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Napoleon Publishing/RendezVous Press Imprints of TransMedia Enterprises Inc. Toronto, Ontario, Canada

      05 04 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1

      Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

      Malton, H. Mel, date-

      Cue the dead guy: a Polly Deacon Murder mystery

      ISBN 0-929141-66-0

      I. Title.

      The support of several generous friends and colleagues helped in the making of this book. I am indebted to Teri Souter and Karen Hood-Caddy, who provided insightful and friendly feedback, often rather late at night. Thanks also to Cathy Glass for keeping tabs on Becker, and to Anne, Peter and Mary for making sure I ate occasionally. Special thanks are due to my publisher Sylvia McConnell and editor Allister Thompson, whose sensitive handling of author and material is very much appreciated.

      This is a work of fiction. The events described did not happen—they are the figments of the author’s imagination, as are the characters, their attitudes and actions. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental.

      One

      SERPENT: Beauty pothetheth a dangerouth punch / She will make you her thlave and then have you for lunch.

      -The Glass Flute, Scene vii

      Rico Amato makes a great woman. When he’s in drag, he looks like a twenty-ish university student—an ultra-hip babe studying environmental science, with a minor in theatre arts. His look is purely classy. No flashy jewellery, no blue eyeshadow or platform heels. He has better taste in clothes than I do.

      When he’s decked out, he likes to call himself Ricki, and because he’s a friend of mine, I play along with it. That’s how I ended up with a broken nose at the tail end of Steamboat Theatre’s “meet the cast” masquerade party.

      My name is Pauline Deacon, and I’m a puppet-maker by trade. You may think that’s a ridiculous thing to be doing for a living these days, but actually, the puppet market is booming. Perhaps it’s because the current political and economic climate has made us all search desperately for something we can control. There’s nothing like pulling a few strings to make you feel powerful. Lately, there’s been a run on police marionettes and Prime Minister hand puppets.

      I have a fair amount of experience building big, theatrical pieces, and that’s what got me involved with Steamboat Theatre. They’re a small children’s touring company based in Sikwan, a town in the Ontario cottage-country District of Kuskawa. Just north of Sikwan is Cedar Falls, the village I call home.

      Steamboat was remounting a guaranteed moneymaker called The Glass Flute, a black-light production in which puppeteers, dressed from head to toe in black (so they can’t be seen) manipulate large, glow-in-the-dark puppets under ultra-violet light. Kids really love black-light theatre. Watching it is like watching a live cartoon, except that it’s bigger than a TV screen, and when you throw stuff at the actors, they throw it back.

      The theatre was reeling with the shock of a ninety percent cut in government funding, and needed a sure-fire hit. The Glass Flute was it—the kind of show that schools and library associations book faster than a Sharon, Lois and Bram concert.

      It was an old show, written in 1980 by Juliet Keating, the company’s founder and artistic director. It had been revamped and remounted so many times that the theatre’s staff groaned at the mention of it. They called it “The Glass Fluke” or “The Fluke”, for short, but the truth was that it had saved Steamboat’s ass more than once, and Juliet had decided to trot it out again. That’s where I came in.

      The props, larger-than-life foam-constructed animals, people, trees and flowers, had taken a battering over the years and their original designer had moved to L.A. to work in film. So, Juliet called me and asked me to re-design everything.

      I jumped at the offer. What I said before about the puppet-business booming? I lied. I was broke and starving. So there. I’d done well at Christmas with my patented Jean Chrétien sock-puppets, but the rest of the winter had been very, very lean, made worse by the fact that I was nursing a wounded ego following a stupid affair with a cop. When Juliet called on the first of April, I was drinking the last of my home-made dandelion wine and going quietly bonkers. She offered me the gig, four weeks of puppet-making followed by an intense, one-week rehearsal period, teaching the actors how to be puppeteers. I made sure it wasn’t a sick April Fool’s joke, then got so excited I danced around like an idiot, which made Lug-Nut (my dog—an idiot too) so hyper he peed on the rug.

      The masquerade party was Juliet’s idea. It was a sort of “get acquainted” thing on the eve of the first rehearsal. Maybe she thought that the cast and crew, many of them fresh from Toronto and suffering from culture shock, would be more at ease if everyone dressed up funny the night before and got howling drunk. Juliet’s an odd one. Raised in an old-money Boston family, she spat out the silver spoon at the age of seventeen, ran away and joined a Vegas-style touring show as a chorus girl. She immigrated to Toronto in the mid-sixties and co-wrote and produced a series of naughty musicals that shocked the straight-laced Canadian audiences, who, nonetheless, flocked to the theatre to be outraged. Juliet and her business partner, Dennis Gold, made pots of money, particularly with their last one, Hogtown Hooker. When Dennis died of a sudden heart attack, Juliet closed up shop and moved north, settled in Sikwan and started Steamboat.

      What Juliet doesn’t know about life on the road would fit comfortably on the back of a pack of piano-lounge matches. She’s in her late fifties, favours short skirts and tight, low cut T-shirts, and has a smoking habit that makes me look like a nun. She’s good at what she does, though, and while she might scare some of the more staid Sikwan-ites, she is generally respected.

      I invited Rico to Juliet’s party because he’s my new best friend. My old best friend, Francy, is resting peacefully in the Temple of the Holy Lamb cemetery and I haven’t forgotten her, but Rico helped me through some rough times after she died, so he gets the dubious honour of replacing her in my affections.

      The transvestite community up here in Kuskawa is somewhat limited, and I knew Rico would enjoy the opportunity to dress up. He always struts his stuff at Hallowe’en, whooping it up at a nearby resort that’s gay-positive, but once a year is not enough when you’ve got a hobby you really like. Juliet and Rico know each other because they’re both on the board of the local AIDS foundation, but I had to ask if I could bring him as a guest, because Steamboat parties are known to be somewhat exclusive.

      When I arrived to pick Rico up outside his antique store by the highway leading into Cedar Falls, I hunkered low in the cab of the truck, which I had borrowed from my neighbour and landlord, goat-farmer George Hoito. I was rigged out as a goat (a costume I’d made three years before for a mascot-gig at a dairy-farming conference)