Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

Temple turned to Lorna with new insight. “So he fired you because you knew too much.”

Lorna nodded reluctantly. “I was ready to leave anyway. I’d had enough of his manipulations. He hated me because I managed not only to stay on at the parent company, but achieve a responsible position there.”

Temple saw another light. “And you tipped Lanyard Hunter off to Royal’s Achilles’ heel!”

“I didn’t ‘tip him off,’ Temple. I complained bitterly to him about Chester’s unfair treatment. We were seeing each other, though Chester didn’t know it. Lanyard had just submitted an autobio on his medical charade. Chester said he wanted to buy it, in the meantime trying to convince Lanyard to suppress it and try fiction instead.”

Hunter nodded. “When Lorna told me how angry Chester had been at her discovery of the medical degree, I knew he had something to hide.”

“So that’s how you became a favored author—you blackmailed him.”

“Nothing so obvious. He knew that I knew and walked more softly, that’s all. I didn’t know anything, other than that he feared something in his past. That was enough to give me an edge; like anyone in an author-eat-author world, I used it.”

On the other side of the aisle, Owen Tharp snorted derisively. “You ever consider simply writing well as a method of career advancement?”

“Why?” Hunter shot back. “That never mattered that much to Royal, or he wouldn’t have put out so many of your books.”

Temple watched the infant ghostwritten Hunter/Tharp collaboration combust before her very eyes in a puff of surly smoke.

“I can’t believe what was going on at Pennyroyal Press,” Mavis Davis said. “It was every man for himself and exploit the women. I’m glad no more of my books will appear under that awful imprint.”

“Nor will any others.” Avenour suddenly spoke up. “I’ll deny it if anyone leaks the news, but R-C-D is deep-sixing the imprint. I’d advise Mr. Hunter and Mr. Tharp to find new publishers.”

“What about my sales figures!” Hunter blurted out. He got no reply.

“I’ve been very patient,” Lieutenant Molina put in, shifting her weight.

Temple held up her palms to quell the objections. “Just a few more points.” She turned back to the audience. “Certainly Chester Royal was unique in the ill will he managed to foster through Pennyroyal Press—but his murder had little to do with authorial or editorial ego, or business exploitation, or publishing, period. Which, of course, is why it happened at the ABA, where everyone—even the police—would presume that it did.”

“What about the ‘STET’ you said was written on the body?” Owen Tharp asked.

“That ‘stet’ cuts both ways. It was a decoy to underline the publishing connection, but the killer was cocky enough to make a play on words at the same time. It’s also an abbreviation of the doctor’s most notable prop, the stethoscope.”

Lorna Fennick was frowning. “Temple, you’ve got a mega-creative imagination. Even if it implied a stethoscope, so what? Everybody knew Chester Royal put out medical thrillers, so that leads right back to publishing.”

“Not... necessarily. This killer was sending a message, one that had festered for a long, long time. The knitting needle was more than a crude attempt to focus suspicion on one of the many women in the case, such as Mavis Davis, or Rowena Novak, or even you, Lorna, because the killer knew of Chester’s misogyny. The knitting needle was as symbolic as the ‘stet.’ A knitting needle especially fit the crime for which he was paying with his life.”

25

Killer Exit

“T his is ridiculous!”

Lieutenant Molina stood with her fists on her hips, her dark head lowered like an angry bull’s. She looked ready to close down Temple’s act.

“A minute! I promise. Just a minute.” Temple snatched up the knitting needle. “This is not just a knitting needle. It did something else in times past, something awful.”

“My God...” The voice was low and shaken. Rowena Novak was burying her face in her hands. Finally she looked up at Lieutenant Molina.

“She’s right. I never thought of it, and it was so obvious! Chester hid his medical past because of a malpractice suit. He’d performed an illegal abortion on a woman years ago, in the early fifties. In those days there was no safe alternative to unwanted pregnancy except the filthy back-alley abortionist, or homemade methods like coat hangers and knitting needles.”

Molina grew stern. “You didn’t mention your ex-husband’s former profession—or legal difficulties—when I interviewed you.”

“It happened nearly forty years ago. Chester was decades removed from it when I married him. I forgot about it, that’s all. Not even the knitting needle reminded me.”

“The knitting needle was a message from one killer to another,” Temple said. “Chester’s death was an execution.”

“Why do we have to be here?” Avenour asked. “If this has nothing to do with publishing?”

Temple held her temper. “The murder has nothing to do with publishing, but the murderer does.”

“Then you’re still saying it’s one of us,” Claudia Esterbrook said angrily.

Temple eyed them all. “Yes. I’m saying it’s one of you.”

“And you know who it is.” Lanyard Hunter’s silver head had lifted like a hound’s scenting the air.

“I know who it is.”

Silence held. Someone cleared a throat.

Temple had them, her whole audience, including Electra on the sidelines and Matt, who had completely abandoned the organ keyboard to turn around and watch. Even Midnight Louie had paused in his grooming, his black hind leg slung over his shoulder like a shotgun.

“Get it over with! Tell us!” Mavis Davis burst out nervously.

“I have to show you—and the police. Mr. Jaspar, except for the Pennyroyal authors, you don’t know these people?” The elderly lawyer shook his head.

“But you knew Chester from college days. You knew him better than anyone?”

“Longer, anyway,” Jaspar said with lawyerly qualification.

“Then tell them about the Gilhooley case.”

Jaspar leaned forward to adjust his body on the hard pew. His eyes grew watery and reflective.

“I lost the case.” He grimaced. “You always remember the ones you lose.”

“Of course, defending an obstetrician-gynecologist against malpractice charges involving an illegal abortion in the fifties was fool’s work. I was practicing law in Albert Lea, and I knew Chester, so I did it. For some damn-fool reason, maybe money, Chester aborted one Mary Ellen Gilhooley, who was pregnant with her eighth or ninth child. I can’t remember. They had big families then. Anyway, she hemorrhaged. It couldn’t be stopped and she died. I didn’t get Chester off. He lost his license to practice medicine for doing an illegal abortion. He never blamed me. It was the breaks.”

“Did he do it just for the money, Mr. Jaspar? Several women here have told me that Chester was pathologically hostile to women. Why would he have risked his license to help a woman—or is that when he became bitter?”

“Chester was always railing against somebody or something. It was his nature. He never told me why he did it. But you must remember that he was a doctor in the old days when folks—especially doctors themselves—really thought they did know best. If you ask me, he suffered from a high-handed streak.”

“Didn’t you tell me that the Gilhooley family claimed that the mother—Mary Ellen—never would have sought an abortion, that it was against her religion, against her wishes and her will?”