Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [115]
I could picture Hugh Akron, all right. He would ace these geezers, a pro amongst the clueless. Ray Brennan? He’d do just fine, sidewinding through the innocent façade. And Arlene Harounian thought she could handle anything.
If I had my credentials, I could have worked the situation in fifteen minutes. As it was, all I could do was saunter around smiling and engaging folks in casual conversation, asking if they’d seen the man in the photo, using the ruse that Ray Brennan owed me some prints, occasionally taking a picture with my Ricoh to look authentic, but I was the only woman with a camera and kept getting apprehensive looks from the moms. I was not liking civilian status one bit.
“Photo day is a handy place to test out your technique,” a retired engineer named George told me.
“Great to test your equipment,” added his friend, who had an automatic camera with no settings.
“Do the models and photographers get to know each other?” I asked dully.
“Oh no, not at all,” insisted George. “This is a very safe place. There’s no direct contact. We only go by first names. We e-mail their pictures to them, but usually to a friend’s computer. You have to be careful.”
“In this day and age,” intoned his pal.
They were gray in the face with thin sloping shoulders, wearing closely related plaid shirts.
“I’m looking for Ray,” showing the picture once again. “Met him out in Riverside,” another location on the circuit. “Ray Brennan? Or he could be using another name.”
Like everybody else, they shook their heads. By now there were maybe fifty hobbyists and half as many models clustered in little groups near flowering trees and stone shrines. It was becoming sultry and humid in the tea garden. Maybe that is why the photographers were moving so languorously. Or perhaps they were all about to drop dead.
No, wait, there was some excitement by the pond, where a narrow girl in a red cowboy hat, short denim jacket and low-riding jeans was placing one red high heel on the lower rung of a bridge, causing a reaction amongst the photographers like goldfish to crumbs.
“Smile, honey! Pose!” shouted a strained woman’s voice.
“Are you the mom?”
Of course she was the mom, who else would have laid out a blanket piled with head shots?
She looked not much older than her daughter, ruddy face, wide at the hips, an infant over one shoulder, a toddler wearing a butterfly costume prancing along the path.
Like they said: family.
“I’m Sonoma’s mother,” she said self-importantly. “Sonoma has her own website.”
She gave me a card. Her nails were long and white and sparkled. The only sparkly thing about her.
“I tell my girls, use your looks while you have them. You won’t have them forever.”
The butterfly had scrambled onto a rock, hands clasped to her chin, flashing a demented smile at a guy with a mustache and a tripod.
“You don’t mean the little one,” I couldn’t help saying. “Losing your looks at three?”
“Oh no,” said the mother, “Sonoma and Bridget. That’s what I say to them.”
She pointed with the toe of her running shoe at the glossies on the blanket. Sonoma was blonde. Bridget had long dark hair, like Juliana’s. There were dozens of shots of them in halters and short skirts. It made you appreciate actual models.
“Bridget is Sonoma’s sister?”
“Eighteen months apart. I have to be careful they don’t get competitive. They like to dress the same, but I tell them, you should each develop your own look.”
“The cowgirl look.”
“They do it different every time. They love it,” she assured me. “We all the time go on a shopping spree before we come to one of these.”
It turned out they lived in the desert, three hours away. The drive was no problem. This was, according to her, how the actress Heather Locklear got started.
“Last week Bridget earned a hundred fifty dollars.”
“Really?”
“Through an agency on the Internet. They get paid twenty-five dollars an hour, two hours minimum. I make sure I’m always at the photo shoot,” she said firmly. “And it has to be nonglamour,