Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“How long was he your editor?”

“Twelve years.”

“And you still called him ‘Mr. Royal’?”

“He was older,” she began.

Temple studied the woman’s plain but unlined features. “Considerably older than you—sixty-six, the bio said.”

Mavis pursed her lips over a sip of tricked-up scotch. “Young people in my day and place were trained to respect their elders. I may be an adult now, but Mr. Royal seemed so much older—and he was the head of Pennyroyal Press. I never would have felt right about calling him Chester. Nor, I think, would he.”

“What did he call you?”

She looked down at the soggy napkin on which she was restlessly turning her glass. “Mavis.”

“I wish I’d known him. You know, I don’t even know if he was married.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Really. To whom?”

Mavis Davis looked confused. “Well, I don’t know to whom at present. I’d heard he had several wives.”

“Several? A sorry little weasel like him?” Temple suddenly realized she had somehow identified the late Mr. Royal with the very live and loathsome Crawford Buchanan.

Mavis blinked.

“I know he’s dead and all that.” Temple backpedaled quickly from her apparent lack of sympathy. “I’m the one who landed atop the corpse. It was not that of a Romeo I’d care to meet—dead or alive.”

“I can’t say. I never thought of Mr. Royal in that way. To tell you the truth, I was in awe of him.”

“Why?”

“He made me rich and famous.”

“But you wrote the books.”

“But he published the first one.”

“And built Pennyroyal Press on it, from what I can read between the press release lines.”

“Oh, no. I’m sure my little book had nothing to do with that. Why, he could hardly afford to pay me three thousand dollars for it, and it was years before he could pay as much as ten thousand dollars. I had to keep nursing for seven years before I could afford to quit. Quite biblical, don’t you think?”

“But—” Temple searched her memory for the press release’s boastful statistics, “ Now I Lay M e had fourteen printings and almost made The New York Times best-seller list. Your next books did better.”

Mavis simpered modestly. “Mr. Royal never grew tired of pointing out how lucky I was to have sold to Pennyroyal my first time out. It took quite a lot of work to rewrite the book; he sent it back four times and had to fix some parts himself. I am—was—a rank amateur, Temple. I owe everything to Mr. Royal. Or did.” Her face blanched, if not quite with grief, certainly with a spasm of personal loss.

Temple eyed the chaste white-wine spritzer before her, the prudent PR professional’s choice when conducting business over cocktails. She caught the eye of a skimpily skirted waitress. “A gin and tonic, please. And another Rob Roy.”

“Oh, no, really—” Mavis protested without conviction. Her face had sagged, first from heat and now from the uninhibiting tide of alcohol. She resembled a tired housewife who’d been prevailed upon to baby-sit the grade school soccer team. Temple felt a wave of guilt that she drowned in a swallow of gin as soon as it arrived, which was very quickly, this being Vegas. Teetotalers don’t up the house take.

“I’ll miss him,” Mavis said bleakly. “I’d gotten so used to him telling me what to do. He took such great pains about it. I know they say they’ll get me another editor, but—”

Her hand made a white-knuckled fist of pure fear. Temple expected to see the tail of a handkerchief trailing from it, Mavis Davis was that kind of old-fashioned, näive woman. There was nothing old-fashioned about the raw edge of her nerves, her desperate lack of confidence.

“Tell me something, Mavis—I can call you that?”

“Yes,” the woman said with pathetic eagerness. “I’m really all alone now. I don’t think—they—know how much Mr. Royal did for me.”

“Or to you,” Temple muttered into her gin. “Mavis. That first book, did you write the whole thing all by yourself when you sold it?”

Mavis nodded.

“Did you have a literary agent?”

Mavis shook her head.

“Do you have one now?”

Another nod. “Mr. Royal said I really should have, after the third book. He recommended someone he’d known for years.”

“But your advances didn’t crack ten thousand dollars until the seventh book.”

“No... why?”

“Well, what did the agent do besides get a cut of your money?”

“He handled all the business stuff that gave me a headache.”

“You mean selling foreign and film rights, that stuff?”

“No. Those were handled by Pennyroyal Press. I was lucky the house had such a big stake in my outside rights, it made them work harder to sell them, my agent said.”

Now Temple’s knuckles had whitened on her glass. She didn’t know much about publishing, but she knew enough to see that Chester Royal had taken shameful advantage of Mavis Davis. The question was, could Mavis Davis, mistress of the Maniacal Nurse Novel, have really been naive enough—even to this moment—to never suspect it?

The right—or wrong—answer to that question could spell a motive for murder.

9

Lost and Found

“I saw youat the Hilton lounge. Some people have all the fun.”

“I guess you’d know about that, Crawford.”

Temple swung her heavy tote bag to the desk. The nice thing about working late—six p.m.—was that the ABA PR office was pretty much cleared and no one was around to hear Buchanan’s charge that Temple had been drinking on the job, even though advertising and PR had invented the three-martini lunch.

The usual notes on incoming calls and current crises sprinkled Temple’s desktop like a giant’s dandruff. First she had to remove her new paperweight: the black cat (an enterprising rascal) had returned to the office all by himself for some serious grooming.

With apologies—to him—she swooped the cat into the storeroom, hoping Buchanan would lose interest and leave, which he did while she was gone. Temple returned to her desk, sank onto her chair and began shuffling memos. Then she pushed her glasses atop her head, cradling her face in her hands. Her eyes refused to focus. It’d been a helluva day. Forget the messages tonight; she’d just scoop the cat into his carrier and head away from her workplace home, sweet homicide.

“Excuse me,” a female voice said pointedly from the doorway.

Temple forsook her “Abandon Hope” pose and took in the visitor—visitors, plural. A man stood on the threshold, too, a darkly handsome man. The woman was petite, blond and looked as though she meant business in a Dresden kind of way.

What now , Temple wondered.

The woman marched to Temple’s desk. “We saw this in the evening edition.”

“Oh, the cat story.”

The man had followed her. “The story’s wrong. We know the cat. It’s not a stray.”

“Not a stray? You mean it’s... your cat?” Even Temple heard a rising note of denial in her voice.

The couple was too busy exchanging mute, consulting looks to note Temple’s fraying control.

“Not exactly ‘our’ cat,” She admitted.

“It’s the house cat,” he said.

Temple just stared at them.

He recognized an opening and uncorked a 150-watt smile. “Our ‘house’ happens to be the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino on the Strip. Louie hangs out there, always has since before we reopened the place. I don’t know how he got way over here, but—”