Cat in an Alphabet Soup

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “ ‘Was’ is the operative word. It’s a shame, but I’m not going to let this latest crisis interfere with keeping on top of the Royal murder.”

  “Speaking of which.” Lorna pulled a canvas book bag up from the floor, the Time-Life, Midnight-Louie-toting kind. “Here’s a bunch of titles by Pennyroyal’s Top Three. I even found some of Owen Tharp’s other pseudonymous efforts knocking around. I thought you could use a crash course in the Pennyroyal medical thriller.”

  “Thanks a million,” Temple said, eyeing the bag. As she took it, the unexpected weight nearly jerked her arm out of its socket, recalling her first fond moments of custody of Midnight Louie. “These will be great. And I deeply appreciate your arranging for Mr. Big to drop by our lunch table later, Lorna.”

  The Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce PR director sipped her murky orange Manhattan and nodded soberly. “We could have had lunch with him, except that ABA meals are working occasions. You’d be amazed at the megabuck deals that go down at this superficially innocuous convention. He’s eating here anyway, and if you recognize his lunch date, don’t let on! The deal isn’t signed yet. But he will stop by for a few minutes. He wants to insure that Chester Royal’s death causes as little scandal as possible.”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t know the name brands in publishing. I’m too ignorant to blow a deal. Trust me.”

  “I do, that’s the funny part. Emily at Baker & Taylor thinks a lot of you.”

  “You know her?”

  “We behind-the-sceners responsible for making the ABAs run smoothly year after year get to know each other.”

  “How did Lieutenant Molina’s grilling of Lanyard Hunter go yesterday?”

  “I wasn’t invited, but Hunter was in a vile mood afterward.”

  “So was Molina, probably. This is definitely not her normal turf.”

  “I don’t blame the lieutenant. How’s she going to nab a murderer in four days flat with twenty-four thousand strangers in town?”

  “Somehow I don’t feel too sorry for her.”

  Lorna Fennick laughed. “No, I wouldn’t want to negotiate a deal with that one.”

  “Did you? Ever negotiate a deal, I mean?”

  “Some small ones. I started as an editorial assistant and worked my way up to editor.”

  “How’d you get into public relations?”

  Lorna looked uneasy. “I didn’t have the stomach for nitty-gritty editorial matters. It can be a frustrating, petty business. Now, what did you want to know about my liege lord?”

  The waiter descended. To save time Temple ordered the first thing that popped into her mind—tuna salad. Lorna had some nouvelle concoction with chard and assorted alien vegetables whose repugnant appearance was exceeded only by its outrageous price.

  “Tell me about an imprint, Lorna,” Temple suggested after forking her tuna salad. The sight and smell repelled her for some reason. “How is one born, how does it grow, how is it grafted onto a big mother of a plant like a major, multi-slashed publishing house?”

  Lorna turned her Manhattan glass until the cherry pointed Temple’s way. “It’s like this. Some enterprising person—an ex-publishing executive or even a rank amateur like Chester Royal—begins packaging a certain kind of book. That means he finds the authors, edits the books, commissions the cover design and hands the house a ready-to-go book. They print and distribute it. If, as in Royal’s case, the book is a medical thriller when the only solid-gold practitioner in the field is Robin Cook, and the packager attracts aspiring med-thriller writers, he’s on his way to a stable of authors. Say his books do well for the big publisher who buys them. When they do spectacularly well, the publisher grafts the imprint and its founding editor onto the corporate tree. Then you have Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce-Pennyroyal.”

  “So Chester was a big success story.”

  “Yes, imprints are becoming more common. The system allows the little guy to take the risks and prove a product’s durability. He must have a good track record at finding authors who perform at a predictable level of success. Then his promising small company is acquired by a big company that can increase his business effectiveness.”

  “Only this business is books, and artistic egos are involved.”

  “And a product’s marketability is less determined by statistical consumer need than amorphous factors like trends, luck and instinct.”

  “Vegas is a perfect location for an ABA, then. From what you say, publishing is a crapshoot.”

  “But a classy crapshoot, Temple. Some book people cringe at the idea of having an ABA in a crass commercial arena like this town. It’s the antithesis of publishing’s Manhattan roots. Yet they must. This convention center is one of the few in the country big enough to handle a display and crowd of this size.”

  “So what was Chester Royal’s story? How’d he happen to hit it big—and get hit?”

  “He stumbled across Mavis Davis, number one. She was a long shot for established publishers, who turned down her first book in droves. But Royal with his medical background saw something there, and the rest is history.”

  “Medical background?”

  “He trained as a doctor, even practiced briefly, I guess, decades ago. That’s what he had that regular editors didn’t; firsthand knowledge of the field. Apparently it was a magical combination in medical thriller fiction.”

  “About Mavis Davis—”

  “She’s having a nervous breakdown over Chester’s death. I know.”

  “From what I can tell, she was hooked on him as her editor. There’s something almost sinister about his influence over her.”

  Lorna’s mouth quirked, and she took a long swig on her drink. “Listen. A lot of us at RCD-about-to-be-slash-P didn’t approve of Royal’s methods, but we couldn’t argue with his bottom line. His imprint was essentially independent although RCD distributed his list and shared the profits. He got plenty out of it personally, believe me. More than the old buzzard deserved. He ran his own fiefdom, but he had a compulsion to handle his authors with an iron hand. He underpaid and overedited them into numb obedience and, frankly, that’s why his bottom line was so attractive. This is a business, Temple, it’s not an experiment in the nobility of the human spirit. Sometimes the meanest bastards make the most dough.”

  “Owen Tharp seems rather realistic—and bitter—about the system. Yet he got along with Royal.”

  “Some writers did. A lot didn’t.”

  “Couldn’t the unhappy writers just leave the imprint?”

  “Sure, they left, but Royal kept pulling new gullible ones from his slush pile. His madness had a method: to prove that his judgment, not any particular writer’s talent, was the cornerstone of Pennyroyal Press’s success.”

  “And was he proving that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was his bottom line still firm? How long could he afford to alienate his more independent authors? How long could an abused writer like Mavis Davis remain productive under such pressure?”

  Lorna shook her head, her expression troubled. “Temple, it’s the real world. Jobs are being lost out there, paperback books are being returned in huge percentages, publishing houses are going under.”

  “Exactly. How could a heads-up company tolerate an ego mill under its wing? The law of diminishing returns holds true for paperbacks, too. Maybe nobody was admitting it, but his bottom line was crumbling. Claudia hinted that Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce was ready to dump Royal, if it could, for running his own imprint into the ground. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mean.”

  “He was mean,” Lorna spat out suddenly. “He was a mean, small-souled man. Why do you think he kept Mavis Davis down on the farm? Ex-Doctor Royal despised nurses; he didn’t want them to benefit at his expense. Everyone knew that her terms were worse than simply being a shrewd deal for the publisher. Other houses tried to lure her away, but she was so brainwashed into thinking she needed Chester Royal... I don’t know if she’ll ever write another book, now that he’s de
ad.”

  “Then she wouldn’t want him that way, would she?”

  “Mavis? A suspect? You’re dreaming.”

  Temple shrugged and watched as a man angled toward their table, keeping his eyes on Lorna. She didn’t know what a prince of publishing should look like, but this one was tall, bald and wearing rimless spectacles.

  Lorna rose as he neared the table. “Temple Barr, this is Raymond Avenour, publisher and CEO of Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Temple said, shaking hands with the CEO as he sat.

  He shrugged. “Anything I can do to help, as I told the detective in charge.” A flash of instantly charming smile. “I’ve discovered that there are a lot of bright, attractive professional women in Las Vegas.”

  Temple, who seldom bothered to protest the rote male gallantries common to the PR business, blinked as she realized what the man had said. She’d couldn’t quite put herself and Lieutenant Molina under the same umbrella, however flatteringly it was extended. She wondered what the blunt-spoken detective would say to such a remark.

  But Temple didn’t carry a badge as backup, so she just got down to business. “Since I’ve had some experience in cultural PR, the officials are relying on me to offer some guidance to the book field. I confess, Mr. Avenour, that I’m confused.”

  “What about?” he asked with another perfectly charming, perfectly bland smile.

  “This imprint business. If Pennyroyal Press was an imprint of RCD, why wasn’t it included in the corporate name?”

  “It would have been.” Avenour rebuffed an approaching waiter with a brisk shake of his head. “The matter was under discussion. The lines of control within an imprint and from it to the overall corporate entity are delicate and must be clearly defined.”

  “It was a power struggle, then?”

  “No! No.” Avenour gave a genial laugh. “You ever seen a book publishing contract, Miss Barr? They’re legal-length pages—and pages—of fine print on the simplest one-book deal. To unite separate publishing entities requires a whole telephone book of fine print and more lawyers than a Trump bankruptcy. The process is closer to a royal wedding than anything so crude as a power play.”

  “But what if RCD had doubts that Chester Royal had all his marbles together? He was getting older and had been set in his ways for years. He was losing promising authors.”

  Before Temple even finished talking, Avenour’s head shook as briskly as it had when warning off the waiter. “Authors can be bought back if they’re important enough. The point is, Royal built the imprint. He could run it as long as—and how—he wanted to. If he ran it into the ground, Pennyroyal Press would go under. Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce would be protected, you can count on that.”

  The publisher was rising, fanning a palm to keep Lorna seated for his departure. “I hope I’ve dissipated your confusion, Miss Barr. Call on me for clarification anytime.” He spoke with such careless cordiality that only a fool or Crawford Buchanan would take him literally.

  Soon after Temple said goodbye and raced off; somehow she didn’t have much of an appetite. She left Lorna nursing a third Manhattan. A PR director’s life was no bed of roses.

  Neither was Temple’s.

  When she got back to convention central, Emily Adcock was waiting by the press room door. A sprinkling of media types—their numbers lessening visibly as the convention lengthened—sat respectfully while a pop-singer-turned-kid’s-book-author tried to say something profound.

  “He wrote a kid’s book?” Temple asked with some wonder. According to the tabloids, the singer had acquired the usual accouterments of success—drug and alcohol addiction and scandals involving underage females, and possibly males.

  Emily Adcock nodded. “If it’s got a brand name, it’s probably written a book, or at least has a byline on one. Celebrity books sell, even if they’re mostly written by open or covert co-authors. I expect an unauthorized Bart Simpson bio by Kitty Kelley out any day. What’s so urgent?”

  “Come into my parlor.” Temple led Emily to the office storeroom.

  “Ooops.” Midnight Louie was in the act of using the litter box. He regarded their arrival over his shoulder with a glassy green glare. Temple pulled Emily around a pile of copier paper boxes. She dug in her ever-present tote bag until she produced a manila mailing envelope and tweezers.

  “What on earth, Temple—?”

  “Listen, this is the best I have for police lab equipment.” With the tweezers, Temple withdrew the white envelope and notepaper. “This was on my desk this morning—don’t pick it up. The police might want to dust it for prints.”

  Emily read the message in an instant. “This is awful! Baker and Taylor kidnapped and potential ‘stew meat.’ Who would do such a rotten thing?”

  “From the syntax, an idiot after a quick buck, but that may be done to mislead us. It’s no local operator. He’d know that Caesars Palace has no apostrophe. Ungrammatical as it is, that’s Las Vegas. You’re sure no business rival—?”

  “Baker & Taylor doesn’t have any. Look. The two biggest national wholesalers are Ingram and us. Traditionally, we supplied libraries and Ingram handled the independent bookstores; you know, the local Book Nook and Cranny. Lately we’ve expanded our focus into the bookstores as well—”

  “Aha!”

  “But that doesn’t even border on cutthroat competition. Bottom line or not, there’s some gentility left in the book business yet.”

  “Well, it’s time to call the local police. This looks like a rinky-dink operation. They don’t ask for much money—but it’s still kidnapping of a sort, and serious stuff.”

  Emily clapped a well-manicured hand to her forehead; even that broad gesture didn’t completely obscure her worry wrinkles.

  “Temple... no. I can’t. It was my idea to bring the cats here. I just can’t embarrass the company that way. I—we’ve got to get them back.”

  “How? How are you going to get the money so fast? How are you going to deliver it with any personal safety? How can you be sure you’ll get the cats back, or that they’re not stew meat already?”

  “I don’t know! Temple, help me!”

  Temple thought. From the background came the rhythmic rasp of litter being pawed over the scene of the crime. How would she feel if Midnight Louie were in danger? How much would she herself do to avoid the humiliation of reporting a catnapping to someone like Lieutenant Molina? “We’ll hire a PI. Vegas is full of ’em.”

  Emily moved her hand from brow to mouth, a wary expression in her eyes.

  “He can deliver the ransom without risk to either of us,” Temple explained. “We can watch, maybe, and spot the crook. The big question is, how will you get the money?”

  Emily shut her eyes. “My American Express Gold Card.”

  “You could lose it.”

  “As long as I find the bloody cats. Temple, I just couldn’t face losing those cats, professionally or personally.”

  “It’s not your fault, Emily. Who’d think somebody’d bag ’em? That’s really odd—a murder and now a—”

  “Well, well, well. Sorry, didn’t see a Ladies’ Room sign.” Crawford Buchanan was leaning in the doorway in an ice-cream suit, eyeing Emily Adcock with his usual predatory smirk. She was too distraught to notice.

  “We’re leaving.” Temple stuffed the manila envelope back in her bag and grabbed Emily’s wrist.

  The woman’s hand was cold and limp with anxiety; she numbly followed Temple into the office. Buchanan remained in the doorway, forcing them to brush by. A moment later Midnight Louie swaggered past his pant leg, leaving a swath of long black hairs on the pale fabric.

  “Alley cat,” Buchanan hissed, kicking at the cat.

  Louie leaped away like a heavyweight boxer avoiding a gnat.

  Temple and Emily had forgotten both man and cat. “We’ve got till tomorrow. It’s Sunday, but I’ll find a PI somehow,” Temple promised quietly. “You get the money.”

  “What kind?” />
  “Small denominations, unmarked bills, like they say on TV. If we want the cats back, we don’t want to rile the napper.”

  “I don’t even know how to get marked bills. Oh, God, Temple! I hope we get those cats back.”

  “They also say on TV that kidnappers are notorious for not keeping their word once they’ve got the money.”

  Emily smiled wanly. “It’s a mess, but thanks, whatever happens. You’ve been superb.”

  As Emily hurried away, Buchanan sidled up. “What’re you girls up to?”

  Temple eyed the ream of typing paper cradled in his arm. “I didn’t know you were fetching your own paper these days, instead of using mine.”

  “You’re out, for some reason.”

  Temple shook her head and stalked off. Midnight Louie followed.

  13

  Enter Ingram

  The lady said it herself; she requires a private eye.

  So I leave Miss Temple Barr paging morosely through the Las Vegas Yellow Pages, which offer every service that can be sold and quite a few that should not be, and am on my way.

  I exit the convention center by my secret route; I can only say that it involves air-conditioning ducts and certain adept but undignified motions on my part. It is the usual hot, bright day outside, but my tootsies flat-foot over the heat-polished parking lot asphalt as if treading black satin sheets.

  I have not had an assignment of an investigative nature for some time. Such is the way of things. A fellow begins to be taken for granted when he is about the place day and night. And my past exploits around this town remain unsung, no doubt due to the lack of a good press agent.

  That celestial masseur, the sun, beats hot hands on my head and back until I reach the Hilton and slip into the shade of its extensive, also expensive, landscaping. A noxious scent of cocoa butter and human sweat slaps my sensitive nostrils like a fly swatter. Tourists splash in the huge chlorinated pool and soak up ultraviolet rays and frozen margaritas. But I walk soft and I walk silent and nobody notices me unless I want to be observed.