Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“Do you miss it?” she asked quickly.

“The charade, you mean?”

“Yes. The thrill of the deception, the intricate creation of the believable persona and a paper trail to back it up. The innocent stupidity of everyone around you. The feeling of being so secret and so special.”

Hunter set down his fork, forsaking his fillet of sole. “How well you put it.” His gaze grew even more intense. “I’d almost think you had an appetite for that sort of game. You know the rewards well.”

“PR is a game, too, sometimes,” Temple said, attacking her scallops. “You try to find out what people don’t want to tell you, then turn around and try to keep other people from finding out what they most want to know.”

“Is that why you’re playing gumshoe?”

“I’m not.”

“Nonsense. I must say I much prefer you to that overgrown police detective.”

“Lieutenant Molina seems highly competent.”

“I wonder if that’s what it will take to unravel the murder of a complex man like Chester.”

“You’re a complex man,” Temple objected. He smiled again, as if she had just conceded a point in a chess match. “You must be to have done what you did, then make a writing career of it. Chester Royal, from what I’ve learned, was the antithesis of complexity. He had very simple needs: to feel powerful, to make others, particularly women, feel his power. I don’t think I’d have liked him if I’d known him.”

“A mutual distaste, I’d think.” Hunter laughed. “Yes, Chester had a rabid dislike of women. He always felt they were trying to take things from him—his stature both physical and figurative; his sense of superiority; his money. Must have been embittered by all those wives—and divorces.”

“But I understand that his fear of women goes back to his medical days. And he was a gynecologist!”

“Most male gynecologists then were Roman Catholic, did you know that? It makes sense, a very baby-directed religion by virtue of its proscriptions against both birth control and abortion. Chester was not RC, and I understand he was not averse to performing the clandestine abortion now and again, before it was legal in any sense.”

“Surely only doctors compassionate to women would do abortions in those days.”

Hunter smiled sadly. “Do you know what abortions by medical doctors were like then—often sans anesthetic? No time for recovery rooms and other niceties. I suspect Chester did them for money, period, and to thumb his nose at the system... and to rip fetuses untimely from wombs. He and his many wives never had children, you know.”

“You really think he was that kind of monster?”

“Many of us are that kind of monster, Temple. I never hurt anybody during my bogus medical career. I have an IQ of one hundred seventy-eight, did you know? I can’t say as much for many of the genuine doctors I practiced alongside. I’ve always meant to do a medical exposé, but Chester channeled me into fiction. I think he feared that if I did a controversial book, it would draw attention to his less than glorious past.”

“Or maybe he didn’t want you running down his ex profession.”

“True. Chester was old-fashioned in more than wanting to keep women in their place; he wanted control. He wanted all his authors as off balance as cats on a hot tin roof. Everyone around him was a possible enemy: the woman who would henpeck him, the man who would outperform him in any arena. He loved to put his authors through hell, playing on their insecurities. He wanted me to rewrite Broken Bones five times.”

“Why put up with it?”

Hunter shrugged. “I knew his type from my medical masquerade days. I simply hired a ghost writer to diddle with the ms. over and over until Chester decided he had put me through enough.”

“So you were never taken advantage of editorially, or fiscally?”

“I’m no Mavis Davis, no.” Hunter grinned to observe Temple’s surprise. “I knew Chester’s game; I didn’t let it get to me. And he’d made the mistake of breaking me out early, there was no way he was going to nickel and dime my agent to death at that late date.”

“You seemed to have used him, rather than vice versa.”

“Exactly. I had good training for it in the hospitals. And after.”

“You’re referring to—Joliet, was it?”

“The games played there make those of editorial ego very small potatoes indeed. Speaking of which, are you really going to eat all that? It’s the size of a wooden shoe.’ ” Temple forked into the tuber in question. “You bet. I’ve been on a strange diet lately—tuna fish—and it’s time to make up for it.”

Temple spent the rest of the evening inquiring politely about Hunter’s novels. Most offered unlikely scenarios about heroic physicians foiling near-future plots dealing with corporate clones, sinister truth serums and genetically engineered plagues created by global conspiracies.

Temple could see why spinning such farfetched tales would satisfy Hunter’s con-man instincts. He could play the doctor every day in his novels, and be the hero as well. She could also see why patients trusted him and women would find him attractive, even if they suspected his sincerity. If you’re going to be sold a bill of goods, the salesman had better be smooth.

“What will happen to your books now that Chester Royal’s dead?” Temple polished off the last of her potato just before the waiter cleared the table.

“Nothing. Even if Pennyroyal Press breaks down, any major publisher would be pleased to snap up myself and Mavis Davis. Even Owen Tharp.”

“What about the others on the Pennyroyal Press list? The writers who were just beginning?”

Hunter shook his head as he finished his expensive white wine. “Nothing. They’ll go on clawing in the melee and living on thin air as they always have. But the top authors won’t have to worry. Survival of the fattest.”

“Maybe one of the thin types did it?”

“Kill an editor in chief? Most of them haven’t even figured out the score yet, much less become ready, willing and able to kill the umpire.”

“Then, no matter how horrible Chester was to his writers, none of them had motive to kill him, since it would only hurt themselves?”

“Yes, that is the Gospel according to Lanyard Hunter. Of course you must take into account that I’m a very slippery fellow.” Again the concentrated, intimate stare. Temple fidgeted, then fought off the spell and returned to basics. “Is that your real name, Lanyard Hunter?”

“As a matter of fact it is,” he said complacently. “Though nobody believes it. That’s the best kind of lie: the truth that nobody takes seriously. It will never catch the teller and it will seriously mislead everybody else.”

“I take it these are the con man’s rules to live by?”

“Call it what you will—it works. Doesn’t it?”

She ignored his question, although it had crossed her mind to wonder if his lovers really called him ‘Lanyard’ in bed, one of those uncensored idle thoughts that one disowns faster than a Freudian slip. “Who do you think murdered Mr. Royal?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, and I don’t care.”

“Then why take the time to spend dinner being questioned by me?” Too late did she recognize that was a provocative question under the circumstances, or considering the company.

Lanyard Hunter bounded into her opening with relish and a seductive smile. “Because, my dear Miss Temple, I happen to enjoy intelligent female company, especially when it’s as attractively wrapped as you. I noticed you at the ABA right away. Besides, there’s only one thing a reformed con man can do, and that is to watch others play the game. I am breathless to discover whether you or Lieutenant Molina will find the culprit first.”