We’ll Always Have Parrots

by Donna Andrews

  I had to get an Amazon security guard to escort me into the locked dealers’ room. Steele had secured the cashbox and the valuable stock before leaving. I rummaged through the cheaper items I had on hand, picked out a couple of daggers, and was about to leave when I noticed a note telling me to look in my cashbox.

  I opened the cashbox to find my card key, and another note that said:

  Nate dropped off your room key. What was Nate doing with your room key, anyway? Oh, wait, maybe it’s his room key…wouldn’t you rather have mine instead?

  Chris.

  I wondered if this was the card Michael had lost that morning or the one I had lent him in the afternoon. And whether the other one would ever surface. No matter. I shoved it in my pocket and raced back to the auction. I handed over one dagger, keeping the other wrapped in my haversack in case they got desperate. And watched Michael and Walker coax bids out of the audience until a beaming fan triumphantly claimed the dagger for three times what he would have paid if he’d bought it from me that afternoon.

  While Walker auctioned off a lunch with Maggie West, I saw Michael slip backstage and exchange a few words with Nate. Then he came over to me.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “They’re still trying to coax the boss lady out of her room,” he said. “Will you go see if you can lure her out?”

  “Me?” I exclaimed, throwing up my hands. “You forget, I’m not her favorite person.”

  “Tell her if she won’t come out, you’ll knock her down and drag her out,” he said. “She knows you’d do it, too.”

  “I’d sic Mother on her, but I suppose you want her alive,” I said. “Has anyone tried having hotel security open the door with a master key? For that matter, I bet housekeeping could do it.”

  “No idea,” Michael said.

  “I’ll go and suggest it,” I said. “And then see what I can do.”

  “Great,” Michael said.

  He returned to the stage, and I hurried to the wing where the QB’s room was. For once, I didn’t make a single wrong turn.

  A crowd stood in the hallway, staring at her door and arguing with each other in stage whispers.

  “She still playing prima donna?” I asked.

  “She still won’t come out, no,” one Amazon said.

  “Have you called hotel security?” I asked. “They could probably open the door with a master key card.”

  “They did,” a wizard said, shrugging. “But she has the latch on from the inside.”

  I could see now that the door was open, but the security latch was on. I pushed the door as far as it would go…just enough to peek through, but all I could see was a small slice of beige wall.

  “We’ll just have to be more persuasive,” another Amazon said. She stepped up to the door and knocked.

  “Go away! I want to be left alone! I need my rest. Go away!”

  The Amazons retreated a little way from the door and looked at each other, shaking their heads.

  “This is ridiculous,” I muttered. Time to execute plan B. I fished out my newly recovered card key and went into our room. Taking out the dagger, I opened the door to the balcony. If any fans were still camped out, I expected they’d leave when I flourished the dagger at them. But the balcony was empty. I put down the dagger and climbed up onto the railing. The fans had been doing it for over a day now. Surely I could make my way from our balcony to the QB’s.

  Maybe the fans helped each other, I thought, looking at the gap. What had I meant, only two feet? Two feet was enormous. And how had I failed to notice that while grass and bushes would cushion a fall from the far side of our balcony, the gap between our balcony and the QB’s had a concrete sidewalk below it.

  Don’t be a wimp, I told myself. Clinging with both hands to anything within reach, I stretched my leg over and got my foot solidly on the other balcony.

  This is too much, I thought, and was about to retreat, when I heard another knock.

  “Go away!” the QB screeched. “I want to be left alone! Go away!”

  Stupid cow, I thought. Anger brought back my courage, and I heaved myself over the gap and onto her balcony.

  “Who cares?” the QB said, inside. “It’s mine.”

  Who was she talking to?

  The sliding glass door to the room was wide open. I peered in.

  I didn’t see anyone. Not even the QB.

  “Miss Wynncliffe-Jones?”

  “Go away! Go away!” she shrieked.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, marching in. “You were due downstairs ages ago. You’re keeping everyone waiting and—oh, God!”

  Lying between the dresser and the bed was a body. The QB’s body. Her dead body, given the wide open yet unseeing eyes. We needed the police—

  And I needed to make sure I didn’t join her. She’d been talking to someone, only a few seconds ago.

  I heard a slight noise in the bathroom. I wished I’d brought the dagger with me. I settled for grabbing an empty wine bottle that was sitting on a nearby table. Holding it above my head, I tiptoed over to the bathroom.

  Which was stupid, I realized. I should go to the door, unlock it, and send those persistent idiots outside for the police.

  I was about to do so when they knocked again.

  “Go away!” shrieked the QB’s voice from the bathroom.

  I lowered the wine bottle and used the base of it to shove the door open.

  A gray parrot. I should have known.

  “Miss Wynncliffe-Jones?” someone outside the door shouted.

  “Go away!” the parrot screeched, fluttering into the shower stall. “Go away! I want to be left alone!”

  “Stupid bird,” I muttered.

  “Same to you and twice on Sunday!” the bird cackled.

  Maybe the bird was right, I thought. I saw a small red stain on the door, where I’d touched it with the bottle. I looked at the bottle. Around the base, I could see a few hairs stuck in something damp. Jet black hairs, with gray roots just barely showing.

  Great. I’d not only found the body; I’d managed to pick up the murder weapon. I set it down on the dresser again, resisting the temptation to compound my idiocy by wiping it clean of fingerprints.

  Instead, I walked over, unhooked the security latch, and opened the door.

  “Miss Wynncliffe-Jones, it’s nearly—what are you doing in there?” The pink-clad priestess stood at the door, her hand raised to knock again.

  A small bevy of costumed convention staff stood around her, their faces set in worried frowns.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “Call the police.”

  “Dead?”

  “Dead, as in murdered,” I said. “Don’t come in here, unless you want to become suspects like me. Call the police. Oh, and another thing,” I added, glancing at my watch. “Send someone down to tell them to start the look-alike contest without her.”

  I closed the door to shut out their questions. I figured since I was already in the room, I should wait here for the police. I didn’t fancy standing there, staring at the QB’s body, so I returned to the bathroom.

  “Go away! I want to be left alone! Go away!” the parrot shrieked.

  How odd, I thought. The parrot’s voice sounded eerily like the QB’s. Her words, her voice, even her angry, imperious tone.

  But the parrot’s body language belied the confident tone of the words. It seemed terrified, fluttering wildly around the shower stall.

  Was it terrified of me? Or still terrified by something that happened before I arrived? Would the bird be terrified if it had witnessed the murder? Possibly, I supposed. But I thought it more likely the bird wouldn’t react this way unless the killer had tried to attack it, too.

  I moved a little closer, to see if the bird was injured. I wouldn’t have thought the bird could get more frantic but it did, and called out something else in the QB’s voice.

  “I can do anything. I own them; I can—”

  And then the voice broke off into a sound that c
hilled me. A death rattle. Not that I’d ever heard a real, live person make that sound. Other than Dad, of course, who’d heard it plenty of times during his medical career, and had been known to demonstrate it at the dinner table for the edification of his children and grandchildren. So I knew this sounded like the real thing, and I wondered if the parrot had just repeated the QB’s last words.

  Figuring I shouldn’t scare the only eyewitness, I left the bathroom and found a spot reasonably close to the door where I didn’t have to look at the QB.

  And then, the minute it crossed my mind that I didn’t have to look at her, the temptation to look became irresistible. I craned my neck in a couple of different ways before giving up and stepping closer.

  Not a pretty sight, I thought, feeling queasy. I couldn’t decide if her face was angry or terrified.

  No sign of a wound on the front of her head. Or the sides. Odd. If she’d been hit on the back of the head, why had she landed face up? Maybe I was wrong—I’d have to ask Dad—but I had the distinct impression that if you coshed someone on the back of the head, they keeled over face first. Had someone moved her?

  I inched forward, trying to see if there was anything that could explain this apparent discrepancy. From my new angle, I could see her right hand—before, the bed had blocked my view.

  She was holding something. A small scrap of paper.

  To get a good look at it, I had to lean over so far that I was in serious danger of falling on top of the corpse. But I did get a look.

  It was the torn corner of a drawing. From a Porfiria comic book, by the look of it. A roughly triangular piece, apparently torn from the lower right corner of a page, and containing most of a single frame.

  Just then, I heard a commotion out in the hall. Probably the police, I realized. Which meant that I didn’t really have time to study the scrap of comic before they barged in. Taking it out of her hand would be a stupid idea.

  I reached into my pocket and found that I still had the tiny digital camera. I took half a dozen shots of the paper. And a few of the position of the body, and a few more of the surrounding clutter.

  I had just barely stuffed the camera back in my pocket when the police walked in.

  Chapter 15

  The tiny digital camera in my pocket felt heavier with every minute the Loudoun County police spent interviewing me. I don’t know why the photos in the camera worried me so much. If they searched me and found them—well, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have plenty of reasons already to suspect me. I’d made no secret of how much I disliked the QB, publicly quarreled with her a few hours before the murder, and then capped it off by burgling her room to find the body. My fingerprints were all over the wine bottle they were testing to make sure it was the murder weapon. Surely the photos would add only a slight weight to the evidence against me.

  And I wasn’t withholding anything the police couldn’t find themselves. From the sound of things, they were taking plenty of photos, not only of the QB’s room, but of Michael’s and my room as well, since the security latch meant that the killer had escaped the same way I’d entered. The cops commandeered Walker’s and Maggie’s nearby rooms to serve as their temporary base of operations. Presumably they’d move the guests of honor, en masse, to another wing for the rest of our stay. I had no problem with that. Another hotel would be even better.

  I could tell they thought I was too bossy. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, trying to tell the first cops on the scene how to handle things.

  “It might be a good idea to send someone down to the ballroom to tell them the QB—Miss Wynncliffe-Jones—isn’t appearing tonight,” I’d said when the cops arrived.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the young officer said. I could tell he was being polite.

  “You don’t have to tell them why, of course,” I said. “But unless you want a constant stream of people coming up to fetch her for the next several hours—”

  “We’ll take care of that, ma’am,” he said, sounding slightly impatient. Great, they’d already pegged me as a troublemaker.

  But by the time the homicide investigators arrived, twenty-two more people had joined the crowd sitting in the temporary waiting room. Detective Foley proved more open to my suggestion; and his taciturn partner, whose name I didn’t catch, went off to take care of the notification.

  I considered it slightly unfair that, being the first person Foley talked to, I had to do all the work of explaining why he was investigating a murder at a hotel filled with papier mâché palm trees and people in strange, unflattering costumes. Also more than slightly unfair that he made only the most perfunctory attempts to shoo away the parrot infesting his temporary interrogation room. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been the Monty Python parrot, or even the hysterical parrot from the murder scene, but this parrot’s repertoire consisted entirely of trite scraps of dialogue from commercials.

  And I was so tired I’d started to nod off whenever Foley stopped to think.

  “So, Ms. Langslow—” Foley said, jolting me back to consciousness.

  “Do you suffer from heartburn?” the parrot chirped. “Try—awk!”

  The detective, who had begun throwing wadded up sheets of hotel stationery at the parrot, scored a direct hit, and the parrot fluttered indignantly to another corner of the room.

  “So,” Foley said, looking back at me. “Can you think of anyone who’d want to kill Miss Wynncliffe-Jones?”

  He leaned back in his chair in a way that suggested a grand finale to the interview. Of course, perhaps that was just an act, and he’d be watching me all the more carefully, now that he thought he’d thrown me off guard. Little did he know that I was wise to the tricks cops play when interrogating suspects, thanks to a mystery buff father who regularly bullied me into reading his favorites so he’d have someone to discuss them with.

  So I didn’t blurt anything out immediately; I frowned and gave the question serious consideration.

  “No enemies?” Foley said, after a few seconds. “What was she, Mother Theresa?”

  “No, more like Mommie Dearest,” I said. “Don’t worry, she has plenty of enemies for you to choose from. I was just trying to figure out where to start.”

  “Take your time,” he said.

  “Time is running out!” the parrot squawked. “This special offer ends at midnight tonight!”

  My paper missile missed the parrot entirely, but then I did have the excuse of being distracted.

  “Well, she’s been beastly to the hotel staff, the convention organizers, and any fans unlucky enough to cross her path,” I said. “But—wait, I have an idea.”

  I pulled my copy of the convention program out of my purse, flipped it open to the alphabetical list of guest biographies, and handed it to him.

  “One of these three people?” he said, glancing down at the page.

  “Not just that page, the whole guest list,” I said. “All twelve of them. Well, eleven; I suppose you can rule the QB out. They all had something to do with the TV show, so they all had reason to hate her. You even have pictures of most of them.”

  He flipped slowly through the bios with one hand while tossing and catching a freshly wadded ball of paper with the other. I wasn’t sure if he was reading the program, or just double-checking the number of suspects. Or possibly lulling the parrot into complacency.

  “Know where I could find any of them?” he asked.

  “Let me see the program a sec,” I said. When he handed it back, I flipped to the Friday schedule.

  “At the contest,” I said, checking my watch. “Most of them are judging or watching the look-alike contest. That was supposed to go on at eight, for an hour. They probably started late, so it might still be on. And after that, I suppose some of them will stay around for a performance by the Amblyopian Minstrels, whoever they are. The rest will either wander through the hotel from party to party till dawn or go to bed.”

  “That late?” Foley said, frowning.

  “These people keep
vampire hours,” I said. “I don’t know what they do at home, but when they’re at a con, they stay awake till dawn. In fact, I suspect some of them don’t sleep at all until they go home.”

  Foley didn’t look as if he believed me. Well, he’d learn.

  “Where is this contest?” he asked.

  “Down in the ballroom. I can show you, if you like,” I offered, and then wondered if that was a mistake. What if he assumed my eagerness to end the interview was a sign of guilt?

  “Yeah, let’s check out the ballroom,” he said, pegging the parrot with another paper wad as he stood up. “Lead the way. Oh, and we’re trying to keep Ms. Wynncliffe-Jones’s death as quiet as possible until tomorrow. I’d appreciate it if you’d avoid discussing it with anyone.”

  Keep it quiet? Was he kidding? What were the odds that when he turned loose the thirty or so people sitting next door in the other commandeered room, none of them told anyone where they’d been for the last hour? I’d lay odds that the whole convention would know within minutes of their general release, and at least a few unofficial fan sites would have the news posted by morning. But he looked serious, and I actually liked the idea of telling curious questioners that the police had ordered me not to talk.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Particularly details that might not be widely known,” Foley said.

  “Like the parrot?” I said. “Or the piece of paper in her hand?”

  “Yes,” Foley said.

  I nodded gravely at that and meekly listened to the expected instructions not to leave town without notifying him. Then I led the way to the ballroom.

  The look-alike contest was wrapping up when we arrived. The winners and runners-up from several categories cluttered the stage—half a dozen assorted Michaels stood stage left with a small band of Maggies, while a clump of Walkers milled around on stage right with the impersonators of minor cast members. In the center, a dozen pseudo-Porfirias anxiously awaited the decision of the judges. Michael, Maggie, Walker, and Nate. I noticed that the contestants included three men in drag, and wondered whether the QB would have kicked them out if she had emerged for the contest. In her absence, not only did no one object to their presence, one of them walked away with a well-deserved third place ribbon.