by Barbara Paul
He’d argued a little, out of principle; I don’t think he really cared one way or the other. But I’d made up my mind right then, I was through pretending to be younger than I was.
That was earlier in the week. But from star of my own (to be) series I’d quickly been bumped back down to mere appurtenance, appendage, accessory, attachment, adjunct to the hero, I did look that one up. My LeFever character was more a piece-of-tail role than ever, and the vibes I got from Leonard were telling me my new series would be just more of the same. Nothing was right. In short, I was spoiling for a fight. I had to have it out with Leonard.
So on pink-dress day I went charging into his outer office, breathing fire (I hoped). Mimsy looked up from her desk, not at all alarmed. ‘Is he in?’ I growled in my best tough-broad voice.
‘He’s out looking over location sites,’ she purred at me. ‘Anything I can do?’
‘Damn it, Mimsy, don’t be so friendly—can’t you see I’m mad?’
‘And you want to stay mad,’ she nodded understandingly. ‘Would it help to yell at me a little?’
‘Naw,’ I said, starting to cool down. ‘Leonard’s got to talk to Lesley, for starters. Did he tell you where he was going?’
Mimsy’s face took on tragic overtones that would have done Medea proud. ‘Sorry—he didn’t. I asked him three times before he left, but he went out without telling me.’
‘Did he take his limo?’
She caught on immediately. ‘Of course—all I have to do is call the driver.’ She punched out a number on the phone.
Leonard never drove himself anywhere. He claimed New York traffic was the one thing in life he was truly afraid of. Mimsy spoke briefly into the phone and then hung up.
‘Well?’
‘The driver is on his way back to the garage. He said Mr. Zoff got out at the Eastside Airlines Terminal and told him he wouldn’t be needing the car any more today.’
‘Eastside Terminal? He’s not leaving town, is he?’
‘No—and I don’t think he’s meeting anyone. He must just be looking for a shooting site.’
One sure way to find out. I went down to the street and stopped a taxi. Rain was threatening and I didn’t have an umbrella, but I didn’t want to take the time to go back and get one. Leonard Zoff wasn’t going to get away from me, he wasn’t.
CHAPTER 19
MARIAN LARCH
‘Again,’ Captain Michaels sniffled. He was catching a cold and his eyes were red and watery.
Ivan cleared his throat. ‘At the appointed time I proceed to the designated rendezvous point—’
‘Jesus, Malecki, you’re not in training class, talk English.’ The Captain’s cold was making him cranky.
Ivan managed to keep a straight face and started over. ‘At five minutes to eleven I go into the Eastside Airlines Terminal. I wait until the last stragglers and latecomers have gotten on the airport buses departing at eleven. Then I approach Zoff.’
Two plainclothes officers would already be inside, one of them behind the counter.
‘I tell Zoff I’m the one he’s waiting for,’ Ivan went on. ‘If he wants a name, I tell him Ivan. If he wants to go someplace else to talk, I tell him absolutely not.’
We’d picked the Eastside Terminal because first of all it had to be a public place. No blackmailer who intended to go on living would agree to a private meeting with his victim. The Eastside Terminal had people coming and going, but there were never huge crowds of people there who stayed put for any length of time.
‘What if he insists?’ I asked Ivan. ‘What if he says he won’t talk to you in a place where there’s a chance you’ll be overheard?’
‘Then I remind him he’s in no position to insist on anything. I tell him my partner is watching from outside, and if Zoff has brought a weapon to force me to go with him, my partner calls the police the minute she sees us walk out the door.’
The ‘partner’ had been Ivan’s idea. He’d thrown himself into the role with gusto, trying to think the way a blackmailer would think—a Method cop. He said the only sure way a blackmailer had of protecting himself was to convince the victim that if anything happened to him, the blackmailer, the victim’s guilty secret would immediately be revealed to the world. And the best way of doing that, Ivan said, was not the conventional letter-with-a-lawyer gambit; that’s what Nathan Pinking had done and Ted Cameron was already figuring a way around that when things came to a head. No, the best way was to produce a partner, one whose existence was established beyond all shadow of a doubt but whose identity was withheld from the mark.
Since the initial contact was to be made by telephone, we decided the caller should be a woman. Otherwise Zoff might think he was dealing with one man pretending to be two, disguising his voice over the phone. We had a policewoman from Narcotics make the call; Zoff might have recognized my voice. She’d told him she certainly was glad to get hold of him, because she’d spent the longest time trying to track him down—ever since the day Richard Ormsby had been killed, in fact.
Zoff had bluffed at first, pretending not to know what she was talking about. Stalling for time. But he had agreed to a meeting. An innocent man would have told her to stop bothering him or he would call the cops. But Leonard Zoff had instead asked her what she wanted. She’d named the time and place for the meeting, and told him to bring ten thousand dollars with him. Then she had informed him she herself would not be there, that all their dealings would be done through an intermediary, her partner. All their dealings, she’d stressed. We wanted Zoff to start thinking this was no one-time payoff, that he was on the hook for good. Push him a little.
Ivan, the ostensible intermediary, would be wired as well as armed. Captain Michaels and I would be in an unmarked car around the corner on Thirty-eighth Street, listening to every word that was said. We were there strictly as back-up. If everything went according to plan, we wouldn’t move in until the money had actually changed hands. Ivan would make the arrest; the two police officers planted inside would witness the payoff and provide assistance if needed.
Captain Michaels took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘Then what?’
Ivan said, ‘Then I ask him for the ten thousand. I tell him my partner and I aren’t greedy, we just want enough to live on comfortably.’
‘And if he asks when’s the next payment?’
‘I tell him I’ll let him know. But I don’t bring it up if he doesn’t.’
I said, ‘What if he doesn’t hand over the money right away and tries to bluff it out instead? What if he says it’s only your partner’s word against his?’
‘I say I’ll tell the police I was also present at the Ormsby shooting—that makes two eyewitnesses, exactly what the law requires for a positive identification. I’ll tell Zoff our story will be that at the time we didn’t want to get involved, we didn’t know who the killer was anyway. But now that we do know—it’s begun to bother us, we feel we should step forward and do our duty, all that stuff. I’ll tell him the cops might not believe our reason for keeping quiet so long, but they’re sure as hell going to be mighty polite to two people who can ID a killer for them.’
‘And if he asks who your partner is?’
‘I laugh in his face.’
‘If he doesn’t bring the money at all?’ Captain Michaels coughed.
‘I say I’ll give him one more chance. Now that he knows we’re serious, he either produces the money or he goes to jail.’
‘New time and place for the payoff?’
‘Noon tomorrow. The fountain at Lincoln Center.’
‘What if he claims he can’t get his hands on ten thousand in twenty-four hours?’
‘I laugh in his face again. Then I quote the balance as of this morning in his Chase Manhattan account.’
‘That should rattle him a little,’ Captain Michaels grinned. ‘Have we thought of everything?’ Pause. ‘Yeah, I think so. Okay—any questions?’
I couldn’t think of any. Ivan shook his head.
>
‘All right then, let’s go,’ the Captain said. ‘If we’re lucky we can wrap this up before the weather breaks.’
CHAPTER 20
KELLY INGRAM
It was almost eleven o’clock when the taxi let me out at the Eastside Airlines Terminal. The rain was still holding off, thank goodness. The terminal isn’t very large; I pushed the door open and spotted Leonard Zoff right off. He was standing back from the counter, a raincoat over his arm, scanning the faces of the other people there—maybe Mimsy was wrong, maybe he was meeting someone after all. He seemed nervous. I walked up and planted myself in front of him.
He was clearly underjoyed to see me. First he gave a little start, then his features settled into a kind of hound-dog sadness. ‘It’s you,’ he said dully.
I agreed it was. ‘Leonard, we’ve got to talk.’
He nodded. ‘But not here. Too public.’
Wasn’t he waiting for someone? I looked around. ‘Don’t you want—’
‘No, no, this is no good,’ he muttered, suddenly in a great hurry to get out of there. He grabbed my elbow and steered me out the door. ‘There’s a park about a block from here—if we don’t get rained on.’
But we never got there. Two young couples, two very young couples (should have been in school) recognized me and proceeded to raise a minor fuss, how nice. I was quite willing to stop for a moment and play the famous television star graciously acknowledging her admiring public, but Leonard had me bundled into a taxi before I quite knew what was happening. He seemed angry for some reason.
He gave the driver the name of a pseudo-Victorian tavern uptown. When we got there, Leonard tossed his raincoat on to the seat of the booth and gestured impatiently to the waiter. It wasn’t eleven-thirty yet, but he ordered himself a liquid lunch. I asked for coffee.
When he’d had his first long swallow, he seemed to brace himself. ‘All right, spell it out.’
I said, ‘First of all, Leonard, we need a basic understanding about where we’re going from here. Then we can work out the details as we go along.’
He nodded wearily. ‘Yeah, the details. I can hardly wait. Starting with the money, no doubt.’
The budget, he meant. ‘Well, there’s always room for more money. But I meant other things—the kind of show we’re going to be turning out, primarily.’
His face grew longer and sadder than ever. ‘I was afraid of that. You and your partner won’t settle for anything less than total control, will you?’
‘My partner?’
‘I go through all that shit and come this far only to have a couple of dumb broads take it all away from me, is that it? Who’s your partner, Kelly?’
I was stunned. ‘Are you actually calling me a dumb broad?’
‘Yeah, I gotta be careful what I call you now, don’t I?’ he sneered. Then he seemed to think better of it and shook his head and said, ‘Don’t mind me, darling, I’m a bit shook, y’understand. This is the last thing in the world I expected. I don’t deserve this. Kelly—I’m not like Nathan Shithead, I don’t enjoy hurting people.’
What on earth? ‘I know that, Leonard. I never thought you did.’
‘But it didn’t stop you, did it? You’re just as grabby as all the rest of them. You see an opportunity, you don’t give a shit who it is you walk over.’
I was beginning to get mad. ‘Now look, Leonard, there’s something you better understand right now. You simply cannot talk to me any way you please. From now on you will speak to me with courtesy and respect or you will not speak to me at all.’ Since I had absolutely no way whatsoever of backing up that ultimatum, I was pleasantly surprised to see him pale. ‘Do you understand me?’
‘I understand,’ he whispered.
Now that got to me. The only time in my life I’d ever before heard Leonard Zoff whisper was when he had laryngitis. Something was greatly out of whack. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him. ‘Do you feel up to talking now?’
‘I’m all right—let’s get it settled.’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘It’s just that you are about the last person I’d have thought … Kelly, don’t you understand? I did it for you as much as for me. Nathan Shithead would have ruined you, he’d have milked you for all he could get for three, four more years and then phlooey! Out in the garbage with Kelly baby. He don’t care what happens to nobody. Me, I wouldn’t do that to you. I’da nursed you along, paced things right so it would go on as long as you wanted it to go on. I had big plans for you, Kelly!’
This was definitely turning into one of the weirdest conversations I’d ever had. ‘What do you mean had, Leonard? You’re still going to do all those wonderful things for me.’
‘Not if I can’t call the shots. How can I? You breathin’ down my neck all the time?’
‘Breathing down—Leonard, you don’t even know what I want yet!’
‘Oh, I have a fair idea! Unless you’ve changed your mind,’ he said, his voice dripping sarcasm. ‘Maybe you don’t want the money now?’
I slapped at the table in frustration. ‘I always want money, Leonard—who doesn’t? I keep telling you that’s not the main thing, but since that’s what seems to be bothering you—all right, start with money. I don’t want my new series to be the quickie, shoddy thing LeFever is. And that takes money. Money for good scripts, money for enough time to do the job right—’
‘And money for Kelly?’ His lip raised in a sneer.
‘Why not?’ I said hotly. He’d been sneering at me ever since we came in. ‘Leonard, face it—you’re just going to have to shell out. And you might as well start right now.’
He stared at me with open contempt on his face. Then he reached to his inside jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope that he dropped on the table. ‘Count it if you want. It’s all there.’
Now what? With a sigh I opened the envelope and counted ten one-thousand dollar bills inside. It was an ordinary white envelope, about nine inches wide, no imprinting. I ran the gummed flap across my tongue and sealed the envelope. I sat without speaking for a moment, just holding it in my hand. ‘Leonard. I am sitting here quietly, making no fuss, trying to understand why you just handed me ten thousand dollars.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ he muttered. ‘Because that’s how much your partner said bring, that’s why. Don’t ask for more because I don’t have it.’
‘There’s that word partner again. What partner, Leonard? What are you talking about?’
He was angry. ‘What are you trying to pull? Your unidentified sweet-voiced friend on the phone, the one who set up our meeting in the Eastside Terminal. Who’d you think?’
‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about. What meeting? We didn’t have a date to meet in the Terminal.’
You know how that comes-the-dawn looks spreads so-o-o-o slowly over somebody’s face? Well, that’s what happened to Leonard just then. At least he understood something; I was still floundering. Abruptly he shook his head. ‘No, wait a minute—you didn’t just happen to run into me there. You came looking for me, don’t tell me you didn’t.’
‘I’m not telling you I didn’t.’
‘So how’d you know where I was?’
‘Mimsy called your driver. He said he let you out at the Eastside Terminal.’
‘Oh my God,’ he said slowly. ‘My God. That simple. It wasn’t you. I shoulda known it wouldn’t be you.’ He gave himself a sort of little shake and reached out and took the envelope back from me. ‘This was a mistake, Kelly. I thought—well, never mind what I thought. The whole thing was a mistake. Just forget about it, will you?’
But I’d had enough time for a few things to filter through. The symptoms were familiar enough, God knows; I’d seen them once before. ‘You said the person on the phone who set up the meeting was “unidentified”—right? Does that mean just anybody can call you up and tell you to take ten thousand dollars to the Eastside Terminal and you’ll do it? I never knew you were that free and easy with your money.’
‘I said forget
it, Kelly.’
‘You’re being blackmailed, aren’t you, Leonard?’ I asked as gently as I could.
He didn’t answer; a tic had developed under his left eye.
‘Don’t pay,’ I urged him. ‘I’ve seen what it can do to a man. Whatever it is your blackmailer has on you, it can’t be worse than what’s going to happen to you once you give in and start paying. Don’t pay.’
He laughed humorlessly and put the envelope back in his pocket. ‘Gee, thanks for the swell advice, Kelly.’ The tic grew stronger.
‘Don’t be so quick to dismiss it. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. Besides, the only blackmail victim I’ve ever known turned out to be a killer, and you certainly haven’t done anything like that.’ Which of course started me wondering what he had done. I did it as much for you as for me, he said. What on earth could that be?
Leonard leaned forward and said in that strange new whispery voice of his, ‘I have this terrible feeling about you, darling. I’m afraid you’re turning into a problem.’
‘Because I made you miss your, er, appointment? You don’t know who your blackmailer is, do you? You thought it was me. I. How could you, Leonard? Me, a blackmailer?’
‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘It was a bad mistake.’
‘Are you worried about what he’ll do? Or she. They were probably there all the time and saw what happened. You’ll hear from them again.’
‘No doubt.’ The tic under his eye seemed to be slowing down.
I did it as much for you as for me. What blackmail-inviting thing could he have done that would have benefited both of us? The only thing that had happened lately that was sheer good news for Leonard was Nathan Pinking’s getting himself arrested. From that one event all of Leonard’s subsequent blessings flowed. And Leonard was so convinced Nathan Pinking would have ruined my career that his take-over of Nathan’s business would have been good for me too, to his way of thinking. (And he may have been right.)
But Leonard didn’t have anything to do with Nathan’s arrest. What did he do that was as much for me as for himself? Nathan was arrested because that horrible Fiona Benedict had found some pictures in Rudy’s papers that led Marian Larch to Ted, and Ted blew the whistle on Nathan. None of it would have happened without those photographs Rudy’s mother found. And she wouldn’t have found them, she would still be sitting here in New York waiting for her trial if somebody hadn’t come along and … oh. Oh.