The Renewable Virgin

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.