Where the Truth Lies (25 page)

Scaglia had been in his mid-thirties when he’d escorted Lanny and Vince to their press conference for the Casino del Mar and then on to their hotel suite. He had a pleasant office now, with a plastic cube on his desk containing photos of his wife and two daughters, and a small plastic Oscar award inscribedBEST DAD IN THE WORLD .

I explained that I had no official standing, saying simply that if he were to provide me with information I would give him credit for his contribution within my book. He asked if I could make clear that his name was pronounced without theg, and I said that if I were to quote him in my book, I would do that. Thus assured, he offered, “Sally Santoro and his people—” He stopped and asked me, “Can this part be off the record?”

I nodded solemnly and assured him that I always retained total discretion in the event of such a request, which he foolishly took to mean yes. Reassured, he explained, “Sally had a pretty tight relationship with the state police—he still does—so when somebody said Sally needed some cops to work security for him, we were always glad to help. As long as he wasn’t committing an actual felony, we tried to keep a respectful, cooperative relationship with Sally’s people. They were very supportive of the police, except of course where crime was concerned. But they brought a tremendous amount of income into the area, as you can imagine.”

I could. It turned out it was Jack who’d found the cleaning lady (who was the first to discover the body) and then Maureen O’Flaherty herself.

“I’d never seen such a beautiful dead woman before,” he confided as I passed on his offer of a drink and watched him pour a Four Roses for himself in his office at three in the afternoon. “The water came just a little above her nose.” He held out his thumb and index finger to indicate. “That much. Imagine that much water being the difference between life and death.”

I asked him if the coroner had actually determined the cause of death. I knew most of this already from newspaper files, but I hoped maybe he’d have something new to say on the subject, especially if it might make Lanny look bad. He smiled patiently as he added some water to the Four Roses from a small pitcher on his desk. “You try lying underwater in a bathtub for a couple of hours without a snorkel. What do you think you’d die from?”

“So she drowned?”

“Of course she drowned.”

“Why?” I asked.

He looked at his watch. “Look, I thought— What do you mean, ‘Why?’”

I indicated a pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes on his desk. “May I?” I asked. He looked annoyed but nodded his assent. I took my time extracting one from the pack. “I mean, you and I take baths all the time. We don’t drown in them.”

He reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a book of matches from somewhere called the Bicycle Club and lit me. “There was some talk that she’d mixed sleeping pills and booze—not that she was a suicide, you understand. Just passed out.”

“No signs of violence?”

Funny. I felt like I knew more about this than he did, and he’d been there. He sat down in the chair next to mine and pulled at his lower lip. “Are we still off the record?”

People hear what they want to hear. I said, “Jack, no one is going to hear anything unless it’s with my say-so, and I guess you can imagine how I would feel about that. Do you even see me writing anything down? I’m looking for context here.” I said it fast and smooth and none of it was technically a lie.

Jack lit one of his hundred-millimeter-length cigarettes. “Okay. Well, look. The Casino del Mar was a huge deal for Sally Santoro, for everyone. It was a chance to turn the town into what Atlantic City thinks it’s going to be. Only we were close to Manhattan, so it could have been even bigger. It got launched with this tremendous publicity push from Vince and Lanny … and this dumb girl shows up dead. Nothing was going to resurrect her. It was in everyone’s interest”—he lowered his voice a little—“especially Sally’s interest, for this not to get blown way out of proportion. So the whole investigation was sped along, and she was cremated here, and that was that.”

I nodded. “I think I asked you if there were any signs of violence on her body.”

“The coroner said—”

“Jack, I’m asking you. You saw her body long before the coroner did. I’m just asking you what you saw, for gosh sakes.”

So he told me. Her body was blue. There were scratches on her torso, but they were a little unusual looking, because they weren’t really cuts but more like welts. The medical examiner hadn’t thought much of the marks, but Scaglia also conveyed in as many words that there weren’t a lot of great medical examiners outside of the big cities back then. In those days, a forensic specialist was generally assumed to be an alcoholic doctor with a strong conscience who’d opted to perform surgery only on people he couldn’t possibly kill.

The medical examiner had ventured that the marks might have come from some activity prior to Maureen’s death, perhaps something sexual. Scaglia told me that any time something couldn’t be explained, the coroner’s office tended to imply that there was a range of perverse sexual activity indulged in by the kinds of shameless people who allowed themselves to be discovered dead.

Looking for any wiggle room in Lanny’s alibi, I asked Scaglia what the consensus had been regarding the time of death. He said the coroner had based his finding on the onset of rigor mortis, the stiffening contraction of muscles after death. Where present, rigor mortis tends to start setting in about six to nine hours after the fact, or at least that was the rule of thumb back in the late fifties. However, in the case of Maureen O’Flaherty, the estimated time of death was placed as being considerably more recent than six hours, owing to the fact that the victim had died while taking a bath. The warmer the temperature, the sooner the stiffening kicks in. In a hot or even warm bath, her body would have responded as if she were living (or rather, dying) in a tropical climate, where rigor mortis often occurs almost instantly. When her body was found by Scaglia and examined by the coroner, the stiffening effect had just started. The coroner placed the time of death as being two to three hours, at the very most, before she was discovered.

The numbers provided by the coroner completely exonerated both of the boys. Even at the most outside time of twelve hours for the onset of rigor mortis, Vince and Lanny still had the best alibi available in the twentieth century: they’d been on camera, live, in front of millions of witnesses. Their “nap” breaks had been in their dressing rooms, which in the Miami studios had no windows; there was a guard posted outside their doors to ensure that no one accidentally or intentionally interrupted their sleep. Most important, the naps never went longer than a few hours, and the fastest private airplane could not get from Florida to New Jersey and back in that amount of time, even discounting traveling to and from the airports and, of course, the few additional minutes required to commit a murder.

The coroner had tested for the presence of semen—Scaglia had a little trouble telling me this part and even blushed a bit—and the response was a clinical positive, but he could find no actual presence of ejaculate (as Scaglia chose to put it). So the indication was that, yes, the victim had had sex sometime in the week before she died but with the limited science of the late fifties, that was all that could be deduced.

“Then from when you and your partner first arrived at the Casino, there was no time when Lanny or Vince wasn’t in full view of more than one other person?” I asked, knowing the answer. Scaglia said it was impossible for them to have slipped away, that not only had he and his partner, a man named Ted Dolinger, been at their side right up until Maureen’s body was found, but that the press had been watching them too, in large numbers. They’d even done a live television interview.

So my trip to Palisades Park had only affirmed what the gossip columnists had reluctantly been forced to concede at the time: that Vince and Lanny couldn’t be pinned to the girl’s death, despite the fact that she was found in their hotel suite and (as later came out) was acquainted with them. What she was doing in their hotel (and in their bathtub, for that matter), how she had gotten there from Miami, and whether her death was by accident or foul play were unsolved mysteries and likely to remain so as the years went by. Through a supposed clerical error, Maureen’s body had been converted into ashes shortly after a lackadaisical autopsy had left a ton of unturned stones lying about in a heap. Her cremation’s inferno ensured that the scent would grow cold for any future investigations.

Once it was clear that our boys could not be directly connected to Maureen’s death, the powerful columnists of the time handled the story a variety of ways. Kilgallen’s was the cleverest: she immediately became their champion, countering all the wicked rumors and falsehoods that were circulating, thereby doing a splendid job of circulating all the wicked rumors and falsehoods. Winchell (who was slipping in popularity) saw the Mafia’s black hand in the girl’s death, and certainly Lanny and Vince had some gaudy mob ties that they weren’t shy of wearing in public. In a similar vein, Jack O’Brien speculated that the late Miss O’Flaherty had caught the eye of Sally Santoro in Florida and when the mob boss had learned that she had the hots for one of the duo, he’d had her laid out dead as a big wet surprise for our two lads. From his viper’s den in Miami, Moe Cohn was a spoilsport about the boys’ alibi; apparently, if he couldn’t say anything bad about Vince or Lanny, he opted to say nothing at all. He never mentioned them in his column again but instead heaped lavish, bland praise on their competition. It didn’t make for interesting reading, and by the end of the year, his column had been dropped, theMiami Sentinel opting for shorter, racier items with lurid pictures to go with them.

But although Maureen’s death couldn’t be pinned on Vince and Lanny, the yellow press had not hesitated to wonder aloud what she’d been doing in their intended suite. Perhaps she’d been taking a bath with the plan of slipping herself between the cool sheets to lie in wait (and wait in heat) for one of our two boys to tuck himself into her. If so, was this meant to be a surprise for one or both of the boys (perhaps coordinated by a grateful Sally Santoro) … or was Maureen there at Lanny’s or Vince’s request? There had been nothing in Lanny’s memoir to indicate that either man was genuinely smitten with Ms. O’Flaherty. Why would she be recruited all the way from Miami when there were undoubtedly a score of superbly skilled courtesans in the New York area?

Scaglia relayed most of what little new information he had to offer at the Bicycle Club, an upscale singles bar near the entrance to the Palisades Parkway. He’d said he could talk more freely there. Certainly he had to talk more loudly. Although he was a family man, I noticed that our waitress knew Scaglia by his first name and relayed an urgent message to him from someone named Cheryl, who was wondering why she hadn’t heard from him.

I asked him, with a look of passionate interest that I assumed he would overinterpret: “But is there anything else you can remember, Jack, something you alone might have noticed or heard at the time that might have been overlooked by others?”

He peered around furtively at the happy-hour crowd, then returned his eyes to me. “Listen, as it happens thereis something else. But this wouldn’t be the place to talk about it. We’d have to … go somewhere private.”

Where would that be? I asked. He suggested a motel about four minutes away.Quelle surprise! So we got in his orange Datsun station wagon and drove down to the Cresskill Inn, nice as flophouses go but a bit tawdry for a Norman Rockwell type of village. He made the checkin arrangements with the manager, who, from my vantage point parked outside his office, seemed to know Jack almost as well as did the waitress at the Bicycle Club.

The motel room had all the amenities: a bed. There was also a chair by the combination desk and dresser. I sat on the amenable bed as Jack looked around the room, elated over its ice bucket. He suggested that he get some ice from the machine outside. He had a bottle of Four Roses in the glove compartment of his car—

“Jack,” I smiled. “We’re here so we can speak more privately. So let’s get business out of the way first and then … well, the night is young.” Actually it was a little after fiveP .M. and the sun was still shining brightly, so the night was barely embryonic.

Scaglia exhaled with a sigh. “You can’t say where you heard this,” he cautioned.

I laughed. “Would I be likely to put in my book that I checked into the Cresskill Inn with you?”

He frowned. “I mean that you heard it from me.”

“Oh, I would just say the information came from a reliable source.”

Jack Scaglia looked relieved. A Reliable Source took another drag of his Benson & Hedges cigarette and began: “The police like to withhold some information about a crime scene from the media and the public. It helps them sort out who might know something and who’s lying. So therewas something strange about the girl’s body that was never mentioned in the press.”

“You mean the marks on her torso and legs?”

He shook his head. “No. This was something a little more unusual. I’m not sure if anyone noticed right away. Two of her toes were cut off.”

Okay.

“Two toes on one foot or one on each?” I asked.

“Two on one foot. Pinkie toe and the one next to it. Like they were cut at the same time, maybe with the same blade.”

“Was there blood in the tub water?”

“The water wasn’t bloody or anything, no. There was a little ‘stuff’ in the water … bodies can, um, leak a bit after death.”

“Was the cut clean?”

“Well, I heard it was. The coroner pointed it out to some of the detectives involved in the investigation. I didn’t notice her toes when I found the body. I mean, what I was looking at was not her toes.”

I’d heard of the Mafia cutting off someone’s fingers, professional cardsharps or dealers who were caught manipulating cards. Never toes.

People with diabetes might have to have a toe cut off if they developed oozing gangrene, but Maureen hadn’t been diabetic. If she had been, there would have been speculation that she’d suffered from insulin shock or gone into a diabetic coma.