Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

14

Behind the Eight Ball

Temple ripped a page from the D section of the Las Vegas Yellow Pages, folded it into quarters, and skidded her rolling office chair to the wall where her tote bag rested.

It took her a minute to contemplate the jam-packed but admirably organized contents for a place to stash this most precious cargo of the moment. Suddenly she was aware of being alone in the office—and of being intently observed.

Living with Max had cultivated that sixth sense. She’d often pottered around the apartment in happy self-absorption only to feel the abrupt pull of someone’s utter attention.

Temple would look up, or around, and Max would be staring at her with the sphinxlike intensity of a cat, as if he were dreaming deep, dark dreams just as she happened to cross his focal point. Or he’d arrive in a room unheard and unseen.

At first, Temple had decided that Max liked surprising people, that the lax attention span of most people was one of the bridges to his magic. Later, she suspected that he’d been training himself, training her, to heed stimuli only heard or seen half-consciously. Either way, goose bumps blossomed on her forearms as she looked up.

Claudia Esterbrook stood in the doorway staring at Temple’s Stuart Weitzman kicky black-patent-and-hot-pink heels as if the ABA PR woman were the Wicked Witch of the West browsing for something in the way of ruby-red slippers.

The shock of seeing her wasn’t as bad as if it had really been Max, but was still unpleasant. Claudia’s face had dropped its professional perkiness. The flesh had curdled, sagging and hardening. Claudia stared at Temple and her high-spirited shoes as if they embodied everything that she saw slipping from her own life.

The insight was fleeting. Then Claudia’s face and voice sweetened. She stepped into the room and might never have posed unhappily on the threshold.

“Breaking news on the Royal death,” she announced.

“They haven’t found... somebody?”

Claudia measured Temple’s surprise, her ebbing vulnerability, and loosed her most impervious smile. “Oh, they’ve found somebody—not the killer. More like one of Royal’s victims. A wife, ex variety. Right here at the ABA. That Lieutenant Molina did some biographical backtracking. It leaves us PR people looking like horses’ derrieres—or like we’ve got something to hide. Here’s an addendum to the group press release. A postmortem statement from the ex-Mrs. Royal.”

Temple slipped the twice-folded Yellow Page into the tote’s side pocket. Some instinct told her to keep Claudia from seeing it. She took the sheet of scanty double-spaced type Claudia offered and skimmed the contents.

“An editor at Cockerel-Tuppence-Trine? Why didn’t she come forward immediately?”

“I imagine that’s what Lieutenant Molina wanted to know. She also wanted to know why Lorna and I didn’t tell her.”

“And?”

“We don’t keep track of everyone’s exes. With the musical chairs at publishing houses today, it’s tough enough to keep tabs on who’s in whose job, much less who’s in whose bed.”

“Or out of it. So when Molina asked you about this Rowena Novak, you cleverly scurried over to CTT and got a statement. Great thinking. The ex-wife wasn’t too shook up, I suppose?”

“About the death—hard to tell. About Molina’s interrogation, probably. That lieutenant means to find the murderer before we all pack up on Tuesday.”

Temple nodded. “Thanks, Claudia. I doubt I’ll be involved in any more PR on the case, but it’s good to be up-to-date. Now, I’ve got an urgent errand to run—” Temple left the release on her desk and headed for the door.

“Oh,” Claudia called after her, “got to change some kitty litter?”

Temple whirled in the doorway and studied Claudia, noting the same bitter expression she’d observed earlier. Then Temple blithely shook her head.

“Nothing so important—just a shoe sale at Pay Less. ’Bye.”

In five minutes Temple was at the Cockerel-Tuppence-Trine booths on the crowded exhibit floor, eyeing name tags.

“Miss Novak?”

The woman nodded. She was plainer than dry toast, a spare, Persian-lamb-haired woman of forty-something with eyeglass frames that echoed her jaundiced skin tones. Trendy shades of chartreuse and rust underlined her enduring homeliness.

“Can we... talk? I’m Temple Barr. I’m assisting with public relations for the convention and also helping Lieutenant Molina with orientation.”

“I’ve talked to Lieutenant Molina, and Claudia Esterbrook.”

“I know, but I hoped you might spare a few more moments. The police don’t understand how an ABA works. They need a translator, and it’s my job to get the information out and the facts right.”

Rowena Novak’s big-boned face screwed tighter, then she sighed. “All right. The refreshment area should be quieter with the lunch rush done. I could use a soft drink.”

“Fine. I’ll buy.”

They threaded through the crowds, Temple making sure that her catch remained in tow. As the woman had said, seats were available in the vast eating area. They shuffled through the cafeteria setup, Temple suddenly ravenous after her nonlunch. She splurged on a sweet roll and gaped when Rowena Novak ordered an honest-to-God Coke, no diet version.

As they hunched over their trays at a round white table, people came and sat and left all around them. In one way it was the worst site for a probing interview, in another the best. The casual atmosphere and crowds made it seem that nothing serious could be said here, so of course it would be.

“What do you need to know?” Rowena Novak took a quick sip of her Coke.

“It’s still hard to explain to Lieutenant Molina what an imprint is, how someone gets started in the business. You were married to Chester Royal for—?”

“Seven years, an appropriate number, like a plague of Egypt.”

“Was that before—or after—the formation of Pennyroyal Press?”

“Oh, before. Chester was writing nonfiction then.”

“Really?”

“That’s how I met him. An agent was enthusiastic about a proposal of his. Of course in nonfiction the author’s salability is as important as the book’s.”

“You mean, whether the author’s good-looking, articulate, will do well on media tours, that kind of thing?”

“Exactly.”

Nothing more was forthcoming except another of those tiny, birdlike sips. Temple munched a mouthful of sinfully sugared pastry. How to keep the interview going before Rowena Novak suddenly finished her Coke and walked away?

“So Mr. Royal, Chester, went from author to editor. That must have been after you’d married.”

“Yes. He became interested in the other end of the business after we’d met and begun—I suppose you’d call it dating.”

A flicker of disgust in those ocher eyes told Temple that despite the woman’s enviable composure, much that was unpleasant lurked beneath.

“I understand Chester Royal was the marrying kind.”

“If you’re asking which wife I was—it was number three. And Chester was not so much the marrying kind as the exploiting kind. If a woman came along he could use, he married her. At least he did when he was younger.”

“He didn’t marry Mavis Davis.” Temple issued a frank glance.

Rowena’s mouth quirked. “No. He’d figured out how to use women without marrying them by then. He owed it all to me.”

“Did you tell this to Lieutenant Molina?”

“No.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because you’re asking the right questions. I have nothing to hide about our lives together, about what he was. I don’t even hate him anymore, I just understand him. I probably understand—understood—Chester better than anybody. I taught him all he knew.”

When Temple stared at her incredulously, she added, “accidentally, of course,” and went on. “I’d never been married before, but I was no kid. I might have resisted Chester, but he was so fascinated, so enthralled by my work. At the time it seemed to mean that he took me seriously. What he took seriously was my work; he took my work.”

“Took your... work? How?”

“He absorbed it. He became what I was.”

Temple, still confused, searched for the right next question.

“Have you ever been betrayed in love, Miss Barr?”

It was a no more personal question than Temple had been asking. “Yes,” she answered with fierce honesty. “I think.”

Rowena laughed, a pleasant sound and an expression that did pleasant things to her plain face. “I can’t say I was disappointed in love, but I was betrayed in my judgment. I failed to see that it wasn’t I to whom Chester was so earnestly attracted, it was something I had.”

“What?”

“Power.”

Temple didn’t know what to say. Claudia’s press release had described Rowena Novak as a senior editor at Trine Books, not a bad position, but certainly not one that would put her into a corner office in Manhattan.

Rowena’s fingers, sallow and ringless, moved up and down the sides of the oversize Styrofoam cup as if they were caressing Baccarat crystal. Her face softened with rueful recollection, reflected a sadness at the ways of the world, at what she had been and Chester had done.

“He saw me edit, that’s all. He saw how careful I was in phrasing revision letters to my authors; he saw me worry when I couldn’t offer them the money, and support I thought their work deserved; he saw them trust me and depend on me. He saw how a good editor—and I was, am, a good editor—nourishes the literary ego, encourages it to stretch to produce the book it hopes to. He was fascinated by how my authors confessed their troubles—money, marriage. Writing books is a long, lonely business. Authors hope to find an editor who will listen through it all, though they seldom do today. Editors are itinerant midwives now, sometimes leaving a house in mid-contraction, unable to invest their own ego in an author or a work they may never see through to the end.”

“And Chester took what he saw you doing, twisted it, and became a bad editor.”

“A destructive one, rather. He didn’t do it consciously. You must remember he had started as a doctor, in the days when physicians were demigods. Patients came to him with their ills and insecurities extended, like an aspiring writer presenting a sickly manuscript. Through all the years, he had missed that position of power, of judgment.”

“Then why did he quit practicing medicine?”

“He had to. Can’t you guess?”

“No,” Temple admitted.

“Malpractice. He lost the suit, lost his license. Lost his power. He never really found himself again, until he met me and saw that there was another way to wield power over people’s lives and make money at it. Best of all, he discovered the medical thriller, so he could have it all back in a sense.”

“You give me the shivers. He sounds like a villain in one of his own books.”

“Oh, no.” Rowena smiled. “No. You will find few villainous doctors in Pennyroyal Press books. Only Owen Tharp could get away with doing that occasionally, for some reason. What you will find in a Pee-R Press book are whining, incompetent, crazy, homicidal nurses. You will find demanding patients and pompous, worthless hospital administrators, especially if they’re women. But you will rarely find ignoble doctors.”

“Remind me to skip reading a few. Claudia said Chester called Lorna Fennick a ‘press-release-pushing ball-busting broad.’ He hated women?”

Rowena nodded. “So deeply that he didn’t consciously admit it.”

“Why?”

“Only Chester really knew. He seldom spoke about his family, but I gather that he felt humiliated in grade school by the women teachers.”

“That warped him on women for life?”

“Maybe.” Rowena smiled. “I remember him grumbling more than once that a man used to be able to get away from women in medical school....” She sighed. “He never had been a prepossessing man; dates couldn’t have come easily when he was young. Maybe that’s why he went through five wives later: to prove he could do it. After our marriage, I realized that he feared losing part of himself in the face of women’s competence. That’s why Lorna couldn’t work for him for long.”

“Lorna Fennick worked for Chester Royal?”

“She was his editorial assistant when he first began packaging for Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce. She never married him, but she’s another victim of the Chester Royal School for Women, as is Mavis Davis.”

“What about his male authors—did he abuse them, too?”

“A raging thirst for power will consume any kind of fuel, but, no, it never bothered him to see another man get ahead as much as it did a woman.”

“Not much question why he was murdered.”

“No. Somebody’d had enough.”

“Not you.”

“I’m glad you didn’t make that a question. Not me. I studied the situation the way I would the structure of a novel. I understood why he became skewed, how my own flaws had made me so useful, so usable. That common book of ours is long out of print. It’s old, cold type; the acid in its pages has already consumed it. And now Chester himself is dead matter.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“A manuscript that’s been turned into type. It’s redundant.”

Temple grimaced at the aptness of the phrase in the current case. “Why didn’t you come forward when he was killed?”

“Why should I? I’m two wives back. I don’t care, and neither did he.”

“Your detachment is admirable,” Temple said, wondering if Max would ever fade as docilely into her past. “From what I’ve grown to know of Chester, he’d be a horrible doctor. It’s lucky that he was forced out young. What was the malpractice suit about?”

“A woman died—in childbirth, I understand.”

“Childbirth, but—he was an ob/gyn?”

Rowena nodded sadly.

“That doesn’t make sense, not with his fear and hatred of women! I mean, babies and the wonder of birth and all that.”

“I can see you’ve never had a baby.”

“No. Have you?”

“Yes. Very young. I gave it up. That’s past history. It had nothing to do with Chester. Nothing to do with this.”

“I’m sorry. And you’ve never looked back—?”

“Never.” Rowena’s face tightened. “Having babies isn’t all pink and powder; it’s also pain and helplessness. A woman is absolutely dependent on her doctor. He sees her at her worst, bloated, swelled-of-belly, fearful; he examines her in what could be called the most passive position imaginable.

“You’re too young to have heard the horror stories. Often ob/gyns dictated when and how many children their patients had, even after the birth-control pill came along; you still can’t get it without a prescription. Your doctor determined when you had your baby; if it was inconvenient for him, as it was for the charity doctor who delivered me, he had his nurses pin a woman’s legs together, maybe so he can drink two more martinis at his dinner party before going to the hospital. A doctor can make a woman patient feel weak, and stupid and worthless. And such doctors often did. Ask any woman over the age of thirty-five.”

“It really was the bad old days, wasn’t it?”

Rowena Novak nodded, her face wry. Temple couldn’t tell if it had been soured by memories of that long-ago, ignorant pregnancy and the shameful way it had been treated—or recollections of the late Chester Royal.

“When I finally found out,” Rowena said, her voice slow and firm, “about his malpractice problem, that’s when I left him.”

Temple sat in her idling Storm, the ventilation fans on high and the flimsy Yellow Page trembling in her hand.

It was four o’clock. She had already visited neighborhoods of Las Vegas she had never known existed. And she still didn’t have the private detective she’d so blithely suggested to Emily Adcock.

What she had was a problem.

Private investigators either came in the form of firms, in which case they would hardly countenance dropping off money to catnappers without police knowledge, or they were the lone wolves of legend whose shingles hung on disreputable buildings in decrepit areas. Temple wouldn’t trust $5,000 cash to any one of these sleaze-os.

She began to see why so many private-eye novels opened with a woman in trouble (in this case, unfortunately, her) consulting one of these lone strangers in some down-at-the-windowsills office.

This one—her last chance—worked out of his home in a neighborhood where cars rusted like modern sculptures in sandy driveways and the rocks on the roofs were matched only by the gravel in the front yards. Joshua trees and cactus crowded around the low-roofed, one-story crackerboxes provided a sort of prickly shade.

Temple got out and locked the car, then approached the house. If she were lucky, E. P. O’Rourke would not be in. Sunning lizards scattered at her approach, pausing only to rear tyrannosaurus-like on their leathery hind legs and watch her with bright black eyes.

The ground felt like the bottom shelf of a red-hot oven as the heat rose to meet the blazing overhead sun halfway. Temple felt sweat blossom on her face and limbs and as swiftly evaporate. It was not an unpleasant sensation, rather like being steam-ironed, she imagined.

Several nearby houses looked deserted, except for one four doors down, from which the drumming bass of a rock station drifted. Spanking new Harleys tilted at rest near its weathered side doors. In the distance a dirt bike droned soft and then loud like a circling hornet.

Temple knocked on O’Rourke’s screen door, which was wearing so little forest-green paint she expected it to flake loose at her blows. The door beyond it was solid wood except for a small black diamond of glass high above the knob.

It jerked partway open.

A man stood against the deep shadow within, a slight, wiry fellow with eyes squinting against the daylight. “Yeah?”

“Mr. E. P. O’Rourke?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m interested in discussing an investigative job.”

The eyes looked her up, then down. The door swung open, baring more interior darkness.

Temple swallowed, then opened the rickety screen door. Entering houses in torrid climates was like plumbing the dark secrets of some ancient tomb. Windows were few and kept shaded. The visitor always blinked blindly on the threshold until the eyes adjusted to the abrupt dimness. In the meantime, E. P. O’Rourke could conk her on the head, rummage her tote bag and ravish her body.

Temple discounted her last foolish fear as her vision adjusted. E. P. O’Rourke was as stringy and desert-baked as beef jerky, with a shock of white hair and eyebrows in odd contrast to his seamed bronze skin.

“Come on in,” he said, turning.

Temple followed. Like most desert houses, this one offered a right-angle corkscrew of turning halls and boxy dim little rooms. In five steps she had lost the direction of the front door, which O’Rourke had shoved shut before preceding her into the house.

The air inside was hot and damp. She heard the drone of an old-fashioned water-cooling air-conditioning system—surprisingly efficient but invariably dank.

O’Rourke stopped in a room almost completely occupied by a huge slab of desktop. The surface was bare except for a black billiard ball that had been drilled into a pen rest and a free-form olive-green ashtray dusted with ash residue. No butts. He slipped into a battered leather office chair behind the desk and indicated a seat.

“What brung you here?”

“I read your entry in the phone book.”

“I mean, what problem?”

“First I should ask you your qualifications.”

O’Rourke shrugged. He was wearing a short-sleeved peach polyester shirt and, she thought, jeans and tennis shoes. At least no one would hear him coming, if his joints didn’t crack. Light filtered through the dusty blinds along one high, long window. O’Rourke’s hair was ethereally white in the hazy illumination, and his eyes gleamed baby-blue.

“I been in the merchant marines, but that was before you was born. I knocked around a bit. Been in business in Vegas for a few years. Been around, that’s about it. Now, what can I do for you, girlie?”

“You’re no relation to Chester Royal, I hope?”

“That dead ’un at the convention center? What’s this got to do with that? I don’t mess with homicide cases.”

“Nothing. This is cats.”

“Cats?” He spoke as if she’d named an alien being.

“Pet cats. Two are missing. What is your fee per hour?”

“Pet cats are missing all over the world. Nobody seeks professional help for it. Fifty dollars, plus expenses.”

“There wouldn’t be expenses. It’s a simple... drop.”

“Drop, missy? Where’d you get that lingo?”

“TV.”

“Don’t have one. Hasn’t been anything good on since Sid Caesar.”

“Before my time,” she shot back. “Are you bonded?”

“Are you kidding?” He paused to groom an unruly eyebrow with a forefinger, the way another man might stroke a mustache. She would have sworn he looked mischievous. “My word is my bond.”

“Are you kidding?” She shifted to rise and leave.

“Look. You don’t get a license unless the police say so.”

“You got a license?”

He pointed to the wall beside her, where a cheap black frame defined a document. Temple rose, got out her glasses and took her time deciphering the cursive script in the dim light.

“I don’t know, Mr. O’Rourke,” she said, resuming her seat, “there’s money involved.”

“Eightball,” he said.

“Huh?”

He gestured to the shiny black ball on his desk. “Eightball. It’s what everybody calls me.”

“Isn’t an eight ball supposed to be unlucky?”

“Only if you mess with it too early in the action. If it’s last on the table, the way it’s supposed to be, it’s lucky for the winner. I usually last to the end at whatever I do,” he said, with an emphasis both crisp and salacious.

Temple, surprised, laughed. She would bet that Eightball O’Rourke would be no one to tangle with in a barroom brawl if he had a broken bottle in hand, and as for his endurance in other pursuits, she wasn’t about to challenge it.

“How much money,” he asked genially, “and what’s involved?”

“It’s ransom money.”

“A kidnapping?” He whistled through teeth so white and even that they had to be false. “I don’t usually send folks to the cops, but even if it is only cats—”

“The ransom is five thousand dollars. That may not seem like much for a kidnapping.”

“That’s considerable for cats,” he admitted. “You want I should tail the napper when he picks up the cash?”

“I want you to drop off the cash so that I can tail the catnapper.”

“You got this backward, miss. Tailing’s the hard part. You could drop the cash and know it’s done and let me do the walking. That’s what you use the Yellow Pages for, isn’t it? ‘Let your fingers do the walking’?”

“If you think that’s best. We could meet before the... drop and I’d give you the ransom money then.”

“And give me my money, too. Then. Heck,” he said when she hesitated, “if you aren’t sharp enough to make sure I drop the dough, how were you gonna tail a kidnapper?”

“I was hoping it would be somebody I’d recognize.”

“Don’t they all.”

“How much is this going to cost?”

Eightball O’Rourke eyed the big round schoolhouse clock on the wall. “We talked a half hour here, say another couple hours before and after the drop. Hundred fifty dollars flat unless your napper takes off for the Spectre Mountains and I gotta trail him.”

“It could be a her,” she said.

“Don’t matter. Either sex trails the same.”

“One thing. Is there anything you can do to ensure the safety—and safe return—of the cats?”

“Nope.” Eightball O’Rourke rose and extended a hard, dry palm for a farewell shake. “Not a damn thing.”