Poppy Harmon and the Pillow Talk Killer

by Lee Hollis

  She silently centered herself, then spun around to face him. “I need to get to makeup and hair, Rod. What is it?”

  He reared back a bit, surprised by her huffy tone. “I just wanted to apologize again for having to bail on you last night.”

  “Again? What do you mean, apologize again? I never heard a word from you last night,” she snapped.

  “I left a message on your answering machine. Didn’t you get it?”

  “No, Rod, I didn’t,” Poppy sighed, so tired of hearing his lame excuses.

  “That’s weird,” Rod said, genuinely perplexed. “I could have sworn I dialed the right number. It sounded like your voice on the recording.”

  Poppy wheeled around to walk away from him, but he jogged ahead of her and positioned himself in front of her, stopping her in her tracks. “Coppola’s in town meeting with actors to star in his next film. He’s already got Kathleen Turner attached, it’s a great script, Peggy Sue Got Married. My agent says Nicolas Cage is in the running and will probably get it, but Coppola wanted to sit down with me personally. He only had an hour to meet me for a drink before flying to New York so I had to get right over to TriStar. I called you on my car phone on the way over to say I had to cancel.”

  Poppy studied him, not sure if he was truly being honest or just delivering another one of his performances.

  “Please, Poppy, I know I left a message. Maybe something’s wrong with your answering machine.”

  There was nothing wrong with her answering machine.

  She was fairly certain he had been so excited about the last-minute meeting, so eager to impress the legendary director, he had plum forgot to call her and cancel, and was now trying to cover for himself. Rod would always be Rod. And she knew she could never change him. So in order to keep the peace in their working relationship, she once more would give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “How did it go?”

  Rod shrugged. “I thought we hit it off, and he was very complimentary of my acting, but I may be a little too old for the part. The character, Charlie, is supposed to be a senior in high school.”

  “Oh . . .” Poppy whispered.

  “I know, it might be a stretch, but he promised to keep me in mind for any future projects down the road if this doesn’t work out, so it was definitely worth it to take the meeting.”

  “That’s great news,” Poppy said, forcing a smile.

  “Can we try again tonight?” Rod asked, hopefully.

  Before she could answer, Pam interrupted them, slightly pouting for having been ditched by Rod so he could chase after Poppy. “Excuse me, Rod, my manager is having a little soiree tonight at his house in Beachwood, and I was wondering, depending on what time we wrap, if you’d like to come with me?”

  Rod frowned. “Sorry, doll, Poppy and I were just talking about—”

  Poppy quickly interjected, “Tonight is not good for me, Rod, so feel free to go to that cocktail party with Pam.”

  Pam, whose whole body had stiffened in front of Poppy when she first approached, was quickly put at ease and smiled sweetly at her.

  “Now, I really need to get my face and hair done. See you both on set,” Poppy said, finally managing to escape, determined to keep her guard up from here on out when it came to the skirt-chasing Rod Harper.

  When Poppy entered the hair and makeup trailer, Dolly was glued to a portable television set next to the counter. There were a few stylists and assistants all gathered around, listening intently to a news report.

  Poppy had made a move to sit down in one of the chairs in front of the giant mirror when she stopped cold at the sound of the TV news reporter’s voice. “Police say they are fairly certain this is not a copycat crime, but that the Pillow Talk Killer has struck again, for a third time in the past four months.”

  Poppy gasped. “There’s been another murder?”

  Dolly glanced back at Poppy. “She was found in her bed by her roommate this morning, a pillow over her face.”

  Poppy joined the others over by the TV as the reporter continued. “The victim’s name is Linda Appleton, an up-and-coming actress who has appeared in small roles in several film and television productions including The Dukes of Hazzard.”

  There was a photo of the aspiring actress on the TV screen.

  Poppy suddenly felt dizzy.

  It was her.

  The tipsy woman she had seen at the bar last night.

  The one her admirer had focused in on after she rejected him.

  Poppy, a bit wobbly, grabbed onto Dolly’s arm for support.

  “Everything okay, hon?” Dolly asked, concerned.

  Poppy nodded slightly and then said hoarsely, “I’ll be back. I need to make a quick call.”

  She stumbled to her dressing room and shut the door. She picked up the phone and called her agent, Diane Lipton, a tough-as-nails battle-ax who had been guiding her career for the past five years. She was also the first person Poppy called in a crisis. Diane’s assistant cheerfully asked Poppy to please hold as Diane was finishing up another call.

  Poppy’s mind furiously flashed with images from the night before, Linda Appleton at the bar, the salesman from somewhere, she couldn’t recall, eyeing her as Poppy left, getting up from his barstool to go join her.

  Was he the last person to see Linda Appleton alive?

  What if the salesman was actually the Pillow Talk Killer trolling the bars searching for his next victim?

  What if Poppy had agreed to his proposition and gone with him up to his hotel room? Would she have been the killer’s next victim? She shuddered at the thought.

  Suddenly a voice made gravelly by too many cigarettes came on the line. “What’s up? Don Juan having a category five star tantrum on the set?”

  Don Juan.

  That’s what Diane always called Rod.

  Don.

  That was it!

  The name of the salesman at the Roosevelt Bar.

  “I know you’re still there, I can hear you breathing,” Diane said, shuffling papers in the background.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that, I don’t know how to say this, Diane, but I think I may have encountered the Pillow Talk Killer last night,” Poppy said solemnly.

  This got Diane’s attention.

  She spewed out a litany of four-letter expletives before demanding a more detailed explanation.

  As Poppy quickly filled her in, Diane was unusually quiet on the other end of the phone. When she finished, there was a few more moments of silence and then another loud expletive.

  “Should I go to the police?” Poppy asked.

  “What the hell for?” Diane howled.

  “To tell them what I know.”

  “How can you be sure this sales guy is the killer?”

  “I’m not. But any information I can give might help with the investigation.”

  “Sure, if you want to do that.”

  Poppy could sense Diane’s reluctance.

  “You don’t think I should?”

  “Look, I would never suggest you not do the right thing, but it’s not like you’re an eyewitness to the actual murder, you just saw the victim out in public, and some random guy trying to start up a conversation.”

  “It seems pretty important.”

  “Then call them. It’s the right thing to do, I guess. I would just hate for you to get caught up in all this, and it somehow adversely affect your career.”

  Now this got Poppy’s attention. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud, but it could taint you, the Enquirer would have a field day tying you to this whole Pillow Talk Killer mess, and you know how the studios hate even the whiff of a scandal.”

  “Scandal? But I’m just relaying what I saw.”

  “Poppy, I support whatever you’re going to do. Now I have to take this call.”

  That meant a more important client was on the other line.

  There was a click.

  She put down the phone an
d pondered Diane’s advice.

  And instantly tossed it aside.

  Poppy was not going to hide potentially key information just for the sake of her career. She picked up the phone again and dialed the operator for the number of the LAPD tip line.

  What she did not know at the time was that her phone call would be all for naught because the Pillow Talk Killer would never be caught.

  Chapter 20

  “My husband was most definitely not the Pillow Talk Killer,” Rosemarie Carter sniffed as she dabbed her ruddy, heavily rouged face with a tissue in an effort to sop up the tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” Poppy said somberly. “I know this must be difficult for you to talk about.”

  Poppy, Iris, and Violet huddled around Rosemarie Carter’s small table with its stained red-and-white-checkered tablecloth in a cramped alcove. The sun streaming through the windows brightened what was otherwise a drab, threadbare kitchen with worn appliances and a scuffed, smudged floor in desperate need of mopping. Poppy glanced over at Iris, whose nose was scrunched up in distaste at the musty, squalid surroundings. Poppy tried signaling her to stop, but Iris failed to pick up on her cue. Violet, however, gamely drank the coffee Rosemarie had offered them when they first arrived and pretended not to notice how unkempt the house was. As for Rosemarie herself, she appeared to have long given up on making herself look presentable, drowning in a shopworn wool sweater despite the hot temperature outside, a faded blue housedress, and slippers. Her hair was matted and unwashed. In fact, her only attempt to gussy herself up for company was the slabs of rouge on both her cheeks, which was incongruous with the rest of her dowdy appearance. Perhaps it was out of habit from when she was a younger woman, or a half-hearted attempt to paint over the cracks of time that were rapidly taking over her face. But the effect was disconcerting, a little too Baby Jane.

  What had brought Poppy, Iris, and Violet to this run-down neighborhood in Indio today was the crack investigative work of Iris’s grandson Wyatt, who when presented with the name “Don” by Poppy, the man she had witnessed approaching Linda Appleton at the Roosevelt on the night she was murdered, took only five minutes to come up with a full name from his online research.

  “Don Carter,” Wyatt had said at the garage office, pointing to a black-and-white photo on his computer screen. “Is that the guy, Poppy?”

  “Yes, that’s him,” Poppy said, shuddering. “After I phoned the police, I heard they brought him in for questioning. After that, I tried to move on and didn’t closely follow the case. I read something later on, how although he had been a focus of the investigation, an arrest was never made.”

  Wyatt nodded. “Yup. And according to this Vanity Fair article I found written about the murders back in 2005, since the killer was never caught, there was a cloud of suspicion around Carter for the rest of his life.”

  “He died?” Poppy asked.

  “Way back in 1994.”

  “Oh . . .” Poppy murmured.

  “But his wife is still alive and she’s living right here in the Coachella Valley. I found her home address in Indio from public records.”

  Poppy had been hesitant to call the woman and possibly reopen old wounds, but she was determined to find out if Danika’s death was in any way connected to the original Pillow Talk Killer murder spree that had plagued Hollywood in the 1980s. At this point, Rosemarie Carter was her only lead and so Poppy called her. As expected, Rosemarie initially resisted Poppy’s request to meet, especially since she made it crystal clear she did not want to talk about the horrific crimes that had engulfed her husband all those years ago. The past, along with her husband, was long ago dead and buried.

  But when Rosemarie realized Poppy was the Poppy Harmon from the old Jack Colt show, she wavered, as if the idea of a TV actress swinging by for coffee and a chat would be some kind of novelty, a way to brighten up an otherwise dull day. She had told Poppy that she could stop by for a visit in the morning before eleven and stay for thirty minutes tops because Rosemarie had to take her dachshund, Shelby, to the vet in Palm Desert at noon. Iris and Violet did not like the idea of Poppy driving out alone to a remote house in Indio to see a woman who might have been married to a serial killer and known about it, and so they had insisted on accompanying her.

  And so here the three of them were, sipping bitter coffee and eating stale sugar cookies in a ramshackle house with an unkempt, oddly mannered woman whose late husband had been a prime suspect in the murders.

  Rosemarie finished dabbing her face and crumpled the tissue up in her hand, squeezing it tightly. “I never knew Don was mixed up in any of that horrible mess, not until we were married, and some reporter came poking around, asking me questions about how it felt to be sleeping in the same bed as a murderer! It was awful! I had no idea what he was talking about. I confronted Don that day when he got home from work, and he finally admitted that he had been with that Appleton woman on the night she was killed, but when she left his hotel room, she was very much alive.”

  “When did you and your late husband meet?” Violet asked gently.

  “In 1989, years after the murders. Don said he didn’t tell me about being a suspect in a homicide investigation because he loved me so much, and was afraid I might be scared off. But I wouldn’t have been. I loved him too much, and there was no way in my mind that he could be in anyway depraved or violent. I trusted him. He was a good man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Poppy studied Rosemarie’s clownish face, which despite her efforts with a massive amount of rouge to cover it up, managed to convey a sense of trustworthiness.

  Iris, whose arms were stiffly folded across her chest, was not as inclined to believe what Rosemarie was saying. Violet, on the other hand, offered Rosemarie an encouraging smile, which went a long way in keeping her calm as she spoke of her dear departed husband.

  “Apparently it was an anonymous tip from some actress he had met that got the police after Don. I’d sure as hell like to know who it was,” Rosemarie spat out.

  Poppy swallowed hard as Iris and Violet threw her nervous glances. Poppy remained steady, choosing not to share the information with Rosemarie that the actress in question was at present sitting at her kitchen table, because she did not want Rosemarie abruptly shutting down the conversation and ordering them out. Instead, she decided to breeze right past it. “So your husband did admit leaving the bar with Ms. Appleton?”

  Rosemarie nodded sedately. “Yes. He never lied about that. They went to his room for a nightcap, and then, well, he was divorced from his first wife at the time, nobody should blame him for wanting to be . . . social. Anyway, after they, you know, finished, she went home. And that’s where she was killed. In her home. Not Don’s hotel room. I never understood why people thought Don could have done it. The desk clerk at the hotel said he saw Don leave right after the Appleton girl, like he was following her, but Don was a smoker and he just went out for a pack of cigarettes. Of course, the desk clerk was on his break when Don came back and didn’t see him. It was a nightmare. Don spent the rest of his life denying he was in any way involved, trying to set the record straight, but because the cops never found the killer, there was always that constant suspicion hanging around him. I can’t tell you how many crank calls we used to get, asking if the Pillow Talk Killer was at home, saying Don was going to burn in hell. We had to change our number every six months. The stress finally took its toll on poor Don, and he died of a heart attack nine years later. I was devastated, of course, but I remember thinking, finally he’ll get some peace.”

  There was absolute quiet in the kitchen broken only by Rosemarie’s sniffles. She raised the wadded-up tissue in her hand and began wiping her face again.

  Poppy finally stood up. “We’ve taken up enough of your time, Rosemarie. Thank you for the coffee and cookies. And I hope everything turns out fine for Shelby at the vet.” She glanced over at the dachshund, who was snoozing in a quilted doggie bed next to the
refrigerator.

  Rosemarie nodded, thanked them for coming by, but did not make a move to show them to the door. Poppy turned and left through the kitchen door, which led to a walkway to the street as Iris and Violet followed suit.

  After they all piled into Iris’s car and were driving away, Violet, who sat in the back, reached over and gingerly touched Poppy’s shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking, and I want you to stop it.”

  Poppy swiveled her head around. “What are you talking about, Violet?”

  “You are feeling guilty about calling the police to report Don Carter all those years ago. You somehow feel it’s your fault he died, and that is simply nonsense!” Iris barked, hands gripping the steering wheel as she kept her eyes fixed on the road.

  “How do you two know me so well?” Poppy sighed.

  “Because we’re your best friends,” Violet piped in. “And just to be clear, you absolutely did the right thing. What if Don had been the killer and you didn’t make that call? Who knows how many more poor girls he might have gone after? Better safe than sorry!”

  “But I ruined his life. . . .” Poppy whispered, consumed with guilt.

  It would take a long time for her to come to grips with what she had done, how her actions had changed the course of Don Carter’s life. In her mind, the best way for her to cope now was to find out who smothered Danika Delgado to death because there was a very real possibility that this killer was the same one who had rampaged Hollywood over thirty-six years ago. And if she did find him, then perhaps she might find some belated justice for Don Carter, not to mention his first three victims.

  Chapter 21

  The house was located at the end of a dusty, deserted road on the outskirts of Desert Hot Springs. The structure appeared to be unstable and teetering, on the verge of collapse if suddenly buffeted by the stiff valley winds. There was a cracked window and large chips of stucco missing. A 2008 Toyota Corolla was parked out front and the license plate matched what Wyatt had found in the DMV records.

  “Looks like we found him,” Matt said as he and Poppy both hopped out of his Prius and made their way toward the tiny house, which was actually more of a shack. They were about fifty feet from the front door when it was suddenly flung open and a young man emerged holding a rifle.