The Renewable Virgin (11 page)

‘God, no,' Pinking laughed before Ted Cameron could answer. ‘But this is the first time Cameron Enterprises has deigned to associate itself with a Nathan Pinking production. Ah well, Teddy old boy, we have to take the rough with the smooth.'

‘So they say,' the man with the invisible irises said. He'd decided to hold it in until I was gone.

‘You're in for an education,' Pinking went on. ‘Watch what happens to your profits once Kelly Ingram starts wearing your swimsuits. Through the ceiling! And you'll owe it all to me. Think you can stand it?'

I wasn't too crazy about Leonard Zoff, but I was beginning to understand why he hated Nathan Pinking so. The man was deliberately abrasive, going out of his way to offend just to show you he could get away with it. I stood up. ‘You'll get in touch with me when you locate that missing file?'

‘Sure, sure,' Pinking said dismissively. He wouldn't.

I said goodbye to Cameron and left through the outer office. Tansy was sitting disconsolately at her desk looking at a magazine. She lifted her head and said, distinctly and puzzlingly, ‘Julia Child doesn't like sauerkraut.'

I nodded and went on out. Sometimes it's best not to ask.

At Police Plaza, Ivan Malecki hadn't yet got back from interviewing Kelly Ingram; somehow that failed to surprise me. I called a few contacts in industry and did some checking. Cameron Enterprises had been started three generations ago by Henry W. Cameron, a haberdasher with big ideas. What was originally a small family business had grown rapidly, acquiring smaller companies along the way until now it was a fairly large conglomerate. Various family members were involved in the conglomerate's operation; old Henry's great-grandson, Ted Cameron, currently sat in the president's chair.

What was the president of a company that large doing
personally
overseeing a television series the company was sponsoring? Wouldn't that be a job for the advertising department? Or at least for someone lower down in the hierarchy. And why all that animosity between Cameron and Nathan Pinking? Perhaps the man with the invisible eyes didn't have absolute powers; maybe his board of directors had forced him into sponsoring a show he didn't want. Strange thing for a board of directors to be concerning itself with. Or maybe not; they'd want to use their advertising dollars to reach the highest number of customers possible, and
LeFever
's ratings had been climbing steadily.

I went in and told Captain Michaels about Rudy Benedict's file that was suddenly missing from Nathan Pinking's office, perhaps conveniently so.

He made a vulgar noise. ‘Benedict's papers. We should have gone through them.'

We'd been through this before. ‘A writer's papers, Captain. Big job—time-consuming.'

‘Got any other suggestions?' he came close to snarling. ‘I tell you to go out and scrounge and you come back and tell me a file folder is missing. So what does that mean—our answer is written down on a piece of paper? We got nothing else.' He picked up the phone and started punching out a number he read from a folder on his desk. ‘Go home and pack, Larch. I have to get the old doll's permission, but she won't say no.'

I'd never associated Ohio with anything in particular, so the community of Washburn made me revise a few of my ideas about smalltown America. I'd halfway expected a wide place in the road that had no reason for being there except for the university it served. But Washburn smelled of prosperity, and of
taking care
. I don't mean the place was a hotbed of millionaires; but the people who lived there were fussy about their surroundings. Manhattan's Fourteenth Street would have driven them crazy.

Washburn was pretty, in an unremarkable way, and clean. Fiona Benedict lived in a conventional red brick house, white trim, single story plus basement and attic, attached garage, nice yard. She'd taken me up to the attic where Rudy's things were stored—and one look was all I needed to tell me I'd never get through all those papers in the two or three days Captain Michaels had told me to take. So I settled for just the business papers, trusting Dr. Benedict to search through the rest of it for us.

Fiona Benedict was a strange woman. She'd told no one in Washburn that her only child had been murdered. She'd made up some story about accidental death that I agreed to go along with. But I couldn't imagine someone keeping a thing like that to herself. It wasn't that she didn't have any friends; she was liked and respected in Washburn. But the murder of her son was just too painful or too private or too something; she wouldn't or couldn't tell anybody. And the odd thing about it was that I got the impression before I left that she didn't really like Rudy very much.

My first night there was a revealing one; I learned several interesting new things. We went to dinner at the home of two of Dr. Benedict's friends, Roberta and Drew Morrissey. After a marvelous dinner, Roberta Morrissey showed me the way to the bathroom—and displayed a rather disconcerting curiosity about me. She had a very direct way of talking, and we were no sooner out of the dining room than she started pumping me about my supposed friendship with Rudy.

The best way to avoid answering personal questions is to ask questions yourself. ‘Rudy never talked to me about his father,' I said. ‘I'm sure he remembers him—Rudy was eight when his father left. Did his parents ever divorce, or what?'

Roberta Morrissey shot me a funny look. ‘Is that what Rudy told you?'

‘That they divorced?'

‘No, that his father deserted his family when Rudy was eight.'

Since I'd never spoken to Rudy Benedict in my life, I wasn't sure what I should say. But there was something funny about that question and the way she asked it. ‘No, it was his mother who told me that. Rudy never talked about his father.'

Roberta Morrissey looked at me a minute, and then said, ‘Rudy's father committed suicide.' I stared at her open-mouthed, and she said, ‘Here's the bathroom.'

She was waiting when I came back out. I said, ‘You mean Dr. Benedict has rationalized his suicide away? That she calls it desertion to keep from facing up to what really happened?'

Dr. Mrs. Morrissey sighed. ‘No, she really does see his suicide as desertion. As an inexcusable abandoning of Rudy and herself. She's never forgiven him.'

‘Why did he kill himself?'

I don't think she wanted to talk to me about it, but she felt obligated to finish what she'd started. ‘Shame, humiliation. Depression. Evidently Philip Benedict wasn't a very good historian. He'd been taken to task rather severely for some inaccurate translations he'd done—he was a medievalist and he had to deal with archaic language a lot. But then he fabricated some evidence for a book he'd written and was found out. It was pretty much the end of his career. His department head asked for his resignation. Publishers wouldn't take a chance on him after that, and the best teaching position he could ever hope for would be in some small community college somewhere that would consider itself lucky just to get a Ph.D. I never knew Philip Benedict, but from what Drew's told me, I'd say he was just trying to keep up with Fiona. Which was foolish—that need to compete. Fiona is rather special.'

‘And you never met Philip Benedict at all?'

‘I didn't even know Fiona when all that happened—they were teaching in Indiana at the time. Drew knew them both, from history conventions they all attended. But when Philip killed himself, Fiona wanted to take the boy and start over someplace else. Drew called and told her there was an opening at Washburn, and she's been here ever since.'

So father and son were both murder victims, one by his own hand and the other by a hand still unknown. I began to see why Fiona Benedict hadn't wanted her peers to know how her son had died. Poor woman.

Then that ‘poor woman' displayed a side I'd never seen before. The personality she'd always shown me was cool, composed, withdrawn, plainly inaccessible. She had a very good defense system. But then in the Morrisseys' living room she started talking about a new book she'd just finished that had taken her fourteen years to research and write—and the change in that woman was downright spooky. When she spoke of the Crimean War and the Charge of the Light Brigade and idiotic lords and misunderstood orders and fatally foolish actions—well, she was a different person entirely. Her face lit up and her voice became musical and her body was animated—she looked a good fifteen years younger. She was happy and even a little bit excited, but it wasn't a gushing kind of enthusiasm she showed. The lady was simply in her element.

Then we turned on the TV to watch
LeFever
and she changed again, this time into the Bride of Frankenstein—all hiss and sparks and disapproval. The only thing missing was the Elsa-Lanchester-electrocuted hairdo. It was a dumb show, true, but it didn't seem to be Rudy's script that made her so mad; she acted as if she hadn't expected anything better on that score. No, it was Kelly Ingram that got her so riled.

It was easy to see why. I couldn't think of two women more different from each other than Kelly Ingram and Fiona Benedict. Kelly was extroverted glamour and sparkle and good times; Dr. Benedict was privacy and quiet, a thinker. Of course the serious woman would have no respect for the frivolous one.

Yet I thought Dr. Benedict underestimated Kelly Ingram. People see a face as beautiful as Kelly's and they tend to assume there can't be a brain behind it. Kelly wasn't an educated woman by Fiona Benedict's standards, but that didn't mean she was stupid. In fact, she was rather shrewd in her own way. Kelly never kidded herself about what she was doing for a living or tried to pretend it was anything more significant than it was. She never put on airs or played the great actress. I liked Kelly—I liked her energy and her style and her upbeat personality. What Dr. Benedict saw was a useless woman who was getting a free ride through life because she happened to be born beautiful. I thought there was more to Kelly than that.

Kelly struck me as being a halfway woman—no, that's not the right way to put it. Kelly was a woman stuck between time zones, getting messages from the past and from the present at the same time. She was sure-footed in a highly competitive profession where you have to be able to take care of yourself if you intend to survive. But she'd gotten where she was by playing the men's game, by catering to male fantasies. Sure, she did it all tongue-in-cheek—but she still
did
it. I don't think Kelly would ever claim women's only function was to serve as objects of male desire. But her extraordinary beauty had singled her out from birth for just that very role. It's what she knew, it's what she understood—of course it directed her behavior. But she wasn't particularly impressed by any of it.

And, well, to tell the truth, there was another reason I liked her. She'd flattered me. When Kelly got that second Lysco-Seltzer bottle in the mail and was scared half out of her skull, it was me she turned to for help. Not Captain Michaels,
me
. Women don't generally look to other women for help. Men are the protectors, the capable ones, right? We're taught from childhood that women are supposed to be helpless. I mean, women are
supposed
to be helpless; it's expected of us. But when Kelly felt threatened and decided she needed help, I was the one she called. Think that didn't make me feel good?

On the way back to Dr. Benedict's house I'd wanted to talk to her about Kelly, but the look on her face said
No Trespassing
so I didn't.

There was a repetitiousness about Rudy Benedict's business papers that soon had me nodding. I forced myself to pay attention to letter after letter detailing percentages, residuals, kill fees, on and on. Reams of paper spent on correspondence about details of scripts in progress—should the villain be kind to animals, how about discovering the body inside a case of peat moss in the greenhouse, etc. Rudy Benedict had spent so much time writing and reading letters I wondered how he ever got anything else done.

The only thing of interest had to do with satisfying my personal curiosity instead of helping to solve a murder. It was a series of four letters concerning a script Benedict had written twelve years earlier. The contents of the correspondence were about the same as all the others; it was the letterhead I found so interesting. It read: ‘Pinking and Zoff Productions, Inc.'

So those two had been partners once—the source of their present mutual hatred? Somehow I couldn't see Leonard Zoff as a producer; he seemed so right in his role of huckster, wheeling and dealing and selling his human products for all he could get. I decided to take copies of the letters back with me; I had to have something to show Captain Michaels for my trip to Ohio.

Then right before I left, Fiona Benedict got some really nasty news: Channel 13 idol Richard Ormsby was publishing a book called
Lord Look-on
. The news hit her so hard I was worried about her; at first I thought she was having a heart attack. I stayed on until Monday, and over that weekend she opened up more than I'd yet seen her do. The
pain
that woman was feeling was overwhelming—I was hurting for her myself. By the time I left Monday morning, she'd withdrawn into herself again; her mouth was bitter.

It was a peculiar thing, and maybe I wasn't being fair in thinking it, but it seemed to me Fiona Benedict was mourning what happened to her book the way you'd have thought she'd mourn what happened to her son. Not that her book was dead, far from it. But what she was feeling was pure and simple grief, no question of that. Yet all the time she'd been in New York seeing about Rudy's cremation and closing his apartment and disposing of his things—she'd been icily calm and collected, never displaying anything of what she was feeling. She was a very private woman.

Perhaps she could handle one horrible thing happening to her, but not two so close together. Or perhaps it was the order in which they happened. If she'd heard about
Lord Look-on
first, then it might have been Rudy's death that caused her to grieve. Or perhaps it was exactly what it appeared to be: the murder was an attack on a son to whom she'd not been close for decades, but the book was an attack on her personally.