The Renewable Virgin (9 page)

‘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.'

She nodded absently as she lifted an armful of folders out of the file cabinet. Then as I started to leave, she said, ‘Oh—will we be back by ten?'

I lifted my shoulders. ‘I doubt it. Why?'

‘This is Thursday—
LeFever
's on at ten. They're into re-runs now—you did know the episode your son worked on is showing tonight, didn't you?'

‘No, I didn't know—and I would like to see it. Thank you for mentioning it.'

‘Did you miss it the first time?'

‘I don't have a television set. We'll watch at the Morrisseys.' I saw her eyes grow large and hurried to cut her off. ‘When my set broke down a few years back, I somehow never got around to having it repaired. I'll call you in time to get ready for dinner.'

I left before she could answer. I knew what she was thinking:
Her son was a TV writer and she didn't even bother to watch?

Roberta Morrissey had cooked her usual roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, although the weather was getting too warm for so heavy a meal. But Marian Larch loved it; she ate with gusto, murmuring compliments between bites that had Roberta beaming. Both the Morrisseys accepted her without question, although I think Drew had been expecting someone more glamorous.

Marian told them she did secretarial work for Nathan Pinking's production company. ‘I read audience mail, type up script changes, things like that.' She told how each new script change was typed on a different color paper to help keep them straight. Color-coded script changes! The kindergarten approach to records-keeping. I'm sure Marian was making it all up as she went along, but on the whole she told a convincing story.

After dinner Roberta took my guest off to show her where the bathroom was while Drew and I cleared the table. ‘When is your book due out?' he asked.

‘Publication date is November fourteenth. But it will probably be available before then. You know how that goes.'

Drew nodded. His last book—about the Battle of Shiloh—had been published almost four years earlier, but he was through with all that now; he'd said at the time it would be his last book. Since then Drew had published a couple of short follow-up articles, unable to leave it alone—but that was all. Roberta liked to say Drew and I were both unabashedly drawn to violence, since we confined our efforts to military history. We were still talking publications when Roberta came back with Marian Larch, who wanted to know what my book was about.

‘It's a biography of Lord Lucan,' I told her, ‘not the present one but the Lord Lucan who fought in the Crimean War.' Silence. ‘Nineteenth Century?' I wasn't particularly surprised at the blank look she gave me. ‘He was one of the four men responsible for that bloody mistake known as the Charge of the Light Brigade.'

‘Aha,' Marian said, her face lighting up. ‘The raglan sleeve!'

‘Very good,' Drew laughed. ‘And the cardigan sweater.'

She didn't know that one, so I said, ‘Lord Raglan gave the order to charge and Lord Cardigan carried it out. Except that the order Raglan gave wasn't the one Cardigan followed—it was so vaguely worded it was misunderstood. Lucan was the man in the middle. He was in a position to stop the slaughter but didn't.'

‘Lord Look-on,' Drew said.

‘That's what his men called him,' I told Marian, ‘even before that infamous charge. A very cautious, unimaginative man who would do nothing without direct orders.'

‘That makes three,' Marian said. ‘You said four men were responsible.'

‘Primarily. The fourth was a young officer named Lewis Nolan. Undoubtedly the most intelligent of the four, but he behaved stupidly at the moment of crisis. He was an impatient young man—full of contempt for the slow-moving, incompetent type of British officer that infested Victoria's army during the entire Crimean campaign. Men such as Lord Raglan, Lord Lucan, and Lord Cardigan.'

Marian smiled and shook her head. ‘How could Lucan have stopped it?'

‘Chain of command. Lord Raglan was up on a ridge overlooking a long valley, and he could see along the ridge to his right where some Russian troops were capturing the few British cannon lined up there. Raglan wanted the Light Brigade to charge up the slope and scatter the Russians. That's what light cavalry was for—quick, darting action. So Raglan dictated an order saying the Light Brigade was to prevent the enemy from carrying away “the guns”. What he neglected to say was
which
guns. Raglan forgot that people down at the bottom of a hill can't see the same things that people on top of a hill can see.'

‘Or read minds,' Roberta smiled.

‘Lewis Nolan carried the message,' I went on. ‘He delivered it to Lord Lucan, the commander of the Cavalry Division, who was to pass the order on to the commander of the Light Brigade under him. A confused Lucan asked what guns did Raglan mean. And hotheaded young Lewis Nolan flung out his arm and pointed down the valley to the
Russian
guns, the enemy cannon.
“There
are your guns!” he answered quite insolently.'

That was the crux of the whole affair—that moment between Lucan and Nolan. ‘It's been well over a century since that young man flung out his arm and pointed to the wrong guns,' I said, ‘and we're still trying to figure out why he did it. But whatever the reason, Lord Lucan passed on the order that the Light Brigade, designed only for quick skirmishes, remember, was expected to charge Russian cannon. Lucan should have demanded a confirming order.'

‘Cardigan
should have demanded a confirming order,' Drew muttered. ‘What an ass. Leading his men into so obvious a death trap.'

‘Lord Cardigan was the commander of the Light Brigade,' I told Marian Larch, who kept nodding her head through all this. ‘He was the one who actually had to carry out the order, and I don't think there was a more stupid man in the whole British army than Lord Cardigan. The man had the brain of a bird.'

‘A peacock,' Drew said.

‘So that birdbrain actually led men armed only with sabres in a charge against cannon. Nearly seven hundred men rode into that valley. Fewer than two hundred rode back out. Cardigan himself survived the charge, but the entire light cavalry was virtually wiped out in less than twenty minutes. And the whole thing was a mistake.'

‘Responsibility ultimately lies with the commanding officer,' Drew said sententiously.

‘Of course,' I said. ‘Besides, it was Raglan's vague wording that caused the misunderstanding in the first place. But that's the odd thing about this battle. Everyone who writes about it feels compelled to take sides—it's intriguing the way so many reputable historians forget they are supposed to be disinterested analysts and instead become passionate partisans once they start writing about the Charge of the Light Brigade. Excepting Cecil Woodham-Smith, of course. She just states flatly they were
all
a passel of fools.'

‘Why do you write about English history?' Marian Larch wanted to know.

I smiled. ‘Why not leave English history to the English, you mean? It used to be that way, but the invention of the airplane changed all that.'

‘And the foundations,' Drew added. ‘Don't forget the foundations.'

‘Lord, no,' I said. ‘I'd never have been able to write my
Life of Lucan
without grants to pay for all those trips to London. But national origins aren't important to historians, not really. The English have turned out to be the best French historians. And the Germans are doing good work in Soviet history.'

Roberta leaned toward Marian. ‘Did you know Fiona's book is the first full biography of Lord Lucan ever written?'

Marian looked at me in surprise. ‘Really?'

‘That's right,' I said. ‘Millions and millions of words written about the Crimean War, and nobody ever got around to doing a study of Lucan's life.' I laughed. ‘Probably because he was such a stodgy, predictable man.' I stopped; I'd been going to mention something Lucan had done in Ireland but an expression had appeared on Marian Larch's face that I recognized. It was the glazed-eye look of those who don't really care what happened before they were born.

We talked desultorily of other things until ten o'clock, the hour of
LeFever
. The Morrisseys had an elaborate, big-screen television console, purchased at Roberta's insistence back when the BBC first announced plans to produce all of Shakespeare's plays. The set tended to dominate the room.

Rudy was one of three writers listed in
LeFever
's credits. I'd once thought that meant a big budget, but Rudy had told me the script fees were fixed by the Screen Writers' Guild and more than one writer simply meant the money had to be split. I listened carefully, but I couldn't hear any lines that sounded more like Rudy than any others. That was good from the show's viewpoint, I suppose, that kind of homogeneity. But this episode was of the sort that had caused me to drift away from watching television in the first place.

It was the kind of story in which the viewer quickly learned to stop listening and just watch. The lines were dull, the plot slow and disconnected. There was no meaning to be found; the script discouraged active participation, it discouraged thinking. It was as bland as oatmeal. The people and the settings, on the other hand, were
beautiful
. Envy-arousing beautiful. The hero, LeFever, was a vain, muscular young man who posed his attractive body against a variety of luxurious backgrounds. No scenes took place on dirty streets or in slum buildings. The fad for picturing New York as a sewer must have passed; these things probably went in cycles.

And then there was Kelly Ingram. Her role was a lot smaller than LeFever's, but when she was in a scene with the hero,
she
was the one you looked at. I wondered if the actor playing LeFever knew that; he didn't strike me as being particularly bright.

‘What a
beautiful
woman,' Roberta murmured. Drew, who'd been in danger of falling asleep, opened one eye.

‘That's Kelly Ingram,' Marian Larch said. ‘She's even more beautiful in person.'

‘Oh, that's right—you know all these people, don't you? Do you know her, Fiona?'

I said I'd met her. There
was
something about Kelly Ingram; if appearance was all it took, she was bound to become a star. Her movements were graceful and unstudied. She walked like a dancer—no, that's wrong; dancers waddle like ducks when they walk. Kelly Ingram walked
as if she were dancing;
that was better.

Her role was that of an adjective describing the noun hero. She was the sexually available but eternally fresh female, experienced innocence personified, the kind of woman whose virginity is renewable upon demand. We were supposed to think that if LeFever could have a woman like that gazing upon him adoringly, then he must be one hell of a man. The same little-boy notion of manhood that has always kept women prone in a male society. I wasn't too surprised to find the Ingram woman helping perpetuate the notion.

The show came to its bland conclusion. Marian Larch and I thanked the Morrisseys and took our leave. On the way home my guest started to say something but stopped. I think she was going to ask me what I thought of the show but then changed her mind.

Marian winnowed a few letters out of Rudy's business correspondence that she wanted to take back with her. They were all concerned with details about scripts Rudy had contracted to write and didn't seem especially significant to me—but historians never give up papers without a fight, so I told Marian I'd take them to school with me and get them photocopied. That was agreeable to her.

She was making plans to leave early Saturday when I asked her to tell me honestly what progress had been made in finding Rudy's killers. I told her I was considering hiring detectives.

‘That's your privilege, of course,' she said. ‘But it's my opinion you'd just be wasting your money, Dr. Benedict. This isn't one of those cases where a private operative can go in and do things the police can't. In fact, we have resources private agencies don't. It's the lack of motive that has us stumped. We can't find even a hint of a reason why anyone would want your son dead.'

‘Then you are stumped.'

A pause. ‘Yes. We are. I'm sorry. Rudy had the usual number of people in his life who didn't particularly like him, but nobody hated him—which I'm told is unusual in television. Of all the people he knew, there's not one you could call a real enemy. There was no woman in his life at the moment—he and Kelly Ingram were just beginning to get together. He wasn't engaged in any illegal money-making scheme we could find out about. The medical examiner said he wasn't a user. There's nothing. That's why Captain Michaels sent me here—in the hope there might be something to give us a lead.'