“Just because she grabbed a knife and tried to kill you?”
I could still hear her wailing. Her cries seemed to echo through the entire place.
“She was trying to poison people with thirty-year-old cereal,” he said. “She almost had me fooled with that story about keeping her toys in pristine condition.”
“I’m not a world-famous detective, but I think she was heavier than the shooter we saw in the surveillance video.”
“But she definitely has violent tendencies,” Monk said. “She’s a danger to society.”
“Only if you trash the cereal boxes that she’s been saving for decades.”
“What kind of person saves a box of cereal for that long?”
“What kind of person feels uncontrollably compelled to throw it out?”
“A Good Samaritan,” Monk replied. “I was acting in the public interest. Those expired boxes of deadly cereal were within reach of children.”
“Do you see any children?”
“I see people acting like children,” Monk said. “That’s just as dangerous.”
I led Monk towards the back door, which, incidentally, was the one the killer had most likely used to escape into the convention center after shooting Stipe. It was the only way to leave the building without encountering that woman and her ceremonial dagger again.
We passed table after table selling Snork noses and Confederation uniforms, underscoring for me Stottlemeyer’s point that it would be close to impossible to trace the killer through the purchase of his costume.
We went down the aisle of autographing booths, where Beyond Earth celebrities signed autographs and took photos with conventioneers for a fee.
There was a woman, easily in her seventies, surrounded with photos of herself from an appearance as Yeoman Curtis, who was reduced to a cube of foam and crushed in episode 17. There were a dozen middle-aged men in Confederation uniforms lined up to pay $20 to have their picture taken with her.
In the next booth were a turnip-shaped man with a bad comb-over and a midget. They were signing autographs and answering questions for three conventioneers. I recognized the actors as Bill Wheatley and Ricardo Sanchez, who played teenage stowaway Bobby Muir and Glorp, the interstellar slug.
“Ricky and I stayed in touch after the show, and a couple of years ago we got together to perform in a dinner theater production of The Odd Couple,” Wheatley was saying. “But in our Beyond Earth personas, so to speak.”
“Being the slug,” Sanchez said, “obviously I played Oscar Madison.”
“All the dialogue was the same, because Neil Simon is a genius, and you don’t mess with perfection,” Wheatley said. “But we have a history, you know, and we tapped that in our performances. And I wore my Confederation uniform.”
“And I wore my makeup,” Sanchez said.
“It was a riff on popular culture, very self-referential and culturally hip.”
The midget sighed. “It could have gone to Broadway if only we’d found a producer with some vision and some guts.”
Monk and I moved on.
In the next booth was Willis Goldkin, the writer of the “Nagging Nanobots” episode, which I vaguely remembered. It was about these little robot mosquitoes that attacked the Discovery crew and took over their minds.
Goldkin had a stack of xeroxed autographed scripts in front of him that he was selling for $15 each. There were no takers.
There were more Beyond Earth guest stars and production personnel along the aisle selling their wares and their memories, but I avoided them. It was too depressing and pathetic.
Instead, I turned my attention to a dealer who was selling books, comic books, novelizations, and magazines about Beyond Earth as well as the DVDs and videos of the original series and the Saturday-morning cartoon.
I was tempted to buy Monk a DVD, just so he could see the show, but the boxed set was fifty dollars and I wasn’t sure the SFPD would consider the purchase a legitimate expense.
The last booth—the one closest to the exit—was devoted to the Galactic Uprising. A couple dressed up like Mr. Snork and Starella were standing behind the table handing out leaflets to conventioneers as they passed by.
Behind the couple was an enormous poster depicting the starship Discovery and the original cast, covered with bold type that demanded that the UBS Network immediately halt production on the show and bring back the “true classic” with the “beloved original actors.”
The poster touted that the campaign was endorsed by “superstars” Kyle Bethany and Minerva Klane, as well as “famed writer” Willis Goldkin, which made me wonder why he wasn’t sitting with his comrades in the rebellion rather than by himself two booths away.
I took one of the leaflets from the woman and stuck it in my purse.
“If you go to our Web site, you can download the JPEG of the poster and e-mail or text-message it to everyone in your address book, put it on your site, your blog, your MySpace page, your Facebook profile, and your Yahoo group,” she said. “It’s the individual responsibility of every single member of fandom to stand up and be counted in this epic struggle.”
Mr. Snork spit and growled and coughed up something.
“My name is Natalie Teeger and I work for this man, Adrian Monk.” I tipped my head to Monk, who was involved in his own epic struggle to avoid looking at the woman’s four breasts. “He’s a consultant to the San Francisco Police Department. Can you tell me who is in charge of the uprising? We’d like to talk with him.”
Mr. Snork hacked and grunted and gurgled.
“Ernie is,” she said, referring to the guy in the Snork makeup. “He’s the one who first heard about what Stipe was going to do and he’s been fighting the fight ever since. His dedication to fandom is unbelievable. Never say die!”
She looked at him with unabashed admiration.
“And you are?” Monk asked.
“His girlfriend, Aimee Gilberman,” she said. “Before I met Ernie, I knew nothing about Beyond
