by Barbara Paul
Ted Cameron had deliberately fostered Rudy’s need to believe he was a sympathetic listener. That part made perfect sense to me; his naturally courteous demeanor inspired an easy acceptance of Ted Cameron as a thoroughly civilized man. He and Rudy met several times, and Cameron always carried a bottle of cyanide crystals with him, waiting for an opportunity. They’d sit guzzling beer like a couple of stevedores, talking about the best way to arrange Rudy’s new income so as not to invite the unwelcome interest of the Internal Revenue people. Rudy wanted the money to appear as legitimate income on which he would pay taxes, so he suggested Cameron buy up a contract for Rudy’s services that Nathan Pinking held and which was about to expire. Businessmen could always use writers.
Who was Nathan Pinking, Ted Cameron wanted to know. Rudy told him. By then they’d progressed to Rudy’s apartment, and Ted had stared at the postered walls with unconcealed amusement. Rudy had hastened to explain it was only a temporary living arrangement, that he hadn’t even bothered to uncrate his paintings but had simply stored them all in the pantry. In the pantry, he’d said. That decided Cameron. When Rudy made a beer-necessitated trip to the bathroom, Cameron had picked up a spare set of keys from the top of Rudy’s bureau. When Rudy came back in, Ted had agreed to the proposed way of paying off the blackmail. The two men parted on good terms; they’d even shaken hands, Cameron said. But he’d left his cyanide crystals behind in Rudy’s Lysco-Seltzer bottle.
As he was telling us this, Cameron seemed more struck by Rudy’s ineptness than by his own perfidy. After Rudy was dead, Cameron had taken his stolen keys and gone back to the apartment. He found the paintings in the pantry, but Man and Shadow wasn’t among them. It had all been for nothing. At one point he’d seriously considered paying Rudy the blackmail he’d asked; it wasn’t all that much. He’d killed him because he decided he couldn’t leave anyone alive who knew his guilty secret.
So double murderer Ted Cameron could do nothing but wait. He had no idea where the painting was; the newspaper stories had made no mention of a missing painting. As the days went by and nothing happened, it was beginning to look as if he’d get away with this one too. Then one day a voice on the phone identified its owner as Nathan Pinking and suggested a meeting.
Ted Cameron knew right away his new blackmailer was no apologetic Rudy Benedict. The first thing Pinking had done was explain that he’d left the painting with one lawyer and a letter of explanation with another. He’d come by the painting because Rudy Benedict had put it in a storage locker on West Thirty-fourth Street and had asked Pinking to hold the key. Just in case something happens, Rudy had said. Pinking had thought it a bit peculiar at the time but then had forgotten about it—until Rudy Benedict had been murdered.
Pinking had told Ted Cameron he’d recovered the painting from the storage locker but still didn’t know what it meant until he saw a picture of him (Cameron) in the newspaper, in connection with Cameron Enterprises’ negotiations for a friendly takeover of some small Florida beachwear company. Now that Pinking had a name to attach to the face in the painting, things began to fall into place. Pinking had been living in Los Angeles at the time Mary Rendell was killed, and he vaguely remembered that Cameron Enterprises was somehow associated with an unsolved murder. He sent his secretary to the library with instructions to track it down; and when she did, Nathan Pinking knew he had the ideal sponsor he’d long been looking for.
He’d started out easy, Ted Cameron said—if you call demanding full sponsorship of LeFever at jacked-up rates starting out easy. Even that took some doing, but Cameron managed it. Then the demands increased, and Cameron understood his company was expected to underwrite anything and everything Pinking wanted to put on the air. Cameron was becoming desperate to find the sponsorship money; he started forcing the ancillary companies to assume part of the burden. Unfortunately for him, Lorelei Cosmetics was in the best financial position of all the individual companies under the Cameron umbrella and the logical one to be tapped for the most funds. So Aunt Augusta was the first to sniff trouble, but soon the whole Cameron clan was up in arms. Ted Cameron was in serious trouble. Not only was his guilty secret in the hands of a totally unscrupulous, totally unreliable man, but Cameron was also in danger of losing Cameron Enterprises. Clearly there was only one thing to do. He was going to have to kill Nathan Pinking.
There was the problem of the two lawyers, though. One had the painting, another had a letter that would incriminate Cameron. He would have to find out who the lawyers were, and then hire someone to burglarize them. The two robberies and the murder of Nathan Pinking would all have to be timed to take place simultaneously, otherwise Pinking would guess what was up if the lawyers were taken care of first. Cameron didn’t like the idea of bringing hired criminals in on it, but he could see no way around it. It would take very careful planning. He was working on the plan when something happened that made him change his mind.
He met Kelly Ingram.
The way Cameron explained it, he was obsessed with her. He’d never been fixated on a woman before in his life, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. He was completely bowled over. Kelly changed everything; Cameron couldn’t chance losing her. He didn’t want to do anything, anything at all, that was the least bit risky—like committing a third murder. He began to feel as if his illicit luck had suddenly run out. He was afraid to kill Nathan Pinking; because this time, the important time, something might go wrong. He couldn’t risk it. Without knowing it, Kelly Ingram had saved Nathan Pinking’s life.
So Ted Cameron had to put up with Pinking’s control over him; he said he felt he was living in a torture chamber. It was Kelly that kept him going. And then Nathan Pinking, who saw only dollar signs when he looked at Kelly Ingram, had commanded Cameron to stop seeing her. But losing Kelly did not revive Cameron’s earlier resolution to kill his blackmailer; by then the fear of failure had become too deeply ingrained. Nathan Pinking gave Ted Cameron an order, and Ted Cameron obeyed. He could no longer make decisions. He could no longer act, he could only sit back and be acted upon. He was drained, defused, whipped. He was through.
So when Captain Michaels had put the two Polaroid snapshots on the desk, it had taken Cameron a few minutes to understand it was finally all over. But when he did understand, he was relieved. Nathan Pinking had once speculated that Rudy Benedict might have held back a snapshot or two; but since Rudy’s papers had all been shipped to his mother’s house in Ohio, there didn’t seem to be much danger. Pinking felt sure that the snapshots—if they did indeed exist—posed no threat to the cosy financial arrangement he and Cameron had finally settled on. And that, Cameron said, was all. End of story.
The lawyer Trotter hadn’t said anything for a long time. He sat staring at Ted Cameron as if he’d never seen him before.
Cameron had a question. ‘Did Rudy’s mother find the photos? In his papers?’
‘That’s right,’ Captain Michaels said.
Cameron made a noise that might have been a laugh. ‘I have a favor to ask, Captain. When you arrest Pinking, tell him where the photos came from. He was so sure they’d cause no trouble. Will you tell him?’
Ivan Malecki cleared his throat and said, ‘Did you have a bug planted in Nathan Pinking’s office—a listening device?’
Cameron looked mildly surprised and said no. Somebody else, then. Cameron turned invisible pupils toward me, looking for all the world like a blind man. ‘When will you tell her?’
‘Now,’ I said. ‘Before she has a chance to hear it on the news.’
He smiled and thanked me. Politest killer I ever met.
I got up and left.
I’d known it wouldn’t be easy, but it was even worse than I’d expected. The words were barely out of my mouth before she started rejecting them.
She didn’t take in half of what I said—she didn’t want to hear any of it. It was pitiful, the way she kept looking for excuses. She blamed Captain Michaels, she blamed me, she even found a way to blame Fiona Benedict. She
was willing to blame the entire world before she’d blame Ted Cameron—he meant that much to her. It’s hard, admitting you made a mistake that big.
‘He’s killed two people, Kelly,’ I said. ‘He’s admitted it.’
She refused to believe it, simply refused. I decided there was no point in pushing it; she was going to have to have time to accept it. Time by herself, time to ease her way in. Bullying her wouldn’t help.
When I left, she looked as if she wanted to kill me. I’ve never felt so bad in my life.
When I got back to Headquarters, the reporters were there. Nathan Pinking had been brought in and charged with blackmail and with being an accessory to murder after the fact (for concealing evidence); Captain Michaels had already made a statement to the press. A blackmailer and a murderer arrested in tandem, and both of them fairly well-known figures. A lurid tale, but even The Wall Street Journal was interested in this one.
I sat at my desk waiting for the traffic going in and out of Captain Michaels’s office to stop. Ivan Malecki came over, saw the look on my face, and said, ‘That bad, huh?’ When I nodded, he squeezed my shoulder and went away. For which I was grateful; sometimes a pep talk is the last thing you need to hear. It had been a nerve-racking day and I wanted to go home.
Catching a murderer isn’t the cause for celebration you might think. There’s no good feeling to it. It’s a depressing scene, and the main feeling is one of shame. Shame that we should be like this; you look at a killer and you see a piece of humanity that’s failed in its essential nature, that of being humane. The last thing in the world you want to do is go out and hoist a few and congratulate yourself for being so clever. Catching killers is just something that has to be done, like carrying out the garbage. They’re both disease preventatives.
I felt absolutely rotten about Kelly. I’d have been glad to offer her a shoulder to cry on, but she’d made it clear she didn’t want me within ten miles of her. There wasn’t anything I could do. I’d just have to rely on her common sense to see her through.
Finally the door to Captain Michaels’s office was open and he was in there alone. I went in.
‘Good work, Larch,’ he said. ‘You stuck with it and you came up with a blackmailer as well as the killer.’ I must not have had my face rearranged right yet because he said, ‘Kelly Ingram didn’t take it too well, huh?’
‘Not well at all.’
‘Give her time. That’s a helluva lot to have to swallow all at once. She’ll come round.’ Back to an easier subject. ‘You’ll get a commendation for this one, you can count on it.’
‘Then am I right in thinking this is a good time to ask for something?’
He stage-sighed. ‘Ask.’
‘Assign me to the Richard Ormsby murder.’
He looked surprised. ‘You still want on that one? It’s a dead case, Marian.’
‘Maybe. It doesn’t need to be.’
He squinted one eye at me. ‘You think you know who did that one too?’
I shook my head. ‘I just have an idea or two I want to follow up. But I can’t if you won’t assign me to the case.’
He told me he thought I was crazy but okayed the assignment. I thanked him and went back to my desk. One more chore to perform before I could call it a day; my role as bearer of bad news wasn’t quite finished.
I called Fiona Benedict in Washburn, Ohio, and told her her son had died because he’d made the mistake of trying to blackmail a murderer.
CHAPTER 16
KELLY INGRAM
It was weird seeing Leonard Zoff sitting at Nathan Pinking’s desk in Nathan Pinking’s office. Taking care of what used to be Nathan Pinking’s business. It was weird thinking of Nathan in jail for blackmail, although I’d done my damnedest to make sure he got there. What it was thinking about Ted, there was no word for.
Leonard looked at me sympathetically. ‘Wouldn’t hurt you to get back to work, darling. Sooner the better.’
I nodded listlessly; he was right. What I needed was some sort of set daily routine, the kind of thing where you didn’t have to think at all. LeFever was just the ticket.
‘You feel awright?’ Nick Quinlan asked me.
‘I feel all right, Nick,’ I said. ‘Just not a whole lot of energy, you know?’
‘Yeah, I know.’ He nodded somberly. ‘Happensa me sometimes. Too bad we doan git to do those three, y’know, the Barbados shows. They’d make ya feel bear. Hey, Leonard, how come we’re not goin’ to Barbados?’
‘Shut up, Nick,’ Leonard sighed. The connection among producer Nathan Pinking and sponsor Ted Cameron and the promised extra episodes in Barbados that were nothing more than blackmail booty—it was all too much for Nick to grasp. ‘Sorry, Kelly,’ Leonard said. ‘He means well.’
I shrugged; it didn’t matter. Nick looked puzzled. He did that a lot—look puzzled.
It had taken some getting used to, the idea that my ex-lover, the joy of my life and the light of my existence let the drums roll and the trumpets sound ta-taa (idiot idiot idiot)—was in fact a cold-blooded killer. And I mean cold-blooded, that’s not just a phrase, it means something. Look at what he did: he killed Rudy Benedict. Rudy Benedict. Undoubtedly the most miscast would-be criminal on the face of the earth—and Ted couldn’t find any way of handling him other than killing him? There were a number of things Ted could have done. He could have paid him off. He could have tried to talk him out of it. He could have stolen the painting. He could have threatened to tell Rudy’s mother.
‘I know it’s early to be starting on the new season,’ Leonard Zoff was saying in his loud voice, ‘but I’d like to get as much in the can as possible before Kelly’s movie airs in December. The network might want us to start taping her new series right away—depends on how fast they can sign up a sponsor. We won’t have any trouble there, Kel, I’m sure of it. It’s good stuff, a sure-fire series idea. You’re lucky you got it finished before Nathan Shithead was arrested.’
‘Lucky. Yeah.’
‘Whassamadda with LeFever? Nick said sourly. ‘Not goodanuff for ya?’ Now there he was pretending to be dumb. Even he understood about having your own series.
Leonard started stroking Nick and I turned out. I didn’t know Mary Rendell, of course, but Marian Larch said she was only twenty when Ted killed her. A girl, for Christ’s sake—such a dangerous person that murder was the only answer? Seemed to me Ted Cameron was the big bad successful killer only when he came up against weak opponents like Rudy Benedict and Mary Rendell. But when he faced off against somebody a little slicker, like Nathan Pinking, Ted was the one to knuckle under. A lot of married, upwardly mobile types had Mary Rendells in their lives, but they didn’t kill them for crying out loud. They either handled the situation and got away with it or they didn’t handle it and got found out, but they didn’t become murderers rather than face a setback in their professional lives. And if Ted hadn’t killed Mary Rendell, he wouldn’t have had Rudy to worry about. He killed those two people simply because it was the easiest way to solve his problems—he wasn’t willing to make the effort to find another way. And if you don’t think that’s coldblooded, I’d like to know what the hell is.
And there I was, Little Miss Stars-in-Her-Eyes-and-Rocks-in-Her-Head. I never knew, I never suspected, I never had an inkling. Even when I figured out Ted was being blackmailed, I still didn’t believe he’d done anything bad. I was so besotted with the man I was even able to rationalize away blackmail. I wanted him to be a certain kind of man and I made him that kind of man, in my mind, I mean. It was just that I knew what I wanted and I decided he was it and I never saw what he really was. I never knew Ted Cameron at all.
Do you have any idea what it feels like to find out you’ve slept with a murderer? And not just once, but repeatedly? Try to imagine it—learning your bed partner is a killer. Kinky thrills, a real turn-on? Maybe for some people. Me—it just made me sick. I threw up every day for a week. Finally Leonard Zoff called and insisted I pull out of my ‘mulligrubs’—whatev
er they are. When I did, I found some changes had taken place in the world.
‘I was thinking of a new car for LeFever,’ Leonard was saying soothingly to Nick. ‘One of the flashier sports models. What do you say to that?’
‘I get to pick it out?’ Nick asked.
‘Who else?’
Sure you do, Nick. Don’t hold your breath, Nick.
Nathan Pinking’s production company was now Leonard Zoff’s production company. The way Leonard explained it, Nathan was still a minor partner and his share of the profits would go toward supporting his family while he was in prison. For some reason that Leonard didn’t explain, Nathan had had a choice only of either selling to Leonard or shutting down—which wouldn’t pay his family’s bills while Daddy was a guest of the state. So the long battle between the two had finally come to an end, and Leonard had won. With Nathan locked up for a goodly number of years, Leonard would have it all his own way.
You’d think he’d be on top of the world, wouldn’t you? Well, he wasn’t. As a matter of fact Leonard was kind of lackadaisical, going at the early taping of LeFever’s third season as if it was every bit as exciting as checking over last week’s laundry list. Nick was always half asleep anyway, and what with me just coming out of the blues, it wasn’t the most scintillating meeting I ever attended. Leonard was businesslike and all that; we were making plans and getting on with it. But Leonard had lost a lot of what my grandmother would have called his spizzer-inctum—his special up-and-at-’em kind of drive. Maybe it just wasn’t the same without Nathan Pinking to scrap with.
