The Renewable Virgin (25 page)

‘She went home.'

‘She went home, to Washburn, Ohio. To her son Rudy's papers. She is the only person alive who was in any way likely to go through those boxes and boxes of papers and read everything in them. We already had our go at them and didn't find anything—I spent several days there reading just the business papers, and they were only a small fraction of the whole lot. No, Fiona's the only one who could be counted on to look at
all
of Rudy's papers, to check every folder. And she did, coming up with the bit of evidence that gave us both a murderer and a blackmailer. You see? That's what made Fiona Benedict so important.
That
's why Richard Ormsby was killed—so we'd have to let Fiona go. She'd be no help locked up in a cell. Ormsby's killer wanted that evidence found. He wanted it so much he was willing to kill to make it happen.'

Ivan whistled tunelessly a moment and then said, ‘You mean one of the Cameron family.'

‘No, no, Ivan—it wasn't the murderer he wanted caught. He didn't give a hoot about Ted Cameron.'

‘The blackmailer then? Nathan Pinking?'

‘Right. And who is it who's benefited from Pinking's arrest?'

The name had been hanging in the air for a long time; it was Captain Michaels who finally spoke it aloud. ‘Leonard Zoff.' He mulled it over. ‘Far as we can tell, Zoff didn't even know Ormsby. And he sure as hell didn't move in the same circles as Fiona Benedict. He knew Rudy, but he'd never had any reason to meet Rudy's mother. So that means Zoff killed a man he didn't know, in order to get a woman he didn't know released from jail. If Larch is right.'

‘It's
weird,'
Ivan pronounced emphatically.

Agreed. ‘Leonard Zoff was losing his battle with Nathan Pinking,' I said. ‘Pinking was successful and showed every sign of becoming more so. Zoff was keeping his head above water, he was doing all right—but he wasn't hitting it as big as his old enemy was. He had to sit there and watch Pinking pulling away from him. That must have hurt bad. Those two men lived for the pleasure of outdoing each other. Anyway, Zoff had one ace in the hole. Kelly Ingram. Kelly was on her way to stardom, and that's all Leonard needed—one really big star.'

‘She'll make it,' Ivan said pontifically. ‘She's there now as far as I'm concerned.'

‘But then Pinking put her under personal contract when he gave her her role in
LeFever
,' I went on. ‘He made it a condition of signing, Kelly told me. Pinking was helping with the star build-up, he cast her in a TV movie, he was going ahead with a new series in which Kelly would star. The bigger a success Kelly became, the more money that meant for Pinking—because he'd see to it that she appeared in nothing but Nathan Pinking productions. And Leonard Zoff had to stand there and watch his one chance at Easy Street gradually being taken over by the man he hated most in the world. No wonder he was moved to action.'

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,' Ivan said. ‘How would Zoff know there was any evidence that'd lead to Pinking's arrest? How'd he know about those photos? And where they were? He couldn't have known about them unless Rudy Benedict told him. Are you saying Rudy told Zoff what he was doing?'

Captain Michaels fielded that one. ‘No, Rudy didn't tell Zoff anything. But remember what Ted Cameron said—that Pinking had speculated Rudy might have kept back a couple of photographs of the incriminating painting? Then Cameron said Pinking decided the photos would pose no threat once Rudy's mother had all his papers shipped to Ohio. Even if she did find them, she wouldn't know what they meant. What Pinking didn't know was that Marian here had already shown a lotta curiosity about that missing painting, and Fiona Benedict remembered that and mailed her the photos.'

Ivan objected. ‘But all that talk about the photos, that was between Cameron and Pinking. Zoff wasn't there. How would he know what—oh. The bug.'

Michaels nodded. ‘Zoff would have had Pinking's office bugged just to keep tabs on what his enemy was up to. The blackmail scheme was a bonus he hadn't counted on.'

I said, ‘I had a talk with Leonard Zoff not too long after Rudy Benedict was murdered, and I remember he expressed a kind of mild outrage that we weren't going through everything of Rudy's looking for clues—every file folder, every envelope. At the time I thought it was just the concern of a man who wanted to see a friend's killer caught. But of course that's what I was meant to think. I ended up reassuring him that Rudy's mother was going to check all the papers and she'd let us know if she found something. So Leonard Zoff
knew
Fiona Benedict was going through those files. He knew because I told him.'

‘So all he had to do was sit back and wait,' Captain Michaels said. ‘Zoff had known Rudy Benedict a long time, and everyone acquainted with the writer knew what a cautious, self-protective man he was. Zoff was sure those photos would be there, and sooner or later Fiona Benedict would find them. She might not know what they meant, but she wouldn't just pass over them the way Pinking thought she would. Zoff knew Dr. Benedict was checking
for the police
as well as for herself—Pinking didn't know that.'

‘But it didn't work,' Ivan said, slowly coming to accept the theory. ‘Instead of staying in Ohio and reading her son's papers, Dr. Benedict came here and tried to shoot Richard Ormsby. She really did try?'

‘She really did try,' I nodded. ‘Ormsby hit her where it hurts. She must have thought she was protecting herself.'

‘Like mother, like son,' Captain Michaels grunted.

True. Those two had been more alike than either one of them had ever realized. ‘I'd like to know when Zoff first began to understand why Rudy had been killed. Would Cameron and Pinking have actually used words like
blackmail
and
murder
while they were working out their private financial arrangements? I can't see that. Zoff must have pieced it together slowly over a number of overheard conversations. Captain, do you remember the missing file folder?'

‘What missing file folder?'

‘The first time I talked to Nathan Pinking, I asked to see the file he kept on Rudy Benedict and it was missing—'

‘Yeah, I remember.'

‘Well, it's back in the filing cabinet now. I went to Leonard Zoff's new office after he took over the production company—Nathan Pinking's old office. Nothing out of the ordinary in Rudy Benedict's folder. Same sort of thing I read in Rudy's business files in Ohio—in fact, I think I remember a few of the letters. But the file is back.'

‘So why was it missing in the first place?' Ivan asked.

‘Zoff probably filched it when he first began to puzzle out what was going on. He may have been looking for evidence that would tie Pinking to the blackmail of Rudy's murderer. I think it's more likely he was just trying to find out whatever he could about the whole Benedict-Cameron-Pinking situation. Zoff
might
have found something in Benedict's folder, but I doubt it. He probably just returned the file intact after he moved into Pinking's office.'

‘Or the secretary had simply misfiled it all along,' Captain Michaels muttered.

‘Mimsy?' Ivan grinned.

‘I think it was still Tansy at that point,' I said, grinning back. ‘But even without any help from that particular file folder, Leonard Zoff was sitting pretty there for a while. All his problems were going to solve themselves. His enemy had committed a felony and evidence of a kind was just waiting to be uncovered in a dead man's papers in Ohio. Zoff wouldn't have to lift a finger—it'd all take care of itself. Once Pinking was out of the way, Zoff would have everything—the production company, the agency … and Kelly Ingram.'

‘Then one day it all blows up in his face,' Captain Michaels said. ‘The woman he'd counted on to find the evidence for him—she's not sitting quietly in Ohio reading through Rudy's papers at all. She's sitting in a New York detention cell on a charge of attempted murder. Think how he must have felt. To see
everything
he wanted within his grasp—majority ownership of both businesses, a new star in his pocket, the defeat of his enemy. And then to watch it all start to slip away—and why? Because of a book some Englishman wrote. He must have had trouble believing what was happening to him.'

‘So he wasn't going to be able to sit back and watch it all work out nicely for him,' Ivan nodded. ‘He was going to have to do something to get Fiona Benedict out of jail and back to Ohio. What could he do? Hope her attorney could get her off? Possible, but chancy. And time-consuming. Maybe he felt he was running out of time?'

‘Maybe,' the Captain nodded. ‘But whatever he was thinking, he ended up convincing himself that his best chance was to make us believe Fiona Benedict wasn't guilty of trying to kill anybody. And the best way to do that was to go ahead and commit the crime she'd been charged with trying to commit. So he was careful to duplicate her method—the TV studio, the gun.' Captain Michaels paused. ‘Man lives over half a century without resorting to criminal acts to survive and then suddenly turns to the worst crime of them all—pretty good sign of how much he wants a thing.'

Ivan stood up and stretched. ‘Well, it's a good story. What are you going to do with it, sell it to the movies? There's not one bit of evidence that that's the way it happened.'

Captain Michaels grinned broadly. ‘That's where you come in.'

‘Me?'

‘You're going to blackmail Leonard Zoff.'

Ivan sat down again, rather quickly. ‘Blackmail. Now there's an original thought.'

‘That's the point,' Michaels said. ‘The idea's already planted. Zoff has to be superconscious of the fact that blackmail can follow murder. And the shooting did happen in a public place, remember—he can't be
sure
nobody saw him.'

‘Jesus, he was hiding in a stairwell behind a door! Only his arm and the hand holding the gun would have been visible. Nobody can identify him from that.'

‘Is he going to take a chance on that? Would you? Besides, he wasn't firing blind. At least one eye had to be exposed—part of his face must have been showing. For two seconds, maybe, but it had to be showing. There was a moment there when someone could have seen him. Nobody did, but he doesn't know that. And that's where we get 'im.'

‘Okay, he might go for it,' Ivan agreed. ‘But why me?'

‘Because he doesn't know you, Ivan,' I said. ‘He'll be wary of you. If he pays, then that's an admission of guilt. We've got him.'

‘Yeah, well, this guy's a killer, you know,' Ivan scowled. ‘He might just think of some other little solution, if you know what I mean.'

‘Don't worry, you'll go in armed and we'll be only seconds away,' the Captain said. ‘We're going to set this up ver-y carefully.'

‘Yeah, well, about that,' Ivan said uneasily. ‘Isn't that entrapment?'

‘Nope,' Captain Michaels said happily. ‘Had a long confab with Rothstein in the DA's office. He says only a set-up that leads to the commission of a crime, a new crime, is entrapment. But our set-up will reveal an old crime, one that's already been committed. We aren't going to lead Zoff into doing anything illegal—
paying
blackmail isn't a crime. So we're okay there.'

Ivan had one last objection. ‘All right, so we're covered on the entrapment angle. But it's been nearly two months now since Richard Ormsby was killed. Why'd I wait so long to start my squeeze?'

‘You had to find out who the man with the gun was first,' I said. ‘What you saw at the Ormsby shooting was a face, an unfamiliar face with no name attached to it. But you're good at remembering faces. So you started working backwards from Richard Ormsby. He led you to Fiona Benedict, who led you to Rudy Benedict, who led you to the wonderful world of television and all the magic people in it—especially those gathered under the Nathan Pinking umbrella. So one by one you started checking them out until you came to the face behind the stairwell door. Then you had your man.'

‘Yeah.' Ivan frowned. ‘An eyewitness who didn't come forward at the time. I suppose it's possible. But will Zoff buy it?'

‘He can't afford not to,' Captain Michaels said shortly. ‘If he killed Ormsby, he'll at least agree to a meeting.'

Ivan accepted his fate with a big sigh. ‘Okay. If he tells me to go to hell, we won't be any worse off than we are now.'

I said, ‘And if he doesn't tell you to go to hell, then we can wrap this thing up and go home and
forget
about it. Thank God.'

The men grunted agreement.

CHAPTER 18

KELLY INGRAM

It was that pink dress that finally did it. I went for a costume fitting and they gave me this clingy
pink
thing to wear and I hit the ceiling.

I detest pink. I loathe pink. I hate it so much I embarrass myself, wasting a good strong emotion like hatred on a
color
. The costumers were a brother-sister team called Lesley, they both answered to the same name, no fooling. When we first started
LeFever
I'd made it clear I didn't want to wear pink, ever, and Nathan Pinking (
Pinking
) had backed me up. But now we had a new producer and Lesley was or were testing the waters, so to speak, indulging in a little muscle-flexing, just what I needed.

‘Look,' I told them, ‘I'm not going to start off this way. We both know the game you're playing, and I'm just not going to go along. When you have something I can wear, call me. I'm not even going to try this pink thing on.'

‘But Kellylove,' one word, ‘it's perfect for you,' Lesley-male cooed. ‘It's so y—'

‘Call me when you have something I can wear,' I repeated and walked away. I heard him muttering to his sister but the only words I could make out were
prima donna
.