“Later on? How late did the bar stay open?”
“Only till one, but the parties went on long after that,” Harry said. “In fact, I think there’s still one going on down in 232 if you get bored.”
“I’ll pass,” I said. “Look, do me a favor, will you?”
“Sure,” he said.
I grabbed a Magic Marker and a sheet of paper, scrawled a sign that read “Get the edge in your next argument…swords, daggers, and other implements of destruction—booth 13,” and pinned it to the back of Harry’s costume.
“And while you’re wandering around, how about carrying this?” I suggested, handing him a knife. An unsharpened one, of course, and safely peace-bonded so the security guards wouldn’t confiscate it.
He wandered off, chuckling. I stood behind the counter.
Steele had tipped his folding chair back against the mound of empty boxes stored behind our booth, pulled his battered period hat over his eyes, and appeared to be dozing.
“Think that’ll do any good?” he asked, from under the brim.
“Who knows?” I said. “Worth trying. Business is a little slow.”
“Slow? Try immobile,” he said, his voice still emerging slightly muffled from under the hat.
I envied his calm. I kept tapping my feet and drumming my fingers on the table. I decided not to look at the clock until I was sure fifteen minutes had passed.
Oops. Try four minutes.
Not that I was waiting for anything in particular. But it annoyed me, being stuck at the booth with nothing to do.
In fact, it was driving me crazy. I envied Steele his apparent tranquility.
And I couldn’t resist interrupting it.
“So where did you learn blacksmithing, anyway?” I asked.
“In a commune,” Steele said.
“A real commune? What was it like?”
“Not my scene,” he said, shrugging. “Stuck around till I got the basics of blacksmithing down, then I split.”
I waited for more. Anyone who asked me how I got into blacksmithing risked a half hour monologue.
“So you liked blacksmithing?” I asked, finally.
“Seemed useful,” he said. “Better than all the odd jobs I’d been knocking about with up till then.”
Obviously Steele and I were not kindred spirits. I went back to drumming my fingers.
Luckily, before my nervous percussion drove Steele crazy, a visitor finally stopped by the booth. Not a customer, of course—Steele disappeared back under his hat. But then, I needed to talk to this visitor.
“Feeling any better, Chris?” I asked. He seemed to be holding his head a little carefully.
“I see you’ve been talking to Harry,” he said.
“Look, Chris, I’m trying to get a program signed for my nephew—the one who had such a bad experience with the QB yesterday.”
“Sure,” he said, reaching for the program and flipping it open, almost by instinct. He’d obviously signed a few of them this weekend. He had his pen poised above the space before he noticed it was already signed.
“Hey, one per customer,” he said, laughing and handing it back to me. “I already did this one. In fact, I think I remember your nephew. Tow-headed kid with a mean little dog, right?”
“That’s him,” I said. “Chris—tactless question of the century, I know, but I’ll ask it anyway—any chance of getting Andrea to sign? Did she even come?”
He shook his head.
“Back in California,” he said. “I found out that much from the police. They, uh, checked up on her. Won’t tell me where she is, though.”
“For all they know, you could be an abusive boyfriend trying to hunt her down,” I pointed out.
“Instead of just a philandering one, you mean?”
I shrugged.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “Last night was out of line. I know that now.”
“And you didn’t know it last night? Maybe Andrea’s got the right idea.”
“Yeah, probably,” he said. “Hey, at least she’s got an alibi, thank God. And she’s not stuck with a future jailbird.”
“You think it’s that bad?”
He shrugged.
“The one thing I’ve got going for me right now is Walker,” he said. “They like me for it, but they love Walker. Stupid as that is.”
“You don’t think it could have been Walker?”
“No way,” Chris said.
“Why not? Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but I’d like to hear your reasoning.”
“Oh, it’s not that I don’t think he could kill someone,” Chris said. “If he was mad enough, and scared enough, I can see him losing all sense of reality and doing something he’d be very sorry for, five minutes later. But I don’t see him daring to kill the QB, even if she was firing him, and from what I’ve heard of how it happened, there’s no way he could have done it.”