An enclosed area entered through a curtain no doubt housed the sanitary facilities.
Although the cats in question were absent in body, they were well represented in the booth—glossy calendars and posters pictured them perched on towers of best-sellers, in round spectacles and assorted bookish poses. Despite their stardom, Baker and Taylor were short-haired, sensible- looking felines with large patches of pepper-and-spice-seasoned white fur. Their undersize ears—a trademark of their unusual breed—were tucked neatly against their sagacious Highland heads.
The booth contact person was a sleek, reassuringly friendly woman Temple’s age wearing—since Baker and Taylor’s absence had been discovered early yesterday morning before Chester Royal’s removal—a now-constant frown of anxiety.
“Miss Barr! Have you heard anything?”
“No”—Temple swiftly consulted the name tag depending from the lapel of a teal silk blazer—“Miss Adcock, I haven’t. To be quite honest, I’ve been caught up in the other crime.”
“Other crime? Oh, the murder.” Emily Adcock absently jabbed the ballpoint pen behind her ear more firmly in place. “But what about the cats! I’ve had a chance to ask everyone who was on duty when we were setting up the booths. Nobody took the cats home for the night, as I’d hoped some misguided animal lover had done. Good grief—this cat palace is equipped with every comfort known to exhibit engineers. Baker and Taylor are library cats. They’re used to mingling with the public. They like the attention. They wouldn’t run away!”
“How did they become corporate cover cats?” Temple asked.
“The sponsoring library got Baker on its own, and wrote the company, which gave them a grant a couple months later to purchase Taylor. These cats are famous among librarians and libraries everywhere. If anything’s happened to them... who could have taken them?”
“Have you talked to Cyrus Bent?”
“The convention hall security chief? Yes, he was most cooperative. He agreed that the cats couldn’t have escaped without human aid. The display area is secure. It might be malicious mischief. He’s sparing what staff he can to search the facility, including the air vents. But who would hear a ‘meow’ in this mess?”
“It’s terribly distressful, but if you don’t want to involve the police—”
Emily Adcock shuddered in her lightweight blazer. “Lordy, no! Not... yet. Not when it could be an accident or a prank. Did you see the Review-Journal with that cat story on the second front? Think what the press could do with this! ‘Double Trouble: Cats out of Bag at ABA.’ ‘Major Book Distributor Loses Catty Corporate Mascots.’ No, thank you.”
One PR woman’s publicity coup could be another’s coup de grȃce Temple mused. “I don’t see what I can do.” Emily Adcock wrung her hands despite sizable diamond solitaires on the third fingers of each hand. “Just make sure that your security personnel takes this matter seriously. I’m just a PR free-lancer like you. My goose will be chopped liver if Baker and Taylor loses its namesake cats, not to mention that everyone’s grown terribly fond of them. Such good-natured creatures. I never would have suggested that they appear in person if I’d suspected—”
“Mr. Bent will find them if they’re hiding out in the building. And if their absence has a more sinister cause—”
“What do you mean?”
“Catnapping. Surely you’ve considered that?”
“No! Who would do such a thing?”
Temple extended a forefinger and began ticking off possibilities down a descending ladder of digits: “A business rival, to embarrass the company. An animal rights fanatic, to protest using animals to sell products and services. An off-beat criminal who wants a ransom. A cat hater who’ll send them to an experimental laboratory.” Temple was about to start on her other hand when Emily Adcock clutched it.
“Stop, Miss Barr! You have such... an active imagination. No more, please. Those possibilities alone are sufficient to cause a sleepless night.”
“Those are just off the top of my head, of course.” Temple sighed. “My immediate problems with the Royal death are almost over. I promise that Baker and Taylor— cats and company—will be my next priority.”
Next, after a previous priority was settled.
Temple raced for the interview area green room, checking her wristwatch. The show-and-tell act was over for the day. If she was lucky, she’d have Mavis Davis all to herself.
“This is so kind of you, Miss Barr.” Mavis Davis gazed around the cocktail lounge of the Las Vegas Hilton.
Like most Vegas hostelries, the Hilton flooded its restaurants and bars with air-conditioning and dim nocturnal elegance from dawn to dusk to dawn again. Despite the crowd and the noise, the place felt cozy, dark and intimate, perfect for breaking off a love affair or confessing to murder.
“Think nothing of it, Miss Davis. And call me Temple, please. Lorna was sick at having to desert you, but the signing was scheduled and then the police lieutenant wanted to interrogate Lanyard Hunter afterward—”
“Oh, dear.” Mavis Davis shivered, but Temple doubted she felt the frosty air-conditioning. Although the Hilton was next to the convention center, the walk here had been long, hot and dry. No walk in Vegas is brief, simply because its buildings are so sprawling.
“You haven’t been... interrogated yet?” Temple asked.
“Me! No. Why should I be?” Mavis Davis looked truly appalled.
“You might have some notion or unsuspected information about the murder.”
“Miss Barr—Temple. I write about murder. I don’t think about it in real life. I’m a nurse.” Mavis Davis sipped her Rob Roy, which Temple had never seen ordered before.
“I’m a PR person, but I’ve sure got murder on the brain now. Doesn’t it intrigue a writer to have the real thing fall on her doorstep?”
“No! My books are stories, that’s all. I know my hospitals, and I’ve seen death. It’s not dramatic, and it’s always so disappointing. We always hope that we won’t lose.”
“Except for your homicidal nurses.”
“Yes, but they’re—well, a few in real life have been so deranged—but mine are made-up.”
“You aren’t basing your novels on true crime cases? How refreshing. These days truth is more shocking than fiction.”
“I did try using actual cases for inspiration, but Mr. Royal discouraged me from doing that, I don’t know why. But I always listened to him—oh, dear! Who’ll tell me what to do now? My next book is due in only ten months!”
“You’ll have to carry on as best you can without him. How did you happen to start writing, anyway?”
“Goodness, that was something I always did, from the time I was little—I’d write and nurse baby-dolls. My foster parents still have all my dolls with their bandages and slings and—oh, my, so much slapdash Mercurochrome on them they look like Indian chiefs!” Mavis smiled maternally. “And my ‘scribblings’ drawer was full of doggerel and notebooks.”
“So why’d you become a nurse first?”
Mavis sipped her romantically named drink, her lips pursing at a taste more tolerated than savored. “Practical. Girls like me were terminally practical in the sixties, my dear. Teachers or nurses, those were our career choices, and only if we couldn’t catch a husband first. Obviously, I ‘caught’ a nursing degree and—later, the writing bug.”
“And you lived with foster parents, so you don’t even know why you gravitated toward nursing and writing?”
Mavis Davis lowered her unfortunate voice. “Maybe that’s why I did. Mother and Father Forbes would never talk about my parents. Adopted or fostered children in those days weren’t encouraged to wonder about their origins—and it was probably for the best. But some Forbes cousins used to giggle about it in front of me when I was a teenager. My mother died having an illegal abortion when I was three, you see. Nobody would talk openly about it, but everybody knew, even me eventually. That’s why I never knew anything about my father. And why I went into nursing, I think.”
Mavis Davis regarded Temple as if she were mad. “Heavens, no! The Forbeses were Roman Catholic, and that’s the way I was raised. My mother may have been young and desperate, but she was also desperately wrong! The Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion coincided with my first nursing assignment, but I only worked in hospitals that resisted abortions—or at least gave staff a choice. Mostly I worked in maternity wards, and those are such happy places.” The joy on Mavis’s face reflected hundreds of unclouded, socially sanctioned births.
“Isn’t it hard, then,” Temple asked delicately, “to write about made-up medical horrors?”
“No. It’s make-believe. A scary story. I feel so... free when I’m writing one of my naughty nurse thrillers. Because I know it’s not real. Readers love them. I cherish this secret fantasy that someday my real father or someone who knew him will read one of my books and recognize some family trait in my photograph and write the publisher... an awful lot of people read these things, you know. Maybe a million.”
Mavis laughed with harsh suddenness at her million foolish readers—and her own poignant little fantasy. “I honestly don’t know why my books fascinate the public. I don’t even know why Mr. Royal bought my first book.”
“How long was he your editor?”
“Twelve years.”
“And you still called him ‘Mr. Royal’?”
“He was older,” she began.
Temple studied the woman’s plain but unlined features. “Considerably older than you—sixty-six, the bio said.”
Mavis pursed her lips over a sip of tricked-up scotch. “Young people in my day and place were trained to respect their elders. I may be an adult now, but Mr. Royal seemed so much older—and he was the head of Pennyroyal Press. I never would have felt right about calling him Chester. Nor, I think, would he.”
“What did he call you?”
She looked down at the soggy napkin on which she was restlessly turning her glass. “Mavis.”
“I wish I’d known him. You know, I don’t even know if he was married.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Really. To whom?”
Mavis Davis looked confused. “Well, I don’t know to whom at present. I’d heard he had several wives.”
“Several? A sorry little weasel like him?” Temple suddenly realized she had somehow identified the late Mr. Royal with the very live and loathsome Crawford Buchanan.
Mavis blinked.
“I know he’s dead and all that.” Temple backpedaled quickly from her apparent lack of sympathy. “I’m the one who landed atop the corpse. It was not that of a Romeo I’d care to meet—dead or alive.”
“I can’t say. I never thought of Mr. Royal in that way. To tell you the truth, I was in awe of him.”
“Why?”
“He made me rich and famous.”
“But you wrote the books.”
“But he published the first one.”
“And built Pennyroyal Press on it, from what I can read between the press release lines.”
“Oh, no. I’m sure my little book had nothing to do with that. Why, he could hardly afford to pay me three thousand dollars for it, and it was years before he could pay as much as ten thousand dollars. I had to keep nursing for seven years before I could afford to quit. Quite biblical, don’t you think?”
“But—” Temple searched her memory for the press release’s boastful statistics, “Now I Lay Me had fourteen printings and almost made The New York Times best-seller list. Your next books did better.”
Mavis simpered modestly. “Mr. Royal never grew tired of pointing out how lucky I was to have sold to Pennyroyal my first time out. It took quite a lot of work to rewrite the book; he sent it back four times and had to fix some parts himself. I am—was—a rank amateur, Temple. I owe everything to Mr. Royal. Or did.” Her face blanched, if not quite with grief, certainly with a spasm of personal loss.
Temple eyed the chaste white-wine spritzer before her, the prudent PR professional’s choice when conducting business over cocktails. She caught the eye of a skimpily skirted waitress. “A gin and tonic, please. And another Rob Roy.”
“Oh, no, really—” Mavis protested without conviction. Her face had sagged, first from heat and now from the uninhibiting tide of alcohol. She resembled a tired housewife who’d been prevailed upon to baby-sit the grade school soccer team. Temple felt a wave of guilt that she drowned in a swallow of gin as soon as it arrived, which was very quickly, this being Vegas. Teetotalers don’t up the house take.
“I’ll miss him,” Mavis said bleakly. “I’d gotten so used to him telling me what to do. He took such great pains about it. I know they say they’ll get me another editor, but—”
Her hand made a white-knuckled fist of pure fear. Temple expected to see the tail of a handkerchief trailing from it, Mavis Davis was that kind of old-fashioned, näive woman. There was nothing old-fashioned about the raw edge of her nerves, her desperate lack of confidence.
“Tell me something, Mavis—I can call you that?”
“Yes,” the woman said with pathetic eagerness. “I’m really all alone now. I don’t think—they—know how much Mr. Royal did for me.”
“Or to you,” Temple muttered into her gin. “Mavis. That first book, did you write the whole thing all by yourself when you sold it?”
Mavis nodded.
“Did you have a literary agent?”
Mavis shook her head.
“Do you have one now?”
Another nod. “Mr. Royal said I really should have, after the third book. He recommended someone he’d known for years.”
“But your advances didn’t crack ten thousand dollars until the seventh book.”
“No... why?”
“Well, what did the agent do besides get a cut of your money?”
“He handled all the business stuff that gave me a headache.”
“You mean selling foreign and film rights, that stuff?”
“No. Those were handled by Pennyroyal Press. I was lucky the house had such a big stake in my outside rights, it made them work harder to sell them, my agent said.”
Now Temple’s knuckles had whitened on her glass. She didn’t know much about publishing, but she knew enough to see that Chester Royal had taken shameful advantage of Mavis Davis. The question was, could Mavis Davis, mistress of the Maniacal Nurse Novel, have really been naive enough—even to this moment—to never suspect it?
The right—or wrong—answer to that question could spell a motive for murder.
9
Lost and Found
“I saw you at the Hilton lounge. Some people have all the fun.”
“I guess you’d know about that, Crawford.”
Temple swung her heavy tote bag to the desk. The nice thing about working late—six p.m.—was that the ABA PR office was pretty much cleared and no one was around to hear Buchanan’s charge that Temple had been drinking on the job, even though advertising and PR had invented the three-martini lunch.
The usual notes on incoming calls and current crises sprinkled Temple’s desktop like a giant’s dandruff. First she had to remove her new paperweight: the black cat (an enterprising rascal) had returned to the office all by himself for some serious grooming.
With apologies—to him—she swooped the cat into the storeroom, hoping Buchanan would lose interest and leave, which he did while she was gone. Temple returned to her desk, sank onto her chair and began shuffling memos. Then she pushed her glasses atop her head, cradling her face in her hands. Her eyes refused to focus. It’d been a helluva day. Forget the messages tonight; she’d just scoop the cat into his carrier and head away from her workplace home, sweet homicide.
“Excuse me,” a female voice said pointedly from the doorway.
Temple forsook her “Abandon Hope” pose and took in the visitor—visitors, plural. A man stood on the threshold, too, a darkl
y handsome man. The woman was petite, blond and looked as though she meant business in a Dresden kind of way.
What now, Temple wondered.
The woman marched to Temple’s desk. “We saw this in the evening edition.”
“Oh, the cat story.”
The man had followed her. “The story’s wrong. We know the cat. It’s not a stray.”
“Not a stray? You mean it’s... your cat?” Even Temple heard a rising note of denial in her voice.
The couple was too busy exchanging mute, consulting looks to note Temple’s fraying control.
“Not exactly ‘our’ cat,” She admitted.
“It’s the house cat,” he said.
Temple just stared at them.
He recognized an opening and uncorked a 150-watt smile. “Our ‘house’ happens to be the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino on the Strip. Louie hangs out there, always has since before we reopened the place. I don’t know how he got way over here, but—”
“Louie?” Temple interrupted.
“Midnight Louie,” the blond woman elaborated. “The cat.”
“And who are you?” Temple said.
A tanned hand extended. “Nicky Fontana, and my wife, Van von Rhine. She manages the Crystal Phoenix. I own it.”
“And Louie is the house cat,” the woman said firmly. “When we saw his photo, we thought we’d better bring him home.”
“Home.” Temple didn’t know why thinking was so hard; maybe it was trying to find believable excuses for the cat’s supposed absence, like she’d sent him to the pound, or a Hollywood animal trainer had already claimed him or— “He’s in the storeroom. I’ll get him.”
They followed her to the storeroom door. Maybe they didn’t trust her; maybe they were just eager to see... Louie. Stupid name for a cat, Temple fumed; why not Whiskers or Schwarzenegger if they wanted a really dumb name?
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