Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“Yeah, but families get hysterical when something like this happens. The fact is that she was on that operating table and she died. Nobody’s ever questioned that Chester Royal was responsible and was violating the law at the time.”

“Wait a minute!” Lorna Fennick sat forward. “I see what Temple’s getting at. Knowing Chester much later as well as I did, seeing—and enduring—the full flower of his misogyny... did anybody then ever ask whether the doctor might have deceived the woman?”

Lorna pushed her bangs back as if to clear her thoughts. “Anybody ever consider that he got her on the table on some pretext and then did what he felt ought to be done? Didn’t matter that she wanted this baby, whatever number it was. Dr. Chester Royal had decided she’d had too many. He planned to abort her and say it was spontaneous. Maybe he was even going to sterilize her if she hadn’t hemorrhaged. Doctors used to do things like that. It would be just like him! That man was so... twisted about women!”

Avenour was frowning, too. “What about the husband, the dead woman’s husband?”

“He’d be dead himself by now,” the unidentified woman with Avenour objected.

“Or surviving children?” Lanyard Hunter asked, his face screwed into speculation. “How old would they be?”

They all looked to Temple. She glanced to the impatient Molina and picked up the faxes.

“According to clippings on the case that Lieutenant Molina received this morning, the father was Michael Liam Gilhooley. The children ranged in age from toddler, Mary Clare, to the mid-teens. Mr. Jaspar remembered some of their names. Want to see how you do against the clipping?”

“Mary Clare,” the lawyer confirmed. “Tragic—little girl like that without her mother. They were all Irish names, old-fashioned Irish names, don’t ask me to spell ’em or say ’em right. There was Liam and Sean and Eoin—”

“Ee-oh-in? That sounds like a strange name,” Temple said.

“That’s how it was spelled. I wouldn’t forget a moniker like that. They were named in the suit, though, of course, we never saw the kids in court. Eoin, like I said, Brigid and Cathleen. How many’s that?”

“Six.”

“There were more. Funny, it’s like the names of the seven dwarfs; can never remember them all. Mary Clare, Brigid and Cathleen, Eoin, Sean and Liam, and—Maeve! That’s it, and another funny name. Maybe Rory. That’s eight.”

“And Kevin,” Temple finished. “Nine Gilhooley kids. Even little Mary Clare would be forty-one today. The oldest would be past fifty.”

Everyone eyed each other nervously and computed their likely ages.

For the first time, Lieutenant Molina smiled. “So which Gilhooley was undercover at the ABA? Was little Mary Clare working in the registration Rotunda? Sean in the maintenance brigade? This isn’t a game of Clue ,” she warned Temple. “If you make accusations you have to back them up.”

Temple turned to her. “You said the key to this case was motive, and I’ve provided a plausible one. You also said that it made no sense to wait nearly forty years to commit a murder of vengeance. Last night I asked you to check on any news stories about the Gilhooley clan since the trial, and you came up with one.”

Temple picked up a fax in the tense silence. She pushed her glasses from the top of her head to her nose.

“Here it is. A Chicago Daily News item dated May fifteenth of this year. An obituary for Liam Gilhooley, seventy-three. Mary Ellen’s husband is dead now, too. No matter what happens, he won’t have to see one of his children accused of murder, though the killer didn’t expect that. Chester Royal’s death had been planned for a long time, and it should have been foolproof. That Michael Gilhooley died on the eve of the ABA was just frosting on the killer’s cake. Where better to disguise a motive than among twenty-four thousand conventioneers?”

“What a story!” Lanyard Hunter’s eyes blazed. “I’m going to write the nonfiction book I wanted to do in the first place, and it’ll be about this case. Eat your heart out, Avenour; any big publisher will snap up a true-crime piece like this. I don’t need Pennyroyal Press or R-C-D.”

“This has been most instructive,” Owen Tharp said. “And, Lanyard, I’ll beat you to press on that book. The only way you’d get a good idea is by being hit over the head by it.”

“Don’t back off, Lanyard; that’s a great idea!” Claudia Esterbrook virtually jeered. “Unless you’re the Gilhooley in disguise. You never did say whether you wrote under a pseudonym or not.”

“None of your business!” he snapped.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Temple felt wrung out. The faxes were crumpled in her hand, she had held on to them so tightly. “Who is the child who has never forgotten a mother’s wrongful death, who never believed that she would act against her conscience, despite the evidence? Mary Ellen’s death robbed a young family of its mother—and worse, of its self-respect, for that mother died under circumstances society regarded as shameful.”

“You sound like the defense attorney for the killer,” Molina noted.

“In the killer’s mind, over many years of agony and planning, the crime came to seem justified.” Temple took a deep breath. “The identity of the killer was staring us in the face, like the placard with ‘stet’ on it. We just didn’t know how to interpret it.”

“ ‘We’?” Lieutenant Molina said. “Keep it in the first person singular.”

“Okay. Think back to the Gilhooley children. Don’t some of their names ring a bell?” A long pause, during which Temple whipped out another visual aid, a list of names. “Something bothered me when Mr. Jaspar first mentioned them, but I couldn’t figure out what. Then I did.

“These Irish names,” she asked Jaspar, “they’re old-fashioned, as you said, but aren’t yuppie couples going back to names like Sean? And everybody knows that, though it’s pronounced ‘Shawn,’ it’s really spelled ‘S-E-A-N’ as if we would pronounce it ‘See-an.’?”

Jaspar nodded. “Hell, even I know that. Knew it then, too. But most of the time, that Irish spelling throws people off!”

“I know. I worked at the Guthrie Theater when the Irish actress Siobhan McKenna appeared. Her first name struck me as one of the ugliest I’d even seen printed on a theater program—until I heard it pronounced, ‘She-vaughn.’ It’s a lovely name.”

Jaspar wasn’t the only puzzled onlooker, but Temple plunged on. “And now there’s Sinead O’Connor, the pop singer. Most people murder that one—‘Sin-ee-ad.” But it’s really ‘She-nayde.’ Isn’t that prettier?”

“If you say so,” Jaspar grumbled. “This newfangled naming is pretty silly to my mind. Girls named Meredith and Tyler and—”

“Temple?” she prompted. Jasper shut up. “Even Maeve has come back. Once I would have said ‘May-eeve,’ but I know better now. It’s ‘Mayve.’ ”

“What are you getting at?” Lorna asked. “Are you implying that one of us is a Gilhooley daughter who changed her name?”

“Sometimes a name changes itself. Did you know that many Celtic names are variations of each other? Take something as basic as the English ‘John.’ The Scots use ‘Ian,’ and the Irish, ‘Eoin.’ You say every letter—but fast, not so every letter stands out, as Mr. Jaspar said it a few moments ago. Not ‘Ee-oh-eye-en,’ as if you were reciting vowels, but fast. ‘Eoin.’ The Welsh, on the other hand, spell it in a way we all know how to pronounce. Owen.”

The congregation sat like stones, suddenly staring at one man.

The silence prevailed until Owen Tharp spread his hands in resignation. “I didn’t expect to be tripped up by a name,” he burst out, “but I’m glad Da was dead before I did it.”