Where the Truth Lies (28 page)

I began reading Lanny’s manuscript.

Let me explain to you here why two guys doing as good as we were doing at this point would find ourselves working in the state of New Jersey.

I was amused again by their gangster friend Sally Santoro. There really were such people. I’d met more than one, and it was always easy, or perhaps I should say convenient, to forget that one of the things such people did in the course of their workday was to arrange for other people to be killed.

And like so many of these gangsters, they tended—

Oh God.

The plane stopped. Or at least that’s what it felt like. The plane stopped, my heart stopped, the moon stopped.

In truth, nothing had stopped, outside of my brain. But a door barricading a terrible darkness was creaking open in my mind, and the acrid black fog behind that door was rolling toward me and into my thoughts as if it carried a plague.

Because of what I’d read. The huge troubling thing was still too big for my limited field of vision to see, but now I was getting glimpses from other angles, and it was beginning to take form. I reread the part where Sally was trying to bribe the boys with gifts.

“… and I’ll have them send you up here your own shipment of lobsters and stone crabs from the Versailles. You like lobster?”

We said we did, because we really did.

“And a case of these grapefruits I get special down there, you never tasted—”

Lanny was saying that they liked lobster.

Maybe he was just saying it to humor Sally. I flipped the pages, searching for— There it was. When the boys were at the Versailles in Miami, the night before the telethon.

We got back up to the suite around seven and found that Sally had been more than good to his word. Laid out around the living room were various crates bearing the address of their destination, our suite at the Casino del Mar Hotel in Palisades Park, New Jersey. What I thought was a box of beach balls turned out to hold the thinnest-skinned, most dripping-wet grapefruits I ever tasted in my life. Likewise the promised six-foot metal locker filled with fruits of the sea, over a dozen lobsters shifting slowly across a bed of stone crabs and ice.

I read on.

… having presented them to us for our approval like a fancy birthday cake, the Versailles was to ship these goodies up to New Jersey the next day, where they’d be waiting for us at the new Casino del Mar on Sunday… .

And just a little farther down the page:

We called down for Maureen, the room-service girl with the gorgeous red hair that you stopped staring at once you got a look at her body, the same Maureen who’d brought me champagne while I was helping out Vince by boffing Denise. Maureen brought us up three steaks (one was for her) as her last official delivery of the day. Much as I love lobster, all that shellfish nested on ice in the living room had actually put us in the mood for hoofs, not claws …

“Much as I love lobster.”

It was all there. He had told the truth without meaning to.

He loved lobster, according to his memoirs, or at least he did up to the night before the telethon. The same night (and the last time) he and Vince saw Maureen O’Flaherty alive.

In a hotel-room suite where there had been a coffin-sized metal case filled with lobsters and crabs packed in ice.

But by the time we dined together at Lee’s Szechuan Garden, Lanny detested lobster. Roaches, he’d called them. Creatures that (manager Lee had just warned Beejay) could nip a finger right off you. They had done the same to people wading in the water at the beach who’d made the mistake of treading near them. Those people had ended up missing toes.

Maureen O’Flaherty was missing some toes.

But she hadn’t been swimming or walking along the beach. The water she’d been in was bathtub water.

Because rigor mortis was in the process of setting in when her body was discovered, the medical examiner knew she couldn’t have died much more than six hours earlier. In fact, because her body was lying in hot water, rigor mortis might have started even sooner; she might have died as recently as two hours before she was found.

And then I could see the truth, and the truth was a terrible thing to see.

The only factor that could have changed the time of death would have been if Maureen had taken a bath in ice water. That would have delayed the onset of rigor mortis and some of the other earmarks by which a time of death is established.

But who on this earth would ever take a bath in ice?

A corpse might.

A corpse in a hotel suite in Miami who must be disposed of.

And so the corpse is placed in a six-foot insulated metal trunk filled with ice and lobsters and crabs and delivered to another hotel suite in New Jersey. And en route, one of the lobsters breaks the rubber band that stops its strong right claw from opening and closing and as it falls asleep from the cold, it snaps at whatever it can grab hold of and takes away two of the corpse’s toes. And it or another crustacean is also responsible for the weltlike marks on Maureen’s torso that brought no blood to the surface because her blood was no longer circulating.

And when the trunk arrives in New Jersey, perhaps one of Sally Santoro’s soldiers—for reasons unknown—puts her body in the bathtub and covers her in the ice, which puts a hold on the contraction of Maureen’s muscles. The lobsters (those creatures that Lanny Morris will never eat again) are taken away from the room. And slowly the solid ice becomes ice water becomes cold water becomes cool water becomes room-temperature water, and finally rigor mortis begins.

The truth was all there in a dreadful throwaway sentence, referring to the day after the night they’d last seen the girl. “Late the next morning, Maureen was sent packing.” Had he known what he was saying? Was it his cold-blooded little joke or simply a monumentally revealing slip in what he’d intended to be a lie?

Vince and Lanny’s alibis meant nothing. Every part of me knew that Maureen O’Flaherty had died before the telethon had even started.

She could have been murdered by Lanny. Or Vince. It could have been either one of the boys … or, for that matter, the both of them.

EIGHTEEN

I had myself a secret, oh yes I had. And I intended to keep it all to myself, idiot that I am.

Certainly I could have walked my brilliant deduction into a police station, although I had no idea how the generous bequest of an amateur sleuth’s inferences would be received. For that matter, towhich police would I report my precious insight: Miami, Palisades Park, Bel Air? Who had jurisdiction?

What did it matter and whom was I kidding? I wasn’t about to tell anyone anything. Without intending to, I’d fathomed my way to exactly the scandalous revelation that Lil Walker had stressed would be so helpful in selling the book. Whatever anyone was going to hear about the secrets I’d unearthed, they were going to hear from the media quoting from (and thereby plugging) my book … not from the police. I wasn’t about to tell anyone anything.

Of course, it would be infinitely better to know more. Such as, say, who murdered Maureen O’Flaherty. But I’d already managed to unravel something, leaving me with the same reassuring feeling one has after extracting the first knot from a child’s tangled shoelace and knowing that the rest of the task is now doable.

To be sure, it had always been assumed that Vince and Lanny knew more about (or were more directly involved with) the death of the Girl in New Jersey than had ever been revealed to the Public, and said Public seemed just fine about this. Collins and Morris were a national treat, like Fritos or Skippy peanut butter, and no one was prepared to abstain from the pleasure of watching them simply because some tramp had turned up dead in their hotel room.

But as ready to forgive them as the Public had been, the boys were not prepared to resume business as usual post-Maureen. Something had happened in the vicinity of that last telethon, something that had truly soured the team. They no longer behaved like brothers on stage. They behaved like brothers-in-law. The put-downs, always a mainstay of their act, seemed to hang in the air a half second longer than before. When Vince said his trademark “I’d kill you if you weren’t already brain-dead!” the audience laughed a half decibel less, and perhaps some of their minds flickered for the duration of an eye blink to the imagined image of that girl’s body in the bathtub.

The start date for shootingA Night at the Opera was pushed back six months because of “casting problems.” As production ofThe Maginot Line began (its roster including Vince Collins but not Lanny Morris), no one was very surprised when Lanny announced that he’d be playing his first dramatic film role in the Warner–Seven Arts motion pictureRoyal Flush, a heist picture with a juicy role for Lanny as a safecracker gone straight who is forced to return to crime to protect his ex-wife. Both movies were supposed to win the boys Oscar nominations, if not the prize itself. Neither film did, nor should have. The boys showed their good sportsmanship by appearing together at the Oscar ceremony to present the Best Supporting Actor award (Vince quipped that he’d been supporting Lanny for years), and that marked the last time the two appeared in public together and, as best I could tell, the last time either saw the other in person.

There are things that everybody knows. It doesn’t mean they’re true. It’s just that everybody knows about them and so they “are.” Documented U.S. Air Force encounters with alien spacecraft, the marriage of Rock Hudson to Jim Nabors, Dr Pepper containing prune juice, champagne goblets being made in the shape of Empress Josephine’s breasts (not referring to the stems, of course—there’s an image), Fidel Castro’s involvement in the assassination of JFK. We have no outright proof of any of this, and yet we all know it to be true because we’ve talked about it so much. We assumed Peter Lawford and Robert Kennedy were involved in the death of Marilyn Monroe, but that just made them more interesting, more worldly. They knew things we didn’t know, and we subconsciously admired them for this.

And we felt that way about Vince Collins and Lanny Morris, whom weknew had something to do with the death of Maureen O’Flaherty. Since it was reported that she’d been involved with one or both of the comics and had turned up dead a few days later in their hotel suite, we knew they were both knee-deep in it without hip boots … because we’d read it, said it, thought it, even if their impeccable alibi proved they couldn’t have been directly involved in killing her.

And now I alone—hurrah!—knew that their alibi meant nothing.

So here I was again about to have lunch with Vince, a man who might have done A Terrible Thing. Only now I knew he’d had the opportunity, if not yet an acknowledged motive. And astutely as ever, I was having lunch with him alone. In his home.

What was I supposed to do? When he suggested that our first interview take place at his house, would it have been diplomatic to say, “Do you mind if I bring a friend? Because I’m concerned that you might, in the course of my questioning, murder me.”

To be sure, I didn’t think I wasreally in any major danger. It wasn’t as if the further careers of Vince and Lanny had been littered with the corpses of other women. I wasn’t some room-service valet. I had an editor, a publisher; there were contracts signed with this man with whom I was about to lunch; people knew where I was going, they would know if I didn’t get back, and if anything happened to me, the police would rain down hard on Vince Collins. You can get away with murder, but usually not twice.

Still, I decided to regularly mail myself an updated copy of all I’ve been relating here. Today I again sent to myself all but these last two pages, and on the back of the manila envelope I’d printed in discreet block letters, so as not to alarm the postman, the melodramatic phraseTO BE OPENED ONLY IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH , and I will repeat this procedure every day or two. (I do hope you’re not reading this now because that event has taken place.)

I was so happy to be back in my home. My glorious day with Lanny, culminating in my utter ravishment, had been a total lie that still sat sour in my stomach. But I had remedies. The best medicine is not laughter but rather, of course, revenge. It would be wonderful if in writing about Vince, I could find evidence that Lanny had been directly involved in Maureen’s death. This would indeed regally reciprocate Lanny’s royal screwing of me.

And in the far more unlikely instance that I found Vince to be the guilty party, well, I’d just have to console myself with a monstrous best-seller. Although every part of me reverberated with the belief that while Vince might know more than he had ever spoken about the death of Maureen O’Flaherty, he was not a murderer.

God, I was so glad I hadn’t slept with Vince. Imagine if I’d compromised myself so disgracefully withboth men! At least I still could begin my work with him feeling halfway clean. There was, to be sure, the agreement I had made to sleep with him when we completed the project. At the time I’d thought I was being quite the alluring libertine. Now I thought differently.

Vince had a villa in Bel Air, built in the late forties by John Lautner. Vince had dictated detailed directions to his home over the telephone. I was now wheeling my really-just-awful canary-colored convertible (which lacked power steering) up the privileged pathways of Bel Air, careening and nearly caroming along the twisted turns of its upper tiers like a tarnished pinball, yellowed with age. America might in theory be a democracy, but I was truly extending the Jeffersonian ideal by daring to drive the wretched refuse of my jalopy through what was a de facto private sector.

I’d been alternately referring to Vince’s directions and cursing them for the last forty-five minutes. I’d passed Anzio, looped onto Roberto, turned down the redundantly named Via Verone Street, swiveled up Portofina Place, turned back onto Stradella, now firmly convinced that Vince lived in Tuscany.

He’d said, “You’ll need to hang a right on Tortuoso, and after you pass a kind of Cape Cod house with blue shutters, you’ll see an unmarked driveway on your left. It has some painted white stones on either side. Head up that until you get to a tall white iron gate. There’s an intercom on the left—the name on it is Otto Bloodwort.”