We'll Always Have Parrots(33)

“Just curious,” I said.

“I’ve never been to a murder before,” he said. “The closest I’ve ever come was the funeral directors.”

After that, he retreated back into his shell. I wondered whether to take his dazed condition as a sign of innocence or guilt. I shrugged and moved on in search of something more likely to keep me awake, and someplace less crazy to wait.

Just then, I saw a monkey drop into the crowd, swipe an ice cream bar from the hand of a mermaid, race to the edge of the ballroom, and scramble up again.

The hotel had become largely free of wildlife over the course of the day, but one of the last contingents of free-range monkeys had taken refuge in the upper reaches of the ballroom. Most of the chandeliers had one or two monkeys swinging gently on them, and you could see how the monkeys traveled across the ceiling using wires, decorative molding and, of course, the ubiquitous fake vines. Other monkeys dangled comfortably beneath the bottom of the balcony, nibbling bits of food and grooming each other.

The balcony. I could hide there.

I located the balcony stairs.

The lighting and sound techs and the camera crew glanced up when I arrived, but I nodded to them in an offhand but businesslike way, walked to the railing, took out my camera, and snapped a few shots of the stage. Then I looked at my watch, frowned, looked down at the stage again, shrugged, and settled in a corner where I thought I’d be out of their way.

I had no idea what I’d say if they challenged my presence, but I’d seen enough of the convention organizers’ operating style to suspect that if I looked as if I knew what I was doing, no one would question me.

At first I thought I could doze off, right there on the floor—the balcony was dark, apparently the better for the techs’ work, and every part of my body voted for sleep. Except my brain, which wanted to filibuster. I felt guilty. After all, Michael had been up as long as I had, and was sick to boot, and he wasn’t sleeping yet. He was off getting interrogated, poor thing.

I took out my camera and flipped through the pictures until I got to the ones I’d taken of the crime scene.

I skipped quickly over the ones of the body. I wasn’t even sure why I’d taken them. Perhaps a fleeting notion that Dad would find them interesting and possibly useful. I imagined, for a moment, how proud and excited Dad would be if he looked at my photos and spotted some key clue that solved the crime. But that seemed a long shot, even for Dad. No reason for me to stare at them.

I studied the shots I’d taken of the room. At first, the room’s wrecked condition had excited the police, who assumed the killer had trashed it while searching for something. I hated to disillusion them, but thought they should know that the room already looked as if a hurricane had hit it at two o’clock, when the QB was very much alive. Which didn’t mean that someone hadn’t tossed the room, of course, but I doubted if anyone could tell which piles of debris had already been there earlier and which the killer had created.

And I studied the frame from the comic I’d seen in the QB’s hand—part of a Porfiria comic. But since I hadn’t read the comics, I didn’t know what the story was about. The little screen that let me preview pictures was less than two inches square. Hard to see any details. A figure that seemed to be Porfiria reclined on a Roman-style couch, holding a wine goblet and saying…something. Possibly “Send in the Vegan ambassador!” which meant nothing to me. Then I decided it actually said Vagan ambassador. That made sense. I could see Ichabod Dilley naming a country for the vagus nerve.

But it didn’t tell me why the QB had died clutching this scrap of comic. Maybe if I could see the damned thing better.

I recalled from my nephew Kevin’s instructions that the camera had a button to let me zoom in on part of the picture. If I could do that, I might see more details. Could be useful.

I wandered over to the edge of the balcony, where the light was better, and studied the various buttons on the camera, all of them rather cryptically marked. I had the sinking feeling that I could play with buttons a long time before I figured out how to zoom in.

And what if I found the delete function instead? In my present exhausted condition, I’d better not chance it. Kevin could walk me through the zoom feature tomorrow.

Better yet, I could e-mail him the photos tonight—he’d made sure I had detailed, written instructions on how to do that—and ask him if there was a way I could get some blowups. Maybe if I could find someone at the hotel with a printer and—

“Wild thing!” boomed a voice, accompanied by crashing guitar chords, from a refrigerator-sized speaker about a foot from my head.