We’ll Always Have Parrots (15 page)

In between trips to the bathroom to reheat Michael’s compress, I went through all twelve comics, page by page, comparing each frame with the shot in my camera. It took most of the hour. I could probably have done it in half the time, even with the compresses, if not for the plastic gloves I was wearing.

“What’s with the gloves, anyway?” Michael asked.

“They’re supposed to protect the paper from the oils on my skin,” I said. “I suppose it makes sense; the paper’s pretty brittle and yellow already.”

“I didn’t realize you collected comics.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I borrowed them from Cordelia. She provided the gloves. And even though she isn’t here to see, I have this sneaking feeling she’d find out if I don’t follow orders. She probably has an inventory of every nick and tear on every page, and I’ll never hear the end of it if I make any more.”

Of course, after a while, I did get used to the gloves, but by that time, I had gotten caught up in the story.

“Caught up in Porfiria?” Michael echoed, when I told him as much. “Maybe you need the compress.”

“No, seriously,” I said. “It’s not that they’re necessarily better than the TV show, but they’re certainly different.”

“From a different era,” Michael suggested.

“That’s partly it,” I said. “Definitely pre-PC. In the TV show, Porfiria’s a very modern woman. Undisputed ruler of her country. Courtiers and counselors leap to do her bidding. Whenever things look darkest for Amblyopia, Porfiria frowns, looks thoughtful, and then comes up with a plan that saves the day.”

“Or at least knows exactly who to send for to save the day,” Michael said. “‘My lord wizard, I have need of your subtle and devious mind.’”

“Don’t gloat. Yes, on TV she usually calls Mephisto, but he doesn’t exist in the comics. The way Dilley wrote it, Porfiria was ruler in name only—her regents were supposed to run things until they found her a suitable husband; and since whoever married her would, under Amblyopian law, become king, the regents were in no hurry to arrange the wedding.”

“Is that our problem?” Michael asked. “Evil regents?”

“I don’t know about evil,” I said. “Porfiria seems to enjoy her unmarried state. She spends most of her time lolling around scantily dressed, eating bonbons, taking endless bubble baths, and ogling whatever handsome young men wander into the frame.”

“Sounds like the QB,” Michael said.

“And in each issue, whenever things look grimmest, Porfiria arrives on the scene, bats her eyelashes, and uses her apparently irresistible charms to save the day—usually by seducing one or more of Amblyopia’s direst foes.”

“So there’s something to the Kansas relatives’ accusation of pornography, after all,” Michael said, with a muffled chuckle. “I should have read those comics ages ago.”

“I wouldn’t bother taking off the washcloth,” I said. “The relatives overreacted. Everything happens offstage. Porfiria invites the Pellagran ambassador or the heir to the throne of Niacin into her private garden for a conference, and the next few panels show her courtiers standing outside, watching garments sailing over the garden wall, hearing titters and bits of mildly risqué dialogue. But only mildly risqué; not pornographic or raunchy.”

“That’s odd,” Michael said. “Doesn’t fit my image of underground comics.”

“Mine either.”

“I mean, with the TV show, we’ve got the network standards and practices office to keep us from going too far,” Michael said. “Much to Nate’s dismay; he has a positive genius for writing accidental double entendres.”

“Fine by me,” I said. I might be in the minority, but I was just as happy that the QB’s vision for the show hadn’t included graphic love scenes. I could do without seeing Michael in bed with any of the show’s parade of twenty-something starlets.

“But Dilley didn’t have any censors watching over his shoulder, unless the early seventies were a great deal less free-wheeling than people made them sound,” Michael said.

“And yet there’s nothing here that would upset the network,” I said. “You see worse on sitcoms every day. I wonder why.”

“Good taste?”

“Or maybe just a lack of firsthand material to work from,” I said.

I flipped back a few pages.

“Yeah,” I said, “My money’s on inexperience. There’s a certain adolescent quality to the drawings. The content, not the style. Exuberance and bashfulness in equal measure. A desire to shock the audience, but underneath, the lingering fear that the audience might not be shocked after all—might only laugh.”

“That’s surprising,” Michael said.

“Why? After all, his nephew said he was only about twenty when he died. He might not have had all that much sexual experience.”

“You’d think he’d have learned a few things, hanging around Haight Ashbury in the Summer of Love,” Michael said.

“You can’t prove it from the Porfiria comics. Maybe he was a late bloomer.”

Michael abandoned his compress long enough to look over my shoulder and agree that, yes, the comics were singularly innocent, all things considered.

“I wonder why,” he mused, disappearing again under the washcloth. “I think it’s more apt to be lack of nerve, not lack of experience.”

No way to tell, really, I thought. Not my generation or my gender. I just filed away my gut impression that the Ichabod Dilley who’d drawn these pictures hadn’t left Kansas very far behind.

“A penny for them,” Michael said, and I realized I must have fallen silent for rather a long time.

“Just wondering what Dilley might have done if he’d lived longer,” I said. “The kid had talent; you can see that in every drawing, and he was getting better all the time. If the issues weren’t numbered, I bet I could have figured out the order by seeing how his skill increased. Talent. And training. By the eleventh or twelfth issue, you’d need a few hundred words of description to say what he can show in one panel, in the arch of a courtier’s eyebrow, or the way Porfiria casts a come-hither look over her shoulder. Most artists don’t get that good without years of practice, including a lot of life-drawing classes. And this was only his progress over a year. Imagine what he could have done if he’d lived to keep getting better.”

“And this relates to the murder…how?” Michael asked.

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s fascinating, but it’s not getting me anywhere. I was hoping it might prove useful if I could figure out which issue the drawing had come from.”

“And search everyone’s rooms for a torn comic book?”

“No, it’s too much to hope that the murderer would still be carrying it around. But I thought if the issue was important enough for the murderer to take it to that final, fatal confrontation, maybe the theme of the issue would give me a clue to the murderer.”

“Which it hasn’t, I gather.”

“No, my scrap isn’t from any of the twelve published issues. Maybe Cordelia isn’t pulling my leg, and there really was a lost thirteenth issue.”

“Is there supposed to be?”

I shrugged, and then realized he couldn’t see me.

“Who knows?” I said aloud. “Maybe it’s just the kind of rumor that always swirls around an artist who dies young.”

“You could show the scrap to Cordelia,” he suggested. “If she’s an expert in Dilley…”

“I’m not sure I’d want to, even if I hadn’t promised Foley to keep quiet about it,” I said. “She’d probably laugh at me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What if I’m being fooled by an obvious imitation?”

“Do you think it’s an imitation?”

“No, but I can’t prove it. Maybe I’ll show her when Foley lifts the embargo. Oh, have you got a moment?”

“For you, any number of moments,” he said, pulling off the washcloth. “Though if you were planning to ravish me while I’m in a weakened condition, I should point out that your timing stinks; I’m due back in the ballroom in ten minutes.”

“I’ll try to plan better next time. For now, just sign this photo, will you? Here’s the inscription they want.”

“We’ll always have West Covina,” Michael read aloud. “West Covina? Where is that? I assume it’s a where; it sounds like a where.”

“I have no idea where it is, but if I hadn’t bribed Cordelia with the promise of a personalized photo for one of her best customers, who lives there, she would never have let me borrow the comics.”

“Shameless, the way you exploit me,” Michael said. “I will exact compensation after dinner.”

While Michael signed, I slipped the last comic back in its acid-free archival-quality plastic cover, pulled off the gloves, and breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t mangled any of them. And then I headed back to the dealers’ room while Michael freshened up for his coming panel.

“So?” Cordelia asked, when I returned the comics. “Did you find anything?”

“I won’t know until I check a few other things,” I said. “Do you know anything about Dilley’s life?”

“I know everything there is to know,” she said. “Not that there’s that much of it. He was only twenty-one when he died, you know.”

“How did he die?” I asked.

“Mysteriously,” she said.

“I was talking the method, not the mood,” I said. “I heard it was drugs.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t straightforward. There were rumors that it wasn’t an accident.”

“Suicide?”

“Or murder. Rumor had it that he owed money to some pretty shady people who finally got tired of waiting for him to pay back. I talked to the private eye his family hired to go down to Mexico and find out what really happened. He never did figure out exactly what was up, but the way the Mexican cops acted, you knew someone had paid them off to cover up something.”

“They actually hired a private eye?” I said. “I thought from what his nephew said that they’d disowned him.”

“Only after they read the PI’s report,” she said, with a laugh. “He was this straight-arrow kid from this small Kansas town—president of his class, captain of the debating club, drama society, varsity athlete—the whole shebang. He goes out to Stanford on a scholarship and disappears into the counterculture by Thanksgiving. And they come out to rescue him from whatever they thought was the problem—a cult or a gold digger or something, and he tells them to get lost, ’cause he’s not from Kansas any more. They keep calling, writing, and eventually he starts mailing them rude cartoons making fun of them, their town—everything. And then they hire this PI to go and try to talk to him, and apparently the kid freaked, ran off to Mexico, and by the time the PI got a line on him, Dilley was dead and buried. Drug overdose, according to the autopsy, but no one ever believed it was accidental. Maybe the people he owed caught up with him, or maybe he figured doing himself in would be less painful than whatever they had in mind. The PI never figured out which.”

“Dramatic,” I said.

“So you can imagine how dramatic it would be if you really did find the last comic he’d been working on,” Cordelia said.

I wanted to say that I thought the artist’s death was a lot more dramatic than any comic could ever be, but I just nodded and took my leave.

I was relieved to find I’d accidentally told Foley the truth when I’d called the circumstances of Dilley’s death mysterious. Or had I said suspicious? Same difference; either way, if he checked, he’d find I was right.

On the way back to the booth, I stopped by a vendor who sold fan fic and spent way more money than seemed reasonable to buy two dozen spurious Porfiria comic books by various authors and artists. Steele went off for a lunch break, and I whiled away twenty minutes or so looking through the comics. The vendor assured me these were the best ones he had, and yet, like the fan fic stories, most of them were pretty amateur. Even the most professional didn’t have Dilley’s genius.

More weight to the theory that the scrap the QB had been clutching came from an authentic lost comic.

So Dilley’s death was mysterious, and the scrap might be an authentic piece of his work. Where did I go from here?

“I need a time machine,” I muttered.

“What’s wrong, Meg?” I heard Dad say. “Investigation not going well?”

“Not going at all,” I said, glancing up to see Dad standing in front of the booth with a green parrot perched on his shoulder. “I’m leaving it to the cops. Are you helping round up the parrots?”

“Round them up?” Dad said. “Why? They’re perfectly happy where they are.”

Meaning that Dad was perfectly happy to have them around.

“How do you know?” I said aloud.

“Oh, you could tell right away,” he said. “They’d exhibit signs of stress. Screaming and biting, and plucking out all their feathers. No, you can tell these parrots are perfectly happy.”

Especially the one cooing amorously in his ear.

“Here, read some of these,” he said. He began rummaging in his tote bag and extracting books with brightly colored parrots on the cover, and titles like
A Guide to Parrot Behavior
and
Living with Your African Grey
.

“Thanks, but I’m pretty busy,” I said.

“Oh, right, with your investigation,” Dad said, nodding as he retrieved his books. “I have something that may help with that.”

He pulled Michael’s tape recorder out of his pocket, held it up dramatically for a moment while looking around for eavesdroppers, and then pushed the
PLAY
button.

I heard the tape hiss for a few, long seconds, and then voices.

“—like this, then?” Dad’s voice asked.

“Yes, that’s it,” Michael’s voice replied. “Both buttons at the same time.”

“Got it,” the canned Dad said.

“Damn,” said the live Dad. “I seem to have rewound it all the way. Oh, well; it’s on here somewhere. And who knows, there may be other clues earlier in the tape that your greater knowledge of the case will let you recognize.”

He fumbled with the tape recorder’s
VOLUME
knob, somewhat hampered by the parrot’s insistence on running its beak through what remained of his hair. He then proceeded to play twenty minutes of recorded parrot vocalizations.

If he’d made the tape as a testimonial for parrots’ uncanny powers of mimicry, I’d have applauded his efforts. I heard parrots dinging like elevators, whooshing like vacuum cleaners, ringing like telephones, grinding like blenders, tinkling bits of classical music in the tinny tones used by cell phones, and, of course, flushing like toilets.

Unless, of course, Dad had taped real elevators, vacuum cleaners, blenders, and so on, to pull my leg. Always a possibility with Dad.

The parrots mimicked human voices brilliantly, though they were remarkably undiscriminating in what they chose to imitate. I heard a few phrases from our friend the Monty Python parrot. A lot of commercials, mostly the loud, repetitive, annoying kind I hated most. I was rather pleased to see that they appealed, quite literally, to bird brains. Dad had even caught a performance from two parrots that had learned the Porfiria theme song, although unfortunately, instead of singing it in unison, they interrupted each other and tried to drown each other out.

If I hadn’t felt impatient to do something useful, I might have enjoyed the performance. Although I did enjoy the look on Alaric Steele’s face when he returned to the booth to find us solemnly listening to a parrot sing a pizza commercial.

“Here it comes,” Dad whispered shortly afterward.

“You’ve double-crossed me for the last time,” came Maggie’s voice, sounding ragged with emotion. “Prepare to die, you—whoops!”

Dad stopped the tape recorder after that and looked at me.

“Prepare to die, you—whoops?” I repeated.

“Suspicious, isn’t it?” Dad said,

“The prepare to die part, yes,” I said. “But whoops? Not that I have a lot of personal experience with the matter, but I really don’t think many people say ‘whoops’ after coshing someone on the head with a blunt instrument.”

“Could be evidence that it was an accident,” Dad said. “If they were quarrelling and Miss Wynncliffe-Jones slipped and fell, for example. And hit her head on the wine bottle.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Still seems odd.”

“You can hang onto it and study it for a while if you like,” Dad said.

“Taking a break from sleuthing?”

“Not really,” he said. “I may have found someone who has an in with the medical examiner, and then I’m supposed to get together with your friend the scriptwriter. So I’ll be pretty tied up all afternoon—why don’t you keep the tape recorder for now?”

“Thanks,” I said, as he turned to leave.

Perhaps my voice betrayed my lack of enthusiasm for his ornithological investigations. Or perhaps I just sounded tired and discouraged.

“Is there anything else you need?” he asked, pausing and turning back to give me a look that was part doctor and part worried Dad.

“I need a time machine,” I said, this time aloud. The parrot tape had distracted me briefly from my frustration at how little I knew. I couldn’t go back thirty years and find out the real story about Ichabod Dilley’s death. I couldn’t even go back thirty hours and try to get the QB to tell me what she knew. I’d studied the original Porfiria comics, picked Cordelia’s brain—I wanted another window to the past.

“Well, there are probably a few time machines around here,” Dad said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know where. You probably have a better idea than I do. Good luck!”

And with that he dashed off.

“Is he pulling your leg, or did he just not hear what you said?” Steele asked.

“With Dad, who knows?” I said.

Actually, I did, but I didn’t really want to go into a long explanation. Dad always referred to Great-Aunt Zelda, who was now over a hundred, as the family time machine. Despite her age, she was as sharp-tongued and clear-witted as ever. And if you wanted to settle some question about the past, Great-Aunt Zelda was usually as reliable as any reference book, and a whole lot easier to consult.

So all I had to do was find someone who had been around Ichabod Dilley or the QB back in 1972. Or failing that, at least someone who had been around the QB enough that he might have heard her talk about old times.

Why couldn’t she have had a faithful retainer? If we were living in one of Nate’s scripts, she would certainly have had one—perhaps a chain-smoking dragon lady who had looked after her wardrobe since they were both ingénues, and was the only person who dared to argue with her. And who, after initially seeming cynically unaffected by her employer’s death, would eventually break down in tears and reveal the critical clue—whatever that was.

But she hadn’t had a faithful retainer. She’d had Typhani. Latest, I suspected, of a long line of Typhanis. And maybe a few Geniphers.

There was always Nate. Not my idea of a faithful retainer, but at least, according to the costumer, he’d known the QB since they were much younger.

Of course, much younger didn’t necessarily mean thirty years. But still—he’d been closer to her than anyone else I could think of.

And, I thought, glancing at the clock, he just might be in the green room, recuperating from his latest panel.

“I need to talk to Nate,” I said, and barely waited for Steele’s nod of acknowledgement before I raced away.

Nate was, indeed, on break, though I finally located him in the bar at the back of the supposedly closed restaurant. Not that he couldn’t have drunk his cup of coffee in the green room. He probably wanted to be left alone. Ah, well.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I know the convention is important for fan relations,” he said, “but my heart’s just not in it right now.”

Okay, maybe I was wrong about no one mourning for the QB. I nodded and tried to look sympathetic.

“I really need to be on the phone, trying to get a sense of what’s happening back in California. Or back in my room, trying to come up with a coherent plan to save the show. What a disaster! And after everything we went through to make this thing a success.”

We. Okay, it wasn’t exactly deep mourning, but perhaps I’d finally found the one person at the convention who sincerely wished the QB alive again.

“You’d known each other a long time, hadn’t you?” I asked.

He nodded.

“More than thirty years,” he said.