Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

“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.