We’ll Always Have Parrots

Chapter 11

I watched, with amusement, the conversation between Cordelia and Ichabod Dilley the younger. As I predicted, she wasn’t insulted or even surprised at his question. She pointed to a couple of items in a locked glass case. He glanced down, and I saw him start. He’d seen the price tags, no doubt. Prolonged discussion followed. I wondered if Dilley was trying to bargain down the price—fat chance—or merely pleading with Cordelia to let him read her precious yellowing comics.

“What’s up with Junior?” Steele, who’d been busy with a customer, asked me.

“Apparently he’s decided to make up for his parents’ neglect of his uncle by championing the late Ichabod Dilley’s work. Although I think it’s mostly because his parents paid off Dilley’s debts when he died.”

“They what?” Steele asked.

“Paid his debts. Large ones. Of course, before he can champion his uncle’s work, he needs to know something about it,” I added. “I steered him to someone who can sell him a copy.”

“Hope he’s well heeled,” Steele said. “I bet they’re charging a lot for those old rags.”

“I hear the original first issue goes for over five hundred dollars now,” I said. “Probably more than the real Ichabod Dilley got for it back in 1969.”

“Probably more than he got for all twelve issues,” Steele said.

“More than the QB paid him for the film rights, anyway,” I said.

“How would you know that?” Steele said.

“She brags about it,” I said. “Not in public, of course; but sometimes when she gets plastered, she gets careless.”

At three, the crowd in the dealers’ room thinned when Walker, the show’s other leading heartthrob, took the stage for his appearance, while the QB held court in the autograph room.

Steele was talking to a slick-looking character who claimed to be the producer of an upcoming sword and sorcery flick that needed a vast quantity of custom armor and weaponry. If Steele asked me, I’d say make sure you get the money first, but so far he hadn’t, and I didn’t really know him well enough to offer unsolicited advice.

And Steele kept glancing at me as if he didn’t want to say too much in my presence, so I took the opportunity to dash out for a much-needed bathroom break.

I was waiting for the hot air machine to finish chapping my hands when the door burst open and Typhani ran in sobbing.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I confess I was hoping she’d assure me that she’d only broken a fingernail. Or perhaps plead to be left alone and lock herself in a stall. Instead, she flung herself on me.

It took several minutes before she calmed down enough to talk. I stood there, awkwardly patting her on the back and wondering if I was a bad person for worrying about the mascara stains on my costume.

“Oh, she’s—she’s—she’s impossible,” Typhani wailed, finally managing to speak.

“The QB? Yeah, impossible works,” I said. “Unbearable’s good, too, and obnoxious. I’d even go as far as unspeakable, if you like.”

“And mean!” Typhani muttered, with surprising venom. “Mean as…as…oh, I don’t know.”

Apparently vocabulary wasn’t Typhani’s strong suit.

“Too mean to live,” she said, finally. “That’s what my mother used to say. Too mean to live.”

“What has she done now?” I asked.

Instead of answering, Typhani doubled over abruptly—was she having some kind of a seizure? No, she had put her head nearly on the bathroom floor and was staring past my feet, at the floor beneath the stalls.

“No feet,” she said, bobbing up again. “Okay, I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but it’s about the hate mail she’s been getting. She got another one today and—”

From one of the stalls, we heard the tinkling sound of liquid falling into a toilet. Followed by the sound of flushing.

“Someone’s spying on us!”

She shrank into the corner farthest from the stalls and stared at them with a panic-stricken face.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. I walked over to where I could see the doors to the stalls. All were ajar. Perhaps the eavesdropper was standing on the seat, hoping we wouldn’t notice.

I strode over to the first stall and slammed the door open. Nothing. I did the same for the second, third, and fourth stalls. All empty.

She was in the handicapped stall at the end.

I took a deep breath and slammed open that door, too.

Empty.

Then, from near the ceiling, I heard the sound of liquid tinkling into a toilet. I glanced up to see a gray parrot sitting on an exposed pipe. As I watched, the parrot fluttered its wings and made the sound of a toilet flushing.

I sighed.

“Who is it?”

“It’s only a miserable parrot,” I said. “It’s safe to talk.”

“What if it overhears us and repeats what I say?”

Interesting point. If Salome’s keeper was right, the parrot might imitate something shortly after we said it, but probably wouldn’t wander around the hotel repeating it for the rest of the convention. But what if the wrong person walked into the bathroom too soon? Better safe than sorry.

“Can we talk somewhere else?” I suggested.

“No, it’s okay,” Typhani said. She was blotting her eyes with a damp paper towel. “I’m all right now, honestly.”

She left.

So the QB was getting hate mail. If that surprised poor Typhani, she had a lot to learn.

I was making sure all the bits of my costume were back in order when my mother stormed into the rest room.

“There you are,” she said, when she saw me, and I relapsed briefly into that dreaded childhood feeling of knowing I had displeased my parents, but not yet knowing how.

“What’s wrong, Mother?” I asked.

“That woman,” Mother said. “I could strangle her with pleasure.”

I winced. Over half the people in the hotel were female, but I had a feeling I knew exactly which woman she meant.

“You have to do something,” Mother went on. “Your father is comforting Eric, but you have to do something about this.”

“Eric?” I said, torn between anger and irritation. “What has she done to Eric?”

As if in answer, Mother handed me a convention program. From the various stains and fingerprints, I deduced that it was Eric’s, and that my parents had fed him pizza for lunch. From flipping through the pages, I further deduced that Eric had adopted the common convention-goer’s goal of getting autographs from everyone pictured. He’d made a good start—I saw Nate’s signature, Chris’s, Walker’s, even Dilley’s, beside the giant question mark they’d used to substitute for his missing photo. When I got to the W’s, I saw that Michael had signed, and after him, someone named Maggie West. The space beside Tamerlaine Wynncliffe-Jones was blank. Okay, this explained why Eric had gotten within striking distance of the QB, but not what she’d done to him.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I know it’s a pain, standing in line, but her line probably isn’t as long as Walker’s or Michael’s. If he goes now—”

“He stood in line,” Mother said. “And he asked her very nicely for her autograph. And that…witch threw the program back in his face and shouted at him!”

“Strangling’s too good for her,” I said. Actually, I thought Mother was overreacting a little. Not that I’d ever tell her.

“The child will probably be traumatized for life,” Mother said.

Or perhaps the experience might teach him the folly of idolizing people on silly TV shows.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

Mother hesitated.

“I was about to say get her to apologize, but on second thought, I don’t want her in the same room with Eric,” she said. “But someone should tell her exactly what we think of her. I would, but I’m not sure they’d let me anywhere near her again.”

What had Mother done to make herself persona non grata in the autograph room? I decided I’d rather not know, though chances were I’d hear all about it before the end of the convention. And did she realize what she was asking me to do? Tell Michael’s boss exactly what my family and I thought of her?

Then again, why not? Odds were the QB couldn’t afford to fire Michael right now. It might be a good thing if she did, for that matter. Right now, at the peak of his popularity with the series, he’d probably find it relatively easy to find other roles. Meatier, more dignified roles that did not require him to prance around in tight leather pants.

And if not, well, eventually we’d find a house we could afford without the acting income.

“But first, get her damned autograph on the program,” Mother said.

“Do you have any idea why she wouldn’t sign it?” I asked.

“She kept shouting that she didn’t want her signature on the same page as that imposter’s,” Mother said.

Imposter? I glanced at the page. I only saw signatures from Michael—that looked genuine—and Maggie West. Who, from reading her one-paragraph biography, had played the Duchess of Urushiol, Walker’s on-screen mother, for the first half of season one. I’d only started watching when Michael joined the show, but she looked familiar. Then again, she was an actress; I’d probably seen her in lots of things, if she’d been in the business as long as the QB had. Of course, that didn’t mean whoever signed the program was the real thing. Maybe the convention had invited the wrong Maggie West, too.

“I’ll straighten it out,” I said.