“What’s wrong, Meg?” I heard Dad say. “Investigation not going well?”
“Not going at all,” I said, glancing up to see Dad standing in front of the booth with a green parrot perched on his shoulder. “I’m leaving it to the cops. Are you helping round up the parrots?”
“Round them up?” Dad said. “Why? They’re perfectly happy where they are.”
Meaning that Dad was perfectly happy to have them around.
“How do you know?” I said aloud.
“Oh, you could tell right away,” he said. “They’d exhibit signs of stress. Screaming and biting, and plucking out all their feathers. No, you can tell these parrots are perfectly happy.”
Especially the one cooing amorously in his ear.
“Here, read some of these,” he said. He began rummaging in his tote bag and extracting books with brightly colored parrots on the cover, and titles like A Guide to Parrot Behavior and Living with Your African Grey.
“Thanks, but I’m pretty busy,” I said.
“Oh, right, with your investigation,” Dad said, nodding as he retrieved his books. “I have something that may help with that.”
He pulled Michael’s tape recorder out of his pocket, held it up dramatically for a moment while looking around for eavesdroppers, and then pushed the PLAY button.
I heard the tape hiss for a few, long seconds, and then voices.
“—like this, then?” Dad’s voice asked.
“Yes, that’s it,” Michael’s voice replied. “Both buttons at the same time.”
“Got it,” the canned Dad said.
“Damn,” said the live Dad. “I seem to have rewound it all the way. Oh, well; it’s on here somewhere. And who knows, there may be other clues earlier in the tape that your greater knowledge of the case will let you recognize.”
He fumbled with the tape recorder’s VOLUME knob, somewhat hampered by the parrot’s insistence on running its beak through what remained of his hair. He then proceeded to play twenty minutes of recorded parrot vocalizations.
If he’d made the tape as a testimonial for parrots’ uncanny powers of mimicry, I’d have applauded his efforts. I heard parrots dinging like elevators, whooshing like vacuum cleaners, ringing like telephones, grinding like blenders, tinkling bits of classical music in the tinny tones used by cell phones, and, of course, flushing like toilets.
Unless, of course, Dad had taped real elevators, vacuum cleaners, blenders, and so on, to pull my leg. Always a possibility with Dad.
The parrots mimicked human voices brilliantly, though they were remarkably undiscriminating in what they chose to imitate. I heard a few phrases from our friend the Monty Python parrot. A lot of commercials, mostly the loud, repetitive, annoying kind I hated most. I was rather pleased to see that they appealed, quite literally, to bird brains. Dad had even caught a performance from two parrots that had learned the Porfiria theme song, although unfortunately, instead of singing it in unison, they interrupted each other and tried to drown each other out.
If I hadn’t felt impatient to do something useful, I might have enjoyed the performance. Although I did enjoy the look on Alaric Steele’s face when he returned to the booth to find us solemnly listening to a parrot sing a pizza commercial.
“Here it comes,” Dad whispered shortly afterward.
“You’ve double-crossed me for the last time,” came Maggie’s voice, sounding ragged with emotion. “Prepare to die, you—whoops!”
Dad stopped the tape recorder after that and looked at me.
“Prepare to die, you—whoops?” I repeated.
“Suspicious, isn’t it?” Dad said,
“The prepare to die part, yes,” I said. “But whoops? Not that I have a lot of personal experience with the matter, but I really don’t think many people say ‘whoops’ after coshing someone on the head with a blunt instrument.”
“Could be evidence that it was an accident,” Dad said. “If they were quarrelling and Miss Wynncliffe-Jones slipped and fell, for example. And hit her head on the wine bottle.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Still seems odd.”
“You can hang onto it and study it for a while if you like,” Dad said.
“Taking a break from sleuthing?”
“Not really,” he said. “I may have found someone who has an in with the medical examiner, and then I’m supposed to get together with your friend the scriptwriter. So I’ll be pretty tied up all afternoon—why don’t you keep the tape recorder for now?”
“Thanks,” I said, as he turned to leave.
Perhaps my voice betrayed my lack of enthusiasm for his ornithological investigations. Or perhaps I just sounded tired and discouraged.
“Is there anything else you need?” he asked, pausing and turning back to give me a look that was part doctor and part worried Dad.
“I need a time machine,” I said, this time aloud. The parrot tape had distracted me briefly from my frustration at how little I knew. I couldn’t go back thirty years and find out the real story about Ichabod Dilley’s death. I couldn’t even go back thirty hours and try to get the QB to tell me what she knew. I’d studied the original Porfiria comics, picked Cordelia’s brain—I wanted another window to the past.
“Well, there are probably a few time machines around here,” Dad said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know where. You probably have a better idea than I do. Good luck!”
And with that he dashed off.
“Is he pulling your leg, or did he just not hear what you said?” Steele asked.
“With Dad, who knows?” I said.
Actually, I did, but I didn’t really want to go into a long explanation. Dad always referred to Great-Aunt Zelda, who was now over a hundred, as the family time machine. Despite her age, she was as sharp-tongued and clear-witted as ever. And if you wanted to settle some question about the past, Great-Aunt Zelda was usually as reliable as any reference book, and a whole lot easier to consult.
So all I had to do was find someone who had been around Ichabod Dilley or the QB back in 1972. Or failing that, at least someone who had been around the QB enough that he might have heard her talk about old times.
Why couldn’t she have had a faithful retainer? If we were living in one of Nate’s scripts, she would certainly have had one—perhaps a chain-smoking dragon lady who had looked after her wardrobe since they were both ingénues, and was the only person who dared to argue with her. And who, after initially seeming cynically unaffected by her employer’s death, would eventually break down in tears and reveal the critical clue—whatever that was.
But she hadn’t had a faithful retainer. She’d had Typhani. Latest, I suspected, of a long line of Typhanis. And maybe a few Geniphers.
There was always Nate. Not my idea of a faithful retainer, but at least, according to the costumer, he’d known the QB since they were much younger.
Of course, much younger didn’t necessarily mean thirty years. But still—he’d been closer to her than anyone else I could think of.
And, I thought, glancing at the clock, he just might be in the green room, recuperating from his latest panel.
“I need to talk to Nate,” I said, and barely waited for Steele’s nod of acknowledgement before I raced away.
Nate was, indeed, on break, though I finally located him in the bar at the back of the supposedly closed restaurant. Not that he couldn’t have drunk his cup of coffee in the green room. He probably wanted to be left alone. Ah, well.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I know the convention is important for fan relations,” he said, “but my heart’s just not in it right now.”
Okay, maybe I was wrong about no one mourning for the QB. I nodded and tried to look sympathetic.
“I really need to be on the phone, trying to get a sense of what’s happening back in California. Or back in my room, trying to come up with a coherent plan to save the show. What a disaster! And after everything we went through to make this thing a success.”