by Barbara Paul
You spend years learning and working toward a goal and doing your best to create something of quality—and some glib, pretty, young person comes along and with a laugh and a wave of his hand dismisses your life. And not only is he allowed to get away with it, he’s rewarded for doing so. Richard Ormsby was everything I hated about contemporary life—the cheapening, cashing-in quality that polluted everything it touched.
Some of this I tried to explain to Marian Larch. There were rivalries in all fields, of course; but I could think of a lot of people I’d rather be in competition with instead of Richard Ormsby. I didn’t doubt for one minute that mine was the superior book; but hustle and hype had invaded the study of history, and I could be hurt by it.
Marian caught the one eastbound flight Monday morning. Tuesday’s mail brought another letter from my publisher, this one gently informing me that the History Book Club had decided to distribute Ormsby’s book instead of mine.
CHAPTER 5
MARIAN LARCH
Captain Michaels had a standard way of dealing with lack of progress in a case, and that was to yell at people who couldn’t yell back. The day after Fiona Benedict went back to Ohio, he let us have it with both barrels. He called in those of us assigned to the Rudy Benedict murder and gave us a dressing-down that I stopped listening to after the first ten seconds because it was so foolish. Abusive language wouldn’t create new leads for us.
He ended with his usual unhelpful instruction: Get out there and scrounge. I did what I usually did in such instances—I swapped interviewees with another investigator. Ivan Malecki would go talk to Kelly Ingram while I gave Nathan Pinking a try. Ivan allowed as how he wouldn’t mind too much.
Pinking had just got back from London and quickly let me know he was doing me a big favor by fitting me into his busy, busy schedule. We were in his office on West Fifty-fourth, a suite that was smaller than I’d expected. A framed photograph on his desk showed a woman and three teenaged girls. All four looked happy.
Pinking’s file said he was fifty-one, but he looked a lot younger. I’d never seen the man before and his face startled me a little. It was the eyebrows you noticed first. The right one was straight and ordinary, just an eyebrow. But the left one was bushy and greatly arched. It made the eye under it look larger—no, the left eye was larger than the right. The nose also had that same kind of lopsidedness; the right nostril looked normal, the left one was fleshy and flared. Same difference in the two sides of the mouth. The left side of the upper lip lifted and seemed more curved than the right; the lower lip was full only on the left, and it drooped a little. Nathan Pinking had two halves of two perfectly good faces that just happened not to fit together. I resisted drawing conclusions about the proper Dr. Jekyll right side and the sensuous Mr. Hyde left.
‘I don’t know what this is for,’ Pinking said. ‘I’ve already told everything I know to that other detective, Ivan somebody.’
‘Ivan Malecki. Just a couple of questions, Mr. Pinking. How long had you been buying scripts from Rudy Benedict?’
‘Oh God, years.’
‘Can you be more precise?’
He looked annoyed, but jabbed a finger at the box on his desk. ‘Tansy, bring in Rudy Benedict’s file.’
A voice said it would and I had to smile. ‘Tansy?’
Pinking grinned mechanically. ‘They’re all called Tansy or Tawny or Silky these days.’
Or Kelly. ‘Benedict was on the last year of his contract with you, is that right?’
‘Yeah, but I would have renewed. Benedict was a good reliable dialogue man.’
‘But would he have renewed? He was planning to write a play.’
He snorted. ‘Look, Detective, uh—’
‘Larch.’
‘Yeah, well, Benedict had been threatening to quit television and write for the stage almost as long as I knew him. Ten, twelve years. But it was all talk. He’d never have gone through with it.’
‘He’d started. Notes, some plot outlines.’
Pinking shook his head. ‘Security blanket. He was always making notes for things he never got around to writing.’
‘You sound as if you knew him pretty well.’
‘I did.’
Just then pretty blonde Tansy came in looking perplexed. ‘Mr. Pinking, the Rudy Benedict folder isn’t in the filing cabinet.’
‘Bull. Look again.’
Tansy faded out of the room with a whispered Yes, sir and I said, ‘How long have you known Leonard Zoff, Mr. Pinking?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Too long. Twenty-five years at least. Why do you ask?’
‘Did Zoff ever represent Rudy Benedict in his negotiations with you?’
‘Zoff doesn’t handle writers. He’s an actors’ agent.’
‘Who was Benedict’s agent?’
But Pinking had quickly had his fill of answering questions. ‘Funny thing—I forget. You’ll have to see your friend Ivan for that. He asked the same question.’
Tansy came back in. ‘Mr. Pinking, the Rudy Benedict file just isn’t there. And Mr. Cameron is here to see you.’
Pinking gave her a look that would have melted a steel girder. ‘You’re just full of good news, aren’t you? Tell Cameron to wait.’ He waved her out. ‘Now look, Ms, uh, I don’t know anything about Benedict’s murder. I can’t even think of a reason why anyone would want him dead. It was probably a mistake—that stuff must have been meant for Kelly Ingram. She’s a much more logical target.’
I explained about the Lysco-Seltzer crystals in Rudy Benedict’s sink and emphasized that Benedict was the ‘right’ victim. ‘Why do you say Kelly is a more logical target?’
‘Because of who she is. A very sexy, very visible young woman about that far away from being a star.’ He held thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart. ‘Women like that are natural magnets. It’s a special quality they have.’
And men like Pinking were always there to cash in on that quality. ‘Still, the cyanide was not meant for her. It—’
I was interrupted by the door bursting open. An angry man I’d never seen before came shooting into the room as if fired from a slingshot. ‘Goddamn it, Pinking, I will not sit there cooling my heels awaiting your pleasure! You go too far. You—’ He broke off, seeing me for the first time.
He was a lean, black-haired man in his forties with the strangest eyes I’d ever seen. The blue of the irises was so faint as to be virtually colorless, making him appear from a certain angle as if he had no irises at all. It gave him an outer-space look. Not spaced out—just other-worldly.
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Pinking, I couldn’t keep him out,’ came Tansy’s faint voice. She was waved out again.
Pinking obviously wasn’t going to introduce us so I said, ‘I’m Marian Larch, with the New York Detective Bureau.’
Pinking’s laugh had a needling edge to it. ‘That’s right, Cameron. I’m being grilled by the police.’
Good manners struggled with anger, and manners won. ‘Ted Cameron,’ he said, offering a hand. ‘Sorry I burst in on you.’
I shook his hand and said, ‘That’s all right, Mr. Cameron, I was about finished anyway.’ Pinking had already made that clear. ‘Are you in television?’
‘I advertise on television.’ He didn’t sound particularly proud of it.
‘Cameron is LeFever’s new sponsor,’ Pinking said with a barely concealed smugness I didn’t quite understand. ‘Or rather his company is. Cameron Enterprises.’
Oho, one of those Camerons. Sportswear, sporting goods, radios, other things I couldn’t remember. Cosmetics. ‘Then this isn’t your maiden voyage?’
‘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 educati
on,’ 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.