“I don’t like that question now any better than I did then.”
“It wasn’t quite as obvious then that Kinsella was playing with fire.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“But I should spill my guts, sure!” Temple took a deep breath. “I’ll say this. Max never did the expected. He liked to surprise people. It genuinely delighted him. That’s why he became a magician. He never lost that sense of child’s play. Maybe it didn’t make him the most predictable of partners, but it sure as hell made life interesting. He came into mine like a white-magic tornado, and I can’t say I was surprised when he left in a puff of smoke.”
“You forgive him?”
“No... but his disappearance wasn’t out of character, and it’s not as simple as cowardice. Stage magicians take risks; that’s part of the performance.”
“Sleight of hand and mind.” Molina snorted. “Tricks.”
“But it takes an athlete to perform them.” Temple shook her head. “You’ll never understand a man like Max. He doesn’t play by the fine print in the book of rules. He laughs at rule books, and steady-job-holding people like us. So he’s not dead, if you want my honest opinion, Lieutenant. Death hasn’t gotten fast enough for Max Kinsella yet.”
“I still think you’re covering up something; maybe just the fact that you miss him.”
“Think what you like.” The policewoman’s air of faint amusement cooled Temple’s anger—and anxiety—better than a pitcher of ice water. “Listen, Mavis Davis will be meeting the media in about five minutes. Want to get a look at her?”
“Apparently you do.”
Temple led them to a pair of seats front row, dead center. “She writes best-sellers about murderous nurses. If you’re looking for perpetrators, Lieutenant—and not chasing ghosts—Chester Royal’s nearest and clearest experts on murder were his authors.”
The press room lunch break ended abruptly. First Claudia Esterbrook charged in, eyeing the disheveled press handouts with distaste and siccing an underling on the mess.
She greeted Temple and the lieutenant with a curt nod... and open disfavor. They would file no stories. Her face screwed into its customary expression of impatience when the next persons in the room were Lorna Fennick and the first entrée of the afternoon’s media feast, Mavis Davis.
Claudia bustled back out to the hall. In moments she could be heard rounding up reluctant reporters. “Larry, you swore you wouldn’t miss the first interview of the afternoon! I’m counting on you; just go right in. Elise—Graffiti magazine, isn’t it? You don’t want to miss Miss Davis. Come on, now, all of you, and we can get started.”
They straggled in, the bleary members of the press, the dapper but bored TV reporters. Their rears had polished the paint thin on the folding chairs so thoughtfully molded to cradle sagging bottoms, and their attentive ears had overdosed on the same questions from their colleagues, the same answers from authors trotted out like trick ponies at twenty-minute intervals.
The morning’s sole interesting moments had been Erica Jong’s cleavage—and that for only half the press corps—and Walter Cronkite’s quips on still-unstable world politics as he plugged his latest tome on sailing ships and squint-eyed old salts.
The media people focused on Mavis Davis with a universally jaundiced eye: a youngish Julia Child without even a chicken wing as a prop to offer the media. Half of them were dreaming over their own book proposals and the encouraging editor, or sales rep, or friend of an editor or sales rep, that they had buttonholed earlier on the convention floor, anyway. Claudia kept her whip out—her strident, almost viciously cheerful voice. She rounded ’em up, headed ’em in, plunked ’em down and... another four hours of raw hide.
Mavis Davis had been deposited facing them on a tastefully upholstered tweed chair, with a freestanding tweed room divider behind her to which Lorna Fennick was hastily tacking posters of the latest Davis title, Ladybug, Ladybug. According to the press release, it followed the medical and off-hours career of an arsonist pediatric nurse. The ladybug pictured on the cover, fully embossed to sensual depth, had a blood-bright shell with tiny black skull markings and wings of red-foil fire.
“People read this stuff?” Lieutenant Molina hissed this in Temple’s ear loudly enough to be heard at twenty feet. “It’s sick! Gives the wacko element ideas.”
Heads whipped around. Claudia Esterbrook glared as her talons scored a glossy folder until the cover stock split.
“You obviously haven’t been keeping up with the bestseller list, Lieutenant,” Temple noted. “Your profession is quite well represented,”
“Libeled, you mean,” Molina said.
Claudia started the show with a clarion throat-clearing that silenced the well-trained media people. Most were ABA veterans, being book page editors, and knew that Claudia demanded a meek flock in her field. If she found them derelict in their devotion to duty—attending the endless round of programs, interviews, author breakfasts, etc.—she could jerk their press credentials, or at least tarnish them a bit. They settled down, pencils poised and cameras, whether hand-held photographic models or shoulder-high videotape machines, cocked.
Everyone was ready but Mavis Davis, who sat fidgeting with a copy of her novel until the dust jacket crinkled.
“How did you happen upon the idea of writing about lethal nurses, Miss Davis?” came the first, hardly original question.
“Ah—” Mavis Davis was a raw-boned woman whose hair had been crimped into an unflattering greige Brillo pad by the Las Vegas oven. Her figured polyester dress must have acted like a nylon tent, sealing in the heat. Her cheeks were hot spots of ruby-red blusher on a pallor of genuine stage fright. Temple had never seen a person less suited to a public interview. She felt sorry for her.
“Ah,” Mavis Davis repeated. Even her voice was unfortunate, an attenuated quiver that couldn’t make up its mind whether to sing alto or soprano. “It’s the contrast, you see. Behind a calling of mercy, of care and the, the... well, you don’t expect a nurse to do anything drastic, do you? On purpose, that is. That’s the fascination.”
“Are you implying, Miss Davis, that there’s a feminist undertone to your subject matter; that men are usually assumed to be capable of violence and mayhem, but not women? There’ve been plenty of villainous doctors in fiction and true-crime nonfiction.”
“Exactly,” Mavis Davis said eagerly. “Nurses are so innocent, you see; all in white, like brides. And then, their victims, my victims—in my books, that is—are innocent, too. Helpless children. Well, I can’t really say why my books are so popular, except that it’s a contrast between innocence and evil. And readers always like that.”
“But your nurse antagonists aren’t innocent caregivers; they’re more of the Nurse Ratched school.”
“Nurse Ratchet School? I’ve never heard of—”
“Like the villainous head nurse that persecuted Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Mavis Davis blinked. “What an odd title. It’s much too long for a book.”
“It was a film. And a book before that.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t know it, young man. Perhaps you could ask me something about one of the characters in my books.”
Silence prevailed.
Then a woman’s voice lilted from the rear. “What about reality, Miss Davis? Has the death of your editor, the chief of your publishing imprint, Chester Royal, given you second thoughts about the fictional deaths your novels portray?”
“Of course, I’m devas-devastated. I’ve worked with Mr. Royal from the beginning of my career. Only Mr. Royal has edited my books. I, I don’t know what I’ll do without him—”
Lorna Fennick spoke up with smooth efficiency. “We will find you another editor as congenial as Mr. Royal, Miss Davis. You are a revered author with Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce. We’ll hardly abandon you, no matter the circumstance.”