“Dad? Why?”
I didn’t think Dad’s parrot project would increase Nate’s confidence in his new technical advisor.
“I need a name for the knights. The Something Knights. Something with an M, I think. I should go and find him,”
“Mastoid Knights?” I suggested.
“Sounds obscene,” Nate said, shaking his head. “What is a mastoid, anyway?”
“A bone,” I said, reaching behind my ear to tap the bone in question.
“Still sounds obscene,” Nate said.
“Metatarsal Knights?”
“Yes!” Nate said. “And in the big, two-part season finale, they all invade the Dungeons of the Metatarsal Knights!”
Just then Maggie sailed into the bar and beckoned to me to join her, so I left Nate covering sheet after sheet of his legal pad with illegible scribbles, muttering to himself as he did so.
We took a table at the back and to my surprise, the bartender appeared to take our order.
“Aren’t you worried about the health department?” I asked.
“Guy hasn’t been seen for hours,” the bartender said, with a shrug. “We’re thinking maybe he’s knocked off for the weekend.”
“He probably saw how mutinous the fans were and decided it was safer,” Maggie said.
I fingered the mini tape recorder in my pocket. What would Maggie say if I played the tape and asked when she’d said the fateful words, “Prepare to die, you—whoops!” The appropriately subtle, nonchalant way to introduce the topic into conversation hadn’t yet appeared.
“He looks like a kid with a new toy,” Maggie said, indicating Nate.
“Working on some ideas to keep the show going without Porfiria,” I said.
“God, wouldn’t she hate that?” Maggie said. But instead of laughing, she shook her head. “Weird, isn’t it? She fought tooth and nail for that silly show, first to get it on the air, and then to make it a success. And not twenty-four hours after her death they’re having to write her out of the picture. It’s almost sad.”
I kept quiet, hoping she’d go on. She looked at me quizzically.
“Is that a stupid thing to say?” she asked. “That I feel sorry for someone that I hated?”
“Not really,” I said. “Seems only natural after so much time. How long were you—did you know her?”
Maggie laughed.
“I’ve known her for thirty-two years,” she said. “But that’s not what you started out to ask, is it? You were about to ask how long we’d been friends.”
I nodded.
“About the first ten minutes,” she said, with another of her amazing laughs. And while I was congratulating myself at how well my time machine project was working, she sat back, held her glass in both hands, and stared down at it, shaking the ice a little now and then.
Chapter 32
“We met on the set of this ghastly movie we both had bit parts in,” Maggie said, smiling off into space. “Total crap. Blind girl runs away from the Midwest to San Francisco and falls in love with this psychedelic poster artist—who finally becomes a sculptor so she can understand his art. There was a subplot, something about her getting kidnapped by a biker gang, that I never quite understood. Then again, neither did the director, but he loved all the leather and chrome. Hollywood does Haight Ashbury.”
“Trying too hard to be with it?” I suggested.
“Exactly,” she said. “And failing, miserably. If they’d asked any of the cast, we’d have told them it was horribly dated. By 1971 the whole Summer of Love thing was deader than vaudeville. And the script was a travesty to begin with. Anyway, that’s how we met, Tammy and I, working on that god-awful movie.”
“Tammy?” I echoed.
“She was Tammy Jones when I met her,” Maggie said. “Tamerlaine Wynncliffe-Jones came later, when she became a Serious Actress.”
“What was she like back then?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “How much of what I say today about the Tammy of 1971 is true, and how much is colored by the bad things that happened between us later, and how much by the fact that she’s dead, and we all get sentimental about dead people? Even dead enemies.”
“Especially dead enemies,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing softly. “She was pretty, of course, but it was dimples and fresh skin pretty, not bone structure beautiful. You knew her face might not wear well—she probably knew it, too. I think that’s why she was so…focused. She knew where she wanted to go and what she had to work with, and she could tell she had to get there fast, if she wanted to get there at all.”