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
“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 pushed 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
