Con Job

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  Zach nodded. “Jacob asked him who’d done it, and I went over to help.”

  “Hold on,” said Detective Martin. “Sorry, I just got here, and I’m already exhausted. Who are you, and why did you think you could help?”

  “I’m Zach Hu, and I do speech therapy,” Zach said. “I’ve put a lot of hours into studying visemes.”

  “And what’s a viseme?”

  “The position of your mouth and face when you make a sound. Like this is oooooooh.” He pointed to his rounded lips.

  “And so you were able to understand the dying man?”

  Zach shook his head. “They tell us that less than half of English phonetics are distinguishable by viseme alone, and a lot of sounds look alike. I can narrow it down, but that’s it.”

  “Well, give us what it’s narrowed down to.”

  “He had an R sound, and then either a F or a V — they look identical. And there was another syllable, with what I think was a T or a D.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What with the weird makeup and the reduced lip movement as he was slowing down, that’s pretty good,” Zach answered. “Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”

  “You told him you got most of it!” Jacob protested.

  “And asked him to repeat it, yes,” Zach said. “I didn’t want him frustrated, because when people try to exaggerate they usually make it harder to read, not easier.”

  “Still, that gives us something to work with,” Detective Martin said. “Now, who did he know with the initials RFT or RVD?”

  Daniel shook his head. “Might not have been a person. We’re at a con, and we call things by what they look like. Those could be a reference to something in a game or movie, just like an AT-ST or R2-D2. Or it might not be initials, if Zach missed the bits in between.”

  “There was definitely stuff in between,” Zach confirmed.

  “So they might be part of a name. Like R-something Aff Taksaorn, or Prince Vandersnooten.”

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter, the point is we aren’t necessarily looking for initials. And if he didn’t know his attacker’s name, he might have tried to describe him, and we could be looking for a character, or a creature type, or even some mundane in a Red Formal Tux.”

  “‘Prince Vandersnooten’ doesn’t start with an R,” said Jessica.

  “But it’s got an R sound. Could it work that way?” Daniel looked at Zach.

  “Given that he wasn’t speaking normally, yeah, there could have been an initial phoneme or two that I couldn’t catch. I’m sorry. I really did try.”

  “We know you did, Zach,” Jessica said. “Nobody thinks anything else.”

  Detective Martin put her hands to her temples. “I hate this thing,” she said. “More specifically, I hate this guy. If it’s the same guy, I hate him, and I’m going to take off work to sit through every day of his trial and eat popcorn as he gets sentenced.” She exhaled forcefully. “Okay, what do we do?”

  “First off, we keep people safe,” Vince said. “Even if that means taking steps none of us want to take. But people’s lives are more important. Detective Martin, do you think it would be better if we shut the convention down?”

  Detective Martin pressed her fingers against the inside corners of her eyebrows. “No,” she said after a long moment. “I don’t think so. I agree with you about people’s lives, absolutely, but I don’t feel like these are random acts. There should be a pattern or process, if we can just get to it.”

  “And sending everyone home would scatter our witnesses as well as the suspect,” Daniel added. “It’s one thing to let people go home from a party or theater, and another to let them spread over five or eight states.”

  Vince nodded, more than a little relieved. “Good. I mean, I don’t want anyone else to get hurt, obviously, but to be honest I didn’t want to shut down the con either. It would be tough, after that.”

  Detective Martin sighed again. “Okay, people, this is your turf. What do you suggest? What’s the best way to get people to talk?”

  There was a moment of quiet, and then Jacob said, “Just ask. They’ve already seen the ambulances and heard about the deaths; they’re not going to panic any more than they already are. Telling them the investigation is underway and being taken seriously is the best way to get help out of them.”

  “They’re likely to be friendly?” she asked, glancing at Daniel.

  “These are geeks,” he answered. “There are exceptions, anyone can be a fan, but for the most part you’re looking at white collar, middle-class, clean records. Definitely some drinking going on in the hotel rooms, probably some other stuff in the dance crowd, but for the most part your more serious offenders have a longer string of speeding tickets. You’re not going to get as much kick against the man here.”

  “So we can put out an official request and let uniforms take statements?”

  “Should work fine.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s get this on the news — or better, on whatever internal messaging you have for the con, the app or Twitter or whatever.”

  “Both of those,” Vince confirmed. “And we’ve been seeing a lot of photos tweeted in, so I’m sure you’re getting a lot of photos uploaded to the police account. So people are willing to help, if they think they have anything that could be helpful.”

  “Don’t get lost,” Daniel said to Zach. “You took a dying statement.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s the only time hearsay evidence is ever admissible in court. That is, if it’s taken right.” He looked at Jacob.

  Jacob straightened. “I asked if he knew he was dying and if he could tell us who had done it.”

  “And?”

  “He nodded.”

  “Once or twice?”

  Jacob thought. “It was fast, but I think he nodded to each. Little nods, he was pretty weak.”

  “That should hold up, then. Good thinking. Now we just have to work out this RFD thing.” He frowned. “Could that be it? A radio frequency device?”

  “Killed by a glorified pager?” Detective Martin sighed. “I’m keeping my mind open on this one. First time I’ve seen a zombie murdered, and the first time I’ve been interviewing fictional characters.” She stood. “Oh, how I’ll be glad to get out of these shoes. Long, long day. Vince, how do we get the word out?”

  “You give us the wording, we’ll upload it.”

  “Good. I’ll be back shortly.”

  People scattered, going for coffee or just to move around and release some tension. Jacob rotated his phone in his hands.

  “You can help with this, Jacob,” came Lydia’s voice behind him. “This is your territory. You’ve got Knowledge Local.”

  He gave her a weak smile. “It’s not exactly a role-playing game, Aunt Lydia.”

  “Most of life is, actually,” she said. “Don’t try to reinvent the wheel in thinking about the investigation they’re doing. They’re good at that, and you’re not going to be able to contribute much when they don’t have to share their info with you. But they aren’t geeks, and this is a geek murder. That’s your ground. Don’t be afraid to follow, you know, hunches.”

  “Use the Force?”

  “That too.”

  He sighed. “I’ll try. But man, this is hard. I mean, that guy practically died in my arms.”

  Lydia leaned over to hug him. “You okay? I mean, not that you can be, but are you managing?”

  “I’ll be okay. I just want to end this. No more deaths.”

  She squeezed him again. “No more deaths. End this.”

  “Hey, Jacob?” Sam called over the pass-through. “Can I borrow a few bucks? It sounds wrong to say I want to eat after that, but… I need food. Blood sugar’s wonky.”

  “Sure.” Jacob pulled his wallet from his pocket and tossed it to her. “I think Vince was trying to get some pizzas ordered, but I don’t know how successful he was. There’s probably some mac and cheese or something left at one of the
upper tables. I don’t think they were getting as much traffic.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Lydia said. “Chocolate isn’t a panacea, but it fakes one pretty well.” She headed out the door.

  “Vince?” Daniel came in, accompanied by Detective Martin. “Can we speak with you a moment?”

  The con chair looked up, his expression worried and then resigned. “Yeah, sure. Rita, don’t go — if this is going where I think it is, I want you to hear it.”

  Chapter Twenty Five

  “So, Vince.” Detective Martin’s expression was gentle but firm. “Tell us about the financial state of the con.”

  Vince interlaced his fingers and set his elbows on the table. “It wasn’t supposed to work out like this.”

  “It rarely is. Tell us what went wrong.”

  Jacob sat very still. No one had asked him to leave, and Vince seemed resigned to openness, but there was no point to taking chances.

  “Con Job has been running for eight years. It’s done pretty well for itself; the con has been self-sufficient for five years. It’s been making enough money to even pay a little bit to the key staffers, the department heads.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Depends on the con. Some of your biggest cons or industry cons have paid staff, but a lot of the smaller and middling cons are all volunteer-run. That is, they have staff, and they have volunteers, but the staff don’t get paid, either.”

  “What makes someone staff, then?”

  “Higher position, more authority, and some perks — staff get comped rooms at the hotel, shared, and meals in the staff suite. When we have one.” He gestured to encompass the stripped room around them.

  “So Con Job was in the black. What happened?”

  Vince sighed. “I sort of borrowed some money. But it would have been fine if we hadn’t been robbed.”

  “If you use words like ‘sort of borrowed’ and ‘robbed,’ I’m going to have to ask you to explain further.”

  “Yes, I took some money out of Con Job’s accounts for my personal use. It was kind of owed to me, you know? I’ve been chairing this con for six years, I basically got it to this level, and I hadn’t ever been paid, not really. Last year I got a check for seventy-eight dollars. That’s not a lot for thousands of man-hours.”

  “Couldn’t you have asked for more payment?”

  “Yeah, but…. No one chairs a con to make money. We do it for the fans. It would have looked bad.”

  “It looks a lot worse when you just embezzle it.”

  “Embezzling is stealing,” Vince said quickly. “I wasn’t stealing. I was borrowing. It was going to go back in the con’s account before anyone realized it was missing.”

  Rita shook her head. “Vince, when you borrow something without asking permission, especially money, that’s called stealing.”

  Jacob glanced at Daniel, who looked strained and sad.

  “I needed liquid funds. I was going to put it back. We would have been fine if not for Ted.”

  “Who’s Ted?”

  “He’s the vice-chair,” Rita said, looking perplexed, “or was. He quit, which was kind of a nightmare right before the con. We were all upset with him, but Vince said to just let him go.”

  Vince rubbed at his forehead. “Ted had made withdrawals, too. And he’d done a lot of other things for a while, charging in expenses to the con for his own services and products. Some of it wasn’t anything we could really prosecute for, like he rewrote a single line in our guest contract and charged Con Job almost a thousand dollars in consulting fees. That’s not actually illegal, just really slimy. We were just as well off without him.”

  “And was it all legal but underhanded stuff?”

  “No.” Vince sighed. “He also made withdrawals on the con account. And he wasn’t intending to pay them back.”

  “But you couldn’t press charges against him without bringing your own withdrawals to light.”

  “Right. And I didn’t have the money paid back yet. And he knew I couldn’t do anything about him, and he said he’d counter-accuse me if anyone from the con tried to go after him legally. So I thought we could hold the con as usual, I could pay back the money, and then I’d look at the accounts and see if we could press charges.”

  “So,” said Detective Martin, “you and this Ted both took money from the con funds, so neither of you could accuse the other without risking exposure of your own embezzlement.”

  This time Vince didn’t protest the word. “Basically, yeah. Only I was really going to pay the con back. Ted took thousands. Tens of thousands. It was after the con last year, when I took out the money. We had time before we would need to make any new payments, it seemed like the best time to do it. But Ted noticed, and when I said I was going to pay everything back before it was missed, he said I couldn’t prove that and he could report me to the rest of the staff and press charges. But he wasn’t going to, he said, because he was just going to do it too, and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “So he did.”

  “It was a nightmare. He took so much more, and it was never coming back. So I had to cut costs in any way I could, and I made a big deal about getting corporate sponsorship this year.”

  “That’s why you made us go back to the dark ages with our registration system,” Rita said.

  “And a lot of other things, like less food in the green room and a lighter staff suite and a whole host of other things. Oh, man, it was killer, trying to keep it hidden from everyone.”

  “I hope not,” said Detective Martin pointedly.

  Vince looked at her. “Oh, no. No, I didn’t kill anyone. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “Really? Because it sounds like Valerie Kimberton’s sponsorship with MEGAN!ME was your ticket off the nightmare coaster, and then she threatened to pull her sponsorship, and then she ended up dead.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” Vince said firmly. “I’m not sorry she’s dead, and maybe it’s wrong of me to say that, and maybe stupid of me to say it, but I didn’t kill her.”

  “Tell me how Valerie Kimberton fit in.”

  “You’re right, she and MEGAN!ME were a big part of getting Con Job afloat. It seemed like a reasonable deal: MEGAN!ME got the back cover, the inside front cover, three interior ad spaces, a lot of mentions in the copy and programming, and special vendor space. We even have a MEGAN!ME video track showing their featured titles running nonstop in one video room all weekend. She got plenty of exposure for her money.”

  “People say she was hard to work with.”

  Vince snorted. “That’s a pretty minimalist way to say it.”

  “Why did she threaten to pull her sponsorship?”

  “Which time?”

  Detective Martin’s pen hesitated. “She did it more than once?”

  “Oh, yeah. On Friday she was mad about a typo in the programs — the exclamation mark was left out of the MEGAN!ME name, in an article. Not even in an ad or a headline, but in a write-up. It shouldn’t have been anything but a mistake, but she wanted all-new programs printed.” He shrugged. “By then I wasn’t taking her quite so seriously. She’d scared me a lot worse before, when she threatened to pull out a month ago and then again last week. That was over an article, which we dropped from the program book to make her happy, and then because we were giving The Last Days of Manhattan a featured viewing, and it’s not a MEGAN!ME title. Like it was suddenly a MEGAN!ME con, all MEGAN!ME all the time, which wasn’t ever the deal.”

  “So you weren’t really afraid she was going to pull the money and walk?”

  “Well, yeah, at first I was. And then still a little bit on Friday, because I figured she had dirty lawyers who could argue that the MEGAN!ME brand had been misrepresented or something, and Con Job sure didn’t have money to fight. Our only lawyer-type was the paralegal who had taken our money and run.” Vince seemed a little more sure of himself now that they were speaking of Valerie and not his own crimes. “But I didn’t
kill her.”

  “Did you want to?”

  “And give her dirty lawyers something else to hold over us? She’s the kind of person who’d be thrilled from beyond the grave to nail us with a wrongful death suit or something. No way.”

  Daniel cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “Why’d you take the money, Vince?”

  Vince’s expression seemed to melt into sadness and regret. “I needed it. For Charlie. And I was going to pay it back.”

  “Who’s Charlie?” asked Detective Martin, but Daniel and Rita had already subtly changed their postures.

  Rita’s eyebrows drew in and upward. “Charlie?”

  Vince nodded once, and then he answered Detective Martin. “My son. My ex-wife has him. He’s got — he’s got some problems. Insurance wouldn’t cover it, said his autism is medical but behavior problems aren’t covered. And he needed some specialized help.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I took enough to pay for a few sessions with a therapist. She sent Charlie to work with a specialist, someone who could work with him and — it’s going good. They think he can get into a special program at school, which is amazing progress, and last time I visited him he even wanted to click me with his little clicker.” He swallowed. “It was worth it. Totally worth it. And I’m paying it back, about seventy-five percent now. I only took a few thousand, to pay for the sessions and Terri’s gas and hotel — that’s my ex-wife — and money so she could take off work to go with him. It’s mostly back already.”

  Daniel swore. “Why didn’t you just ask for help, man?”

  Vince’s head drooped. “Who’s got six thousand dollars sitting around? Who would just lend it to someone, if they did?”

  “You might be surprised,” Daniel said sadly.

  Rita ran a finger beneath one eye. “You were talking about you and Terri the other day,” she said. “How things were better.”

  “Yeah.” Vince swallowed. “We — that is — we’d never tell him, of course, but Charlie was…. It was really hard, living with a special needs kid, and we didn’t know how to do it. Not at first. And we split. But after Charlie got help, and Terri says she’s been learning a lot about how to teach him, and we… it’s been better. A lot better. And Terri said she’d like to see us maybe try things out again.”