Nerds Who Kill: A Paul Turner Mystery (9 page)

Turner asked, “You hear any gossip about them possibly having an affair?”

“I can’t imagine Muriam having an affair with anyone. Although as part of that overly sunny persona she was always giggling at handsome young men. Some might call it flirting, but I watched her. Her flirting never led to anything. She reminded me most of the character Mae West played in the movie
Myra Breckenridge
. She did a whole lot of showy posing and flirting. The Mae West character is never shown following up the invitations. Devers certainly never followed up on hers. If some guy tried to accept her apparent invitation, she shut them down real fast. She’d go so far as to pinch their butts and do this stupid simpering number. But I never saw or heard of her actually inviting someone to her room or of her giving someone her room key.”

“You watched her that closely?” Turner asked.

“After she ruined one possible career for me, how could I not notice her? If you hung around enough of these conventions, she was impossible to miss.”

“Nobody thought what she did was sexual harassment?” Fenwick asked.

“Who would give a rat’s ass?” Kagan said. “She was in her seventies. Sometimes the butt pinching escalated to a lingering pat or, on occasion, a solid grab. If it was a forty-year-old boss with a twenty-year-old intern there’d be lawsuits flying faster than you can say hostile environment. Maybe it’s part of the hypocrisy of society. She could approach the edge with younger men, hell, even go over it. I certainly never heard a rumor about harassment or lawsuits. Supposedly a previously pinched butt was an entree to her writing group. I have no idea if that was true. I live in Boise, Idaho, and wouldn’t have been able to make any such meeting. Although I wouldn’t have gone even then.”

“Why not?”

“Writing groups? Pah! I don’t have time for writing groups. They’re for cowards, or people who need help with their writing. I don’t need help from some snarky wannabe. You work by yourself. Not with a committee. Writing groups are utter nonsense.”

“You mean, you were never invited to join one,” Fenwick said.

“Boise doesn’t have a lot of SF writers.”

Turner asked, “Did Ms. Devers have fights with anyone that you know of?”

“She was involved for a long time in several science fiction organizations. I heard she could get pretty steamed up over some awfully small issues.”

“Like what?” Turner asked.

“Some fairly typical stuff. Who should be in charge? Should the organization be centered in New York, Los Angeles, or somewhere more central in the country? Should they be a group dedicated to professionals already writing or should they be trying to help new authors get established?” He shook his head. “It got kind of silly, but Muriam hated any kind of change. In public Devers tried to position herself above the fight, but she was desperately working against the newbies in sneaky, underhanded ways.”

“What would those be?” Fenwick asked.

“Working against candidates who might be more representative of an organization’s membership. Trying to make any change to a group’s by-laws require a two-thirds majority to pass.”

“Sounds like a weird kind of democracy to me,” Fenwick said.

Kagan said, “Didn’t feel like any kind of democracy if you were on the losing end.”

Fenwick said, “We heard the members of her writing group did her bidding in a lot of these negative things she perpetrated.”

“They were all desperate wannabes. I hate wannabes. They hang around these conventions in droves. Frankly, I’m ready to believe she kept the members of her writing group around as sexual toys, but I have no proof for that. Studly young men? I heard most didn’t hang around long in the group. I assumed they got tired of getting hit on or tired of being led on with no sex to show for their groveling. Maybe they got smart and realized their careers were going nowhere, and gave up. They were kind of a joke among those of us familiar with the situation. I don’t know any of them personally.”

Turner asked, “Do you know anything about a red ostrich feather connected with Ms. Devers?”

“She always had one when she appeared in public.”

“What was the point?” Fenwick asked.

“She used it in publicity for her first book.”

“Why?” Fenwick asked.

“It had something to do with the main character, some kind of symbol of purity and truth. What’s important about the feather?”

“We found broken ones near both dead bodies. Ms. Devers had a large supply in her luggage.”

“Would anybody else have a negative association with them?” Fenwick asked.

“You mean did she attack someone with one, use one to try to strangle someone? Or that someone might have attacked her because of some anti-red-ostrich-feather complex? I can’t imagine. It was a harmless affectation.”

They got the name of the Hollywood agent that had met with Kagan about his script and then they told him he could go.

When he was gone, Fenwick said, “We have come full circle. We’ve got an elderly woman who kept a group of boy toys.”

“Is that progress?” Turner asked.

“When we announce it, we can see if all the feminists have a party to celebrate.”

Oona Murkle, Sanchez, and Brandon Macer, the hotel security man, entered. Between the two officials was a scrawny man wearing black high-top tennis shoes. An unbuttoned and threadbare red flannel shirt covered a ragged and torn black T-shirt. Turner thought the splotches on it could be remnants of meals long forgotten. His black, ill-fitting jeans had a belt which had a foot of leather drooping past the buckle. The man might have cut his own hair with a pair of children’s scissors. Clumps stuck out here and there, some parts longer than others. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses. There was no pocket protector in sight. Turner supposed this might have been a costume, but it looked like an outfit that had been slept in and worn daily for weeks. He caught an odor of too much aftershave trying to mask an unwashed body.

Sanchez said, “This guy’s been asking questions of every beat cop he can get hold of.” He handed them a black backpack. “This is his.”

Macer said, “We had to stop him from hanging around several of the celebrities.”

“Which ones?” Turner asked.

Macer gave them a list of names. Turner recognized Muriam Devers’ but none of the others.

“We’ll take care of it,” Turner said.

Murkle beckoned Turner over to a corner of the suite out of the hearing of the others. She said, “I’ve seen him lurking at a number of these conventions. The name on his badge is obscured. He probably does that deliberately. It looks like Melvin or Mervin. I’ve seen him trying to buttonhole people. Mostly they ignore him. I did get one complaint from a male author yesterday morning.” She pointed. “When I talked to him about it, he promised to stay away from people. No one else has come to me about him.”

Sanchez, Murkle, and Macer left.

Turner walked up to Mervin/Melvin. The name on the convention badge was impossible to make out clearly. Turner asked, “What’s your name?”

The man met Turner’s eyes for a second then studied the floor.

“Melvin,” he muttered.

“Melvin what?” Turner asked. He kept his voice low and non-threatening.

“Melvin Slate.”

What Turner could catch of his voice was high and reedy. He might have been six foot three. He probably didn’t weigh one hundred forty pounds.

Fenwick unzipped the backpack halfway. “What you got in here, Melvin?”

“You can’t look at my stuff,” Melvin said. As he snatched at the backpack, a bony wrist protruded from the red flannel shirt. Turner noted a black and gray metal thumb ring on the hand. The design alternated flames and pentagrams. He saw its twin on Slate’s other thumb.

Turner’s son Brian had considered purchasing this type of body decoration but had decided to purchase a couple CDs instead. Brian had explained several times to him, with that patient exasperation teens develop on their thirteenth birthday, that thumb rings were not automatically a sign of membership in a Satanic cult. He had insisted over and over that among most teens the iron rings were simply a personal decoration. Turner had done his own research. His data confirmed that the rings could be simple personal decoration, or they could be the sign of a person in a cult of the nastiest sort.

Fenwick pulled the backpack out of Melvin’s reach, but he took his hand off the zipper. Turner knew the backpack couldn’t possibly contain a broadsword. He wasn’t about to risk the fact that this could be a killer quite happy to switch methods of killing and pull out a semi-automatic. All three of them sat down on the uncomfortable chairs. Melvin’s eyes roved between his backpack and the hotel room painting of a Paris street in the rain.

Turner said, “Melvin, we heard that sometimes you bother people at these conventions.”

Slate’s eyes rarely met Turner’s directly. As the distinctly emaciated man spoke, his eyes darted from carpet to painting. Slate said, “I go to a lot of conventions. I like to go to the conventions. I pay my registration fee. I can’t always afford to stay at the main hotel. I have to scrimp. When I’m here, I try to talk to people. If they ask me to, I always go away.”

“Are you supposed to bother people?” Fenwick asked.

“I’m allowed to ask questions. I go to lots of workshops and seminars. They like me because I always have questions. Lots of times they ask for questions, and there aren’t any questions, and so I ask questions.”

Turner suspected the gratitude was more in Melvin’s mind than in the thoughts of the people at the seminars. Still, he felt sorry for such an obvious loser, a man who would get little more than sneers from everyone he met—at conventions, on the street, in his job. But his sympathy did not preclude him from wanting answers.

“Do you have a job?” Turner asked.

“I help at a pet shop sometimes, and I do small jobs at a library near my home.”

“Where do you live?” Turner asked.

“Here in the city. I’ve got an apartment in Logan Square.” Turner knew that this was a dicey part of town, filled with gritty eccentrics. It also had the highest murder rate in the city

“I live with my mom. She needs help getting around. My brothers and sisters are too busy to help. I can’t always get away to these conventions because of that.”

“You’ve been pestering the police.”

“Something strange is going on. I watched people lining up for the luncheon. I don’t pay for convention meals. Lots of times I don’t. It’s a lot of money for some goopy dead chicken.” Turner couldn’t dispute his analysis of banquet food.

Slate continued to mumble to the wall, floor, and ceiling. Turner noted that his long fingers twisted the rings on his fingers round and round while he was being asked questions. During his answers the fingers would lie still. “If I do go to the banquets, nobody ever wants to sit at a table I’m at. If I go early, the table stays empty. If I go at the last minute, they always say that the empty seats are saved. But later, no one is sitting there.”

“Why bother the police?” Turner asked.

“This many police don’t show up unless something bad has happened. I sat in the lobby and counted at least twenty. There’s a lot more than that. Plainclothes like you guys. There’s a buzz in the line for the luncheon. I notice things. They’re buzzing about something.”

“Do you know Ms. Devers or Mr. Foublin?” Turner asked.

“I downloaded every issue of Mr. Foublin’s magazine. It had some of the best illustrations of any of the fan magazines. He had some good contributors. They could have been drawing for the comics. I e-mailed him sometimes at the magazine site. He’d e-mail back. He knew a million things about science fiction movies, books, comics, and magazines. You could ask him about the most obscure character, and he would know book, author, publication date. Without looking it up, he knew who Solomon Grundy was, and the dates of his first and last appearances in the comics. Everything. He was a great resource. I read all of Ms. Devers’ books. I was a fan. She is a very good writer.”

“Did you talk to either of them this weekend?” Turner asked.

“I tried to talk to Ms. Devers. Every time, someone got in between us.”

“Who got in between you?” Turner asked.

“Different people. Usually some woman. I don’t know who. I don’t know why.”

“You look weird,” Fenwick said.

Slate’s fingers now pulled the rings off both thumbs. He caressed the rings a moment, replaced them, then raised his eyes to Fenwick’s. “And you’re fat. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed at conventions or be forbidden to get autographs or kept from talking to people.”

“Did somebody forbid you?” Turner asked.

“Someone was always watching me.”

“Look at how you’re dressed,” Fenwick said. “If you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself, why didn’t you show up in a costume?”

“You’ve seen some of the people here, and you’re saying I don’t look normal?”

“Look at yourself,” Fenwick insisted.’

Slate glanced at his attire. “I dressed up as best I could.”

Turner suspected this was true. He said, “I noticed your rings.”

“So what?”

“Some people associate them with some pretty dark cults.”

“I’m not a member of a cult. No cult would have me.”

Turner wondered what kind of life someone lived where Gothic cults didn’t even want you. He asked, “You said you go to a lot of these conventions?”

“I always go to them if they’re in Chicago. I get to a few around the rest of the country. It’s the best way to meet people in the business so you can sell your stuff. I write some things, too.”

“You tried to get close to Foublin and Devers, but you didn’t interact with them?” Fenwick asked.

“No. I told you. I know everything about them I could read. There’s a bunch of stuff on the Internet about both of them. I like to spend time on the net. I go to the library every day and look things up. They’re very nice to me in the library. I never bother them. Sometimes I have to come back if they have a line waiting to use the computers. I go to web sites and enter chat rooms about all the writers at the conventions. I don’t care about the television and movie personalities so much. They aren’t real artists. Writers do the real work.”