“Or maybe you didn’t print all the photos.”
She gave him a look, but said, “If it will make you feel better, I’ll check my thumb drive.” She reached over him to call up the list of files. “How many photos do you have?”
He counted them. “Twenty-four.”
“And I have twenty-four stolen files, so everything has been printed. Now we know why the amateur was an amateur—he was too slow to go pro.”
But Cooper said, “Wait a minute. Look at the file names.”
All the files had the prefix bhawks followed by a three-digit number: bhawks001, bhawks002, and so on. Except that there were gaps—there was no bhawks003 or bhawks007. All in all, there were eight gaps in the numbers.
“That’s odd,” Tilda said. “From what I saw on that hard drive, Lil is meticulous about how she stores and names files.” She looked at the file list again. “See the time stamps for when the files were created? She scanned them methodically, too, one after the other.”
“Except that some of them aren’t here.”
“Now why would that be?”
“Maybe Sandra deleted them.”
“Are you kidding? Even if her hands weren’t bothering her, she told me that she barely knew how to turn the computer on.”
“She also said she taught Bettie Page everything she knew about posing.”
“Good point. Plus she could have asked Lil to do it for her—she could have made up some excuse. Or Lil could have done it for some reason of her own.”
“What about the killer?”
“Maybe.” She drummed her fingers on the desk until Cooper slapped her hand. “I wish I could get back to that hard drive and rummage around the deleted files, but Lil took the computer home with her, and I’m not sure where she lives.”
“Otherwise, you could do a spot of breaking and entering. Except, of course, that it’s both illegal and dangerous.”
“Another good point. So the photos are missing, and the scanned copies of those photos are gone, or at least somewhere where I can’t get to them. Which leaves the source.”
“Except you don’t know where they came from.” He paused. “Don’t I get a ‘good point’?”
“Not this time. I know where they came from. Sandra said the photographer lives in Medford.”
“She did? I don’t remember that.”
“Not everybody in that room was slavering over pirate photos—I was listening.”
“So all you have to do is find a guy in Medford who was in a New York camera club in the 1950s. Good point?”
“Nope. I know his name or at least part of it. His last name is Hawks, and his first initial is B.”
“The file names! Smart!”
“Good point,” she said, then ducked when he slapped at her head. A quick look at an online phone book found only one B. Hawks in Medford, a Bill Hawks on Fulton Street. Unfortunately, there was no answer when she called his number, which left them out of ideas.
They were not, however, out of Westerns on DVD, so after scrounging for yet more food, they spent the evening trying to decide which of The Magnifi cent Seven was more studly. Eventually Tilda took her pinup photos and headed home.
She slept soundly that night, maybe because she was making progress of some kind. She just wished she knew where it was leading.
Chapter 22
There’s a side of my personality that goes completely against the East Coast educated person and wants to be a pinup girl in garages across America . . . there’s a side that wants to wear the pink angora bikini!
—MIRA SORVINO
TILDA tried to call Bill Hawks a couple of times the next day, though she wasn’t supposed to be working on Sunday. It was hard enough for a work-at-home freelancer to keep her life separate from her work, so Tilda usually tried to protect her weekends. But given that the conversation with Hawks was only semi-work-related, she gave herself dispensation, and since she never reached him, it was moot anyway.
Instead she did boring weekend stuff: laundry, house-work, duty calls to her mother and stepfather and to her father and stepmother. Plus she e-mailed Lil the stuff she’d promised. Later on, she tried to make peace with Colleen by taking her out to dinner at the Malden branch of Applebee’s restaurant. It might have done the trick had Tilda not had another noisy nightmare.
That was the night that Colleen moved past concerned, past annoyed, and on to downright resentful, and she made no bones about it. Tilda was really apologetic and had remorse to burn, but Colleen was not appeased.
Despite interrupted sleep, Tilda got up early on Monday and spent the first part of the morning doing Cowtown-related research, but as soon as it was late enough she called Bill Hawks once again, pumping her fist in the air in celebration when somebody answered.
“May I speak to Mr. Hawks please?”
“This is Bill Hawks.”
“Mr. Hawks, my name is Tilda Harper. I work for the magazine Entertain Me!, and I’m researching Sandra Sechrest. You may know her as Sandy Sea Chest.” Tilda was tweaking her ethics, since it sounded as if she was working on an article for Entertain Me!, but she hadn’t exactly lied.
Hawks said, “I read in the paper that she’d been murdered. What an awful thing! Have they caught the killer yet?”
“Not as far as I know. I was hoping we could meet so I could ask you some questions about her.”
“Me?”
“I understand you were one of the photographers who was there for one of her most well-known shoots, and I thought you could tell me what it was like, seeing it live.”
“Sure, why not?”
They arranged to meet at his house in Medford at one, which gave Tilda enough time to finish what she was doing and eat a sandwich before heading over. But first she wrote a note about where she was going and e-mailed copies to Cooper and June. Being pushed onto a busy street had made her a little more cautious, and if she went missing, she wanted to make sure there was a neon-lit trail to follow.
Mr. Hawks lived in a solid, well-established neighborhood not all that different from Tilda’s, and only ten minutes away, though since it was in Medford the houses probably cost ten to twenty thousand dollars more for the same floor plan. She’d long since given up trying to decipher what made one town higher up the economic totem pole than another, especially when the towns shared a border the way Malden and Medford did.
Tilda parked her car on the street, hoping the person who’d shoveled the spot clear of snow wouldn’t return before she left and get mad at her for usurping it. Mr. Hawks must have been watching for her, because he opened the front door before she could ring the bell. “Ms. Harper? Come on in. I’m Bill Hawks.”
She stepped inside, and followed him into the living room, which screamed that it was an older person’s house. Tilda wasn’t sure how it was she could usually spot that. The furniture tended to be dated, but no more so than in many Cambridge apartments devoted to retro styles. Often there were more pictures, maybe more knickknacks, too, but not all the time, and not so much in Hawks’s house. It was something else. Maybe it was just that the furniture looked relaxed, as if it knew it wasn’t going anywhere.
Mr. Hawks offered her a drink, which she refused, and a seat on the couch, which she accepted. He settled into a La-Z-Boy as she pulled out her notepad and pen and sized him up. He was in his seventies, at least, and moved slowly and deliberately. His hair was down to just a fringe around the edges, and his eyes were a clear, almost luminous blue.
“Thanks for seeing me so soon. As I told you on the phone, I’m writing a story about Sandra—Sandy Sea Chest.”
“You know, I should have told you before that I really didn’t know her that well. I’d only recently found out she was living in the area, and before that I hadn’t seen her in fifty years or more.”
“I understand that you were in one of the camera clubs that used Sandra as a model.”
“That’s right. That’s how I met her. In fact, if it hadn’t been for that, I woul
dn’t have minded asking her out.”
“You lost me.”
“Our club had strict rules. We weren’t supposed to contact the models outside of our shoots. I guess there had been problems with other clubs, and our club decided we had to keep things on the up-and-up. We wanted to make sure everybody knew we were serious photographers, even artists, not just men ogling pretty girls.”
“Is that right?” Tilda said, raising one eyebrow.
He let loose with a laugh. “Of course we were ogling pretty girls—otherwise we could have taken pictures of landscapes and puppies! But we really were serious about the photography, and having that rule protected the girls. We could look, but we couldn’t touch. Roy—he was our president—he used to bring his older sister to the sessions, and she’d watch out for the models. One guy forgot one day. All he wanted was to get the model to move her chin a little to the left, but as soon as he touched her, Roy’s sister let out a screech and slapped his hand away. Scared the crap out of him!” He laughed again. “Oh, hell, who am I fooling? It was me, but I really did just want her to move her chin!”
Even though Tilda already knew a lot about how the camera clubs worked through her previous research, she asked a few more questions, just to make sure Hawks was relaxed. Finally, she said, “I spoke to Sandra the day she died, and she showed me that batch of pictures you’d sent her, the ones from the pirate session. You do good work.”
“Not bad for an amateur, anyway. I hated to let those pictures go, too, but the wife insisted. Crazy, isn’t it? Jealous of a woman I hadn’t laid eyes on in fifty years!”
“Well, they are pretty provocative pictures.”
“Oh yeah, I took some great shots that day, and Sandy was one hell of a poser. No Bettie Page, but the camera loved her. The other gal, Virginia, was good, too. Those pictures were works of art, you know what I mean.” He threw up his hands. “But Jazz—she’s my wife—Jazz said they had to go. She said that if I wanted to keep cheesecake pictures around, they damned well better be of her.”
Tilda blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Jazz can’t stand the idea that I ever used another model. I keep telling her that once I met her, I didn’t have any interest in taking pictures of anybody else.”
“Your wife was a pinup model, too?”
“Was? Is! She’s still got it—we’ve got our own Website and it’s doing great, thank you very much. Plenty of guys want women with a little mileage on ’em. Here, let me show you some.” Hawks levered himself out of the recliner and went to a well-filled bookcase to pull out a large photo album. “We’ve gone digital, of course, but there’s nothing like having prints to look at,” he said as he handed her the album.
Tilda was prepared to freeze her face into an expression of polite interest so as not to offend the man with any distaste, or a worse reaction, but she needn’t have bothered. After the initial shock of seeing an older woman in sensual poses—No, she wasn’t older. Jazz Hawks was old—nothing had been airbrushed or Photoshopped out—but she was still as sexy as hell. She was also quite well endowed, proving that Hawks was still a breast man.
“These are amazing,” Tilda said as she flipped through the pages.
Hawks beamed with pride. “Now those are the glamour shots—some of the other stuff we do is a little bit kinkier. Jazz doesn’t have any hang-ups. Except about me having other models, of course.”
Tilda decided that she didn’t need to see those pictures, and closed the album. “So she didn’t like you having photos of other women?”
“She made me promise to get rid of any pictures I had of other women when we got married, and I did get rid of most of ’em. She thought they were all gone until she found a cache I had in the basement. I told her I’d forgotten they were there, but I’ll be honest with you—I kept those pictures on purpose. That session with Sandy was some of the best work I ever did until I started working with Jazz, and I couldn’t just throw that stuff out. I thought I had the perfect hiding place, but she found them, and they had to go. I’d heard about Sandra’s Website, so I decided to send ’em to her for old times’ sake. Do you know if anybody is going to be posting them on her Website now that she’s gone?”
“Unfortunately, the pictures you sent are missing,” she said. She was skirting the truth again, since she knew Lil had file copies.
“No!” Hawks said. “What happened?”
Tilda wasn’t willing to launch into her suspicions, so she settled for, “Nobody knows for sure. Actually, I was hoping you might have copies, but if your wife objected that strongly, I suppose not.”
But Hawks was wriggling in his seat. “To tell you the truth . . . Look, you won’t tell Jazz, will you?”
“Absolutely not. I deal with confidential sources all the time.”
“Well, I was going through the negatives, just for one last look, you know, and I just couldn’t resist.”
“You made more prints, didn’t you?”
“Nah, prints are too hard to hide. I put ’em on disk. I’ve got this gadget that takes slides and converts them to .jpeg files. Then I put the files on a thumb drive, and hid the thumb drive.”
“Mr. Hawks, you are a sneaky man.”
He grinned proudly.
Half an hour later, Tilda had the files copied onto her own thumb drive and was on her way back home. Another hour, and she’d downloaded all the photos onto her hard disk, identified which weren’t included in the files stolen from Sandra’s hard drive, and printed them.
All she had to do was figure out why they were worth killing for.
Chapter 23
It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor.
—JOHN FORD
TILDA eagerly grabbed each of the formerly missing pictures as the printer spat them out, but though she really couldn’t have said what she was expecting, the reality was depressingly anticlimactic. The photos looked pretty much like Bill Hawks’s other photos—they showed lots of bosom and had other photographers in the frame.
Okay, she had to be missing something. She picked up each picture and looked more closely. The first shot: pirate, maiden, and the profile of a dark-haired photographer whose face was mostly hidden by his own camera. The second: pirate, maiden, and two photographers. Hmm . . . One of them was the same guy, now with the camera held below his chin as he decided on his next shot. The third: pirate, maiden, and the dark-haired photographer again, this time holding the camera in one hand as he leaned against a table or sideboard. Fourth: pirate, maiden, dark-haired photographer. Tilda flipped through the rest of the newly acquired photos, verifying that each of them included the same photographer. Then she looked through the pictures she’d copied from Sandra’s computer. The dark-haired stranger didn’t appear in any of them.
That had to be it. The photographer was the missing piece. She grabbed the phone to call Cooper and crow.
“Cooper? It’s Tilda.”
“What do you need?”
“Nice to hear your voice, too.”
“Tilda, it’s Monday afternoon. I’ve got until five o’clock tomorrow to get next week’s issue copyedited.”
“Shit! I forgot. Call me tonight.”
“If I can. No guarantees. Bye.” He hung up.
So much for crowing. Tilda pulled out the best shot of the guy, and looked at him closely. He looked as if he were eighteen or nineteen, or a very young twenty or twenty-one. The plaid button-down shirt with gray slacks gave no clues to his identity, and he had no rings or any other identifying marks. His eyes were dark, and he was cute enough if you liked trim guys with 1950s-style crew cuts. So who the hell was he?
Tilda looked up Bill Hawks’s number, and called him, hoping she’d get him and not the overly possessive Jazz. Luck was with her.
“Mr. Hawks, this is Tilda Harper again. I’ve got a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“I was looking at some of your photos, and noticed that there’s one particular
photographer in the frame for several of them.” She described him and said, “I was wondering if you could tell me his name for the caption.”
“Hang on, let me find the pictures on my computer.”
Tilda waited impatiently as he pulled his thumb drive of contraband material out from its hiding place and plugged it into his computer. “Okay, I see the guy you’re talking about, but I have no idea who he was. That shoot had guys from three or four different clubs, and that guy wasn’t in my club. I don’t even know which one he was in.”
“Oh well,” Tilda said, as if it were of no particular importance. “I might be able to get by without knowing. It just depends on how picky the legal department is getting.”
“Lawyers!” Hawks said. “They do complicate matters.”
“Sad but true. Maybe I could talk to some of the other photographers from that shoot. Have you kept in touch with any of them?”
“You don’t ask for much—that was over fifty years ago!”
“I know, and I’m sorry. The legal department just makes me crazy.”
“Take my advice and crop the guy out. It won’t hurt anything, and the lawyers will never know.”
“I will if I have to, but I really wanted to show the camera club members who were behind the scenes, not just the models.”
“I see what you mean,” he said, “Tell you what. I’ll make a call or two and send some e-mails. If anybody knows anything, I’ll get back to you.”
“That would be wonderful. I really appreciate it.”
“Anytime.” She heard a woman’s voice. “Hell, Jazz is home. Gotta go!” He hung up before Tilda could respond, and she hoped he’d gotten his thumb drive hidden safely away in time.
Tilda glared at the crew-cut man, with no clue who he was and no idea how to find out. She speculated about using the bulletin boards on Sandra’s Website to put out feelers for other photographers who’d been there that day, but she didn’t want Lil knowing she’d stolen the pictures.
Who Killed the Pinup Queen? Page 13