The Renewable Virgin Read online

  The Renewable Virgin

  A Marian Larch Mystery

  Barbara Paul

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  CHAPTER 1

  KELLY INGRAM

  Rudy Benedict and I were just beginning to get something going when I found out he saw himself as David ready to take on the giant. What Rudy didn’t know was I’d always been on Goliath’s side.

  ‘What is there to fear?’ he said, puffing away on his pipe in that writerish way of his. (Anybody else would have said What’s to be afraid of?) ‘The networks are composed of mere human beings motivated by the same fears and ambitions that drive the rest of us. There are no superpowers involved.’

  Except that those mere human beings controlled budgets in the millions while good folks like Rudy and me or I had to scrabble for a piece of the pie. ‘What are you up to? You’re cranking yourself up for something.’

  He gave that smug little smile of his that was just beginning to irritate me and didn’t answer right away. Making me wait for it. ‘I’m writing a play. I’m returning to the theater—where I really belong.’

  I didn’t see how anybody could return to where he’d never been, but I was being polite that night and didn’t say so. ‘Well, congratulations, Rudy. That’s good to hear.’

  ‘I’m not telling everybody, Kelly. But I wanted you to know.’

  I nodded. ‘Thanks for the confidence. It’s important for Leonard and I to keep track.’ Leonard Zoff was my agent.

  ‘Me. For Leonard and me.’

  Guessed wrong. ‘Me, then. What’s your play about?’

  Rudy took a long draw on his pipe and said, slowly, ‘I’m writing about television. So of course there’s no chance of getting it produced on television. And the movies aren’t any better, not any more. You can’t beat that system either.’

  So it was theater by default. ‘Exposé sort of thing, you mean?’

  He looked pained. ‘Please, Kelly. I don’t write sleaze. All I want to do is show that television is merely one fingernail of the multi-armed corporate powers that control our lives.’

  I took a moment to work my way through that metaphor and then said, ‘Didn’t Paddy Chayefsky already do that?’

  Rudy waved his pipe dismissively. ‘Merely as one episode in an ongoing David-and-Goliath confrontation. Chayefsky always wrote about the little guy fighting the good but futile fight. One small man failing to topple the giant. That’s not what I’m interested in. I want to probe more deeply into the nature of the beast.’

  ‘So you’re not interested in giant-toppling?’

  He smiled in that charming way that reminded me why I’d been attracted to him in the first place. ‘I didn’t say that, Kelly. But I’m not such a fool as to think my one play will miraculously open everybody’s eyes. This country is so addicted to television that people simply refuse to believe their attitudes are manipulated every time they turn on the set.’

  I thought it more likely they just didn’t care. ‘So you do want to topple the giant.’

  His charming smile eased into his smug one. ‘My goals are more modest. Just shake him up a bit.’

  So there it was. Rudy Benedict saw himself as a giant-killer, no matter how modest he claimed his goals were. Like David, standing in a place of safety with his long-distance weapon, taking pot shots at the giant with impunity. (Impugnity?) Only Rudy’s weapon would be a play instead of a sling. ‘Got a part for me?’ I asked automatically.

  ‘Maybe,’ he answered just as automatically. ‘The dramatis personae isn’t complete yet. Ever acted on the stage?’

  ‘No.’ Ever written for the stage? ‘Should I do Off-Broadway, Rudy? I keep getting contradictory advice.’

  He shrugged. ‘Good showcase. Wouldn’t hurt. The kind of stage training you get depends on the director you get. Wouldn’t hurt, Kelly.’

  I nodded, as if thinking it over. I had no intention of committing myself to a not-completely-professional production that would tie me up all summer on the million-to-one shot that some Big Producer would turn up in the audience one night. I had better irons in the fire.

  Rudy had already turned the talk back to his play. I’d flattered him by asking his advice and he hadn’t noticed. If he’d needled me for trying to stroke him, I’d have respected him for it. If he’d preened himself on being consulted as a figure of superior experience, I’d have accepted it. But when he didn’t even notice … sometimes I think writers are the most unobservant people in the world.

  I’d met Rudy three years earlier, in California, when I was still in my second-generation Barbie doll phase. Slit skirts, sprayed-on plastic face, the whole shtick. I hated looking exactly like everybody else but it was the only way to get roles. Rudy Benedict was one of a trio of writers grinding out unfunny scripts for a show in which the actors mostly rolled their eyes suggestively while the laughtrack man punched the button marked ‘Dirty Snickers’. The script called for a Playboy-bunny type who for some reason agrees to go out with one of the show’s yokel heroes. My agent’s West Coast rep happened to be sucking up to the right people that week so I got the part. I appeared in two scenes and had a total of seven lines, one of which was ‘Yes.’ Rudy swore he didn’t write that one. Then I kind of lost track of him for a while, until we ran into each other in New York.

  Just then he was lighting his pipe again, the seventeenth time in the past hour. Rudy was a good guy, but his putting on egghead airs was beginning to get on my nerves. I understood he needed those props to help him make the transition from TV hack to Serious Dramatist. Rudy wasn’t forty yet; he’d just scheduled his mid-life crisis a little early, that was all. I wished he’d go on and get the damned play written so he could forget about all the posturing he thought was supposed to go with it.

  Finally he gave up on the pipe and decided to nuzzle my neck instead.

  ‘Rudy, you ought to stop smoking that pipe,’ I told him. ‘It’s given you another headache, hasn’t it? You’ve got that pinched look again.’

  He rubbed his forehead with the tip of his middle finger. ‘Now that you mention it …’

  He left soon after that. Sometimes it works.

  After a good night’s sleep I allowed myself the luxury of feeling a little guilty about Rudy. I didn’t want to dump him; he was good fun when he was thinking about something other than himself. Besides, there was always the chance that he might turn out to be a Big Talent after all. I resolved to be nicer to Rudy Benedict.

  But I never got a chance to put my good intentions into practice, because about then somebody came along and murdered him.

  When Rudy Benedict decided it would be easier to be a Serious Writer on the East Coast than on the West, he’d moved into an apartment in Chelsea and hated it. He’d told me he’d been looking for a better place to live for almost a year but couldn’t find what he wanted; welcome to the club. I’d been to the place once and it was crowded and littered-looking, nothing special. Rudy had taken it only because someone had told him a lot of writers lived in the area.

  Rudy hadn’t completely broken his ties with the West Coast, however, and that’s how I happened to run into him again. I’d moved back east myself because I’d gotten a small continuing part in a series about a private investigator, to be shot entirely in New York City. (‘Pea eyes are making a comeback,’ my agent, Leonard Zoff, had said.) This one was a sort of Harry O in the Big Apple, and I had the Farah Fawcett role, the Sex Object Next Door. (‘Play it sweet,’ Leonard told me when I went in for my interview. ‘Make it like “Who, me—sexy?” We’re in a conservative period, darling. Play it real sweet and make sure they know you’re not wearing a bra.’) So I’d been all bright-eyed innocence, seemingly unaware that my clothing and movements were come-ons. That�
��d been just what they were looking for and I had my first continuing role in a series.

  At first I didn’t have any great hopes for it except as a way to get myself seen; I mean, I didn’t have much expectation for the show. For one thing, it was a Nathan Pinking production (‘If it’s stinking, it’s by Pinking’)—and even if it did hit, that was no guarantee I’d be remembered as anything other than the broad in LeFever or by some equally unflattering label. That was the name of the show, LeFever, just the one word. Hot stuff, you see. One of the writers soberly explained to me the word had been chosen because of its ‘rhythmic compatibility’—a three-syllable word with the stress on the middle syllable, like ‘McMillan’. Also, ‘LeFever’ was elegant-sounding, easy to remember, and not too ethnic.

  So I’d moved back to New York, right where I’d started out making whee-look-at-me shampoo commercials until I was told at age twenty-three I’d gotten too old for the image. After that had come five frustrating years in Hollywood, taking every shlock TV role and movie bit I could get. Then along came LeFever and it was back east again. I was pushing thirty and fully intended to go on pushing it as long as LeFever played. (‘Stay young,’ Leonard had told me. ‘Forget Shakespeare, they’re still buying youth.’)

  The initial feedback from the network had been good. They said the mail indicated the viewers wanted to see more of me. Nathan Pinking wasn’t sure whether that meant they wanted to see me in more scenes or whether they wanted to see more of me physically, of my own personal bod. So we did it both ways; my role got larger and my costumes smaller. I even did one scene nude. But the network censor wouldn’t let it pass, even though I’d played it sweet.

  That’s where Rudy Benedict came into the picture. Nathan Pinking had signed him some time ago as part of his stable of writers (you’re supposed to think of horses), and the contract still had a year to run. But this last year Nathan wasn’t using Rudy as a regular but instead kept bringing him in to do rewrite work and to fill in on this series or that as needed. Nathan had four series in production, two of them shooting in New York, so Rudy had been able to make the move back east without violating his contract. He told me he liked doing rewrite work—at least it suited him just then. He didn’t have the responsibility of a weekly grind, and it was always fun to walk in at the eleventh hour and point out to the other writers what they’d done wrong. Didn’t win him a lot of friends, but he said it felt so good. Nathan Pinking called him in on LeFever when one of our regular writers had to go into the hospital for prostate trouble.

  I asked Rudy to give me some comedy lines and godblesshim he came through with some good ones. The ass playing LeFever was so dumb he didn’t even know the scene was supposed to be funny until someone showed him a notice in the Daily News that said I’d revealed an ‘unexpected flair’ for comedy. So he’d come in the next morning mad as hell ’cause I’d gotten the good lines and demanding to know why he’d been left out of the fun. But our regular writer was back then and Rudy was long gone, Nathan Pinking had turned invisible, and so I took the heat. Ass.

  Thus Rudy Benedict was doing oddjob rewrites for Nathan Pinking while all of what he called his true creative energies went into the Great American Mellydrammer about television, a subject on which everybody in the world considers themselves, ah, himself or herself, or whatever, an expert. But Rudy really was an expert, or as close to being one as anyone who works for the medium can be. As opposed to those who make the medium work for them, owners and execs and such. Rudy’d been around almost since the day he’d left college, fifteen, sixteen years maybe. That’s a lot of television scripts. Rudy had survived writer burn-out by working only half of each year.

  The night after I’d sent him home with a headache, Rudy had failed to show up for a poker game in the same building where he lived. Since Rudy was supposed to bring the chips, an annoyed host had gone up and pounded on the door. There’d been no answer, but the host could hear the radio playing in Rudy’s apartment. So he got the super to open up, and the two of them found Rudy crumpled up on the floor.

  Rudy Benedict was dead, and he’d been poisoned—the police weren’t saying what kind of poison or how it had been administered. It was a hell of a shock. Rudy wasn’t what you’d call a threatening man—he was more like, well, like a supplicant, a petitioner. Trying to crash the inner circles, you know, that kind of person. He was a moderately successful man within his own field of expertise, but the field was kind of narrow and Rudy was beginning to feel squeezed. That’s one reason he wanted to write a real honest-to-God play, I think. Not to get into the theater so much as to get out of television. Although theater has its own inner circle Rudy would have loved to crash. Not the money and muscle you find in TV and the movies, but there were compensations in belonging to that particular club. Poor Rudy never even got close.

  Shock’s funny, everybody doesn’t react the same. For me it was like pulling back to a kind of platform and looking at the world from that slight distance. Things were a different color, too, a kind of yellow around the edges, I don’t know why. That faded after a couple of days. Rudy Benedict and I were not close, had never been close. But the potential for getting close had come up and that made all the difference.

  LeFever was shooting exteriors at the UN Building when the police came around to talk to me. I was waiting for a new camera set-up when the questions started.

  ‘He was writing an exposé of the television industry,’ I told the policewoman who was questioning me. ‘A play.’

  ‘Gawdalmighty,’ she groaned. ‘That’s the first thing everybody says.’ I let my surprise show, so she dropped the other shoe. ‘And it wasn’t even true.’

  ‘Whoa, wait a minute.’ I thought a moment. ‘First of all, who’s “everybody”? Rudy didn’t tell everybody.’

  ‘He might have missed a few people in Manhattan,’ she said sardonically, ‘but not many.’ The policewoman was Detective Second Grade M. Larch, her ID had said; she had a gray potato face and was tired and fed-up-looking. Either a long day or a frustrating one, probably both. ‘Rudy Benedict told everybody he knew—in strictest confidence, of course—that he was writing a play about television.’

  ‘But he wasn’t?’

  ‘Not really—just piddling around. He’d made some notes about the story, but he hadn’t gotten very far. He didn’t even have names for his characters yet. Just called them A and B and C and like that.’

  ‘Maybe that’s all you found …’

  Detective Larch shook her head. ‘That’s all there was. He did more talking about that play than he did writing. Writer’s block, maybe?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe. I thought he really was working on it. How can you be sure there wasn’t anything else? Research notes, incriminating letters, all that stuff? Maybe somebody stole them. The same somebody who killed him.’

  She smiled, the first time. ‘You want it to be an exposé, don’t you? All you folks in television, everyone I’ve talked to wants it to be an exposé. Sorry to disappoint you, but what notes Rudy Benedict left indicate his play was going to be one of those crisis-of-conscience things. Moment-of-truth stuff for the hero. The hero was to be a television writer who was afraid something he’d written might be harmful to young viewers. Autobiographical?’

  I answered with a question of my own. ‘Something the hero had written? Like what? Maybe that—’

  ‘Benedict hadn’t even figured out what yet. He was just doodling. He was writing no exposé, Ms Ingram, believe me.’

  ‘Call me Kelly,’ I said absently. ‘So he wasn’t killed because of his play?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it, although we’re keeping that door open. Who were his enemies, Ms Ingram?’

  Okay, if she didn’t want to call me Kelly, that was her business, what did I care. ‘I don’t really know, Detective Larch, ma’am. I hadn’t seen Rudy for a couple of years until I ran into him again a few weeks ago.’

  She sniffed at me. ‘You’ve got to have an idea or two. Give me some nam
es.’

  ‘You want me to guess?’

  Detective Larch looked tireder than ever. ‘Yes, Miss Kelly Ingram, guess, if you have to. Give me some names. I’ve got to have something to report.’

  She didn’t give a damn what I said, just so I said something. Terrific police work. ‘His ex-wife, maybe,’ I said reluctantly—not out of concern for the former Mrs. Benedict (didn’t even know her) but because I hate being bullied. ‘But I understood she and Rudy were on good terms. But then, I thought Rudy was writing an exposé of television, so what do I know. She’s remarried, living in Connecticut. I don’t think Rudy ever told me her married name—pretty sure he never mentioned it.’

  ‘Turrell, Mrs. Roger Turrell. She was home in bed with Mr. Roger Turrell the night Benedict was killed. Guess somebody else. Somebody he might have been on bad terms with.’

  I lifted my shoulders. ‘Just about any producer or director he worked with. Writers are always crying about how their scripts are butchered.’

  ‘Name one.’

  I looked around; nobody within earshot. ‘Start with the one who’s running this show. Nathan Pinking.’

  ‘Pinking was a bad enemy of Benedict’s? Ruined his scripts, did he?’

  ‘I don’t know if Nathan Pinking was any kind of enemy. You said name somebody and I did. Nathan’s no worse, no better than other producers. Maybe a little better than most because he’s so careless.’

  Bloodshot eyes in a potato face, blinking at me. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Nathan’s always in a hurry, which makes him careless, which keeps him from interfering too much. He’s not even here most of the time—just shows up once in a while to make sure we aren’t all off playing hookey on his time.’

  ‘Is he here now?’

  ‘No. Just a couple of his lackeys.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  I was pointing them out to her when the word came the cameras were ready. All I had to do in the scene was get out of a cab, run up some steps, and hand an envelope to the actor named Nick Quinlan who played LeFever. The first time we did it he dropped the envelope.