The Renewable Virgin (26 page)

Things had not been going at all well. Nathan Pinking was a blackmailer and a rat and a skunk, but he was also a good organizer. Nathan had delegated a lot of his responsibility, but Leonard Zoff was trying to handle most of the detail work himself and it was too much for him. Once we got rolling he'd probably get the hang of it a little better, but right now things were a bit rough. We were getting ready to start taping the new season of
LeFever
, and the very first script gave me a sour picture of what I had to look forward to. I had only three scenes, and I was to play all three of them in a horizontal position. On a bed, on a towel beside a pool, and on a sofa. I'd convinced Leonard the sofa scene could be just as suggestive if I played it sitting up, but now I had that damned pink dress of Lesley's to worry about.

But what was really bothering me was my new series. The pilot movie was going to show in December; its title was
On Call
—subtle, huh? If NBC bought it, they were going to want the series to keep on with the kind of thing the movie showed. Nathan Pinking had used the
LeFever
writers, and those guys didn't strain themselves any. They'd written the same kind of story they wrote for
LeFever
, except they just switched the male and female roles—as if a woman were just some sort of reverse man.
I
had the adventures, and they'd hired some good-looking actor to gaze adoringly at
me
while I was involved in all those preposterous goings-on. They'd gone at the whole thing wrong, just taking the easy way. It was my series and I wanted it to be right—but I hadn't really been able to make Leonard understand that.

I'd bugged him mercilessly until he showed me the story treatments Nathan Pinking had assembled; Leonard hadn't yet decided which ones to commission writers to turn into shooting scripts. One of them contained a flash-back sequence that was supposed to show me just entering college.

‘You get to be a student, darling,' Leonard had said loudly. ‘Won't that be fun? Pot and protest and free love—just the thing to win the college crowd. Maybe even a classroom scene. Don't you worry none, Kel, you can still pass for eighteen, nineteen, whatever the shit it is. We won't hafta do any close-ups—you just squeeze that fabulous butt of yours into a pair of tight jeans and we got it made.'

Suddenly I'd had enough. I had played the game; I'd let my thirtieth birthday pass without mention. My reason was financial as well as personal: I belonged to a profession where youth was money in the bank. In television, a woman depreciates in value as she grows older, like a car. Men don't; just the women. So maybe there was something wrong with the profession itself, if it made you feel your right and proper age was something to be ashamed of. And there was Leonard Zoff, glibly assuming I'd be delighted at the chance to play a teenager again.

‘I'm thirty years old, Leonard,' I said. ‘My schoolgirl days are over. I think we can find a better story than this one, don't you?'

He'd argued a little, out of principle; I don't think he really cared one way or the other. But I'd made up my mind right then, I was through pretending to be younger than I was.

That was earlier in the week. But from star of my own (to be) series I'd quickly been bumped back down to mere appurtenance, appendage, accessory, attachment, adjunct to the hero, I did look that one up. My
LeFever
character was more a piece-of-tail role than ever, and the vibes I got from Leonard were telling me my new series would be just more of the same.
Nothing
was right. In short, I was spoiling for a fight. I had to have it out with Leonard.

So on pink-dress day I went charging into his outer office, breathing fire (I hoped). Mimsy looked up from her desk, not at all alarmed. ‘Is he in?' I growled in my best tough-broad voice.

‘He's out looking over location sites,' she purred at me. ‘Anything I can do?'

‘Damn it, Mimsy, don't be so friendly—can't you see I'm mad?'

‘And you want to stay mad,' she nodded understandingly. ‘Would it help to yell at me a little?'

‘Naw,' I said, starting to cool down. ‘Leonard's got to talk to Lesley, for starters. Did he tell you where he was going?'

Mimsy's face took on tragic overtones that would have done Medea proud. ‘Sorry—he didn't. I asked him three times before he left, but he went out without telling me.'

‘Did he take his limo?'

She caught on immediately. ‘Of course—all I have to do is call the driver.' She punched out a number on the phone.

Leonard never drove himself anywhere. He claimed New York traffic was the one thing in life he was truly afraid of. Mimsy spoke briefly into the phone and then hung up.

‘Well?'

‘The driver is on his way back to the garage. He said Mr. Zoff got out at the Eastside Airlines Terminal and told him he wouldn't be needing the car any more today.'

‘Eastside Terminal? He's not leaving town, is he?'

‘No—and I don't think he's meeting anyone. He must just be looking for a shooting site.'

One sure way to find out. I went down to the street and stopped a taxi. Rain was threatening and I didn't have an umbrella, but I didn't want to take the time to go back and get one. Leonard Zoff wasn't going to get away from
me
, he wasn't.

CHAPTER 19

MARIAN LARCH

‘Again,' Captain Michaels sniffled. He was catching a cold and his eyes were red and watery.

Ivan cleared his throat. ‘At the appointed time I proceed to the designated rendezvous point—'

‘Jesus, Malecki, you're not in training class, talk English.' The Captain's cold was making him cranky.

Ivan managed to keep a straight face and started over. ‘At five minutes to eleven I go into the Eastside Airlines Terminal. I wait until the last stragglers and latecomers have gotten on the airport buses departing at eleven. Then I approach Zoff.'

Two plainclothes officers would already be inside, one of them behind the counter.

‘I tell Zoff I'm the one he's waiting for,' Ivan went on. ‘If he wants a name, I tell him Ivan. If he wants to go someplace else to talk, I tell him absolutely not.'

We'd picked the Eastside Terminal because first of all it had to be a public place. No blackmailer who intended to go on living would agree to a private meeting with his victim. The Eastside Terminal had people coming and going, but there were never huge crowds of people there who stayed put for any length of time.

‘What if he insists?' I asked Ivan. ‘What if he says he won't talk to you in a place where there's a chance you'll be overheard?'

‘Then I remind him he's in no position to insist on anything. I tell him my partner is watching from outside, and if Zoff has brought a weapon to force me to go with him, my partner calls the police the minute she sees us walk out the door.'

The ‘partner' had been Ivan's idea. He'd thrown himself into the role with gusto, trying to think the way a blackmailer would think—a Method cop. He said the only sure way a blackmailer had of protecting himself was to convince the victim that if anything happened to him, the blackmailer, the victim's guilty secret would immediately be revealed to the world. And the best way of doing that, Ivan said, was not the conventional letter-with-a-lawyer gambit; that's what Nathan Pinking had done and Ted Cameron was already figuring a way around that when things came to a head. No, the best way was to produce a partner, one whose existence was established beyond all shadow of a doubt but whose identity was withheld from the mark.

Since the initial contact was to be made by telephone, we decided the caller should be a woman. Otherwise Zoff might think he was dealing with one man pretending to be two, disguising his voice over the phone. We had a policewoman from Narcotics make the call; Zoff might have recognized my voice. She'd told him she certainly was glad to get hold of him, because she'd spent the
longest
time trying to track him down—ever since the day Richard Ormsby had been killed, in fact.

Zoff had bluffed at first, pretending not to know what she was talking about. Stalling for time.
But he had agreed to a meeting
. An innocent man would have told her to stop bothering him or
he
would call the cops. But Leonard Zoff had instead asked her what she wanted. She'd named the time and place for the meeting, and told him to bring ten thousand dollars with him. Then she had informed him she herself would not be there, that all their dealings would be done through an intermediary, her partner.
All
their dealings, she'd stressed. We wanted Zoff to start thinking this was no one-time payoff, that he was on the hook for good. Push him a little.

Ivan, the ostensible intermediary, would be wired as well as armed. Captain Michaels and I would be in an unmarked car around the corner on Thirty-eighth Street, listening to every word that was said. We were there strictly as back-up. If everything went according to plan, we wouldn't move in until the money had actually changed hands. Ivan would make the arrest; the two police officers planted inside would witness the payoff and provide assistance if needed.

Captain Michaels took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘Then what?'

Ivan said, ‘Then I ask him for the ten thousand. I tell him my partner and I aren't greedy, we just want enough to live on comfortably.'

‘And if he asks when's the next payment?'

‘I tell him I'll let him know. But I don't bring it up if he doesn't.'

I said, ‘What if he doesn't hand over the money right away and tries to bluff it out instead? What if he says it's only your partner's word against his?'

‘I say I'll tell the police I was also present at the Ormsby shooting—that makes
two
eyewitnesses, exactly what the law requires for a positive identification. I'll tell Zoff our story will be that at the time we didn't want to get involved, we didn't know who the killer was anyway. But now that we do know—it's begun to bother us, we feel we should step forward and do our duty, all that stuff. I'll tell him the cops might not believe our reason for keeping quiet so long, but they're sure as hell going to be mighty polite to two people who can ID a killer for them.'

‘And if he asks who your partner is?'

‘I laugh in his face.'

‘If he doesn't bring the money at all?' Captain Michaels coughed.

‘I say I'll give him one more chance. Now that he knows we're serious, he either produces the money or he goes to jail.'

‘New time and place for the payoff?'

‘Noon tomorrow. The fountain at Lincoln Center.'

‘What if he claims he can't get his hands on ten thousand in twenty-four hours?'

‘I laugh in his face again. Then I quote the balance as of this morning in his Chase Manhattan account.'

‘That should rattle him a little,' Captain Michaels grinned. ‘Have we thought of everything?' Pause. ‘Yeah, I think so. Okay—any questions?'

I couldn't think of any. Ivan shook his head.

‘All right then, let's go,' the Captain said. ‘If we're lucky we can wrap this up before the weather breaks.'

CHAPTER 20

KELLY INGRAM

It was almost eleven o'clock when the taxi let me out at the Eastside Airlines Terminal. The rain was still holding off, thank goodness. The terminal isn't very large; I pushed the door open and spotted Leonard Zoff right off. He was standing back from the counter, a raincoat over his arm, scanning the faces of the other people there—maybe Mimsy was wrong, maybe he was meeting someone after all. He seemed nervous. I walked up and planted myself in front of him.

He was clearly underjoyed to see me. First he gave a little start, then his features settled into a kind of hound-dog sadness. ‘It's you,' he said dully.

I agreed it was. ‘Leonard, we've got to talk.'

He nodded. ‘But not here. Too public.'

Wasn't he waiting for someone? I looked around. ‘Don't you want—'

‘No, no, this is no good,' he muttered, suddenly in a great hurry to get out of there. He grabbed my elbow and steered me out the door. ‘There's a park about a block from here—if we don't get rained on.'

But we never got there. Two young couples, two
very
young couples (should have been in school) recognized me and proceeded to raise a minor fuss, how nice. I was quite willing to stop for a moment and play the famous television star graciously acknowledging her admiring public, but Leonard had me bundled into a taxi before I quite knew what was happening. He seemed angry for some reason.

He gave the driver the name of a pseudo-Victorian tavern uptown. When we got there, Leonard tossed his raincoat on to the seat of the booth and gestured impatiently to the waiter. It wasn't eleven-thirty yet, but he ordered himself a liquid lunch. I asked for coffee.

When he'd had his first long swallow, he seemed to brace himself. ‘All right, spell it out.'

I said, ‘First of all, Leonard, we need a basic understanding about where we're going from here. Then we can work out the details as we go along.'

He nodded wearily. ‘Yeah, the details. I can hardly wait. Starting with the money, no doubt.'

The budget, he meant. ‘Well, there's always room for more money. But I meant other things—the
kind
of show we're going to be turning out, primarily.'

His face grew longer and sadder than ever. ‘I was afraid of that. You and your partner won't settle for anything less than total control, will you?'

‘My partner?'

‘I go through all that shit and come this far only to have a couple of dumb broads take it all away from me, is that it? Who's your partner, Kelly?'

I was stunned. ‘Are you actually calling me a
dumb broad
?'