There wasn't much of any estate for me to inherit. In between the rent and the alimony and the legal fees, dad's royalty checks from the comics just barely covered his day to day living expenses.

Two months after the incident, the property manager, noticing that the rent hadn't been paid, put up an eviction notice.

A few weeks after that, after the second and final eviction notice, a group of guys from Temp Labor took all his things to the dumpster.

My mother, of course, upon receiving a query from the owner, managed, probably illegally, to swoop in there beforehand, snatching up whatever valuable items she could find, furniture, prints, originals, premium art supplies. The rest went to the curb.

Dad's will was poorly conceived, and his ex-wife's lawyers poked it full of holes. Mom got dibs on just about everything that wasn't in the house. Some of my favorite limited edition prints ended up being claimed and sold at auctions so mom could buy jewelry and fancy clothes at big end retailers.

I was just a baby at the time. I didn't get a choice about what got thrown out.

For a long time, I was apathetic about the whole business. I mean, despite the lack of meaningful contact with my father, the sales and the court imposed garnishments on his royalties fed me and put clothes on my back for a large portion of my life.

I thought I would go through adulthood without seeing a scrap of my father's real life until I met the strange woman at the funeral.

She was a curly haired blonde with glasses, reminding me of the picture of dad's accomplice they showed in newspapers. I never knew what happened to that infamous stranger.

I've driven past dad's old rental flat numerous times over the years, but only stopped and looked around a couple. His neighbors were largely unfriendly and aloof. When I had visited Diamond Bar Homes as a young child, I had seen a young woman spying on me and mom from a window. Instead of coming out and greeting us, she only threw the curtains shut really fast.

I often wondered if our voyeur had been the same woman as in the newspaper, but she never appeared when I knocked on her door.

Honestly, I'm not that good with faces, so I had no way of telling if it were her. Plus I had only been a baby at the time of the incident.

I wouldn't have spoken to the stranger at all, had I not noticed her unusual outfit.

The woman, roughly thirty years older than me, had on a shiny black dress with a slit running up the side. The neckline was plunging, entirely the wrong type of thing to wear to a funeral, even if she did wear a t-shirt and little black boyshorts underneath.

Of course, I excused all this because we didn't have a body, the funeral was outside, and a cluster of devoted fans stood nearby, the women there clad in outfits more revealing than that.

The social faux pas, in and of itself, wasn't the weird part. That's Desperate Housewives stuff. What was weird was the material of the dress. It looked like it had been painted on.

I don't mean skin tight. I mean literally painted with a big brush, and the paint was still wet. How it stayed on her body and covered anything defied physics.

The paint surrounded her plump figure like plastic, but didn't cling. Instead it rippled, like liquid. The more I stared at the black material, the more I associated it with the times I'd watched cartoons with my face too close to the screen, and how the characters looked as the paint made slight movements from frame to frame to frame.

The puff sleeves and a portion of the skirt section appeared to be regular silk, but the rest I expected to see coming out of Walt Disney's inkwell with a blinking set of googly eyes.

Throughout the ceremony, I stole glances at her. She was only about ten years younger than my mother, so it was mostly out of curiosity.

When this farce of a funeral ended, I noticed her trying to sneak away, behavior consistent with the aloof loner type I'd seen at Diamond Bar.

I immediately rushed up to her before she could escape.

"Hey!" I cried. "Who are you?"

She looked nervous. "I was a good friend of your father."

"Aha!" I said. "The dress! The famous Holli Would! I knew it! I have so much to ask you!"

The woman burst out laughing. "I wish!"

Her smile dropped. "You're his kid, aren't you? Andrew, right?"

I nodded. "Who are you, then?"

"Jessica Malley. I work for United Health. Your father was my next door neighbor."

She let out a sigh. "What do you want to know?"

"What happened after my dad got out of prison?" I blurted.

Jessica glanced back and forth, as if afraid to be overheard. "A lot of stuff. I know it might sound crazy, but I don't believe in the lysergic acid theory."

"But the hallucinations!" I protested. "How do you account for that?"

She tugged on the flowing ink of her dress. "How do you account for this?"

My mouth fell open, speechless. "But..."

"Think you're hallucinating now?"

"It stays in your system a long time," I fumbled.

"Think what you want," she said. "But if you want answers, I've got them."

My mother, clad in a kind of slutty dress herself, marched up to me, tugging on my arm.

"C'mon, Drew. Let's go."

"Drew," Jessica chuckled. "That's cute."

"Wait," I told mom. "She knew father."

"She was your father's whore," mom snapped.

I shoved her arm away. "I don't care. I want to talk to her."

Mom gave me a cold glare. "You want to stay and talk to that tramp? Fine. But you'll have to find your own way home!"

"There's plenty of room in my car," Jessica said with a smile.

I raised an eyebrow, giving her a nod.

I could see mom's face flushing red.

"Fine!" she shouted. "I hope the funeral home tows your car!"

She stomped away from the grave site, slamming the door as she climbed into the limo.

"To think your father murdered someone for her," Jessica said as she watched her go.

She gave me an apologetic smile. "Want to go out for coffee or something?"

Like I'd really say no at this point.

Jessica owned a little red Honda four door, its seats and the spaces between crammed with art supplies, comic books, dolls, and books on the paranormal. She had whole sketchbooks full of confusing notes and meticulous renderings of my father's characters.

Betty Boop seat covers. A Thundercats medallion dangling from the rearview. The interior smelled of paint, linseed oil, Chinese take-out and a tinge of marijuana.

I didn't really expect a straight answer from someone so mentally deranged, but even a patient at an asylum can occasionally provide concrete facts about the building in which they reside. I chose to take everything con grano salo.

When we pulled away from the curb, trailing the procession out, I said, "Did you sleep with him?"

As an afterthought, I qualified it with, "Ever?"

"Well," she said, looking a bit pink. "No. I mean, I thought about it a couple times, but he's way older than me. Mostly I just really really love his comics."

"You talk about him like he's still alive."

"Oh he is!" she said as she took a turn out of the cemetery. "He is."

"But how do you know?"

"I'm one of the last people that saw him," she said.

We rolled through dusty Nevada neighborhoods. A depressing lack of color. All sand and sagebrush and cacti. Ugly one story buildings, cigarette shops and taco stands. All the color appeared to have drained into the Strip, leaving outlying areas desolate.

Jessica tugged on her sleeve. "You know, this dress once belonged to Holli Would?"

"The woman who was at the hotel?"

She nodded.

"Are you friends with her?"

She shook her head and sighed. "It would be nice!"

"So you just like to raid her closet."

"She didn't have a closet. She just left her things behind in a bunch of suitcases like she were traveling or something. She didn't even come back to pick them up."

"That's nice for you," I said.

"I'd say so."

I chuckled. "What's with all the junk in the back seat?"

"I'm trying to create what your father made. I know it sounds crazy, but there's something that he did, and if I can just figure out what it was..." She trailed off.

"You think you can create your own franchise."

She laughed. "You're thinking too small."

My eyes widened. "You actually want the whole nine yards? Movie deals? Action figures? That's your angle?"

Jessica giggled and shook her head. "You're still thinking too small. Look. Money doesn't even enter the equation. I've got something much bigger in mind."

I gawked at her. "You're starting a religion? Around my dad's comic books?"

Jessica scrunched up her face. "Your mother raised you to be a very closed minded boy. It's sad."

"Then what?" I said. "What's your angle?"

"Do you believe in parallel universes?"

I frowned at one of her pseudoscientific books. "Not exactly. They're only theoretical. Makes for great television. That's about it."

"They're not entirely theoretical."

Jessica pulled to a stop in a Starbucks parking lot, offering a section of her flickering painted dress for me to touch.

At first, I hesitated. I mean, I was only a toddler when she was running around with my dad, and she basically wanted me to touch her body, but then I relented. This was only a demonstration.

The substance felt like paint, silky and liquid, but my fingers came away dry. The material stretched like normal clothing when you tugged on it. "You're saying this came from a parallel universe."

"How else would you explain it?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "It could be a new space age fabric. I don't see what this has to do with my dad's comics."

Jessica rolled her eyes. "Okay. Nobody can see this but you and me, and I can only show you for a second."

I raised my hand in protest. "I don't do older women."

"What!" her face flushed red. "That wasn't even what I was going to show you! You're as bad as your father!"

"So he did flirt with you."

"No," she said. "But he has a reputation..."

"So do you," I returned.

Frowning, she said, "Fair enough. Look. It's in the glove box."

She undid the latch on the compartment. "I'm only going to show you this for a second, so keep your eyes and your mind open."

"Okay," I muttered, confident that she was crazy.

The compartment contained a single neon blue high heeled slipper, one with blinking eyes and a bow. Animated.

"Holy shit!" I cried. "That's from a Disney-!"

She slammed the compartment shut.

"Do you understand now?"

I stared at her, unable to formulate a response.

"Cool World is real," she said. "Your father's comics. Cartoon characters. It's all real."