We’ll Always Have Parrots

Chapter 40

“Hello?” I said, not too loudly. “Anyone in here?”

No answer, just the usual hollow bathroom echo.

And I didn’t hear any roars outside, or any screams of terror or anguish.

But I didn’t hear any reassuring sounds of the convention resuming, either.

Great. I was trapped in the men’s room.

At least if I’d found an exit door, I could mill around outside with the rest of the evacuees. Find out if the police had caught Francis, or if his diversionary tactic had worked and, more important, find out when they’d caught Salome. As it was, I could either stick my head out and risk having it bitten off or lurk around here until someone came in and found me crouching among the urinals. I’d be a long time living that down.

Also a long time getting over the ick factor of fondling a urinal. I washed my hands, twice, and then realized the bathroom was out of paper towels.

Typical of this dump, I thought, drying my hands on my skirt.

Something crackled in my pocket.

I reached in and found the folded piece of paper. My fingertips rasped over the rough, pebbly texture. I pulled it out and stared at it. Off-white with little flecks of color.

“I know who killed her,” I said, half-aloud. I’d been wrong. And the cops were wrong. And I knew how to prove it. Provided the killer didn’t do away with the evidence before I could get it to the police.

I opened the bathroom door a crack and peered out. Nothing. No Salome. No people, either, which probably meant she was still on the loose.

The only sane thing to do was to stay in the bathroom.

Of course, sanity has never been my strong point.

I slipped out into the hall. Still nothing. I crept quietly across the hall, and then along the opposite wall, until I got to the small side door that led into the dealers’ room. I opened it as quietly as I could.

Of course, all this silent creeping might prove useless. Maybe tigers relied more on smell than hearing. If I’d known I’d be trying to elude one, I could have looked it up before coming to the convention.

I glanced into the dealers’ room. No sign of Salome.

Of course there were things she could hide behind. Just a few, but still.

I heard a faint noise in the hall. Monkeys, chattering softly.

Chattering at what?

I slipped inside quickly and closed the door. I’d have felt better if some idiot hadn’t left a door at the other end of the room hanging wide open.

I half-ran over to the booth and grabbed a sword—one of the ones I’d sharpened because, crazy as it had always seemed to me, some customers wanted them that way.

Not so crazy now. I felt suddenly, though quite irrationally, safer. Stupid; what could I really do with a sword if Salome came at me? But I didn’t put it down, even though it hampered me a bit when I searched the booth.

Alaric Steele’s side of the booth.

I might be risking my neck for nothing. He might have already gotten rid of the sketchpad, the one containing the off-white paper with the colored flecks. Of course, I still had the sheet of paper in my pocket, the paper on which Steele had done his estimates for the producer on making armor and swords for his TV show. Neat, legible letters and numbers—his printing had an almost calligraphic elegance. Several very deft sketches—I wished I could draw designs for potential customers that well. It looked quite good on that sheet of pebbly, color-flecked drawing paper. More like fine art than a craftsman’s sketch. But he could always claim he’d found the paper somewhere. It would be so much more satisfactory to find…

The pad. He’d hidden it among the packing materials, sandwiched in between several sheets of cardboard at the bottom of a box filled with Styrofoam peanuts.

Inside, I found pages of the same rough-toothed paper, covered with sketches. I hadn’t seen him sketching at the booth, but suddenly I could see him sitting alone in his room, drawing. Just him and the sketch pad.

He was good. Hell, he’d been good thirty years ago. He was brilliant now. His figures, always strong, were cleaner, simpler—now but just as subtle and lifelike, as if he’d learned to achieve the same results with fewer lines.

The first few pages contained small sketches of various people at the convention. You could tell at a glance how he felt about each subject. He mocked the costumed fans, but gently, as if their antics amused him. He wasn’t quite so kind to the bearded professor or Walker. I was relieved that he hadn’t drawn Michael.

He liked Maggie. He didn’t idealize her, didn’t remove any lines or gray hairs, and yet the sketch of her had a warmth and vibrancy that made you smile just to look at it. It wasn’t unlike the glow Porfiria had in those early comics. Yeah, he liked Maggie.

He liked me, too. The sketches of me didn’t quite have Maggie’s warmth, but they did have their own kind of heat. I didn’t think my Renaissance wench costume was quite as low cut as he’d drawn it, and I knew perfectly well he’d exaggerated my figure. Nice to know I retain my appeal to the criminal element.

But the QB—he’d sketched her, more than anyone, and the pictures radiated a cold hatred that made me hesitate to touch the page. And they made her look startlingly ugly and repulsive. The more startling because they didn’t seem distorted. More like photo-realism, and yet through some subtle alchemy, he’d made the seemingly straightforward lines and curves reveal not only the outer shell but the cruel soul inside. I found myself staring into the eyes of one sketch and thinking that Medusa must have looked just like this, to turn her viewers into stone. I certainly stood staring down at the page for far too long.

A monkey chattered overhead, and I snapped out of it.

“I need to get out of here,” I muttered.

But which way? Back the way I’d come, or out the other side of the dealers’ room?

I should have paid more attention to which way Salome was going. Or, for that matter, where Steele went when he left the dealers’ room a few minutes before Francis turned Salome loose.

“Lady killer or tiger?” I muttered, looking back and forth between the two escape routes. Though for all I knew, if I chose the wrong path, they’d both be lying in wait.

Maybe I could sneak out the back way while they were fighting over who got to finish me off.

“Chill,” I told myself. Odds were Steele was outside, with the rest, waiting to hear that Salome had been recaptured. The last time we’d talked, I’d been busy explaining why I suspected Nate. He had no way of knowing that his producer friend had just handed me the clue that gave him away.

“Just move,” I muttered. I decided that if I were Salome, I’d steer for the lobby, so I headed toward the opposite side of the dealers’ room, where the back exit would take me near the ballroom and the green room. It would have taken Salome longer to reach those.

Though between the time I’d spent cowering in the men’s room and the time it had taken me to search the booth, she could have strolled halfway downtown.

I walked as quickly and quietly as possible to the other end of the room and peered out the open door. Quiet out there.

Possibly too quiet? Would the parrots and monkeys shut up if they knew Salome was nearby?

No way to tell. I peered around the doorway, carefully. Nothing. I slipped out and headed toward the ballroom door. My plan, to the extent I had a plan, was to slip into the ballroom and then out again through the back door Michael and I had used the night before. Odds were few people at the convention knew that route, and Salome would have trouble with the door handles.

Halfway down the hall, I heard a noise. From the ballroom.

Or was it my imagination?

I crept into the ballroom. Definitely a real noise, and coming from a utility closet. Which was locked, from the outside. Perhaps someone had taken refuge in the closet, as I had in the bathroom, and been locked in.

I opened the door and found the bound, gagged figure of the man from the health department.

“Ah, so that’s where you went,” I said.

He wriggled frantically, and made a lot of loud umphing noises that didn’t really need translation.

“Yes, I can untie you if you like,” I said, “but it really might be better to wait until they catch the tiger, and besides—”

Just then, I felt the point of a sword at my back.