Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“Have you talked to Cyrus Bent?”

“The convention hall security chief? Yes, he was most cooperative. He agreed that the cats couldn’t have escaped without human aid. The display area is secure. It might be malicious mischief. He’s sparing what staff he can to search the facility, including the air vents. But who would hear a ‘meow’ in this mess?”

“It’s terribly distressful, but if you don’t want to involve the police—”

Emily Adcock shuddered in her lightweight blazer. “Lordy, no! Not... yet. Not when it could be an accident or a prank. Did you see the Review-Journal with that cat story on the second front? Think what the press could do with this! ‘Double Trouble: Cats out of Bag at ABA.’ ‘Major Book Distributor Loses Catty Corporate Mascots.’ No, thank you.”

One PR woman’s publicity coup could be another’s coup de grȃce Temple mused. “I don’t see what I can do.” Emily Adcock wrung her hands despite sizable diamond solitaires on the third fingers of each hand. “Just make sure that your security personnel takes this matter seriously. I’m just a PR free-lancer like you. My goose will be chopped liver if Baker and Taylor loses its namesake cats, not to mention that everyone’s grown terribly fond of them. Such good-natured creatures. I never would have suggested that they appear in person if I’d suspected—”

“Mr. Bent will find them if they’re hiding out in the building. And if their absence has a more sinister cause—”

“What do you mean?”

“Catnapping. Surely you’ve considered that?”

“No! Who would do such a thing?”

Temple extended a forefinger and began ticking off possibilities down a descending ladder of digits: “A business rival, to embarrass the company. An animal rights fanatic, to protest using animals to sell products and services. An off-beat criminal who wants a ransom. A cat hater who’ll send them to an experimental laboratory.” Temple was about to start on her other hand when Emily Adcock clutched it.

“Stop, Miss Barr! You have such... an active imagination. No more, please. Those possibilities alone are sufficient to cause a sleepless night.”

“Those are just off the top of my head, of course.” Temple sighed. “My immediate problems with the Royal death are almost over. I promise that Baker and Taylor— cats and company—will be my next priority.”

Next, after a previous priority was settled.

Temple raced for the interview area green room, checking her wristwatch. The show-and-tell act was over for the day. If she was lucky, she’d have Mavis Davis all to herself.

“T his is sokind of you, Miss Barr.” Mavis Davis gazed around the cocktail lounge of the Las Vegas Hilton.

Like most Vegas hostelries, the Hilton flooded its restaurants and bars with air-conditioning and dim nocturnal elegance from dawn to dusk to dawn again. Despite the crowd and the noise, the place felt cozy, dark and intimate, perfect for breaking off a love affair or confessing to murder.

“Think nothing of it, Miss Davis. And call me Temple, please. Lorna was sick at having to desert you, but the signing was scheduled and then the police lieutenant wanted to interrogate Lanyard Hunter afterward—”

“Oh, dear.” Mavis Davis shivered, but Temple doubted she felt the frosty air-conditioning. Although the Hilton was next to the convention center, the walk here had been long, hot and dry. No walk in Vegas is brief, simply because its buildings are so sprawling.

“You haven’t been... interrogated yet?” Temple asked.

“Me! No. Why should I be?” Mavis Davis looked truly appalled.

“You might have some notion or unsuspected information about the murder.”

“Miss Barr—Temple. I write about murder. I don’t think about it in real life. I’m a nurse.” Mavis Davis sipped her Rob Roy, which Temple had never seen ordered before.

“I’m a PR person, but I’ve sure got murder on the brain now. Doesn’t it intrigue a writer to have the real thing fall on her doorstep?”

“No! My books are stories, that’s all. I know my hospitals, and I’ve seen death. It’s not dramatic, and it’s always so disappointing. We always hope that we won’t lose.”

“Except for your homicidal nurses.”

“Yes, but they’re—well, a few in real life have been so deranged—but mine are made-up.”

“You aren’t basing your novels on true crime cases? How refreshing. These days truth is more shocking than fiction.”

“I did try using actual cases for inspiration, but Mr. Royal discouraged me from doing that, I don’t know why. But I always listened to him—oh, dear! Who’ll tell me what to do now? My next book is due in only ten months!”

“You’ll have to carry on as best you can without him. How did you happen to start writing, anyway?”

“Goodness, that was something I always did, from the time I was little—I’d write and nurse baby-dolls. My foster parents still have all my dolls with their bandages and slings and—oh, my, so much slapdash Mercurochrome on them they look like Indian chiefs!” Mavis smiled maternally. “And my ‘scribblings’ drawer was full of doggerel and notebooks.”

“So why’d you become a nurse first?”

Mavis sipped her romantically named drink, her lips pursing at a taste more tolerated than savored. “Practical. Girls like me were terminally practical in the sixties, my dear. Teachers or nurses, those were our career choices, and only if we couldn’t catch a husband first. Obviously, I ‘caught’ a nursing degree and—later, the writing bug.”

“And you lived with foster parents, so you don’t even know why you gravitated toward nursing and writing?”

Mavis Davis lowered her unfortunate voice. “Maybe that’s why I did. Mother and Father Forbes would never talk about my parents. Adopted or fostered children in those days weren’t encouraged to wonder about their origins—and it was probably for the best. But some Forbes cousins used to giggle about it in front of me when I was a teenager. My mother died having an illegal abortion when I was three, you see. Nobody would talk openly about it, but everybody knew, even me eventually. That’s why I never knew anything about my father. And why I went into nursing, I think.”

“To make sure that women would never have to undergo the trauma of abortion without a caring attendant?”

Mavis Davis regarded Temple as if she were mad. “Heavens, no! The Forbeses were Roman Catholic, and that’s the way I was raised. My mother may have been young and desperate, but she was also desperately wrong! The Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion coincided with my first nursing assignment, but I only worked in hospitals that resisted abortions—or at least gave staff a choice. Mostly I worked in maternity wards, and those are such happy places.” The joy on Mavis’s face reflected hundreds of unclouded, socially sanctioned births.

“Isn’t it hard, then,” Temple asked delicately, “to write about made-up medical horrors?”

“No. It’s make-believe. A scary story. I feel so... free when I’m writing one of my naughty nurse thrillers. Because I know it’s not real. Readers love them. I cherish this secret fantasy that someday my real father or someone who knew him will read one of my books and recognize some family trait in my photograph and write the publisher... an awful lot of people read these things, you know. Maybe a million.”

Mavis laughed with harsh suddenness at her million foolish readers—and her own poignant little fantasy. “I honestly don’t know why my books fascinate the public. I don’t even know why Mr. Royal bought my first book.”