Where the Truth Lies

GeM presents: Where the Truth Lies

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book exists because of my editor, Jon Karp.

He inspired, encouraged, cajoled, guided, honed, and “homed” these pages into whatever life they now live. He’s also a wonderful writer and a glorious librettist, which has made his compliments only more meaningful to me. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve such a noble ally, but he owns deed and title to my lifelong (and clearly inexpressible) thanks.

I’m deeply grateful to all at Random House for their patience, support, and enthusiasm while I stretched out the writing of this book over many years. Benjamin Dreyer, my production editor, and Bonnie Thompson, my copy editor, did their jobs not only adroitly but cleverly as well. I’m immensely thankful for (and in awe of) the craft they ply.

Working with Heather Schroder, my literary agent at ICM, has never been anything less than an absolute pleasure. Interacting with her astute mind and vivacious personality has been not only invaluable, but a true delight all along the way.

Before anyone sees or hears anything I create, it’s first auditioned, screened, sent back to the shop, cautioned, trimmed, aided, abetted, advised, and amended by my closest associate and beloved friend Teressa Esposito, whose memorable voice has been heard, both figuratively and literally, in virtually all of my work for the last ten years. I could not have written this book, nor much of anything else, without her. Thank you ever and always, Teressa.

Charles Dickens once said that he had in his heart of hearts a favorite child whose name was David Copperfield. I, too, have favorite children. Their names are Wendy, Nick, and Tim.

My daughter, Wendy, died at the age of ten. I miss her every day of my life, and the enduring memory of her goodness and grace has become what passes for my conscience. She was a beautiful, brilliant, gentle girl who was entitled to a lifetime.

My younger son, Tim, carries the weight of autism with literally unspeakable courage. I live and long for the day when he can talk to me and tell me what he has been feeling all these years. Until then, I treasure his smiles, I hold him, I wait.

My older son, Nick, was born after Wendy died, and did nothing less than save his parents’ lives. He gave us hope. He is a very funny and feeling and strong young man. I’m incredibly lucky and proud to be his father. Every page in this book represents an hour I couldn’t spend with him, for which I can only ask his understanding and forgiveness.

This book is dedicated to these children whom I so love, and particularly to the woman who is their mother and my wife, whom I’ve loved since and until forever.

About the Author

For his Broadway musicalThe Mystery of Edwin Drood, RUPERTHOLMESbecame the first person in theatrical history to solely receive Tony Awards for Best Book, Best Music, and Best Lyrics, whileDrood itself won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The Mystery Writers of America gave Holmes their coveted Edgar Award for his Broadway comedy-thrillerAccomplice, the second time he received their highest honor. He created and wrote all four seasons of the critically acclaimed Emmy Award–winning seriesRemember WENN, and most recently authored the Broadway playSay Goodnight, Gracie, based on the life of George Burns. Holmes began his career in the seventies as the writer and composer of story songs, some so intricate they’ve been included in several hardcover and softcover mystery collections from Ellery Queen.Where the Truth Lies is his first novel.

ONE

In the seventies, I had three unrelated lunches with three different men, each of whom might have done A Terrible Thing. The nature of their varying “things” ranged from obscene to unspeakable to unutterable, and you will surely understand if, as a writer, I was rather hoping that each had. (Done their particular Terrible Thing.)

In the case of my lunch with the first man, I knew by the time he rested his gold Carte Blanche card upon the meal’s sizable check that my hopes were abundantly justified.

In the case of the second lunch, even while a busboy filled our water tumblers, I realized that my dining companion was as innocent (and inevitably tedious) as a playful pup. But neither of these men need concern us here.

As for Man the Third (whom you shall meet in but a few paragraphs), I left our first repast feeling much the way I feel after a dinner ofchirashi and green tea … full but starving. To paraphrase Mark Twain regarding a literary puzzle, it seemed my studies had already thrown considerable darkness on the subject, and if my research continued, I would soon know nothing about the matter at all.

He had agreed to meet me for lunch at the restaurant of his choosing, Le Carillon, which is gone now but which was, for that particular month of the mid-seventies, the restaurant of choice for the Hollywood community. Lots of brass, both hanging on the walls and seated at the tables, was the look of the period. Heaps and heaps of flowers everywhere. I was greeted (if a full military dress inspection can be called a greeting) by a searingly stunning young girl who had almost as many inches on me as I had years on her. This is my way of saying that I was a jaded twenty-six when all this took place, and if you picture me at all, you might picture me five-five in height and fairly trim from a steady diet of Tab, menthol Virginia Slims, and encroaching deadlines for slick publications. I apparently was also fairly “cute,” or so lots of married men had taken the time to tell me.

I gave the hostess my name and she went searching for it in her reservation book, almost certainly the only book she had ever read through to the very end.

“O’Connor, O’Connor,”she murmured, pleased to have learned a new word.

“I’m meeting with Mr. Collins,” I added.

The Gossamer Girl (not just her hair—even her exposed navel was somehow gossamer) nodded in recognition and said, “Oh yes, he’s just finishing his first lunch.” She indicated the restaurant’s small bar. “If you’ll take a seat, Mizz O’Connor”—the use of “Ms.” was still quite new at the time, and she buzzed charmingly on the letters —“I’ll let you know when he’s ready.”

So it seemed I was taking a seat at the bar, which was tended by another fair Ophelia, who was just as uselessly lovely as the hostess. She stood on endless legs capped by a blank, beauteous face with the big, empty eyes of a murder victim. “Ophie” (as I’d now named her) asked me, with the delivery of an actress trying to give importance to a perfunctory part, what I’d like to drink.

“Dry vermouth on the rocks, twist. Noilly Prat if you have it,” I pronounced perfectly. This was my good-behavior drink. Vermouth on the rocks at lunch was the seventies equivalent of mineral water. We all drank at lunch in the seventies. How any competent work was done after three in the afternoon during that decade is, for me, as mysterious a question as the one I had for Mr. Collins, upon whose pleasure I was waiting.

There was a brass-framed mirror behind the bar, hung on the bottle-green velvet wall between an ornamental brass coal scuttle and an ornamental brass footbath. In the mirror, I could see the back of Vince Collins’s head. He was seated with a female who was dressed in a women’s business outfit of the time—pinstriped jacket, vest, extremely tight skirt riding high on her thighs. I couldn’t see Vince’s face, but the female’s alternated between an earnest“Does what I’m saying make any sense?” expression and an occasional giddy laugh, apparently more at something he had said than at something she had said. I couldn’t hear his voice as more than a low, burry murmur.

My vermouth was set before me by the Oph. I had the thought that when Vince finally allowed me to sit at the grown-ups’ table, I would not want to be making my business pitch while contending with food that required advanced cutlery skills. I had once tried to promote a series of essays on “high infidelity” to an editor atViva Magazine while simultaneously attempting to disassemble the near covey of quails that littered my plate. Never again. We were now, in the seventies, well into the Age of Egg-Based Skillet Cuisine, and I wondered if a ratatouille crepe or Gruyčre omelette was on the bill of fare. I certainly wasn’t going to order anything that couldn’t be cut with the side of my fork.

“Might I see a menu?” I asked of the Oph.

“Oh, don’t worry, they’ll be giving you one when you sit down at your table,” she reassured me in her most affable Braniff Airlines stewardess manner and moved to the other end of the bar.

In the mirror, Vince’s table companion laughed again, displaying several sets of teeth. Vince laughed as well, low and lovely, as one might expect from a pop recording artist who’d been heavily influenced by Crosby and Como.

In a magnificent manifestation of the Totally Disproportionate Reaction, I was now beginning to feel … rejected. Yes. Hurt, jilted by this man who had never met me. My ears were toasting with embarrassment and jealousy. His pinstriped lady friend in the mirror had become the embodiment of girls I’d loathed in high school—hurtful girls whose names I’d long ago forgotten, Janet Maitlin, Ann Rakowsky, Lisa Robb, Sarah Connelly, and Barbara Tozer. The goblet of vermouth before me was the humiliating punch bowl of the Sadie Hawkins dance where Kevin McMahon had arrived with me but danced the evening thereafter with another. And Vince—

“Mr. Collins is ready for you to join him at his new table,” said my perishable hostess.

I got down from my seat at the bar feeling, yes, a bit absurd about my wounded heart. My left eye saw Vince’s dining companion departing the restaurant. She had stopped to laugh with a table of men. One slid his hand onto her pinstriped rear end. She laughed at this as if her left buttock were the Algonquin Round Table and his flattened palm George S. Kaufman. The hostess led me like a sedated calf to a spanking-brand-new table where Vince was waiting upon my arrival. The restaurant’s lead busboy rushed around Vince, transferring his half-finished bourbon on the rocks and chaser from his prior table to our new table, wiping the glasses clean of condensation as he set them down.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Vince in an absurdly familiar baritone.

People think to themselves all sorts of things that would be embarrassing or humiliating if heard aloud, and thank God, they rarely voice them. As a writer, however, I’ve always felt it’s precisely my job to voice exactly such things and for you to enjoy hearing them and for me simply not to mind my embarrassment and humiliation … as a diabetic doesn’tmind a hypodermic injection, as a boxer doesn’tmind a sharp blow to the head. This is nothing more than the shamanlike obligation clearly stated in the job description when I first applied to the Famous Writers’ School for Famous Writing.

So I will voice that, in the moment when I first met Vince Collins, my rush of thoughts ran:My God he is truly gorgeous (gorgeousnot being a word I can recall ever using previously),He’s a little shorter than I thought he’d be, That cashmere turtleneck and camel’s hair jacket must have cost a fortune, andI wonder if he’s circumcised.

Please understand I was not thinking this last thought because there was anything visibly bulging in the vicinity of his crotch. I just had this premonition that I would have a definitive answer before I was done with him, or he with me.

It was, however, a very nicely trousered crotch.

“Not at all,” I said, which was a bit of a mismatch to his “Sorry to keep you waiting.” I sat, but as I attempted to segue into the clever opening I’d formulated over the course of several days and practiced to a state of careless perfection, Gossamer Girl intruded herself, bearing my half-finished vermouth from the bar. As she set the goblet down before me, its oversized straw fell out of the glass and onto the carpet.

“Oh, your straw,” she said, as if I were the one who’d dropped it. Reflexively, I reached to pick it up, but she corrected me. “Don’t do that,” she said. “We have more.” She gave a look at the busboy, pointing at the straw so that he and everyone else in the restaurant would see it. I looked back at Vince. My lemon wedge was sitting stupidly in the middle of my glass before me and I was sitting stupidly in the middle of my chair behind me. There we all were: my chair, my lemon, my straw, my self. “I’ve never been here before,” I said unfathomably.

“Have you had something to eat?” he asked.

“Oh sure, while cooling my heels at the bar I consumed a bowl of lobster bisque, Chateaubriand for two, potatoes lyonnaise, petit pois with pearl onions, scarfed up a half carafe of pallid claret, and concluded with a large Dairy Queen dipped in rainbow sprinkles. You made a lunch appointment with me, I’ve been seated at your table all of forty seconds, and you want to know if I’ve eaten. Of course I haven’t eaten.”

Of course I didn’t say this. I opted instead for a chipper “No, but actually I had a late breakfast. I’m not really very hungry.”

A waiter appeared. Vince looked at him and said, “Nope.” The waiter understood and turned to me. Vince counseled, “If you’re hungry, the soft-shell crabs here are out of this world.”

“Soft-shell crabs it is,” I intoned smoothly with a small-mouthed smile, handing the waiter my menu while suppressing a tidal wave of absolute panic. I’ve avoided soft-shell crabs my entire life. I’m not comfortable with any mode of consuming them. I’ve actually seen people hold them in both hands, biting away at an entire dead animal as if it were a foul gray sandwich. I hate soft-shell crabs.