Con Job

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  Detective Martin nodded. “And why is this a secret?”

  “Valerie and I work in the same industry, not exactly together but in the same circles. I’m a voice actor, she’s an executive in a dubbing and distribution company. I do some voice work for MEGAN!ME, and it could get uncomfortable if people think I’m getting hired for some other reason than my professional talent.”

  “Right.” Detective Martin stopped and looked at Mickey. “What did you think of Valerie?”

  “Will Sophie ever hear this?”

  “Not unless it’s introduced as evidence.”

  “And if that happens, we’re probably already done, anyway.” Mickey sighed. “I’m going to be honest with you, Valerie was a fairly terrible person to be around. If someone really did kill her, it was an extreme and horrible action — but it probably wasn’t a random act of violence.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You want specific examples?” Mickey shook his head. “I could give you some, but I’m betting you’re already hearing stories as you’re talking to people. Let’s just say that Valerie wasn’t afraid to throw her weight around. I hear a rumor she was making life miserable even here at the con for Vince, since MEGAN!ME was a big sponsor. She probably thought that gave her the right to be queen or something.”

  “What did you hear about Vince and Valerie?”

  Mickey spread his hands, gesturing vaguely. “I didn’t see anything specific myself, if that’s what you mean. More of a general vibe among everyone.”

  “I saw them, yesterday afternoon, in the dealer hall,” offered Jacob. “She was yelling at him because there was a typo in the program guide, using an I instead of an exclamation mark. Dressing him down right in front of the whole con. She wanted him to recall all the program guides and reprint them — which is impossible, because the program guides were already being distributed and because you can’t just get a run of eight thousand books done as a walk-in while-you-wait sort of thing. Not to mention the cost.”

  Mickey was nodding. “Typical. Not that she necessarily cared about the typo that much, but it gave her leverage for something else.”

  “Like?” Detective Martin looked between them.

  Jacob shrugged. “I heard her say she’d pull her sponsorship if it wasn’t fixed, but I don’t know if that was what she wanted to do or just another threat.”

  “Yeah.” Mickey sighed. “That was Valerie. I don’t know if she could have, but she would have threatened to.”

  Detective Martin was making notes. “Was that significant to Vince? What would happen if she did?”

  Now Mickey shrugged. “Running conventions is not my gig. I don’t know how Con Job is doing, none of my business.”

  “Vince said it was tight this year,” Jacob recalled. “That’s why Reg is being done in house with spreadsheets, instead of using one of the event services.”

  “Reg?”

  “Registration. Everything’s done by hand in spreadsheets, which is slow and makes for mistakes.” He held up his badge. “I wasn’t supposed to have my real full name as my badge name, but that’s what happens when someone enters the data wrong.”

  Detective Martin nodded. “Is that typical, do you know? Not the badges, but being tight on funds?”

  “This isn’t Comic Con San Diego,” Mickey said. “It’s not a Hollywood love fest. Most of these smaller and mid-size cons are a labor of love, just funding themselves. All the people you’re seeing work Registration, checking badges, even selling the energy bars out there are volunteers, not staff. And the staff at these smaller cons get paid in hotel rooms and food for the weekend. Nobody’s making money off this.”

  “Going back to what you wanted to tell me,” Detective Martin said, “how did you meet this — Sophie?”

  “Yeah, Sophie. I met her at a bookstore, actually, about two years ago. It was in Delaware, I had a little time to kill after a con, so I went to find something to read on the plane. She was browsing in Historicals, she recommended a couple of titles, and in the end we got some coffee at the bookstore.”

  “And you didn’t know who she was.”

  “No way. Kimberton isn’t such a unique name, and I — I told her I was in video games at first, which was sort of true. I do a lot of game voices. But you don’t tend to tell people right away, or they just want to hear voices all the time. I told her later, of course, and that’s when it started to come out, when she was all, Oh, my sister’s company does a lot of voice dubbing.”

  “And did you tell Valerie?”

  “I think Sophie did. She’d already mentioned me to her family, and she didn’t realize that Valerie and I had already worked together. Valerie — she didn’t exactly hold it over my head, that would be unfair to say. We had a kind of unspoken agreement not to talk about it, as it wouldn’t have done either of us any good.”

  Detective Martin nodded. “Had she ever threatened you with this?”

  “What? No, no, nothing like that. Like I said, she couldn’t bring it out without hurting both of us. It was kind of a nuclear deterrent. There was no advantage in it for her.”

  “So you had nothing against her?”

  “Well, this is probably stupid to say while her murder’s being investigated, but I can’t honestly say that. She wasn’t a nice person. I’d rather stick a fork in my ear than spend another Thanksgiving with her. But it’s a lot easier for me to just skip Thanksgiving than to kill her — and at a con, full of my colleagues and fans. This would just be stupid.”

  “I agree,” said Detective Martin, “but murder is pretty much always stupid, and that doesn’t stop a lot of people.” She closed her notebook. “Still, this kind of honesty doesn’t exactly rocket you to suspect number one. Thanks for telling me about it.”

  “Thanks.” He hesitated. “Um, you’d tell me if I should be worried, right? Like, if that’s enough to get me on a suspect list?”

  Detective Martin smiled. “Mr. Groene, right now we have a suspect list of about eight thousand people, which is to say we have a suspect list of none. I don’t think your love life is likely to put you in danger, but if that changes, I’ll break the news as early and gently as I can.”

  “You’re a good cop,” he said. “Here, lemme buy you another.” He pushed the untouched candy bar over to her.

  “Thanks, but I’m on duty.” She grinned. “What about Valerie’s family? How’s her relationship with her parents, any other siblings?”

  “Her family’s not so bad, I don’t think. No money issues that I know of, either. I mean, they all know she flies on a broomstick, but she’s been like that forever and they just live with it. They weren’t even really surprised when—” He stopped. “Oh, why didn’t I think of this? Valerie got a death threat.”

  Detective Martin straightened. “What?”

  “She told everyone about it last Thanksgiving. She was kind of proud of it — which might have been a front, and maybe she was scared, but all she was saying was that it showed how much she was shaking things up in the industry.”

  “Who from?”

  “Some fan,” Mickey said. “Someone mad about MEGAN!ME’s handling of its catalog.”

  Jacob’s stomach tightened. Not Sergio. Sergio wouldn’t have done anything so stupid, surely….

  “Do you have a name?” She flipped back a few pages in her notebook, and Jacob was sure she was thinking of Sergio. “Did she tell you who it was?”

  But Mickey shook his head. “It was just a kid, I think. She showed us the email, and it looked like a third grader had written it — which I guess is like a high-schooler nowadays, but still. He was just mad, it was obvious.”

  “But someone’s killed her.”

  “Even given the fact that he couldn’t punctuate, capitalize, or spell, he’d have to be a pretty dim bulb to think that killing Valerie would get Mr. Doobles out of the vault.”

  “What’s Mr. Doobles? Is it valuable?”

  “To the fans, maybe,” Jacob offered. “It’s
a show, about a bunch of kids who draw stories. Huge fanbase, cute show. It’s been running about fifteen years, but MEGAN!ME has the US license, and they haven’t released any new episodes for over a decade.”

  “Why not?”

  Mickey lifted a shoulder. “Who can say? But MEGAN!ME sends a cease-and-desist to everyone who scans or rips or previews anything from an overseas release. Which is illegal, sure, but which obviously angers the fans because they can’t legally get anything from the last ten years.”

  “Why don’t they just order it from overseas? Or do they need the voices dubbed?”

  Mickey shook his head. “Mr. Doobles fans don’t need the dub. Hey, I make a good chunk of my living doing dubs, and I’ll admit upfront that most fans prefer Mr. Doobles straight and wouldn’t even blink if they just had subtitles. But MEGAN!ME holds the US license, which means it’s illegal for anyone in the US to order it from anywhere else. If they order a DVD from, say, a UK company, they’re breaking international copyright law.”

  Detective Martin blinked. “That’s silly, if it’s not available to buy here.”

  “Don’t expect anyone to line up to argue. Even the creators are getting screwed, since no one can buy any Mr. Doobles material except for second-hand copies originally put out by Pop Culture, which of course pays no royalties.”

  “But can’t they sue MEGAN!ME then, for failing to distribute?”

  “Nope. It’s a license, not a distribution contract. An option, not an obligation. If they decide they don’t want to mess with a title, or if they pick it up in a bundle with something else, they don’t have to do a thing with it. But then no one else can buy or sell it.”

  Detective Martin’s eyebrows drew together. “So what are the fans supposed to do?”

  “Get mad or break the law. Or both. It’s harder to import a DVD, since a lot of companies can’t or won’t ship licensed titles to the US, plus the whole region mess, so they can’t buy them legally from out of the country. So, piracy.”

  “Well.” Detective Martin looked faintly offended. “I didn’t know it could work like that.”

  “Yep. And off the record, it’s hard to blame them when there’s a MEGAN!ME sitting on titles and making it impossible to do the right thing.” He shrugged. “But that’s not exactly your murder crowd, you know? They may get upset and vocal, but what it boils down to is, people are mad because they can’t pay for a product instead of stealing it.”

  Detective Martin chuckled. “Okay, I see your point. But you said she did get a death threat.”

  “She did. And I suppose there could well be some nutcase who thinks killing a VP will release his favorite show because that’s what all the voices tell him, but my money’s that it was some angry brat who never learned how to talk like a grown-up.”

  “We probably ought to have the details, just in case.”

  “I’ll bet it’s still in her email, saved somewhere. Not because she was worried about it, but because she was proud.”

  “Proud.”

  “Proud that she’d managed to make a kid swear at her in bad spelling. That was Valerie, sad as it is to say it.” He gave Detective Martin a pleading look. “Don’t tell Sophie. She wasn’t under any illusions about her sister, but she wouldn’t like to hear it said aloud to strangers.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything. Does she know, about her sister?”

  “I called her today. I got through a few minutes after her mother did, so she already knew. Still, pretty rough.”

  Daniel walked in and stopped to look at them. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “No,” Mickey said. “Except — yes.” He ran both hands through his hair. “There’s one other thing I should tell you, before you find out from someone else.”

  Detective Martin flipped her notebook open again. “Yes?”

  “I — I need work. Pretty bad. I have a good reputation, some fans, steady roles, but — I could really use the money, you know? Got in a bit deep last year. And… Sorry, all that is just to say that I can’t afford to lose any work right now. And Valerie was going to cut me from Caesar’s Ghost.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She told me she was going to pull some strings and drop me. Or, it’s a first-person shooter set in ancient Rome, depending on what you’re asking.”

  “Why was she going to do that?”

  Mickey sighed. “Because Sophie booked a Caribbean cruise and invited their mom and step-dad, but not Valerie. So she was going to drop me to get back at Sophie.” He looked at them. “But I didn’t kill her, I swear. I wouldn’t do that — especially not to Sophie. But it’s going to look bad if it comes out.”

  Detective Martin exhaled slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “It will.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Well, that was unexpected,” Daniel said.

  They were in the staff suite, or what had been the staff suite. Now it was full of uniformed and plainclothes police and a single table of candy bars, packaged chips, energy bars, bottled water, cans of soft drinks, and snack-sized packs of trail mix.

  Detective Martin propped her feet on an empty chair and popped the top of a can. “Yeah. But he had something about bringing it up before it came up, because I’m finding it a little harder to be suspicious of him. He seemed like a pretty nice guy.”

  “A lot of them do.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not at the top of my list. That’s Vince Corleone.”

  Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “I know he’s your convention buddy, but how much do you know about his financial situation?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing that comes up during Marvel versus DC debates.”

  “Everyone’s got hints that the convention’s underwater. Even Jacob here mentioned it.” She looked at him. “Come on, I know you’re listening.”

  “Am not,” Jacob called. “I didn’t hear a thing about Marvel or DC.”

  “It’s okay, I think we can use you.” She beckoned him over. “You’re not police, you’re part of the con. You’re our mole.”

  He gave her a dubious look. “I’m a painted blue-green alien with antennae?”

  “I’m betting that’s another in-joke,” she said wearily, and she took a drink.

  “Why Vince?” prompted Daniel.

  “The con’s in trouble,” she resumed, “and people seem surprised by that. Apparently it wasn’t struggling the last year or two, and my casual interest with some people has indicated that a convention of this size should be pretty stable and self-sufficient after several years. And Fibbins—” she nodded toward a man in a loose-fitting suit across the room — “says he can smell an embezzler from twenty paces but picked up Vince Corleone at twenty-five.”

  Daniel gave her an even look. “You talk like old film noir.”

  “Busted. But it’s true, anyway. Fibbins is already talking about going over the accounts with Vince, with the excuse of understanding the MEGAN!ME sponsorship.”

  Daniel exhaled. “I hope that doesn’t turn out to be true.”

  Detective Martin’s face softened. “I hope so too, Daniel, for your sake.”

  “But that doesn’t say anything about the other girl, Trish Kur….”

  “Tasha Kurlansky,” supplied Detective Martin. “I know. Killing her wouldn’t affect the con’s finances, or Micky Groene’s job, or even that guy who was replaced by the stuffed animal.”

  “Potential stuffed animal,” Daniel corrected. “That was only a rumor.”

  “Right. Killing Tasha doesn’t save him from losing to a potential stuffed animal. But it can’t be a coincidence, not with two killings in two days on the same site with the same method.”

  “Maybe the first one was a practice murder?” Jacob asked.

  “It’d be a stupid practice run,” Detective Martin said. “If Valerie was the target, and he killed Tasha for practice, all he did was put us on alert about Valerie’s death that much faster.”

  Jacob’s phone buzzed. Are
you busy? Lydia asked.

  He rolled his eyes. It’s been that kind of a day, he texted back. What do you need?

  I want to put my new figurine in your room so I don’t have to carry it everywhere.

  Come by Ops and I’ll give you my key.

  Busy, can’t come at the moment. Can you swing by Gaming?

  Jacob chuckled aloud, and Daniel gave him a curious glance. “My aunt,” Jacob said. “She’s not fooling anyone, she’s having as much fun here as any other attendee. You need anything done toward Gaming? I’m headed that way to drop off a room key.”

  “Play a round of DDR for me,” Daniel said.

  “Hey, Jacob.”

  “Sergio! Walk with me. I’m headed to Gaming.” He glanced at his friend. “Man, you look kind of green. And it’s a bit early for what that cup smells like. You okay? Something else happen about being a suspect?”

  Sergio’s mouth twitched. “I just found out I’m about seven thousand dollars in the hole.”

  “What? What happened?”

  “You know Rick Yoshinaga?”

  “Name is vaguely familiar, but no.”

  “He’s a photographer.”

  “Oh, yeah, got it. What about him?”

  The Gaming room was a long room, subdivided from a larger ballroom. One end was full of arcade machines, consoles, and musical games such as Guitar Hero, DDR, and Rock Band. The other had a mosaic of tables at which groups of various sizes leaned over card games, board games, dice games, and arrays of small figures on maps.

  “He wanted to get into videography,” said Sergio, “start a company. Do weddings, cons, graduations, promo films, small projects and stuff.” The tall Starbucks cup wasn’t full of coffee, and it probably wasn’t Sergio’s first. He was going to talk a lot. “But that’s an expensive business to get into. Lots of equipment.”

  “I’m guessing about seven thousand dollars’ worth?”

  “He’d been talking about it for a while, and then last year at Con-nundrum we were drinking in his room, and he told me he was ready to get started, that he even had the ideal project coming up and he was pretty sure he could land it if he just had the equipment.”