Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“What do you mean?”

“If he did anything for you, there was a mousetrap in it somewhere. He had an odd sense of humor. On the surface he looked like a beneficent guy, but deep down everything was not only to his advantage, but it soothed some private sore spot to get the better of someone. An Indian giver— that’s what we used to called giving and then taking back, like the government kept grabbing back lands it’d promised the Indians. Chester handed you something with one hand and took something of you away with the other.”

“He stole a bit of their souls,” Temple said darkly.

“Maybe. But this one time a body was involved. Some woman died. They said it was Chester’s fault.”

“Was it?”

“Hell, yes! That kind of thing was illegal then. May soon be again.”

“Abortion?” Temple held her breath. Could this be the malpractice case she’d set Molina on?

Jaspar nodded and took a swig of beer from the massive mug before him. “Chester was lucky to get off with just his medical license jerked. The DA was thinking of going for manslaughter, but I was pretty sharp in those days; it ended up just a malpractice case. Helped some that the family was claiming the woman hadn’t wanted an abortion. Kinda hard to swallow.”

“What days? When exactly?”

Jaspar puckered his whole face in indecision. “Early fifties.

“Exactly?”

“ ‘Exactly’ isn’t exactly in my mental vocabulary anymore. Maybe... fifty-two.” Jaspar managed to look both stubborn and grumpy, so Temple tried a different tack.

“But why was the family’s claim that the aborted woman was unwilling so hard to swallow?”

“Well—” Jaspar leaned back in the well-padded captain’s chair. This question would permit the proper elaboration, the attorney’s equivalent of good, old-fashioned gossip. “The woman had almost a dozen kids already. Husband was a switchman for the Great Northern Railway, you know, the one with the mountain goat.”

Temple didn’t know, but figured the goat wasn’t important, so she just nodded.

“Gil—Gil—Gilhooley or some cheesecloth-curtain Irish name. Roman Catholics, of course, but it’s one thing to go to church on Sunday and bend your knee and say ‘Bless me, Father,’ and another to live with ten hungry mouths and another one coming.”

“But the family—the husband—insisted she never would have asked for an abortion?”

“Mary... Ellen, that’s it! Mary Ellen Gilhooley. Women aren’t having kids like that anymore. I never did know how they took that kind of wear and tear back then. They don’t do it nowadays. Progress.”

“Mary Ellen Gilhooley died on Dr. Chester Royal’s table during the course of an abortion her husband said she’d never have asked for?”

“That’s it. Well, people lose someone close, they don’t want to think that person would be driven to do something they’re not supposed to. But who knows better than a doctor—or a lawyer—what the client really wants, huh? “Denial, that’s what the psychologists call it nowadays. Those Gilhooleys were into denial up to their face freckles about Mary Ellen and what she needed and wanted, believe me. Husband’s name was Michael—that’s it! Michael and little Mary Clare, and Eoin and Liam and Brigid and Sean, and—let me see—there was a Cathleen, of course, and maybe a Rory. Irish as they come. Enough kids; Chester was just trying to do a good deed. You can’t blame him, ’cept it was out-and-out illegal. So they took his license and he went on to different work. I hadn’t thought about that in years, but I remember it clearer than what I had for breakfast this morning. Cost a mint, too.”

Earnest Jaspar’s pale aging eyes suddenly focused on Temple’s. “Don’t get old and forget, like me and Chester. Some people, it’s like they forget to get old. Others, they just get old to forget.”

Temple, lost in the implications of a possibly hot lead, assured Jaspar that she would never forget meeting him. He fussed about planning to attend Chester Royal’s memorial service tomorrow once he knew where it would be, but she took his home address and phone number anyway—to justify her snooping to Molina if it should ever come up. She said goodbye and thank you, then paused again in the lobby and phoned home to inquire into the action on other fronts.

“Electra? Have you heard from a woman named Lorna Fennick? Great. What’s on in the background? I can hardly hear here and it sounds like you’ve got a soccer match in your living room.” Temple put a finger in her free ear.

“Just the MTV, hon,” Electra answered. “I like the sound on high. And I’m on the portable phone in your living room. Mr. Marino is home sick so Matt is seeing if he can fix your French door latch.”

Temple shifted her weight onto one foot and realized that she was hot, tired and depressed—and that Electra had Matt Devine all to herself in Temple’s living room.

“Listen, have you seen anything of Louie? Louie! The black cat. Yeah. Well, look now, please. On the patio, or in the yard.”

Temple tapped a toe and stonily eyed the person waiting behind her for the pay phone. Let him go stuff a slot machine, that’s what Vegas was for.

“Nothing? No sign? Okay. Yeah, I’m coming home later if the traffic will let me. Keep the MTV warm for me.”

Where the devil was Midnight Louie? But she had other felines in the fire. Temple pulled the now-worn Yellow Page from her bag and dialed Eightball O’Rourke. No answer, the same story as when she’d tried the number several earlier times that afternoon. He was probably on his way to the Maldives with Emily Adcock’s $5,000.

“You sure know how to pick ’em,” Temple admonished herself.

On the other hand, O’Rourke still could be hopping up the money trail in pursuit of the ransom collector. It was possible. Or maybe he’d been hurt—knocked out—by the napper. That was possible, too.

Temple was beginning to feel as flummoxed about the murder of Chester Royal and the snatching of the Scottish folds as she was about the disappearance of the Mystifying Max.

She’d just about had it with being left totally in the dark.

20

Midnight Louie, Dead Matter

I t is hot as hell in this joint, but then I have not seen the Afterlife yet, thank Bast.

(Bast is reputed to be the head deity of cats since Ramses hot-rodded up and down the Nile in a two-tone chariot. Talk about your low-riders.)

I do not ordinarily put my faith in supernatural agencies, especially since those ancient Egyptians used to mummify my forebears—no way to treat a gent of any species. Longevity in a form resembling dried parsley flakes does not appeal to my sense of dignity, not to mention my joie de vivre .

However, my sense of dignity has been sorely tried for the past thirty-some hours. Although I am in solitary, there is not enough room in this cell for a fellow to dip his lips in a water bowl without having his posterior doing a bump and grind over the sanitation facility. Sleep—although who could under a death sentence?—is possible only if I knot my limbs into the kind of position I have not assumed since I was a kitten and did not know better, or was a young tom and did—but did it anyway.

My rear extremity, once my pride and joy, is developing a decided kink, not to mention a basket weave pattern from being pressed against these metal-grid walls. Oh, if I had the wings of a bird—I would eat them.