Where the Truth Lies (34 page)

I sat down across from him. “Well, this is something,” I tried to purr. “Neuman and Newberry are certainly getting their money’s worth.”

Vince shook his head. “I thought that if I was going to discuss for the record something that made such an impact on both of our lives, professionally and personally—we’ve declined to comment about the incident since it happened—I thought it would be only fair for Lanny to hear what I have to say and be given the chance to respond. There may be something he wants to add from his own recollection, or even contradict. My memory isn’t always the best.” He nodded toward his bar. “A lot of my gray cells have been put out of their misery over the years.”

I started to unpack my tape recorder, still trying to figure what the hell I would do, but not wanting Vince to think I was anything but pleased about this development. “Well, it’s going to be fabulous to meet Lanny,” I chirped, reaching for my microphone. “I mean, in researching you, I’ve certainly read a ton about him as well.” Oh, God help me, I couldn’t get my brain to operate. I kept picturing Lanny walking in the door and seeing me for the first time. The first time since Bonnie Trout had fallen asleep in his arms at the Plaza hotel. “I’m sure I’ll have a ton of questions for him. When is he due to arrive?”

“He couldn’t be here until three-thirty, but he’s always right on time. I didn’t even have his number—I had to have my manager call Irv Fleischmann to track it down.” He took a last drag and stubbed out his cigarette. “I can’t tell you what it was like to call him.”

I smiled to cover my inner hysteria. “Oh, I think youshould tell me. This is a huge event in both of your lives, and I’m just thrilled that I’ll be here for it.” Thrilled, yeah. The structure of my universe was being picked apart like a game of jackstraws.

What would I say when Lanny saw me? A fabulous wash of absolutely opposite and extreme emotions was churning inside me, like the first, formal introduction of nitro to glycerine. Yes, I was angry at Lanny. Yes, I was hurt. But this was simply that stupid “love” stuff. Lanny would say, “Bonnie?” And Vince would say, “What do you mean ‘Bonnie’?” And then Lanny would no doubt explain to Vince that I had apparently wangled my way next to him on a flight to New York, lied about who and what I was, flirted with him until he had me right where I wanted him. Vince would look at me, think of our little agreement, and recall that I had certainly done my share of the propositioning with him—oh God, I was sunk. At best, Vince might continue to work on the book with me, but he’d hereafter perceive me as an unscrupulous whore who was not to be trusted in any way. Far more likely, he’d get on the phone with Neuman and Newberry and state that my behavior with his ex-partner was unethical and duplicitous, that he wanted me off the book, and that all my work thus far should be barred from publication. Oh, would Greg Gavin have a pipe-sucking festival withthat crisis. If word ever got out in the trade (and it would, rest assured) that I’d blown their million-dollar advance by becoming sexually involved with one of the two men about whom I was writing, and done so while lying about my name, my address, my profession, my life story—in fact, being fraudulent about virtually everything except my orgasms …

My first reflex was to tell the truth. (I know. “Fancy that.”) But what I’d done was so damning, even given my best presentation of the facts, that the truth offered me little more than the option of shooting myself in the head rather than facing a firing squad.

I had one dim candle of hope but very little time before Lanny’s breezing in would snuff that right out. “Well, this is very exciting.” I beamed. “If you don’t mind, I’d just like to run to the powder room before Lanny gets here.”

Vince looked wounded. “Oh, your makeup was fine for me, but for Lanny you need to touch yourself up?”

“No, actually, it’s a ‘woman thing,’” I said and excused myself. No man has ever challenged that answer and, to my knowledge, none has ever requested more specific information.

Vince’s guest bathroom was, thankfully, not by the front door but down a dark paneled hallway to the right of the foyer. I opened the door and checked to see if Vince could see me, but luckily, I was angled out of his sight line, assuming he stayed put. I entered the bathroom, leaving the door open. It was all done in black lacquer, and I recognized the engravings on the wall by Piranesi, from hisImaginary Prisons of Rome: incredible vaulting arches supported narrow galleries bridging the way to staircases that descended hundreds of feet into the hopeless gloom of secret dungeons. I turned on the cold-water tap and then left the bathroom, shutting its door loudly as if I’d closed it behind me and I were still inside. I moved down the hall toward what Vince had once indicated to me was his bedroom. I’d not seen it yet, but I was about to.

I opened the door as quietly as I could manage. I had no time to note details, but it was done in various shades of rust and navy blue and very smart indeed. The bed was low and as big as a dance floor in a small nightclub; I still hoped to dance there with Vince someday.

I was praying he had a bedside phone, and my prayers were answered. It was a custom Italian designer model in maroon, and it was so sleek and stylish that I couldn’t figure out where you talked into it or how you dialed. Fuck! I had to decrypt a MoMA award-winning designer’s rethinking of a touch-tone. I found a button flush with the receiver and pushed it, heard the purr of an open line. I then hit zero and dialed a New York City number. The operator kicked in. “Collect call, Operator,” I advised her in a whisper. She asked for (and I gave her) my name. I listened to dead air for about ten seconds. If Vince caught me making a surreptitious call here in his bedroom, I had no idea what explanation I could give, but it didn’t matter. I was at least unhampered by doubts about the wisdom of what I was doing, just as a basketball player in the last second of a losing effort has no second thoughts about shooting an eighty-three-foot basket in an attempt to tie the game. Neither of us had any choice.

There was a discernibleclick, and the other end of the connection rang on the line. It was six-twentyP .M. in New York. Everything depended on Beejay having gotten home on time and not having gone anywhere since. On the fourth ring I actually felt the sting of self-pity welling in the corners of my eyes; then I was pulled back to life by a sharpclick on the line. I wiped away my twin tears with my left index finger as I heard Beejay’s voice, heard her say yes to accepting the phone call, and I had her.

“Beejay, I have to talk fast.”

“I’m glad, kiddo, ’cause if you’re in L.A., I can’t afford you calling collect.”

“Beejay, I need you to do exactly what I tell you, and I have no time to tell you why, okay?”

“Yeah yeah yeah, shoot.”

One minute later I walked out of Vince’s bedroom. I heard him doing something in the kitchen and was able to duck into the bathroom, quietly opening and closing the door behind me. I turned off the faucet and flushed the toilet for further effect.

It was three twenty-four, and if Lanny was even a minute early, this wasn’t going to work. I strolled back from the bathroom and found Vince staring at the view that filled his wide windows, a veritable relief map of downtown Los Angeles. He gazed thoughtfully at nothing in particular. I adopted the most casual, glib manner I could muster, considering that I wanted to make like Peter Lorre inCasablanca and beg, “Rick, hide me!”

“Sorry if I was long,” I said breezily.

Vince half-smiled. “You never hearmen apologizing on that account.” He stepped away from the window. As he did so, I noticed that behind him on an end table alongside one of his low couches was a multiline telephone with five clear, square buttons and a red hold button to the left of them. I realized that if, as was likely, the bedroom phone was one of those lines, then when I had picked up the phone in Vince’s bedroom, it would have illuminated one of the buttons on the master phone in the living room. Of course, as long as Vince was staring out the window at that time, or occupied in the kitchen, or doing anything but looking at the phone, I was okay. If not, I was surely suspect, as there was no one else in the house. But again, in a strangely blissful way, I had no choice but to brazen it out until either I escaped or the whole mess exploded in my face. Like an expert defusing an atomic bomb while a timer ticked down from sixty seconds, I could only try to clip the right wire. At this point, running for cover would be of no use.

I flopped down on the couch as if I’d be staying there forever. “Well, this is pretty damn exciting, Vince,” I gushed, plugging my microphone into the recorder. “The only question for me is, will Lanny let me record what he has to say? I guess we’ll have to ask him that when he gets h—”

The phone rang. I saw the third translucent button flash slowly.

It rang a second time. I waited for Vince to answer it, but he was looking only at me, interested in the end of my sentence. The phone rang for the third time. I smiled casually. “It’s okay, you can get that.”

Vince waved dismissively. “No, that’s the number I give to the press, people I’m working with short-term, you know, landscapers.” Of course, this was the number that Vince had givenme, which I had given Beejay. “I don’t answer it unless I’m expecting one of them to call. Otherwise it rolls over to my office.”

The ringing stopped.

At this point my fate was in the hands of Beejay. I could only act as if everything was sunny and fine. “Well, tell me, did you speak to Lanny directly on the phone?” I asked in as reportorial a fashion as I could manage. Vince nodded a grim yes and I pressed ahead: “What was that like? I know you haven’t seen each other in over a decade, but have you ever spoken on the—”

There was a louder ringing sound from his phone than before, and my eyes could see the right-most button flashing.

Vince muttered, “Excuse me, that might actually be Lanny,” and instantly picked up the phone. He listened and looked at me with concern. “It’s my office, there’s a woman, a friend or relative of yours, it wasn’t clear. She says she called on the number you gave her, my number. Says there’s a problem, your family …”

I stepped quickly to the phone, and Vince handed it over watchfully. “Yes?” I asked. I was speaking to Vince’s secretary, the woman I’d met at the Burbank Studios. She told me much the same as Vince had just said, and that my friend or relative would call back again on the same line as before, only Vince would pick up this time.

Almost in the same instant, the third line rang. Vince took the phone back from me, answered, and handed me the receiver.

“Hello?” I asked, concerned.

“Hi, kiddo,” said Beejay. “Now listen, your brother Clifford has just been rushed to the hospital. He was doing some construction work when a thing—”

“A steel girder?” I asked in a concerned voice.

“That’s it. So you better get back to the city and make your peace with him, ’cause the doctors don’t think he’ll last the night. I’ve booked you on the next flight via American Airlines, I’m waiting here for you in front of the terminal. I’ll drive your car home for you.”

“Thank you, Sharon,” I said to Beejay and hung up. Vince watched what I hoped was my controlled hysteria as I first started packing up my recorder, then abandoned the task. It was three twenty-seven. “Can I leave this stuff here, Vince? I have to go to the airport. It’s my brother. They say he may have very little time.”

“How can I help?” he asked, concerned.

I shook my head. “They’ve reserved me a seat on the next American flight to New York. I have to get to the airport this instant.” I grabbed my pocketbook and was already moving to the door. I hoped he would view my rudeness simply as touching, sisterly concern.

Vince walked with me. “I’ll get you a ride there.”

Behind me, I heard the loud “hot” line of his phone ringing again, but Vince ignored it. I waved him off. “No, Sharon is waiting at the airport for me. I’ll turn my car over to her at the white zone for the loading and unloading, you know. It will be quicker than if I wait for someone to pick me up here.” I was through the courtyard now.

“I’ll drive you in my car,” he said.

“What, and have you stand up Lanny Morris? Then the two of you won’t talk for another dozen years. It’s easier and faster this way.” I had reached my Caprice. A few more steps and Lanny would never see my face. “My deepest apologies to Mr. Morris and, of course, to you, Vince.”

I was behind the wheel, turning the ignition. Even if Lanny arrived now, if I could just be pulling out of the driveway, I could probably angle my face so he wouldn’t recognize me through the windshield as I drove by. In a movie, the car wouldn’t start and I’d struggle with the ignition, but the car did start (suddenly my car wasn’t so pathetic) and the wheels spat gravel as I pulled away from Vince.

All down Tortuoso, I kept waiting for Lanny’s car or limousine to pass me as he ascended the hill. I’d quickly put on my sunglasses and wrapped a scarf around my head. I thought that under the circumstances it would be difficult for him to recognize “Bonnie Trout” behind the wheel, and I kept my head as low as I could without losing sight of the road. I also twisted my mouth like a character out ofDick Tracy to further distort my appearance. I wished I could take the descent faster than thirty miles per hour, but with the road’s extreme turns and unrailed edge, there was simply no way. However, by the time I got to Sunset Boulevard, I’d encountered no limos nor had I passed any driver who looked anything like Lanny.

Now my body allowed the adrenaline level in my system to drop to normal. All the icy thoughts of dread and panic that I had fended off were melting into a flood of slush, which I felt rushing down into the pit of me. It was terrifying how close I’d come to being exposed in the most awful way. I could hardly breathe, and I found myself jumping a red light to try to outrun the feeling, but it was no use. Once paranoia is in full bloom, it’s difficult to uproot, and in my case, my anxiety had been as justified as that of a whore strolling the alleys of Whitechapel circa 1888.

Home was the one place I didn’t want to go for the moment. Vince might have noticed his bedroom phone line being lit only two minutes before my emergency phone call. As a matter of fact, there’d been a click on the line that I’d assumed was the phone system, but that might have been Vince on the living room extension. Vince knew where I lived, and in case he had his doubts about my poor brother’s accident, or if he good-naturedly decided to leave a note for me, I didn’t want him to find me walking in or out my door when I was supposedly on a plane to New York.