We’ll Always Have Parrots

Chapter 23

In the green room, I scanned the occupants covertly while filling a plate with bacon and hash browns. Yes, several suspects were available for questioning, if I could think of anything to ask.

I scored another autograph for Eric and eliminated one suspect immediately. The mild-mannered elderly actor who played Porfiria’s chief counselor had only just come from the airport, and was all agog to hear about the QB’s death. I was a little worried that I’d get stuck answering his questions, but the bearded professor I’d seen lecturing several times Friday interrupted his monologue about the similarities between the modern TV series and Chaucer and barged into our conversation. After also signing Eric’s program, he began telling Porfiria’s counselor all about the murder with endless details. Though not, I quickly noticed, much accuracy.

A convention volunteer standing nearby saw the expression on my face and ambled over.

“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” he murmured. “Just wind him up, give him a topic, and he can go on for hours.”

“Amazing, yes,” I said. “You’d think by now he’d have accidentally gotten one fact right, but so far he’s batting zero.”

“Well, what do you expect?” the volunteer said. “Last night we decided, for the good of the convention, to take him out for dinner and keep him away as long as possible. So we all drew straws and I was one of the ones who lost. We collected him at four, after his last panel, and we didn’t manage to dump him off again until two in the morning. He missed the whole thing.”

“So anything he knows about the murder is secondhand.”

“And probably wrong,” the volunteer grumbled. “Even if someone told him what really happened, there’s no way he’d stop talking long enough to hear it. His mouth doesn’t have an off switch, or even a pause button. God, what a night.”

“Your valiant service to fandom shall not pass unnoticed,” I said. “For that matter, the police might be mildly grateful that at least you’ve given one possible suspect a good alibi.”

“We could be persuaded to frame him, if you’d like,” the volunteer said. “We could suddenly recall that he made a very long trip to the bathroom, and came back covered with blood, complaining about a broken paper towel dispenser.”

“Sounds suspicious,” I said. I couldn’t decide whether or not to laugh—I wasn’t entirely sure he was joking.

“Just tell me what time the murder happened,” he said, “That’s all I need. And I’m sure the rest of the pita patrol would be happy to remember it the same way.”

“Pita patrol?” I echoed. “Do I deduce that you took him to a Middle Eastern restaurant?”

“No, actually pita stands for pain in the…ah…”

“Gotcha,” I said. “But if you’re the pita patrol, what should we call the crew who were shepherding Miss Wynncliffe-Jones around?”

“Happily unemployed, now,” he said, “and maybe prime suspects.”

I noticed that Porfiria’s counselor seemed to have gone into character—not surprising, since much of his on-screen time was spent maintaining an expression of rapt attention while Porfiria delivered harangues at least as tedious as the professor’s. “I do chess problems in my head,” he’d explained once, when I asked him how he put up with it.

“Maybe you should rescue the poor man before too long,” I suggested to the volunteer.

“Yeah, I’ll be dragging the professor off to a panel in about five minutes,” the volunteer said.

I left him leaning against a wall watching his unwanted charge with a commendably neutral face, and strolled over to a table where Francis and Walker were sitting, both staring down at a sheaf of papers.

Francis, who startled easily at the best of times, nearly leaped out of his chair when he noticed me, and reflexively held out his hand to shield his document. Walker glanced up, waved his coffee cup to me in greeting, and then took a deep swallow, closed his eyes, and sighed with the ecstasy of the true caffeine addict. A transient ecstasy, though. Almost immediately he opened his eyes again and frowned at Francis.

“Have a seat, Meg,” Walker said. “You probably want to hear about this, too. We’ve been studying my contract.”

“You can’t assume that Michael’s contract is identical,” Francis said, looking anxious.

“Yeah, right; like you’d actually bother to fight for any changes,” Walker said. “Never mind, we all know this clause is pretty standard with her contracts. The upshot,” he continued, turning to me, “in case Michael hasn’t managed to pry it out of Francis yet, is that as far as Francis can tell, the clause in our contracts that lets her hang onto us for three more years, whether we like it or not, still applies, because our contracts are with her production company, not her.”

“Only as long as the show is still being filmed,” Francis said. “If the network cancels the show, you’re released.”

“But we don’t yet know if the network will cancel the show. Do you have any idea when we’ll find out?”

“It could be as soon as Monday,” Francis said.

“Or not for a couple of months,” Walker added. “And even if the show goes on, we have no idea whether they’ll keep me or not. Who gets to decide that? The network? Her heirs, whoever they are? Nobody seems to know. So I’m in limbo. Can’t take another job, because there’s no knowing whether they’ll call me back to Porfiria.”

“Wouldn’t her firing you break the contract?” I asked.

“It would, if she’d actually done the paperwork,” he said. “But she didn’t; just told me she was planning to. And I have no proof. No witnesses. They could say I was making it up.”

“They wouldn’t say that,” Francis said, in his most soothing tones. “More likely they would say that you were overreacting to something Miss Wynncliffe-Jones said in the heat of a creative discussion.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Walker said. “I’ll still go crazy waiting to find out.”

“It could be as soon as Monday,” Francis repeated, with more patience than I would have managed at this point in the discussion.

“If I’m not in jail,” Walker said. “This is great: the police want to arrest me because I was fired, and the production company still might claim I wasn’t fired. Great. Even dead she’s wrecking my life.”

“She’d have made a hell of a contract lawyer,” Francis said.

“And an even better contract killer,” Walker added. “You knew her; you used to represent her. Why didn’t you warn me?”

With that parting shot, he stormed off. His exit would have been more dramatic if I hadn’t noticed that everyone with an eleven o’clock panel was leaving anyway, while some of the ten o’clock panelists had begun to filter into the green room.

I noticed Francis slipping something into his mouth. Another antacid tablet. Why would someone who handled stress this badly ever go into a career like agenting? He had steepled his hands in front of his face and appeared to be taking deep breaths while he chewed.

“Ridiculous,” he said, with the overly precise articulation of someone who would really rather be screaming and breaking things. “It would be different if we actually had anything lined up that this would interfere with. Or if people were beating on our doors.”

And then he glanced at me as if suddenly realizing that he had accidentally revealed embarrassing, confidential information about one client to the girlfriend of another. I didn’t believe it was an accident, but I didn’t really blame him.

“You represented the QB?” I asked.

“Years ago,” Francis said, shuddering. “About twenty-five years, to be exact. She’s gone through a lot of agents since then. And it wasn’t precisely me, individually. I had gone to work for a rather large agency—I think they called me a ‘document specialist,’ but it was really just a glorified name for a file clerk. And then one day, one of the agents called me into his office and told me they were giving me a chance. Assigning me a client. It was all rather disconcerting.”

“I can see how it would be, to have the QB as your first client.”

“Well, at first it was having a client at all that disconcerted me,” he said. “Apparently most of the thankless, low-paying jobs in this agency were taken by would-be agents. I was the only one in the lot who simply wanted a paycheck. Perhaps I should have spoken up then.”

“You didn’t want to be an agent?”

“I had no objection to it,” he said. “The idea just never occurred to me. And, of course, I quickly learned that the reason they’d picked me was that they couldn’t really afford to lose clients at that juncture, but no one else at the agency could stand to deal with her.”

“And you could?”

“I didn’t like it, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “But apparently I managed to keep her on board longer than anyone imagined possible. By the time she’d moved on, I’d become sort of an agency specialist in…um…”

“Difficult, high-maintenance clients,” I suggested.

“In a word, yes. And after about ten years, another agency offered me better terms for doing essentially the same thing. And four years ago, I decided to go out on my own. I thought maybe I could finally pick and choose my clients. Unfortunately, about half of the clients I was representing at the time chose to go with me.”

“Including Walker?”

“Yes, including Walker,” Francis said.

I burst out laughing, and Francis looked deeply offended.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I just realized that you’ve spent your whole career on pita patrol!”

And to my relief, after I explained the phrase, Francis wasn’t insulted.

“Pita patrol,” he said, as if savoring the word. “Yes, I like that. I usually refer to them as ‘my little flock,’ but pitas is more like it.”

“Always nice to find a new way of looking at the world,” I said. “It’s divided into pitas and non-pitas.”

“More like pitas and other people’s clients,” Francis said. “Except for one or two. Michael, for example, but I know perfectly well that I won’t be keeping him much longer.”

If he was trying to win my sympathy, it was working. I found I not only felt sorry for Francis, but I liked him more than I had before. And felt even more strongly that Michael needed a new agent.

“What was she like back then?” I asked. “The QB, back when you represented her.”

“Younger,” he said. “But then, weren’t we all? I don’t remember much about her, back then. I know that sounds implausible. After all, I worked with her for a year and a half. But all I remember from that whole time is a sort of ghastly feeling, like getting hit over the head repeatedly with a sledgehammer.”

He sat staring into space for a few moments, as if trying to remember.

“Of course, she hasn’t changed much,” he said, finally.

“Then why did you let Walker sign with her?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not as if we had a lot of other options, did we?” he said. “Not like Michael. If he did decide to put his academic career on hold, there’s no end to what he could do.”

Time to hit the trail, I thought, if Francis was going to keep dragging the conversation around to his uneasy relationship with Michael.