The Con Artist

by Fred Van Lente

  “Oh, right, it’s three hours behind on the West Coast, I’m such a dummy. Here I was calling early because I thought you were ahead—”

  “It’s okay Becca, really, it’s all right. How are you feeling? I am so, so sorry about Ben.”

  “Thank you, honey, you are a sweetheart. I saw that you called on my phone, but, you know, things have just been…you know.”

  “I know.”

  “It was all so sudden, really,” she said. “I mean, in the sense it wasn’t sudden at all, not surprising. I mean, he treated his body the way he treated me. Neglectful.” I laughed weakly. “Is that awful? You must think I’m awful. Well, I’m not, I just have to laugh instead of cry.”

  “You go right ahead.”

  The toilet flushed and Dirtbag emerged from the bathroom in his tighty-whities. He was carrying a full paper cup of water, which he poured into the tiny, cheap coffeemaker resting on the mini-bar fridge. I had to cover my ear to hear Becca when the little machine started sputtering brown liquid into the cup.

  “Are you calling from Ben’s studio?” I said.

  “How do you know that? Oh, yeah. Caller ID. Everyone knows everything about everyone now, or so they think. The more information people get, the dumber they seem to me, but what do I know?”

  “Is that Becca?” Dirtbag whispered from across the room. I waved him off.

  Dirtbag mouthed, Tell her I say hi.

  “Aw, geez. I mean, if you could see this place…Such a mess. I mean…I don’t even know where to begin.” Her voice tightened. “The man hasn’t thrown a single thing away in fifty years. There’s just art and paintings and old comics and science-fiction pulp magazines and books everywhere. I don’t even want to go in the closet where he slept.”

  “Where he…slept?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She paused. “We’d split up, didn’t you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I just couldn’t take being treated the same way he treats his liver, you know? He was just so angry. At Atlas. The way they were treating him, not giving him his artwork back, not letting him share in the rights to Mister Mystery.” Deep breath. “The thing is…”

  “What is it?”

  “You…haven’t been here recently, have you?”

  “Did you tell her I say hi?” Dirtbag whispered, and I had to shoot him a “WTF?” look.

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t been over in—geez, I think the last time I visited the Atlas offices. That’s, like, four years ago.”

  “Because I’ve got to tell you, it looks like someone’s been all through this place. I mean, Ben has always been a hoarder. There’s just stacks of stuff in these cubbyhole shelves on every wall and stacked in the corner and by the bed and next to the toilet. There’s got to be sketchbooks here dating back to when he first started at Atlas, and blank paper, and office supplies, and everything else, but…I don’t know, it’s usually an organized mess. Now it looks a hurricane tore through here. Some stacks are tipped over, drawers are open—there’s something funny going on here. I can always tell. I got a nose for funny.”

  As I mulled over her words I happened to glance over at Dirtbag, who spread his hands in an accusatory “WTF?” look of his own.

  “Uh, hey, Becca, guess who’s here too—Randall. He crashed the night in my room.”

  “Who?”

  “Randall. Dirtbag.”

  “Oh, Dirtbag! Put him on, put him on.”

  I handed the phone to Dirtbag, who said, “How’s it hanging, girl?” I zoned out for the rest of the conversation as I absorbed the new information. Did it have any bearing on my own predicament? I was still inclined to believe Ben and Danny’s deaths were a coincidence, but that stance was becoming harder and harder to maintain with each new revelation.

  Soon enough, Dirtbag was handing the phone back, and I could hear Becca crying.

  “The hell, man?” I hissed over at him, but he was crying too. He waved me off.

  “It’s me again,” I said into the phone.

  “Sorry, it’s all so fresh,” Becca sniffled. “That man,” she said, her voice quavering with a combination of fury and grief. “He had so many good qualities, you thought he could figure out a way of getting rid of all the bad ones. Part of me, even after I got fed up with him, hoped that he would still try. But now…” She took a deep breath. “He’s all outta chances to change.”

  “Yeah,” I said, inadequately.

  “So, listen, do you still live in Jersey?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Once you’re back from San Diego, do me a favor. Please, come by and help me sort through all this stuff. Some of it maybe needs to go to the Society of Illustrators, maybe I’ll sell some of it, I just don’t know. And the lawsuit! With Atlas! I guess that’s my responsibility now too, huh?”

  I didn’t know whether or not to say anything about Ben K’s settlement, but since I knew that information secondhand anyway, keeping my trap shut seemed wise. “Yes. I will definitely come by as soon as I can.”

  “Great. And could you bring Christine too? She has such a good eye for the original art. She handles your pages online, right? Is she there too?”

  I swallowed. “No. She didn’t come with me this year.”

  “Aw, that’s too bad. But the conventions can be a trial for the wives. I know more and more ladies are getting into the comic books now, but when I was a kid I was all Barbies and ponies. I mean, when I was sitting there with Benjamin at his table…I was always amazed at the love the fans would just shower on him. How Mister Mystery meant so much to them. It’d fill my heart with so much joy, that he meant so much to them and their childhoods, like this living legend, and I would always say something like, ’Can you get the Great One to remember to leave the toilet seat down from time to time?’ I meant it in good fun, but maybe…maybe I was jealous.” She was crying openly now. “I’m gonna have to go now. Thank you for calling. I’ll speak to you when you’re back to the city, okay?”

  “Okay, Becca, talk soon. Bye.”

  I set down the phone. Dirtbag emerged from the bathroom again with a wad of tissues in both hands. He had mostly recovered but was still sniffling a bit. “Death sucks, man,” he said.

  I nodded. “Indeed it does.”

  Dirtbag heaved a sigh. “I need to eat through my grief.”

  “The living need breakfast. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  – – – –

  We went down to the Space Restaurant and got a Space Booth. After we returned from the Space Buffet with plates heaped with Space Breakfast, Dirtbag noticed me staring off strangely into the distance.

  “What?” he said.

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “What?” Dirtbag turned and immediately saw the bearded and bespectacled buddha sitting in the booth behind us, wearing a Mets cap and suspenders. He interrupted his meal to sign a napkin brought to him by two quavering thirteen-year-olds.

  “Holy shit,” Dirtbag whispered. “That’s George R. R. Martin.”

  “Yeah, and I think I had a Game of Thrones dream this morning.” I shook my head. “It’s just a weird coincidence.”

  “Not at Comic-Con it ain’t. What was the dream like? Were you with Cersei? Or Daenerys? In combination with Sansa, perhaps?”

  I chomped contemplatively on toast. “Jon Snow, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Well, that’s very progressive of you.”

  “You are shocked that my subconscious likes to get freaky?”

  “No, I just thought…well, I just thought you were dreaming about Christine is all.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you kept saying the same thing over and over in your sleep: ‘No más, Mama, no más.’ ”

  * * *

  – – – –

  “Shit,” I sai
d too loudly, looking up from my Deadpool full-body sketch in Artists’ Alley. I had dispatched Dirtbag on his day’s sleuthing so I could go to the con and get some work done.

  “What’s wrong?” Katie Poole asked without looking up from her work. She was using a red marker to dab blood onto Red Sonja’s blade.

  “I’m pretty sure I forgot to file another extension on my income taxes. Shit.”

  Katie laughed. “Christine used to do yours, I bet.”

  “She met with the accountant, yeah. After we split it took me a year to figure out the guy’s name. And how to get in touch with him.”

  “Yeah, Javier does all that financial crap for me. Although he does our taxes himself. He says he actually enjoys it. He’s such a weirdo.”

  “He’s a good weirdo to have. Wish I still had one.”

  Common in the comics community is the phenomenon of the Hyper-Competent Spouse. Few were the creators I knew who supported their families: that role fell to the wife or husband who worked as an X-ray technician, landscape architect, estate tax lawyer, et cetera. Mostly women and the handful of men who had adult, human, capital-J jobs with health benefits and retirement strategies that allowed their life partners to weather the swells and squalls of intermittent freelance employment and unpredictable income in pursuit of the arguably frivolous dream of drawing stories in their waking hours.

  Christine had been my Hyper-Competent Spouse. She had made stabs at becoming a colorist and got some gigs as a flatter, but she found it too tedious and worked instead as a sales rep for a furniture wholesaler until my career took off. This was really the best-case scenario a Hyper-Competent Spouse could hope for, that hubby or wifey’s career was one of the lucky one percent that landed a big payday so that comics could put the kids, hypothetical and otherwise, through college.

  Once my earnings ballooned, Christine quit her job to essentially become my manager, coordinating con appearances, dealing in my original art, and basically managing all the financial and business side of Life for which I have long shown zero competency. Since we split up, I gained no additional competency in any of her many major skills. Like an escaped zoo animal, I was wandering around backyards and parking lots, free from captivity but also free to be run over by a tractor trailer at any moment.

  “He’s back home with your boy?” I said while drawing. “Javier, I mean?”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t thrilled about me coming out here seven months in, but I was like, I’m the most popular girl in school right now. Gotta make hay while the sun shines, you know?”

  “I hear that. Javier’s off from school now, right, or does he teach summer semester too?”

  “Well…” She put her Zebra marker aside. “He’s going through a tough time. The university made all these cuts to the music department.”

  “He has tenure though, right?”

  “No, that’s the thing. He was just adjunct faculty. But then he got knocked down to assistant. They slashed him back to two classes and if he’s just a part-timer…we get kicked off the school health insurance.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah, not ideal in my condition.” She tried to pick up a pen but had to arch her back, wincing. “He can give private lessons for, like, violin and piano, but there’s only so much of that to go around. Thank God for this Mister Mystery gig.”

  Swallow. “Yeah?”

  “I would be completely screwed without it. It was stressful enough when the guy who sexually harassed me was my editor, but now maybe I’m safe. I better be. For both Javy and I to lose our jobs now…You know what, forget I brought it up. I don’t like to think about it.”

  “Totally. It’s forgotten.”

  I tried to turn back to my drawing, mind seething with renewed hatred for Sebastian Mod, but I nearly leaped out of my chair because Violent Violet was standing right in front of me burning twin holes in my skull with her come-at-me-bro gaze.

  “You need anything? Water? Food? More drugs, like yesterday? I brought a whole bottle of Tylenol with me today. Also, Tums. Also, some weed. Do you need me to sit at your table while you go to the men’s room? Do you need anything at all?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I could use my faith restored in the essential goodness of humanity.”

  “On it,” Violent Violet said with her endemic intensity, and then she disappeared into the teeming costumed hordes.

  * * *

  – – – –

  I returned to the zone, drawing Green Lantern (John Stewart—no, not that one, the fictional one), so I didn’t know how much time had passed before I saw Violent Violet again, but there she was, standing over my table, and she handed her phone to me.

  She had the black band of an Apple Watch wrapped around the end of her six-inch-long left arm and she tapped at it with her right hand. Instantly, the screen on the phone in my hands burst to life and I was looking down from a security camera’s vantage point onto a fairly nondescript office space. An Asian man in a bulletproof vest was sitting amiably on the edge of a desk chatting with another man standing in the doorway with a hand pointed accusingly in his direction.

  “What am I looking at?” I said as the two figures mouthed silent words to each other.

  “This is a police station in Bangkok,” Violent Violet said. “That man on the right there has walked in with a knife. He wants to die. He’s hoping the police will shoot him. But that policeman on the left? He doesn’t shoot him. He just starts talking to him.”

  While I watched, the guy with the knife took a few steps toward the cop. At first it looked like he was going to stab him, but instead he held out the knife and the cop took it off him. Then the cop walked forward, knife still in his hands, and gave his would-be attacker a great big hug. And tossed the knife away.

  The video stopped.

  “You see?” Violent Violet said. “There is good in people. And sometimes…sometimes people do dumb things. And get forgiven for them.”

  She said that last part with a very meaningful look on her face. I guess I should have realized that she was trying to tell me something else, something very important.

  But unfortunately I was in the zone and unable to focus on anything other than the drawing in front of me. So I just said, “Thank you, Violet, that was awesome,” and went right back to my Green Lantern.

  Because I am not very, you know.

  Smart.

  * * *

  – – – –

  Dirtbag didn’t have a Comic-Con badge so I had to meet him outside the convention center for a late lunch. He drove me out to this folksy eatery over on El Cajon that was legendary among San Diegans for its amazing chicken pies.

  “So anyway, I tracked down my old buddy Dinesh, he’s running the Absolute Zero immersive thing for Syfy. He used to be the talent coordinator at Atlas, so he’s still pals with people over there; they’re members of this massive text chain where they trade gossip with each other. And wouldn’t you know—Atlas wasn’t planning on dumping Katie from Mister Mystery.”

  “Let me guess: they were gonna dump Mod.”

  “Hells to the yes. Danny Lieber had been advocating for it for months. Months. It was kind of an open secret around the office. Mod’s numbers were really weak, he just wasn’t moving the needle. Not just Mister Mystery; his titles across the board were soft and getting softer.”

  “Any idea who they wanted to replace him?”

  “They begged Joss Whedon, but he passed. Like, he passed a million times.”

  “Damn. Go big or go home.”

  “But now Danny’s out of the picture and who inherits his books is still up in the air. Word is, though, Mod’s got Danny’s assistant editor wrapped around his little finger. So if she gets bumped up because Danny got bumped off…”

  “Right. He’s safe. For now.” I frowned. “But would a guy really kill another guy just to not get fired off
a freaking comic book series? That sounds nuts.”

  Dirtbag shrugged. “Who gets into this crazy business in the first place? I’ll tell you who: crazy people.”

  “I guess.” I thought about it some more. “Though…whoever is writing the Mister Mystery comic when the movie comes out is going to make a nice chunk of change. See a healthy boost in the royalties on his backlist from all that other media exposure. I know that from Gut Check. It’s not inconsequential at all.”

  “But there’s not really going to be a Mister Mystery movie. The rights are still tied up in Ben’s lawsuit.”

  I blinked. “No. They’re not.” I looked into Dirtbag’s face. “Ben reached a settlement with Atlas. And Danny must have known that.”

  Dirtbag’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit, dude,” he said. “Holy shit.”

  “I guess we’d better run down Sebastian’s alibi a little harder. And, say, speaking of alibis, did you get a chance to check out those pedicab places?”

  “Nah, brah, haven’t had time yet. But isn’t you finding the guy who really did this the best alibi you could possibly have?”

  * * *

  – – – –

  The Gaslighter karaoke bar didn’t open until five in the afternoon. Dirtbag and I pushed our way inside at 5:15. Half the lights were off and the big room smelled of dried beer stains and mop water. A leathery old white guy was already hunched over something brown with ice at the bar in the front of the joint. In the back a dozen tables and their attendant chairs surrounded a big stage with a bigger screen behind it and an enclosed DJ booth off to one side. Doors ran along the left-hand side of the room, opposite the bar, and through the portholes set into them I could see smaller karaoke booths: vinyl couches lining the walls inside, facing a central screen.

  A good-looking Korean bro in a black T-shirt and a flat-brimmed Golden State Warriors cap bumped through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, carrying a box full of bottles that clinked when he dropped it onto the bar. He opened the box and started transferring various random bottles of Asian beer, Hites and Sapporos and Singhas, into the waist-high cooler behind him.