Louise said, “At my age, I’m becoming uncomfortably familiar with funerals, but I don’t enjoy them.”
“It’s not my favorite thing to do either,” Tilda admitted. She saw an empty cab coming, threw up her hand to hail it, then stepped out of range of the splash as it pulled up in the middle of an icy puddle. She and Louise had already arranged to conduct the interview at the Colonnade Hotel where Louise was staying, and during the cab ride they limited their conversation to the inevitable discussion of Boston weather. Louise’s suite was smaller than the Ambrose brothers’ at the Park Plaza, but the baby grand piano gave it a homey touch.
After they unwrapped themselves from their winter wear
and Louise offered a drink from the minibar, which Tilda gladly accepted, they settled on the couch.
“So, Tilda, how did you say you knew Sandra?” Louise asked carefully.
“I’d interviewed her. Did you know she used to be a pinup model?”
“Oh yes,” Louise said with a tolerant smile. “I was in New York doing stage work back then, and some friends of mine worked with her and introduced us. It wasn’t unusual for actresses to use modeling as a stepping stone.”
“I understand Bettie Page tried to do that.”
“Bettie wasn’t much of an actress,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. Then, as if afraid she’d revealed too much, she added, “I ran into her at a couple of auditions.”
“Really?” Tilda said. “How about Sandra?”
“No, Sandra was no actress, either, but at least she knew it. She actually seemed to enjoy the modeling.”
“She certainly spoke of it fondly.” Since it was pretty obvious that Louise wasn’t going to break down and confess her pinup past, Tilda moved on to Louise’s stint on Cowtown. It turned into an interesting interview.
The two-part episode on which she’d appeared had been early on in the show’s run, meaning that the Ambrose brothers were still feeling their way, and it was Louise’s first television role, which meant that she wasn’t familiar with the differences between working onstage and working on camera. Plus the horses used for the shoot hadn’t been properly trained, which made for some unintentionally exciting moments. It must have been frightening at the time, but the way Louise told it had Tilda in stitches.
“No wonder you looked so convincingly scared during the runaway stagecoach scene.”
Louise laughed. “I was petrified. I assure you that I wasn’t that good an actress!”
From that, they moved on to Louise’s work at A Life Worth Living, and once again she lamented the lack of screen time. “I’ve been with the show forever, and they’ll never let me go completely, but all the big stories are about the young ones.” She sighed. “Some weeks I get no work at all, and when I do, it’s not exactly challenging. Like earlier this week.”
“Oh?”
“We’ve been shooting Tanya and Tony’s wedding, and you probably know what that’s like. Endless days, extras, costume problems, continuity issues, musicians. And of course Tanya’s daughter Arianna had to be flower girl, which complicated it further, because we had to work around the restrictions for child actors. I had to be on set twelve hours a day, but only had half a page of lines all week long. The rest of the time I was looking proud and pleased, or teary, or gently amused by Arianna’s antics.” In rapid succession, she demonstrated the three expressions.
Tilda couldn’t help but laugh again. Maybe Bettie Page couldn’t act, but Louise sure could.
“Thank goodness we wrapped up the nuptials yesterday.” Louise checked her watch, and politely asked, “Was there anything else you wanted to ask?”
Tilda looked back over her notes. “Just one other thing. You said Cowtown was your first TV role. Can you tell me how that happened?”
“What do you mean?” Louise responded a trifle stiffly.
“Did you have an agent, or did the Ambrose brothers see you onstage or—”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “You know, don’t you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know about the modeling.”
Tilda thought about lying, but since she wasn’t even as good an actress as Bettie Page, decided against it. “I suspected. Were you Fanny Divine?”
Louise shuddered. “That awful name. Though I suppose it did its job, since nobody but you has ever made the connection.”
“Sandra had told me that she’d been in touch with some of the other pinup models she knew, but that they were trying to stay under the radar.”
“Actually, Sandra and I had been in touch since long before the Website venture. We’ve exchanged Christmas cards for years, and had visited one another a few times. But I never thought she’d tell anybody.”
“Oh, she didn’t give you away,” Tilda said, “even when I asked about other models. It’s just that I was curious after the way you reacted when I asked you about Sandra, so I checked out pinup models until I found your picture. But don’t worry. I’m not going to use this in the article or even tell anybody if you don’t want me to. It’s completely off the record.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Absolutely.” After all, she didn’t have an assignment—she was only being nosy, so she made a show of putting away her pad and pen.
Louise let out a deep breath. “Thank you.”
“But what does the pinup stuff have to do with you working on Cowtown?”
She smiled ruefully. “That’s how I got the job. Tucker said that he’d seen the pinup photos, and then recognized me when my agent sent in my head shot, but he was discreet about it. I think he was hoping I would be grateful enough to show my appreciation. Physically, I mean.”
“How sleazy is that?”
“It wasn’t that bad, actually. He hired me even after I made it plain that I wasn’t going to sleep with him. And I can’t really blame him for thinking I would be willing, given those pictures.” She shuddered again. “Have you seen them?”
“A few, but honestly, I find them pretty mild by today’s standards.”
“I suppose, but I hated doing that kind of work.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Money, of course. I wanted to be an actress, but I had to have enough to live on and pay for acting classes while still having time for auditions. I’d pose for a few hours a week, and get as much as I would in a forty-hour-a-week desk job. But as soon as I got my first decent acting role, I quit modeling for good.”
“Nobody ever connected Louise Silberblatt with Fanny Divine?”
“Never, and I worked hard to keep it that way. When I was Fanny, I wore a wig, and I knew all kinds of makeup tricks to make myself look different. It was just another kind of acting, really. I pretended to be the kind of woman who would allow men to take those kind of pictures.”
“Amazing. Did you know there are Websites dedicated to trying to find you guys?”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“People love a mystery—they’re still coming up with theories about Bettie Page.”
“Bettie’s dead!”
“Some people want to believe she’s still out there.”
“But why would anybody care about Fanny Divine? I wasn’t famous, not like Bettie or even Sandy. I never made any films, or posed for magazines, just for the camera clubs. I only recently realized that any of those pictures were still around, let alone online. Nobody in my day ever dreamed of anything like the Web.”
“I suppose not. Would it be that bad if the story came out?”
“Tilda, my career would have been ruined if anybody in the industry had known about those pictures. Nobody would have taken me seriously as an actress. Other soap actresses complain that they aren’t respected, but they have no idea what a former pinup had to endure. Look at Bettie. Did you see that movie about her? The Notorious Bettie Page. That’s what they called her. She could have been another Meryl Streep, and they would only have remembered her cheesecake and bondage photos.”
“I can understand your keeping things quiet then, but now? Those pictures may have been shocking at the time, but they’re less revealing than what plenty of teenage girls post on MySpace—now they’re even sending nude pictures of themselves via their phones. In fact . . .” Tilda thought for a minute, then for a minute more. “Okay, I know people must give you lame plot ideas all the time, but I’m going to run this past you anyway. You’ve heard of sexting, right?”
“Of course.”
“And you know that girls are starting to realize there are repercussions if those photos make it onto the Internet, which they always do.”
“I could have told them that. The dirtier a photo is, the more likely it is to stay around.
”
“Exactly. You could have told them that. So why couldn’t your character?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suggest a sexting plot to your writers, along with a nice storyline for you. It would make a terrific contrast—their secrets on the Web and your character’s hidden past. And they wouldn’t have to mock up your photos—they could use your real pinup work. Revealing the fact that you actually did that kind of work would make terrific publicity for the show and for you.”
Louise was speechless for a moment, and when she did speak, all she said was, “Oh, my!” But her eyes were gleaming at the prospect.
“Just a thought,” Tilda said, “but if you ever decide you want to come out of the darkroom, so to speak, I sure would appreciate it if you’d let me know.”
“I certainly will,” Louise said. “Thank you, Tilda.”
Tilda didn’t know if anything would come of the notion, but if it did happen, she’d get one hell of a story. And even better, she knew for sure that Louise hadn’t killed Sandra. She knew enough about soap opera wedding shoots to know that there was no way Louise could have snuck away long enough to get to Boston and back, even if she’d felt that strongly about keeping her past in the past.
Chapter 16
I never kept up with the fashions. I believed in wearing what
I thought looked good on me.
—BETTIE PAGE
TILDA didn’t even try to guess what the windchill was when she stepped out of the Colonnade and onto Huntington Avenue, but she knew it was obscenely cold. She stayed on the street just long enough to cross over and go into the Prudential Center Mall. Then she called Cooper to see if he’d gotten her message about shopping, and if he was willing to get lunch first. He had and he was, and they arranged to meet at the mall food court. Though they usually preferred eating at California Pizza Kitchen, given what had happened the last time they ate there, neither of them was eager to repeat the experience. Besides, Tilda reasoned, a quick bite at the food court would give them more time to look at clothes.
Who Killed the Pinup Queen? Page 9
