“Coincidence?”
“That’s what I am now. A comics illustrator.” She gestured with the portfolio under her right arm, bringing his attention to it for the first time.
“No kidding,” Fenderson said, searching for the nearest exit. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Alcott had to be as lousy an illustrator as she had been a screenwriter, even if he couldn’t remember, exactly, just how lousy a screenwriter she was.
“Maybe you’d like to see my work.”
“Uh …”
“Just for old times’ sake? You never know. I might be exactly what you’re looking for.”
Fenderson figured there was zero chance of that, yet he couldn’t bring himself to blow Alcott off. It bothered him that she was such a blank page to him; her name was familiar, so why wasn’t her face?
“Well, okay,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Here?” Alcott looked around, scrunching up her nose at all the bodies flying by them. “I’d rather we found a place to sit down. Maybe have some tea or something.”
“Not here at the Con. Somewhere else. I’ll drive, if you want. I know just the place.”
Fenderson couldn’t imagine why he should go anywhere with this cow. He tried to retreat. “Gee, I don’t know, Jen. I’ve got a couple of meetings to take later, I wouldn’t want to be late.”
“I understand. You don’t want to waste your time on somebody who can’t deliver the goods. And all you’ve got so far is my word that my stuff’s decent, right?”
That was exactly what Fenderson was thinking. “No, no. It’s just …”
“Here. I’ll give you a small peek.” She unzipped a corner of her portfolio and peeled it open for him.
Fenderson leaned in, squinting. What he could see of the artwork inside was pretty damn impressive: crisp, bold, even slightly cinematic. It wasn’t as dynamic as the stuff the big man in the Luke Skywalker outfit had been hawking earlier, but it was close. Maybe even close enough.
“Not bad, huh?” Alcott said. “Some people tell me that my work reminds them of Jack Kirby.”
Fenderson had no clue who Jack Kirby was, but if he could draw like Jennifer Alcott apparently could, he’d probably go far in the comics business.
“So,” Alcott said, zipping the portfolio back up before Fenderson could ask to see more of what it contained, “shall we go?”
Fenderson wanted to say no. He’d been hoping to partner up with somebody who was more than just another face at the Con, maybe one of the superstars sitting in on a panel or signing books for a line of people winding through the hall like an endless snake. But that hope was a long shot and Alcott was a bird in the hand. If the lady was as good as the sample she’d let him see, and she could be bought for next to nothing, he could avoid all the hassles of negotiating with a stranger by cutting a deal with her instead. Rather than a pain-in-the-ass distraction he could have done without, maybe running into Alcott like this had been a genuine stroke of luck. The kind of luck, he knew, that only came to people destined for greatness.
“Sure. Lead the way,” Fenderson said.
She drove an old shitbox Honda that would have had him laughing out loud had it not been a big step up from the ancient Toyota he’d driven down to San Diego at a crawl. The A/C was on the fritz so they had to ride around with all the windows down, Alcott’s hair blowing in her face like a damn sheep dog.
She took him to a cafe that sat on a corner at the feet of the old El Cortez Hotel, up in the hills above downtown where the one-way streets could make you crazy if you didn’t know the territory. The cafe was mundane and the place wasn’t even a hotel anymore—all the building played host to these days were business seminars and wedding receptions—so Fenderson couldn’t figure what they were doing there until they were seated at a table and Alcott explained the irony in her choice of setting. Apparently, during its infancy, Comic-Con used to be held at the El Cortez, down in a basement that was far too large for the meager turnout it was able to generate at the time. Alcott knew this because she’d been coming to the Con forever, even back then when she was just a pimply faced kid, having dreamed of drawing comic books years before the thought of being a screenwriter ever entered her mind.
Fenderson nodded and pretended to give a shit. He still couldn’t recall anything about Alcott as she’d appeared in his Learning Bridge extension class, but her mention of screenwriting gave him an idea as to how he might discretely refresh his memory. “So how’s the script going?” he asked.
“The script?”
“The one you were writing in class.”
“Oh. That,” Alcott said, clearly embarrassed the subject had come up. “I gave up on it. Everybody I showed it to said it was awful.” She flashed that eerie smile again. “Just like you did.”
“Me? Did I say that?”
“In so many words. You told the whole class. But I didn’t take it personally, because you liked to say similar things about everyone’s writing.”
Fenderson briefly considered denying it, then decided to save his breath. Of course he’d said some terrible things to the morons in that class; they’d paid their tuition to have a working professional assess their writing in an honest and straightforward manner, and he wouldn’t have been doing them any favors by killing them with kindness. The sooner they realized they’d just be muddying the waters real writers like Fenderson had to swim in, glutting the market with unsolicited screenplays that were all but unreadable, the better. Cruel? Fenderson liked to think he was simply giving them their money’s worth.
“Remind me what it was about. I’m drawing a blank,” Fenderson said.
“It’s not important. I’ve moved on. And it’s not my writing we came here to discuss anyway. It’s my abilities as
