by Barbara Paul
‘Joke? What do you mean, joke?’ I looked at her closely, but that potato face wasn’t giving much away; I’ve got to stop thinking potato face. ‘Marian, what was in that bottle?’
‘Phenolphthalein. Ever heard of it?’
‘Spell it.’
She spelled it. ‘It’s not hard to get hold of, the way cyanide is. Anybody can buy it in a drugstore—you don’t even need a prescription. Kelly, phenolphthalein is used mostly as a laxative.’
I just stared at her. ‘Somebody sent me a laxative?’
She nodded soberly, but I suspected she was trying not to laugh. ‘Somebody sent you a laxative.’
I was absolutely dumfounded or even dumbfounded, I’m not going to look it up. ‘A laxative.’ I was at such a loss I went over and kicked the United Parcel carton, I didn’t know what else to do.
‘Hey,’ Marian said uneasily.
‘You said it wasn’t a bomb. Nobody’s out to kill me. They’re just out to give me diarrhea. Isn’t that wonderful? What a glamorous ailment to come down with! Why would anybody send me a laxative?’
‘Maybe simply to get a rise out of you—to make you react the way you are reacting.’
‘And they just happened to pick the same means that was used to kill Rudy? A Lysco-Seltzer bottle? Come on. That’s no coincidence.’
‘No—I don’t think it is. It certainly could be Rudy Benedict’s murderer who sent you the phenolphthalein. Or somebody else who found out it was your Lysco-Seltzer that had been doctored in Benedict’s apartment and decided to give you a little scare just for the fun of it. A sadistic practical joker.’
‘Great idea of fun, isn’t it?’
‘Whoever sent you the laxative would have to get pleasure out of what he was doing—there’s nothing else to be gained. Do you know anybody with that kind of personality? The kind that would get a kick out of embarrassing you?’
‘A couple of hundred,’ I said without hesitation. ‘Nathan Pinking, Leonard Zoff, Nick Quinlan—’
It was Marian’s turn to say, ‘Oh, come on.’
‘Come on, nothing. Most of the people I know would think it was funny to put somebody out of commission that particular way. Using the same kind of bottle that killed Rudy is ghoulish, sure, but that just puts an edge on it. It’s the kind of thing Nathan Pinking especially would get a kick out of. He’s not exactly nice people.’
‘But why would he want to put you out of action for even a day? Wouldn’t that cost him—oh, that’s right. You’re not in this week’s episode.’
I said, ‘Nathan’s always doing things just to show you what he can get away with. Do you remember Christopher Clive?’
‘An actor, sure.’
‘Not just an actor. He used to be somebody, a Shakespearean actor primarily. An Englishman, same kind of training as Gielgud and Richardson and the rest of them. But he went on the skids, stopped acting for years. You know, one of those alcoholics who have to stop drinking altogether because one more swallow will kill them? Well, he’s trying to make a comeback. He takes any role he can get.’
‘That’s it,’ Marian said. ‘He was on LeFever, wasn’t he? Small part. Thought I’d seen him recently.’
‘Remember the scene in Central Park where he lost his trousers? That wasn’t in the script. Nathan Pinking wanted him to drop his pants for a cheap laugh. Christopher Clive is a man of enormous dignity, even as a reformed drunk. It was painful for him. But he did it—he needed the job. Nathan just stood there and snickered. He humiliated that man just to prove he could. Now, do you think somebody like that would hesitate to send me a laxative disguised as something else?’
Marian shook her head. ‘I got to admit, he sounds like a good candidate. But those others you mentioned—what about your agent, Leonard Zoff? How would hurting you benefit him?’
I shrugged. ‘Leonard sometimes calls himself a flesh-peddler. I think he dislikes women. His speech is just full of little put-downs—well, you met him, you know what he’s like. I don’t really know what goes on in Leonard’s head. But I take it back about Nick Quinlan. On second thought, I know he didn’t do it. He’s too dumb. Nick couldn’t even manage typing the address label much less all the rest of it.’
‘I’m glad you eliminated one suspect,’ Marian said dryly. ‘Do you really spend your life surrounded by so much ill will?’
‘Absolutely. You mean you don’t? You’re a cop, you should know what it’s like. Look what’s happened here. Somebody just told me they think I’m shit. How am I supposed to feel about that? What am I supposed to do—take it in stride?’
‘Kelly—’
‘I can’t even hit back! Oh, how I’d love to hit back!’ Something occurred to me. ‘I wouldn’t mind slipping a little of that phenolwhatsit to Nick Quinlan. Is the crime lab finished with that bottle? Do you suppose—’
‘No, you may not have it back,’ Marian said disapprovingly. ‘You shouldn’t mess around with chemicals you don’t know anything about. What’s a safe dosage? Don’t even consider it.’
I muttered something at her. She was right, of course. I just didn’t want her to be right, not just then; I wasn’t in the mood for it. I went over to the United Parcel carton and thought about kicking it again.
‘Why don’t you open it?’ Marian asked. Then, when I hesitated: ‘Would you like me to open it for you?’
‘No, I’ll do it.’ I couldn’t spend the rest of my life being afraid of boxes. The carton was taped shut and I had to get a knife from the kitchen to cut it open.
‘You’d think the crown jewels were in there,’ Marian said as I sawed away at the tape. But it wasn’t the crown jewels inside.
It was toilet paper. Seventy-two rolls of White Cloud toilet paper, three hundred double-ply sheets to the roll.
CHAPTER 4
FIONA BENEDICT
When I got back to Washburn, Ohio, I ‘confided’ in a few people that Rudy had died of an allergic reaction to a new medicine he was taking for high blood pressure. Some of my high-minded colleagues immediately assumed overdose, I’m sure, but I couldn’t help that. It was better than putting up with the kind of stares that were bound to come my way if it were known I was even remotely connected with a murder. Washburn, Ohio, was where I intended to live out my retirement, starting in three years’ time. I did not intend to live there as an object of curiosity.
Poor Rudy. How hard he’d tried, how much boasting he’d done. He was too bright for that world of flash and glitter he’d moved in, but not really inventive enough for any enduring work. In the beginning I’d thought television would be good for him, mature him a little. By constant exposure to the perfectly horrible example television offered, he’d learn how not to write, I’d hoped. Eventually, I thought, he’d move on to better things.
But no, he never did. At first I’d assumed Rudy had been seduced by the easy success he’d found, but later I came to understand it was fear that kept him from venturing farther afield. He never took any real risks in his life, and for that I blame his father. All of Rudy’s confidence in himself evaporated the day that cowardly man left us to cope on our own. Rudy was supposed to have been planning a play when he died, and there’s always the possibility that he would actually have gone ahead and written it. But I didn’t think so; it was all talk. Rudy was a big talker. That New York police detective, the doughfaced woman named Larch—she’d brought up the subject of Rudy’s play every time she could. I suppose she was trying to give me a good final memory of him: the serious writer embarking on a major work. But it was a false picture; I knew my son.
Rudy had started rebelling against me soon after his father left us and never quite grew out of it. He blamed me for his father’s going; and by the time he was old enough to understand what had happened, it was too late. The pattern was set—he needed to blame me. In the last letter I had from him, he was still telling me (in a disguised manner, of course) how important he was in the world he had chosen—as distinguished from the one I inhabited. His fath
er had also been a historian, but in college Rudy had taken courses exclusively in the soft disciplines, art and literature and music appreciation, the sort of thing in which the student’s opinions of works of art are treated as more important than the works themselves. And then midway through his senior year, he quit. One semester away from graduation, and he walked out. Rudy had taken a perverse pleasure in leaving school before getting a degree; it was his way of thumbing his nose at the academic life that he identified with me.
At least, that’s what I was supposed to believe. On the surface Rudy and I were always on good terms; the rebelling was more in the nature of needles in the side. And I did believe his walking out of college was basically a defiant gesture directed at me. But not completely. By rejecting the academic world, Rudy would never have to live up to its standards—which weren’t all that high even then. But the way he systematically avoided the hard disciplines was revealing. By avoiding them, Rudy never had to risk failing. Rudy didn’t like taking risks.
When he first started selling scripts to the various series, I watched every show he wrote for. But even on television Rudy rarely missed a chance to get in his digs at the academic life. Repeatedly he pictured it as a retreat, a hiding out from ‘real’ life—which on television was always assumed to be violent and exhibitionistic and loud and vulgar. That was ‘real’ living? Being ‘street wise’ was the epitome of human achievement?
It’s an attitude that has always amazed me. Rudy frequently had his heroes sneer at teachers as head-in-the-sand milksops, people who never really knew what was going on out there in the ‘real’ world. Rudy wasn’t alone in claiming that, of course; it’s a favorite excuse of dropouts, failures, those too lazy or too afraid to use their brains. But it seemed to me they were the ones with their heads in the sand. I know perfectly well that the polite life led by a small, self-contained academic community in the ‘safe’ state of Ohio is not typical of all human life. I have never claimed that it was. But it’s a way of life that does exist and it isn’t going to go away, no matter how loudly the outsiders proclaim it isn’t real.
And what did Rudy know of street life? He loved to write about wise-cracking private eyes and fast-talking con men and dedicated social workers and crime-busting lawyers and world-weary police officers. None of that Rudy had any direct experience of; his knowledge of his subject matter was second-hand and even his attitudes were borrowed—from other writers, other shows. He was my son, but I’m afraid there wasn’t one spark of originality in Rudy. Even when he was writing comedy his protagonists were usually unlettered but ‘savvy’ people who consistently triumphed over their better-educated adversaries. And that, I think, was the secret of Rudy’s success. He was a populist writer. He repeatedly gave voice to enduring folk ideals, such as the one that celebrates getting something for nothing. Or the one about the simple soul who wins out not through superior intelligence or skill but just by being his own wonderful self.
There must be a frighteningly large number of people in this country who need to believe that kind of thing; otherwise Rudy’s particular brand of dramatized exculpation wouldn’t have been so much in demand. This is the way he’d spent his life, telling TV audiences the self-flattering things they wanted to believe. Rudy did not pretend he was doing great work; he affected a certain cynical nonchalance that said this was the only way to survive in the ‘real’ world.
So Rudy deceived himself as well as his audiences. He always wrote safe stories, ones that could be counted on not to disturb, not to challenge. He took no risks. And yet he looked down his nose at me for hiding in a safe environment. He never saw that he was doing the same thing himself.
And in the end, it hadn’t protected him after all.
The semester would be over in another few weeks, and I had plans to make. I notified the dean I wouldn’t be available for either summer session after all, and asked him to find someone to take the two courses I’d agreed to teach. It was late notice and rather put him on the spot, but he told me he’d take care of it and not to worry. A considerate man, and a friend.
I had made up my mind that if the police hadn’t caught Rudy’s murderer by the end of the school term, I’d go back to New York long enough to hire my own detectives. I was concerned that I might be leaving it too late, that whatever trail the murderer had left might have grown cold. But there were too many obligations keeping me in Washburn just then; the end of the term meant final exams and term papers to grade. Also, I had to finish correcting the proofs of my book, and that was something I simply could not rush. After spending eleven years on research and three more on the writing, I wasn’t going to allow hasty proofreading to mar the finished product.
So I really had no time to spare when Captain Michaels called me from New York and told me he wanted to send Marian Larch to look through Rudy’s papers.
‘Why didn’t you do that before I had them all shipped here?’ I asked in exasperation.
‘We didn’t want to delay your departure,’ he said blandly. (I translated that to mean he hadn’t thought it necessary then.) ‘She’ll take nothing without your permission—she won’t even photocopy anything without your permission. We have no authority in Ohio, but I’m hoping you’ll cooperate. I’d like to send her, Dr. Benedict.’
‘It’ll be a waste of time, Captain. Rudy’s papers are mostly writing notes, business correspondence, copies of his scripts. The paperwork any writer accumulates over a period of years.’
‘Have you read it all?’
‘No, I just sorted through it to see what was there, I haven’t had time to read it yet.’
‘What about personal correspondence? Do you have his personal letters too?’
‘There weren’t any. Rudy never kept personal letters.’ He certainly didn’t keep any of mine.
‘Still, there might be something. Dr. Benedict, we’ve got to consider everything.’
‘That means your investigation has reached a dead end, I take it.’
A brief silence from the other end. ‘We aren’t getting very far here,’ he admitted. ‘Let me send Detective Larch. It won’t hurt for her to take a look.’
In the end I agreed, on condition that she stay at my house and pass herself off as a personal friend of Rudy’s here for a visit. I didn’t want to have to explain a New York police detective’s poking through my son’s papers. So now I had a house guest to concern myself with.
I prepared the way by telling a few people she was coming, friends such as the Morrisseys. Drew Morrissey’s field was the American Civil War, and Roberta taught in the English Department—Victorian period, mostly.
‘I don’t remember your ever mentioning a Marian Larch,’ Roberta Morrissey said in that annoyingly straightforward way she had.
‘I just met her, when I was in New York,’ I said truthfully. ‘She was a friend of Rudy’s,’ not truthfully at all.
We were in the faculty lounge of Cuthbert Hall, going through the morning coffee break ritual. Drew cleared his throat. ‘Fiona, I don’t mean to be nosy—but did you invite her here?’
‘She invited herself.’
‘Then why, Fiona?’ That was Roberta. ‘Why are you letting her come? Intruding on you at a time like this!’
I liked her honest indignation, but I went on with the lie just the same. ‘Ostensibly she’s coming here to console me, but I think she’s really looking for consolation herself.’ How glibly it came out. The Morrisseys were my closest friends, and I didn’t like deceiving them. But the true story was so unpalatable I couldn’t tell even them.
Drew was looking especially concerned. He’d turned almost completely gray this past year, something I’d not realized until I got back from New York; I’d watched it happen, little by little, without seeing it. Drew glanced at Roberta. ‘Dinner?’ She nodded. ‘Bring her over to dinner one night,’ he said. ‘That’ll take up some of the time. When is she getting here?’
That seemed a little risky to me; I didn’t know how good Marian Lar
ch was at acting a part. But I could think of no reason to refuse, so we agreed on a time. I was sure I could count on the detective’s willingness to go through with the charade; she’d shown herself to be a considerate woman in New York.
‘You’ll have to call me Marian,’ was the first thing she said. ‘Although I’ll go on calling you Dr. Benedict, of course.’ She’d rented a car at the airport and found my house on her own; I didn’t even have to meet her.
‘Yes, that’s probably best, Marian,’ I agreed. I don’t like calling near-strangers by their first names but it would have looked odd not to, this time.
‘Just so we’ll be telling the same story,’ she went on, ‘am I right in assuming you haven’t told the people here your son was murdered?’
‘You assume correctly.’
She kept her face expressionless. ‘Now, if you’ll show me where the papers are? The sooner I get started, the quicker I’ll be out of here.’
I took her up to the attic where I’d had Rudy’s things carried. I’d put up a table and chair near one of the dormer windows; I planned to work there myself when I got around to reading the papers.
She was appalled when she saw how many there were. Fourteen good-sized cartons plus three filing cabinets. She opened one of the cartons. ‘I had no idea—so many scripts! And all these other folders—what are they?’
‘Notes, outlines. Works he never completed, probably meant to get back to eventually. Some research work—background material, mostly. Rudy rarely threw anything away.’
‘You’ve read all this?’ Her dough face plainly said she didn’t believe it.
‘No, I’d planned to give the summer over to it.’
She scowled down at the carton she’d opened. ‘Well, I can’t read everything here—I’d be here all summer myself. Where’s his business correspondence?’
I indicated one of the filing cabinets. ‘By the way, we’re invited out to dinner tonight. The Morrisseys, friends of mine.’
