8 Antiques Con (7 page)

I went back for a bag of four-dollar chips, and got even more crumbs on the bed—maybe on purpose, peeved as I was with Mother for getting us involved in yet another murder. I hoped Sal Cassato had been kidding about fingering us to the FBI.

And here I had been looking forward to a fun-filled vacation in New York, with the only detective work in our plans being that of searching the countryside for Aunt Olive.

Spitefully, I reached over, picked up the mattress remote control from the nightstand, and pumped the gage up to one hundred, making the bed hard as a rock.

Let Goldilocks sleep on
that
.

With my malaise lifting a little, I got out my cell and saw that I had just missed a call from Joe Lange. I had wanted to check in with him anyway, because he was running our antiques shop back in Serenity while we were away.

Joe, a friend since my community college days, an avid collector of Star Trek memorabilia, was pretty knowledgeable about antiques in general. He had wanted to come along to the convention—excited about Tommy Bufford starting a retro-style con at a smaller venue—but found himself short of funds.

Or maybe the pre-con search for Aunt Olive had discouraged him.

He answered on the first ring. “Trash ‘n’ Treasures, Joseph Lange speaking.”

At least he’d left off his rank and serial number.

“Joe,” I said, “everything cool at the shop?”

“Affirmative.”

Something else you need to know about Joe: he still talked in Marine-speak, even though he’d been discharged ten years ago.

I asked, “You doin’ okay, dude?”

“For a first civ-div.”

Translation: a former Marine in the civilian world (I had gotten pretty good at deciphering his dialect).

“And the shop? All’s well?”

“Affirmative.”

Less than thirty seconds into the call and he was repeating himself already. Conversations with Joe went that way a lot.

“You must’ve called for a reason, Joe,” I prodded.

“Saw the buzz on the Net that Bufford’s a casualty.”

Yikes! Violet’s press release was out already?

Joe was saying, “And that PR bilge about a suspicious death? Bum scoop. My gut? Bufford was deep-sixed.”

“You think so?”

“Affirmative.”

“Who by?”

“Best guess? Gino Moretti—Bufford’s former partner. Bad blood there after he forced Tommy out of Manhattan Con.”

“You may be right, Joe. I saw them arguing the night before.”

“Then he’s your man.” Pause. “I assume you and Big Mama are on the case.”

“I hope not. But probably, yeah.”

“Brandy? You do any recon on Moretti, take care.”

“Oh?”

“Guy’s mobbed up, big-time.”

I thanked Joe and ended the call.

What a warm feeling a girl got, calling home from the big city. . . .

Then I heard Mother yelping out, “Yoo-hoo, Brandy! Are you here, dear?”

“In the bedroom, Todd.” That’s a reference to an old Bob and Ray radio show running gag. If you got it, you’re smiling right now. If not, probably just irritated. Sorry.

She rushed into the bedroom, out of breath, face flushed, eyelashes aflutter. “I gave Detective Cassato an extra room keycard—and he’d like to use it right away. So we must vacate, toot aysap.”

“I want my nap!”

“Well, you don’t get it.”

She crossed to the dresser and yanked open a drawer. “Now
where
did I put that thing?”

I got off the bed. “All right, okay, spill it, lady . . . what are you
up
to? You didn’t offer up our suite out of the goodness of your heart.”

Mother turned to gaze at me, a child who’d asked a really dumb question. “Well, of course not, dear. Do I look like a fool?”

“Is that a trick question?”

She returned to rummaging around in the drawer.

“Ah . . .
here
it is!” Mother held up a key-chain.

Only it was not just
any
key-chain, rather a recording device she’d recently ordered from a spy-gear website. Attached to the ring was a round leather fob—the recording part—about an inch in diameter. The gizmo was voice activated, would record up to three and a half hours, and had a sound file that could be transferred to a computer by using it as a flash drive (for you computer-savvy folks). To the ring, Mother had added a couple of our old house keys, by way of deceptive trimmings.

Oh, and just so you know? That gizmo wasn’t cheap—about three hundred smackers. Which might help to explain why Mother couldn’t afford a new handcuffed briefcase.

And, no, I didn’t bother asking her if she intended to record Detective Sal Cassato’s interviews. Some things between mother and daughter are just understood.

Mother headed into the other room as I followed.

“Let’s see,” she said, eyeing the furnishings. “Where to put it? Where to
put
it?”

“Out in the open of course.”

Mother crossed to an end table by the couch and set the key ring down.

“Bring me my purse, dear.”

I did.

She dug through it, pulled out a few other items—some change, a pen (not the murder weapon, though), matchbook, and tube of lipstick—which she arranged around the recording device.

I nodded in approval. “Just looks like a bunch of harmless stuff.”

Mother, satisfied, even pleased with herself, said, “Now! Let’s gather the little doggie and go, dear.”

I went to the closet to get Sushi’s harness bag, then began strapping it to my chest. Soosh, hearing the velcro strips pulling apart, began to go bananas, dancing at my feet, barking, thrilled to be leaving with us.

I picked up the wiggling mutt, then placed her in the bag, facing forward.

And the Three Musketeers left. One for all and all for . . . Mother.

“You know,” Mother said, as we walked down the gold-and-blue-patterned hall carpet toward the elevators, “Tommy’s murder changes everything.”

“It does?”

Mother nodded. “Hasn’t it occurred to you yet, dear? Our intruder was not after our Superman drawing, after all.”

“He wasn’t?”

“No, dear. Remember—we were not supposed to be in that suite—
Tommy
was.”

I stopped to look at her. “Our intruder intended to kill Tommy, right then and there?”

“As opposed to later in the service elevator? Perhaps. Worth consideration, at any rate.” She smiled cheerfully. “So I guess we may have been lucky girls last night, since it seems we likely had a murderer in our room.”

A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Tip

When attending a comics convention, be sure to bring the right tools. That’s different for everyone, but some standard items would include a list of things you seek, a comic book price guide, and a spiral notebook with pen (or a tablet computer). Usually the convention gives out a free bag for carrying purchases, but at Bufford Con, the giveaway tote clashed with Mother’s outfit and she substituted a shopping bag from the Stage Door Deli.

A
fter vacating our suite to allow Detective Cassato to use it for interviews—and for Mother’s electronic eavesdropping—we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon getting the feel of the convention by way of the dealers’ room. (And by “we,” I don’t just mean Mother and me, but Sushi as well, tucked away in her baby-style in-front carrier.) As much as fans might enjoy the panels and various special events, it was the chance to pick up collectibles that made the Globetrotter Ballroom on the lower level the hub of the con.

But first, we had to get past a quartet of staff members in red t-shirts who were paired off on either side of the open double doors. A hefty, dark-haired woman in her twenties with a nose-piercing stopped us with an upraised palm.

“No entry without badges,” she said curtly.

I’d forgotten about those. The plastic name tags provided by the late Tommy Bufford himself were in Mother’s purse somewhere. Of course, so were the original blueprints for Stonehenge and ticket stubs from a 1944 Frank Sinatra concert at the Aragon Ballroom, most likely.

“Stand to one side,” the staffer said, almost nasty.

While searching her purse, Mother huffed and puffed, but there was no blowing this officious guard’s house down.

“We are guests of the convention,” Mother said, rummaging. “
Honored
guests, young lady. We don’t
need
no
steenking
badges!”

This latter was, of course, a famous line from the film
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, and a joke that might have gone over with someone from a couple of generations prior to that of the pierced-nose staffer, who only heard an old lady making a bizarre, politically incorrect remark.

“You
do
need badges,” the woman insisted. “Stand aside
please
.”

And just then Mother found the little plastic rectangles, and handed them to the woman as if they were tickets. The staffer scowled at this breech of protocol, but then took the opportunity to look the badges over, as if they might be counterfeit, before handing them back to Mother.

“Put them on,” the staffer commanded.

As I was putting mine on, clipping it to Sushi’s carrier, the staffer frowned and pointed at my chest.

“That’s a dog!” she said.

“Right,” I said, resisting the urge to comment on her keen powers of observation. “Why, does
she
need a badge?”

The staffer didn’t know what to say to that, though the other staffer working the door with her—a redheaded woman of about thirty-five—started saying, “Ooooh, what a cutie! What a cutie-pie!”

Presumably, she was talking about Sushi, not Mother or me.

Throughout this little confrontation, other convention-goers had to squeeze past us by the other guards, and I was getting increasingly embarrassed. You might think I’d be used to Mother’s antics by now, and maybe I am, but I am still capable of feeling embarrassment.

“It’s a pet-friendly hotel,” I told the staffer.

Who finally relented, gesturing in a sarcastic after-you manner, saying, “Go on ahead.”

As we went by, Mother held her head high, throwing a comment back at the guardian of the gate: “You dishonor your late founder!”

Mother had a point. The staffer had been brusque and borderline rude, which didn’t match up very well with the late Tommy’s vision of a kinder, gentler convention.

“That’s no way to treat honored guests,” Mother harrumphed.

“Let it go, Mother. She was right.”

“Well, she didn’t have to be
snippy
about it.”

“You’re lucky that other staffer—the Hispanic one?—didn’t clobber you for that ‘steenking badges’ remark.”

“That was meant in good fun! Well, isn’t
this
quite the spectacle . . . ?”

And it was, a sort of World’s Fair of popular culture, wide aisles between facing rows of dealers’ booths, predominantly comic book sellers with wall displays of precious rare issues (“Golden Age!” “Silver Age!”) and long boxes of other comics, all plastic bagged, for fans to leaf through. Now and then a booth would offer posters or t-shirts or DVDs, and an occasional booth would center around video games. The biggest, showiest displays—so typical of a trade show—were by the major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and a few others.

What made this comic con different—and what had been a precept of Tommy Bufford’s retro thinking—was a ban on Hollywood movie studios from attending. This had been an outrageous and dangerous move on Tommy’s part, because Hollywood usually pumped tens of thousands of dollars into the big comic book conventions. But that emphasis on movies and TV had pushed actual comic book fans off into a ghetto-ish corner of the world they had created.

And Tommy had wanted to take a big, nostalgic step backward.

So comic books were king in the realm of the Globetrotter Room, which was packed with fans, both in and out of costumes, creating a steady stream of nerdity flowing by us as we moved slowly, cautiously along. I had to take hold of Mother’s hand so we wouldn’t get separated, and we fell in step with the others, letting the crowd sweep us along, driftwood carried to no particular destination. Sushi was distracted by the various smells, the best of which came from fast-food carts, and didn’t seem to realize we were engulfed in a mob.

And we had been told today would be the
slow
day. . . .

The upbeat if frantic atmosphere suggested that the news of Tommy’s demise hadn’t reached most attendees, and I doubted Violet would have made any announcements over the sound system. Still, her Net news releases about the tragedy would almost certainly have gone viral by now, and here and there clusters of fans stood with stunned expressions, some teary eyed, others just sad and staggered as the news spread further via word of mouth and texting.

As we walked wide-eyed, like children at their first carnival, allowing the crowd to dictate our pace, we suddenly sensed movement behind us. The crowd parted like the Red Sea as a phalanx of media moved through, on their way somewhere, anywhere.

Not just one group, either—but clusters from various networks and local TV stations. Of course, it was not unusual for local TV, even national news outlets, to cover a comic con. All that pop culture sharing space with nerds made for good visuals and cheap laughs on the five o’clock news.

I was happy to move aside as they trooped by.

Unfortunately, Mother had other ideas.

“Well, dear, I think the time has come,” she said, trying to sound casual but with a manic edge to her voice, as she watched the army of microphones and HD-cams marching by. “Now that the word is out, it’s best to take the bull by the horns.”

And before I could think to stop her, much less try, she was knifing through the crowd and down past the media storm troopers. I pressed forward, too, not enough to catch up, but still able to see her fling herself in front of the press corps and thrust out her arms, like a desperate hitchhiker before an oncoming car.

Her theatrically schooled voice managed to cut through the dealers’ room din.

“
I can give you the straight skinny on Tommy Bufford!
” Mother announced. “
I am Vivian Borne, honored guest of the convention! And
I
found the body!
”

So, do you see what I mean about not ever losing the ability to be embarrassed by Mother?

A thirtyish newscaster, in tan slacks and black polo shirt with a Channel 6 logo, eagerly thrust his microphone in Mother’s face, as a cameraman locked onto them.

“You found the body?”

“Indeed, yes.” Mother, in a relatively subdued version of her fake Brit accent, declared, “My darling daughter Brandy and I discovered Mr. Bufford’s body. As to the particulars . . .”

“
Mother!
”

I had finally clawed my way close.

My stern look reminded her of the pledge to secrecy we’d made, and with nary a hint of Merry Olde England in her voice, she went on, ridiculously: “. . . I am afraid I am committed to confidentiality.”

I was wishing she were “committed” period, about now.

The reporter pressed: “Is ‘suspicious death’ code for murder in this matter, Mrs. Borne?”

Flustered now, Mother said, “I’m afraid I can’t speak to whether that term is code for matter in this murder. I can tell you only that my daughter and I are consulting with the police on this . . . matter. We are the famous Borne sleuths from Serenity, Iowa.”

A blond woman, so attractive it seemed unreal, moved in with her mic: “Are you the Vivian Borne involved in a reality show pilot?”

“Why, yes. Thank you for asking. We’ll be shooting it very soon, in our quaint hometown on the Mississippi. The show’s called
Antiques Sleuths
, and—”

The male reporter cut in, dueling mics with the blonde. “Aren’t you and your daughter the Bornes who were implicated in the Senator Clark scandal last year?”

Now all the mics and cameras were pressing in. For a moment, I thought Mother might be crushed under the weight of this media frenzy. And for a moment, I wasn’t sure I minded. . . .

But when Mother glanced at me helplessly, I grabbed on to her arm, pulling her away from the closing-in newscasters. We were quickly swallowed up by the sea of fans, a tide we swam against until I was able to propel us out the door we’d come in fifteen minutes (or was it five hundred years) ago. The media horde, however, was in pursuit, the fans jumping out of their way....

Getting a frown from the pierced-nose staffer at the door, we ran past her and down the carpeted corridor. All the while, a confused Sushi was thumping against my chest, before we took refuge in a ladies’ room, which would at least keep the males among the newshounds at bay.

I turned on Mother. “Take the bull by the horns? More like the tail, you mean!”

Mother, out of breath, managed a weak, “
Olé?
”

“Now we’re
stuck
in here,” I grumbled.

Mother was still catching her breath. She had the expression of somebody in a zombie movie looking for nails to board up a window with. “It . . . it won’t be long, dear, before the
females
among them make their move—and then we’re done for.”

There were already other females among us, con-goers and not reporters, thankfully, using the stalls, washing hands at the sink, touching up or applying makeup, particularly those in costume.

Of the latter, two young women in particular caught my eye. They stood at the far end of the ladies’ room, in front of a full-length mirror, making adjustments to their look—specifically, Alice in Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts.

In the vein of the Tim Burton movie remake of a few years back, Alice wore a powder-blue dress with tight bodice and little puff sleeves, her white shoes reminiscent of Victorian button ankle boots. Innocent-sexy.

The Queen was in a red-and-black velvet floor-length gown, red hearts sprinkled across the front, gold stripes down the sleeves. While Alice’s makeup was minimal, the Queen’s was garish—bright blue eye shadow, rose-colored circles on each cheek, and crimson lipstick in the shape of a small heart on her lips. A tiny gold crown was perched on her head, secured by the top bun of a blood-red wig.

I approached the pair.

“Ah . . . hi,” I said. “Cool costumes.”

Alice said, “Thanks,” and the Queen echoed her. Both were a little wary.

“How would you like to make some money?” I asked, no more hysterical than somebody who just fell out of a hot air balloon. “Both of you?”

Comics fans could always use more cash at a convention, right?

They looked at each other, then back at me.

“What do you have in mind?” asked the Queen.

“And how much money?” queried Alice. “Cute dog, by the way.”

“Thanks!”

And I explained our predicament with the press, and outlined my plan. Then we negotiated the price for a temporary rental of their costumes, and their aid in applying that distinctive makeup.

“It’ll be fun,” I said.

“Fifty,” the Queen said.

“Each,” Alice said.

What I wanted to say was, “Off with your heads!”

What I did say was, “Sounds fair.”

Ten minutes later, Mother—dressed (and made up) as the Queen, and myself as Alice, with Sushi still in her front pack, passing (I hoped) as the Cheshire Cat—sailed out of the bathroom and right past the milling media.

Soon we were up on level C, in the ladies’ room by the Gold Ballroom, where two girls in Brandy and Mother costumes traded their clothing back to us for Alice and the Queen. I washed off the Alice makeup, but I caught Mother admiring herself as the Queen for several moments before doing the same. It did suit her.

We stood just outside the ladies’ room.

A sheepish Mother said, “I’m afraid I did make a wrong decision back there, holding that impromptu press conference.”

“You think?”

“Perhaps I’d better make myself scarce for a while.”

“Well, you can’t go back to the dealers’ room,” I said, adjusting Sushi in the baby sling, “and our suite is off-limits till four p.m. Maybe you could slip into a panel and just sit there. And mind your own business?”

Mother’s eyes were moving behind the magnifying lenses, rolling around like somebody trying out a new pair of glass eyes. “No, I think I’ll go off by myself, if you don’t mind. If you can get along without me for the rest of the day.”

“I’ll try.”

“This might be just the opportunity to look up some old thespian pals from my theater days.”

“Lucky them.”

“There you go again, Debbie Downer. I’ll be happy to take a break from that bad attitude of yours!”

“I
still
need a nap, and you turned our room into an interrogation booth.”

“Find yourself a quiet corner, dear, and just rest a while. Take a cue from Sushi—she can sleep anywhere.”

Something told me I shouldn’t let her go off by herself—whether that was concern or apprehension, I couldn’t tell you. “What if I need to get in touch with you?”