We’ll Always Have Parrots

Chapter 38

Kevin and the Kinko’s staff had done a nice job. I stuffed the 8×10 blowups of the QB’s body back into the envelope to save for Dad and concentrated on the two shots of the comic strip.

I’d done a good job, too. Or maybe I should give credit to Kevin again, for picking out such a good digital camera. Every line of the drawing was as sharp and crisp as if I had the original in front of me. Looking at it brought back something else: the drawing had been done on nubby-textured paper, off-white with colored flecks in it. I could see the flecks as clear as anything, and the faint shadows from the nubs.

Some kind of specialty drawing stock. All the artists I knew were particular to the point of superstition about their tools. They’d go to the ends of the earth to track down their favorite brands of pens, pencils, and drawing paper. Not that I didn’t understand. I felt the same way about my metal-working tools. So the paper was probably a useful clue for the police, who had the resources to identify it, track down where it was sold, perhaps even discover which suspects had bought it.

All it told me was that this wasn’t from a published comic. They generally used plain white paper, and much cheaper paper at that.

So I was looking at either an original, unpublished cartoon by Dilley, or a very plausible imitation.

And if I had to bet on it, I’d say the real thing. A real Dilley. I couldn’t prove it. Couldn’t even explain how I knew. But just as I didn’t need to look for a maker’s mark to see whether I’d done a piece of ironwork or whether it belonged to one of my blacksmith friends, I could tell Dilley had drawn this, and not some skilled imitator.

And then again…it felt different. In the published comics, the artist seemed to like Porfiria, despite her flaws. There was a strange innocence to her promiscuity, and a certain glow to her features.

But this Porfiria looked different. A faint piggish look to the eyes. A slight suggestion of blowsiness. And was that an ink blob, or had the artist drawn a large, dark speck stuck between her front teeth?

It still looked a lot like the QB. To me, even more like her than the published comics. Of course, maybe I wasn’t the best judge, since I thoroughly disliked the QB.

Maybe that was it. In the published comics, Porfiria was Tammy Jones, and Ichabod Dilley clearly worshipped her. But in this sketch, though apparently no later, she had become Tamerlaine Wynncliffe-Jones, and he’d learned to hate her. What had she done to turn him against her? And did it have anything to do with her death?

Or for that matter, with his?

“Found something interesting?”

I started, and clutched the photo closer to my chest as I glanced up to see Steele looking at me with curiosity.

“No, just looking at some possible new PR stills for Michael,” I said. That seemed the most plausible explanation for why I’d been so absorbed in studying something from an envelope clearly marked “Photos—do not bend!”

Then again, maybe it was time to enlist another brain and another set of eyes. I longed to talk things over with Michael, but he was off dutifully schmoozing with his fans. Maybe I should stop being so cagy and bounce my ideas off someone. Failing Michael, Steele would do as well as anyone. Better than most in fact. Someone who wasn’t part of the TV show crowd might have a more balanced perspective on the whole thing.

I glanced back at the photos, and this time I noticed something else. When I’d studied the pictures in the camera, the image was so small that I could barely decipher the words of Porfiria’s dialogue. In the blowup, I could see that I’d misread it. She wasn’t saying “Bring in the Vagan ambassador.” It was “Bring in the Viagran ambassador.”

Viagra hadn’t been invented in 1972. I didn’t know precisely when it came on the market, but surely no earlier than the 90s. Probably the late 90s.

Which meant that no matter how sure I was that Ichabod Dilley had drawn it, that just wasn’t possible.

Or was it?

“He’s alive,” I said.

“What’s that?” Steele said.

I slipped the photos back into the envelope and then shoved that into my haversack. Then I took a deep breath. Time to see how this sounds when I say it aloud.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said.

He lifted an eyebrow and glanced briefly at the troupe of dancing trolls performing at the other end of the room, as if to suggest that my definition of crazy needed updating.

“What if Ichabod Dilley is alive?”

“The comic book guy?”

“Yes. When I found the body—I also found something that—well, it doesn’t make sense unless Dilley’s alive,” I said, figuring that I was at least technically keeping my promise not to talk about the scrap of paper. “What if he just disappeared? Went into hiding—after all, he had a good reason to.”

“What reason?” Steele asked.

“He owed money to some very impatient people,” I said. “So he changed his name, disappeared, and left his friends and family to settle with the loan sharks. Maybe he kept tabs on the QB through the years, or maybe he didn’t care. But then the TV show came out, and he saw her getting rich from his creation, and he came back to confront her.”

“Sounds weak to me,” Steele said, frowning. “The show’s been running a couple of years. Why wait till now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’s been working up to it. Typhani said the QB had been getting hate mail. Of course, Typhani’s only been with her for six weeks, but maybe he’s been sending her hate mail for years, and this convention was the first chance he’d had to strike.”

“Hasn’t she done conventions before?” Steele asked.

“Yes, but not a lot on the East Coast,” I said. “Or—wait! Maybe he saw an announcement about Ichabod Dilley appearing at the convention, knew it wasn’t him, and finally lost it. He would have no way of knowing that the convention organizers, not the QB, had recruited the wrong Dilley. And if he thought her responsible, he might have thought that not only had she stolen his work and made a travesty of it, but now she was stealing his very identity.”

I savored the idea.

“You watch a lot of TV, don’t you?” Steele asked.

“Come on,” I said. “Work with me, Steele.”

Bouncing ideas off Michael was much more satisfactory, I thought. Michael bounced them right back. So call this a dress rehearsal for bouncing things off Michael at dinner.

“Okay. You think Ichabod Dilley was here, at the convention,” Steele said. In a voice that clearly showed he was humoring me.

“Is here. In disguise,” I said. “And the only thing we knew about him is his approximate age. Only a few of the backstage crowd are in the right age group, but we only need one. For that matter, he doesn’t have to be part of the backstage crowd. He could be any of the fans. A killer, hiding himself in a crowd of a thousand innocent fans.”

“You going to interrogate them all?” Steele asked, glancing around at the passing convention goers.

“Most of them are too young,” I said. “Most of them are in their teens or twenties. Probably only about five percent of them are even close to the right age.”

“Yeah, but there’s another five percent wearing costumes that don’t let you see how old they are,” Steele said, pointing to two passing figures in space suits.

He was right. Some of the costumes obscured faces and hands so completely that their wearers could be any age.

“But they’re still a minority,” I said, after a minute. “Maybe another five percent, for a total of a tenth of the crowd. But then take out the roughly half who are women, because I’m pretty sure Dilley’s still a guy. Back down to five percent.”

“Of course, five percent of a thousand means fifty people,” Steele said.

“And that’s where the police come in,” I said. “There’s no way I can find and investigate fifty people. But for the police, it’s a piece of cake. Especially since they do have one witness to narrow down the suspect list, or even pick Dilley out of the crowd.”

“Witness?” Steele said. “Who?”

“Nate,” I said. “They knew each other—Dilley stayed with him for several months, when they worked on a film together.”

“Long time ago,” Steele said, shaking his head. “People change. Wait till your high school class has its twentieth reunion and you’ll see.”

“That’s true,” I said, wondering briefly if Steele realized how close I was to that twentieth reunion. “And Nate didn’t exactly give a good description. Maggie did ten times better, and she claims she only saw him once or twice.”

“Women usually are better at that stuff anyway,” Steele said.

“Or maybe there’s another reason,” I said. “Maybe Nate doesn’t want Ichabod Dilley found. Maybe Nate is Ichabod Dilley.”

“Nate?” Steele echoed.

“Okay, not necessarily the real Ichabod Dilley, the kid who left Kansas for the bright lights of San Francisco and then supposedly died tragically young,” I said. “But back around 1972, writing and drawing underground comics and painting psychedelic posters probably weren’t the kind of things an ambitious young screenwriter wanted on his resume. So maybe he knew Dilley and used him as a front for his counterculture projects.”

Steele shook his head, but he was listening.

“And that would explain how Ichabod Dilley could change from his high school’s most-likely-to-succeed golden boy to the awkward, taciturn character Maggie describes,” I said. “It wasn’t drugs. He would try to say as little as possible because he’d need to avoid giving away the fact that he hadn’t painted the paintings or created the comics.”

“Or maybe when Dilley showed up, it was really your friend Nate, in disguise,” Steele said.

“That’s the spirit,” I said. “And you know, that’s not a bad idea. It fits with what little physical description I’ve heard of Dilley—he and Nate were both tall and painfully thin, with brown hair. And I saw Nate in a photo from around that time—even in the 1970s, Nate kept his hair short and his face clean-shaven. So what better disguise than to put on a wig and a fake beard when he wanted to pretend to be Dilley? When you add the trench coat and the dark glasses, it positively shouts disguise. I wonder if Dilley the nephew could get any pictures of his uncle. Maybe the real Ichabod was short and round like him.”

Steele shrugged.

“Anyway,” I continued. “The Porfiria comics ended, not because their creator was dead, but because the front man was. Nate could no longer publish them under Dilley’s name. And if his screenwriting career was starting to take off by then, maybe he was just as glad to end the comic series.”

“Still doesn’t explain why he would kill the QB, as you call her, this weekend,” Steele said.

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet,” I admitted. “Dilley disappeared not long after they all worked together on that movie. Maybe Nate killed him, or set him up to be killed by his enemies, and the QB found out this weekend, and he killed her to keep her from fingering him. Or maybe she knew all along, and was blackmailing him—that could explain why he’s stood by her so loyally all these years. Until this weekend, when he snapped. Who knows? If I can just get the police to consider the idea that the creator of the comic books is alive, they can probably figure out the rest.”

“Still sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” he said. “Of course if you—damn!”

“What’s wrong?”

“I need to make a call before five,” he said. “Preferably from someplace quieter. Can you watch the booth for maybe fifteen minutes?”

“I owe you a lot more than fifteen minutes,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “You can tell me the rest of your theory when I get back.”

I wasn’t sure there was much more to my theory, I thought, as he strode away. In fact, I’d already found a flaw. Nate didn’t know about Ichabod Dilley naming his characters out of a medical dictionary.

Or pretended not to know. After all, even if Nate hadn’t figured out the naming scheme over the years, odds were someone would have done so, and that Nate would have heard about it. In fact, his claiming not to know was downright suspicious.

And his stick figures, which I’d always seen as evidence of Nate’s complete lack of drawing ability—were they deliberately bad?

Yes, I liked my theory. It explained everything, from the scrap of comic to her last words.

I could see it. Nate protesting something she was doing to the show. Telling her she couldn’t do that to his comics, or his characters, or his words—it didn’t matter which. And both Nate and the parrot heard her reply: “I can do anything. I own them; I can—”

And that was where he cracked. And killed the QB.

Suddenly, I was impatient for Steele to return. I had to tell this to the cops. And the sooner the better.