Cat in an Alphabet Soup

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  25

  Killer Exit

  “This 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?”

  “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.”

  Even as he spoke the police were converging on him. He offered no resistance, and stood to be handcuffed. In a moment an officer was mumbling the ritual Miranda warning, a grimmer sort of rite for the Lover’s Knot Wedding Chapel.

  “Chester ended up with quite a lively wake. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Claudia Esterbrook rose to smooth the wrinkles in her scarlet skirt. “I assume the rest of us can go now?”

  Molina nodded. Temple watched people stand, looking lost and a bit ashamed. Not Claudia. She swaggered up the aisle ahead of Avenour and his still-anonymous lady friend, and Earnest Jaspar. No one else left, and no one met Owen Tharp’s eyes except Temple.

  “Even though you tried to kill me, I... regretted giving you away.”

  Tharp shook his head bitterly. “After Royal, I really didn’t have it in me to kill again. It was reflex; a murderer is supposed to care about his own skin, his freedom. I found out I don’t.” He turned on Lanyard Hunter. “But I do care about my writing. And if you lay one incompetent finger on my story, I’ll sue the pseudonym right off you!”

  “You should have time to write now,” Rowena Novak noted thoughtfully. “I’d be happy to be interviewed for your book.”

  “That did it?” Lorna Fennick asked Temple in some awe. “You figured out that his pseudonym was the key?”

  “Every creative person wants to make his or her work known in some unique way,” Temple said. “ ‘Gilhooley’ had never been a good candidate for a book cover—too long, too vaudevillian, too bitter to Owen Gilhooley. So he used Michaels. He was Michael’s son, wasn’t he? And he used the more recognizable Welsh version of his baptismal name as a last name; and then as a first name. Tharp contains the word ‘harp’—a metaphor for the Irish storytelling bard. Through the years he made word-games of his pseudonyms, and they eventually led back to his past.”

  Temple turned to Lanyard Hunter. “You said it yourself when we had dinner. The best kind of lie is the truth that nobody takes seriously. It will never catch the teller and will seriously mislead everybody else. Owen Tharp’s choice of pseudonyms both veiled and memorialized his past. Chester Royal never tumbled.

  “He’d donned many personages during his journey through genre fiction. But the true personality, the one that had never changed over the years, was the young man who’d seen his mother needlessly taken away. That was the person who killed Chester Royal.”

  “Close enough,” said Tharp to Temple’s diagnosis, his head turned away. He wasn’t about to share the mystery of his own actions, the history of his mania. Maybe he was saving it for the book—and probably the motion picture, too.

  “What about the catnapper?” Lieutenant Molina was still waiting, arms folded, looking unimpressed.

  “As you suggested, Lieutenant, the kidnapping of Baker and Taylor was a diversion Tharp engineered to distract the ABA and the media from Royal’s death. Except Emily Adcock and I failed to cooperate. We didn’t publicize it. So he left a ransom note on my desk hoping to force me to go public, but Emily whipped out her American Express Gold Card and paid the ransom, further frustrating his purposes. Then he promised the return of the cats to trick me onto the convention floor for his halfhearted attempt at mayhem. I’d like to think he was out to confuse matters rather than kill me. as he claims now. I may be wrong.”

  Tharp said nothing.

  “What about the woman who picked up the ransom money?” Molina persisted. “That’s a lesser crime, but she’s still out there. Who is she and where’s the money?”

  Temple shrugged uneasily. “I don’t know everything, Lieutenant. Got to leave something for the proper authorities. She’s probably a mere hiree, like my Mr. O’Rourke. I wish you luck in finding her, Lieutenant, if Tharp won’t tell you.”

  Molina was about to say more, but Temple turned quickly to Owen Tharp. “But there’s one thing I do deserve to know, Mr. Tharp. Those cats are the innocent victims of all this. Where are they?”

  Owen Tharp looked truly shamefaced for the first time. “I had to lose them as soon as I could. They’re... at the pound.”

  “How long have they been there?”

  “Since Friday,” Tharp muttered.

  “Good Lord! They’re goners by now,” Temple said with a lump in her throat and a glance at Midnight Loui
e reclining on the organ bench next to Matt.

  “Oh, poor Emily!” Lorna Fennick came over to commiserate.

  “Thanks for Tharp,” Molina said curtly as she and her troops led the man out.

  Lorna hugged Temple’s shoulders. “Don’t listen to that sourpuss. This was a tour de force, Temple. Better than Murder, She Wrote. I hope you get the credit you have coming for this.”

  “Well, it’s been exciting, and risky, and I’m glad the ABA doesn’t have an unsolved murder hanging over it. But addictive as puzzle-solving is, I’m just realizing that this one ends with a man facing years in jail. I kind of liked Owen Tharp, even if he did try to knit and purl my tote bag, and he certainly had his reasons—in triplicate. And—poor Emily!—I’m just sick about Baker and Taylor being killed at the pound. I really blew that. Look—Louie’s come to rub on my legs and comfort me, haven’t you, Louie? I can’t bear to tell Emily.”

  “You’ll have to,” Lorna said warily. “Here she comes now.”

  Emily was barging through the double doors, her purse over one shoulder, a huge shopping bag over the other and a cat carrier dangling from either hand, and jammed herself helplessly in the doors. “Temple—thank God I caught you. I’m on my way to the airport, but look—”

  Temple and Lorna ran to free her.

  “Your darling stuffed Baker and Taylor are in the shopping bag,” Emily said breathlessly. “We don’t need them anymore.” She lifted the carriers. “Look! The right one’s Baker, and the left, Taylor. Thought you deserved to see them in person.”

  “You got them back! Oh, Emily, how?”

  “The woman who owns the local mystery bookshop bought them from the pound, can you imagine? This weekend. She was tickled to get such good ‘look-alikes’ for her shop. When she compared them to the posters she realized she’d somehow bought the real McCoys. Well, she came to B & T at the convention center when we were clearing out.