I figure on perusing a booth or two, since I always was a bookish sort, having nodded off over many great tomes—including the collected works of Dickens. I like nothing better than curling up on a good book. And I personally know a literary figure or two, the most famous of which—besides Boss Banana, whose memoirs sold quite a few guys upriver—is my hard-shelled pal, archy the cockroach, whose nightly tap dance on the typewriter keys (he is an old-fashioned kind of guy) brought much fun and profit.
So I decide to broaden my horizons, no easy thing to do in Vegas, which is all horizon, and hotfoot over to the convention center.
I plan to scout the rear service areas, normally deserted at my namesake hour, except for the presence of a few local cats in search of tidbits among the refuse. Even Vegas has its homeless these days, in addition to the usual shirtless.
There are a thousand ways to get into a locked building, especially if you are a stealthy but wiry little guy, and Midnight Louie knows every one. Soon I am ambling through a maze of booths, gazing at piles of books, posters and plastic bags bannered with pictures of every description.
I am vaguely in search of the Baker & Taylor concession, where I am given to understand that a pair of famous felines are on display. Apparently any live acts at a book convention are newsworthy. This duo made all the papers, being official library cats at a little town in the West.
From their mug shots, Baker is a white, gray and what-have-you feline of no distinguished ancestry, and Taylor is likewise. Neither has much to speak of in the way of ears, which gives them a constantly frowning expression. As for tail, I cannot say as I am always the gentleman. Still, a celebrity cat—much less two—is something to see, there being few around since Rhubarb, the long-gone marmalade tom of motion-picture fame. Of course someone has scrammed with both Baker and Taylor for the night; the booth offers nothing but vacant director’s chairs and slick catalogs. I sniff out the area and am in the process of withdrawing—perhaps the sole individual in history to leave the ABA without a free book—when my nose for news fastens on the dreadful truth that the stale atmosphere is not the only thing dead about this place.
I poke my puss through a curtain, clamber over an Everest of disheveled cartons, dodge several empty Big Gulp-size paper cups and a Big Mac wrapper that has been sucked clean—and find myself nose to nose with a white male sixty-some years of age with specs as thick as the lens at Mount Palomar and no more earthly use for them.
He is supine among the effluvia and deader than a stripper’s Monday afternoon audience at the Lace ’n’ Lust downtown. I trot around front to catch the booth number. The booth itself is fairly unmistakable, being blazoned with illustrations of assorted bodies in a similar if more spectacular condition of permanent paralysis than the current corpse. There are also depictions of such sinister implements as hypodermic needles dripping blood and embossed silver scalpels lethal-looking enough for Lizzie Borden to be alive and well and using them to practice medicine without a license.
I commit the name on the above-booth banner to memory—Pennyroyal Press—and retreat to more pleasant venues to await morning and an opportunity to acquaint the authorities with my discovery in a way that will do my duty as a citizen and leave my name off any list of suspects.
1
Chester’s Last Chapter
“Some cat’s cutting loose on the convention floor,” the guard grumbled, heading for the office coffeepot. “Thought we were supposed to be on the lookout for international terrorists.”
“A cat!” Temple’s head whipped to attention, abandoning her computer screen. “Where?”
The guard shook his own head, which was decorated by a wilted lei of gray hair, and donned his cap. Caffeine piddled from the spigot until foam lapped the rim of his Styrofoam cup. “Kitty Kong. Some terrorist.”
“Listen, Lloyd, a very valuable cat happens to be missing from an exhibit this morning—two, in fact. We need to corral them before we open the floor to the exhibitors. Where was it seen?”
Lloyd scratched his scalp, almost dethroning his cap. “You office girls are all cat crazy.”
Temple made her full five feet zero as she stood, slamming the oversize glasses atop her head to the bridge of her nose.
“I’m not an ‘office girl.’ I’m liaison for local PR for this convention, and I don’t give a flying fandango about pussycats on the job unless they’re relevant to public relations, so you can bet that corporate mascots like Baker and Taylor are bloody vital to the American Booksellers Convention. Baker and Taylor happens to be one of the country’s top book wholesalers.”
Temple paused, breathlessly, to dive under her desk and withdraw a formidable canvas bag emblazoned with the words “Temporus Vitae Libri." A freebie from Time-Life Books.
She edged around the desk, frowning. “Now where is this rogue feline? If he’s beneath your notice, I’ll bag him personally.”
Lloyd examined her three-inch heels, her elephant-bladder-size bag and her implacably determined face. She didn’t look a day over twenty-one—despite being in imminent danger of pushing thirty, well, twenty-eight, and regretted it bitterly. July was her natal month and this was the cusp of May and June.
Lloyd’s head jerked over his shoulder. “Somewhere near the sequined zebra on the stick.”
“Zebra on a stick? Oh, you mean the Zebra Books carousel. Damnation”—Temple eyed the silver-dollar-size watch face that obscured her wrist—“the doors open at nine. Good thing book people sleep late. Probably up reading all night.”
She clicked out of the office, bag flapping, while Lloyd muttered something uncouth about “modern women” into his scalding coffee.
Lights glared on the mammoth exhibition area, making the booths’ glossy posters and book-cover blowups into vertical reflecting pools. Temple threaded the maze of aisles. A few early-bird exhibitors were already at work, unpacking book cartons and readying their wares for opening day.
She bustled past arrays of next year’s calendars, juicy dust jackets promising sex and violence in lavish doses, past lush photographic covers on massive art books, past ranks of reading lights and tasseled bookmarks.
She heard Lloyd faintly calling “Miss Barr” and minced on. Few would believe how fast Temple could travel on her upscale footwear; in her favorite Stuart Weitzman heels she was even a match for a footloose feline.
“Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,” she crooned as she neared the Zebra booths, slipping the Time-Life book bag from her arm in preparation for a genteel snatch.
Nothing stirred but a dedicated exhibitor who was fanning book catalogs on display cubes.
“Hee-eere kitty. Nice kitty.”
Zebra Books’ life-size papier-mâché namesake glittered, seeming to move in stately splendor amid the eerie quiet.
“Here kit-eee, damn it to—!”
A scream of outrage deleted the rest of Temple’s expletive as she tripped on what felt like thick electric cable. She stumbled forward, looking down to see an abused feline tail streaking from the needle-sharp exclamation point of a single Weitzman stiletto.
Lloyd ambled up to announce the obvious. “There it goes.”
Temple went after, darting down aisles, careening around corners, caroming off unwary pedestrians.
“The cat, catch it!” she yelled.
Bemused exhibitors merely paused to watch her sprint past. A bald man with a wart on his nose pointed ahead without comment. Temple hurtled on.
A black tail waved from behind a stack of paperback Bibles. Temple followed. The Tower of Babel fell again.