Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

18

A Mavis in Flight

Temple found passing room on the convention floor now. Some attendees had no doubt left town. Others had finished their book business and were ranging farther afield in search of bookies and other less-than-literary Las Vegas drawing cards.

Consulting the convention guidebook she pulled from her tote—a tome the size of the Reno phone directory—Temple hunted under the L’s. Not long after that she was sailing past the usual alphabet soup of signage, including the Bantam-Doubleday-Dell consortium under the familiar logo of the red rooster and the entwined anchor and dolphin.

Time-Life Books, long since stripped of the popular navy book bags that were its ABA trademark, reeled by on Temple’s right. At the Zebra/Pinnacle’s booths Temple almost tripped over stacks of giveaway paperback romances featuring equally well stacked cover girls, though the awesomely developed bare-chested heroes gave the heroines a run for their cleavage.

Aisle numbers high above the exhibits were hitting 2400. Temple angled cross-traffic and headed down to 2570-82.

And there the quarry was, chatting happily to all comers—Mavis Davis, already if unofficially ensconced at the Lodestar-Comet-Orion-Styx booths, pumping up the public for her first book under a change of colophon.

“Hello!” She greeted Temple like an old friend, and indeed any familiar face in the press of an ABA soon came to seem like one.

“Hello, yourself. I hear you’ve been making news.”

“Oh, but it won’t come out until the next issue of Publishers Weekly. You can’t publicize it.” Anxiety was still as much a part of Mavis Davis as her perm-crinkled hair. Her eyes looked even more haunted behind the surface euphoria. Performance pressure, maybe? Or guilt?

“Of course not,” Temple said soothingly. “But just in case Lieutenant Molina wants to reach those who worked with Chester Royal, I’ll need to put her in quick touch with everybody once you’ve all left Vegas. You’ll be accessible through a new house now.”

“Well, yes.” Insecurity peeked more boldly through the facade of Mavis’s obvious joy and relief. “I wouldn’t want... the police to think I was making myself unavailable.”

“Why don’t we get off our feet? You must be exhausted, standing on this hard floor all afternoon. Come to the staff room and I’ll get you a soft drink.”

“All right.” Mavis looked around uneasily, searching for someone to say no for her. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to leave, but they really haven’t anything planned for me to do here. It’s all been so sudden.”

“I’d love to hear about it. I couldn’t be happier for you,” Temple said with sincerity. The poor woman was dying for a sympathetic ear, and Temple had at least two of them.

She steered Mavis back to the same large bland room dominated by a conference table where Temple had met Lorna Fennick and glimpsed the background for this killing.

“Sit down; I’ll get you a drink—diet orange okay? Great. Now.” Temple had installed Mavis on a chair near the table corner. She claimed the one across the corner from it. That made the big empty table vanish, made them seem like two friends meeting for lunch at a cafeteria. “Tell me all about your great new publisher.”

“It’s not only a new publisher, Miss Barr. It’s a new agent. The agency is one of the most respected in Manhattan. Imagine. I’ve got the same agent who handles Michener.”

“I don’t have to imagine it, it’s true. How did it happen?”

“Well, my new agent approached me and said that he’d long felt that my career had not been as strongly promoted as it could have been. That I was ‘untapped potential.’ That he couldn’t ethically encourage me to leave my current agent, but that it would serve me far better to have New York City representation, and that—”

“Wait a minute. Your old agent, Chester’s friend, wasn’t based in New York?”

“No. And he wasn’t really a literary agent. He was a lawyer. Mr. Royal said that’s all I needed anyway, that the really big authors just have lawyers look over their contracts. He was a friend of Mr. Royal’s from way back.”

“Where was he based?

“Albert Lea, Minnesota.”

Temple gulped diet orange soda that tasted like a chemically addicted tangerine. She could hardly believe her sympathetic ears. Even Temple knew that having a literary agent in a tiny Minnesota town made as much sense as having a film agent in Nome, Alaska.

“Is he here, at the ABA?”

“I guess so.” Mavis’s seesaw voice wavered into a low range. “I haven’t seen him,” she admitted. “I don’t want to see him! According to what my new representatives are saying, it’s clear to me that... now you mustn’t tell a soul”—Temple shook her head so vigorously her glasses did a bebop on the bridge of her nose—“my ex-agent wasn’t exactly doing his best to see that I got what I deserved. Mr. Royal’s old friend was... behind the times.” Mavis’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not pleased about it.”

And would be even less so later, Temple guessed, when Mavis began to grasp the extent of her editorial enslavement. Or was this just an act? Hell hath no fury—or guile—like a writer ripped off.

“Mavis,” she began carefully, “I need to make sure that Lieutenant Molina is aware of all the people connected to Chester Royal who are at the ABA. What’s this man’s name?”

“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Mavis said, waffling.

Temple stifled an impulse to point out that she’d just admitted the man had stolen her blind. “You’ll get in trouble if you’re not forthcoming to Lieutenant Molina, and I’ll get in trouble if the lieutenant finds out there were some facts I overlooked mentioning.”

“You don’t think he... iced”—this was intoned with great drama and a surprising amount of relish—“Mr. Royal?”

“I don’t think he even flushed him, but I need to know his name.”

“Earnest Jaspar—with two e’s and three a’s. But I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him all ABA.”

Temple smiled. “Right now I’d say that’s a lucky thing for Mr. Jaspar.”

“Yes, it is. I’m not a violent woman, Miss Barr,” Mavis said mildly, “but I do think I’d be tempted to, to—trip Mr. Jaspar if I saw him now.”

“Heaven forbid.”

Mavis looked down at the orange drink can as if she were reading her fortune in its gaudy contours. “You know, I’m beginning to realize that Mr. Royal had some old-fashioned ideas. Styx—that’s the house I’ll be writing for now—wants me to do a really Big Book. Not two days ago, I’d have said I couldn’t have done that without Mr. Royal. Now—”

“Now you think you couldn’t do it with him?” Temple prodded gently.

“Yes! He never wanted me to put the doctors in a bad light, but Styx says that people love to know that doctors have Achilles’ heels like the rest of us. And, frankly, Miss Barr, I’ve seen some stuck-up stinkers of doctors.” Mavis suddenly recognized her anger and retreated. “Mr. Royal was a bit naive, I’m afraid.”

“It’s possible,” Temple said with a straight face.

“Still, what if these new people don’t know how to edit my books? What if they don’t like what I do on my own, all by myself?”

“Didn’t you write your first book that way?”

“Yes.” Mavis sounded uncertain nevertheless.

“I’ll tell you what you do.” Temple leaned forward and donned her most emphatic expression. “You think about everything you ever saw or thought in those years as a nurse when nobody—doctors, patients, hospital administrators—thought you were looking and you write it all down to make the most exciting, true story you can. And you don’t worry a bit what Mr. Royal might think. He’s not here anymore.”

“You’re sure I can do that? Just write what I know and it’ll be all right?”

“Yes, I am, Mavis. Now you just sit here and finish your soft drink. I have to run along. Deadlines, you know.”

“Sure. Thank you, Miss Barr.”

Temple loved a source who thought you’d done her a favor by grilling her.

She waved goodbye and darted off, only to pause in the hall outside the conference room. Where—or how—would she find a low-profile loner like Earnest Jaspar in the waning hours of the ABA? He wouldn’t make a booth his base of operations, and apparently he handled only Royal’s authors.

She headed for the exhibit floor again. Had it only been three days ago she’d been tracking a rogue cat through the setting-up clutter? Pennyroyal Press’s booth looked as shiny and ferocious as it had Friday morning. The glittering, blown-up book covers resembled graphic teeth about to snap at the idle book browser. Those horrific covers made Temple nervous, brimming as they were with barely hidden hostility and ill will.

And who should be holding up a corner of the display other than Lanyard Hunter and Owen Tharp in rapt consultation? They made such an unlikely pair that Temple stopped to watch them with a smile.

Hunter, tall and angular, slouched into a suit that so replicated his thin frame it seemed to cover hangers rather than flesh and bone. Tharp, shorter and stouter, bristled as he talked, his compact body tense with unleashed energy, his gestures almost abrupt.

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.