Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

25

Killer Exit

“This is ridiculous!”

Lieutenant Molina stood with her fists on her hips, her dark head lowered like an angry bull’s. She looked ready to close down Temple’s act.

“A minute! I promise. Just a minute.” Temple snatched up the knitting needle. “This is not just a knitting needle. It did something else in times past, something awful.”

“My God...” The voice was low and shaken. Rowena Novak was burying her face in her hands. Finally she looked up at Lieutenant Molina.

“She’s right. I never thought of it, and it was so obvious! Chester hid his medical past because of a malpractice suit. He’d performed an illegal abortion on a woman years ago, in the early fifties. In those days there was no safe alternative to unwanted pregnancy except the filthy back-alley abortionist, or homemade methods like coat hangers and knitting needles.”

Molina grew stern. “You didn’t mention your ex-husband’s former profession—or legal difficulties—when I interviewed you.”

“It happened nearly forty years ago. Chester was decades removed from it when I married him. I forgot about it, that’s all. Not even the knitting needle reminded me.”

“The knitting needle was a message from one killer to another,” Temple said. “Chester’s death was an execution.”

“Why do we have to be here?” Avenour asked. “If this has nothing to do with publishing?”

Temple held her temper. “The murder has nothing to do with publishing, but the murderer does.”

“Then you’re still saying it’s one of us,” Claudia Esterbrook said angrily.

Temple eyed them all. “Yes. I’m saying it’s one of you.”

“And you know who it is.” Lanyard Hunter’s silver head had lifted like a hound’s scenting the air.

“I know who it is.”

Silence held. Someone cleared a throat.

Temple had them, her whole audience, including Electra on the sidelines and Matt, who had completely abandoned the organ keyboard to turn around and watch. Even Midnight Louie had paused in his grooming, his black hind leg slung over his shoulder like a shotgun.

“Get it over with! Tell us!” Mavis Davis burst out nervously.

“I have to show you—and the police. Mr. Jaspar, except for the Pennyroyal authors, you don’t know these people?” The elderly lawyer shook his head.

“But you knew Chester from college days. You knew him better than anyone?”

“Longer, anyway,” Jaspar said with lawyerly qualification.

“Then tell them about the Gilhooley case.”

Jaspar leaned forward to adjust his body on the hard pew. His eyes grew watery and reflective.

“I lost the case.” He grimaced. “You always remember the ones you lose.”

“Of course, defending an obstetrician-gynecologist against malpractice charges involving an illegal abortion in the fifties was fool’s work. I was practicing law in Albert Lea, and I knew Chester, so I did it. For some damn-fool reason, maybe money, Chester aborted one Mary Ellen Gilhooley, who was pregnant with her eighth or ninth child. I can’t remember. They had big families then. Anyway, she hemorrhaged. It couldn’t be stopped and she died. I didn’t get Chester off. He lost his license to practice medicine for doing an illegal abortion. He never blamed me. It was the breaks.”

“Did he do it just for the money, Mr. Jaspar? Several women here have told me that Chester was pathologically hostile to women. Why would he have risked his license to help a woman—or is that when he became bitter?”

“Chester was always railing against somebody or something. It was his nature. He never told me why he did it. But you must remember that he was a doctor in the old days when folks—especially doctors themselves—really thought they did know best. If you ask me, he suffered from a high-handed streak.”

“Didn’t you tell me that the Gilhooley family claimed that the mother—Mary Ellen—never would have sought an abortion, that it was against her religion, against her wishes and her will?”

“Yeah, but families get hysterical when something like this happens. The fact is that she was on that operating table and she died. Nobody’s ever questioned that Chester Royal was responsible and was violating the law at the time.”

“Wait a minute!” Lorna Fennick sat forward. “I see what Temple’s getting at. Knowing Chester much later as well as I did, seeing—and enduring—the full flower of his misogyny... did anybody then ever ask whether the doctor might have deceived the woman?”

Lorna pushed her bangs back as if to clear her thoughts. “Anybody ever consider that he got her on the table on some pretext and then did what he felt ought to be done? Didn’t matter that she wanted this baby, whatever number it was. Dr. Chester Royal had decided she’d had too many. He planned to abort her and say it was spontaneous. Maybe he was even going to sterilize her if she hadn’t hemorrhaged. Doctors used to do things like that. It would be just like him! That man was so... twisted about women!”

Avenour was frowning, too. “What about the husband, the dead woman’s husband?”

“He’d be dead himself by now,” the unidentified woman with Avenour objected.

“Or surviving children?” Lanyard Hunter asked, his face screwed into speculation. “How old would they be?”

They all looked to Temple. She glanced to the impatient Molina and picked up the faxes.

“According to clippings on the case that Lieutenant Molina received this morning, the father was Michael Liam Gilhooley. The children ranged in age from toddler, Mary Clare, to the mid-teens. Mr. Jaspar remembered some of their names. Want to see how you do against the clipping?”

“Mary Clare,” the lawyer confirmed. “Tragic—little girl like that without her mother. They were all Irish names, old-fashioned Irish names, don’t ask me to spell ’em or say ’em right. There was Liam and Sean and Eoin—”

“Ee-oh-in? That sounds like a strange name,” Temple said.

“That’s how it was spelled. I wouldn’t forget a moniker like that. They were named in the suit, though, of course, we never saw the kids in court. Eoin, like I said, Brigid and Cathleen. How many’s that?”

“Six.”

“There were more. Funny, it’s like the names of the seven dwarfs; can never remember them all. Mary Clare, Brigid and Cathleen, Eoin, Sean and Liam, and—Maeve! That’s it, and another funny name. Maybe Rory. That’s eight.”

“And Kevin,” Temple finished. “Nine Gilhooley kids. Even little Mary Clare would be forty-one today. The oldest would be past fifty.”

Everyone eyed each other nervously and computed their likely ages.

For the first time, Lieutenant Molina smiled. “So which Gilhooley was undercover at the ABA? Was little Mary Clare working in the registration Rotunda? Sean in the maintenance brigade? This isn’t a game of Clue,” she warned Temple. “If you make accusations you have to back them up.”

Temple turned to her. “You said the key to this case was motive, and I’ve provided a plausible one. You also said that it made no sense to wait nearly forty years to commit a murder of vengeance. Last night I asked you to check on any news stories about the Gilhooley clan since the trial, and you came up with one.”

Temple picked up a fax in the tense silence. She pushed her glasses from the top of her head to her nose.

“Here it is. A Chicago Daily News item dated May fifteenth of this year. An obituary for Liam Gilhooley, seventy-three. Mary Ellen’s husband is dead now, too. No matter what happens, he won’t have to see one of his children accused of murder, though the killer didn’t expect that. Chester Royal’s death had been planned for a long time, and it should have been foolproof. That Michael Gilhooley died on the eve of the ABA was just frosting on the killer’s cake. Where better to disguise a motive than among twenty-four thousand conventioneers?”

“What a story!” Lanyard Hunter’s eyes blazed. “I’m going to write the nonfiction book I wanted to do in the first place, and it’ll be about this case. Eat your heart out, Avenour; any big publisher will snap up a true-crime piece like this. I don’t need Pennyroyal Press or R-C-D.”

“This has been most instructive,” Owen Tharp said. “And, Lanyard, I’ll beat you to press on that book. The only way you’d get a good idea is by being hit over the head by it.”

“Don’t back off, Lanyard; that’s a great idea!” Claudia Esterbrook virtually jeered. “Unless you’re the Gilhooley in disguise. You never did say whether you wrote under a pseudonym or not.”

“None of your business!” he snapped.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Temple felt wrung out. The faxes were crumpled in her hand, she had held on to them so tightly. “Who is the child who has never forgotten a mother’s wrongful death, who never believed that she would act against her conscience, despite the evidence? Mary Ellen’s death robbed a young family of its mother—and worse, of its self-respect, for that mother died under circumstances society regarded as shameful.”

“You sound like the defense attorney for the killer,” Molina noted.

“In the killer’s mind, over many years of agony and planning, the crime came to seem justified.” Temple took a deep breath. “The identity of the killer was staring us in the face, like the placard with ‘stet’ on it. We just didn’t know how to interpret it.”

“ ‘We’?” Lieutenant Molina said. “Keep it in the first person singular.”

“Okay. Think back to the Gilhooley children. Don’t some of their names ring a bell?” A long pause, during which Temple whipped out another visual aid, a list of names. “Something bothered me when Mr. Jaspar first mentioned them, but I couldn’t figure out what. Then I did.

“These Irish names,” she asked Jaspar, “they’re old-fashioned, as you said, but aren’t yuppie couples going back to names like Sean? And everybody knows that, though it’s pronounced ‘Shawn,’ it’s really spelled ‘S-E-A-N’ as if we would pronounce it ‘See-an.’?”

Jaspar nodded. “Hell, even I know that. Knew it then, too. But most of the time, that Irish spelling throws people off!”

“I know. I worked at the Guthrie Theater when the Irish actress Siobhan McKenna appeared. Her first name struck me as one of the ugliest I’d even seen printed on a theater program—until I heard it pronounced, ‘She-vaughn.’ It’s a lovely name.”

Jaspar wasn’t the only puzzled onlooker, but Temple plunged on. “And now there’s Sinead O’Connor, the pop singer. Most people murder that one—‘Sin-ee-ad.” But it’s really ‘She-nayde.’ Isn’t that prettier?”

“If you say so,” Jaspar grumbled. “This newfangled naming is pretty silly to my mind. Girls named Meredith and Tyler and—”

“Temple?” she prompted. Jasper shut up. “Even Maeve has come back. Once I would have said ‘May-eeve,’ but I know better now. It’s ‘Mayve.’ ”

“What are you getting at?” Lorna asked. “Are you implying that one of us is a Gilhooley daughter who changed her name?”

“Sometimes a name changes itself. Did you know that many Celtic names are variations of each other? Take something as basic as the English ‘John.’ The Scots use ‘Ian,’ and the Irish, ‘Eoin.’ You say every letter—but fast, not so every letter stands out, as Mr. Jaspar said it a few moments ago. Not ‘Ee-oh-eye-en,’ as if you were reciting vowels, but fast. ‘Eoin.’ The Welsh, on the other hand, spell it in a way we all know how to pronounce. Owen.”

The congregation sat like stones, suddenly staring at one man.

The silence prevailed until Owen Tharp spread his hands in resignation. “I didn’t expect to be tripped up by a name,” he burst out, “but I’m glad Da was dead before I did it.”

Even as he spoke the police were converging on him. He offered no resistance, and stood to be handcuffed. In a moment an officer was mumbling the ritual Miranda warning, a grimmer sort of rite for the Lover’s Knot Wedding Chapel.

“Chester ended up with quite a lively wake. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Claudia Esterbrook rose to smooth the wrinkles in her scarlet skirt. “I assume the rest of us can go now?”

Molina nodded. Temple watched people stand, looking lost and a bit ashamed. Not Claudia. She swaggered up the aisle ahead of Avenour and his still-anonymous lady friend, and Earnest Jaspar. No one else left, and no one met Owen Tharp’s eyes except Temple.

“Even though you tried to kill me, I... regretted giving you away.”

Tharp shook his head bitterly. “After Royal, I really didn’t have it in me to kill again. It was reflex; a murderer is supposed to care about his own skin, his freedom. I found out I don’t.” He turned on Lanyard Hunter. “But I do care about my writing. And if you lay one incompetent finger on my story, I’ll sue the pseudonym right off you!”

“You should have time to write now,” Rowena Novak noted thoughtfully. “I’d be happy to be interviewed for your book.”

“That did it?” Lorna Fennick asked Temple in some awe. “You figured out that his pseudonym was the key?”

“Every creative person wants to make his or her work known in some unique way,” Temple said. “ ‘Gilhooley’ had never been a good candidate for a book cover—too long, too vaudevillian, too bitter to Owen Gilhooley. So he used Michaels. He was Michael’s son, wasn’t he? And he used the more recognizable Welsh version of his baptismal name as a last name; and then as a first name. Tharp contains the word ‘harp’—a metaphor for the Irish storytelling bard. Through the years he made word-games of his pseudonyms, and they eventually led back to his past.”

Temple turned to Lanyard Hunter. “You said it yourself when we had dinner. The best kind of lie is the truth that nobody takes seriously. It will never catch the teller and will seriously mislead everybody else. Owen Tharp’s choice of pseudonyms both veiled and memorialized his past. Chester Royal never tumbled.

“He’d donned many personages during his journey through genre fiction. But the true personality, the one that had never changed over the years, was the young man who’d seen his mother needlessly taken away. That was the person who killed Chester Royal.”

“Close enough,” said Tharp to Temple’s diagnosis, his head turned away. He wasn’t about to share the mystery of his own actions, the history of his mania. Maybe he was saving it for the book—and probably the motion picture, too.

“What about the catnapper?” Lieutenant Molina was still waiting, arms folded, looking unimpressed.

“As you suggested, Lieutenant, the kidnapping of Baker and Taylor was a diversion Tharp engineered to distract the ABA and the media from Royal’s death. Except Emily Adcock and I failed to cooperate. We didn’t publicize it. So he left a ransom note on my desk hoping to force me to go public, but Emily whipped out her American Express Gold Card and paid the ransom, further frustrating his purposes. Then he promised the return of the cats to trick me onto the convention floor for his halfhearted attempt at mayhem. I’d like to think he was out to confuse matters rather than kill me. as he claims now. I may be wrong.”

Tharp said nothing.

“What about the woman who picked up the ransom money?” Molina persisted. “That’s a lesser crime, but she’s still out there. Who is she and where’s the money?”

Temple shrugged uneasily. “I don’t know everything, Lieutenant. Got to leave something for the proper authorities. She’s probably a mere hiree, like my Mr. O’Rourke. I wish you luck in finding her, Lieutenant, if Tharp won’t tell you.”

Molina was about to say more, but Temple turned quickly to Owen Tharp. “But there’s one thing I do deserve to know, Mr. Tharp. Those cats are the innocent victims of all this. Where are they?”

Owen Tharp looked truly shamefaced for the first time. “I had to lose them as soon as I could. They’re... at the pound.”

“How long have they been there?”

“Since Friday,” Tharp muttered.

“Good Lord! They’re goners by now,” Temple said with a lump in her throat and a glance at Midnight Louie reclining on the organ bench next to Matt.

“Oh, poor Emily!” Lorna Fennick came over to commiserate.

“Thanks for Tharp,” Molina said curtly as she and her troops led the man out.

Lorna hugged Temple’s shoulders. “Don’t listen to that sourpuss. This was a tour de force, Temple. Better than Murder, She Wrote. I hope you get the credit you have coming for this.”

“Well, it’s been exciting, and risky, and I’m glad the ABA doesn’t have an unsolved murder hanging over it. But addictive as puzzle-solving is, I’m just realizing that this one ends with a man facing years in jail. I kind of liked Owen Tharp, even if he did try to knit and purl my tote bag, and he certainly had his reasons—in triplicate. And—poor Emily!—I’m just sick about Baker and Taylor being killed at the pound. I really blew that. Look—Louie’s come to rub on my legs and comfort me, haven’t you, Louie? I can’t bear to tell Emily.”

“You’ll have to,” Lorna said warily. “Here she comes now.”

Emily was barging through the double doors, her purse over one shoulder, a huge shopping bag over the other and a cat carrier dangling from either hand, and jammed herself helplessly in the doors. “Temple—thank God I caught you. I’m on my way to the airport, but look—”

Temple and Lorna ran to free her.

“Your darling stuffed Baker and Taylor are in the shopping bag,” Emily said breathlessly. “We don’t need them anymore.” She lifted the carriers. “Look! The right one’s Baker, and the left, Taylor. Thought you deserved to see them in person.”

“You got them back! Oh, Emily, how?”

“The woman who owns the local mystery bookshop bought them from the pound, can you imagine? This weekend. She was tickled to get such good ‘look-alikes’ for her shop. When she compared them to the posters she realized she’d somehow bought the real McCoys. Well, she came to B & T at the convention center when we were clearing out.

“I’m afraid I borrowed your cat carrier for Baker. Maeveleen, the bookstore owner, gave me one of hers, so we three are outa here in a limo to McCarran and a plane to—don’t ask me where; it’s hush-hush. Gotta go. See you at the next ABA in Vegas!”

Emily backed up and barged out the doors as Lorna and Temple braced them open.

“Forget the carrier,” Temple shouted at Emily’s back, as she raced for the white limo hugging the curb. Corporate kitties traveled in style. She glanced at Midnight Louie, who had trotted over to nose Baker and Taylor through their carrier grilles. “I don’t need it anymore.” She dropped her voice. “But what about your five thousand dollars!”

Baker’s and Taylor’s carriers were disappearing into the limo’s back seat on disembodied hands. Emily Adcock dived in after them, pausing only to flash Temple an ecstatic smile. “Don’t worry! The company will reimburse me—or the librarians will raise the money. I don’t even care. I’m just so happy to have them back. ’Bye.”

The remaining ex-suspects trickled out the chapel doors into the glaring midday heat.

Lanyard Hunter donned dark glasses and drew Lorna Fennick’s arm through his. “This has been an eventful ABA, thanks partly to you, Temple. I’ll have to dedicate a book to you.”

“I’ve enjoyed working with you,” Lorna said with a farewell handshake. “Sort of. I’ve got to get out of town, too.”

They ambled away, renewing old acquaintanceship and maybe more. Mavis Davis came out last, her unshielded eyes puckering against the sunlight. She looked ten years older.

“I—” She fell silent, gazing miserably down the Strip where the others were vanishing into a haze of heat and shimmering signage.

“When did you change your name to Mavis?” Temple asked quietly.

The nervous eyes fixed on her face at last. “Why... you know that, too?

Temple smiled. “Maeve Gilhooley was an impossible name for a book jacket. Even a newcomer to publishing like you knew that. Besides, you wanted to escape the past. I imagine you went by your foster family surname for so long that ‘your’ name didn’t seem yours, so why not use another? That’s why you wouldn’t take a pseudonym when Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce asked you to. Mavis Davis already was one. And Mavis is Celtic, too, as in the old Scottish song, ‘I have heard the mavis singing.’ Like your brother, you kept your original identity in some way. Guess writing ability ran in the family.”

“I didn’t know the truth about my mother’s death, or even that I had a father—or all those brothers and sisters. Imagine!” Mavis smiled, but sudden tears filled her eyes. “The scandal shattered the family, which was poor to begin with. Eoin, like the other older boys, left home to earn money. Us younger ones were parceled out quietly to other families. You could do that without official interference in those days. Eoin has told me that Da was never himself after Ma died. He drifted, drank. Eoin sent what money he could. He never forgot, never forgave. Of course, I was too young to remember the trial and the troubles.”

“Eoin told you all this? When?”

She reached up to remove the sad mantilla. “Eoin came to me only two days ago. It was like one of the thrillers we wrote that I never really believed—a long-overdue reunion, sins of the past, revenge. He’d deliberately begun working for Pennyroyal Press to wait for his chance. He had kept track of me through the years, of all of us, though he never contacted us—”

“That’s one way he betrayed himself,” Temple put in.

Mavis frowned. “By keeping track of us kids?”

“I overheard him tell Lieutenant Molina that you were from Kankakee. But how did he know? Later, it hit me. That information wasn’t in your author bio. That’s when I figured out there must be a hidden connection between you and Owen Tharp.”

“Poor Eoin. He may be a murderer, but he didn’t tell me sooner about our relationship because he didn’t want the rest of us to suffer for his crime if he were caught, though he thought he’d go free. He was newly furious about how... Mr. Royal was treating his sister. When he told me everything, when I saw how I’d been lied to all my life—denied my own mother’s memory, kept from knowing my father and family, and from believing in myself—when I realized that Chester Royal had managed to ruin my life twice... well, it made me angry, too, so I did what Eoin wanted. He was my brother.”

“All you had to do was play dumb and pick up the ransom money, though?”

She nodded. “I’ll send the money to Emily Adcock.”

Temple grinned. “Pseudonymously, I hope.”

“You mean—?”

“No one needs to know. Why do you think I kept my mouth shut? You didn’t do anything wrong except abet a relative in a catnapping; that’s hardly Murder One. You’re finally free of Chester Royal. Certainly you’ve paid in advance for any wrong you might have done, simply by working with the old ogre all those years. Just go home and write that Big Book.”

“I won’t abandon Eoin now that I’ve found him. Our mother’s death marked the older ones, and I can’t blame them. Sometimes, Miss Barr, ignorance is bliss. I’m glad I didn’t know what Chester Royal was earlier. I might have done what Eoin did.”

“I doubt it.” Temple bent to pick up Midnight Louie. “Oof, what an armful.”

Mavis daubed at her eyes with a lacy comer of mantilla. “Thank you. Goodbye, and thank you.”

Temple watched Mavis Davis join the migration up the Strip, her back straighter than Temple had ever seen it. Most of them would be racing back to hotels and into airport limos. They’d soon forget the Las Vegas ABA.

Meanwhile, guess who was stuck here? She turned and lugged the cat inside.

Electra was flitting among her fiber people, removing their mourning garb.

“That was more exciting than a wedding any day,” she said. “I thought that lieutenant would never get here. Not very grateful, if you ask me. And those publishing people! I had no idea they were such a kinky bunch. ’Course, when you consider what goes on in some books nowadays.... I bet you’re glad this ABA job is over and you can concentrate on normal clients, like the mud-wrestling federation.”

“I’m going back to the apartment, Electra. I’m ready to collapse, and Louie wants his lunch.”

“Fine, fine.” A matronly dummy lost her swath of veiling and her wig in one sweeping gesture.

Tired, Temple ambled through the breezeway, the cat at her heels. The tepid halls were deserted. She felt she moved in warm Jell-O, like a dreamer wading farther and farther away from the shoreline of reality.

When the elevator stopped on her floor, Louie paused midway in the door to consider his next move.

“In or out, you lug? Make up your mind.”

He finally deigned to amble along the arc of the building’s central hallway. When Temple reached the long shadowy passage that led to her door, she stopped.

Matt Devine, now. in civvies, was leaning against the wall, with what looked like frosty margaritas in both hands.

“Thought you could use a refresher after the show. That was quite an ordeal.”

Temple perked right up. “Great idea, thanks. Say, what was that slow-tempo funeral march you played at the beginning of the memorial?”

He grinned. “Curiosity will be your downfall. How do you know it wasn’t Mozart?”

“It wasn’t.”

Matt sighed, and studied the contents of his glass. “ ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale.’ Procol Harum.”

“One of my favorite songs! Really?”

Matt nodded, then pointed to the business card Temple had put into her nameplate slot. “I saw this when I was installing your chain lock. I think it’s wrong.”

She stared at her card as he handed her a hand-chilling glass. “I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

Matt’s glass clicked against hers. “It should read ‘Temple Barr, P.I.’ ”

She liked the sentiment, and the compliment, and especially the source, but she said modestly, “No, not really. Never again. I solemnly swear.” She was actually contemplating matters more intimate than detection.

Midnight Louie, ignored at their feet, didn’t believe a word of it. He indolently stretched his forelegs all the way up to the doorknob and gave it a royal whack.