Pillow Stalk (A Mad for Mod Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the grape jelly!”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Madison, you’re lucky you don’t have kids. I gotta go.”
    I spun the old Rolodex to the S’s and found the number for Susan from American Film Rentals, or AFFER, as we’d come to call them. I’d met Susan exactly once, three weeks after moving from Philadelphia to Dallas. She’d flown from Los Angeles to help host a Rat Pack themed weekend. She was the quintessential party girl, out until two every night, stretching the limits of my lifestyle. Thanks to AFFER’s ongoing long distance relationship with the Mummy, we’d stayed friends ever since.
    AFFER was one of two major rental companies that we worked with to secure the best copies of films to show in our theater. There existed a unique crowd of people interested in seeing old classics on the big screen, people willing to trade the comfort of their living room sofas and the convenience of the pause button for the movie going experience. That was the audience we catered to. Local film buffs made our reopening a possibility and they wouldn’t appreciate if we simply hooked a projector up to a DVD player. They wanted the reel thing, honest-to-goodness 35mm film that spun on metal reels, scratches and all. I fired off an email to Susan.

    Dear Susan,
    I’m trying to sell Richard on a Doris Day film festival for July. Tight schedule! I’m curious what films AFFER has available? Initial idea is for six different features to show over three nights as double features. Obvoiusly would prefer to rent all movies from one house. Richard’s not a fan, so let me know what’s in your inventory and we’ll go from there.
    I ran a spell check, fixed “obviously”, and sent the note.
    The phone rang but I let it go to the recording. Most of the mid-day calls were for show times and addresses. Only in my early days did I make the mistake of answering, and that time I’d ended up defending John Hughes’ movies for close to an hour. A bell sounded from the computer and an instant chat window appeared. It was Susan from AFFER. “Answer your phone!”
    I picked up the jangling receiver. “Susan?”  
    “I thought Richard wanted you guys to answer the phone with ‘Dig Movies at the Mummy’?” said her bubbly voice. “He’s not there, right? He can’t be there. He’d never allow you to answer like that.”
    “Why the call? Did something happen?”
    “I got your email. Are you really talking Doris Day?” she said. Even the crackling of the old phone line couldn’t hide her obvious enthusiasm. I couldn’t keep up with her, not now, not today. My world was still in slow motion, my interest in mounting a Doris Day film festival unfairly unimportant regardless of how much I wanted to sink my teeth into it. I looked at the computer screen at a movie poster of Pillow Talk and concentrated on the simplicity of what it promised.
    “Yes, I’m talking Doris Day. Are you talking Doris Day? You sound a little too excited to be on the same page as me.”
    “No way. I’ve been waiting for the right person to pitch this idea to for years!”
    “I didn’t know you were such a fan,” I said.
    “I’m not. But I’ve been sitting on some Doris Day dirt, and if you’re willing to use it, your film festival will turn into one hell of a seat filler.”

FIVE

    “You’ve got dirt on Doris Day?” I asked, immediately sucked into the moment.
    “Here comes the manager.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’ll call you later.”
    If there was dirt, and I mean good dirt on Doris Day, I would have known about it. Even though we were literally Night and Day, from the moment I’d discovered that we shared a birthday, I felt a connection to the actress.
    I called up Google and typed “ dirt on Doris Day .” Nothing. I tried other phrases, ones that felt wrong to type, but found no scoop. The woman, at least on the Internet, was still as squeaky clean as she’d been her whole career. It only piqued my interest more.
    I was