Where the Truth Lies (39 page)

He got down from the shoeshine chair, handed Pancho the going rate of fifty cents, and then gave him another quarter. “That’s foryou, ” he said. He opened the exit door for me, and the heat hit us both in the face.

“Give you a lift back to your apartment?” I asked.

He said in a carelessly dashing manner, “Oh, I thought I might dine at the Embers this evening. It’s only a few blocks from there, if you wouldn’t mind …” I said that would be fine. He demurred, “I’d ask you to join me, but I’ll be catching up with many friends, regulars there, whom I’ve not seen for quite some while.” He patted his breast pocket, where he kept his wallet. “This has been an exceptionally good day for me.”

We arrived at the parking lot across the street. An attendant fetched me my cool rental car. Ludlow got in the passenger seat and looked about with the expression of a man eager to be seen in a sporty car being driven by a young woman who is dressed in risqué fashion. I drove slowly, and he liked that.

“Mr. Ludlow, one last question about Maureen O’Flaherty? Why do you think she died?”

Ludlow looked at me with some resentment. He was enjoying his little run of luck today, and this topic was spoiling that. “She died because, if I believe the newspapers, she stopped breathing. I assume she drowned.”

We turned onto I-95 and traveled for half a minute in silence.

“I hate that she died.” I don’t know if he even heard himself speak.

“You miss her company,” I ventured diplomatically.

“I hate that she died because it was sostupid of her. Unless it’s a health problem, it’s stupid to die young. The rest of us who go on living, we’re left to deal with it.”

I reached over and placed my right hand over his left hand. It was cold and small and fixed, like a claw. He seemed to shiver at the warmth of human contact.

“You cared for her, didn’t you?” I asked, and he moved his hand away. “Sorry if I seem too personal, but I just want to know if she had found a friend, a caring friend here before she died. It would make it easier to wrap up the article about her if I could say that someone here in Hollywood still missed her.”

He reached into his side pocket and took out a very long pack of More cigarettes. Their brown paper made them look expensive, but they weren’t. He asked in a sullen voice, “Have you ever been in love with someone who just didn’t love you?”

“Yes,” I answered truthfully.

“Not that they hated you, or didn’t like you. They just didn’t love you and there was no way they could even consider feeling that way.”

I told him I had known both sides of that deal.

“You’re pretty,” he laughed flatly. “I think you’ve spent more time breaking the bad news to others than hearing it yourself.”

He had trouble lighting his cigarette, which kept moving away from the flame of his lighter as if he were performing a carefully rehearsed burlesque routine. He finally gave up trying to be suave and held the cigarette still with his left hand while lighting it with his right. “In the end, the only way most people can deal with that kind of rejection—it’s so much, and so hopeless—is to hate the other person. Out and out hate them. You invent reasons if there are none. Like the way you hate people who belong to country clubs that won’t let you be a member. You hate those elite snobs, right up until the second they ask you to join. That’s why I guess so many divorced couples end up hating each other. It isn’t really that, suddenly, they don’t like this person they’d planned to spend their life with. Each hates the other because the other just doesn’t care about them anymore. Not one bit. You turn right into this circle here.”

I turned into Young Circle, a grand rotary named after the fellow who’d decided there should be a Hollywood on the Atlantic. I slowed down because the engine threatened to drown out Ludlow’s voice, which had grown softer.

“I wasn’t a very happy man before I met her, but I had no way of knowing how unhappy I’d been until I had a little happiness. So now I have to hate her, for showing me that my life could have been different. I hate her because she couldn’t care for me, and because she died. The dying part was just stupid, however it happened.”

“And however it happened … where were you when it did?” I asked bluntly.

The water in his eyes froze over. “The papers didn’t say exactly when she died, but it wouldn’t make any difference. I was here in Hollywood, at the track, in my apartment, at the Embers one night and a lobster place the night before. She died in New Jersey, Miss O’Connor. I’ve never left the state of Florida in my entire life. It didn’t matter where I was.”

We had looped around three-quarters of the grand circle, and Ludlow had me make another right onto Hollywood Boulevard. As directed by Ludlow, I pulled up in front of the Embers. Neon flames flitted back and forth above its name.

He nodded at the building. “If you feed a man on nothing but red beans and rice his entire life, he’ll only complain about the weather. But God forbid you treat him just one time to”—he read from a sign in the window—“’our famous charbroiled strip sirloin steak, done just as you like it, served with shrimp cocktail, baked potato, creamed spinach, choice of soup or salad, coffee, and our famous key lime pie.’God forbid you then tell him he has to go back to only red beans and rice for as long as he lives. That would be cruel and inhuman punishment.” He opened the car door and readied himself to go inside. “Wonder if any of the gang are still here?” he pondered a bit nervously. I had the feeling “the gang” might never have really considered Ludlow a member.

He reached across to shake my hand. “Thank you for the drinks and the company. It was very interesting to have you to talk to.” He hesitated and then said, “I assume I shouldn’t be looking for any articles about dog-racing from you, Miss O’Connor?”

He smiled a thin smile. I watched him adjust the waistband of his pants and primp up the shoulders of his polo shirt before he entered the restaurant.

I made a right on Twentieth Avenue (where do they ever find these names!) and another on Tyler. I saw a sign for the airports of Miami and Fort Lauderdale and started to turn left, but impulsively hit another hard right and a right again. I pulled over to the curb in front of the Embers. Double-parked, I hopped out of the car and into the steak house.

It was really a glorified coffee shop. An old geezer worked a charcoal grill about the size of a beginner’s jigsaw puzzle. All the other people in the place were geezers and geezettes. Ludlow was seated alone in a booth, trying with no success to get the attention of a waitress in her mid-fifties.

I strode over to him as noisily as I could and waited until the patrons were all eyes. I was easily the youngest in the place and definitely the dressiest (or perhaps undressiest might be more accurate), although in my healthy-looking Moon Drops demi-makeup and Geminesse eyelashes, I certainly didn’t look like a hooker. “I just came back to thank you for the mostwonderful time,” I said in as lascivious a tone as I could muster. I bent down to him and kissed him. I didn’t kiss him on the lips (that much of a Samaritan I am not), but by holding his alarmed face in both my hands, I ensured that no one would see that I caught him on the cheek instead. I made a second smacking sound with my lips to account for the lipstick on his cheek and pulled away from him. He was a darker crimson than my particular shade of Helena Rubenstein. “Kef, you aresuch a man,” I said for public consumption, adding in a low whisper for his ears only, “Let’s see howthis plays with the old gang.” I turned on my stacked heels and ambulated my way out of the Embers, with a knowing sway for whosoever had eyes to see.

I’m not all bad, right? It was stupid, but I’d been touched by him.

Back at the airport, while settling up the car-rental bill, I went into my purse for my wallet and noticed that the notepad with the hot-pink cover, the one with Maureen’s address in it, was now missing. It was no loss; its lone entry had been the 1350 North Dixie address, entered for the sole purpose of displaying it to Ludlow. But now it was gone.

It might very well have fallen out of my bag in the bar or on the shoeshine stand or when I was doing my little lovey-dovey routine at the Embers.

Or Ludlow could have filched it from me, curious to see what else was written between the covers of my hot-pink book.

There was no way to take back the kiss I’d given him. But I promptly stopped at a Rexall pharmacy, bought a pack of Kleenex and some Albolene cream, and wiped off every trace of my lipstick, replacing it with Blistex, in case my lips might be burned by the harsh Florida sun.

TWENTY-FIVE

At the back of one of the bars at Miami airport, there was an unusual coin game called Pong. It was played on a black TV screen, the white outline of a rectangle representing a Ping-Pong table, two short vertical white lines representing two players’ paddles, and a small white dot representing a Ping-Pong ball. I thought it was absurd to put a kid’s game in a bar, but you couldn’t keep adults away from this thing. Two players could square off against each other or, if you were alone, you’d play the computer that controlled the game and if you did, you were dead.

Next to the machine they’d put in another machine for the sole purpose of changing dollar bills into quarters. I ordered a greyhound (such a whimsical person I am) and asked the bartender if I could have the change in singles, which I then took to the change machine by the Pong game. It swallowed my first dollar bill and spat out four quarters just as nice as you please. By my sixteenth dollar, a false sense of elation had come over me. I felt like I was playing the slots and winning with every spin.

I drank half my greyhound to bolster my nerves, then gathered up my sixty-eight quarters and went to a pay phone in the loudest part of the terminal, near the public-address system.

My first call was to Connie Wechsler, my editor at Neuman and Newberry. I had to give her some explanation as to why I’d abandoned my interview schedule with Vince and flown to Florida, so that she could then relay this explanation to Greg Gavin.

The best version of the truth I could present to her was that I’d made a possibly stunning breakthrough regarding the girl found dead in Lanny and Vince’s hotel suite in New Jersey, and that I’d had to fly to where Maureen O’Flaherty had lived in South Florida to get more background before I continued questioning Vince. This was, in a way, completely true. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d been motivated to leave because I couldn’t let Lanny Morris see me in any guise other than as Bonnie Trout, schoolteacher from New York, because I’d lied to Vince’s ex-partner about my identity just prior to having immense sex with him at the Plaza hotel. No, were I to tell Connie that, she might feel she’d just possibly misplaced her trust in my professionalism and integrity. I did explain that, not wanting to delay the interview schedule any more than was necessary, I hadn’t even bothered to book through N&N but had headed straight to LAX and purchased a ticket for the next available flight, and I wouldn’t even think of requesting reimbursement (largely because they’d rightfully question why in God’s name I’d routed myself from Los Angeles to New York to Miami). And that, not wanting to arouse Vince’s suspicion, I’d improvised a cover story for his benefit.

“What was the cover story?” asked Connie, who’d been wonderfully understanding about all this.

“Just that my half brother was killed in an accident in New York and that I had to go to Florida for his funeral. His ashes were scattered over the Everglades. You see.”

I heard silence on the other end of the connection.

The operator kicked in, asking for three dollars and seventy-five cents. I dropped in the appropriate amount of quarters and faced Connie’s scorn.

“Boy, that’s a pretty god-awful story,” she said. “Remind me never to hire you to write fiction. Did Vince Collins buy it?”

“I’ll know soon enough. He’s my next phone call after this.”

“You’re back in L.A., I assume?” asked Connie.

I held the phone up so she could hear an announcement for Air Florida Flight 586 to Pensacola and Memphis, now boarding at Gate 4. “No, I’m at Miami airport.”

Connie hissed into the phone, “Dammit, I just this second agreed you’d do an awards ceremony tomorrow afternoon! When will you be back in L.A.?”

I told her I’d be home that evening and heard her emit a small sigh of relief. She explained that the P.R. woman who handled the West Coast for Neuman and Newberry had called asking if I could hand out a Scotty award, named after F. Scott Fitzgerald in honor of the myriad number of fine writers of fiction who’d been seduced and stomped out by Hollywood. The awards leaned heavily toward books about motion pictures. The first three years they’d had to tell people in advance that they’d won in order to get them to come, but although that meant the losing nomineesdidn’t come to the Event, it did in some instances guarantee that the winner would buy an entire table or, rather, that their publisher would. In a few scandalous cases, when a winner had told them in advance that they couldn’t make it to the Event, a different winner was chosen.

“I hate the Scotties,” I told Connie.

“So do we all, but when your book wins one, you’ll hate them a whole lot less,” Connie advised. “It will be a great way to serve notice about your book with Vince—they promise they’ll mention it when they introduce you, and the people who are there are exactly the people we have to hype. They originally had Rona Barrett announcing the winner of the Best Critical Book on Cinema. Then they decided maybe Rona was a little too trashy all on her own, so they figured, have two people present the award, Rona from the gossip side and someone from the journalism side. Rona is Miss Dish and Dirt and you’re Ms. Woodward and Bernstein. Do it, you owe me, you owe N&N.”

I did owe them, especially considering my incredibly shady behavior, which might at any moment backfire not only on me but on them. “Fine,” I said. “Just remember in the future that I was a team player. So who’s winning the award?”

“They don’t know. They’re doing the Scotties ‘legit’ this year. They’re a little worried that no one will show up, but they figure they have to go straight sometime or they’ll never have credibility.”