We'll Always Have Parrots(20)

He nodded and waded into the crowd.





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.