Where the Truth Lies (38 page)

I let myself enact what I hoped was a sufficiently flabbergasted expression and said in a low, stunned voice, “Why, that’s astounding.”

He looked confused. “Why’s that?”

I shook my head slowly. “Unless I’m mistaken …” I rummaged in my bag for another of my spiral-bound notebooks, which I’d rigged for this moment. It had a hot-pink cover. I flipped to a single page where I’d written down the address I’d gotten over the phone from Maureen’s mother and showed it to him. “Look. It’s the exact same address as yours.” I put the notebook back in my bag. “One of the other pieces I’m doing in my series is about this girl, Maureen O’Flaherty. The one who was found dead in the hotel room of that comedy team … ?”

“Collins and Morris,” he said.

“Yes, that’s them. I came across the fact that she lived here in the year or two before she was murdered, and the address her mother gave me is the same as yours. I mean, this must be the most remarkable coincidence I’ve ever— Talk about killing two birds with one stone! I guess— Would you mind, as long as I have you here? I mean, you’ve already told me you’ve lived at the same address for almost twenty years, so youmust have known her.”

He had three gimlets in him, and I offered to buy him a fourth. He said yes to this, but once the order was in, he said, “I don’t talk about her.”

I told him I wouldn’t quote him directly in theHooray for Hollywood article (which was easy to promise, since the magazine didn’t exist) and that he didn’t have to tell me anything he didn’t want to (which I hoped he’d forgotten was already his right as an American citizen). I said I just needed some background onher, as if this would keep him out of it, that it was probably information I could get from someone at the apartment building… . At that point, his look changed; he may have decided that it was preferable to tell me his version of the story rather than have Tony the doorman recount what he knew.

(I did know that if Kef Ludlow and Tony ever talked to each other about me, they’d both realize that I’d been completely deceptive with them, but that didn’t concern me, as I had no plan to speak with either ever again.)

The fourth gimlet arrived, and with a sip of it, he told me a small ration of what he knew about Maureen.

He’d met her here, literally, in the Dog Pound Lounge. She’d been working as a cocktail waitress a couple of matinees a week to fill out her afternoons. They would talk. She was new in town, just out of college, had no money, and was holding down several part-time jobs in a number of Miami Beach hotels. It was hard breaking into the hotel scene, especially for a woman, but she’d told the management she was okay with working the graveyard shifts, from elevenP .M. until morning. Sometimes, on a Monday or Tuesday, she’d wait for hours without a single order, and with room service you made decent money only if you got tips; but she considered the wasted time an investment. The management appreciated those who didn’t complain at the start; someone had to work the unprofitable shifts, and since the veterans had families to support, it fell to newcomers to bear the burden. In time, a newcomer would acquire veteran status. It was just a matter of patience.

Maureen was sweet but quite smart; she got her orders right the first time and delivered them efficiently. She looked nice as well, with a warm, natural quality that was different from so many of the bleached-blond waitress-types that applied for such jobs. Her speaking voice was lilting, not Miami-courtesy-of-Brooklyn. She had a college degree. She didn’t chew gum on the job. She was, in fact, a touch of class, and the management knew that such a staff member was an asset to the operation. Big-spending guests will return to a specific hotel for so simple a reason as liking a certain waiter or desk clerk.

Soon the different hotels were assigning her to the guests who needed kid-glove treatment: celebrities, big-time brokers (Florida’s Hollywood was called “the Wall Street of the South”), real estate developers … It would have been an ideal situation for Maureen to land herself a fat-cat husband.

“But she wasn’t in it for that,” asserted Ludlow. “She was real independent, just wanted to make good while she could. When she had a little bundle saved away, she was going to write, and that’s all she was going to do. No day job for her. The biggest problem she had was finding the right living arrangements. See, the hotels were more than happy to put her up for the night when she was working the graveyard shift there. There are always two or three rooms that any first-class Miami hotel prefers not to sell: rooms with a view of a dumpster or ventilator, rooms across from the elevator or directly above the ballroom. They know most paying customers would complain, and it’s not worth the grief to them. So when a room-service valet like Maureen or other staff members were working lousy hours, the management would make one of these unwanted rooms available to them. If between midnight and fiveA .M. it got to be slow going, Maureen could go to a room and nap, rest her legs, watch TV. If someone ordered something in the middle of the night, the front desk would call her room and she’d be down in the kitchen setting up the cart with linen and silver before the steak and fried eggs even hit the grill. All the hotel asked was that she make her own bed and leave the room the way she found it, so the maids wouldn’t have to make it up all over again the next morning.”

Ludlow ran his finger around the rim of the glass. “So she really only needed somewhere to stay three, maybe four days a week, when either the hotel was all filled up or she wasn’t working the hotels but working afternoons somewhere like here, or when, God forbid, she wanted a day off. Of course, like all women, she needed a place to keep her, you know …”

“Clothes,” I prompted.

“Exactly. So that’s when I suggested that she could rent space from me. See, my apartment is only a one-bedroom, but the couple who lived there before me had a baby. They put up one of those plastic room dividers to section the dining area off from the living room. Made it into a nursery. I told her, ‘Look, put a mattress down on the floor in there and you have your own room, privacy, an address.’ I’m not fancy with the clothes, so she had most of my closet space, too.”

I took the check from a bleached-blond, gum-chewing waitress and looked it over. “And you got?”

“I got thirty dollars a week. That meant quite a bit to me. I was able to afford a few extra luxuries with that.”

“And?”

He saw my eyebrows raised with innuendo and had the most interesting reaction: a grace note of anger, which slurred into rakish pride. “Well, it wouldn’t have been that odd if Maureen and I were more than just landlord and tenant. I was in my fairly youthful mid-forties at the time. I may not have been a lifeguard, but I was pretty trim, pretty spry.”

I added a tinge of admiration to my voice. “I can see that even now. And I’ll tell you, if it were me, a woman of my age in a strange city, fresh out of college and on my own for the first time, I’d certainly be grateful to have had someone smarter, hipper, to advise me, someone who knew their way around this town, knew all its high spots and high jinks.” I think that may have been the first time in my life I’d said the words “high jinks,” and for the life of me, I had no idea from where in my memory I’d retrieved them. “I’m sure any woman my age would have been grateful for some intelligent conversations, too.”

He nodded. “Oh, we had those. Some nights we’d watch TV together before she went off to work.Make Room for Daddy, with Danny Thomas. We liked that a lot. But like you say, it was mainly talking with each other.”

The waitress returned with my change and stepped away. As I fumbled through the bills, Ludlow said, “No, no, I’ll leave the tip.” He set down a five and snapped his fingers at the waitress. “The tip,” he called to her. “From me.”

I rose from the table. “I’m sure Maureen learned a lot from you.”

“Writing, for example,” he said with some considerable pride, not getting up. “Sure, she had courses at that Hunter College telling her how to be the next Shakespeare or Silas Marner.” I didn’t bother to point out that Silas Marner was not an author. “But she knew nothing about the real world of writing. That’s where I was able to help her.” He smiled. “I’m in the trade, you know. Here, I’ll show you.”

He downed the last of his lollipop-flavored vodka, stood up, and put his hand on the tabletop to steady himself. The four gimlets had obviously accumulated on only one side of his body, causing him to wobble just a little. He led me down an escalator to the entry level. We were in between the afternoon and evening sessions of racing and among the last matinee customers to leave. I followed him to a cigarette stand, where a chunky, sweaty-lipped fellow said, “Yes, Mr. Ludlow, what can I do you for?”

Ludlow pointed to a row of tip sheets that were hanging by clothespins from an overhead line. “Let me have theGazette, Lester.”

“No, that’s yesterday’s, Mr. Ludlow. It only covers last night and this afternoon.”

Ludlow shook his head at the doubting Thomas. “Let me have it, Lester.”

Lester looked sullen. “Well, if you really want it, I’ll sell it to you for seventy cents. That’s what I have to give the distributor if I don’t send it back.”

Ludlow tossed a dollar at Lester, waited for his change, and walked me over to a shoeshine stand, which, with the cigarette counter, flanked two restroom doors markedBOWSERS andBITCHES . Sitting asleep in one of two shoeshine chairs was a Hispanic man in a colorful open shirt that revealed sleeveless underwear and a potbelly. A diagonal scar across his forehead bisected two furrows in his brow, making it look like Zorro had struck again.

Ludlow lightly slapped the side of the sleeping man’s knee. “Shoeshine, Pancho,” he said. I desperately hoped that Pancho was the man’s real name, but I doubted it was. Pancho got down from his perch and Ludlow replaced him in his seat and motioned for me to sit alongside him. I stepped up into the adjoining chair. The hem of my outfit was high on the thigh, and I was sitting mighty pretty from Pancho’s perspective. If a peep show charged a quarter for this kind of action, Pancho currently owed me six boots shined and we were well on our way to having the suede ones weatherized.

As Pancho rolled up my escort’s trouser cuffs, Ludlow instructed him, “Pancho, roll my cuffs up above my knees, will you?” Pancho smiled back broadly, nodding to himself but not acting upon the request. Ludlow added, “Oh, and use peanut butter on my shoes, okay?”

Pancho said okay with the same broad smile.

Ludlow turned to me. “He doesn’t speak English. So. You’re a journalist, you honor the journalists’ code. Someone tells you something off the record, you can’t reveal it, correct?”

I looked him straight in his watery eyes. “I have never disclosed an anonymous source in my life, Mr. Ludlow. Not ever.” As a matter of fact, none of my sources had ever been anonymous; I’d known each and every one of them, sometimes on a first-name basis. “Just check through those articles I showed you if you doubt me.”

I saw the glint of gimlets in the shallow pools of his eyes. “Can you keep a secret?”

“My lips are sealed,” I replied solemnly. Luckily, I don’t write or type with my lips.

He opened theGazette to the center of its eight pages (really just two sheets of pink paper folded in half and stapled in the middle). He pointed to a column that had a caricature of a turbaned Hindu above it.“THE SWAMI SPEAKS!” was its breathless banner.

As Pancho switched shoes, Ludlow pointed to the copy below the headline and explained, “The Swami picks the best bets at the dog races around Florida. Has a forty-seven-percent success rate so far this year.”

“Is that good?”

“Ted Williams never batted four-seventy. Read the Swami’s picks for this afternoon.”

I read and saw that Ludlow had bet the Swami’s recommendations to the letter, including winners like Bobby’s Baby and losers like Proud Fella.

“You follow his suggestions meticulously,” I said, trying to find some merit in his servitude.

“Whatever the Swami says to bet, I bet. I never deviate.”

“But doesn’t that take some fun out of it for you?”

He leaned closer to me. “Not a bit. Because the Swami is … me.” He waited for my reaction, and I made sure he got his money’s worth. I was dumbfounded to the point of speechlessness. He nodded slowly, savoring the bombshell he had dropped.

“Uh-huh. I told you I was ‘in the trade.’” Pancho was done with Ludlow’s shoes and started retying them. “Now you understand why I had to swear you to secrecy. If the Swami’s identity became common knowledge, there’d be no end to the pressure on me to tailor my predictions so as to influence the odds. Bookiesand the management here hate it when possible winners start to show long odds. If the Swami started touting these longshots, the pari-mutuel odds would go down, and the track and the bookies would be out of danger.”

I thought of the paltry number of spectators at this afternoon’s races, standing at the one-and two-dollar betting windows, and had to assume he was aggrandizing the amounts of filthy lucre actually at stake here. “It must be very tempting, Mr. Ludlow,” I said. “I’m sure there are any number of shady operators out there who would pay all sorts of money to have you in their hip pocket.”

He fixed me with a stare and brought his face very close to mine, breathing gimlet breath on me. “I am a man of integrity, Miss O’Connor. I’ve written a column for theGazette for over twenty years now. It’s never paid very much. Enough to defray some of the costs I incur when I put my own money where my mouth is, to mix a metaphor.” I wasn’t sure exactly what metaphor he’d mixed. No matter. “But it’s been respectable work. TheGazette and other such tout sheets may look cheap, but that’s the intent. They’re actually all owned by the Tate-Donner Syndicate—they control theMiami Sentinel and theHollywood Financial Weekly. Theywant theGazette to look like it’s ‘under the counter.’ That’s its appeal.” He paused melodramatically. “When I die, Miss O’Connor, perhaps you’d be kind enough to let the world know who ‘the Swami’ was?”

The world was probably not as keen to know the identity of a prognosticator of dog races at a fading venue in a suburb of Miami as, say, the identity of Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat, but I nodded solemnly at the immense responsibility I’d been handed.