Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) by Tim Cockey Page A

it.”
    “So soon?”
    “She was one of the models they used for the life drawing class. She was clearly new at it. Couldn’t have been more than nineteen. I had seen her posing. She couldn’t sit still for very long. She really couldn’t hold a pose. But she must have figured it was an easy way to pick up some cash. Her body was a knockout, no question about it. She wasn’t one of those big bucket, small breasted types they seem to prefer in life drawing. There’s a big push to steer clear of the conventional hourglass figure. All about so-called realism. It’s so silly. Well, this woman—this girl—was voluptuous. Seemed real enough to me.” Julia paused and unfurled one of her deliberately taunting smiles. “Is
your
Vickie voluptuous?”
    “The word might apply.”
    “Well Terry Haden certainly picked up on it. I guess he must have spotted her during one of his reconnaissance visits.”
    “So what you’re telling me is that Mr. Flak Jacket Von Stroheim got this Victoria Wagner to act in his silly movie, along with the boys and girls of the Maryland Institute of Art. Is that the chase you’re refusing to cut to?”
    “You really don’t like my foreplay, do you?”
    “I thought I did. I’m reconsidering.”
    “You’re the one who started me down memory lane.”
    “Please. Hit the gas, lady.”
    “Okay, okay. Yes. Haden put her in his silly movie. Not only that, he starred her in his silly movie. He became fixated on her. He fashioned the whole damn thing around ‘his discovery.’ I remember he actually used those words. Hitch, I’m telling you, it was amateur hour. Victoria Wagner basically became Terry Haden’s muse. Actually, she became more than that. They became lovers. They moved in together.”
    “It just gets uglier and uglier, doesn’t it.”
    “Actually, it does. But here’s the perverse thing, though. Haden was right. I mean, he didn’t just shove her in front of the camera so that he could sleep with her. She really
was
the real deal. In a sense anyway. She certainly left those MIA beatniks in the dust. With that cheap blond hair and that body, she did have a sort of trashy Marilyn Monroe thing going on. The camera drank her up. It loved her. Haden even paid her, for Christ’s sake. That tells you something right there. This wasn’t just another silly art student anxious to hop into a project. This was a paid model. A working girl.”
    “But you said Victoria Wagner was, and I quote, a porn star. All you’re really telling me is that this huckster shot her in a naughty movie. One step up from a student film, from the sound of it.”
    “You’re right. And Haden didn’t even finish it. He closed up shop halfway through. He knew he had a silly pretentious flop on his hands. A bunch of so-so paintings and a bunch of sub–so-so actors. But he had his big discovery. His star. Those two were as thick as thieves, Hitch. Right from the start. You could see it. She wasn’t being exploited. It was the March of the Opportunists. You know those cartoons where the big, bad wolf looks at the little pigs and all he sees is a full course ham dinner on a plate? Well, that’s how those two looked at each other, as far as I could tell. They were each other’s meal ticket.”
    Julia prattled on a while more, recounting how, after Haden pulled the plug on his pretentious art house masterpiece, he opened shop as a maker of cheesy skin flicks. It was a real life case of
Porn Is Born
with Victoria Waggoner standing in for Esther Blodgett. As I listened to her though, I refused to believe that Haden’s Vickie and “my” Vickie were one and the same. It just wasn’t adding up. Granted, people who make their living in the sex trade don’t exactly walk around during daylight hours wearing a sandwich board advertising the fact … but still. I simply couldn’t match the woman who had sat in my office earlier that same day crying her eyes out with the platinum-blond fleshpot thespian that Julia