Cat in an Alphabet Soup

3

Nothing but a Pack of Flacks

Temple slipped down the corridor past Charlton Heston and nodded automatically.

Movie stars’ familiar faces bred the notion that one actually knew them, a wholly one-sided phenomenon, unfortunately. She stopped to watch Heston’s six feet three inches shoulder around the corner, shrugged and headed for room 208. Amazing, she ruminated, how a murder can alter one’s sense of proportion. Heston was en route to the interview room down the hall, where celebrities gathered like an exaltation of La-La Land larks, in high supply given Las Vegas’s proximity to Hollywood.

Earlier during the setup period for the ABA’s long post-Memorial Day weekend, when Temple’s patience had been young and her feet uncallused—just yesterday, Thursday—she actually had been uncool enough to “peek” when a particularly stellar personality was flashing the flesh. Now,

She could trip over Charlton Heston, Paul Newman or Sean Penn and she wouldn’t care—just so long as he wasn’t dead.

Outside conference room 208’s nondescript door she paused to contemplate the coming ordeal. Nothing was worse than a triumvirate of PR persons with conflicting goals. A messy murder put a lot of public images on the line: the convention center’s, the ABA’s and, especially, that of the big publishing house that sponsored Pennyroyal Press. Temple lowered her glasses to her nose, lengthened her neck for an illusion of greater height and charged the door.

Correction, Temple thought as she surveyed the two people in the otherwise empty room: nothing is worse than a trio of PR women, definitely the more dangerous of the species. Public relations was one of the rare fields where women could rise to the top; most of them would not settle for less, especially Claudia Esterbrook, the power-suited woman who’d run the ABA publicity circus maximus since the heyday of Messalina. That she didn’t show it was only thanks to the gentle art of plastic surgery.

“We don’t have much time,” Claudia announced. Claudia’s lacquered hair was the color of tapioca. It was razor-cut and so were her mandarin-length fingernails. One tapped the table with Freddy Kruegerish emphasis.

“I’ve got a rock star,” she said, “with a mouth that Drano couldn’t fix meeting the press in twenty-five minutes. I’ve got to be there for damage control.”

“This won’t take long.” Temple clicked toward the conference table and slung her briefcase atop the beige Formica. “We better get our acts together before we rush out conflicting press releases on the Royal death. That would really prolong the agony.”

The mouse-haired woman with a long, sinewy face sitting opposite Claudia Esterbrook nodded. “Lorna Fennick, director of PR for Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce. You’re right; if we’re not all tap-dancing in time, it’ll be Reverb City.” From her open patent-leather briefcase she withdrew sheaves of paper and spun them across the slick tabletop.

“Bios of Chester Royal; a history of the Pennyroyal Press imprint; releases on its three biggest authors and a statement from our publisher expressing regret et cetera for Mr. Royal’s death.”

“Great.” Temple grinned as she sat. This was going to be easier than she’d thought. Despite Lorna Fennick’s tough-turkey looks, she evinced the hyperactive efficiency of the best of her breed. “Here are copies of the convention center’s local and regional press list. That’ll let you know who you’ll have to fend off.”

“Sure.” Claudia Esterbrook delicately raked her homicidal nails down her neck. “Something nasty, like murder, happens and we have to fend off the press. Do our regular jobs right—promoting good news, like books and writers—and we can’t fill a quarter of the ABA interview room.”

“You know why,” Lorna put in. “Book reviewers have zero clout because book sections get virtually no advertising support. We’d get more coverage at the ABA if newspapers got more publisher and bookstore ad bucks. Money talks.”

“Yeah, that’s why our conventions draw so many city-desk types who only want to cover an ABA to flack their own coffee-stained manuscripts, most of which are best suited for use as blotter paper at a puppy academy.”

“That’s the point, Claudia.” Lorna Fennick sipped from a Styrofoam cup. “The ABA does attract members of the press, whatever the motive, and every reporter eats up something meaty like murder, especially at an unlikely place like an ABA.”

“I don’t know about that ‘unlikely’ part,” Claudia retorted. “You shouldn’t be surprised by what happens when egos collide at an ABA. Not two days ago Chester Royal called you a ‘ball-busting press-release pusher’ to your face.”

Lorna flushed. “Chester Royal was rotten to everyone; it was part of his mystique,” she explained to Temple. “Some people think that’s the only way to express power.”

“I take it the victim was a wee bit unlikable?” Temple said as An Awful Thought occurred. “That could prolong the investigation into next week—of the year 2023!” Claudia sniffed. “Listen, Little Miss Lollipop, Royal even had a run-in with you. Don’t you remember? You were in the press room and mentioned that the Vegas papers weren’t big on covering culture.”

Temple’s eyebrows had lifted at the ‘Little Miss Lollipop’ crack and stayed there. “I remember some guy going into a Geritol tirade about the book business being ‘thrills and chills and bottom line, not literature.’ I think he called me ‘Girlie.’ ”

Lorna groaned. “That’s Chester. Or was Chester. He played professional curmudgeon.”

“Heavy on the ‘cur,’ ” Claudia added, scanning Lorna’s sheaf of press releases. “Frankly, Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce is lucky to unload the old grouch. I’ve heard he was getting so senile lately he was deep-sixing the imprint. Mr. Bigwig’s regrets are for show only.”

“Hardly.” Lorna Fennick’s voice had turned sharp as filed tacks. “Pennyroyal Press practically invented the medical thriller as a salable subgenre. The imprint is extremely profitable.”

“Without Royal?” Temple wondered, looking up from skimming the late Chester Royal’s bio.

Before Lorna could answer, Claudia Esterbrook did. “More so, without him. I hear he had the RCD brass by the monkey’s marbles. No one had any control, editorial or fiscal, over him or Pennyroyal Press. And PP pulled down a very pretty penny, I hear—or did until lately.”

“Does,” Lorna Fennick said through her teeth. They were exceptionally handsome, and probably expensive. “We’re hardly helping Miss Barr with rumor-mill speculations.”

“Speak for yourself,” Esterbrook snapped. “Look; I’m outa here. Mr. Razor Mouth is getting ready to spit-polish the podium even as we shilly-shally. You can stay and feed fairy tales to Miss Barr, Lorna. That’s all the press sees fit to print anyway.”

“Whew,” said Temple when the door had crisped shut behind the woman.

“It’s a rough job.”

“So’s mine—now,” Temple said. “You’re in for a tough time, too. The local police will need a crash course in book publishing to investigate this case. They’ll want to know who,what,when,where, and why not. It’s the last thing your staff will want to deal with.”

Lorna pulled out a wine snakeskin cigarette case and lighter and gave Temple a quizzical look. When Temple nodded, she lit up and inhaled until her cheeks were concave.

“Claudia’s right,” she admitted on a dragonish puff of exhaled smoke. “Chester was a Royal pain. That’s between us.” Her eyes narrowed. “You ever flacked for a publisher? You have some insight on corporate ins and outs.”

“Repertory theater. The same thing: sell arts and entertainment; snuff scandal and any ragged bottom-line stuff.”

“Where?”

“Minneapolis.”

“The Guthrie.” Lorna’s murky eyes glinted with respect. “How’d you end up in Las Vegas, for gawd’s sake?”

Temple sighed. “A long and personal story. I’m saving it for the movie.”

“Anyway, you know how obnoxious these egotistical artsy types can be.”

Temple nodded. “The best are usually sweethearts, though.”

“Usually.”

“Besides, Chester Royal wasn’t a temperamental author; from his bio, he was an editor in chief—and more chief than editor nowadays. Wasn’t his position mostly business, not art?”

“More people are killed for bottom lines, baby, than art.”

“Still, that ‘stet’ sounds like the last word from an author whose precious prose has been tinkered with. Could any writers on the Pennyroyal Press list harbor a grudge for past indignities?”

“You’ve got the bios of the best-selling authors. The others have nothing much to gain—or lose.”

Temple frowned at the standard press releases—stapled, two-page, double-spaced sheets with small half-tone photos of the author and latest book cover notched into the text. Mavis Davis. Lanyard Hunter. Owen Tharp.

“I’ve never heard of them,” Temple confessed.

Lorna rolled her eyes, her inhalation so deep it was almost suicidal. “Welcome to the majority of the U.S. population. Most people buy only three or four books a year, including cookbooks, travel guides and horoscopes. Only a tiny percentage of the pop. are regular readers. Divvy that up by reader tastes— literary versus genre fiction like mystery, romance and sci-fi, add nonfiction—and a steady readership of a hundred thousand or so can fuel a middling novelist’s career.”

“Even a B act in Vegas pulls a bigger crowd in the six weeks during Lent,” Temple said.

Lorna shrugged. “Facts of publishing life. Makes it hard to picture most authors as crazed killers over such meager stakes.”

“Aha, but you aren’t considering artistic soul,” Temple said darkly. “I’ve known actors who would kill for a walk-on. This bunch, though”—she waved the releases—“looks pretty normal.”

Lorna snickered. “Show me a normal author and I’ll show you a walking contradiction. Like acting, publishing is built on rejection. A successful author is either someone with incredible luck and an inch-thick skin—or a very long enemies list and a memory to match it.”

“This Mavis Davis woman looks just like a nice woman from Peoria, Illinois, should: a fortyish Julia Child coming over with chicken soup.”

“Have a chemist check the soup before you sip it. Mavis Davis writes the ‘Devils of Death’ series.” Lorna Fennick warmed to Temple’s blank look. “Instructive little tales of killer nurses. Her last one, Death on Delivery, was about a serial baby killer. She also features kidnapping obstetrics nurses. We call her the Queen of White-Cap Crime.”

“Nice tag line. Is—”

“Yes, it is. You think any publisher would concoct ‘Mavis Davis’? We urged a pseudonym, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

“What about Lanyard Hunter?”

“The name—or the author?”

“The author. What’s his story?”

Lorna lit a new Virginia Slim—her fourth—and studied her copy of the release. “An intriguing case. One of those medical impostors.”

“You mean the guys who dress up in lab coat and stethoscope to become fake doctors in real hospitals?”

Lorna nodded. “We don’t stress it in the release; we call him a ‘medicine buff.’ Hunter conned an amazing number of reputable hospitals into hiring him in an even more amazing range of specialties before his deception caught up with him. Chester Royal signed him to write an autobio, but it came out fiction—and this guy knows his hospitals, believe me. Reading his books would convince me to consult a Roto-Rooter franchise rather than a doctor any day.”

Temple studied the photo of Lanyard Hunter, a handsome, prematurely silver-haired charmer in his early forties with a chamber of commerce smile. “He’s so distinguished and humane-looking.”

“Exactly why they should have run the other way when he presented himself as a doctor. He was too good to be true.”

“It would take a clever, confident man to do something like that. He would have to feel superior to everyone around him. He would have to cultivate a certain distance that could make it easy to murder.”

Lorna nodded soberly. “Lanyard Hunter is fascinating. I interviewed him for that release and if I didn’t know better, I’d let him remove my gallbladder. But he’s made a mint exploiting his knowledge of hospitals, and Pennyroyal Press gave him lead title status; why kill the giant that let him lay such golden eggs?”

“And this last one—Owen Tharp?”

“The compleat hack. He’s written novels in a dozen genres under two dozen names. Owen Tharp’s a phony, by the way. His stuff’s never lead title, but he’s fast, reliable and has a decidedly grisly bent that lends the list a touch of outright horror.”

“Corpus Delicious?”

“Cannibal morgue attendants.”

“Scalpels Anonymous, P.A.?”

“Sadistic plastic surgeons who deface their patients and drive them to suicide.”

“I do have to wonder now, are the people who write these books normal?” Tharp certainly looked normal enough—middle-aged, middle-class, Midwestern.

Lorna beamed like a comedian given a straight line. “Are any writers normal? Of course not. They write whatever fantasies are knocking around their brains and get paid for it, if they’re lucky.”

“There are kinder, gentler things to write about.”

“Like what?”

“Uh... romance, families, the stock market,” Temple said.

“Kind and gentle doesn’t sell. Sex and violence sells. And there’s plenty of it in the stock market, in families and between supposedly loving couples.”

“If you put it that way, it’s a wonder more publishing personnel don’t get murdered.”

“You sure it’s murder? The police haven’t said so.”

“The body looked like it was left there by someone who enjoyed it.” Temple frowned. “Have the police mentioned how Royal was found?”

“Dead,” Lorna said, her eyes narrowing. “There’s more?”

“Not yet, but there may be.” Temple rapped the press releases she had collected from Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce into a neat pile on the tabletop. “Would you ask your people to make themselves available to me? I know the media and police in this town; the more I know, the more I can head them off at the pass—and the presses.”

“You really think that there’s going to be more, rather than less, hubbub over this?”

“You bet your Lily of France lingerie. Las Vegas is a lot more crime-conscious than it is book-conscious, but then you gave me the sad statistics yourself.”

“I’ll take cooperation over hanging separately any day. We’re all in this together,” Lorna Fennick said with a conspiratorially arched eyebrow.

The comment made Temple wonder why an imprint’s editor-in-chief would call his overlord’s publicity director a “ball-busting press-release pusher.”

“You still here?” Temple was not pleased to find Crawford Buchanan sitting at her desk poking a pencil through the wire grating at the captive cat. It was past 6 p.m. and the office was otherwise empty.

“We’re all in this together,” he sing-songed back. “Press solidarity. Speaking of which, Dubbs wants to know—any news on the missing pussycats?”

“Oh, God... Baker and Taylor! Look, I’ve been a little busy running damage control on this dead body.”

“You mean like that?” Buchanan’s lifted elbow revealed the Review-Journal’s PM edition. The headline, “Editor Dead at Convention Center,” leaped up at Temple.

“At least the story’s below the fold.” She leaned over to skim the type.

“Front page, though. Not many details. Went to press too fast. And that Lieutenant Molina’s closemouthed. Dubbs took two Ibuprofens this afternoon.”

“He should take aspirin,” Temple snapped. “At his age, it’s better for his heart.”

Buchanan spun from side to side in Temple’s chair. “A lack of stories like this is even better for his heart, T.B. Hey—ouch! That sucker snapped the pencil right out of my hand.”

“Better pick on someone who isn’t bigger’n you, C.B.”

That got Buchanan out of her chair, but he never stayed angry. He smiled smarmily and rapped his fingers along the top of the cat carrier. “All I can say is, you better uncover those cats and cool this murder, or the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, not to mention the ABA, will not be pleased with you. Ta-ta.”

Temple watched his grizzled mop of curls saunter out of the office, just visible over assorted cubicle tops.

"Shark!” she spit after him under her breath. Then she regarded the almost-forgotten carrier. “Are you okay, kitty? Did the mean little man hurt you? I thought not. Come on, let’s hit the road. I’m tired of this place.”