The Renewable Virgin Page 5

  ‘Well, there—what about that? Trying to change. Doesn’t that indicate things weren’t the same for him as they used to be, that he wanted something different?’

  ‘Aw, no. Rudy was always complaining—even when I knew him in California. He grumbled all the time about the tripe he had to write every week. But the money was good and Rudy wasn’t about to throw that away. He didn’t really like what he was doing, but he didn’t know how to get out of it without giving up the comfortable way of living he was used to.’

  ‘But he had decided to go ahead and write a play. He must have been giving something up for that,’ she mused.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘He was still getting a salary from Nathan Pinking—his contract hadn’t quite run out yet. He wasn’t taking any risks. Rudy just wasn’t the daring type, Marian. If you’ll pardon the four-letter word.’

  ‘You mean “type”? I’ll pardon it. But there had to be something out of the ordinary in Rudy Benedict’s life or else—Kelly, is that man trying to get your attention?’

  I glanced across the set of LeFever’s office to see a familiar figure jumping up and down and waving his arms. ‘That’s Leonard Zoff, my agent. He doesn’t like coming here—something must be up. Come on.’

  We picked our way around the set, Leonard helping us by pumping his arms faster. He wouldn’t have dreamed of working his way over to us; too many things to trip over.

  ‘Hello, Leonard, why didn’t you just yell, the way you usually do?’

  ‘Laryngitis,’ he whispered, and peered suspiciously at Marian. ‘Whozis?’

  ‘Marian Larch, of the Detective Bureau. Marian, this is Leonard Zoff.’

  ‘Oh—okay,’ Leonard rasped before Marian could say anything. ‘Kelly, we gotta talk. We—’

  Sometimes he really bugs me. ‘Not Oh, okay, Leonard. How do you do or Pleased to meet you or just plain Hello. But not Oh, okay.’

  Leonard had a standard response for that kind of situation. He slipped an arm around Marian Larch’s waist, leered into her face, and whispered, ‘Don’t mind me, darling. No offense intended—I’m just in kind of a rush, y’know?’

  She stared at him. ‘I think I liked Oh, okay better.’

  Rolled right off him. ‘Kelly, we got a biggie coming. You ready for this? The Miss America people are considering you for one of the judges. Whaddaya say to that?’

  Me, I didn’t say anything; I was speechless. But Marian snorted, ‘That meat parade!’

  ‘Meat, schmeat, it’s exposure, darling.’ Leonard’s eyes were dancing and his lived-in face was one huge grin; he was angling a big one, all right. ‘Every year they have one professional beauty among the judges to show the little girls how it’s done, and I been telling them how next year it’s gotta be Kelly Ingram.’

  ‘This is for next year?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah, these things gotta be settled way ahead—you got your foot in the door now because the broad, ’scuse me, the lady they had lined up went and got herself preggie. You’re still on the pill, aren’t you, darling? Anyway, they were thinking Bo Derek but I talked them out of it. By the end of the season, I told them, Kelly Ingram’s going to be the biggest thing on the tube. I said you want somebody visible, don’t you? Shit, I got other clients, I said, but I’m telling you Kelly’s the one you want. How do you like that—I’m in there pitching for you, Kel. You got that?’

  ‘I got it, Leonard.’

  ‘Right. So now all I got to do is persuade Nathan Shithead that it’s just what the LeFever image needs. And it is, it is!’

  Marian was looking puzzled. ‘If this other woman is pregnant now and this contest isn’t until next year …?’

  ‘Why can’t she go ahead and do it?’ Leonard rasped. ‘Because this is her first baby and some women lose their looks when they become mommas. Sorry, darling, but that’s the way it is. The Miss America people just can’t take the risk.’ Leonard’s grin had disappeared; he swallowed, painfully—his throat must really have been hurting. ‘Nathan Shithead has graciously granted me an appointment, ain’t that generous of him? The Miss America Apple Pie folks want a guarantee there’s no contractual problems before they’ll even negotiate.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was in the works, Leonard?’ I asked. ‘You know I like to be kept posted.’

  ‘I didn’t want to get your hopes up.’

  ‘Meaning you didn’t think the pageant people would go for it.’

  ‘Now, darling, don’t go putting yourself down like that—you’ve got to have faith!’

  ‘In myself, I got faith. It’s you I’m not so sure about.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on a sick old man,’ he rasped. ‘Call my office later—I’ll leave word. Glad to’ve met you, uh, Marilyn.’ His grin flashed back on for a tenth of a second and he was gone.

  ‘Whew,’ Marian said, looking after him. ‘Is he always like that?’

  ‘Usually he’s noisier.’

  Just then they called me to do my half of a telephone scene. The assistant director stood off-camera and read LeFever’s lines to me with far more expression than Nick Quinlan would ever be able to manage. When I finished the story editor’s secretary came up and handed me some green pages. I groaned.

  ‘Only two lines in your part, Kelly,’ she smiled. ‘Easy changes.’

  I managed to smile back, but I didn’t mean it. I hate it when we get as far as green pages.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Marian Larch wanted to know.

  ‘Script changes,’ I told her. ‘Every new set of changes comes through on a different color paper. This week’s script already looks like a rainbow and now—well, I guess these aren’t so bad.’ I read through the new dialogue quickly. Two new lines for me, I already knew them. Trouble was, I still knew the old ones as well. The trick was remembering which set to say when you were in front of the camera.

  ‘Kelly—’

  ‘Come into my dressing room, they’re getting ready to shoot.’

  With the door to the dressing room closed we could talk, if we kept our voices low; the soundproofing wasn’t all it was supposed to be. Marian was worrying about what Leonard Zoff had said. ‘Is that true about the pregnant woman? That the Miss America people won’t take a chance on her keeping her looks after she gives birth?’

  ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘There’s not a word of truth in it. In fact, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any pregnant woman at all—Leonard just made her up.’

  Marian Larch’s eyebrows climbed. ‘But why?’

  ‘To keep me in my place, grateful and grovelling. Notice how Leonard supposedly slipped and said broad—and then made a big production of correcting the word to lady? Well, that was deliberate, that was. Good old subtle Leonard, reminding me I’m just a package to be sold but he’s the salesman. Then he came on with this story about the pregnant woman—to make me think I was the pageant officials’ second choice. And then they only came around to considering me because of Mr. Leonard Zoff’s superior powers of persuasion.’

  ‘You mean you might have been their first choice?’

  ‘I mean I’ll never know—which is exactly what Leonard had in mind. He knows I don’t swallow most of that guff he dishes out, but he likes to keep me off-balance. Figures he has more control that way.’

  She just looked at me. Then: ‘Why do you stay with an agent like that?’

  ‘Find me a better one and I’ll change.’

  ‘You mean he’s so good at getting results you’re willing to put up with all that other stuff?’

  ‘I mean he’s no worse than the rest of them. And Leonard does know everybody. Right now he’s in the office whispering in Nathan Pinking’s ear about how this Miss America gig will be just what LeFever needs next year. And Nathan will loll there in his big leather chair, letting himself be convinced. He likes to see Leonard sweat.’

  ‘Why Nathan Pinking? What does he have to say about it anyway?’

  ‘It’s in my contract—it’s a personal contract Nathan had
me sign before he’d give me the role in LeFever. I can’t do anything outside LeFever without his say-so. He vetoed a greeting card commercial I’d been offered because he said down-home wholesomeness wasn’t exactly the image he had in mind for me. Nathan told me to try to get one of those pantyhose commercials—you know, the ones where the models sit down without quite putting their knees together.’

  ‘I know the ones,’ Marian said sourly. ‘Your Nathan Pinking must be a real prince. Kelly, are you really going to do it? Be one of the Miss America judges, I mean.’

  ‘Sure, if Leonard can arrange it.’

  ‘And it doesn’t bother you at all?’

  Oh boy. ‘Look, Marian. A beauty contest is sort of like an audition, you know? It’s a recognized way of getting started on a career.’

  She snorted. ‘It’s a meat parade. All those young girls offering their bodies for inspection—like prize cows at the county fair. And you sanction that?’

  ‘Hey, wait a minute—nobody’s forcing those girls to take part. Hell, that’s what they want, a chance at the spotlight.’

  ‘Sure, they want it—because they’re young and just beginning to feel their power and flushed with new success. And because they’re taught every day of their lives that girls are supposed to be ornamental. They want it because they don’t know what else to want.’

  I snorted at that. ‘Well, I’m going to do it, and that’s that. If Nathan Pinking doesn’t decide to say no just to bug Leonard.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Notice how Leonard always calls him Nathan Shithead?’

  ‘Could I miss it?’

  ‘Leonard hates Nathan Pinking’s guts. And Nathan returns the compliment. Yet each of them is the other’s best customer. When Nathan’s putting a new show together, he doesn’t call a casting office until after he’s talked to Leonard. And whenever Leonard manages to sign up an established star who’s just fired his old agent, Leonard makes sure Nathan gets first crack at him. They can’t stand each other, but they always find a way to do business.’

  ‘A love-hate relationship?’

  ‘More like a hate-hate relationship. They really do loathe each other. But money’s money, so they’ll keep doing business as long as it’s profitable for both of them. But if one of them ever starts to slip, the other one will drop him like a hot potato.’

  ‘What if Leonard’s the one to slip? Where will that leave you?’

  ‘With a new agent. I’m not going down with anybody’s ship but my own, may it never come to pass. Here, check me on my new lines—read me my cues.’

  ‘Ah, it’s time I was getting—’

  ‘It’ll take you twenty seconds, for crying out loud. There are only two lines. Come on, read me my cues.’

  She grumbled, but she did it.

  I didn’t see Marian Larch for a while after that. I couldn’t tell whether the investigation of Rudy’s death was easing off or just heading in a different direction. Or maybe Marian had run out of excuses for dropping in on the LeFever set.

  When he had a show taping in New York, Nathan Pinking rented space at a converted movie soundstage on West Fifty-fourth Street. We had a few permanent sets, but mostly we shot exteriors. New York wasn’t like California, where everything you needed to make a movie or a television series was all right there together in the same studio—the crews, the commissaries, the costume shop, the print shop, the scenery docks, the prop shop, everything. Like a factory. In New York you had to go hunting for all the things you needed in a hundred different places. So, nobody came to New York to make a series indoors. You came because of what the city had to offer in the way of location shots. The place was an inexhaustible backdrop. And a good filler—for those weeks when the script was a mite on the skimpy side and you had to fill in those empty spots with pretty pictures. That happened on LeFever every week, by the way. We never ran long, never went into overtime. Nathan Pinking didn’t believe in overtime.

  I had a week off from the show. I yelled bloody murder but they wrote me out of the script just the same. The episode was being shot in London and the writers explained in this overpatient way they had of talking to dumb broads that there was no way to justify LeFever’s taking a girlfriend along with him on an overseas business trip. Oh yeah? I said. What about all those Congressional junkets?

  But the answer was still no, and the real reason, as always, was money. The episode was being financed by a British production company that wanted to use LeFever to introduce the hero of a new series they were making. The British were going to try for a direct sale to American television instead of playing it in England first and then selling it to Masterpiece Theatre fifteen years later. So the deal Nathan Pinking had worked out was that the British would pick up the tab for an episode showing LeFever in London cooperating with their hero—but the funds were not limitless. Certain things had to go, and the character I played was still on the expendable list. I wasn’t exactly overloaded with job security just then.

  I called Leonard Zoff and demanded he do something about it, but he wouldn’t even try. ‘These things are decided long in advance,’ he said. ‘I know what the Brits budgeted for and there just ain’t no traveling money for little Kelly. Accept it, darling—there’s nothing to be done.’

  ‘I’ll pay my own way.’

  ‘Like hell you will!’ he exploded, causing me to jerk the receiver away from my ear. ‘Once you start that, Nathan Shithead’ll have you paying through the nose until the very second your contract runs out! Don’t you suggest it, don’t you even think it—do you hear me?’

  I told him I heard him but he went on hollering until I said okay okay and hung up. So I was to be the Invisible Woman that week.

  I had a special reason for wanting to be in that episode. Their hero was a hell of a lot more attractive than our hero. I’d seen their leading man in one movie and almost wrote the guy a fan letter. I wanted to meet him, that’s all there was to it. And then when Nathan Pinking pretended to be doing me this big favor by giving me a week’s vacation in mid season, I almost poked him one.

  Nathan had said okay to my being a judge at the Miss America contest, so Leonard Zoff was trying to arrange it. If Leonard could bring it off, I’d go through with it, no question. I know what side my bread’s buttered on. It was easy for Marian Larch to sneer at the ‘meat parade’ side of it. She didn’t have to worry about the right exposure at the right time in order to earn a living. So a lot of women didn’t like the contest, so that was too bad.

  Not my problem.

  My problem was a bad case of the fidgets. I could use the time off, though. I had my hair done by somebody other than the LeFever people, checked my wardrobe, watched the cleaning service people do their weekly thing in my apartment, read some of my mail, and went dancing. That took care of Monday.

  The man I went dancing with also took care of Tuesday and Wednesday, but Thursday he felt he should go back to work. He was an architect, and his boss was quote the most demanding, most unreasonable man in the universe unquote. (He worked for his father.) So on Thursday morning I was thinking of getting on a plane and going somewhere for the weekend when the mail arrived, containing a little something I wasn’t expecting at all.

  It was a yellow box and it had black and white letters that said ‘Sample—Not for Sale’ and its name was Lysco-Seltzer.

  Now, there’s no need to panic, I told myself in the calmest and most rational way imaginable. Somebody intent on murder wouldn’t use a Lysco-Seltzer bottle again, surely. Would he? No—it was exactly what it appeared to be, it had to be. Thousands and thousands of other New York mailboxes were holding little yellow boxes that morning, and they were all exactly alike. There was absolutely no need to panic.

  I called Police Headquarters and screamed for Marian Larch.

  One thing about Marian, she never tried to brush your anxieties aside as something you just imagined. She always took me seriously, anyway, and while I expected her to say things like You’r
e making a fuss over nothing or the like, she never did.

  What she did do was take one look at the Lysco-Seltzer box and drop it in her shoulder-bag. ‘It’s been tampered with,’ she said.

  After one look she could tell that? ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The address label. That address was typed individually—it didn’t come out of a machine like an Addressograph or some sort of dry-process addressing machine. In mass mailings they use a master list and print from that. This box goes straight to the lab. Why are you home?’

  It took me a second to figure out what she meant. ‘I’m not in the episode they’re taping now. I have the week off.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said dubiously.

  ‘No, that’s not nice.’

  ‘No, that’s not nice,’ she agreed. ‘Look, just sit tight until the crime lab gets finished. Don’t go out, keep your door locked.’

  ‘Count on it,’ I said grimly.

  Marian didn’t get back with an answer until the next morning—that was one very anxious day and night I spent, I can tell you. I’d almost talked myself into thinking there was nothing to worry about when she’d pulled that label stunt on me. Well, she didn’t pull the stunt, of course, but it was the kind of news I could have lived without knowing. Or maybe I couldn’t. Live without knowing it, I mean. Jesus.

  I was sitting and staring at a big cardboard carton that United Parcel had just delivered when Marian showed up around ten Friday morning.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘A bomb, no doubt,’ I said fatalistically.

  ‘Nonsense.’ All brisk efficiency. ‘Too big for a bomb. Besides, you’ll be happy to learn nobody mailed you any cyanide in a Lysco-Seltzer bottle.’

  I perked up at that. ‘You mean the bottle wasn’t tampered with after all?’

  ‘Didn’t say that—it was tampered with, all right. But whoever did the tampering didn’t substitute cyanide this time. The lab boys said it didn’t even look like cyanide crystals—or Lysco-Seltzer. Yellow instead of white, for one thing. So maybe the guy who sent it didn’t really intend for you to take it at all. Maybe it was just a joke.’