Pillow Stalk (A Mad for Mod Mystery)

by Vallere, Diane

  “Stupid little mutt, just like you. I took care of him. He’s in the dumpster.” A maniacal sound erupted from his throat and triggered a volcano of rage inside me. I stepped forward and brought my knee up to his groin, hoping to catch him by surprise.

  He anticipated the move and caught my knee. With his bare hands he twisted my shin far enough to the left to let me know he’d been paying attention all of those mornings at the pool where I’d favored my left leg. The pain grew steadily stronger, until I was all but incapacitated.

  I heard the snap before I felt the pain. As a kaleidoscope of colors burst in my head, blotting out my vision and my common sense, I lost both balance and the ability to fight back. I collapsed onto the floor.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  When I came to, I was on the sofa. Richard pressed a bag of ice against my kneecap. I pulled away, on alert. I couldn’t feel my leg. I was scared, more scared than I’d ever been. And the pain rivaled the pain of the skiing accident still fresh in my memory.

  “Madison, I’m sorry I scared you. Andreev’s been after me for a while. He thinks I have a reel of a Doris Day movie he stole from AFFER. But it’s not Pillow Talk, it’s something else. Something he hid decades ago.”

  “Richard?” I uttered.

  His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Where is it, Madison? Where did you hide it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Any of it.”

  “He knows you have it. If you just tell him where it is, he might go away and not hurt us.”

  Sounds of someone tossing my kitchen like a Waldorf salad filled the background. Richard was more gullible than I took him for. Four murders, countless attacks, threats, breaking and entering? Popov wasn’t going to let us go no matter what he found in my cabinets, and I still didn’t understand exactly what he thought I had.

  “Richard, listen to me. There’s a cop, out back, sitting in a Jeep next to the dumpster.”

  “No there’s not, Madison. I saw him on my way in. I knew he would stick around if I couldn’t get rid of him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told him Hudson James was at The Elbow Room getting drunk. He thanked me and took off. That’s how Popov got past him.”

  I stared at the ceiling, not wanting to believe Richard. Catching Hudson was the one thing more important to Tex than my safety. Tears stung my eyes, and I fought to sit up.

  “Listen to me, Richard. That man is not going to let us go. We have to get out of here and I can’t walk.”

  “Please, Madison, tell him where you hid the film reel.”

  “I don’t have a film reel. I didn’t hide anything. I don’t know what you think I have, but I don’t have anything you don’t see.”

  “Think. Thelma Johnson had it and you are the only person to take anything from her house. You must have taken it, even if you don’t know that you took it.”

  Pans crashed against the linoleum floor. My downstairs neighbor would hear that if anyone was home. Where were the rest of my tenants? Why wasn’t anyone coming to check on the noise coming from my apartment?

  Popov came out of the kitchen. “Are you sure you don’t want to save me the trouble of searching the apartment, missy? If you just give it to me, I’ll get out of here. Get in my car and get to the airport and on the next flight back to Russia. I could have been home years ago but first them, then you. You were more stubborn than everybody else. The rest of them got scared. You lived like you had nothing to lose.”

  “What is so important that you were willing to kill four people?”

  “My reputation in my country. My Russian citizenship. My life. Here I’m an old man. There, I was an astronaut. A legend. I stole the evidence they had of my infidelity to my country. Thelma Johnson—she screwed everything up, she thought it really was Pillow Talk, thought it had a scene with her in the background. When she found out the truth, that the only interest I had in her was in the film reel, that I had killed her daughter over it, she came after me with a knife. I should have destroyed the film when I had the chance. But that woman hid it. She knew its value to me and how dangerous I was. A man without a country. Because of the mission to Mars, because of what I knew, because of what I told. It’s the only evidence that I sold secrets of our space program, that I sacrificed the Soviet strategy for money. They’ll have no proof I’m a spy and they’ll have to let me back into my country, to formally apologize, to celebrate me as a hero once more.”

  Andreev Popov was crazy. He was not going to allow either one of us to walk out of there alive, even if I had been able to walk at the moment.

  “I’ll tell you where it is if you let Richard go,” I said boldly.

  “Madison, no!”

  “That’s the arrangement you made with him, years ago, when you approved his application to film school, right? When you first saw the letter campaigning to destroy all Doris Day movies? You knew somehow you could use him. You thought you’d create an ally, even an unwitting one. You sent his letter to AFFER. You even mailed it with his name on the envelope, so he’d be under suspicion if anything happened to Pillow Talk.”

  “He wanted to cooperate at first.”

  I looked at Richard. The bravado had left him and all that was left was the shell of a man in a grimy, sweaty, rumpled T-shirt. Even Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu looked less threatening than he had earlier.

  “It was a highly competitive program and I wanted an edge,” Richard said. “That’s why I wrote the letter in the first place. And when Mr. Popov taught my class on documentaries he asked for volunteers to help with a project. I wanted a good grade. I thought it would make a difference, you know, have a solid reference on my resume. He was supposed to be teaching us how to get good footage, how to get past the people that try to keep you away from the truth. How to get inside, you know?”

  “The kid did good, too. I gave him an A,” the Russian said with a laugh. “I could have assembled an army on the power of a grade in those days.”

  I still didn’t know where this supposed film reel would be, and I’d just offered to give it up to save Richard. Running through my head, along with the fear and the pulsating rush of blood, were snippets of conversation Hudson and Tex had shared with me independently. It was in her wardrobe. But I’d seen the wardrobe. It had been destroyed. The table leg, sitting off to the side, told me Hudson had been there. Hudson needed to find the film reel, too, to show there was a clear motive for murder between someone else and Sheila Murphy, between someone else and Thelma Johnson.

  But the fact remained that Popov thought I had it. And what if I did? What if the best items I’d taken from Thelma Johnson’s wardrobe included whatever we were looking for? That whatever we were all looking for was now in my wardrobe? Was it possible that between polyester pant suits and vintage cotton dresses hung proof of a Soviet espionage ring, secrets that people would kill for?

  I tried to stand, but pain shot through my leg. I collapsed back onto the sofa. I was dizzy and nauseous. And then I remembered Mortiboy.

  “Popov, it’s in the closet. On the top shelf.”

  “Madison!” cried Richard.

  Popov moved like a mountain lion stalking prey in the wild. His shoulders hunched and his sleeves, pushed up to expose the hair on his forearms, tensed with muscles that had never atrophied under his eighty-year old skin. I realized he’d been at the pool so many times but had never been in a bathing suit. I’d never seen his physique, never knew he was a solid and menacing mass of muscle, now coated in the stink of desperation.

  I pushed at Richard. “Get out of here. Now!”

  “I can’t leave you with him.”

  “Get help. Fast.” I could only speak in short words, the pain interrupting my ability to breathe. Richard stood up and looked in the bedroom. Popov was bent over, moving the piles of shredded laundry tha
t Mortiboy had left on the floor after yesterday’s climbing session. He would soon turn his attention to the closet. Mortiboy had been trapped in the closet for almost a day. He would be one pissed off cat. At least, that’s what I was counting on.

  Popov didn’t notice Richard move toward the front door. He flung the sliding closet doors aside in a grand gesture. Mortiboy jumped out of the closet at him, clawing his face, his neck, his arms. Popov screamed.

  I pulled the bandana off my head and wound it around my knee. While Popov wrestled with Mortiboy, I pulled the metal rod of the broken pink and brass lamp from under the sofa and angled it like a cane.

  And then I heard the crash.

  I looked in the bedroom. Popov was on his knees, holding his face. Streaks of blood on his cheeks indicated Mortiboy’s damage. But as he knelt on a pile of clothes, with blood-covered hands pressed against the wounds on his face, a stack of hatboxes settled into a pile on the floor in front of him.

  And it wasn’t the turquoise felt trilby that caught my attention. It wasn’t the brown and white rabbit fur cap that buttoned under the chin. I hadn’t looked at either since buying them years ago and tucking them away on the top shelf of my closet, where I’d stacked the hat boxes I’d brought home from Thelma Johnson’s house.

  It was a reel of film that fell out of the bottom box and landed by Popov’s knees. A reel of film that Thelma Johnson had hidden in a hatbox years ago.

  Popov grabbed the reel with bloody fingertips. I stood, balanced on one foot, and stared at him. I had to get out of there while I had the chance, but I couldn’t walk. Popov tore a pillowcase from its case and threw the reel into it, then held it shut the way a miser would clutch at a bag of gold coins.

  “You stupid girl. You had it all along. So many people dead. So much wasted time.”

  He moved toward me, a sharp kitchen knife in his hand, his eyes bloodshot with fury. His hair, a comb-over, stood on end and fell down longer on one side than the other. I put the weight of my bad knee on the pole of the lamp and mustered up the strength to fight him, yet even if I had two good knees I couldn’t win this battle. I couldn’t run away, could barely stand. Mortiboy had been my ace in the hole and he’d done his best, but now, like so much of my life, I was on my own. I was about to become victim number five.

  My fingers closed around the pink metal pole. I pressed my back against the wall of the living room, hearing Popov’s footsteps getting closer. I could smell the rancid odor coming from his t-shirt as he approached. Just as I saw the toe of his shoe, I yelled as loudly as I could and swung the broken lamp with all of my might. The weight of the lamp caused it to arc low, knocking the knife from his hand. The metal connected with his kneecap. He fell onto all fours and cursed in hard, guttural words.

  He crawled toward me like an animal.

  “This ends here, Popov,” I said, and tried to move backward.

  “You’re right, missy, it does.”

  He grabbed at my knees, forcing them to buckle. I lost balance and fell to the floor. My head ricocheted off the corner of the low wooden coffee table but I fought to stay in the moment. He knelt down on top of me, his kneecaps piercing my thighs, pinning me to the floor. His breath, hot and spicy, blasted my face. My leg was underneath me, bent at an unnatural angle. Popov set the reel next to my elbow and reached behind him for a pillow from the sofa. He pushed it into my face. The last thing I saw were his white knuckles.

  My scream was lost in the fabric.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The blood pumping through my ears drowned any sounds from outside. I couldn’t get air. I felt my hands along the rug, searching for something, anything. My fingers threaded through the metal film reel. I pushed it over my head and hoisted it, then slammed it down. Popov’s body went limp on top of me.

  I pushed him off me and gasped for breath, huge gulps of air that did little to calm me down. I blinked several times to clear my vision and pushed at his body, kicked at him with my right foot, trying to get out from under him before he started to move.

  That’s when I heard my name.

  My reaction to Tex was less than graceful. Tears clouded my vision, streamed down my face. My nose was running. Blood ran from an opening on my hand. I didn’t know I’d cut it when I’d picked up the broken lamp. Tex pulled me up onto the sofa and put his arms around me. I cried into the soft fabric of his shirt. And then I heard barking.

  Sloppy wet kisses covered my cheek. Rocky wriggled next to me on the bed, trying his best to elicit a response. When I moved and reached out to him, he yelped with the happy announcement that I was awake. I looked around, trying to figure out where I was. The walls were white, the bed was white, the unfamiliar nightgown I wore was white.

  This wasn’t home.

  People in scrubs moved around a white room with peach and green paintings framed in white-washed wood. A man I didn’t know sat in a folding chair next to the door. He flipped through a dog-eared golf magazine.

  “She’s awake,” he announced to whoever was listening from the hallway.

  Tex came into the room. For a moment he stood by the foot of the bed and looked at me.

  “Night, you sure know how to prove a point.”

  Rocky snuggled into the nook of my arm. His nose prodded the right side of my ribs. I curled my arm around him until he was against me like a teddy bear might have been for a child.

  Tex sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on Rocky’s head. “I should have been there like I said I would.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It’s my fault that it got as out of hand as it did.”

  “Popov…” my voice trailed off as I auditioned the different questions I had against the priority of how to start.

  “Popov isn’t a threat to you anymore.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “He’s in jail, and based on what we know and what I think we’ll find out after talking to you, he’ll be convicted of four murders, along with whatever is on that spool of film. And after the home run you hit against his kneecap, I doubt he’ll be able to go anywhere.”

  Ironic, I thought.

  “I don’t get it. He’s been after that spool of film for twenty, thirty years?”

  “The preliminary info is still coming in, but we know that Andreev Popov was an astronaut in Russia while the MIR space station was still operating. He was convicted of selling secrets to other countries. He compromised his country for money. The proof is on that footage.”

  “But how does it all tie in with Doris Day?”

  “That’s the weird part. He actually showed some promise as a filmmaker while he was working on the space program and had contacts in the States. He arranged for someone to send American movies to their mission base. It made him popular, important. The guy who could procure entertainment from behind the Iron Curtain back when very little was getting there. We weren’t racing to partner with Russia, and Russia wasn’t racing to cooperate with us. The only race anybody knew about was part two of the race for space.”

  “The race for space was in the late sixties and Popov isn’t that old. I’m not following.”

  “He had movies sent in to his camp. Doris Day movies were easy to come by. It was the mid-eighties, and people were fascinated with movies of the sixties. He arranged to see Pillow Talk and The Glass Bottom Boat.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “Scenes were filmed outside of NASA in The Glass Bottom Boat. That’s when he got the idea, a way to send secrets out of Russia. He spliced footage from his own camera into a reel of the movie loaned to them, and sent it back. This reel is from Pillow Talk. Only, it isn’t Pillow Talk. It’s footage from the Buran space program. Photos, schematics, plans. Projections. Timetables and formulas.”

  “But I heard that movie reel was a lit
tle,” I sought the best word, “provocative.”

  “It is. Aside from the information about the Buran missile, it also shows a young Andreev Popov having sex with a blonde secretary in a restricted office. That’s what made this particular reel so valuable. It wasn’t just footage of their mission. It was the footage that ID’d him as the spy.”

  “And that copy of Pillow Talk ended up at AFFER. Are you telling me that Popov came to the states and has been looking for it since he left Russia?”

  “The woman came forward. Told her story to the media, told what he was doing. He denied any involvement in the spy scandal. His cover story was that someone stole his camera and made the footage inside the space station. The Russian media didn’t believe him, so he fled, but he knew he had to find that film and destroy it if he ever wanted to return. Once in the States, he made a name for himself as a,” he paused for a second, “documentary filmmaker, all the while searching for that reel of film.”

  He tipped his head to the side and stared out the window. “He knew what he was doing when it came to filmmaking. Russia had no proof he was the spy, unless they came into the possession of this reel, but they were unforgiving. His career was over. He knew this reel of film was in the US so he went about finding it. Madison, he’s not a dopey old man. He’s a spy. A successful spy, who sold his country’s secrets for money. He was smart. But he was vain, too. He used his charm and his wits to get into the beds of women along the way—Thelma Johnson being one of them, and in the end, that was his undoing.”

  “You found the connection between Popov and Thelma Johnson.”

  “From what we can determine, Thelma Johnson knew she had something very valuable in that film reel. We’ll never know if she knew what it was, but she realized early on that as long as she had it and told no one where it was, she was safe from Popov’s rage. He wouldn’t dare hurt her without knowing where she’d hid it.”