Where the Truth Lies (27 page)

She was kneeling now at the foot of the peach tree and digging a small hole with the spade. She dropped the peach into the hole and smiled up at me. “Once Frank had planted the idea in my head that Maureen was now part of the tree, I couldn’t let the fruit rot on the ground, to be pecked at or carried away by the birds, like vultures would do to carrion. So I have to bury every peach that falls. Which helps replenish the tree.”

I watched her as she covered over the peach with dirt.

“That must be a tremendous amount of work,” I said sympathetically.

“Next month it will take every minute of my day,” she said, patting the earth flat. “It keeps me occupied. I’m grateful to God for that.”

She got up, put the spade back in the empty flower pot, wiped her hands on a thin towel in the kitchen, and led me to the front door. I thanked her for her valuable time. She nodded slowly.

“My daughter was studying to be an English teacher. She went to Miami Beach for a spring vacation. After that, all we got from her for a few years were postcards and phone calls. When she died, I received a check with a typed letter calling it an ‘anonymous gift of bereavement.’”

“May I ask the amount of the check?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.” She laughed bitterly. “If it were a hundred times that, what good would it do? I put it in a savings account, and when I die, it will all go to the church.”

“Do you remember the account the check was drawn on?”

“It was what they call a bank check. The note itself was typewritten on plain paper. Frank kept it. Later he said he’d thrown it away.” She opened the front door, and indicated the path. “So, Miss O’Connor, I can tell you the question I would most like you to ask Mr. Vince Collins, or anyone else who might have the answer to it, for that matter. I hope you’ll commit it to memory. It’s a question that I hopeyou never have to ask yourself. Why did my daughter die?”

I said I would ask the question and told her where she could contact me if she wanted to. I thanked her for her time and apologized if I’d stirred up any painful feelings. She said I hadn’t stirred up a thing.

I walked down the path and for a long time after that. I could have called the Bluebird Taxi company from the O’Flaherty house, but I opted not to. I simply walked downhill on the assumption that towns are rarely uphill of the residential area.

My slow descent eventually brought me onto Huguenot Street, where I saw a sign directing me to the train station. As I walked through New Rochelle’s rendition of an urban ghetto, I realized that there is no such thing as the right side of the tracks. Respectable people live nowhere near the tracks.

I didn’t ask when the next train was, but merely stood on the Manhattan-bound platform until one pulled in. I may have waited for twenty or thirty minutes. There was an additional charge for purchasing my ticket on the train.

I looked out the window. When Maureen O’Flaherty was born, a great deal of New Rochelle had still been farmland. That had all gone away, but someone here was still working the soil with her own two hands.

SEVENTEEN

We had intentionally timed it so that I wouldn’t leave for Los Angeles until after Beejay had returned to New York. Her morning flight was scheduled to arrive in the late afternoon; mine was to leave at nine that night. If there were no delays on her end, we would have dinner together before I took a cab to JFK.

I opened her apartment door and she screamed a loud, shrill howl of delight that would have put a car alarm to shame. “Oh God, it isso weird for you to be on that side of the door and me to be on this side!” she laughed. She walked in, her suitcase banging into a small table she ought to have remembered was there, sending a deluxe box of Crayolas flying.

“Beejay, I’ve needed you.” I poured myself into her arms for sympathy, but she was having none of that. She’d already talked through the dearly departed Mr. Morris with me over the phone several times during the course of the past week. She gave me a quick hug and shook me off.

“Yeah yeah, there you were, saving yourself all these years for that special someone and then the Big Movie Star passes through town and he deflowers you.” She hoisted her suitcase onto the elevated bed. “I refuse to let you act victimized here. What were you thinking, that you’d be the third Mrs. Morris?”

I sat down in her uncomfortable beanbag chair. “If I’d known I was going to be tossed out with the empty bottles of complimentary shampoo, I would have at least questioned him more about his career, about Vince, and especially about the Girl in New Jersey. But no, I had to get all dewy-breathed and exchange sweet nothings. So totally unprofessional of me.”

“Yeah yeah. He was good, huh?”

“Yes.”

“How big?”

“I had no complaints.”

“Come on, this is me, length and girth, please: two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate … ?”

I gave her the details she craved and a blow-by-blow description of what we did and she was placated for the moment. The fact that the sex had been really good made her slightly more sympathetic to me. Oddly, I’d found myself no less wounded or angry or rejected over the last several days. I hoped that putting New York three thousand miles away from me would put Lanny well behind me. I started packing the last of my clothes.

Beejay tossed a manuscript alongside the pantsuit I was folding. It was the chapter from Lanny’s autobiography that had been sent to my apartment under such odd circumstances. I’d decided that some paralegal or trainee from the offices of Weisner, Hillman and Dumont had relayed it to me without a cover letter explaining its why and wherefore. I put the pages into my flight bag. I’d only heard Beejay’s synopsized version of the manuscript; my flight home would be a fine chance to read through it carefully.

Beejay lit a cigarette. “When are you going to start interviewing Vince Collins?”

“I’m planning to call him tomorrow and set up something for as early as the next day.”

“You going to tell him about you and Lanny?”

I’d been thinking about this all day. “I don’t see that I need to, or that I really owe him that information. Our agreement allows me to research his life, interview the people he’s worked with—”

Beejay smiled. “’Interview.’ Is that what we’re going to call what you did with Lanny Morris?”

“No, if it’d been that, I’d have gotten something more useful out of him. But honestly, do I have any moral obligation to tell Vince who I’ve slept with in the past?”

“Well, it’s pretty bogus of you not to let him know, but then again, I suppose it could really screw up your working relationship with Vincenzo.” She was using the nickname that absolutely none of Vince’s friends ever used.

I’d been so busy calculating my side and Lanny’s side of the equation that I’d not thought much about how Vince might react to the revelation. He and Lanny had had a marriage of sorts, or at least their split-up had been like a divorce.“Excuse me, Elizabeth Taylor, I’d like to write a book in which you reveal to me all your innermost thoughts, fears, and desires—and oh, by the way, may I mention what a fan tastic lay your ex-husband Richard Burton is! Yes, we just had sex yesterday. But back to you, Liz, and remember, you can open up to me as much as you want.”

God, I reallyhad been stupid, hadn’t I? Beejay stubbed out her cigarette hastily. “Can we eat right away? I’m starving.”

“You didn’t eat on the plane?”

She looked annoyed with me. “I don’t get to fly like you do, I’m stuck back in coach. The choice of entrées was ‘meat’ or ‘not meat.’ I told the stewardess I was hungry enough to eat a horse and she said I should definitely have the meat entrée. I haven’t had a good meal in over a week.” I asked why that was and a pained look came over her face. “Honeycake, may I be blunt with you about that painted desert with a sprinkler system you call Los Angeles? Your apartment is lovely, the men are prettier than I am, but what in God’s name do you people do forfood out there? There’s nowhere ethnic, it’s all Robert Redford Restaurants, the blond leading the bland! Italian cuisine means a pizza burger, Japanese is a teriyaki burger, French means fries. Mexico is less than a hundred and fifty miles away, but despite that, they’ve come up with this thing called ‘Taco Bell,’ and when I ate one of their burritos, I found myself saying, ‘Gee, Toto, I think we’re still in Kansas!’”

I’d only been half-listening while picking up her scattered deluxe Crayolas. “So—where do you want to eat, Beejay?” I asked.

She grabbed my arm. “Spice. Flavor. Nothing with cheese. No ground beef. I want to go to a restaurant where no waiter named Brad asks us if we’ve ever dined here before and then explains to us how it all ‘works.’ As a matter of fact, I’d prefer it if our waiter hardly spoke English at all. I want jagged, ballsy New York foreign food.”

The obvious answer struck me. “Look, Beejay, I know you’re the New Yorker here, but have you ever had Szechuan cuisine?”

Fuck Lanny Morris, I thought (while noting that I’d recently acquired much personal insight into that particular profanity). I considered how nice it would be to reclaim the Szechuan Garden on Doyers Street with Beejay, wrest it from Lanny, and make it our own. And it would be fun to watch Beejay’s expression as she tasted these shocking new flavors, like taking a friend to a clever whodunit you’ve already seen, and watching their reaction as they encounter the surprise twist you now already know.

We headed up a few steps into the restaurant. I wondered if Lee, the manager, would recognize me.

“Oh, I know you!” called out Lee, pointing at me with the index fingers of both hands. “You come here with Mr. Lanny Morris!” he proclaimed so that others in the restaurant would hear him, employing what I now firmly believed was a completely fraudulent accent. He showed me the autographed photo on the wall he had shown me before. “You bring your friend”—he pumped Beejay’s hand—“to the hottest restaurant in New York! Ah, you bring champagne, good, we open for you. Where you want to sit, here?”

He made it seem as if it were our choice, but in fact he steered us quite emphatically to a small table against the wall; there really wasn’t much else available. In an instant a metal ice bucket was set down on the table and a bottle of cold Mumm’s we’d bought near Beejay’s apartment was plonked into the sloshing ice and water. Two old-fashioned champagne goblets were set down in front of us. A waiter efficiently opened our bottle and filled them.

Lee was at our side. “You want me to order dishes that Mr. Lanny Morris likes?He come here often, ” he added loudly for the benefit of any nearby tables.

I very much wanted Beejay to taste the cascading flavors I’d recently experienced, which had gloriously flambéed themselves on my palate. She’d love every mouthful, I knew. But I was also smarting that Lanny had been fanfared by Lee more than I liked. We had walked in on our own, we had brought our own booze, and we would be paying our own check. But Lee was making me feel as if we were Lanny’s guests.

Then I realized the one thing I could order that would make me feel as if I’d momentarily trumped the Loathsome Lanny.

“Lee,” I said, “we’d love to have the, uh, king-pow chicken and the lamb in tea sauce, but you know what we’d also like to try? That, um, dish that Lanny sent back, lobster in chile sauce with, with … ?”

“Lobster! I knew you weren’t a Jew!” he said more loudly than he probably intended. The restaurant went silent for just a moment. Apparently the predominantly Asian clientele understood English perfectly. As conversation resumed, Lee asked, “You ladies want to pick your lobster?”

Beejay, feeling her second glass of champagne, nodded. “Yeah yeah, I always like it when I go to a steakhouse and pick which cow will be slaughtered. Even better when I’m having veal piccata.” She got up boisterously, I fell in line with her, and we followed Lee.

The lobsters shared their bubbling water tank with a bed of understandably sullen crabs. To Lee’s credit, the water in the tank was as clear as a mountain brook. Black rubber bands held the claws of the crustaceans in check, to stop them from attacking one another.

“You see any particular lobster that looks delicious?” asked Lee. I wanted to inform Lee that “delicious” was a hard term to apply to any greenish-blue skeletal creature with antennae.

Beejay apparently didn’t have any qualms about selecting which arthropod would go to its doom. “Look at that guy,” she smiled. “He’s got a lot of fight.” Beejay’s lobster had broken the rubber band that had been intended to emasculate him. “That’s the one I want,” she declared and, ever game, started to reach into the tank to pluck him out. “Where do I grab him?”

Lee caught her wrist with surprising abruptness and pulled it away from the tank. “Don’t do that! His cutter claw is totally capable of shearing off your finger!” he snapped, simultaneously betraying the sham of his Charlie Chan accent.

Lee had a net that was used to scoop up the doomed one, and we went back to our table, where a waiter was topping off our champagne glasses for us, but from that moment on …

… the rest of the meal, Beejay’s reaction to Szechuan cuisine, the taxi ride back to Beejay’s place, dropping her off and getting my bags, the limo I’d booked to JFK, boarding the 747, taking my favorite seat, more champagne, the takeoff, Captain Anderson’s reassuring prediction of smooth weather on the way to Los Angeles, the food that I waved away …

… not one bit of it went into the cerebral cortex where memory is stored. The events around me just sailed into and out of my cute little hippocampus as if it were the revolving door at Macy’s on December 23.

Something huge was troubling me, something so immense I couldn’t step back far enough to see what it was.

The lights were low in the airplane’s cabin. A number of people were watching the in-flight movie (I believe it starred Michael Caine); others were napping. I took Lanny’s manuscript from my flight bag and went up the spiral stairs to the first-class lounge.

It was empty. I sat down on the orange-cushioned couch that ran around three sides of the lounge and lit a cigarette. Out the window, a stark white moon held total dominion over a flat sea of cloud caps. Myself and the moon. Everything else was below us.