Who Killed the Pinup Queen?

by Kelner, Toni, L. P.

  She resumed doodling.

  What about Louise Silberblatt? She’d recognized Glory at Sandra’s funeral, and it wouldn’t have been too remarkable for her to realize that the woman she’d known as Glory was also Cynthia Barth. Though she couldn’t have been in Boston to kill Sandra, she could have hired somebody to kill her, and while she’d claimed to be unavailable for the fund-raiser, she could have come in disguise. Tilda just couldn’t imagine a motive for her to want her former colleagues dead, or why she wanted them dead now particularly.

  Timing . . . The timing of the murders must mean something. What had happened recently to inspire murder? There was Sandra’s Website, but it had debuted back before Christmas, and then there was the Cowtown project, but that didn’t concern Sandra at all. Her only connection with Cowtown had been Miss Barth.

  Tilda ran her fingers through her hair in frustration. Her brain was overstuffed with contradictory facts, secrets that she couldn’t share with anybody, and questions she couldn’t ask without betraying confidences.

  Secrets . . . Was it too outlandish to assume that a secret had led to the murders? If so, which one?

  First, there was the fact that Louise had been Fanny Divine. Sandra had known that, and presumably Miss Barth had, too, since Louise had identified herself to Miss Barth. But why would Louise have admitted it just to turn around and kill Miss Barth for knowing? That made no sense.

  Then there was the fact that Miss Barth had been Morning Glory. Louise could have known that, but she still had no motive.

  What else? Miss Barth used to drink, and presumably a few people knew that, but unless she’d killed somebody in a drunken rampage, Tilda didn’t see how that could lead to murder so many years down the road.

  The Ambrose brothers weren’t real cowboys. What if Miss Barth had known that and had been blackmailing them with the threat of exposure? The only thing was, it would have been a pretty toothless threat. Who cared? Sure it would embarrass Tucker and Hoyt if the truth came out, but otherwise the only potential damage was the Cowtown resort tanking, and that would have hurt Miss Barth, too.

  Then there was Bill Hawks hiding photos of nearly naked women other than his wife. He’d described his wife Jazz as jealous, but was she crazy enough to hunt down Sandra and beat her to death? It seemed unlikely. Besides, before Sandra died, she’d said she was going to make herself beautiful for somebody, which Tilda thought meant that the expected guest was a man. Sandra could have been a lesbian of course, but Tilda had spent a fair amount of time with her, and she’d been pretty open about her sex life. She liked men—in fact, she’d liked a lot of men.

  What about Hawks himself? Maybe he’d kept the pictures of Sandra because they’d been having a torrid affair all those years. When Jazz found the pictures and realized the truth, she demanded that he break if off. So he went to give Sandra the news in person and when she wouldn’t accept it, he got physical. The problem with that was it gave him no motive for killing Miss Barth. Tilda didn’t think she could stomach the idea about him having an affair with her, too.

  None of her theories could adequately explain both murders and, come to think of it, none of them explained the pictures that had been stolen from Sandra’s apartment.

  Pictures . . . Two days ago, she’d shown the best picture of the mystery photographer to Miss Barth, who’d disavowed knowledge of them. The next day, Miss Barth had asked about it for no reason, and then proved that she was a really good liar. A few hours after that, Miss Barth was dead.

  The pictures had to mean something. Tilda abandoned her doodling again, found the pictures on her desk, and flipped through them, stopping at the cropped photo of the phantom photographer.

  Even without further doodling, she reached a conclusion. She could either stare at the photos until her eyes bled, or she could enlist a fresh set of eyes to tell her what it was she was missing.

  She reached for the phone. “Cooper? This is Tilda. Are you free tonight? I need somebody to bounce ideas off of.”

  “Sounds painful. Your place or mine?”

  “Yours.” In her current mood, she was afraid that she would resort to violence if she had to endure more of Colleen’s curiosity.

  Two hours later, she and Cooper were back in his office. Jean-Paul had been warned she was coming for dinner, and had had salad and pasta waiting, but once the three of them were finished eating it and killing half a bottle of wine, he’d shooed Cooper and her off while he cleaned the kitchen. Tilda decided that if she ever got a sex-change operation, she was going to get rid of Cooper so she could marry Jean-Paul herself.

  Once they were settled, Tilda explained to Cooper as much of what she’d been doing and thinking as she could without revealing the “off the record” and “please don’t tell” conversations. Once she was done, she handed Cooper two stacks of photos.

  “These are the pictures that I got from Sandra’s hard drive, and these are the ones from Bill Hawks that fill in the gaps. See if you can figure out what was so important about the ones that somebody deleted.”

  He looked at them. “All of the formerly deleted photos have this one guy in them.”

  “I know that. I was hoping you’d see something else.”

  “That seems to be the big difference.”

  “Do you see anything that might identify him?”

  “Like what?”

  “A mole, a tattoo, a nametag that says, ‘Hi, my name is Butch.’ Anything!”

  He obligingly pulled out a magnifying glass to examine the photos. “Late teens or early twenties. Dark brown hair. Brown eyes. I’m thinking around six feet tall. Nice build. Fair skinned. Recently shaved or very light beard. Good complexion. No visible moles or birthmarks. Clothes are horrible, but probably stylin’ for the day. Hands look clean. Nails trimmed. No rings. I’d date him.” He put down the magnifying glass. “That’s all I’ve got.”

  “Damn it!” Tilda ran her fingers through her hair for what seemed like the millionth time that day.

  “Is little Matilda having a bad day?”

  She glared at him. “You know better than to call me that.”

  “Poor little Matilda,” he cooed.

  “Cooper, I’m warning you . . .”

  “Oh dear, little Matilda is getting cranky!”

  “Did you know that I called your mother after you called me that last year?”

  “You tattled on me?”

  “No, but I did ask her if you had any childhood nicknames.”

  Cooper’s smile dissipated. “She didn’t tell you—”

  “Oh yes she did, Pookie. The story behind it is awfully sweet. Does Jean-Paul know?”

  “He does, but nobody else. Oh God, please don’t tell the people at the office.”

  “This is your last warning, Pookie. If you ever call me Matilda again, I will tell Nicole and Shannon, and I may even put it on Facebook.”

  “Damn, girl, you play dirty!”

  “I play to win.”

  “So, Tilda, what do you want to do now?”

  “I don’t know. There’s got to be something in those pictures to help us identify that guy, something worth killing for.”

  “I’ll look again,” Cooper said. After a few minutes, he said, “Hmm . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing really, I was just thinking that it’s a shame that Virginia Pure didn’t do more of this kind of work. She was quite shapely, if you like that kind of thing.”

  “Obviously Bill Hawks did, but according to Sandra, she didn’t like modeling. Modesty exacerbated by being uncomfortable with her figure.”

  “Why would anybody be unhappy with that figure?”

  “Sandra said Virginia was shy about her bosom size.”

  “Are you kidding?” Cooper said. “Look at her dress! If she’d taken a deep breath, she’d have ripped it in two!”

  “Most women dislike their looks,” Tilda said thoughtfully, “but for her to be unsatisfied with that bustline seems excessive.” Tilda we
nt to Cooper’s computer, Googled photos of Virginia, and displayed one. “That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  “Cooper, look at her bosom.”

  “Never have I looked at so many bosoms,” he grumbled. “If Jean-Paul catches me, he’ll think I’ve gone straight.”

  “Just look!”

  He did so, then checked the photos in his hand. “She looks bigger in her captive maiden costume.”

  “A lot bigger.”

  “Did she get work done?”

  “Did they do that kind of work back then?”

  “I’m not sure, but they did stuff bras.”

  “I don’t think she’s wearing a bra.”

  “Her bodice, then.”

  “Possibly, but why? Sandra told me that Virginia was embarrassed that she wasn’t better endowed, but she was getting plenty of work. So why start padding?”

  “How do you explain it?”

  Tilda went through reasons for a woman’s bust size to increase. “Okay, probably not plastic surgery or stuffing. It was way too late for her to hit puberty, and I don’t think she put on weight—the rest of her looks the same. Shit! Cooper, June told me that she went up two cup sizes when she got pregnant the first time.”

  “Seriously?”

  “She was quite pleased about it, too.”

  He went back to the photos. “You think Virginia was pregnant? But her stomach is flat.”

  “One, that skirt could hide a little bump. And two, the breasts start to swell before the stomach. June explained every step of the process in excruciating detail. You don’t want to hear about mucus plugs.”

  “No, I most definitely do not.”

  “Anyway, a pregnancy would explain a lot, like why she never did another shoot with Sandra. Sandra said it was a shame because the pirate shoot went so well that the photographer wanted to use the two of them together again. What is it about two girls together, anyway?”

  “You’re asking the wrong man.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, Virginia quit modeling and everybody thought she’d gone back home to Virginia, but she didn’t.” Tilda explained the efforts she’d made to track Esther down.

  “So you’re guessing she didn’t go home because she was pregnant?”

  “When a girl ‘got in trouble’ in the 1950s, she usually disappeared for a while. Or, in this case, for good. She could have moved somewhere else and started over.”

  “Meaning that our pure virgin was neither. But what does that have to do with anything else?”

  Tilda shrugged her shoulders. “Hell if I know. Maybe nothing.” She thought about Esther Martin’s family, waiting all those years for their daughter to return, never knowing they had a grandchild. It seemed so sad.

  While she was getting maudlin, Cooper had started combining the two stacks of photos.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Now that we’ve got them all, I want them in chronological order.”

  “Has anybody ever told you what anal retentive means?”

  “Hello? I’m a copyeditor? Do you want a ‘big picture’ guy going over your stories?”

  “I bow to your anal retentiveness.”

  “And well you should.” He placed the formerly missing pictures into the stack, flipped through them, pulled a couple out, flipped through again, then rearranged again. “Huh.”

  “Was that a good grunt or a bad grunt?”

  “It’s a confused grunt.” He went back a few pictures, then forward. “You remember how I originally figured out the order in which the pictures were taken from the models’ positions, the clock hands, and the liquid in that glass. I just noticed something funny about that glass, and that’s why I’ve been having a hard time getting the photos in order.”

  Tilda looked at the top photo and saw a glass on the table behind the mystery photographer. “I think it’s iced tea. What about it?”

  “Early in the session, it’s full.” He showed her, then flipped to another picture. “Later, it’s a little emptier. Emptier. Nearly empty. Full again.”

  “She refilled the glass.”

  “Okay, but keep looking. The glass is full again, then three-quarters full, then half full, then three-quarters full. Since Virginia was lashed to the mast during that time, I don’t think she refilled it herself.”

  “So somebody brought her more.”

  “Why would anyone bother to bring a quarter of a glass?”

  “Are you sure you’ve got them in the right order?”

  “Look at the clock.”

  “You’re right. So where did that extra tea come from? And why?”

  Together they looked through the pictures of that part of the photo session, giving special attention to the glass. Then Cooper pointed to the mystery photographer. “Look at that! He’s pouring something into the glass!”

  Tilda looked closer. “You’re right.” She’d only been looking at his face, not at what he was doing with his hands.

  “So what did he put in?”

  “I doubt it was iced tea. What is that in his hand, some kind of bottle? Maybe the 1950s equivalent of roofies?”

  “I think it would have been called slipping her a mickey.”

  “Sandra said Virginia started feeling sick by the end of the shoot.”

  “You think it was something she drank?”

  “Could be. So we’ve got a pregnant pinup. Somebody puts something into her drink during a photo session, she gets ill, and she’s never heard from again.”

  “That sounds suspicious,” Cooper said.

  “And potentially very ugly.” Tilda thought for a moment. “Can I do some searching on your computer?”

  “Sure. What are you looking for?”

  “There are a couple of databases I use to find death records.”

  “You do this for fun?”

  “For work, you jerk.” She took a seat in his chair, signed in on a death records site in which she maintained a registration, and searched for Esther Marie Martin. Several names came up, but none of the birth or death dates fit. She searched again with an M. instead of Marie, and then without a middle name at all. Still nothing. Just in case a typo had been made, she threw in some wild-card characters to see if anything useful emerged.

  As usual, when she was doing database searching, she lost track of time, and didn’t realize how long it had been until she noticed that Cooper had put a dish of ice cream next to her and that it was already halfway melted.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking a spoonful, “but I don’t think I’ve earned it. I haven’t found anything.”

  “That’s not necessarily bad news. Maybe she’s still alive after all. Or maybe there’s no record—they get lost sometimes. Maybe her body wasn’t identified, and she was buried as Jane Doe,” Cooper said.

  “Maybe,” Tilda said, taking another bite, “but the police would have checked out all Jane Does when her parents tried to find her.”

  “I bet they didn’t ask after a Virginia Pure.”

  Tilda nearly choked on her ice cream. “Cooper, you’re a genius!” She put the bowl aside and hit the database again. “Shit, nothing. Unless . . .” She threw in wild-card characters again, so she’d find any Virginia whose last name started with P. “I’ve got a Virginia Pearl, age twenty-two, died Sept. 14, 1952.”

  “When did that photo shoot take place?”

  Tilda flipped to Sandra’s site to check. “September 1952.”

  “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  But Tilda had gone back to the death records. “Cooper, the cause of Virginia’s death was recorded as suicide.”

  “The hell it was!” he said. “It was that bastard in the picture. He poisoned her!”

  “According to this, she died from ingesting ethylene glycol.” Before Cooper could ask, she was already Googling for more information. “It tastes sweet. That’s why she didn’t notice it in her iced tea—Sandra said she drank it with tons of sugar. At first Virginia would have felt drunk but within hour
s, she’d have been vomiting, convulsing, in a stupor, or in a coma. It can take as little as four ounces to kill an average-sized man.”

  “That looks about what the bastard poured into her glass,” said Cooper.

  “Get this! It’s used in photography for color developing baths, whatever those are.”

  “And our guy was a photographer. He did it, Tilda. He killed that girl.”

  “He did, didn’t he,” she said, staring at his picture. “But who is he? And why did he kill Sandra and Miss Barth?”

  “Maybe if we figure out who, we’ll be able to get the why.”

  “The ‘who’ part is still the sticking point.”

  “Somebody must know who he is.”

  “Miss Barth knew,” Tilda said. “At least, I think she did, and I think her knowing may have had something to do with her being killed.”

  “So that means he was at the party last night. That helps, right? I mean, how many men that old were there?”

  “What if it wasn’t the guy himself who did the killing? I mean, yes, he killed Virginia, but it could be a relative who’s killing now.”

  “So our suspect is either a seventy-plus-year-old man, or somebody related to him. That’s a big help.”

  “Cooper, I’ve been having bad dreams about this for two weeks now. Did you think it would be easy?”

  “You’re still having nightmares?”

  She nodded wearily. “If I were in my right mind, I might have figured it out by now. Miss Barth might still be alive.”

  “We did this already, with Sandra. You didn’t kill them!”

  “I know, but—”

  He continued, talking over her. “And you did not cause their deaths. Now cut the crap, and start thinking!”

  “Yes, sir,” she said mockingly, unwilling to admit that hearing him say that had made her feel better.

  “So what do we do next?”

  “I don’t know. This isn’t exactly in my comfort zone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Yes, I did find out about that Kissing Cousins curse stuff, but—”

  “No, not that—that was a fluke. I know looking for killers isn’t in your comfort zone. But pretend you don’t know this picture is of a killer. How would you track this guy down if all you knew is that he was connected to a story you were working on?”