We’ll Always Have Parrots (19 page)

“Sorry,” I said to Steele, as I slipped behind the table. “Please tell me you’ve been getting along just fine without me.”

“I was until he showed up,” Steele said, jerking his thumb toward where Walker was standing at my end of the booth, fiddling with things and trying to pretend not to have noticed my arrival. “And I could continue getting along fine if you’d take him somewhere and patch him up.”

“Patch him up?” I echoed. “What happened?”

“Hey, Meg, how’s it going?” Walker said, waving one hand at me in a casual greeting that would have looked a lot more natural if he hadn’t had a wad of bloody paper napkins wrapped around his fingers.

“Playing with the merchandise,” Steele said, rather contemptuously. “Actors.”

“You keep some of this stuff sharpened,” Walker said, his tone more hurt than accusing.

“Yeah, some of the customers want it that way,” I said. “Come on; I think I know where to find a first aid kit. Alaric, see if someone can find my father in case Walker needs more patching up than I know how to do. I’ll be in the convention office; it’s off the green room.”

“Right,” Steele said and began scanning the ceiling. Apparently he’d noticed Dad’s parrot project.

“Meg,” Walker said, as he followed me through the room. “Did you get her to—”

“Not here,” I muttered, and he got the message and shut up until we reached the convention organizers’ room.

They did, indeed, have a first aid kit. I’d have let the two volunteers do the honors of patching him up, but Walker’s presence seemed to reduce one to paralysis and the other to silly giggles, so I took charge of the bandaging. He’d sliced open three fingers on his left hand and gouged the base of his right thumb rather badly.

“Ow,” he said, as I took the napkins off. “Not so rough.”

“The thumb looks pretty ghastly,” I said. “It might be a good idea to go to the emergency room in case it needs stitches.”

“No, no,” he said, curling his hand back protectively. “I really hate hospitals.”

Probably because he spent so much time in them, I thought.

“So how did it go?” he stage-whispered.

“She’s with the police now,” I said.

“Yeah, but what is she telling them?”

“I think I managed to convince her that she’d get in less trouble telling the truth to the police herself than having you tell the newspapers.”

“Wow!” Walker exclaimed. “You’re incredible! I can’t believe you actually—Meg? Is something wrong?”

I realized that I’d been staring at him.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just realized something.”

“Something about the murder?”

I shook my head, and went back to washing his cuts. I’d suddenly realized why I’d been spending so much energy worrying about Walker. He reminded me, uncannily, of my kid brother who, though far from stupid, seemed content to cruise through life on looks and charm, letting other people take care of him. Sometimes I got tired of being one of the other people, but he was my brother.

Walker was just a friend. More Michael’s friend than mine. And yet here I was, cleaning up after him.

Evidently I’d made less progress than I thought in conquering my tendency to take care of the world.

Just then, fortunately for Walker, Dad arrived, and they both forgot all about me. Dad had partially retired from practicing medicine, which meant that he only saw patients with interesting diseases or injuries. His joy at having a nice gory injury to treat was matched only by Walker’s hypochondriac delight at having a doctor fussing over him.

I stayed long enough to ask the two volunteers if they knew who had arranged Ichabod Dilley’s appearance.

“Todd chaired the program committee,” one of them said.

“Great,” I said. “Where is he?”

“Home,” the volunteer said.

“He’s not here?” I asked. I probably sounded critical. Well, I felt critical. “Doesn’t someone have to keep the program lurching along? Rearranging it when necessary due to deaths, interrogations, and arrests?”

“Well, not Todd,” the volunteer said, as if I ought to know better. “He doesn’t cope well with change. We gave him a Valium and sent him home. Sandra’s doing all that.”

Sandra, it turned out, was the diminutive Amazon who’d been acting as a combination emcee, stage manager, and baby-sitter for the events taking place in the ballroom, where she was currently running the trivia contest.

So I’d have to wait to interrogate her until the contest ended. By now, any resemblance between what was happening around the hotel and what was printed in the program would be purely coincidental. Still, it gave me a guideline. The trivia contest was supposed to last from three to four. Sometime between four and seven, it would end, and I could interrogate Sandra. And perhaps later the sedated and calmer Todd.

“Will Todd be back?” I asked.

“He said he’d come in for the costume contest,” the first volunteer said.

“He’d better,” the other volunteer muttered. “If he flakes out like last year…”

“We managed last year,” the first volunteer said.

“We didn’t have all these animals last year,” the second volunteer muttered.

“Oh, is Todd in charge of the animals?” I asked.

The two looked at each other.

“I suppose so,” the first said.

“He’s the one who found them,” the second volunteer said. “Which means he’s the only one who knows what we’re supposed to do with them when the convention is over.”

“And I suppose he’s the one who managed to get permits to have them here in the first place,” I said.

“Permits?” the first volunteer said.

“Oh, great, you mean he should have gotten permits?” the second volunteer said.

“You know Todd,” the first one said. “Easier to beg forgiveness later than get permission beforehand. Sandra can take care of any problems, like she did last year.”

“Yeah, and I bet by the time we’re finished, last year’s fire and water damage will look cheap,” the second volunteer said.

I decided I’d rather not know what had happened at last year’s convention.

“Rounding up the monkeys and parrots seems to be going rather slowly,” I said instead.

“Someone kept letting them go again,” the first volunteer said.

“You should have had someone guarding them,” I said.

“We did, of course,” the volunteer said. “It was the guards who were letting them go.”

“We’ve got better guards now,” the other said.

“Well, different guards, anyway,” the first muttered.

“We’re going to have to change our name again to get a hotel for next year,” the second volunteer said.

“Three years in a row?” the first said. “We’re running out of names.”

On that note, I decided to return to the dealers’ room. The more I learned about the inner workings of the convention, the more anxious I felt.

“What is this crap, anyway?” Steele said, when I slipped behind the table. “Part of your sleuthing?”

He’d gotten into the stash of fan fic and spurious Porfiria comics I’d stuck under the table.

“Just some stuff I found,” I said. “I was thinking of pulling Michael’s leg with some of it. He gets so embarrassed by all the action figures and fan fic.”

“You might want to check it out first,” he said. “Some of this stuff is pretty…raw.”

He was holding one of the fake comics by one corner, as if it were a loathsome object. Which it was, actually; I recalled that particular comic as an unpleasantly lewd parody without even the saving grace of any humor.

“Good idea,” I said.

I noticed that the receipt from the booth where I’d bought the spurious comics had fallen out of the stack and lay on the floor. I faked dropping my pen and managed to snag the receipt and stuff it in my skirt pocket while Steele was still shaking his head over the offensive comic. Silly, but I hated to admit paying good money for the stuff.

But before long, neither of us had time to worry about the fan fic. Either Harry’s efforts as an improvised sandwich man had helped or the convention-goers had gotten tired of watching the police and the press. More of them started coming into the dealers’ room, and for a while I had enough to do to keep me from fretting.

Steele and I each made a few more sales. Actually, I made more than a few sales, about half of them of Steele’s merchandise. Without discussing it, we’d fallen into a comfortable pattern. Steele kept an eye on the stock, packed and unpacked, cleaned and polished things, filled out sales forms, wrapped purchases, and generally took care of all the mundane and routine work, while I charmed swords and daggers into the hands of customers. Even without counting the savings on the booth rental, we were doing much better as a team than either of us would have solo.

Steele kept giving me approving glances, and I decided it was lucky I hadn’t worked with him like this a few years ago, before I met Michael. Under the right—or wrong—circumstances, I’d have assumed that because we worked together so well, we were meant for each other. I might have found his brusqueness with customers strangely appealing. After all, he obviously didn’t dislike me. He found me useful. You could even say he needed me. Once, that, combined with my innate compulsion to take care of people and his attractiveness, would have spelled trouble. The kind of trouble that’s hard to avoid because even when you spot it a mile off, part of you still wants to walk right in.

Thank God I’d learned better. Or maybe just thank God for Michael.

“Meg?”

I looked up to see Typhani standing in front of the booth.

“A messenger just dropped this off for you at the front desk,” she said, holding up a nine-by twelve-inch Kinko’s envelope. “I said I’d deliver it.”

Finally!

“Thanks,” I said, trying not to look too eager as I took the envelope out of her hand.

I grabbed a dagger from the table display and slit the envelope open. I peeked in, and was glad I hadn’t just fished the pictures out in plain view. Apparently Dad had reached Kevin to ask for blowups of my photos of the QB’s body. They were on the top of the stack, and I didn’t exactly want anyone seeing those.

Anyone included Typhani, who seemed to be hovering.

“Yes?” I said.

“It’s okay?” she said. “The desk clerk can describe the guy who dropped it off if you like.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I mean, unless you think there’s something I ought to know about the guy who dropped it off.”

“Well, you know, if it’s some kind of hate mail…”

“No,” I said. “Kinko’s and I are on reasonably friendly terms these days. Did Miss Wynncliffe-Jones get her hate mail in envelopes like this?”

“Yeah, some of them,” she said, nodding. “Well, not in Kinko’s envelopes. They came in the mail. But in envelopes like that.”

“Big, flat envelopes with cardboard inside to keep the contents from bending?”

She nodded.

“The first time she yelled at me for throwing away the envelope,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, how stupid can you get? Like whoever sent it would put a return address!”

I nodded. Typhani seemed to find that satisfactory and went off after fluttering her fingertips at me, the way a child would wave bye-bye.

So whoever sent the QB’s hate mail was taking some pains to make sure the contents arrived in good condition.

Not hate mail at all. Hate comics; I’d bet anything. And the shred of paper she’d been holding had probably been part of one of them.

I sat back a little—far enough that I could still keep an eye on the booth, but where passing customers couldn’t see what I was holding—and pulled out the photos.

Kevin and the Kinko’s staff had done a nice job. I stuffed the 8×10 blowups of the QB’s body back into the envelope to save for Dad and concentrated on the two shots of the comic strip.

I’d done a good job, too. Or maybe I should give credit to Kevin again, for picking out such a good digital camera. Every line of the drawing was as sharp and crisp as if I had the original in front of me. Looking at it brought back something else: the drawing had been done on nubby-textured paper, off-white with colored flecks in it. I could see the flecks as clear as anything, and the faint shadows from the nubs.

Some kind of specialty drawing stock. All the artists I knew were particular to the point of superstition about their tools. They’d go to the ends of the earth to track down their favorite brands of pens, pencils, and drawing paper. Not that I didn’t understand. I felt the same way about my metal-working tools. So the paper was probably a useful clue for the police, who had the resources to identify it, track down where it was sold, perhaps even discover which suspects had bought it.

All it told me was that this wasn’t from a published comic. They generally used plain white paper, and much cheaper paper at that.

So I was looking at either an original, unpublished cartoon by Dilley, or a very plausible imitation.

And if I had to bet on it, I’d say the real thing. A real Dilley. I couldn’t prove it. Couldn’t even explain how I knew. But just as I didn’t need to look for a maker’s mark to see whether I’d done a piece of ironwork or whether it belonged to one of my blacksmith friends, I could tell Dilley had drawn this, and not some skilled imitator.

And then again…it felt different. In the published comics, the artist seemed to like Porfiria, despite her flaws. There was a strange innocence to her promiscuity, and a certain glow to her features.

But this Porfiria looked different. A faint piggish look to the eyes. A slight suggestion of blowsiness. And was that an ink blob, or had the artist drawn a large, dark speck stuck between her front teeth?

It still looked a lot like the QB. To me, even more like her than the published comics. Of course, maybe I wasn’t the best judge, since I thoroughly disliked the QB.

Maybe that was it. In the published comics, Porfiria was Tammy Jones, and Ichabod Dilley clearly worshipped her. But in this sketch, though apparently no later, she had become Tamerlaine Wynncliffe-Jones, and he’d learned to hate her. What had she done to turn him against her? And did it have anything to do with her death?

Or for that matter, with his?

“Found something interesting?”

I started, and clutched the photo closer to my chest as I glanced up to see Steele looking at me with curiosity.

“No, just looking at some possible new PR stills for Michael,” I said. That seemed the most plausible explanation for why I’d been so absorbed in studying something from an envelope clearly marked “Photos—do not bend!”

Then again, maybe it was time to enlist another brain and another set of eyes. I longed to talk things over with Michael, but he was off dutifully schmoozing with his fans. Maybe I should stop being so cagy and bounce my ideas off someone. Failing Michael, Steele would do as well as anyone. Better than most in fact. Someone who wasn’t part of the TV show crowd might have a more balanced perspective on the whole thing.

I glanced back at the photos, and this time I noticed something else. When I’d studied the pictures in the camera, the image was so small that I could barely decipher the words of Porfiria’s dialogue. In the blowup, I could see that I’d misread it. She wasn’t saying “Bring in the Vagan ambassador.” It was “Bring in the Viagran ambassador.”

Viagra hadn’t been invented in 1972. I didn’t know precisely when it came on the market, but surely no earlier than the 90s. Probably the late 90s.

Which meant that no matter how sure I was that Ichabod Dilley had drawn it, that just wasn’t possible.

Or was it?

“He’s alive,” I said.

“What’s that?” Steele said.

I slipped the photos back into the envelope and then shoved that into my haversack. Then I took a deep breath. Time to see how this sounds when I say it aloud.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said.

He lifted an eyebrow and glanced briefly at the troupe of dancing trolls performing at the other end of the room, as if to suggest that my definition of crazy needed updating.

“What if Ichabod Dilley is alive?”

“The comic book guy?”

“Yes. When I found the body—I also found something that—well, it doesn’t make sense unless Dilley’s alive,” I said, figuring that I was at least technically keeping my promise not to talk about the scrap of paper. “What if he just disappeared? Went into hiding—after all, he had a good reason to.”

“What reason?” Steele asked.

“He owed money to some very impatient people,” I said. “So he changed his name, disappeared, and left his friends and family to settle with the loan sharks. Maybe he kept tabs on the QB through the years, or maybe he didn’t care. But then the TV show came out, and he saw her getting rich from his creation, and he came back to confront her.”

“Sounds weak to me,” Steele said, frowning. “The show’s been running a couple of years. Why wait till now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’s been working up to it. Typhani said the QB had been getting hate mail. Of course, Typhani’s only been with her for six weeks, but maybe he’s been sending her hate mail for years, and this convention was the first chance he’d had to strike.”

“Hasn’t she done conventions before?” Steele asked.

“Yes, but not a lot on the East Coast,” I said. “Or—wait! Maybe he saw an announcement about Ichabod Dilley appearing at the convention, knew it wasn’t him, and finally lost it. He would have no way of knowing that the convention organizers, not the QB, had recruited the wrong Dilley. And if he thought her responsible, he might have thought that not only had she stolen his work and made a travesty of it, but now she was stealing his very identity.”

I savored the idea.

“You watch a lot of TV, don’t you?” Steele asked.

“Come on,” I said. “Work with me, Steele.”

Bouncing ideas off Michael was much more satisfactory, I thought. Michael bounced them right back. So call this a dress rehearsal for bouncing things off Michael at dinner.

“Okay. You think Ichabod Dilley was here, at the convention,” Steele said. In a voice that clearly showed he was humoring me.

“Is here. In disguise,” I said. “And the only thing we knew about him is his approximate age. Only a few of the backstage crowd are in the right age group, but we only need one. For that matter, he doesn’t have to be part of the backstage crowd. He could be any of the fans. A killer, hiding himself in a crowd of a thousand innocent fans.”

“You going to interrogate them all?” Steele asked, glancing around at the passing convention goers.

“Most of them are too young,” I said. “Most of them are in their teens or twenties. Probably only about five percent of them are even close to the right age.”

“Yeah, but there’s another five percent wearing costumes that don’t let you see how old they are,” Steele said, pointing to two passing figures in space suits.

He was right. Some of the costumes obscured faces and hands so completely that their wearers could be any age.

“But they’re still a minority,” I said, after a minute. “Maybe another five percent, for a total of a tenth of the crowd. But then take out the roughly half who are women, because I’m pretty sure Dilley’s still a guy. Back down to five percent.”

“Of course, five percent of a thousand means fifty people,” Steele said.

“And that’s where the police come in,” I said. “There’s no way I can find and investigate fifty people. But for the police, it’s a piece of cake. Especially since they do have one witness to narrow down the suspect list, or even pick Dilley out of the crowd.”

“Witness?” Steele said. “Who?”

“Nate,” I said. “They knew each other—Dilley stayed with him for several months, when they worked on a film together.”

“Long time ago,” Steele said, shaking his head. “People change. Wait till your high school class has its twentieth reunion and you’ll see.”

“That’s true,” I said, wondering briefly if Steele realized how close I was to that twentieth reunion. “And Nate didn’t exactly give a good description. Maggie did ten times better, and she claims she only saw him once or twice.”

“Women usually are better at that stuff anyway,” Steele said.

“Or maybe there’s another reason,” I said. “Maybe Nate doesn’t want Ichabod Dilley found. Maybe Nate
is
Ichabod Dilley.”

“Nate?” Steele echoed.

“Okay, not necessarily the real Ichabod Dilley, the kid who left Kansas for the bright lights of San Francisco and then supposedly died tragically young,” I said. “But back around 1972, writing and drawing underground comics and painting psychedelic posters probably weren’t the kind of things an ambitious young screenwriter wanted on his resume. So maybe he knew Dilley and used him as a front for his counterculture projects.”

Steele shook his head, but he was listening.

“And that would explain how Ichabod Dilley could change from his high school’s most-likely-to-succeed golden boy to the awkward, taciturn character Maggie describes,” I said. “It wasn’t drugs. He would try to say as little as possible because he’d need to avoid giving away the fact that he hadn’t painted the paintings or created the comics.”

“Or maybe when Dilley showed up, it was really your friend Nate, in disguise,” Steele said.

“That’s the spirit,” I said. “And you know, that’s not a bad idea. It fits with what little physical description I’ve heard of Dilley—he and Nate were both tall and painfully thin, with brown hair. And I saw Nate in a photo from around that time—even in the 1970s, Nate kept his hair short and his face clean-shaven. So what better disguise than to put on a wig and a fake beard when he wanted to pretend to be Dilley? When you add the trench coat and the dark glasses, it positively shouts disguise. I wonder if Dilley the nephew could get any pictures of his uncle. Maybe the real Ichabod was short and round like him.”

Steele shrugged.

“Anyway,” I continued. “The Porfiria comics ended, not because their creator was dead, but because the front man was. Nate could no longer publish them under Dilley’s name. And if his screenwriting career was starting to take off by then, maybe he was just as glad to end the comic series.”

“Still doesn’t explain why he would kill the QB, as you call her, this weekend,” Steele said.

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet,” I admitted. “Dilley disappeared not long after they all worked together on that movie. Maybe Nate killed him, or set him up to be killed by his enemies, and the QB found out this weekend, and he killed her to keep her from fingering him. Or maybe she knew all along, and was blackmailing him—that could explain why he’s stood by her so loyally all these years. Until this weekend, when he snapped. Who knows? If I can just get the police to consider the idea that the creator of the comic books is alive, they can probably figure out the rest.”

“Still sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” he said. “Of course if you—damn!”

“What’s wrong?”

“I need to make a call before five,” he said. “Preferably from someplace quieter. Can you watch the booth for maybe fifteen minutes?”

“I owe you a lot more than fifteen minutes,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “You can tell me the rest of your theory when I get back.”

I wasn’t sure there was much more to my theory, I thought, as he strode away. In fact, I’d already found a flaw. Nate didn’t know about Ichabod Dilley naming his characters out of a medical dictionary.

Or pretended not to know. After all, even if Nate hadn’t figured out the naming scheme over the years, odds were someone would have done so, and that Nate would have heard about it. In fact, his claiming not to know was downright suspicious.

And his stick figures, which I’d always seen as evidence of Nate’s complete lack of drawing ability—were they deliberately bad?

Yes, I liked my theory. It explained everything, from the scrap of comic to her last words.

I could see it. Nate protesting something she was doing to the show. Telling her she couldn’t do that to his comics, or his characters, or his words—it didn’t matter which. And both Nate and the parrot heard her reply: “I can do anything. I
own
them; I can—”

And that was where he cracked. And killed the QB.

Suddenly, I was impatient for Steele to return. I had to tell this to the cops. And the sooner the better.