Who Killed the Pinup Queen?

by Kelner, Toni, L. P.

  That’s the Cowtown Code.

  —“THE COWTOWN CODE,” COWTOWN COMPANION BY RUBEN TIMMONS

  SINCE she couldn’t very well brood in the bathroom all night, Tilda took a deep breath, straightened her hat, and went back to the party. It was nearly time for the program, so she edged close enough to the stage that she could see clearly.

  The people due to speak were milling in the confusion that precedes even the most rehearsed performances, which this was anything but. She suspected from the way Quentin was mouthing words as he focused on a stack of index cards that he was suffering from a major case of stage fright. When he looked in her direction, she gave him a reassuring smile and a thumbs-up, but though he returned the smile, it didn’t look as if the comforting sank in.

  Just then, Jean-Paul, resplendent in his black cowboy duds and scarlet vest, started up the theme song from Cowtown , and as it faded, announced “Cowboys and cowgirls, put your hands together for the one and only, Cynthia Barth, Arabella Newman of Cowtown!” Applause was thunderous, and Miss Barth beamed as she stepped front and center.

  Her speech was short and simple. She thanked everybody for coming, picked out a few costumes in the audience for special attention, and spoke about how much it meant to her that people were so willing to help with such a worthy cause. Then she introduced Quentin to tell them more about the fine work the Foundation was doing.

  He stumbled a little at first, but the audience was both forgiving and approving of his message, not to mention admiring of how cute he looked in his costume. He explained Stickler Syndrome and how it affected people, then cued Shannon to show a ten-minute video about the condition.

  Tilda kept an eye on the audience, and was glad to see that most people were actually listening, and not just eating or waiting for the music to start up again.

  Once the video ended, Quentin asked everyone to do what they could to help—meaning to open their wallets—and finished up. The applause wasn’t as loud as it had been for Miss Barth, but it was respectable, and Tilda saw him wiping his forehead in relief once he was out of the spotlight.

  Miss Barth returned and introduced the three guest stars, each of whom gave a short speech about the cause. Next she introduced the Cowboy Kings themselves. Hoyt just waved and smiled, but Tucker called up a bunch of Sticky kids and taught them one of the hokiest rules from the Cowtown Code.

  A true cowboy never breaks his word. When you’re out on the plains with nobody but your horse to keep you company at night, you’ve got to be able to respect yourself. That’s the Cowtown Code.

  Then he distributed Cowtown badges and hats to each, and the hug he got from one of the cutest of the little girls could even have been unscripted. Tilda saw more than one kerchief being used to wipe a cowboy’s manly tear.

  Miss Barth came back just long enough to announce that the silent auction would be going on for two more hours, and that she and the rest of the Cowtown actors would be signing autographs and posing for pictures and hoped that people wouldn’t mind making a small donation in return.

  As applause faded, Jean-Paul started country music playing, and on cue Hoyt offered his arm to Miss Barth and they started up a spirited polka. They were soon joined by other members of the Entertain Me! staff who’d been tasked to get people moving. Tilda hadn’t been given a dance assignment, and was not pleased to see that Nicole had laid claim to Quentin. Then Cooper came over and said, “Might I have this dance, ma’am?”

  “I’d be plumb pleased.”

  Tilda knew she wasn’t very good, but she was probably no worse than most of the other dancers on the floor, so enjoyed it just the same. She noticed that Cooper was dancing her over toward Nicole and Quentin, and a second later, Jean-Paul announced, “Now everybody switch partners.”

  Cooper, who must have known what was coming, released Tilda toward Quentin, grabbed Nicole, and promptly got her dancing in the other direction.

  “Ma’am?” Quentin said to Tilda.

  “Please.”

  They danced to the end of that song and one more before Tilda begged off. “Thank you kindly, Doc, but I’m afraid this cowgirl has to round up more doggies or something.”

  “Then I’ll go check in with Jillian. I’ll catch you later!”

  Tilda grabbed a few more people, in costume and out, even though she knew she was getting more material than she needed. Most stories were like that—she got all the info she could, and then used the most interesting or entertaining bits.

  Over by the silent auction, she chatted with a longtime collector of TV and movie Western memorabilia—he had signed photos from people even Tilda had never heard of, as well as cowboy hats from James Arness on Gunsmoke , Dan Blocker on Bonanza, and Robert Conrad on The Wild, Wild West. His prize was one of Lash Larue’s actual whips, with a recording of the actor using it for his famous whip crack. Tilda took the man’s name and number, speculating about a series on nostalgia collectors.

  At the signing tables, she saw an equal number of autograph hounds, Western fans, and folks who were being carried along by the excitement to donate a few bucks for the privilege of taking home an eight-by-ten signed by an obscure actor. Unlike the prospectors who passed through Cowtown in Season Five, the Stickler Foundation had struck gold.

  As time went on, family groups started to circle up the wagons to head home and the party got a little rowdier, though not unduly so. The celebrities, having apparently signed everything offered to them, had closed their stations and retreated to the green room to gossip. Tilda would have loved to have been a fly on the wall, but decided they deserved a little privacy.

  She was looking to see if Quentin was available for a drink when she saw Miss Barth standing at the very top of the stairs, looking down at the room. The rest of the upstairs was dimly lit, but of course the stairs were designed for brides to make their entrances, and that meant good lighting for photos. So Miss Barth seemed almost to glow. It was more than the light. The smile on her face was so proud, almost maternal. The Ambrose brothers had never staged a moment as breathtaking as that one.

  Tilda looked around for one of the roving photographers, but neither was in sight, so she reached into her bag for her camera to take a picture herself. It wouldn’t be a great shot, of course, but she wanted it anyway. She looked away long enough to rummage in the bag, which is why she didn’t see Miss Barth fall. It was only when she heard the scream that Tilda looked up and saw the woman tumbling down the wooden stairs, her arms flailing as she tried to catch herself. Afterward Tilda wasn’t even sure if it had been Miss Barth or one of the bystanders who’d screamed, but it had stopped by the time the actress hit bottom with a sickening thud.

  Tilda ran for her, yelling, “Call 911!” as she went, but once she got there she realized she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. “We need a doctor!”

  She heard rather than saw Quentin pounding down the stairs to take over, and scrambled back to give him room. One of the women with the Stickler’s Syndrome T-shirts appeared, and said, “ER nurse—what do you want me to do?”

  Quentin barked incomprehensible orders at the woman, who complied while Tilda watched. Realizing that she didn’t know if anybody had called 911 or not, Tilda used her own phone to do so and was relieved when the dispatcher said an ambulance was on the way.

  The Ambrose brothers showed up. “Is she all right?” Hoyt wanted to know, while Tucker asked, “What happened?”

  Quentin and the nurse were too busy to answer, so Tilda said, “She fell. There’s an ambulance coming.”

  “Dear lord in heaven!” Hoyt breathed. Then he surveyed the crowd around them, some people looking on in shock while others jockeyed for better positions. Tilda realized more than one camera was aimed in their direction, and snapped, “Put those things away before I—”

  Hoyt patted her shoulder, then stood straight, incidentally blocking most of the cameras. “Folks, you can see Miss Barth has had an accident, and she needs your prayers. Please step back and give
the doctor room to work, and if somebody could go to the door and make sure the ambulance knows where to come . . .” Half a dozen people rushed off to take care of that, including Cooper.

  In the meantime, Tucker had gone over to where the photo backdrops were temporarily forgotten, and started dragging one over. Realizing what he was doing, Tilda went to help him, and together they put a partition of sorts around the area where Quentin was working on Miss Barth.

  Deciding she wasn’t needed, Tilda started to step out, but suddenly Miss Barth gasped and opened her eyes. “I fell,” she said wonderingly. “It hurts.” She looked around in alarm, and actually reached down to pull on her skirt to make sure no unseemly amount of leg was showing. Quentin whipped his black duster off and laid it across her.

  Tilda couldn’t help thinking of her own fall, just a few days before, and how she’d been hyperaware of every stage of her progress to the ground. Had Miss Barth been that conscious as she tumbled down the stairs?

  Quentin murmured for her to lie still, and said something comforting, but when Tilda caught his eye, she knew exactly what he was thinking. Miss Barth was dying.

  Then Miss Barth saw her. “Tilda!”

  Tilda knelt beside her, and the older woman reached out and grasped her hand far more strongly than Tilda would have thought possible.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Promise me.”

  “Promise you? Promise you what?”

  “Don’t tell. Please don’t tell!”

  Quentin and the nurse were looking at Tilda in confusion, but she knew what Miss Barth was talking about. She didn’t want anybody to know about her pinup past.

  “I won’t tell. I promise.”

  Miss Barth nodded, and Tilda thought she was done, but she started to say, “I-I—”

  “Don’t talk,” Tilda said. “It’s okay.”

  But Miss Barth wouldn’t be stopped. “I-I wasn’t drunk.”

  “What?”

  “I only had one glass of wine. I wasn’t drunk. Tell them I wasn’t drunk!”

  “You weren’t drunk,” Tilda repeated. “Only one glass of wine.”

  Miss Barth nodded, then closed her eyes and seemed to relax. Tilda had never thought of dying as relaxing before.

  Chapter 32

  [T]hat nothing’s so sacred as honour, and nothing’s so loyal as love.

  —EPITAPH FOR WYATT AND JOSEPHINE EARP

  TILDA was still holding Miss Barth’s hand when the ambulance arrived, and Cooper had to take her by the shoulders to move her out of the way. Not that there was anything the EMTs could do, of course. The actress was gone. The police arrived even before they took her body away, and started rounding up party attendees.

  Later on Tilda realized that she could have made a comment about the irony of rounding up cowboys, rather than cows, but at the time, she was oddly numb, other than somehow still feeling the pressure of that last squeeze Miss Barth had given her hand.

  A uniformed Saugus police officer got to her fairly early in the process. “Officer Frank Tallman,” he said. “And you are?”

  “Tilda Harper.” She gave him her contact information automatically, thinking that it was terribly wrong that she was so familiar with the procedure for talking to the police at the scene of sudden death.

  “Can you tell me what you saw?”

  “I was standing there,” she said pointing, “and I saw Miss Barth at the head of the stairs. She was looking at everybody dancing and she had this indescribable look of joy on her face. You know she was on Cowtown, right?”

  He nodded.

  “I think that role was really pivotal to her life, and for a long time, she was forgotten. Then this whole resort idea came up, and she got a chance to see all the people who still remembered the show. She was so happy. I looked away to get my camera, and that’s when she started to fall.” Tilda blinked several times, trying to keep from crying.

  “I’m sorry—I know you just need to know what happened and not that other stuff.”

  “No, it’s fine. I understand you were the first one to get to her.”

  Tilda nodded. “Most people froze, of course, the way people do. I got to her, and then Quentin—Dr. Beaudine showed up, and right after that, a nurse. I don’t know her name.”

  “Did Miss Barth say anything?”

  “She asked me not to tell anybody.”

  “Tell anybody what?”

  “She didn’t say. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want her to waste her energy talking.” Both of those statements were technically true, and as much as Tilda could tell without breaking her promise. “Then she said that she wasn’t drunk.”

  “Did she have a drinking problem?”

  “I’d heard rumors, but only from years back.” Since others knew about Miss Barth’s drinking, probably including the Ambrose brothers, it didn’t bother Tilda’s conscience to admit that much.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “No, she just died. But—”

  “Yes?”

  Tilda hesitated, thinking about that horrible tumble down the stairs. “I think there was something odd about how she fell. When I slip on the stairs, usually my feet go out from under me first, and I land on my bum. Miss Barth seemed to fall headfirst.” Much as she herself had fallen on Boylston Street, Tilda thought. “Could somebody have pushed her?”

  Tallman regarded her curiously. “Did you see anybody push her, or anybody near her?”

  “No, but like I said, I wasn’t watching every second.”

  “So you don’t know how it looked when she first fell?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Do you have reason to believe that she was in fear for her life? Had anybody threatened her?”

  “Not that I know of. I didn’t really know her that well.” Tilda explained how she’d come into contact with Miss Barth. “So I met with her a couple of times, and I interviewed her about her work on Cowtown. That’s about it.” She was uncomfortable about leaving out the encounter at Sandra’s funeral, but she hadn’t spoken to her there anyway. If she brought it up, it could lead to subjects Tilda wanted to avoid.

  Tallman closed his notebook. “Well, we’ll certainly look into all possibilities, but I have to tell you that I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve fallen down stairs, and they don’t always fall neatly.”

  He gave her his card, and asked her to call if she thought of anything else he should know, but it was pretty clear that he’d put her into the category of civilians shocked into irrationality when encountering sudden death. Maybe he was right. Had it not been for her own recent encounter with a shoving hand, she wouldn’t have even considered the idea that Miss Barth’s fall was anything but an accident.

  Tallman moved on to the next person, and Tilda went to find the Entertain Me! crew. Jillian and managing editor Bryce were bitching at one another about insurance coverage, Shannon was red-eyed and sniffing, and Nicole looked peevish.

  “I told the bartender to cut people off if they’d had too much to drink,” Nicole said to Shannon.

  “She wasn’t drunk!” Tilda snapped.

  “How do you know?” Nicole snapped back.

  “She said she wasn’t, and I didn’t smell alcohol on her breath. Her dying breath, by the way, and I would appreciate it if you’d show a little respect.”

  “Hear, hear,” Quentin said, coming up from behind Tilda. He put his arms around her, and she leaned into him gratefully. Nicole glared at them, but had enough sense to keep her thoughts to herself.

  “How are you holding up?” Quentin asked her softly.

  “Not great,” she answered. “How about you? Does it ever get easier for you?”

  “God, no!” he said. “Why do you think I’m a researcher, and working with a nonfatal disease at that?”

  The Ambrose brothers joined them, and Tucker said,

  “The police are asking some mighty strange questions, like who might have wanted to hurt Miss Barth, and I don’t understand
why. It was a terrible accident, but it was an accident. Did any of ’em say anything to any of y’all?”

  Tilda shifted uncomfortably. “The cop I talked to said they were investigating all the possibilities. I guess it never hurts to be sure.”

  “It could hurt a whole lot if something like this gets out to the press.” Then, as if realizing he was talking to members of the press, Tucker said, “I mean, nobody wants a bunch of crazy rumors to hurt Miss Barth’s reputation.”

  “Or the resort,” Tilda said.

  “This project meant the world to Miss Barth—I know she’d want us to carry on,” Tucker said solemnly, and Tilda had to admit that he was probably right.

  Jillian and Bryce looked at one another, and for once, seemed in agreement. “Unless the police tell us differently, we’re all calling this an accident,” Jillian said. “Right?”

  Everybody nodded, including Tilda, but she didn’t like it.

  “Tilda,” Jillian went on, “I want an obit by noon Monday to get into the next issue. Are you up to it?”

  “Sure,” Tilda said.

  After that, the Ambrose brothers went into a huddle and the regular Entertain Me! staff went to work clearing up and packing up.

  “I suppose I should get going,” Tilda said to Quentin, who also seemed at loose ends.

  “Me, too. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to be alone right now. Would you like to come over to my place?”

  “If that invitation includes getting something to eat, you’ve got a deal. I’m starving, and I’m not eating here.”

  “I have eggs and I know how to scramble.”

  “You may be the perfect man.”

  After stopping to say good night to Cooper and Jean-Paul, and to let Jillian know they were leaving, they took off for Quentin’s condo. After the eggs were duly scrambled and enjoyed, they moved to the couch and talked about nothing in particular. Then they moved to the bedroom, and didn’t talk at all.

  It was no particular surprise to Tilda that the bad dreams came again, but now with two grotesque pinups instead of just one. Quentin tried to be understanding when she woke him, but she could tell it was a strain, so when he fell back asleep, she kept herself awake for the rest of the night, watching for the dawn to sneak in beneath the window blinds.