A Killing in Costumes Read online

  A Killing in Costumes

  A HOLLYWOOD TREASURES MYSTERY

  Zac Bissonnette

  For Ryan

  1

  Cindy Cooper stared at the computer screen, wincing at the red number at the bottom of her accounting sheet: –$85,000.

  Her heart pounded, pumping anxiety through her chest. Selling her Los Angeles financial planning business to move to Palm Springs was supposed to be an escape from a career spent panicking over numbers on spreadsheets. But now, too much money was going out, and not enough was coming in. She knew she’d have to cut her losses on the movie memorabilia store after the first hundred-thousand dollars. She did the math in her head: one month left before she needed to have a tough conversation about the future with her business partner, Jay Allan. Who was also her best friend. Who was also her ex-husband.

  She looked up from the sea of red when she heard footsteps.

  “Cindy?” Jay walked into the office, perky as ever.

  She closed the laptop quickly. “Jay. What’s wrong?”

  He smiled. “Nothing, but I was about to ask you the same thing. You seem stressed.” He crouched down on the floor next to her chair. “Tell me everything.”

  That was the problem, Cindy thought, with being in business with someone you had this much history with: he could read her like Farmer Hoggett could read Babe.

  “Oh, I’m just … you know,” Cindy said, stalling. “Thinking about the numbers.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  Cindy hesitated. She loved Jay’s innocence, his positive attitude. She was the worrier, and she didn’t know what she’d do if they were both bogged down with anxiety. She and Jay had met in middle school, where they’d discovered a love of singing together. One of the best memories of Cindy’s life was the forty-five-minute bus ride to a thrift shop in another county to get costumes for a talent show so their classmates wouldn’t tease them for wearing hand-me-downs they recognized. Dressed in the hip outfits Jay put together at Goodwill, they’d won the show—surprising no one more than themselves. It had been the beginning of a beautiful friendship and a series of shared dreams. Now she needed to keep their latest dream alive, and Jay panicking wouldn’t help.

  “Yes, everything is fine,” she said, clearing her throat to hide the tremble in her voice. “I’m just thinking about ways we could help boost sales.”

  Cindy could see Jay brighten immediately, his shoulders squaring back and his eyebrows lifting up to nearly clear his hairline. He loved marketing. He loved thinking about ways to bring people into their store—wowing them with his knowledge of Hollywood history and then convincing them they just couldn’t go home without a lamp featured in multiple episodes of The Golden Girls. It worked. Just not often enough.

  Jay talked excitedly about a marketing idea he’d had—local radio spots featuring a “Hollywood Treasure of the Day,” with him and Cindy talking about a piece they had and how Palm Springs residents should stop by the store to make an offer. “Just think,” he said. “We can do funny patter like Donny and Marie. It’ll be like the old days: you and me, stars on the radio! Remember those commercials we did for the soap opera star cruise?”

  He sang a few bars of the jingle, and Cindy’s mind drifted back twenty years to the recording session for the commercials—back to when she and Jay were twenty-two years old. A hot, young, singing married couple playing a hot, young, singing married couple on a popular soap opera. They’d been on for two seasons, just enough to build the beginning of a fan base. Then they both came out as gay and got divorced. The press had been so cruel, and the advertisers, terrified of alienating anyone, demanded the producers remove the gay couple from the air, which they quickly did. She smiled softly despite herself. Painful as the end had been, the memories of their TV career were mostly nice now—nostalgia was a beautiful thing.

  “Interesting,” Cindy said, trying to sound noncommittal without letting him down. Cindy admired the blond hair that fell into his eyes boyishly as he talked about his big, creative idea—the only kind of idea he felt was worth excitement. At some point, she’d need to tell him they couldn’t afford to keep spending so much on marketing. Soon. But not now. It was so hard to give Jay bad news.

  “Interesting?” Jay said, popping one of the caffeine pills he seemed to go through like candy. “That’s it? Come on, Cindy, do you like it? I think it would really get the word out.”

  Cindy touched her ear, trying to think of what to say. She was wearing her favorite earrings—a pair of emeralds once owned by Marlene Dietrich—and the reminder instantly made her feel a little better. Jay had saved for months to buy them as her wedding gift when she’d married Esther ten years ago. She saw Jay notice her touching them, felt the warmth and love in his toothy grin—it was almost enough to stave off the pangs of sorrow that came when anything reminded her of Esther. Almost.

  She needed all of Jay’s warmth and love now more than ever. The store had been a dream she’d had for years, first with Jay, and then with Esther. “One day,” she and Esther had told each other, they’d move to Palm Springs full-time and sell movie memorabilia in an adorable little store. They’d talked about the idea during the commercial breaks on Turner Classic Movies—cuddled up with popcorn, fantasizing about one day owning a shop filled with props and costumes from the movies they loved and wanted to preserve for eternity. When Esther died, Cindy decided “one day” needed to be now—and so, a few years before her financial plan had dictated, she’d decided it was time to make the leap for a new career. Now the business wasn’t working. And Esther wasn’t here to help her figure out what to do.

  She was saved from having to respond when the front door opened—their first visitor in hours. The stranger appeared to be in his fifties, full hair but all white, and wearing a well-cut baby-blue blazer and khakis over an ample stomach. Boat shoes and a skinny tie with whales. Very Palm Springs: conspicuous wealth, but clearly a man of leisure.

  “Nice shop,” the man said, running his hand along the surface of a dining room table used in a bunch of low budget, direct-to-VHS horror films in the ’80s.

  “Thank you,” Jay said, walking toward him. “Welcome to Hooray for Hollywood Movie Memorabilia, our little slice of Old Hollywood in a Palm Springs strip mall.” He was smooth, practiced: this was why he was in charge of all their public outreach.

  “What can we help you find today?” Cindy asked.

  The man smiled. “Unfortunately, I’m not here to buy something.” Cindy felt her heart sink. “But I may have an opportunity for you that’s much more interesting.”

  “Color me intrigued,” Cindy said, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. More interesting than money? Unlikely.

  “It’s a chance to make a lot of money,” the man said.

  Well, that was something, at least.

  “Please,” Jay said. “Pull up a chair.”

  “And not just any chair”—Cindy carried over a canvas director’s chair—“but one that held Bette Davis’s bottom on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” It even said “Bette Davis” in big letters on the back, and the attached tag had a photo of Bette sitting in it, next to Joan Crawford in a similar chair. Both women were smiling, though media reports had established that their on-set rivalry was one of the most furious in Hollywood history.

  “Not that I’m in the market for it, to be clear,” the man said as he took a seat, “but how much is this chair?”

  “Fifteen thousand dollars,” Cindy said. “They made a miniseries about Bette and Joan’s feud a couple years ago, which added to the legend. And, of course, increased the value.”

  She hoped.

  The man whistled. “It’s good to hear there’s so much de
mand for this kind of stuff.”

  Jay ran into the office and returned with a few bottles of water from the mini fridge. The three of them sat around the horror movie table, still lightly stained with fake blood. Cindy had priced it at seven hundred and fifty dollars, but she was prepared to go lower if she didn’t find a horror obsessive in the next month or two. Heck, maybe she’d even raise the price. She’d heard that sometimes worked in the antiques business: a piece no one wanted at a low price could find a whole new audience at a higher one.

  “You were saying,” Cindy said, “that it’s good to hear there’s so much demand for vintage Hollywood memorabilia. I’m curious what your interest in it is.”

  The man leaned back, steepling his hands over his stomach. “Are you familiar with an actress named Yana Tosh?”

  “I don’t think—” Jay said.

  “Absolutely,” Cindy said, cutting him off. She stared at Jay in disbelief. “How can you not know her?”

  Jay shook his head. “You win this round.”

  Cindy grinned. They shared an encyclopedic knowledge of all things TV and film, and trying to “out-trivia” each other was a running game between them. “Yana Tosh played minor villains in dozens of films in the 1950s and early 1960s,” Cindy said, looking at Jay. “A femme fatale. She was more sinister than your typical vixen, but, my God, she was hot.” She rattled off a string of mostly forgotten movies from that period. “She retired by 1970, though, and nobody really knows what became of her.”

  “Actually,” their visitor said, sounding smug, “somebody does know.”

  “And why do I have a feeling that somebody would be you?” asked Cindy.

  “Ben Sinclair,” he said, finally extending his hand for the two of them to shake in a firm, businessman-like grip. “Yana Tosh’s financial advisor.”

  “Well, if she has a financial advisor, she’s still alive,” Jay said. “And I suppose she can’t have done too badly with money.”

  “Not badly at all,” Ben agreed. “She married a real estate mogul in 1969, retired from the industry, and lived a relatively quiet life. When he died fifteen years ago, she sold their other residences and has lived alone in Palm Springs ever since.”

  “Every day we learn about a new celebrity who has retired to Palm Springs,” Cindy said. “Is she looking to buy some Hollywood treasures?”

  “Quite the opposite,” Ben said.

  “Ah,” Cindy said. “What kind of stuff does she have?”

  Their 1950s phone—used in multiple episodes of Mad Men—rang, a shrill trilling sound, but soft enough to be endearing rather than annoying. Jay excused himself and ducked into the tiny office to answer it.

  With the phone silenced, Ben continued. “I think it would be better if you come see for yourself. Yana saw a piece in the paper about your store and sent me over to see if you’re any good.” He looked around, eying the walls lined with movie posters and the showroom floor filled with furniture, accessories, and costumes, each piece with a tag identifying its price and connection with Hollywood history. He smiled. “You passed the test. She wants to see you.”

  “She saved things from her movies?”

  “Oh, it’s not props from movies she was in,” Ben said. “It’s memorabilia she bought—things that just scream ‘Old Hollywood’ and ‘the star system’ and ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.’ Think pieces of the quality and value of your Bette Davis chair. But hundreds of them. She put most of the collection together after she retired.” He paused for effect. “With her husband’s real estate fortune.”

  Reaching into his wallet, he extracted a business card and then retrieved from his jacket pocket an expensive-looking pen, a Montblanc that could have come straight off the set of Poirot. After scribbling on the back of the card, he handed it across the table to Cindy.

  “Tomorrow at two PM,” he said. “And be punctual. Yana goes to her aerobics class at four thirty. You’ll love her, but she’ll hate you for the rest of your life if you keep her waiting.”

  He left without waiting for a response. Cindy watched him go. The guy was arrogant, but she was too desperate to hold it against him. Twenty minutes ago, she’d been staring at numbers that promised her impending doom. Now, with one visitor, she might just have—if it was all he said it was—a chance at a deal that could save the business. And if it came together fast enough, she might never have to tell Jay how close they’d come to financial ruin.

  By the time the door closed, she was already googling on her phone. Yana Tosh had been in more movies than she’d realized, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, and then a smattering of TV appearances through the end of the decade, before disappearing into the sunset. After her husband’s death in 2005, she’d come back for a few made-for-TV movies, including one Hallmark film where she’d played a mail carrier and sometime matchmaker. According to Wikipedia, tomorrow would be her ninetieth birthday.

  She was still absorbed in Yana’s bio when she heard Jay say her name. “Hello?” he said, sounding slightly annoyed. “Third try here.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “What?”

  “A gift,” he said. “We need to bring Yana a gift. Obviously. But what does one bring to a 1950s movie vixen?” He gestured to the store.

  Cindy nodded, liking the way he was thinking. She got up and walked around, picking up a vase from Barbra Streisand’s A Star is Born before setting it down. Jay did the same thing with a rotary phone used by Raymond Burr on Perry Mason. After five minutes, nothing seemed quite right. The Bette Davis chair would, of course, be a showstopper, but Cindy wasn’t about to let such an expensive piece leave their store without some guaranteed revenue coming in. Besides, would Yana really want a chair of such significance if she was trying to offload her collection? They wanted something to make her smile—not something she could turn around and sell if she didn’t end up working with them.

  Jay pecked away at his phone, then walked over and picked up an Academy Award statue—or, what looked like an Academy Award statue, but was, to the right buyer, something even more special: a fake Academy Award statue used in “How to Dial a Murder,” a 1978 Columbo episode guest starring Nicol Williamson. “Yana once appeared on an episode of Columbo.”

  “I remember that episode,” Cindy said.

  “Yeah, it was a good one. What if we bring her the Academy Awards statue?”

  Cindy furrowed her forehead. “You want to bring an actress a fake Academy Award as a gift, and you think that’ll make her like us?”

  Jay grinned, his face full of mischief. Cindy couldn’t help but notice once again how handsome he was, as good a catch as he’d ever been. He had prominent cheekbones from regular exercise and a low-carb diet, and his slight build went well with his tailored seersucker suit, complete with silver pocket square and a turquoise bow tie. Truth was, even though they had been divorced for almost twenty years, she was still as madly in love with him now. Just in a different way.

  “So, we give her the award,” Jay said, excitement growing in his voice, “and tell her we think she deserved a real one for Columbo, but all we have is a fake one from Columbo.”

  “She’ll laugh at us,” Cindy said skeptically.

  “Exactly!” Jay said. “We’ll make her laugh. She’ll like us—and realize we already have such an amazing collection that we can bring her something that special on such short notice. It’ll give us instant credibility. And then, we swoop in with the sales pitch. The collection will be ours. It’ll be just that simple.”

  “Just that simple,” Cindy repeated.

  2

  Jay felt optimistic—cautiously optimistic, but optimistic nonetheless—as he and Cindy climbed into her 1992 Ford Explorer to drive over to Yana’s house. A few curious passersby had stopped in to browse that morning, and he’d sold them a couple of old movie posters from their 50-dollars-each, three-for-a-hundred bin.

  It was clear the bin was going to be a hit, even if sales hadn’t been as great as he’d hoped so far. People were alwa
ys surprised at how affordable huge old movie posters were. For the price of a restaurant meal, you could have an original poster, featuring stars like Marilyn Monroe or Cary Grant, from the 1950s onward.

  He leaned back against the leather seat, bracing for dear life, as Cindy pulled out onto the busy main road. She was a good driver but drove a lot faster than Jay ever did. Normally an Explorer would be the most boring car in the world, but this one was special. It had been used in the original Jurassic Park movie and still had the famous green and yellow paint, along with the theme park logo on the hood. Cindy had paid $40,000 for it a year ago, but the price was worth it, as were the endless trips to the garage to fix its frequent maladies. It was the best advertising Hooray for Hollywood could ask for.

  Cindy slammed her palm on the steering wheel. “I hate traffic!” she cried. Jay winced—not a good sign. They had left plenty of time left to get to Yana’s house for the two o’clock meeting, and it wasn’t like Cindy to complain, which meant that something else was on her mind. She’d seemed down lately. Of course, that was understandable after watching her wife, Esther, succumb to cancer a year earlier. Cindy never wanted to talk about it. So Jay focused on what he could do: make the store amazing so she could worry about the business as little as possible—which was still a lot.

  Luckily, the store was in good hands in their absence, manned by their longtime friend, Mary Rawlings. Mary was eighty-five now and had been their personal assistant long ago, during their soap opera days. When Jay and Cindy had hatched the plan for Hooray for Hollywood, there was clearly only one thing for Mary to do: come out of her southern Florida retirement, move to Palm Springs, and work the register.

  “I meant to tell you,” Jay said. “That phone call we got yesterday when Ben Sinclair was visiting was from a guy named Dylan Redman. He runs the entertainment memorabilia department at Cypress Auctions.”

  “Cypress Auctions?” Cindy said. “That’s big time. What’d he want?”