by Barbara Paul
But before I could say anything Ivan Malecki came up to the desk and cleared his throat. ‘Hello, Kelly, remember me?’
Kelly glanced up. ‘Oh hello, Ivan, how are you?’ She’d not only remembered him, she’d remembered his name as well. After a minute’s worth of inane dialogue, Ivan strutted away, his existence justified.
‘You don’t really want to see Dr. Benedict,’ I said.
‘But I do!’ she protested. ‘I should have been in before this but I, uh …’
‘Kelly. You once told me you couldn’t get away with telling lies off camera. You were right. Now why did you come in?’
‘I told you—I want to see Dr. Benedict.’
‘Your nose just grew another inch.’
She looked at me disconsolately a moment and then made up her mind. ‘All right, here it is. I need a private detective, and don’t ask me why because I’m not going to tell you. The yellow pages are full of names, but they don’t tell me what I need to know.’
‘Which is?’
‘The ones that are legit and the ones that are a smidge on the shady side.’
‘Uh-huh. And which kind do you want?’
It was hard for her to say it. ‘The shady kind.’
Oh my! Now what did this pretty doll-woman want with a shady detective? What had gone so wrong in her glamorous, successful life that she should need expert help from someone who wasn’t averse to bending the law a little if the pay was right? There was only one new element in her life that I knew of.
So I said: ‘What’s Ted Cameron done?’
‘Oh, Marian!’ She looked hurt and exasperated at the same time. ‘Are you going to give me a name or not?’
‘No, I am not going to give you a name. At least not the kind you want. I’m a policewoman, remember? Sworn to uphold the law? I will give you the names of a few reputable people, if you like.’
‘I thought you’d help.’
‘I’m trying to. But I can’t read minds. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?’
‘I can’t do that. Damn it, Marian! Just one lousy stinking name.’
‘Forget it. Why do you want to have your boyfriend investigated?’
‘I don’t! Oh, you’ve got it all wrong.’
‘Then set me straight. Tell me what’s going on.’
She thought about it a few minutes, but ended up shaking her head. ‘I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anybody.’ She sighed. ‘As long as I’m here—I might as well go see Dr. Benedict. I’m allowed, aren’t I?’
It would be my second trip to the detention cells that day. ‘I’ll have to take you. This isn’t a regular visiting day.’
‘Oh—I didn’t think of that. Marian, I don’t want to put you out—’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. And it was. I was thinking that on the drive over I might get a little more out of her about why she wanted a shady detective.
But what I got was a new lie she’d had time to think up. ‘I might as well tell you,’ she said. ‘I want somebody to find out who sent me the laxative and the toilet paper. You remember that time, don’t you?’
I stopped at a red light and just looked at her. The lie was so blatant she had the good grace to laugh at her own clumsiness.
‘Won’t do, Kelly,’ I said.
‘Won’t do,’ she agreed. ‘Especially between you and I.’ She frowned. ‘I?’
‘Me, I think. Besides, it’s easier to tell the truth.’
But mentioning the laxative had started her thinking. ‘I probably never will know who sent it, will I?’
‘There’s no way of proving it,’ I said carefully. ‘You can make a reasonable assumption, however.’
‘You think you know? Who?’
‘Laxative and toilet paper,’ I said. ‘Who is it among your acquaintance that can’t get through a conversation without using the word shit over and over again?’
Her eyes grew large. ‘Leonard Zoff? Leonard sent me the laxative?’
‘He’d be my guess.’ The light turned green; I eased the car forward. ‘Didn’t you once tell me you thought he didn’t like women? And here you are, extremely female, one of his brightest prospects for success if not the brightest. Maybe sending you that laxative was a way of relieving his own tensions a little—oh dear, bad word choice. But all that’s just speculation, Kelly. I may be maligning the man.’
‘If he sent me a doctored bottle of Lysco-Seltzer …’ She didn’t finish.
‘Did he send one to Rudy Benedict too? We don’t think so. Whoever substituted the cyanide had to do it the same day Benedict died. Zoff had an alibi for almost the entire day. He was on the go, had a lot of appointments. But we checked all the people he met with, and there just doesn’t seem to have been time for him to slip down to Chelsea, make the substitution when Rudy wasn’t looking, and keep to his schedule. It’s not airtight, so he could have found a way of doing it. But it doesn’t look likely.’
Kelly accepted that. ‘Besides, Leonard would have no reason to kill Rudy. They were friendly. They weren’t even working together—they never did, so far as I know.’
‘Yes, they did—about a dozen years ago,’ I told her. ‘When Rudy was writing scripts for that well-known production team, Pinking and Zoff.’
Her head swiveled towards me. ‘Pinking and Zoff? You mean Leonard was a producer? Wow. And in business with Nathan Pinking?’
‘That’s right.’ The news so surprised her that she was quiet the rest of the way to the detention cells.
Inside the building, we waited in the interview room while Fiona Benedict was being brought up. Kelly began to have second thoughts. ‘I’m not sure this was such a good idea.’
‘Too late now,’ I said as the door opened and a matron escorted Dr. Benedict in.
She stopped cold when she saw Kelly. ‘What do you want?’ Not a very auspicious beginning.
Kelly stood up, hesitated. ‘I, ah, I wanted to see if you were all right. If you needed anything.’
‘Nothing.’ Fiona Benedict’s eyes narrowed and she forced herself to say, ‘I suppose I should thank you for sending Howard.’
Well, yes, I suppose you should, I was thinking, but Kelly said quickly, ‘That’s all right, glad to help. Is there anything else? Anything you want that I can bring?’
The dislike on Dr. Benedict’s face was so naked that I wasn’t surprised when Kelly flinched. I doubted that she’d ever been looked at like that before in her entire life. ‘The role of Lady Bountiful doesn’t suit you,’ Dr. Benedict said contemptuously. ‘Not convincing, not convincing at all.’
‘Wh-what do you mean?’ Kelly stammered.
‘Little Miss Innocence. You forgot to bat your eyes.’
Kelly looked as if she didn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Why are you talking to me like this?’
‘What are you doing here?’ the older woman snapped out. ‘Did you come to crow? Go away, Kelly Ingram, go away and don’t come back. I don’t want to see you or your kind ever again. You and your flashy looks and your cheap obviousness—’
‘Now, wait a minute!’ Kelly said hotly, stung into defending herself. ‘Who the hell are you to call me cheap?’
‘Oh, I’m sure you put a high price on yourself,’ the older woman said heavily. Her shoulders slumped. ‘You sell yourself and then you sell out the rest of us.’
Kelly glanced at me; I shook my head—I didn’t know what she was talking about either. ‘What are you saying, Dr. Benedict?’ I asked.
‘Look at her, Marian,’ she said bitterly in reply. ‘So pleased with herself. So willing to adjust to whatever demands a man might make of her. But she’s never tarnished and she’s always fresh and ready for more. The ideal woman—a renewable virgin. What a role model for young girls!’ She took a couple of steps towards Kelly. ‘We’re all teachers—don’t you understand that? You go on that asinine show and teach schoolgirls to be exhibitionists. You teach them that their function in life is to display their bodies and never think at all. You’re tell
ing them the only worthwhile goal in life is to attract male attention. Yes, I call that cheap.’
Kelly was outraged. ‘It’s only a role I’m playing, for crying out loud!’
‘And if you don’t do it, somebody else will? That’s the rest of the argument, isn’t it? The same rationalizations women have always used. You made your choice long ago—you’re selling yourself, and there’s no way you can pretend you’re not.’
Kelly looked as if she’d been slapped in the face; you could almost see the fingermarks on her cheek. I decided to interfere. I stepped between the two of them and said, ‘Fiona, that’s enough. You’re being unfair. Don’t take it out on her.’
She looked me straight in the eye for a long moment and then without speaking turned on her heel. The matron opened the door and they were gone.
Kelly sank weakly into the nearest chair. ‘How can she hate me that much? I never did anything to her.’
‘It wasn’t really you she was telling off. It was Richard Ormsby.’
‘Ormsby? But I don’t even know him!’
‘You’re both attractive, successful television personalities. Dr. Benedict attacked you because you were the handiest representative of a world she feels threatened by. And it’s the world her son chose to live in, don’t forget—that’s mixed up in it too.’
‘But all that business about selling myself—’
‘Well, she couldn’t very well blast you for writing bad history, could she? That’s really what’s bugging her. She sees it as a form of prostitution.’
‘Marian, do you think I’m selling myself?’ While I was floundering for an answer, she went on, ‘I am going to judge the Miss America contest. It’s all set. I’m going to do it.’
I started to say Oh, Kelly in exasperation when I realized what she was telling me. Any other woman in her place—myself included—would have been furious, striking out at her accuser, indulging in a long process of self-justification. But Fiona Benedict had said selling yourself and Kelly Ingram had thought Miss America. A natural link. I always knew Kelly was more self-aware than most glitter girls. She understood the prostitutional aspect of meat parades.
Now if she would only turn her back on it.
But right then she didn’t look up to making any decisions at all. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this place,’ I said. ‘It’s beginning to depress me.’
In the car Kelly asked me to come home with her. ‘You’re through for the day, aren’t you?’
I said I was. ‘Where’s Ted Cameron?’
‘Los Angeles. Soothing his Aunt Augusta. Wouldn’t you know he’d have an aunt named Augusta?’
I knew of Augusta Cameron; she was the head of Lorelei Cosmetics—one of those grandes dames who seem to be the natural rulers in the realm of fashion and cosmetics. ‘Why does Aunt Augusta need soothing?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Ted says every couple of years she gets it into her head she could do a better job of running Cameron Enterprises than Ted and he has to go out and calm her down.’
I was hungry and announced the fact. When we got to her apartment, Kelly called the restaurant at the top of the building and ordered dinner to be sent down. While we were waiting I turned on the news and heard something that made me forget all about food.
And that was that Richard Ormsby had been shot.
It had happened while the Englishman was leaving the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center. His assailant had stood behind a barely open stairwell door and fired at Ormsby from there. No one saw his face. His aim had been perfect: his victim died on the spot. The killer had done his damage and made his escape before witnesses were fully able to realize what was happening.
Richard Ormsby was as dead as they come. And all the time Fiona Benedict had been locked up in a detention cell on Sixty-seventh Street, where we’d left her not more than forty-five minutes earlier.
CHAPTER 11
KELLY INGRAM
Ted gave me the news on Thursday, just after noon. I always knew the end of the world would come on a Thursday.
Look at me, making jokes, ha ha ha. I don’t know what else to do so I make a joke about it, how else do you stay away from the funny farm when the sky falls on your head? And it fell, all right, oh wow did it fall. Crash, bang, BOOM, noisier than the sound track of a science fiction movie, jokes again. It has to be this way, he’d said. Sez who? Why does it have to be this way? Where’s that written down?
No explanation, no answer, no real reason. Just we’re going to have to stop seeing each other, Kelly. Stop seeing each other? Good God, I’m not a character in a 1940s movie, wasn’t even born then. And the worst part was he didn’t mean it, I mean he meant it, we would have to stop ‘seeing’ each other, but he didn’t want to mean it, he didn’t want to say it. Ted did not choose to end the affair. He was being forced to end it.
Doesn’t that sound stupid? Paranoid, even. Woman gets dumped, thinks up elaborate explanation to save face. Are you going back to your wife, I said. I don’t have a wife, he said. You’ve got two, I said. Ex-wives, he said, and I’m not going back to either one of them, he said. Then why, Ted? Why?
But he had no reason. Just: It has to be this way. It was as if he wanted me to know something was wrong, otherwise he’d have made up a believable excuse or tried to make me think he wasn’t interested any more or something. But there was nothing like that; just Goodbye, Kelly, like that. Was he really saying Help me? Am I looking for excuses?
He made sure we were in my apartment when he told me—so he could leave, I guess, rather than put himself in the spot of having to tell me to go. After he’d gone, I just sat there and stared at the wall until I realized I couldn’t see anymore, it had gotten so dark. Wednesday he ordered the tickets for our trip to Scotland, Thursday morning he went to a meeting, Thursday afternoon we were through. So all right, Sherlock, figure out where the change came. I didn’t know who or whom his meeting was with; he always told me when I asked but this time I hadn’t, damn it. But something had happened that Thursday morning to make me persona non whatever, and of course I had to wonder if it had anything to do with the blackmail. Damn Marian Larch, if she’d given me a name when I asked for one maybe all this could have been avoided.
I refused to accept it. It was a temporary separation, that’s all, forced on Ted by a villainous blackmailer, Nathan Pinking or somebody else, somebody hateful. Why was utterly beyond me, I couldn’t even begin to guess. But what was happening now was only an interruption of the normal state of things, an obstacle to be overcome, a thing-in-the-way to be removed, the course of true love never did run on well-oiled wheels or however. It was up to me to do something.
Big talk. Do what? Two little words, floating on top: Marian Larch. That’d do it—sic the police on them. That would do something all right, maybe put Ted in jail? (What did he do?) Didn’t really mean it, I was just thinking nasty things—I was hurt and I wanted to hurt back. Yes, Ted, I wanted to hurt you. Why hadn’t you managed better? You are a professional manager, you should have managed your personal business better.
But I didn’t want to call in Marian Larch or Ivan Whatsit or Captain Whoosit for another reason, the best reason in the world, and that was it was too embarrassing. I’d be damned if I’d play a woman-scorned role. Because that’s what I’d look like if I went to the police for help, a woman scorned who was getting even—with Ted, with whoever was blackmailing him. With the world. And I wasn’t scorned, dammit! Ted was almost crying when he told me it was all over.
But still he did tell me.
Oh Christ, what a mess. Somebody had Ted’s life on a string; all he had to do was pull the string and Ted jumped. Was it Nathan Pinking? Whoever it was, he’d come between me and Ted—for what reason? For kicks? Just to prove he could do it? That sounded like Nathan Pinking, all right. Nathan didn’t particularly dislike me, and that Fiona Benedict was the only person I knew who outright hated me. (I think.) But Nathan had invested money in me, I was one of his more promising ‘properties�
��—why would he want to hurt me? Maybe he didn’t; maybe he was just using me to get at Ted; maybe it wasn’t Nathan Pinking at all; and maybe I should stop making up fairy tales.
Wish I hadn’t thought of that woman. The way she lit into me—my God, so much resentment! Rudy’s mother, I mean. As if she’d been storing up grudges against me for years, and we’d only known each other a couple of months. The very first time I saw her she accused me of having caused Rudy’s death, the old bitch, God, listen to me. I felt like killing her, completely forgot myself. If it hadn’t been for Marian Larch—
I don’t think I’ve ever known two women more unalike than Fiona Benedict and Marian Larch. Rudy’s mother is awful, just awful—arrogant and disapproving and always looking down her nose at me. At me! But Marian Larch doesn’t judge everybody by herself, she’s friendly and helpful and in her own way a very cool lady, she doesn’t get rattled and she always knows what to do. She agrees with Fiona Benedict about one thing, though, the Miss America kind of thing, but she never makes me feel like some kind of worm from under a rock because I don’t agree with her. But Dr. Benedict makes me feel I could never never never do anything that would please her, not that I want to, please her, that is.
Older people are always doing that, it makes them feel superior. If they don’t have anything else going for them, they claim age automatically gives them answers that are withheld from undeveloped ignoramuses like me. They specialize in being right. No matter what happens, they say in their smug little voices: ‘You don’t know yet, wait until you’re older.’ God, is that infuriating! They can tell you anything, anything at all, and then stop you from disagreeing with them by saying you’re not old enough to know. You mean you believe that ridiculous story about the world being round? Oh dear, tee hee. You don’t know yet, wait until you’re older. Fiona Benedict had done something like that to me. She’d taken one look at me and decided no. Who the hell is she to set herself up as my judge?
I’ll tell you who she is. She’s a dried-up old prune who’s past it, that’s who she is. These women who are always saying Stop making yourself a sex object, they’re always old or ugly or both. I hate to say it, but if Marian Larch was even a little bit pretty, she might not be so quick to turn up her nose at the Miss America contest. I like looking the way I look, damn it, and why should I have to apologize for it? Why is it so wrong to be pretty?