The Renewable Virgin (20 page)

Another remembered smell: garlic. From a sandwich on the Ingram woman's table, the night I first met her. She and Marian Larch sitting there, offering uninvited sympathy for the death of my son. My refusing to tell them to call me by my first name, my resisting an intimacy with them—because they belonged to a harsh and violent world! Something was wrong with me. Something was very much wrong with me. I was not reacting right. The only thing I truly regretted was that someone other than I had had the pleasure of killing Richard Ormsby.

In the meantime I needed something to occupy my mind, or at least distract my attention. I had thought that when my
Life of Lucan
was completed, I'd probably have one more book left in me. I'd been thinking of a problem in connection with the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, something that had been teasing at me for a long time. But now undertaking work of that nature seemed futile, for reasons I didn't care to stop and examine. What I needed was busy work, not real work.

Rudy's papers.

I'd made only a bare start on his papers when the
Times
review had appeared and started me on my insane mission to New York. So I sat down at the little table in the attic and got to work.

Just about the first thing I learned was that my son had specialized in beginnings. Aside from the opening scenes of over a hundred television scripts that never got written, there were countless folders containing anywhere from two to fifty pages of fiction. Novels, short stories—I couldn't always tell which they were meant to be. Some of the ideas were quite good; but after a powerhouse opening, Rudy would run out of steam. He wouldn't know what to do with his ideas once he had them. It was very frustrating reading; I would have liked to know the endings of at least a few. But if it was frustrating for me, it must have been torture for Rudy—all those promising beginnings that never went anywhere.

But the incomplete stories did the trick. They kept me going, they kept me distracted.
They kept me sane
.

Thank you, Rudy. I wish I could repay you. Thank you.

I'd been reading steadily for almost a week when I came to a folder with the promising title ‘The Town That Loved Mozart' written on it. But instead of the usual typewritten pages inside, I found a clipping from
The Los Angeles Times
and two Polaroid snapshots.

The newspaper clipping was nearly fifteen years old; it told of the death by cyanide poisoning of a woman named Mary Rendell. Her body had been found on the grounds of a Bel Air mansion; the owners hadn't known the woman, but said they'd given a large party the night before and the victim could have come in with one of the invited guests. Police were checking the guest list.

Cyanide poisoning. How ironic that Rudy should have kept this clipping about a woman who'd died the same bizarre way he was to die. I read through the news story again. Mary Rendell, Mary Rendell. Why was that name familiar?

Both Polaroid snaps were of a painting, the same painting. It showed a man and his shadow … of course!
Man and Shadow
, the painting that was missing from Rudy's apartment—and it had been painted by a woman named Mary Rendell. I looked at the clipping a third time; it said nothing about her being an artist. But I was sure that was the right name, Mary Rendell. Now why would Rudy have been keeping these snapshots and a fifteen-year-old clipping, and why had he hidden them in a deliberately mislabeled folder?

I studied the snapshots. In the painting the man and his shadow had reversed their traditional positions. The shadow was upright and three-dimensional and dynamic; the man was stretched out on the ground and flat and elongated. The shadow was casting the man, not the other way around.

Even in the snapshots I could tell the detail work was extraordinary. This Mary Rendell was not one of those East Village pretenders who spend twenty minutes slapping paint on a canvas and then display the finished ‘work' for the tourists to gawk at even before the paint is dry. No, Mary Rendell was painstaking in her work; I wished I could see the original. One of the photographs was a close-up of the man's head—it showed the face had been painted with great care. It was an attractive face, but the eyes didn't seem to have any irises. Intentionally symbolic, or had the photo's color just faded over the years? I couldn't tell.

Well. What was I to make of that? The clipping and the snapshots obviously meant something to Rudy or he wouldn't have kept them. I knew one person who'd be interested—Marian Larch. She'd said right at the start there was some mystery about the painting, this painting of a blank-eyed shadow-man that was still missing as far as I knew. I'd send the snaps and the clipping along to Marian in a few days, the next time I felt up to venturing out of the house. There was a time I wouldn't let anything go without photocopying it first. No more; why bother? I'd just send everything to Marian—let her figure out what it meant.

Not that I expected what I'd found to make any difference. I was fairly well resigned to never knowing who killed Rudy. Even if the police did find out who the murderer was, it would just be a name to me. Someone I didn't know, probably a name I'd never even heard mentioned. But
who
wasn't as important as
why
. Every day it was becoming more important to me to know
why
Rudy was dead.

Why had Rudy been killed? And for that matter, why had Richard Ormsby been killed? Why had I found it so easy to pick up a lethal weapon and use it? Why was I sitting there like a fool in a Washburn, Ohio, attic asking myself impossible questions?

Keep on reading Rudy's papers. Keep busy reading. Keep reading. Read.

CHAPTER 14

MARIAN LARCH

We got a court order to put a tap on Nathan Pinking's telephone, but the judge turned down a similar request for Ted Cameron's phone. He said we couldn't tap in on the alleged victim without his consent. Captain Michaels and I talked it over and decided bringing Cameron in on it at that stage would do more harm than good; so we went with just the one bug.

And what do you know—the tech people who installed it found someone had been there before us. Nathan Pinking's phone contained a multi-directional mike of the sort that picked up everything spoken in the room, not just telephone conversations. It was of standard manufacture, nothing there to tell us who had planted it. We left it, in order not to tip off whoever had put it there that the police were now in on the act.

‘Who do you think?' Captain Michaels asked.

‘Cameron or Leonard Zoff,' I said. ‘The first for self-defense, the second for sheer meanness. But I wouldn't bet on either—it could be someone we don't even know about. Pinking's a man who makes enemies easily.'

So we waited; the calls we monitored were for the most part regular business calls. Pinking did call Cameron twice. The tapes made it clear Pinking was coercing Cameron, but there were no open threats and no talk of payoffs. A man named Rothstein from the DA's office listened to the tapes and said they'd be useful as supporting evidence, but they weren't enough for an arrest warrant.

In the meantime I was busy prying information out of the television networks about their fall schedules. I wanted to find out just how deeply involved Cameron Enterprises was with Nathan Pinking productions. This is what I learned had been scheduled:

1.
LeFever
—a one-hour crime/action series sponsored by Cameron Enterprises, Ted Cameron, president.
LeFever
's first-year sponsors had been unwilling to pay the huge increase in advertising rates NBC had decided on (based on the show's steady climb in the ratings). Cameron Enterprises had taken over full sponsorhip.

2.
Crossover Valley
—a trash-passion prime-time soap on CBS, running time one hour. Sponsorship was split between Lorelei Cosmetics, a subsidiary of Cameron Enterprises, Augusta Cameron, president; and Ross Insurance Associates, no connection with Cameron Enterprises. Lorelei Cosmetics was a new sponsor; Ross Insurance was a carry-over from last season.

3.
Down the Pike
—a thirty-minute yokel comedy ABC had planned to cancel until Watercraft, Inc. agreed to pick up the tab. Watercraft was owned by Cameron Enterprises and its president was Roger Cameron.

4.
Gimme an A
—a new half-hour comedy series about high school cheerleaders scheduled to debut on ABC in October. The sponsor was Shakito Electronics, which was owned by Watercraft, which was owned by Cameron Enterprises. The president of Shakito Electronics was Peter B. McKenna, who had married a Cameron and had taken on the presidency of Shakito when his wife died.

5.
On Call
—a made-for-TV movie doubling as a series pilot and starring Kelly Ingram, penciled in for an early December showing on NBC. Three sponsors: Featherlight Footwear, a Cameron Enterprises line of boots and shoes; Mercury Office Machines, a subsidiary of Cameron Enterprises, Robin Cameron, president; and Lorelei Cosmetics.

So, with the exception of Ross Insurance's half-sponsorship of
Crossover Valley
, Ted Cameron's conglomerate was footing the bill for everything that came out of Nathan Pinking's production company. Footing the bill and then some; the networks had to make a profit. The nets bought the shows from the production companies, paying less than what it cost the companies to make them and charging the sponsors as much as traffic would bear. A show had to run at least three years before it could go into syndication, and only then would the production company that made it begin to realize a profit—from the residuals. So by locking Cameron Enterprises into full-time sponsorship, Nathan Pinking had found a way to make sure all his shows eventually reached the syndication stage. He might bankrupt Cameron Enterprises in the process, but his own future was secure.

I felt certain that was what Augusta Cameron and the others were up in arms about. Two one-hour series, two half-hour series, and a movie—that must have made a terrific drain on Cameron Enterprises' resources. Pinking also had two more programs in development; rumor at the networks was that he also had sponsors sewed up for them as well (guess who).

Thus when the call came from Los Angeles, it was more in the nature of confirmation than of providing new information. A Sergeant Finley of the LAPD had, at our request, interviewed Ted Cameron's Aunt Augusta—and Aunt Augusta had talked his ear off.

‘She's out to stir up as much trouble as she can,' Sergeant Finley said. ‘She made no bones about that. Augusta Cameron lives in a constant state of rage—she's furious with her nephew. And all because of the television advertising.'

‘I think it goes back farther than that,' I said, ‘but it's the TV sponsorship that's got all the Camerons riled up this time. Did she say what her plans were?'

‘She got a little coy about that—I think there are still a few Camerons she wants to bring over into her camp. She didn't say so, but I got the impression that if the entire family unites against Ted Cameron, he'll pretty much have to resign. That's what Augusta wants—Ted Cameron's resignation.'

‘She has a good chance of getting it.' Ted Cameron was running close to the edge; he might have to resign to avoid a nervous breakdown.

‘Why doesn't Cameron just pull back on the TV advertising?' Sergeant Finley wanted to know. ‘It can't be worth losing his company over.'

‘He can't. It's a long story, but he's committed. Four series and a movie this coming season.'

‘Yeah, I know. Augusta says that will come close to bankrupting them because they're just not that big a conglomerate—they can't put that much money into television.'

I thanked him for his help and hung up. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. Ted Cameron was caught between Nathan Pinking's blackmail on one side and Augusta and her army of Camerons on the other. Pinking's hold over Ted must be herculean to have forced him into a position like that.

What had Ted Cameron done?

The answer came in a brown mailing envelope post-marked Washburn, Ohio.

I looked at the two snapshots of
Man and Shadow
and wondered how Ted Cameron could ever have got himself into such a fix. No question, it was his face in the ‘man' part of the painting; those strange eyes with their invisible irises were unmistakable. It wasn't too surprising that the New York gallery owners I'd contacted when Rudy Benedict died hadn't known of the painting or the artist: Mary Rendell had been dead for fifteen years, and she hadn't been old enough to have earned a reputation for herself when she died.

CYANIDE POISONING IN BEL AIR DEATH

The body of the woman found on the Bel Air estate of Ted Cameron, a vice president of Cameron Enterprises, has been identified as Mary Rendell, age twenty, of 1175 Costa Mesa Drive, Santa Monica. Dr. James E. Vernon of the Los Angeles Medical Examiner's office says the cause of death was cyanide poisoning.

Miss Rendell's body was discovered late Monday afternoon by Ernesto Garcia, a gardener at the Cameron estate. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Cameron knew the victim. Identification was established by means of a medical alert bracelet the victim was wearing; Miss Rendell was diabetic.

Cameron suggested the victim may have come on to his estate with a guest at a party the Camerons had given Sunday night. Lt. Joseph Taylor of the LAPD says police are interviewing the party guests in an attempt to find someone who knew Miss Rendell.

So Ted Cameron had not yet been promoted to president of Cameron Enterprises, and he'd still been married to one of his two wives. Probably the first; fifteen years ago he'd have been about thirty, young for a vice president—but then he had the right surname. I called Sergeant Finley in Los Angeles and asked him to look up the results of the fifteen-year-old investigation into the death of Mary Rendell.

When he called me back he said, ‘Unsolved. The investigating officers didn't even have a suspect. Mary Rendell hadn't been in Los Angeles long enough to make much of an impression—only seven months.'