Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

After the show, Billy had no time to talk to us. A photographer from Motorcycle Mania magazine had posed him on the Billycycle, the name on the back of the bike. Oh, that Yvette! She must have been really busy buying glittery gold decals for bikes and ears, and setting up photo opportunities, and nudging out Sally Sue and me for Billy’s affections. All those activities must have seriously cut into her flouncing time.

As soon as we got back to my place, I kicked off my shoes and curled up in Billy’s old recliner. Somehow I knew that chair was as close as I’d get to Billy from then on, but I was too tired to care. Before long I fell asleep and had an insightful dream. In it, Sally Sue and I were standing next to a table in a laboratory. When lightning flashed through the windows, I saw a man asleep on the table. Sally Sue and I put on white coats and then attached jumper cables to his temples. We pulled some switches and electricity zigzagged through the man. The shocks woke him up and he ripped off the straps that bound him to the table. “Hi, hons,” he said before he started destroying the room.

Startled, I woke up and called out to Sally Sue, who had come home with me, supposedly to make more sundaes. Actually, she had come to my place for another reason which I soon found out.

“Sally Sue, I need to talk to you,” I yelled again.

“Be right there. I’m on the phone.”

The sound of Sally Sue talking in her normal voice helped me shake off the scariness of the dream. When she came into the living room, I knew what I had to tell her.

“Sally Sue, I’ve had a dream and it explains everything. Brace yourself: my dream tells me that we’ve created Billystein, a monster.”

“I know.” She grinned. “That’s what. I just told Bruno and he agreed that Billy is our Frankenstein.”

“Bruno?”

“Yes, Bruno from the Bronx. I just spoke to him. I lost his business card and came here to use the one he sent you. Bruno’s going to carry out the plan I thought of, but we have to do our part.”

“Do our part?” I croaked.

“Yes, and on the Zazu Show. It will be a talk-show first.”

This couldn’t be happening. I was locked in the dream laboratory. To prove it, I yanked at my hair. It hurt. I was awake and that person in front of me, talking with all the assurance of a TV therapist, was my former archrival, Sally Sue. When she told me the plan, I said I wanted nothing to do with it, but the package Billy had delivered to my door changed my mind.

The note in the box read: “Hons, don’t forget the training program. Sally Sue, take a bite out of the Big Apple by practicing your speech lessons on the Manhattan phone book. Ruth Anne, here’s some New York City inorganically grown parsley for you to sprinkle on your prunes. Don’t bother calling to thank me, I’m tied up with my agent. Love, Billy.”

After receiving Billy’s package, the only time I wavered about carrying out the plan was when we entered the green room for the Zazu Show. She was a non-bottom pinching, environmentally correct grandmother who had stocked the green room with refreshments (in recyclable containers, of course) for us. Such thoughtfulness made me want to ditch the plan until Billy flounced into the green room. Yes, flounced. The jacket of his burlap coat swished at the exact moment that his cowlick bobbed and his reusable-container shoes squeaked. I’d call that a three-ring flounce.

“Hons,” he began.

“Our names are not hons,” Sally Sue and I retorted.

“Oh, okay. Well, Sally Sue and Ruth Anne, just don’t use too much airtime bowling over me.”

“Bowling?” I asked.

“Yep. They’re setting up a miniature bowling lane on the set so you girls—”

“Women,” corrected Sally Sue.

“So you girls can do it all over again like the night Sally Sue won me at Bowla-Bowla. But hurry it up. Yvette figures a minute and a half ought to do it. That will give me the camera time I need now that I’m a celebrity.”

Executing a reverse flounce, he left the room. Oh, that Billy! As the romance novels like to say, he had just sealed his fate.

After Zazu introduced us, Sally Sue nudged me and pointed to the audience. Although we knew him only from a blurry photo he had sent, I recognized at once the person Sally Sue had singled out. In the spirit of Sally Sue’s plan, Bruno from the Bronx had dressed in a military-looking khaki outfit set off by a jaunty brown beret. He looked like a young Saddam Hussein. I squirmed. There was still time to call off the plan. I could fake a faint, perhaps another talk-show first, but Sally Sue, sensing my distress, whispered, “Courage.”

Veering from the standard talk-show format, Zazu let the TV therapist, Dr. Sharon Thorney, open the show because, Zazu said, “The whole world knows about Billy, Sally Sue, and Ruth Anne now. So what’s your opinion, Doctor?”