We’ll Always Have Parrots

by Donna Andrews

  “Just wondering what Dilley might have done if he’d lived longer,” I said. “The kid had talent; you can see that in every drawing, and he was getting better all the time. If the issues weren’t numbered, I bet I could have figured out the order by seeing how his skill increased. Talent. And training. By the eleventh or twelfth issue, you’d need a few hundred words of description to say what he can show in one panel, in the arch of a courtier’s eyebrow, or the way Porfiria casts a come-hither look over her shoulder. Most artists don’t get that good without years of practice, including a lot of life-drawing classes. And this was only his progress over a year. Imagine what he could have done if he’d lived to keep getting better.”

  “And this relates to the murder…how?” Michael asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. “It’s fascinating, but it’s not getting me anywhere. I was hoping it might prove useful if I could figure out which issue the drawing had come from.”

  “And search everyone’s rooms for a torn comic book?”

  “No, it’s too much to hope that the murderer would still be carrying it around. But I thought if the issue was important enough for the murderer to take it to that final, fatal confrontation, maybe the theme of the issue would give me a clue to the murderer.”

  “Which it hasn’t, I gather.”

  “No, my scrap isn’t from any of the twelve published issues. Maybe Cordelia isn’t pulling my leg, and there really was a lost thirteenth issue.”

  “Is there supposed to be?”

  I shrugged, and then realized he couldn’t see me.

  “Who knows?” I said aloud. “Maybe it’s just the kind of rumor that always swirls around an artist who dies young.”

  “You could show the scrap to Cordelia,” he suggested. “If she’s an expert in Dilley…”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to, even if I hadn’t promised Foley to keep quiet about it,” I said. “She’d probably laugh at me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What if I’m being fooled by an obvious imitation?”

  “Do you think it’s an imitation?”

  “No, but I can’t prove it. Maybe I’ll show her when Foley lifts the embargo. Oh, have you got a moment?”

  “For you, any number of moments,” he said, pulling off the washcloth. “Though if you were planning to ravish me while I’m in a weakened condition, I should point out that your timing stinks; I’m due back in the ballroom in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll try to plan better next time. For now, just sign this photo, will you? Here’s the inscription they want.”

  “We’ll always have West Covina,” Michael read aloud. “West Covina? Where is that? I assume it’s a where; it sounds like a where.”

  “I have no idea where it is, but if I hadn’t bribed Cordelia with the promise of a personalized photo for one of her best customers, who lives there, she would never have let me borrow the comics.”

  “Shameless, the way you exploit me,” Michael said. “I will exact compensation after dinner.”

  While Michael signed, I slipped the last comic back in its acid-free archival-quality plastic cover, pulled off the gloves, and breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t mangled any of them. And then I headed back to the dealers’ room while Michael freshened up for his coming panel.

  “So?” Cordelia asked, when I returned the comics. “Did you find anything?”

  “I won’t know until I check a few other things,” I said. “Do you know anything about Dilley’s life?”

  “I know everything there is to know,” she said. “Not that there’s that much of it. He was only twenty-one when he died, you know.”

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “Mysteriously,” she said.

  “I was talking the method, not the mood,” I said. “I heard it was drugs.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t straightforward. There were rumors that it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Or murder. Rumor had it that he owed money to some pretty shady people who finally got tired of waiting for him to pay back. I talked to the private eye his family hired to go down to Mexico and find out what really happened. He never did figure out exactly what was up, but the way the Mexican cops acted, you knew someone had paid them off to cover up something.”

  “They actually hired a private eye?” I said. “I thought from what his nephew said that they’d disowned him.”

  “Only after they read the PI’s report,” she said, with a laugh. “He was this straight-arrow kid from this small Kansas town—president of his class, captain of the debating club, drama society, varsity athlete—the whole shebang. He goes out to Stanford on a scholarship and disappears into the counterculture by Thanksgiving. And they come out to rescue him from whatever they thought was the problem—a cult or a gold digger or something, and he tells them to get lost, ’cause he’s not from Kansas any more. They keep calling, writing, and eventually he starts mailing them rude cartoons making fun of them, their town—everything. And then they hire this PI to go and try to talk to him, and apparently the kid freaked, ran off to Mexico, and by the time the PI got a line on him, Dilley was dead and buried. Drug overdose, according to the autopsy, but no one ever believed it was accidental. Maybe the people he owed caught up with him, or maybe he figured doing himself in would be less painful than whatever they had in mind. The PI never figured out which.”

  “Dramatic,” I said.

  “So you can imagine how dramatic it would be if you really did find the last comic he’d been working on,” Cordelia said.

  I wanted to say that I thought the artist’s death was a lot more dramatic than any comic could ever be, but I just nodded and took my leave.

  I was relieved to find I’d accidentally told Foley the truth when I’d called the circumstances of Dilley’s death mysterious. Or had I said suspicious? Same difference; either way, if he checked, he’d find I was right.

  On the way back to the booth, I stopped by a vendor who sold fan fic and spent way more money than seemed reasonable to buy two dozen spurious Porfiria comic books by various authors and artists. Steele went off for a lunch break, and I whiled away twenty minutes or so looking through the comics. The vendor assured me these were the best ones he had, and yet, like the fan fic stories, most of them were pretty amateur. Even the most professional didn’t have Dilley’s genius.

  More weight to the theory that the scrap the QB had been clutching came from an authentic lost comic.

  So Dilley’s death was mysterious, and the scrap might be an authentic piece of his work. Where did I go from here?

  “I need a time machine,” I muttered.

  Chapter 30

  “What’s wrong, Meg?” I heard Dad say. “Investigation not going well?”

  “Not going at all,” I said, glancing up to see Dad standing in front of the booth with a green parrot perched on his shoulder. “I’m leaving it to the cops. Are you helping round up the parrots?”

  “Round them up?” Dad said. “Why? They’re perfectly happy where they are.”

  Meaning that Dad was perfectly happy to have them around.

  “How do you know?” I said aloud.

  “Oh, you could tell right away,” he said. “They’d exhibit signs of stress. Screaming and biting, and plucking out all their feathers. No, you can tell these parrots are perfectly happy.”

  Especially the one cooing amorously in his ear.

  “Here, read some of these,” he said. He began rummaging in his tote bag and extracting books with brightly colored parrots on the cover, and titles like A Guide to Parrot Behavior and Living with Your African Grey.

  “Thanks, but I’m pretty busy,” I said.

  “Oh, right, with your investigation,” Dad said, nodding as he retrieved his books. “I have something that may help with that.”

  He pulled Michael’s tape recorder out of his pocket, held it up dramatically for a moment while looking around for eavesdroppers, and then pus
hed the PLAY button.

  I heard the tape hiss for a few, long seconds, and then voices.

  “—like this, then?” Dad’s voice asked.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Michael’s voice replied. “Both buttons at the same time.”

  “Got it,” the canned Dad said.

  “Damn,” said the live Dad. “I seem to have rewound it all the way. Oh, well; it’s on here somewhere. And who knows, there may be other clues earlier in the tape that your greater knowledge of the case will let you recognize.”

  He fumbled with the tape recorder’s VOLUME knob, somewhat hampered by the parrot’s insistence on running its beak through what remained of his hair. He then proceeded to play twenty minutes of recorded parrot vocalizations.

  If he’d made the tape as a testimonial for parrots’ uncanny powers of mimicry, I’d have applauded his efforts. I heard parrots dinging like elevators, whooshing like vacuum cleaners, ringing like telephones, grinding like blenders, tinkling bits of classical music in the tinny tones used by cell phones, and, of course, flushing like toilets.

  Unless, of course, Dad had taped real elevators, vacuum cleaners, blenders, and so on, to pull my leg. Always a possibility with Dad.

  The parrots mimicked human voices brilliantly, though they were remarkably undiscriminating in what they chose to imitate. I heard a few phrases from our friend the Monty Python parrot. A lot of commercials, mostly the loud, repetitive, annoying kind I hated most. I was rather pleased to see that they appealed, quite literally, to bird brains. Dad had even caught a performance from two parrots that had learned the Porfiria theme song, although unfortunately, instead of singing it in unison, they interrupted each other and tried to drown each other out.

  If I hadn’t felt impatient to do something useful, I might have enjoyed the performance. Although I did enjoy the look on Alaric Steele’s face when he returned to the booth to find us solemnly listening to a parrot sing a pizza commercial.

  “Here it comes,” Dad whispered shortly afterward.

  “You’ve double-crossed me for the last time,” came Maggie’s voice, sounding ragged with emotion. “Prepare to die, you—whoops!”

  Dad stopped the tape recorder after that and looked at me.

  “Prepare to die, you—whoops?” I repeated.

  “Suspicious, isn’t it?” Dad said,

  “The prepare to die part, yes,” I said. “But whoops? Not that I have a lot of personal experience with the matter, but I really don’t think many people say ‘whoops’ after coshing someone on the head with a blunt instrument.”

  “Could be evidence that it was an accident,” Dad said. “If they were quarrelling and Miss Wynncliffe-Jones slipped and fell, for example. And hit her head on the wine bottle.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Still seems odd.”

  “You can hang onto it and study it for a while if you like,” Dad said.

  “Taking a break from sleuthing?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I may have found someone who has an in with the medical examiner, and then I’m supposed to get together with your friend the scriptwriter. So I’ll be pretty tied up all afternoon—why don’t you keep the tape recorder for now?”

  “Thanks,” I said, as he turned to leave.

  Perhaps my voice betrayed my lack of enthusiasm for his ornithological investigations. Or perhaps I just sounded tired and discouraged.

  “Is there anything else you need?” he asked, pausing and turning back to give me a look that was part doctor and part worried Dad.

  “I need a time machine,” I said, this time aloud. The parrot tape had distracted me briefly from my frustration at how little I knew. I couldn’t go back thirty years and find out the real story about Ichabod Dilley’s death. I couldn’t even go back thirty hours and try to get the QB to tell me what she knew. I’d studied the original Porfiria comics, picked Cordelia’s brain—I wanted another window to the past.

  “Well, there are probably a few time machines around here,” Dad said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know where. You probably have a better idea than I do. Good luck!”

  And with that he dashed off.

  “Is he pulling your leg, or did he just not hear what you said?” Steele asked.

  “With Dad, who knows?” I said.

  Actually, I did, but I didn’t really want to go into a long explanation. Dad always referred to Great-Aunt Zelda, who was now over a hundred, as the family time machine. Despite her age, she was as sharp-tongued and clear-witted as ever. And if you wanted to settle some question about the past, Great-Aunt Zelda was usually as reliable as any reference book, and a whole lot easier to consult.

  So all I had to do was find someone who had been around Ichabod Dilley or the QB back in 1972. Or failing that, at least someone who had been around the QB enough that he might have heard her talk about old times.

  Why couldn’t she have had a faithful retainer? If we were living in one of Nate’s scripts, she would certainly have had one—perhaps a chain-smoking dragon lady who had looked after her wardrobe since they were both ingénues, and was the only person who dared to argue with her. And who, after initially seeming cynically unaffected by her employer’s death, would eventually break down in tears and reveal the critical clue—whatever that was.

  But she hadn’t had a faithful retainer. She’d had Typhani. Latest, I suspected, of a long line of Typhanis. And maybe a few Geniphers.

  There was always Nate. Not my idea of a faithful retainer, but at least, according to the costumer, he’d known the QB since they were much younger.

  Of course, much younger didn’t necessarily mean thirty years. But still—he’d been closer to her than anyone else I could think of.

  And, I thought, glancing at the clock, he just might be in the green room, recuperating from his latest panel.

  “I need to talk to Nate,” I said, and barely waited for Steele’s nod of acknowledgement before I raced away.

  Nate was, indeed, on break, though I finally located him in the bar at the back of the supposedly closed restaurant. Not that he couldn’t have drunk his cup of coffee in the green room. He probably wanted to be left alone. Ah, well.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I know the convention is important for fan relations,” he said, “but my heart’s just not in it right now.”

  Okay, maybe I was wrong about no one mourning for the QB. I nodded and tried to look sympathetic.

  “I really need to be on the phone, trying to get a sense of what’s happening back in California. Or back in my room, trying to come up with a coherent plan to save the show. What a disaster! And after everything we went through to make this thing a success.”

  We. Okay, it wasn’t exactly deep mourning, but perhaps I’d finally found the one person at the convention who sincerely wished the QB alive again.

  “You’d known each other a long time, hadn’t you?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “More than thirty years,” he said.

  Chapter 31

  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 o
nly 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.”