The Renewable Virgin (22 page)

His connection with aspiring artist Mary Rendell turned out to be sexual after all. He said she was ‘a mistake I once made'—thus casually dismissing a human life in so callous a manner that whatever possible sympathy I had left for him was utterly destroyed. When it was time for their affair to end, twenty-year-old Mary Rendell had been shocked and unbelieving. She wouldn't let go. Cameron himself was only thirty at the time and not as experienced in handling sticky situations as he was later to become. An uncle who was then president of Cameron Enterprises was on the verge of retirement; and Ted, brightest new star in the Cameron firmament, was terrified that an extramarital scandal might queer his chances for the job. Cameron Enterprises was a large conglomerate now, but it was still a
family
business.

So poor, naïve Mary Rendell had to go. Ted Cameron poisoned her, and lived in constant fear of discovery for months afterwards. He became president of Cameron Enterprises over Aunt Augusta's strenuous objections (she'd wanted the job for herself); and as soon as he safely could, he moved the corporate headquarters to New York. A new start in a new place; he even had a new wife by then.

Things went well for him after that; he had years of smooth sailing. Cameron had reconciled himself to the fact that he was a successful murderer. Business was good; he'd turned out to be the right choice for Cameron Enterprises' chief executive—a fact that kept Aunt Augusta at bay. His second marriage failed, but he quickly discovered that the life of a rich, unmarried man in New York City wasn't all that hard to take. No unsurmountable problems in his life.

And then one day a snapshot arrived in the mail, a snapshot of a painting in which Cameron's face was easily recognizable. On the back of the snapshot was written
Man and Shadow, painted by Mary Rendell
. Cameron had not known of the existence of the painting. Mary had probably been saving it as a surprise. ‘She was like that,' he said off-handedly.

I wondered—not for the first time—why Mary Rendell had put her lover in the shadow position in her painting. Perhaps she'd instinctively sensed there was something basically insubstantial about Ted Cameron. Or was it just her way of saying she didn't completely understand this man she was so involved with?

It was Rudy Benedict who'd sent Ted Cameron the photo. When the two men met, Rudy was the nervous one. He told Cameron they'd run into each other in California years ago, that, in fact, he'd been a guest at the party Ted and his first wife had thrown the night Mary Rendell was killed. Ted didn't remember him.

The relationship between would-be blackmailer and blackmailee-elect had been a strange one. Rudy Benedict clearly had never tried anything like that before in his life, and he was
very
uncomfortable. His approach, Ted Cameron said, was that of an insecure job applicant while he himself had been cast in the role of prospective employer. Rudy wanted Ted to understand
why
he was putting the screws on him; that was important to him.

So Ted Cameron had nodded sympathetically and listened to poor, second-rate Rudy Benedict's dreams of theatrical and literary glory. This pretended interest Rudy mistook for sympathy; he began to relax a little. All he wanted, he said, was living expenses until he could get one play written and produced. Just one, that was all. When his play opened, he would hand over
Man and Shadow
to Ted Cameron. Whether the play succeeded or flopped made no difference. Rudy just wanted to be taken care of until he had his foot in the stage door. His blackmailing ambitions were so limited it didn't even occur to him to demand that Ted Cameron put up the money for the production of his unwritten play. All he wanted was an
allowance
.

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.