We'll Always Have Parrots(46)

“Sold out!” the reporter exclaimed.

The other two Amazons crossed their arms, too, as did the monkey perched on the shoulder of the taller one.

The reporter took a deep breath and was opening her mouth to protest when she suddenly began batting at her head and shrieking. Apparently one of the hovering monkeys had become fascinated with the wire leading to her head and made a grab for it, ripping the earpiece out of her ear and the lavaliere microphone from her lapel.

The reporter retreated from the lobby, shouting something rather incoherent about lawyers, rabies, and the First Amendment. One of the Amazons tried to retrieve the microphone and earpiece from the monkey, resulting in a lively game of tug of war, while the cameraman had begun filming some nut who’d shinnied up a pillar in the lobby and was doing something to one of the parrots.

I moved to where I could get a better angle and saw that it was Dad, teetering just below the lobby ceiling, his legs locked around the pillar. With one hand, he was waggling a piece of fruit, trying to catch the parrot’s eye, while the other hand held Michael’s cassette recorder as close to the parrot as possible.

“I don’t even want to know,” I said.





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.