We’ll Always Have Parrots (16 page)

Yes! I thought, but I tried to stay calm and think of just the right thing to ask. If I wanted to be subtle, it was too soon to ask whether he’d been in love with her, or whether he knew anything about her buying the rights to Porfiria so soon before Ichabod Dilley’s untimely and downright suspicious death.

“What was she like?” I asked instead.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s anyone like when they’re young? Ambitious, impatient. Beautiful, of course. You have to be, to get anywhere in this business. And tough. I mean, I know a lot of people call her a bitch and a dragon, but that’s because they don’t understand what she had to go through to get where she is. You have to be tough.”

“And talented,” I suggested.

“Yeah, well,” he said, shrugging. “That’s not as important as you think. Not that she was untalented. But it’s not as if she ever pretended to be a great tragic actress or anything. Still, she could really have gone someplace, been much bigger if she’d only had the breaks.”

Just then we heard Maggie’s laugh, somewhere nearby. Nate smiled, involuntarily—the way most people seemed to when they heard her. Then he looked down at the table and sighed.

“Actually Maggie was the one who really should have gone someplace,” he said.

“Why didn’t she?” I asked.

“Who knows, with Hollywood?” he said. “She was good enough, and gorgeous enough, but maybe she didn’t want it enough. Or wasn’t mean enough. All I know is, I lost track of her for…I don’t know. Fifteen years? Maybe twenty. Then I got an invitation to this fund-raiser she was running, and I went, just for old time’s sake. And when I saw her, I thought, my God. She still had it. I thought it would be a great PR stunt, signing her for the show: old friends getting together to bring to life the long-neglected work of their dead buddy.”

“Oh, they were friends of Ichabod Dilley? Maggie and the QB?”

“They all worked on the same movie,” Nate said, shrugging. “I don’t know about friends, but they probably met, one time or another. And if they didn’t, what did it matter. It was just a PR stunt. Stupid idea.”

“Only problem is that word ‘long,’” I said. “As in ‘long in the tooth.’”

“Yeah, stupid me for not realizing that,” Nate said. “I was surprised when she hired Maggie anyway. And then, first week on the set, I realized why. Gave her the perfect excuse to make life miserable for someone she never liked. I was surprised Maggie stuck it out as long as she did.”

“Stuck it out? I thought the QB fired Maggie.”

“Yeah, she did, finally,” Nate said. “Soon as she figured out how much the fans loved Maggie. Or maybe realized how much better Maggie looked on camera. You ask me, Maggie was probably relieved that the battle was over, and she could go home to her animals again.”

“Her animals?” I said, feigning ignorance.

“Yeah, she runs this animal sanctuary up in the foothills outside L.A.,” Nate said. “That’s what she ended up doing when her career slowed down. Or maybe it was part of the reason it slowed down, that she started spending all this time rescuing abused animals. Not dog-and cat-type animals. Big animals. Orphaned lion cubs, neglected iguanas, abandoned boa constrictors.”

“Do you think Maggie running a sanctuary had anything to do with the QB trying to buy a tiger?”

Nate shuddered.

“God, if I’d known she was serious about that!” he exclaimed. “Yeah, probably. She doesn’t even like having to bother with a dog. I don’t know what she’d have done with a tiger. But she’s competitive. Maggie has tigers, she wants tigers.”

He kept talking about her in present tense. Was that significant? Perhaps it meant that he hadn’t really accepted her death. Didn’t really believe it possible, and therefore couldn’t possibly be her murderer.

Or maybe that was just what Nate wanted me to think.

“What did Maggie think about the idea of the QB owning a tiger?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We never talked about it. Maybe she wouldn’t—hell, that’s a lie. We both know what Maggie would have thought about it, if she’d known. She’d have thought it was a crime, giving the QB custody of a helpless animal. Or even a not-so-helpless animal. She gave the convention organizers what for about the monkeys. And the parrots. Says it’s cruel treatment, bringing them here.”

We both glanced upward, involuntarily. Half a dozen monkeys lurked near the ceiling, intently watching the bar’s human occupants. The staff had put the peanuts, pretzels, and other bar chum in jars with supposedly childproof safety lids, but the monkeys hadn’t given up yet. The several illicit customers scattered throughout the room kept one hand over their plates while eating with the other. Several parrots perched near the widescreen TV, intently watching a baseball game and learning to sing the beer commercials.

“You ask me, the monkeys and parrots are having as much fun as anyone,” I said.

“More than me, anyway,” Nate said. “I just wish I knew whether I still had a job.”

“When will you know?” I asked.

“No idea,” Nate said. “After all, I’m only the writer.”

I shook my head sympathetically, and then, as I’d expected, he shared what he’d found out.

“It’s probably a good thing we’ve got the third season in the can,” he said. “If we were in the middle of the season, with the meter running, they’d just shut us down for good. But this way, we’ll have time to come up with a solution to the problem.”

“Cast another actress,” I suggested. “Soap operas do it all the time. There’s no shortage of unemployed fifty-something actresses.”

“Yes,” he said. “But some fans always have trouble accepting the change. On the other hand, you can’t just kill her off—she’s the title character.”

“What would you do if she went out temporarily?” I asked. “You coped when Walker broke his foot.”

“We had Mephisto capture him and chain him to a dungeon wall,” Nate said. “For a couple of weeks, we just showed him lolling around in a loincloth with his cast hidden in some straw. The fans loved it. But who would have a reason to kidnap Porfiria?”

“Just have her kidnapped,” I said, shrugging. “Figure out who did it later.”

“Ooh! Yes!” Nate exclaimed. “And everyone accuses everyone else of being responsible. A power struggle over who runs Amblyopia in her absence.”

He reached into his inside jacket pocket, pulled out a pen and a mini legal pad, and began scribbling words, and making little drawings to illustrate the action—though I don’t know why he bothered with the drawings. All he ever drew were stick figures, with or without indistinguishable objects stuck to the ends of their arms, so they all looked as if they were either shouting for help or brandishing dumbbells at each other. But it seemed to help him think.

“And then halfway through the season, we introduce a whole new group of villains!” he said, drawing another cluster of stick figures with such a heavy hand that he actually tore the paper, and then nodded as if in satisfaction at this concrete evidence of his new villains’ dastardly nature.

“See, I knew you could do it,” I said.

“We needed a new big nasty,” he said. “Not monsters, this time; you have no idea what the prosthetics do to the budget. Something easy. Knights. All you need is tin foil. Knights with magic. Where’s your father?”

“Dad? Why?”

I didn’t think Dad’s parrot project would increase Nate’s confidence in his new technical advisor.

“I need a name for the knights. The Something Knights. Something with an M, I think. I should go and find him,”

“Mastoid Knights?” I suggested.

“Sounds obscene,” Nate said, shaking his head. “What is a mastoid, anyway?”

“A bone,” I said, reaching behind my ear to tap the bone in question.

“Still sounds obscene,” Nate said.

“Metatarsal Knights?”

“Yes!” Nate said. “And in the big, two-part season finale, they all invade the Dungeons of the Metatarsal Knights!”

Just then Maggie sailed into the bar and beckoned to me to join her, so I left Nate covering sheet after sheet of his legal pad with illegible scribbles, muttering to himself as he did so.

We took a table at the back and to my surprise, the bartender appeared to take our order.

“Aren’t you worried about the health department?” I asked.

“Guy hasn’t been seen for hours,” the bartender said, with a shrug. “We’re thinking maybe he’s knocked off for the weekend.”

“He probably saw how mutinous the fans were and decided it was safer,” Maggie said.

I fingered the mini tape recorder in my pocket. What would Maggie say if I played the tape and asked when she’d said the fateful words, “Prepare to die, you—whoops!” The appropriately subtle, nonchalant way to introduce the topic into conversation hadn’t yet appeared.

“He looks like a kid with a new toy,” Maggie said, indicating Nate.

“Working on some ideas to keep the show going without Porfiria,” I said.

“God, wouldn’t she hate that?” Maggie said. But instead of laughing, she shook her head. “Weird, isn’t it? She fought tooth and nail for that silly show, first to get it on the air, and then to make it a success. And not twenty-four hours after her death they’re having to write her out of the picture. It’s almost sad.”

I kept quiet, hoping she’d go on. She looked at me quizzically.

“Is that a stupid thing to say?” she asked. “That I feel sorry for someone that I hated?”

“Not really,” I said. “Seems only natural after so much time. How long were you—did you know her?”

Maggie laughed.

“I’ve known her for thirty-two years,” she said. “But that’s not what you started out to ask, is it? You were about to ask how long we’d been friends.”

I nodded.

“About the first ten minutes,” she said, with another of her amazing laughs. And while I was congratulating myself at how well my time machine project was working, she sat back, held her glass in both hands, and stared down at it, shaking the ice a little now and then.

“We met on the set of this ghastly movie we both had bit parts in,” Maggie said, smiling off into space. “Total crap. Blind girl runs away from the Midwest to San Francisco and falls in love with this psychedelic poster artist—who finally becomes a sculptor so she can understand his art. There was a subplot, something about her getting kidnapped by a biker gang, that I never quite understood. Then again, neither did the director, but he loved all the leather and chrome. Hollywood does Haight Ashbury.”

“Trying too hard to be with it?” I suggested.

“Exactly,” she said. “And failing, miserably. If they’d asked any of the cast, we’d have told them it was horribly dated. By 1971 the whole Summer of Love thing was deader than vaudeville. And the script was a travesty to begin with. Anyway, that’s how we met, Tammy and I, working on that god-awful movie.”

“Tammy?” I echoed.

“She was Tammy Jones when I met her,” Maggie said. “Tamerlaine Wynncliffe-Jones came later, when she became a Serious Actress.”

“What was she like back then?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “How much of what I say today about the Tammy of 1971 is true, and how much is colored by the bad things that happened between us later, and how much by the fact that she’s dead, and we all get sentimental about dead people? Even dead enemies.”

“Especially dead enemies,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, laughing softly. “She was pretty, of course, but it was dimples and fresh skin pretty, not bone structure beautiful. You knew her face might not wear well—she probably knew it, too. I think that’s why she was so…focused. She knew where she wanted to go and what she had to work with, and she could tell she had to get there fast, if she wanted to get there at all.”

“No talent, then?”

“She had talent, yes; but not enough to match her ambition,” Maggie said. “She had brains though, and not a lot of scruples. We both started off with bit parts, but she wanted more. Well, we both wanted more, but I wasn’t unscrupulous enough to sleep with the scriptwriter to get it. Or maybe I’d already figured out exactly how little power the scriptwriter had. She learned fast, though; dumped the poor wordsmith for the director, and she got her extra lines—in one of the worst movies ever filmed, but you have to start somewhere.”

“What was the movie?”

“God, what
was
the name of that stinker? Where’d Nate go, anyway? He’d remember, of course; but if I asked him he’d pretend he didn’t. He doesn’t like to be reminded of his early screenplays.”

“Nate wrote it?” I exclaimed, glancing over at the table that Nate had apparently vacated. “He was the scriptwriter she…um…”

“You bet,” she said, shaking her glass and smiling. “That’s how they met, working on that movie. And probably how she met that comic book writer, too.”

“Ichabod Dilley?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. He was an artist, actually. Nate dug a kid up somewhere to do the psychedelic paintings they used in the film.”

So Nate had known Ichabod Dilley, too. Curious that he hadn’t mentioned it just now.

“What was he like?” I asked.

“Dilley? I didn’t really know him,” she said, shrugging. “He was this total recluse who never came to the set, though perhaps Nate was just trying to be mysterious about his discovery. I think I only ever saw Dilley once: tall; skeletally thin; long, greasy brown hair. Had one of those unfortunate, mangy beards, the kind you see on a kid who’s really too young to grow one but insists on trying anyway. And big, round wire-rimmed sunglasses, and an oversized pea coat. Unprepossessing.”

“You didn’t like him?” I said.

“I didn’t
dis
like him,” she said. “I didn’t really know him. Tammy was the one who hung around with him. God knows why. From what little I’d seen, I couldn’t figure out what she saw in him but, then, if Tammy thought she could use a guy to get something she needed…”

Maggie shrugged, and took a sip from her iced tea.

“I always thought the poor kid based those comics on her, if you really want to know,” she said.

“The Porfiria comics?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You ever read them? In the comics, Porfiria is pure Tammy. As she was then. No wonder she wanted so badly to play the part. It was perfect for her. Too bad the chance finally came about twenty-five years too late.”

She sat back, clinking the ice in her drink, and smiling again. I waited, because I could tell the scene hadn’t ended. Maybe a melodramatic way of thinking, but I suspected that was how Maggie saw life: as a series of scenes that often hung together badly, like a movie made by an incompetent director from a wretched script. And there wasn’t anything Maggie could do about that, but at least she could control her own performance. Make any scene in which she appeared as good as she knew how. I’d seen Michael trying to teach his acting students about pacing. I’d heard his lecture to the Drama 101 class on the structure of a well-made play. Even I could tell that this scene still needed a proper ending.

Maggie took a swallow, and then reached down into her tapestry bag, rummaged around for a bit, and came out with something.

“This was us,” she said. “Taken on the set.”

She handed over a plastic sleeve containing a 4×6 color photo that had obviously been around a while before someone decided it was worth protecting with the sleeve. In the shot, a group of about twenty beautiful young people smiled into the camera. They were wearing costumes from the early seventies. Okay, the photo was taken in 1971, but they were still costumes—Hollywood’s idea of what flower children looked like. Flower children, and a couple of Hell’s Angels who looked as young and innocent as the pseudohippies. All of them a lot cleaner than their real-life counterparts probably managed to be, and with hair so perfect you knew a stylist with a brush and a big can of hairspray lurked just out of the frame. The women, all sporting long, pre-Raphaelite hair, wore granny gowns, Indian-print dresses, fringed or beaded halter tops over artfully frayed jeans. The men’s tresses were almost as long—some less obviously wigs than others—and most wore beards or mustaches and flowered shirts or tie-dyed T-shirts in rainbow colors.

I could see the younger Maggie, near the back of the group. The QB—Tammy, as she was then—near the center, draped artfully on the shoulder of one of the most attractive young men. All the men seemed to be standing closer to her than they had to. I could see why. She had a glow—that’s the only way to describe her.

And off at one side, Nate, looking as if he’d walked onto the set from another movie, or maybe out of a bad high school yearbook picture. Tall, skinny, with thick glasses, wearing a badly fitting suit. Oddly enough, he looked less ridiculous than most of the men in the picture. Or at least less painfully dated. But he certainly didn’t look as if he fit in, or expected to. The photographer had probably told them all to move closer together for the camera, and the men around Tammy had done so eagerly, and Nate had sidled perhaps an inch closer before the shutter immortalized him, standing awkwardly on the periphery, the perpetual outsider.

Which was usually how he looked today, even after thirty years. The badly fitting suit was visibly more expensive, but otherwise nothing much had changed. In the photo, he looked almost like a time traveler from the present. Had he been ahead of his time, or had he simply found, early on, a kind of anti-style that endured better than fashion? I recalled looking in my high school yearbook recently, and noticing, to my surprise, that from a distance of nearly two decades, the cool people didn’t look nearly as cool anymore. The fashionable clothes and trendy hairstyles hadn’t worn well. And all the rest of us, the little people who’d despaired of ever being that cool—we looked rather normal. Time, the great leveler.

I wondered if I’d recognize any of those beautiful young actors if I saw them today. Apart from Maggie and the QB, of course. Probably not. Thirty years can do a lot to a person. Any one of them could be walking around, pretending to be nothing more than an aging Porfiria fan.

And Maggie was right. The QB looked like Porfiria. Not the aging Porfiria of the TV show, but the young, vibrant, earthy Porfiria of Ichabod Dilley’s drawings.

“
Acid Dreams
?” Maggie said. “Acid something.
Acid Visions
; that was it.
Acid Visions
. God, what a stinker. I haven’t seen it in ages. Not that I usually sit around watching my own movies, but I notice when they’re on TV, and it’s been years since I saw a trace of that one.”

“Check the dealers’ room,” I said. “I’ll bet anything one of the dealers has got a copy, even if it’s only a bad quality bootleg tape.”

“I said I hadn’t seen it, not that I wanted to,” she said, with a laugh. “But maybe I should go and buy up all the copies they have. Protect my reputation as a serious actress.”

“You’d go broke buying up all the copies,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, gulping the last of her iced tea. “If anyone gives me a hard time, I usually just tell them that I did my best, and it paid the rent that week. And besides—what the hell?”

A sudden shower of mixed nuts and pretzels rattled down on our heads, and we both looked up to see that a monkey perched above our table had learned how to open the childproof lid of a snack jar.

“And on that note, I think I’ll leave before the gathering primates descend,” Maggie said, laughing as she tossed her head to shake the pretzels out of her mane. “Gotta run anyway; another panel.”

She ran off, leaving more money on the table than necessary to cover her share of the tab. Since I could see monkeys traveling from the far corners of the bar to hover over our table, I decided she had the right idea. I added enough cash to the tip to make sure the bartender remembered us both fondly. As I stood up, the weight of the little tape recorder in my pocket reminded me that I still didn’t know why Maggie was running around the convention telling people to prepare to die. And for that matter, now I had another question—why had she brought that particular photo to the convention? Was it only nostalgia? I sighed, brushed a few clinging peanuts out of my hair and reached the exit just as the first fight broke out among the swarming monkeys.