Free 8 Antiques Con by Barbara Allan Page B

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.

Chapter Five
Con Traption
    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,