Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“Are you implying, Miss Davis, that there’s a feminist undertone to your subject matter; that men are usually assumed to be capable of violence and mayhem, but not women? There’ve been plenty of villainous doctors in fiction and true-crime nonfiction.”

“Exactly,” Mavis Davis said eagerly. “Nurses are so innocent, you see; all in white, like brides. And then, their victims, my victims—in my books, that is—are innocent, too. Helpless children. Well, I can’t really say why my books are so popular, except that it’s a contrast between innocence and evil. And readers always like that.”

“But your nurse antagonists aren’t innocent caregivers; they’re more of the Nurse Ratched school.”

“Nurse Ratchet School? I’ve never heard of—”

“Like the villainous head nurse that persecuted Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest .”

Mavis Davis blinked. “What an odd title. It’s much too long for a book.”

“It was a film. And a book before that.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know it, young man. Perhaps you could ask me something about one of the characters in my books.”

Silence prevailed.

Then a woman’s voice lilted from the rear. “What about reality, Miss Davis? Has the death of your editor, the chief of your publishing imprint, Chester Royal, given you second thoughts about the fictional deaths your novels portray?”

“Of course, I’m devas- devastated . I’ve worked with Mr. Royal from the beginning of my career. Only Mr. Royal has edited my books. I, I don’t know what I’ll do without him—”

Lorna Fennick spoke up with smooth efficiency. “We will find you another editor as congenial as Mr. Royal, Miss Davis. You are a revered author with Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce. We’ll hardly abandon you, no matter the circumstance.”

“Still...” Mavis Davis smiled weakly. “I’m not a writer by first career, you know. I was a nurse—quite a different nurse from those I write about, I might add. It’s hard to—to change horses in midstream—”

Lorna’s hands sympathetically clamped the woman’s shoulders. “Leave all that to us; we only ask that you continue to create the wonderful stories that you have such a gift for writing. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen; we’ll cut this off early. Miss Davis, as you can see, has been deeply affected by Mr. Royal’s sudden death. Oh, yes, a few last photos, I'll step back for a moment.... There. Thank you all.”

“You know who I’d like to see in the hot seat?” came a low male voice from behind them. “The hotsy-totsy homicide lieutenant who’s been hanging around this convention. What’s the verdict, Molina? Murder?”

C. R. Molina turned and fixed one eye on the local newsman behind her. “Come to the police briefing for that, Hentzell. There’s so much fiction floating around here, you’re likely to confuse it with the facts, as if you aren’t liable to do that anyway.”

“How to win friends and influence people,” Temple whispered to an unheeding world.

“What was that?” Molina had turned on Temple with dispatch.

“You’d make a horrible PR person.”

C. R. Molina looked momentarily abashed. Then the instant passed. “It’s my job to uncover what people want hidden, not to help them hide it.”

“You really think hiding the truth is what PR is about?”

“Isn’t it?”

“No more than police work is about civic politics and corruption. Sure, PR has a downside. Most of the time it’s a necessary link in the vast chain of communications that the modern world depends upon.”

“You believe that?”

“Why not?”

Molina regarded her piercingly. “Maybe you really don’t know anything about Kinsella’s vanishing act.”

“Does that mean that you think I’m näive?”

Molina shrugged. “Your profession requires looking for the silver lining. If you’d seen some of the things that I have in this city—”

“You mean on the force.”

“That, too. But I grew up in L.A. and came to Las Vegas as an adult. Neither place is Kansas, Dorothy.”

“I once was a big-city TV reporter, Lieutenant. I’ve seen more than the merry old land of Oz in my time, too.”

“Maybe.” Molina consulted the Timex on her wrist. “When can we catch the next Royal author?”

Temple squared her shoulders. “Follow me.”

Molina did. After the stone-faced security personnel at the portals eyed them both in the name badges, they were admitted to the vast exhibition area where Chester Royal had set up his inadvertent last stand.

Crisscrossing hordes flooded the exhibition floor. Everyone was draped with canvas saddlebags choked with books that swung erratically, bruising shins and hips of brushers-by. Dismayed yips punctuated the din.

“Who are all these people?” Molina demanded in exasperation after they’d progressed only three jam-packed aisles in five minutes.

Temple unleashed her best informative downpour. “Only about six thousand are booksellers—owners of independent bookstores and small chains, and buyers for the big bookstore chains like Waldenbooks, B. Dalton’s and Crown. More than thirteen thousand are publishing personnel—editors in chief, subsidiary rights heads, senior editors, publicists, PR people and the all-important sales reps. The reps are the ones who actually sit down to flash the fall covers past the booksellers and take orders. What happens here determines what you’ll find on the bookstore shelves up to Christmas.”

“I go to the library,” Molina snarled, resisting the pulse of free enterprise throbbing all around her.

“Librarians are here, too. They’re part of the miscellaneous five thousand. Purchasing librarians, book reviewers, oh... everybody.”

“And authors.”

“Of course, but only selected authors. The ABA isn’t open to anyone outside the trade. If the publishers let all their authors in, the place would be swamped. Plus, authors don’t sell books, except indirectly or in their own imaginations. Above all, the ABA is a marketplace. Think of this as a trade show.”

A man in a gorilla suit passed them, escorting a girl in a metal bikini. Molina stopped dead. “There’s nothing genteel about this scene; it’s like any big convention, except for the book fever.”

“There’s nothing genteel about publishing, from what I hear,” Temple said. “It’s a multibillion-dollar entertainment business, with an iron-clad bottom line now that movie and oil companies own most of the publishers.”

“What about ivory towers, men of letters and women of blue pencils—?”

“Are the police anything like their stereotypes—men of steel and long, blue lines?”

“Of course not. I see.” Molina said the last two words as if they closed the subject, and her mind, forever. “The ABA is a perfect environment for murder, then; the high pressure point of the entire industry. Victim, suspects and perpetrator all obscured in a sea of’—Molina looked around piercingly—“bound galleys and free Winnie-the-Pooh posters.”

C. R. Molina having a revelation standing in her conservative khaki blazer and slacks amid a tide of book-happy conventioneers was a sight to cherish.

Temple mushed the lieutenant onward through the mob. “Think of it as a convention of strippers or bookies and it’ll all fall into place. These are book people—most of them utterly respectable and perfectly nice—but they’re people first, and murder will out, even at an ABA.”

7

Writers Anonymous

“N ow there’s aman who could murder,” Temple mused aloud.