“No, the panel started an hour and a half ago,” Nate said. “And I know exactly where he was then—the police were interviewing him.”
“Damn.”
“They probably still are. They’re closing in.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “They’ve interviewed all of us.”
“They wouldn’t disrupt the convention this way if they weren’t looking pretty seriously at him.”
“I don’t actually think making the convention run smoothly ranks very high on Detective Foley’s priority list.”
“God,” Nate moaned. “Let’s not talk about it. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s talk about Ichabod Dilley.”
“What about him?”
“You never told me you knew him,” I said.
“Didn’t I? Well, you never really asked,” Nate said. “I don’t recall denying that I knew him.”
I wanted to tell him that he’d implied it, but I suspected that would bog the conversation down into a long discussion of semantics, instead of letting me find out anything useful.
“How well did you know him?” I asked instead.
“How well did I know anyone in those days?” he said. “Especially from that side of my life. The private side.”
“Private in what way?”
“Nothing…sinister, if that’s what you mean,” Nate said, looking alarmed. “Weekdays I was a hard-working, buttoned-down little writer. Very corporate. Nothing to alarm the studio execs. Weekends, I’d drive up to San Francisco and hang around Haight Ashbury. Go to concerts. Get stoned.”
“I see,” I said
“Don’t laugh,” he added, although I could have sworn I hadn’t let any sign of amusement cross my face. “I wasn’t always the staid, boring guy you probably think I am from seeing me on the job.”
Actually, you were, I felt like saying. In fact, you used to be worse. I’ve seen the photo. Aloud, I decided to stick to vague platitudes.
“People change.”
“Life changes them,” Nate said. “Professional responsibilities.”
Professional responsibilities like creating the Metatarsal Knights, I thought, but I nodded solemnly.
“So you met Ichabod Dilley while you were slumming in Haight Ashbury,” I said.
“My script called for a psychedelic artist,” he said. “You know—like a Grateful Dead poster. The studio hack kept bringing in things that looked like you’d smeared lime green paint on a Renoir. So I said I’d find someone.”
“Dilley.”
“I put him up in my own apartment the whole time he was working on those damned paintings,” Nate said, with sudden heat. “The whole time he was supposed to be working on them. I found out later, he’d done the first Porfiria comic book—maybe the first several—while I was down on the set, making excuses for why the rest of the paintings weren’t ready yet. And then, when he finally finished the damned things, I let him stay in case they decided at the last minute that they needed changes, or maybe another painting. When the movie was finally over, I thought I’d never get rid of him. Took weeks before I came home one day and found he’d disappeared. Taking half my wardrobe—the hipper half, of course—but I considered it cheap at the price.”
He fell silent. Brooding over those long-lost bell-bottoms, I supposed.
“And then the thugs started showing up,” he added.
“Thugs?”
“Guys claiming he owed them money. One of them actually beat me up when I said I had no idea where he’d gone. Which was true. I finally found a gallery that was showing a couple of Dilley’s paintings, and started referring the thugs there, and eventually they stopped showing up.”
“And then what happened?”
“What happened? Nothing. End of the story of Nate and Ichabod.”
“You never saw him again?”
Nate shook his head.
“I figured he’d drifted back to San Francisco. Turns out he died, not long after that. Of course, I didn’t hear he’d died until a couple of years later. The QB had me do a movie treatment based on the comics. Asked her why she didn’t just have him do it, and she said he wasn’t a screenwriter, and anyway he was dead.”
And did Nate’s helping the thugs find him have anything to do with Dilley’s death? Probably not something he’d admit, even if he suspected it was true, so I didn’t see any point in asking.
“So you did the movie treatment,” I said.
He nodded.
“First of many,” he said. “Every time fantasy was in, we’d do another damned treatment. When Star Wars came out in ’77 we set it on another planet. In ’82, when Schwarzenegger did Conan, we stuck in a barbarian warrior. Princess Bride’s a big hit a couple of years later, and we did a tongue-in-cheek version. Anne Rice gets hot, and we do one where Porfiria’s an immortal vampire. I suggested an animated version once, but she never went for that.”