Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“Not much question why he was murdered.”

“No. Somebody’d had enough.”

“Not you.”

“I’m glad you didn’t make that a question. Not me. I studied the situation the way I would the structure of a novel. I understood why he became skewed, how my own flaws had made me so useful, so usable. That common book of ours is long out of print. It’s old, cold type; the acid in its pages has already consumed it. And now Chester himself is dead matter.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“A manuscript that’s been turned into type. It’s redundant.”

Temple grimaced at the aptness of the phrase in the current case. “Why didn’t you come forward when he was killed?”

“Why should I? I’m two wives back. I don’t care, and neither did he.”

“Your detachment is admirable,” Temple said, wondering if Max would ever fade as docilely into her past. “From what I’ve grown to know of Chester, he’d be a horrible doctor. It’s lucky that he was forced out young. What was the malpractice suit about?”

“A woman died—in childbirth, I understand.”

“Childbirth, but—he was an ob/gyn?”

Rowena nodded sadly.

“That doesn’t make sense, not with his fear and hatred of women! I mean, babies and the wonder of birth and all that.”

“I can see you’ve never had a baby.”

“No. Have you?”

“Yes. Very young. I gave it up. That’s past history. It had nothing to do with Chester. Nothing to do with this.”

“I’m sorry. And you’ve never looked back—?”

“Never.” Rowena’s face tightened. “Having babies isn’t all pink and powder; it’s also pain and helplessness. A woman is absolutely dependent on her doctor. He sees her at her worst, bloated, swelled-of-belly, fearful; he examines her in what could be called the most passive position imaginable.

“You’re too young to have heard the horror stories. Often ob/gyns dictated when and how many children their patients had, even after the birth-control pill came along; you still can’t get it without a prescription. Your doctor determined when you had your baby; if it was inconvenient for him, as it was for the charity doctor who delivered me, he had his nurses pin a woman’s legs together, maybe so he can drink two more martinis at his dinner party before going to the hospital. A doctor can make a woman patient feel weak, and stupid and worthless. And such doctors often did. Ask any woman over the age of thirty-five.”

“It really was the bad old days, wasn’t it?”

Rowena Novak nodded, her face wry. Temple couldn’t tell if it had been soured by memories of that long-ago, ignorant pregnancy and the shameful way it had been treated—or recollections of the late Chester Royal.

“When I finally found out,” Rowena said, her voice slow and firm, “about his malpractice problem, that’s when I left him.”

T emple sat inher idling Storm, the ventilation fans on high and the flimsy Yellow Page trembling in her hand.

It was four o’clock. She had already visited neighborhoods of Las Vegas she had never known existed. And she still didn’t have the private detective she’d so blithely suggested to Emily Adcock.

What she had was a problem.

Private investigators either came in the form of firms, in which case they would hardly countenance dropping off money to catnappers without police knowledge, or they were the lone wolves of legend whose shingles hung on disreputable buildings in decrepit areas. Temple wouldn’t trust $5,000 cash to any one of these sleaze-os.

She began to see why so many private-eye novels opened with a woman in trouble (in this case, unfortunately, her) consulting one of these lone strangers in some down-at-the-windowsills office.

This one—her last chance—worked out of his home in a neighborhood where cars rusted like modern sculptures in sandy driveways and the rocks on the roofs were matched only by the gravel in the front yards. Joshua trees and cactus crowded around the low-roofed, one-story crackerboxes provided a sort of prickly shade.

Temple got out and locked the car, then approached the house. If she were lucky, E. P. O’Rourke would not be in. Sunning lizards scattered at her approach, pausing only to rear tyrannosaurus-like on their leathery hind legs and watch her with bright black eyes.

The ground felt like the bottom shelf of a red-hot oven as the heat rose to meet the blazing overhead sun halfway. Temple felt sweat blossom on her face and limbs and as swiftly evaporate. It was not an unpleasant sensation, rather like being steam-ironed, she imagined.

Several nearby houses looked deserted, except for one four doors down, from which the drumming bass of a rock station drifted. Spanking new Harleys tilted at rest near its weathered side doors. In the distance a dirt bike droned soft and then loud like a circling hornet.

Temple knocked on O’Rourke’s screen door, which was wearing so little forest-green paint she expected it to flake loose at her blows. The door beyond it was solid wood except for a small black diamond of glass high above the knob.

It jerked partway open.

A man stood against the deep shadow within, a slight, wiry fellow with eyes squinting against the daylight. “Yeah?”

“Mr. E. P. O’Rourke?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m interested in discussing an investigative job.”

The eyes looked her up, then down. The door swung open, baring more interior darkness.

Temple swallowed, then opened the rickety screen door. Entering houses in torrid climates was like plumbing the dark secrets of some ancient tomb. Windows were few and kept shaded. The visitor always blinked blindly on the threshold until the eyes adjusted to the abrupt dimness. In the meantime, E. P. O’Rourke could conk her on the head, rummage her tote bag and ravish her body.

Temple discounted her last foolish fear as her vision adjusted. E. P. O’Rourke was as stringy and desert-baked as beef jerky, with a shock of white hair and eyebrows in odd contrast to his seamed bronze skin.

“Come on in,” he said, turning.

Temple followed. Like most desert houses, this one offered a right-angle corkscrew of turning halls and boxy dim little rooms. In five steps she had lost the direction of the front door, which O’Rourke had shoved shut before preceding her into the house.

The air inside was hot and damp. She heard the drone of an old-fashioned water-cooling air-conditioning system—surprisingly efficient but invariably dank.

O’Rourke stopped in a room almost completely occupied by a huge slab of desktop. The surface was bare except for a black billiard ball that had been drilled into a pen rest and a free-form olive-green ashtray dusted with ash residue. No butts. He slipped into a battered leather office chair behind the desk and indicated a seat.

“What brung you here?”

“I read your entry in the phone book.”

“I mean, what problem?”

“First I should ask you your qualifications.”

O’Rourke shrugged. He was wearing a short-sleeved peach polyester shirt and, she thought, jeans and tennis shoes. At least no one would hear him coming, if his joints didn’t crack. Light filtered through the dusty blinds along one high, long window. O’Rourke’s hair was ethereally white in the hazy illumination, and his eyes gleamed baby-blue.

“I been in the merchant marines, but that was before you was born. I knocked around a bit. Been in business in Vegas for a few years. Been around, that’s about it. Now, what can I do for you, girlie?”

“You’re no relation to Chester Royal, I hope?”