We’ll Always Have Parrots

by Donna Andrews

“It is possible, you know,” said another voice.

  I turned to see Brad, Salome’s keeper, carrying two McDonald’s bags.

  “They often form attachments to individual humans,” Brad went on. “Especially ones they perceive as dominant within their social group.”

  With that, he turned and strolled down the hall toward the entrance to Salome’s lair, nearly invisible under its covering of vines.

  “Very perceptive, these monkeys,” Chris said, suppressing a grin, “and delightfully uninhibited.”

  He pointed to a pair of monkeys who appeared to be mating, oblivious to the chaos around them.

  “You would notice that,” I said. “I always thought that if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room, they were supposed to rewrite Shakespeare. These monkeys are not performing up to expectations.”

  “Someone forgot the infinite number of typewriters,” Chris said.

  “Look, do me a favor, will you?” I asked.

  “Will I earn your eternal gratitude?” he asked.

  “I don’t know about eternal,” I said, “but you will make me grateful enough to significantly increase the odds that I show up for tonight’s Blazing Sabers performance.”

  “Ask away, O Dominant One,” Chris said.

  “What are the odds that you can cut one fan out of the herd and lure her into the tiger’s lair?” I asked.

  “My kind of assignment,” he said. “I assume you mean a particular one?”

  “The blonde over there,” I said, trying to point discreetly, “standing in the middle of that group of decoratively if scantily attired young ladies.”

  “The one with the red rhinestone in her navel?”

  “That’s her.”

  “One blond groupie, coming up,” Chris said. “Meet you in the lair.”

  “Just shove her in and wait outside.”

  Chapter 35

  While Chris went to hijack Amy, I walked down the hall, glancing upward from time to time. Was Chris right? Were some of the monkeys following me? It was hard to tell, because if you looked up in the hall, the whole ceiling appeared to be in vague motion, between the monkeys, the parrots, and the vines. Still, several monkeys did seem to be swinging purposefully along behind me.

  Maybe we were just going in the same direction.

  Several monkeys did pop into Salome’s lair shortly after I finished crawling through the doorway.

  “We’re—”

  “Closed, I know,” I said. “If you’re not going to let anyone see Salome, why not just take her home?”

  “I’m trying to,” Brad said. “I’ve been trying to reach Mrs. Willner all day.”

  “Why don’t you try again?”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Go use a pay phone,” I said. “I’ll guard the door until you get back.”

  Brad hesitated.

  “You let my father do it,” I pointed out. “Trust me, I’m at least as responsible as he is.”

  He nodded, and disappeared through the vine-covered opening.

  Spike and Salome had already inspected and decided to ignore me. I untied Spike’s leash and led him over to stand with me just inside the opening. He growled a little, but once he saw I wasn’t taking him away from Salome, he calmed down.

  A few minutes later, Concubine Aimee crawled out from under the vines, giggling.

  “I don’t see why we can’t—” she was saying, as she emerged from the opening. She stopped, still on her hands and knees, when she saw me, but she didn’t know quite how to react until she heard the door slam behind her.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  Her voice must have disturbed Spike’s rapt contemplation of Salome. He whirled and snapped at her, growling. She backed away, hastily, still on her knees.

  “You can stand up if you like,” I said, tying Spike to a sturdy vine. “You’d be more comfortable.”

  “What’s going on here?” she said, looking from me to Salome as if she wasn’t sure which made her most nervous.

  “Just a little friendly conversation,” I said. “I overheard you talking to Walker Morris just now, and I’m—”

  “If you think you can bully me into talking to the police, you’re wrong,” she said, sticking her chin out in a stubborn gesture.

  “Nobody’s trying to bully you,” I said.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “You don’t understand,” she said.

  “I understand perfectly,” I said. “Walker only wants you to tell the police the truth. Which I gather is that you and he were together when the QB’s murder took place. Is that true?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “Is it true that you and Walker can alibi each other?”

  “I don’t need an alibi,” she said, startled.

  “How do you know?” I said. “The police are still investigating.”

  She looked a little less smug, and crossed her arms a little tighter, which made her look more defensive than defiant.

  “And that’s why it’s so important for you to talk to the police now—while they’re still looking for the killer.”

  “My boyfriend would kill me.”

  “If you tell the police that, they’ll try to keep it quiet. But what happens if you don’t tell them and they arrest Walker?”

  “He’ll find another way to prove his innocence,” she said.

  “Maybe. But first he’ll tell the police he was with you, and they’ll interrogate you. And when you tell different stories, the police will start looking for evidence to see which of you lied. They’ll ask everyone in the hotel if they saw the two of you together. They could even look for DNA evidence in whatever room you were in. And even if they don’t find witnesses or DNA, the press will find out about it, and they’ll put it all over the front page—the whole world will know they’re looking. Including, of course, your boyfriend.”

  She looked a little stricken. I also noticed that she was holding her nametag so I couldn’t see it. And she’d started to glance around as if looking for an escape. Evidently she still thought she could vanish into the crowd. Time to enlighten her.

  “Imagine the headlines,” I said. “‘Local Woman Denies Affair with TV Star. Loudoun County Police continue to investigate allegations that Ms. Amy Goldman of Fribble Lane, Alexandria, is actually the mystery woman named as Walker Morris’s alibi in the—’”

  “How do you know—” she began, and then her hands flew over her mouth.

  “It was easy,” I said. “And if you think it’s easy for me, imagine what a snap it would be for the police.”

  I’d produced a change in attitude, but frozen panic wasn’t necessarily an improvement over her previous stubbornness.

  “Go and talk to the police,” I said, as gently as I could. “Tell them why you were afraid to talk. They’ll understand, and they’ll try to protect your secret.”

  She nodded. She didn’t look happy, but she looked resigned.

  “You want me to go with you and make sure they understand how important it is to keep this quiet?”

  She nodded with greater enthusiasm. I moved Spike back away from the door, and she followed me meekly through the opening.

  I led her up to the rooms where the police were still encamped, intending to turn her over to the kindly sergeant. I wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that Detective Foley and his partner were there, too.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Foley said, when I’d explained, as briefly as possible, why we were there. Amy seemed to have lost her voice from fright and was losing the battle not to cry.

  I followed Foley out into the hall while his partner and the sergeant fetched tissues and a Diet Pepsi for Amy.

  “Thank you,” Foley said. “I think. You’re sure all you did was talk her into coming here?”

  “I didn’t talk her into lying, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “I have no idea if she’s telling the truth—that’s your problem.”

  “Y
ou think we’re doing a bad job on this investigation?” Foley asked. “You think we need your help?”

  “I have no idea—” I began.

  “We may not be the NYPD, but we’re not some hick outfit,” he said. “If we don’t have something in-house, we can call on the state or the FBI. Every forensic and investigative tool available to modern American law enforcement is at our disposal. We have a dozen trained professional police officers working full time on this case. You people come out here from Hollyweird with your—”

  “Foley, I only brought you a witness,” I said. “I happened to overhear her arguing with Walker, and I convinced her to come forward and tell the truth. If I hear anything else you can use, I’ll come and tell you that, too. And for your information, I don’t live in Hollywood. I came up for the weekend from Caerphilly, which in case you’ve never heard of it, makes Loudoun County look like Metropolis.”

  “Just don’t bring me any more damned parrot surveillance tapes,” Foley said, as he turned on his heel and strode back into the room.

  Nice to know I hadn’t single-handedly provoked his ire, I thought, as I headed for the stairs. More of a family project.

  But something Foley had said stuck in my mind.

  Chapter 36

  “Every forensic and investigative tool available to modern American law enforcement,” I muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  I looked up to see that Michael had emerged from the police suite.

  “Damn, what did the police want with you again?” I asked, feeling a sudden flutter of anxiety.

  “Questions about Walker,” Michael said. “I gather I have you to thank for the decorative damsel whose arrival made them lose interest in me?”

  “Yeah, Walker found his alibi, and I convinced her to talk to the police.”

  “Thank God,” Michael said. “Of course, this means they’ll go looking for another prime suspect.”

  “And looking in the wrong place, not to mention the wrong decade,” I said.

  “Wrong decade?”

  “Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but here goes,” I said. “Foley said something about them using every forensic and investigative tool available to modern American law enforcement. And yes, law enforcement has come a long way in the past thirty years. But even back in 1972, they didn’t do too shabby a job on forensics, right?”

  “At least in the big cities, where they had money to get the right equipment,” Michael said, nodding.

  “Yes, places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Ichabod Dilley hung out,” I said. “But Ichabod Dilley didn’t die in California, where the case would get decent police scrutiny. He died in a small Mexican town where the PI his family hired to investigate thought the authorities had been bribed to conceal something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Suicide or murder—the story doesn’t say which,” I said, with a shrug. “And possible motivation for either; he owed a lot of money to the wrong people.”

  “Which is a lovely bit of Porfirian history, but how does it relate to the QB’s murder?” Michael asked.

  “One of the few people who knew Dilley back in those days has just been murdered,” I said.

  It sounded pretty weak when I said it aloud.

  “Two murders, thirty years apart?” Michael said.

  “And the second murder happened at a time when several of the people who knew Dilley happened to be around,” I said. “Nate. Maggie. Francis, if he was stretching the truth a bit about when he’d represented the QB. Which wouldn’t surprise me. If he knew something fishy had gone on back in 1972, wouldn’t he try to hide the fact that he’d known her back then?”

  “In a heartbeat,” Michael said. “Right now, he’s so freaked at having his clients turn into murder suspects that I suspect he’d try to hide his connection to me and Walker if he thought he could get away with it.”

  “Of course, they’re all hiding things, or at least leaving out things, fairly crucial things,” I said. “And if you call them on it, they shrug and confess, like children caught in a minor fib. As if it didn’t really matter. Or is that only another layer of deception?”

  “What do you expect?” Michael said, looking suddenly tired. “It’s a habit a lot of people pick up when they’ve been working too long in an industry that cares too much about youth. So you don’t mention everything you’ve seen or done, or everyone you know, because sooner or later, someone will do the arithmetic and realize that you’ve been around a little too long. Hell, yesterday Walker asked me to stop mentioning how long ago we were in the soaps together. And it’s not as if we’re geezers or anything.”

  No, but the closer Michael got to forty, the less he liked big birthday celebrations. I wondered suddenly if some kind of male biological clock thing was behind his ever-increasing desire to discuss the M word, as we called it. I’d have to think about that.

  Later. When I didn’t have murder on my mind.

  “Yeah, maybe that’s an explanation for how Nate, Maggie, and Francis have been acting,” I said. “But maybe one of them had something much more serious to hide than an inconveniently distant birth date.”

  “Such as?”

  “I can think of two theories, actually. First, one of them killed Ichabod Dilley, and the QB knew about it, and was threatening to expose them.”

  “After thirty years?” Michael said.

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but why wait that long? Are you suggesting that the killer meekly endured the QB’s blackmail all these years, only to lose his or her temper and bump her off this weekend?”

  “Okay, maybe that’s a little far-fetched, but what if the QB, after concealing her knowledge all these years, finally revealed it, only to have the killer strike her down?”

  Michael nodded slowly.

  “A little more plausible,” he said. “I like the picture of the QB like a spider on her web, sitting on her secret for decades until just the right moment to use it. Yes, she’d play it that way. Only…”

  “Only what?”

  “Maybe a tad too melodramatic?”

  “Yeah,” I said, reluctantly. “A little too much like one of Nate’s scripts, maybe. But I have another theory.”

  “I never doubted you would.”

  “What if the QB herself was the murderer?”

  “Of Dilley, you mean?”

  “Right,” I said. The more I thought about it, the more I liked this theory. “I can imagine her killing someone who stood in her way. And maybe she didn’t even have to do the deed herself—maybe all she had to do was set him up for the guys who were after him?”

  “I’m not sure that counts as murder,” Michael said.

  “Legally, I suppose not, but morally, I think it does. So what if Ichabod Dilley didn’t really sell her the rights to Porfiria? What if, instead of getting paid peanuts, he was the one who ended up paying—with his life?”

  “And thirty years later, someone took revenge?”

  “Someone who cared about Ichabod Dilley, and only found out what really happened to him recently—maybe even this weekend.”

  “Found out how?”

  “The other Ichabod Dilley,” I said. “If she’d killed the original, she’d have known her Dilley wasn’t coming to the convention. And yet, with no picture in the program…maybe she thought it was some kind of trick, designed to expose her.”

  “A tall, gaunt scarecrow in bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed shroud, rising up out of the audience, like a boomer version of Banquo’s ghost, pointing the accusing finger at her?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “Although you may want to suggest that to Nate if he does a script based on this weekend. But the idea that someone who had always suspected the QB of murder might make a deliberate effort to surprise and disconcert her and watch her reaction—very possible.”

  “Might be worth finding out whether the convention organizing committee thought of hunting down
Ichabod Dilley all by themselves or whether they had help,” Michael suggested.

  “Good point. And even if no one deliberately engineered Ichabod Dilley’s apparent return from the dead—even if it really was only a comedy of errors—it could have rattled her. Enough, perhaps, that she’d say or do something that gave her away as the murderer. And inspired someone to murder her.”

  “So if you like the scenario that someone killed the QB because he or she knew she killed Dilley—” Michael began.

  “Or set him up to be killed,” I said. “I like it a lot.”

  “That whittles the suspect field down enormously. Mainly Nate, Maggie, and Francis.”

  “Or some less-well-known person who knew Dilley,” I suggested. “Or for that matter, Ichabod junior. We only have his word that he first learned of his uncle’s existence here at the convention. What if his family has been obsessed for years with tracking down the person who murdered his uncle?”

  “They could even have suspected the QB,” Michael said, “but not had a way to prove it—until the convention invitation fell into young Ichabod’s lap.”

  “Or until he engineered his invitation,” I said. “I definitely need to talk to someone on the organizing committee. Find out just how the idea of hunting for Dilley came about.”

  “And I definitely need to get back downstairs,” Michael said, looking at his watch. “I have a panel that should be starting almost immediately, assuming things are still running more or less on time, which I doubt.”

  “And I should make at least a token appearance at the booth,” I said.

  Chapter 37

  “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?”