Cat in an Alphabet Soup

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Why, Temple wondered, had Owen Tharp shaven off the mustache shown on his publicity photo? Was he vain and unwilling to ditch a younger photograph? Did he now think not having a mustache made him look younger? He had to be fifty at least. Or had losing the mustache been a ploy to make himself less recognizable at the ABA? If Molina hadn’t spotted him, Temple certainly wouldn’t have. He was ordinary-looking to begin with. He could have easily remained behind unnoticed on Thursday night and killed Chester Royal.

  And Lanyard Hunter. He acted so resigned to Royal’s demeaning little ways, as if constant editorial ego-flaying were no skin off his back. Was he really so cool under that smooth, patrician manner of his?

  It was Lanyard Hunter who spotted Temple. He straightened, a movement that alerted Tharp to her presence. Both men stopped talking and regarded her. Some women might have accepted this sudden pall in the conversation as due homage to their beauty and charm, but Temple was just irritated that her chances to eavesdrop had plummeted to zero.

  “Still tidying up Chester’s messy PR blooper?” Hunter asked. “So crude, getting killed at an ABA.”

  “It was tidily done, though,” Temple said. “The police still haven’t arrested anyone, and you’ll all be leaving soon.”

  “Except Chester,” Tharp said roughly. “He was shipped off by Cadaver Express yesterday.”

  “I can see why you write the books you do, Mr. Tharp. Lorna Fennick said you added a macabre twist to the list.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I suppose it’s in bad taste, but then so’s a lot of horror fiction, and I have the bad taste to write it. What I meant was, they flew Royal’s body out.”

  “Where?” Temple wanted to know.

  “Who’s the ghoul here now?” Hunter put in. There was a touch of pique in his voice. She guessed that her blithe rejection the other night had not sat well with his male ego.

  “I just wondered who would claim Chester Royal, since his wives are long gone and glad of it. And there were no children.”

  “He didn’t need children to abuse,” Tharp said bitterly. “He could make us writers do what we were told—most of the time—but we’re all out of the nest now, and he’s dead matter.”

  “Are you staying with Pennyroyal?”

  Both men flashed nervous looks around, but only weary ABA-goers slogged past, book-bloated and indifferent to gossip.

  “Sure,” Tharp admitted. “Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce is a good house. The imprint might perk up with some new blood running it.” He grinned at his gruesome cliché.

  Hunter smiled faintly. “Owen, you’re a consummate actor, always entering into the spirit of a new part. Now you’re the cheeky, press-on employee, eager to support the house in the face of catastrophe. I’ll stay if it suits my mood or my wallet.” Hunter eyed Temple. “Tharp here was just trying to persuade me to let him ghostwrite a series for me. He thinks my production level could stand beefing up, even if he has to do it personally.”

  “Will you do it?” she asked.

  “If it pays, why not?”

  Temple turned to Tharp. “You might be in line for a promotion under your own name, anyway—or I should say your own pseudonym.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With Mavis Davis over at Lodestar-Comet-Orion-Styx, doesn’t a lead spot open up?”

  Both men looked shocked. Hunter’s hands came out of his pockets white-knuckled. Tharp’s very stillness broadcast his disturbance.

  “So Mavis has flown the coop,” Hunter finally said. “With the big bucks,” Tharp added. “We may be on a sinking ship, pal.”

  “Or,” Temple interjected cheerily, “dueling for the position of captain—of the Titanic.”

  With that she veered into the dispirited passersby and wove her way to the exhibit entrance and the Rotunda where awaited, like an apple dangling from the Tree of All Knowledge, the registration center.

  A lone woman now commanded the long counter that only days before had thronged with eager ABA-goers demanding immediate attention and name badges. Now the attendant watched the occasional passerby through bored eyes adorned with lurid aqua contact lenses that perfectly matched the paint on Temple’s Storm. Little did the woman know that she had one shiny red apple to hand over.

  Temple approached her briskly.

  “Hi. I’m with ABA publicity. I need to contact a member of the convention at his hotel. Can you look that up?” First the woman looked down at Temple’s badge, to make sure it bore a stripe in the proper color. Staff was red this year, red like a Roman Beauty apple.

  “What last name?” the woman drawled, letting her eyelids droop over the electric irises.

  “Jaspar. Earnest Jaspar. J-A-S-P-A-R.”

  “Not too many j’s,” she said grumpily, as if annoyed that she wasn’t being put out as much as she could have been by a Smith, say, or even a Wesson. “The Riviera,” she announced shortly after consulting an encyclopedia-thick computer printout.

  “On the Strip?” Temple was startled. There were closer hotels.

  “It hasn’t moved since Thursday.”

  Temple went on tiptoe and leaned over the shoulder-high (on her) countertop. “Does it say how long he’s staying? Whether he’s still there?”

  “Sorry.” The data sheets were suddenly accordion-pleated into a closed book. “You’ll have to ask at the hotel.”

  Temple checked her watch. Mid-afternoon, the cusp of checkout time. She might just be too late.

  19

  Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Thief

  Temple raced back to the office area, people’s heads turning at the passing clatter of her high heels, and didn’t stop until she reached the employee lot in the building’s rear. The Storm sizzled in the sunlight. A trip to the Riviera would barely get its air-conditioning going, but it was too far to walk.

  Luckily, all the Strip hotels had humongous parking lots. Las Vegas was a city made for private wheels, even though buses duly plied the Strip at twenty-minute intervals. Unluckily, the lots were so large that one usually hiked the length of a football field to get out of the sun and into the building.

  Temple’s shoulders sagged with relief as she trotted through the Riviera’s always open doors into a wall of icy air-conditioning. Inside, the hotel was luxe and dusky, like all Las Vegas hostelries. The ambiance offered a deliberate contrast to the heat and glare of the sidewalks. This dim, forever-bistro world of glitter and gaming chips was always a refuge from the harsh hand of nature.

  At the Guest Information desk, Temple waited in line while slot machines chirped and clanked and whirred in the hotel lobby behind her. No foot of the city’s floor space was wasted that could support a one-armed bandit with oranges and cherries for eyes and a stainless steel gullet for a mouth.

  Slot machines occupied grocery stores and laundromats; they wore the first familiar face you saw in the airport lobby when you came and the ultimate one to kiss your last nickel goodbye when you left. Unless you liked vistas of endless scrub and you drove to Vegas.

  “Jasper,” the clerk complained, about to say, “it doesn’t come up on the computer.”

  “A-R,” Temple said.

  Clerkish eyebrows elevated. “Here it is. No, he’s not checked out, miss. If you want to ring the room, his extension is 1517. The house phones are—” He had not looked up while delivering his data; Temple had left as soon as she had what she needed.

  She clutched the receiver in both hands and braced one high heel against the wall while the extension rang once, twice. Lord knows why she had a hunch that Jaspar was an important person to talk to, but she did.

  On five the phone was answered with a simple, “Hello.”

  “Mr. Jaspar? This is Temple Barr from the ABA. I’d like to talk to you about Mr. Royal. Can you meet me in the lobby?”

  He could, and did. Easy as pineapple pie. She’d described herself rather too thoroughly, but paced in front of the long banks of elevators nevertheless. This was her last chance to dig up an ironclad motive. The
ABA was in its death throes. It could very well fade away without revealing the killer of Chester Royal.

  That would be a blot on Molina’s record—but Temple wasn’t worried about Molina’s ass. When was that Nazi in pantyhose ever civil to me? she thought heatedly. Yet she didn’t really need to find the murderer first, if only the murderer were found. Why was she so determined to do it herself? She would hardly be righting an injustice in the emotional sense; Chester Royal’s death seemed more an act of justice than anything else. So why bother some elderly stranger for what might be nothing?

  Because someone had messed up her convention, damn it. She was responsible for everything going smoothly, and murder was definitely not smooth. She had to know why—and who.

  Jaspar was older than she’d expected, certainly over seventy, with a stiff frailty that made her feel like a rotter. No wonder the old boy hadn’t visited the ABA floor much; it would have done him in. She had begun looking around for a quiet place to talk when Jaspar squinted in the direction of the lounge.

  “I could use a drink. This climate dries out my gullet until I feel like an overbaked turkey on Christmas morning.”

  “Sure.” Temple scurried alongside as Jaspar struck out at a stooped but snappy pace.

  The lounge wasn’t quiet, but at least they had a table the size of a pizza all to themselves.

  “Who’d you say you were?” he wanted to know first.

  Lord, she hoped he wasn’t half-deaf. “Temple Barr—”

  “I know the name. What do you do for the ABA?”

  “Public relations.”

  “What does public relations have to do with Chester’s death?”

  “I’m helping the local police get a fix on the dramatis personae.”

  Jaspar looked blank.

  “The people who knew him that are here.”

  “I knew him, knew him over forty years.” Jaspar hoisted his beer at the TV high on the wall that no one could hear.

  The President was on-screen, giving a press conference. Temple wondered what hell was breaking loose where, then brought her mind back to Jaspar. “You acted as an agent for several of his writers.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I beg your pardon?” They were shouting by now. It sounded like an argument, although it was only the usual attempt to communicate in Las Vegas.

  “I just dealt with the writers now and again, eyeballed the contracts. Chester was doing me a favor, throwing a little business my way. Wasn’t much to the job, but he paid okay.”

  Another dupe of Chester Royal’s? Temple couldn’t believe it. “But... why?”

  “We go back a long time. I helped him with a spot of trouble years ago.”

  “In Albert Lea, Minnesota?”

  Jaspar looked surprised. “Yeah, I was working out of Albert Lea, but Chester’s difficulties were in Illinois. Lots of folks wondered why Chester got an out-of-state lawyer. For one thing, we went to college in Milwaukee together—I was older because of World War Two by the time I got to college. For another, I was a good lawyer and he knew it. Everybody thinks there’s nothing in Minnesota but snow.” Jaspar grinned. “That’s not quite true, but it sure’s not as hot as this place.”

  “Why’d you come to the ABA if you did so little?”

  “Chester. He wanted me to be around if a writer needed a little reassurance.” Jaspar leaned close and enunciated every word. “They’re kinda temperamental, writers. Chester explained it to me. Artistic snits. He sure went through a lot of rigmarole to keep ’em happy. I don’t know much about this publishing stuff, but if I was you, I’d get out of it.”

  “I’m not in publishing, I’m in PR.”

  “PR? Not many Puerto Ricans in Minnesota. Vietnamese, though.”

  “Tell me about the case you helped Chester with.”

  “In Illinois?”

  “Yes!”

  “It was back in the fifties. Sad situation, nasty pickle. You couldn’t do things like that in those days, but Chester was always breaking rules. Chester was the ultimate Indian giver.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he did anything for you, there was a mousetrap in it somewhere. He had an odd sense of humor. On the surface he looked like a beneficent guy, but deep down everything was not only to his advantage, but it soothed some private sore spot to get the better of someone. An Indian giver— that’s what we used to called giving and then taking back, like the government kept grabbing back lands it’d promised the Indians. Chester handed you something with one hand and took something of you away with the other.”

  “He stole a bit of their souls,” Temple said darkly.

  “Maybe. But this one time a body was involved. Some woman died. They said it was Chester’s fault.”

  “Was it?”

  “Hell, yes! That kind of thing was illegal then. May soon be again.”

  “Abortion?” Temple held her breath. Could this be the malpractice case she’d set Molina on?

  Jaspar nodded and took a swig of beer from the massive mug before him. “Chester was lucky to get off with just his medical license jerked. The DA was thinking of going for manslaughter, but I was pretty sharp in those days; it ended up just a malpractice case. Helped some that the family was claiming the woman hadn’t wanted an abortion. Kinda hard to swallow.”

  “What days? When exactly?”

  Jaspar puckered his whole face in indecision. “Early fifties.

  “Exactly?”

  “ ‘Exactly’ isn’t exactly in my mental vocabulary anymore. Maybe... fifty-two.” Jaspar managed to look both stubborn and grumpy, so Temple tried a different tack.

  “But why was the family’s claim that the aborted woman was unwilling so hard to swallow?”

  “Well—” Jaspar leaned back in the well-padded captain’s chair. This question would permit the proper elaboration, the attorney’s equivalent of good, old-fashioned gossip. “The woman had almost a dozen kids already. Husband was a switchman for the Great Northern Railway, you know, the one with the mountain goat.”

  Temple didn’t know, but figured the goat wasn’t important, so she just nodded.

  “Gil—Gil—Gilhooley or some cheesecloth-curtain Irish name. Roman Catholics, of course, but it’s one thing to go to church on Sunday and bend your knee and say ‘Bless me, Father,’ and another to live with ten hungry mouths and another one coming.”

  “But the family—the husband—insisted she never would have asked for an abortion?”

  “Mary... Ellen, that’s it! Mary Ellen Gilhooley. Women aren’t having kids like that anymore. I never did know how they took that kind of wear and tear back then. They don’t do it nowadays. Progress.”

  “Mary Ellen Gilhooley died on Dr. Chester Royal’s table during the course of an abortion her husband said she’d never have asked for?”

  “That’s it. Well, people lose someone close, they don’t want to think that person would be driven to do something they’re not supposed to. But who knows better than a doctor—or a lawyer—what the client really wants, huh? “Denial, that’s what the psychologists call it nowadays. Those Gilhooleys were into denial up to their face freckles about Mary Ellen and what she needed and wanted, believe me. Husband’s name was Michael—that’s it! Michael and little Mary Clare, and Eoin and Liam and Brigid and Sean, and—let me see—there was a Cathleen, of course, and maybe a Rory. Irish as they come. Enough kids; Chester was just trying to do a good deed. You can’t blame him, ’cept it was out-and-out illegal. So they took his license and he went on to different work. I hadn’t thought about that in years, but I remember it clearer than what I had for breakfast this morning. Cost a mint, too.”

  Earnest Jaspar’s pale aging eyes suddenly focused on Temple’s. “Don’t get old and forget, like me and Chester. Some people, it’s like they forget to get old. Others, they just get old to forget.”

  Temple, lost in the implications of a possibly hot lead, assured Jaspar that she would never forget meeting him. He fussed abou
t planning to attend Chester Royal’s memorial service tomorrow once he knew where it would be, but she took his home address and phone number anyway—to justify her snooping to Molina if it should ever come up. She said goodbye and thank you, then paused again in the lobby and phoned home to inquire into the action on other fronts.

  “Electra? Have you heard from a woman named Lorna Fennick? Great. What’s on in the background? I can hardly hear here and it sounds like you’ve got a soccer match in your living room.” Temple put a finger in her free ear.

  “Just the MTV, hon,” Electra answered. “I like the sound on high. And I’m on the portable phone in your living room. Mr. Marino is home sick so Matt is seeing if he can fix your French door latch.”

  Temple shifted her weight onto one foot and realized that she was hot, tired and depressed—and that Electra had Matt Devine all to herself in Temple’s living room.

  “Listen, have you seen anything of Louie? Louie! The black cat. Yeah. Well, look now, please. On the patio, or in the yard.”

  Temple tapped a toe and stonily eyed the person waiting behind her for the pay phone. Let him go stuff a slot machine, that’s what Vegas was for.

  “Nothing? No sign? Okay. Yeah, I’m coming home later if the traffic will let me. Keep the MTV warm for me.”

  Where the devil was Midnight Louie? But she had other felines in the fire. Temple pulled the now-worn Yellow Page from her bag and dialed Eightball O’Rourke. No answer, the same story as when she’d tried the number several earlier times that afternoon. He was probably on his way to the Maldives with Emily Adcock’s $5,000.

  “You sure know how to pick ’em,” Temple admonished herself.

  On the other hand, O’Rourke still could be hopping up the money trail in pursuit of the ransom collector. It was possible. Or maybe he’d been hurt—knocked out—by the napper. That was possible, too.

  Temple was beginning to feel as flummoxed about the murder of Chester Royal and the snatching of the Scottish folds as she was about the disappearance of the Mystifying Max.