Chapter 32 - Where the Truth Lies

DID YOU EVER WAKE and realize it isn’t tomorrow—that you’ve only slept a few hours, a nap that got a little out of hand—and there’s still more of the day left? Like regretfully finishing a delicious ear of corn only to discover you missed a few more precious rows on the other side.

A voice in my head told me a phone was ringing. Then I heard the phone itself—the distinctive trill of a Princess—and a more conscientious voice told me I really ought to answer it. But the rebellious voice in my head said, “I don’t work for the phone company, so why should I answer their phones for them?”

Eventually the conscientious voice won out, and I sat up straight, cracking my forehead yet again on the ceiling just above Beejay’s elevated loft bed. Ignoring the pain, I jumped to the floor below and grabbed the cord of the Princess phone in the alcove directly under the bed, causing its illuminated base to fling away the lightweight handset, which I managed to catch on the fly. “Hello!” I cried in victory.

It was Reuben. Well, this was even more fabulous than my catch. I had wanted to speak with him alone, but hadn’t relished the thought of languishing in the produce section of my local Safeway in L.A. until he needed more tomatoes. Now here he was, calling from a pay phone literally across the street, only a few hours after I’d seen him at the Plaza. I told him to buzz apartment 4D and I’d let him in.

It was raining in fits and starts, with grumblings of thunder, but as I opened the door for Reuben, his golden face and radiant demeanor managed to brighten the light-starved room.

I apologized for the dinginess, decor, and disarray, and suggested we sit in the alcove below the elevated loft bed, as there was really nowhere else. He settled warily into the beanbag chair while I perched on a cushion with my back up against the wall.

“This is wonderful that you were able to come by,” I began. “Where does our Mr. Morris think you are—?”

He told me Mr. Morris had a meeting at CBS and Lanny had given him the rest of the day off. Reuben hoped I didn’t mind his contacting me, but he’d been confused at the Plaza to overhear me say that my publisher was willing to pay “any price” to complete my book about Vince. He had known me to be a schoolteacher, and yet now I was working on something related to the late Mr. Collins…?

I told him I had a confession to make and that I hoped he would still be willing to talk to me once I’d told him the truth. I then related, as honestly as I could and without trying to make excuses for myself, a thumbnail history of my professional involvement with his employer and Vince Collins. (There was, of course, no need to tell him of my personal involvement, because he had packed Lanny’s bags around my unconscious body as I’d lain in Lanny’s bed at the Plaza.) To confirm that I was not some groupie who had delusions of being a writer someday, I showed him the permanent resident of my pocketbook: the letter addressed to me from Connie Wechsler on N&N stationery confirming that I’d been commissioned to write about Lanny and Vince.

When I was done, and he with some difficulty now addressed me as Miss O’Connor, a mildly stricken look overtook his face. After taking a deep breath, he said that he had a confession of his own to make, one far more serious than mine. He asked me if it was true that I could not repeat anything he told me “off the record.” I responded that the only way to guarantee a secret is to share it with no one.

He hesitated and then said he felt he could trust his confession with me, and that he had gone with his instincts all his life and they rarely failed him. Then he made a statement that would have shocked anyone who knew this reliable and gentle man. “At my own expense, I have consulted two separate criminal attorneys, and without recounting any details that could implicate other parties, they have advised me that my own actions are now legally past the statute of limitations for prosecution.”

Although I already knew from reading Lanny’s letter to John Hillman that Reuben was aware of Maureen O’Flaherty’s murder that night, it was still eerie to hear him own up to that. I’m sure for him it was very strange to be letting light fall upon this secret that he, Lanny, and Vince had hidden away all these years. I thought it wise not to turn on any lamps in Beejay’s shadowy apartment, as some matters are best discussed in low voices and low light.

Most of what he told me was identical to Lanny’s account. He’d been called by the hotel operator in his room at about ten after eight in the morning because Lanny hadn’t answered his eight A.M. wake-up call. He had a key to Lanny’s room, but there was a chain across the door. He banged on the door and called to Lanny, who took more than a few moments to arrive and unchain it. While Reuben started to collect things that Lanny might need at the telethon from his employer’s bathroom, Lanny called to him from the living room. He rushed in and saw Lanny trying to revive Maureen, although Reuben knew enough from his war experiences in the Philippines to assume she was already dead. Wondering if someone had broken into the suite, he saw the living room door was chained, then raced to Vince’s room and found Vince, seemingly as dead as Maureen, passed out on the floor. The door there was chained as well.

He called for Lanny and the two of them revived Vince. Lanny insisted that the last time he’d seen Maureen she’d been going to sleep in the living room and Vince was looking at her from the doorway of his own room. Vince himself couldn’t recall anything that had happened beyond that moment. He became hysterical, and Reuben and Lanny had to literally slap him silent. They made Vince lie down, and then the two more levelheaded men decided they had to get Maureen’s body out of the suite and far away from the hotel. If either of the two performers were suspected of murder, that would be the end of the world for Reuben as well. “If one cannot be a rich man, Miss O’Connor, then the next best thing is to be a domestic servant for a rich man. You eat much the same food, you often drink the same wine, you stay—granted, in smaller rooms—in the most luxurious hotels, you travel in limousines… My life in the Philippines… You here in the United States cannot imagine what some levels of poverty are like. I could never go back to that. I would sooner die. But my only skill, my trade, is to do”—Reuben held his hands out—“what I do. I would have helped Mr. Morris and Mr. Collins out of loyalty alone. But I had a second motive that made it even more urgent for me to assist them: my own security and comfort.”

“Didn’t you consider turning to Sally Santoro for help?”

He shook his head gravely. “To ask for that kind of assistance from a man like Mr. Santoro would certainly entail a lifelong debt. Mr. Morris and Mr. Collins always tried to be ahead of Mr. Santoro when it came to favors. That’s why they were willing to fly up to New Jersey without taking time to rest after the telethon, and now what had seemed a burdensome obligation was a heaven-sent opportunity for both to establish an alibi.”

It had been Reuben who had thought of using the metal locker of lobsters, crabs, and ice as a profane coffin for Maureen’s body. It was always to have been under his supervision when he moved Vince and Lanny’s things from the Versailles to the Casino del Mar. And Reuben’s wartime experience with battlefield cadavers as a medic in the Philippine Scouts made him well aware how extreme heat or cold could confuse the time of death. They had two bellmen bring the metal locker back up from the meat freezer to Lanny’s room, purportedly to show to some friends. Vince being completely useless at this point, the grisly task of loading Maureen into the metal locker had fallen to Reuben and Lanny, who swore he would never touch lobster or crab again. The locker was resealed and taken down to the hotel’s freight dock to be flown to New Jersey, along with Sally Santoro’s other boxed gifts, under the watchful eye of Reuben. A revived Vince left for the TV studio, eager to put the suite and the Versailles and the evening he couldn’t remember behind him.

All went well up to a certain point. Reuben saw that the duo’s luggage and crates were taken up to their Casino del Mar suite. They had discussed what they would do with the body once it was in New Jersey. The main thing was for it to be found there rather than in Miami, where the boys still were. It had been Reuben’s hope to get Maureen’s body into one of the wooden crates once they’d been emptied, and to get his brother-in-law, who did lawn maintenance out of Park Slope, to help him move the crate out of the area. Unfortunately, the Del Mar hotel manager—one of Sally Santoro’s lieutenants and eager to be of help—offered to bring the lobsters and stone crabs down to the Blue Grotto, where they could be stored in water tanks reserved just for Lanny and Vince. Reuben had only a few minutes alone in which to move Maureen and the ice she’d been packed in to the bathroom. He then watched as the metal locker, now containing only a little ice but still bearing its fruits of the sea, was carried out of the suite. Reuben, who’d been unable to reach his brother-in-law by phone (it turned out Reuben’s sister had gone into labor with a third child), found himself in an empty hotel room with a corpse still frozen in ice, so he made a great show of leaving with the bellhops and the lockers of shellfish, turned the keys to the suite over to the desk clerk, and rushed to Park Slope. Since he knew the time of death would be advanced considerably later, he knew that he’d be free from suspicion as long as he stayed with his family at the hospital in Brooklyn, where he made sure his alibi was established as solidly as that of Collins and Morris.

He’d been advised, he admitted with some shame, that since he had merely helped to conceal a murder, he would not legally qualify as an accomplice, since the deed was done before his involvement. Thus, the statute of limitations on the potential charges he might have faced for his crime had long ago passed.

“Well, obviously,” I said at last, in the murk of apartment 4D, “this is stunning information. But why are you telling me?”

As answer, he leaned forward (as if there could be anyone other than the two of us in this cramped studio apartment who might hear) and asked me how my meeting with Lanny had gone.

I told him in all honesty that, because of information I’d pieced together, I didn’t think Mr. Morris would be in a position to employ Reuben very much longer and that I hoped Reuben had made plans for such a circumstance… that I suspected Mr. Morris was actually not at a meeting at CBS but already in hiding… and that my guess was Reuben should not expect to see him at the Plaza that evening or possibly ever again. And that was as true a statement as I’ve ever made to anyone.

He nodded. “Well… in that case…” I could tell this was difficult for him. At last he fumbled, “I… I heard you say at the hotel today that your publisher is looking for some way to add to the book you were writing. That they would pay a great deal for something that could achieve this.”

I said that he had heard correctly.

“Miss O’Connor… I have a tape recording of the night Miss O’Flaherty was murdered.”

He’d found it after Vince and Lanny had left for the telethon, in her tote bag, which she’d brought with her to their suite. It had been a little battery-powered Grundig reel-to-reel, the reels being three and a half inches wide. It had been in a tight case that kept its operation silent, and there had been a small omnidirectional mike stitched into the top of the tote bag itself. At its snail-pace slowest speed (unsuitable for music but acceptable for speech), it could get an hour’s worth of conversation onto a reel.

I quickly explained to Reuben why such a tape recorder would have been standard kit for Maureen in her dual identity as Moe Cohn. He understood better. “I don’t think the tape will tell you whether it was Mr. Morris or Mr. Collins who murdered her, but I’ve heard the tape and it will definitely tell you why. It will amaze you, I think. And it would make any book containing a transcript of the tape very, very successful.” He explained that he had personally transferred the tape to the new medium of cassette but would make both versions available for Neuman and Newberry. There would have to be arrangements, of course. He couldn’t just “loan” them the tape. His golden skin flushed orange at the embarrassment of discussing such things.

“Reuben,” I said gently, “you were very consoling, very thoughtful to me when we met at the Safeway back in Los Angeles. Let me help you around your squeamishness by saying it for you. I can’t speak for Neuman and Newberry yet, but this thing you’ve held on to for nearly fifteen years—saved for a rainy day—let’s set a price for it now. Then we listen to it, with you present, and, if it’s as represented, you’re paid in full, then and there.”

He nodded gratefully. I could have sworn there were almost tears of relief in his eyes. I asked him if he had any kind of ballpark figure in mind. He leaned forward modestly and asked, “Would you think… would you think a million dollars too much?”

I couldn’t suppress a startled cough. “Reuben, Reuben, listen. Vince was being paid a million dollars for his entire life. You’re asking the same for an hour of it?”

Reuben nodded slowly. “The most interesting hour of his life. I’ve heard the tape. I assure you, this is explosive material.”

I sputtered, “Well, I can try, I mean, I guess I can see… I mean, they’re only going to have to pay Vince’s estate the initial advance to use the material we did record, so maybe if you were to lower your price—Hey. Wait a second. There might be a way… Reuben, you have this tape, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I have a transcript. At least I think I do,” I said, moving to my portfolio with considerable excitement. I produced Lanny’s third chapter and showed it to him. “After all, you put all your cards on the table, I can return the favor. Look, your boss left this for me outside my apartment. It’s his version of what happened that night. It would be amazing to put this side by side with a transcription of your tape. You understand, Reuben? On their own, these pages are absolutely useless to me. I could have typed them myself, I can’t quote from them… but if they closely match what’s recorded on your tape, it would make them very credible. That makes your tape even more valuable. And guess what? If the tape were to differ greatly, then that would tell us that Lanny is trying to shift the blame onto Vince. Either way, I think suddenly your tape could be worth a million dollars!”

He beamed, uplifted by my enthusiasm.

I added, “That makes two amazing things that have transpired between us today!”

“What’s the other?” he asked, excited.

“You called me!” I said, elated.

He nodded eagerly. “Yes? And?”

I looked at him. “You called me. That’s the amazing thing. You called me from a pay phone to tell me you were across the street.”

He looked mildly puzzled. “Yes?”

“But since you and Lanny left me high and dry that morning at the Plaza, Lanny has said that every time he tried to call me, this phone was disconnected. Of course, I knew it hadn’t been, so I just figured he was a liar.”

Reuben nodded. “I’ve told you about him.”

“Yes, you have. But today, when I was at the hotel, I had him call Bonnie Trout. He got out a number written on a list you update for him now and then, and dialed it, and you know what? It was disconnected. Because it was the wrong number.”

Reuben shrugged. “Then I wrote it down incorrectly. I’m very sorry.”

“But he says you’re his human Rolodex and have given him this number several times.”

Reuben looked chagrined. “I guess I got the number wrong when I first took it down. Very bad of me.”

I shook my head. “But you called me this afternoon and got the number right.”

Reuben smiled. “I’m afraid I foolishly forgot to take my phone list with me. I had to call Information.”

“The number is unlisted.”

Reuben sat placidly.

I said, “You’ve always had the right number. But the one you gave Lanny has the fifth and sixth digits flipped. Close enough that Lanny didn’t notice the difference when he got hold of Bonnie Trout’s phone records. My guess is you dialed variations on the correct number until you found one that was nearly the same but out of service. Now, why would you have done that?”

He looked at me kindly. “Perhaps, Miss O’Connor, I just was trying to spare you some hurt and rejection. I told you how he deals with women.”

“I know, and oh, how I agreed with you about how loathsome he is. But why do I have this opinion? First, because of how he depicted his behavior fifteen years ago in his mock memoirs; second, because he never called me after checking out of the Plaza, which is hardly despicable if you kept giving him a disconnected number; third, because he left me no note. Of course, Lanny insisted he did leave me a note explaining why he’d left and where I could reach him. But in the exhausted, blissfully unconscious state I was in that morning, it would have been baby-simple for you to pocket the note while doing a last-minute check of all the rooms before you and he left.”

Reuben rose in dismay and walked as big a circle as a circumnavigation of the room would allow. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Is this what being a journalist does to people? Makes them see conspiracies in simple mistakes or honest concern? Why would I have been afraid of a public-school teacher by the name of Trout?”

“You weren’t. You were afraid of a snoopy journalist by the name of O’Connor.”

He stopped dead and sat down. “Now you’re being a foolish girl. I only learned your true name and profession just now, when I read that letter written by your publisher about you.”

I clambered out of the alcove and headed to the sink to get a glass of brown tap water I didn’t really want. I needed Reuben to come out from under the loft as well, and he seemed more than ready to un-nest himself from the low-slung beanbag chair.

“No,” I corrected him, “you learned who I was at the Plaza when you read that letter about me written by my publisher. It was in my pocketbook there, it’s always in my pocketbook, and when I woke up, my clothes and pocketbook had been lined up on the dresser for my departure, the way they line up your luggage outside the boardinghouse door when you’re evicted. That’s when you went through my bag. That’s how you learned I was going to write about the one thing you didn’t want anyone writing about: Collins and Morris. And since the letter was addressed by Connie Wechsler to me at my L.A. address, you then knew where I lived. Which is how you were able to follow me that day to the Safeway supermarket.”

Reuben followed me now to the sink, scoffing, “No, you followed me!”

I drew myself a nice thick glass of tenement water. “Now, that was a very odd response, Reuben. The correct reply would have been ‘We met by accident!’ or ‘That was sheer coincidence!’ But not ‘No, you followed me!’ ” His golden face had darkened to tarnished copper. “Sure, you let me think I’d spotted you. Who knows how long you followed me around the store, placing yourself in my field of vision until I spotted you, letting me think I was Nancy Drew. How you must have been laughing at me! You finally let yourself ‘discover’ me at the checkout when I’d made it humanly impossible for you to credibly ignore me any longer. And you took this chance encounter to confide and convey to me your profound mortification at the treatment Lanny had given me, and all women… and I completely bought into it, when all I really had was your word and a rejection that you had engineered!” I’m sure I wasn’t hiding my rage particularly well and his eyes started appraising the room. “You made me feel I was nothing to him, because you were playing your own complex game with both men, and the more I was in the picture, the more I might start comparing what each of them had to say about that night. You needed me controlled and contained.”

Reuben idly slid a kitchen drawer open a bit and let his eyes drift over its contents, as if his attention was beginning to wander. “And, uh, what was this complex game I was playing?”

Suddenly the room felt altogether too quiet for my comfort; the slightest movement would be heard. I decided to create a little background noise and reached for a skillet and placed it on one of the electric burners atop Beejay’s combination demi-fridge and electric stove. I turned on the burner to “high.”

“You don’t mind if I cook dinner while we talk, do you?” I asked. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

I opened a drawer and took out some oven mitts. There was a half-full bottle of Wesson oil—which Beejay claimed had supported a variety of enterprises, the least interesting of which had been frying—and I poured what was left into the skillet. I turned back to Reuben. “The complex game was that you were blackmailing Vince Collins with the tape you’re now offering to Neuman and Newberry. Then, as now, you wanted a million dollars for it, which is why Vince was so desperate for money.”

I opened the fridge below the electric burner and felt around the shelves for something to fry.

“You had Vince’s sexual secret on tape, and the powerful motive it gave him to murder Maureen. And you knew he had no idea what he’d done that night. With so many ways to blackmail him, it’s a wonder he didn’t try to kill you.”

Reuben, still trying to stay within striking distance of his public persona, and very much within striking distance of me, said, “Mr. Collins was a tragic man.” He casually opened another drawer and was sorely disappointed to find it held the mother lode of soy sauce, duck sauce, and mustard packets. Meanwhile, I’d found a bag of frozen peas in the tiny freezer box of the fridge.

“Yes, he punished himself more than anyone. He tried to kill me once and just couldn’t do it. Did you suggest to him that he try blackmailing me into writing a puff piece? That would have served you well. He’d get his money for the book—money you’d already earmarked for yourself—but the book would be harmless, leaving you and your tape to be the only threat to him. The odd thing, Reuben, is that I was both your greatest ally and enemy. My book was going to provide the million that Vince would pass on to you, but if it unearthed the truth about Maureen O’Flaherty, you’d lose your hold over him… the truth would already be known. And then, when I told him I wasn’t going to knuckle under, that he’d either talk to me about that night or go home without his million—in which case he’d have to pay you out of pocket, leaving him with next to nothing—he could only see one certain way out of his nightmare.”

I dumped the frozen peas into the fat, and the green ice pellets sizzled madly, emitting a huge cloud of blue steam; it was exactly the audio cover the situation required. “Of course, once Vince died, you were really screwed, weren’t you? You had a very tough choice to make. You weren’t prepared to stop being valet to Lanny Morris. That was your safety net between the poverty you’d known and the luxuries you enjoyed. You’d never requested any rewards from Lanny for keeping mum about Vince’s presumed crime. No, you allowed the rewards to come voluntarily from him. First-class travel, staying in the same accommodations, dining at the same restaurants. As long as you showed loyalty, it was hard to know who had the better life: master or servant.

“But now Vince was dead. Sic transit the golden goose. And blackmailing Lanny could end the honeymoon. Your tape was nowhere near as damning to him.

“And then, perhaps not even until this morning, you suddenly realize there was one other player on the table who might readily provide the same money you’d been trying to squeeze out of poor Vince Collins—me, funded by Neuman and Newberry. How foolish you’d been to try to get the money from Vince when it was N&N’s money you were after all along. When you heard me say today, as I certainly meant you to hear, that my publisher would pay any amount for something like your tape—oh, Lordy, what music that must have been to your ears.”

The french-fried peas had settled down into a slow, spattering sizzle. My hand was very near the pan’s handle, just in case.

Reuben appeared almost bewildered. “So you already knew about the tape?”

“An incident known only to three people, two of whom would certainly deny it, shouldn’t have been a threat unless Maureen had some form of proof. The fact that she took her tote bag into Lanny’s room when she had no need for it there made me wonder what might be in it. And her threat that the world would hear the dulcet tones of Vince Collins crooning his swan song sounded as if she could be referring to a recording. But all these ideas coalesced in my mind when I made the most fascinating discovery of them all.”

I left my percolating peas and walked back to the alcove beneath Beejay’s high loft bed and picked up Lanny’s third chapter. To mollify Reuben, I assured him, “If you’ve detected any hostility in my tone, please don’t let that discourage you. I still think your tape will be very valuable, and I’ve never let my personal feelings stand in the way of a good story.”

The brooding clouds lifted from Reuben’s face at this reassuring news and he joined me. “I think you have misunderstood many things, but hopefully, in time, you’ll find you were wrong about me.”

I thumbed through the pages. “Look, you may have caused my life a little misery, and you caused Vince enough that he killed himself… but here’s where I realized you were a true Renaissance man.” Reuben seemed not altogether displeased with this characterization. “Now, if we assume, as your first glance at this document seemed to verify, that Lanny’s account of what happened that night is pretty accurate—” I looked at him for verification.

Reuben nodded. “From a quick look, they’re consistent.”

I said, “Okay, Lanny has just come out of the shower and he’s going to offer Maureen his robe in case she’s a little bashful, and he says, ‘I look through the door of my bedroom and see she’s already stark naked and on top of Vince. So much for bashful! I threw the robe on the bed and ran into the room, half-worried they’d finish without me.’ Eager little fellow.”

Reuben murmured, “Distasteful.”

I continued, “Now, after the fiasco in the living room, Lanny is going to go back into his bedroom to give Maureen her three hundred dollars. He wrote:

“ ‘I walked over to my bedroom door and told her, “In here.” She got the tote bag she’d brought with her and followed me into the room. I shut the door behind us and looked for my wallet, which I spotted atop my silk robe on the dresser. From it, I withdrew three one-hundred-dollar bills, tossing them onto my bed in the age-old tradition.

“ ‘She looked at me with an amused expression. I suddenly felt as bothered by my nakedness in front of her as in front of Vince. I unfurled the folds from my robe and wrapped it around me quickly, tying its sash in a huff. She was laughing at me.’ ”

I stopped reading and looked at Reuben, who shrugged. “So?”

I closed the portfolio. “Pretty cool robe Lanny had there. Throws it on his bed, and when he comes back into the room fifteen minutes later, it’s folded on the dresser and his wallet is on top of it.”

Reuben moved toward me. “Let me see that for myself,” he said, looking genuinely puzzled. I handed it to him and he stepped back to the kitchen to see it in slightly less dingy light. Suddenly he produced his lighter, as he always did so smoothly for Lanny, lit the corner of the pages, and tossed them into the french-fried peas. The superheated oil convulsed and hissed, swallowing Lanny’s pages in a scalding blast of steam as they blanched and curled. It’s a good thing the tenement’s landlord had opted not to install smoke detectors or the whole building would have been on alert. Soon the document was reduced to a greasy pulp amid the shriveled peas, and Reuben transferred the pan to the sink, where it spat back and sputtered. He didn’t seem to mind the heat of the handle.

I sighed. “A shame that you would burn that letter, Reuben, when you took the risk of stealing it from your employer’s files and making a copy for yourself. Those dramatic words at its start—‘only after the death of Lanny Morris’—must have made it tempting reading. And then you were thoughtful enough to get a copy to me, because it would make your tape a much easier sell to Neuman and Newberry. I was already aware of the secret it contained. Thanks for that. Equipped with the former, one could easily understand the significance of the latter. By the way, the copy you burned is a Xerox of a Xerox.”

Reuben now headed toward me, making no illusion of his attitude. I backed up a bit and found my head against the edge of the loft bed. I wanted him next to me.

“So this is how I have it figured, Reuben, and you tell me if I’m wrong. You’d let yourself into Lanny’s room, as you always did, to clean up and make his room ready for bed. You had just folded his robe and put his wallet on top of it when you heard the fascinating activity in the living room, so you monitored the drama through the open door. When you heard Lanny coming toward the bedroom, you hid in the bathroom and overheard what serious danger the team of Collins and Morris was in. You stayed in the bathroom while Lanny put the chain across his door and fell into bed.

“Sleep came fast and heavy to Vince, Maureen, and Lanny. You sat there in the dark of the bathroom and realized that this could be the end of everything. Either Maureen would bleed the team dry or she’d go public with what she knew, spiraling them into oblivion. Either way, Collins and Morris were on the verge of ruin… and if they were ruined, where would that leave you?”

I could look at him with contempt now; there were no illusions left for either of us. “The only question in my mind is whether you found the tape recorder before or after you killed Maureen. Any hints?”

He glared at me as if I were a plump priest saying grace at a cannibal luau.

“No? Well, my guess is that you found it first. With the amount of drugs in the three of them, you could have held a Deep Purple concert in that living room and not awakened them. We already have a working postulate that you search women’s handbags as a reflex. Your first concern may have been protecting your world by silencing Maureen, but when you saw that tape recorder and realized what must be on it, the late Miss O’Flaherty was as good as consigned to the angels. For you realized that while she might have the upper hand at that moment, once she was dead you would be the one with the tape… and the curator of Collins’ and Morris’ darkest secrets.

“Surely no murder could have been easier to commit. Your victim was in a deep sleep, bordering on a stupor. There was a pillow right there. You held it over her face. She may not have even struggled. And she was gone. There went her ambition, and Moe Cohn’s very existence, and Kef Ludlow’s dreams, and her mother’s heart, and her father’s mind. And ultimately, Vince’s life. Not bad, Reuben. Six with one blow.”

Reuben was tensing himself now. It would happen any second. He asked, “How could I have killed her if all three doors were chained? You’ll have to tell me that.”

I moved closer to him. If he tried to kill me, it would confirm for me everything I was saying. A signed confession to the police would have been nicer, but it was never going to come to that.

“After you murdered Maureen, you left the suite by Vince’s room, aware that Lanny’s door and the living-room door were already chained. You knew when you left that the boys weren’t going to wake up at eight A.M. without your help. In the morning, you banged on Lanny’s door, telling him you couldn’t let yourself in with your duplicate key because his bedroom door was chained from the inside. When you followed him into the living room, again, you made sure he’d seen that the door there was chained as well. While Lanny tried to revive Maureen, you ran into Vince’s room alone. Vince was still lying unconscious on the floor, where you’d walked over him to leave only a few hours earlier. The first thing you did when you entered the room was to fasten the chain. Then you called for Lanny, who found you bent over Vince’s body, and who saw that Vince’s door was also chained from the inside.”

“Now you had the tape, which you’d taken with you after you’d murdered Maureen. You had the goods on Lanny and Vince in many different ways. And so you then lived the not-very-unpleasant life of Lanny’s valet, as you let the years tick by, taking you past the statute of limitations for the help you ‘loyally’ gave Vince and Lanny to cover up the murder that you committed. You let both of those men believe for all those years that one or the other had killed Maureen O’Flaherty. Vince Collins lay in that tub, slipping toward a lonely, stupefied death, believing into oblivion that he was a murderer. May you rot in Hell, Reuben.”

“Why don’t you get there ahead of me and do my unpacking?” he suggested. He drew himself up to his full height and oh, I was so afraid. “So you were lying to me when you said Mr. Morris wouldn’t be in a position to employ me, that I wouldn’t see him at the Plaza ever again, and that you thought he might already be in hiding. You said that to make me drop my guard?”

“No, I was being very honest with you. He won’t be in a position to employ you because you won’t be free to work for a living. You won’t see him at the Plaza ever again because you’re not going back there again. As for him being in hiding—” Reuben grabbed my throat with both hands. Although not as strong as Vince, he was not as conflicted about his intentions.

But it had been foolish of him to interrupt me, because I’d just been about to tell him that Lanny Morris was already in hiding, under a sheet in the shadows at the back of Beejay’s loft bed, where we had only just finished making spectacular love twenty minutes before Reuben woke us from the contented sleep we’d been sharing. Although Lanny’s legs had gone to sleep from lying still for so long (I’d tried to make some noise at the stove to let him stir a bit, as well as draw Reuben’s attention away from the loft bed), Lanny was able to hit Reuben hard (though not as hard as Lanny would have liked) with the steel bar police lock that Beejay preferred to keep in bed with her.

When Reuben came to, he found himself tied up in the bathtub with torn, wet bedsheets. He could barely breathe through the gag in his mouth and, you know, we really weren’t all that worried about it.

Reuben’s muffled cries seemed to include something about a lawyer.

Lanny responded, “Why would you need a lawyer, Reuben? It’s not like you’re going to be arrested or tried or convicted or paroled. Relax. You don’t need a lawyer.”

Lanny then dialed a number he hadn’t called in many years. It was a New Jersey area code, and it must have been an extremely private number because Sally Santoro answered himself. Lanny made sure Reuben could hear him clearly.

“Sally. It’s Lanny Morris. Can we talk on this line? Okay, look, you know fifteen years now, I don’t think I’ve ever come to you and asked for a favor. Thank you. Well, I’m in Manhattan, and I have a package that I could use the Lattanzi Brothers’ help with. What? Good question, hold on.” Lanny called out to Reuben, “Hey, Reuben, Sally wants to know if this is temporary storage or final disposal. What do you think?”

Reuben, who’d heard about the trucks at the Casino del Mar that took passengers on one-way excursions to the Lattanzis’ landfill, screamed a terrible “Noooooooooooooo!” from behind the gag.

Lanny looked at me for my opinion. I had no idea what to tell him, being occupied with cleaning Beejay’s sink before she got home. I felt just awful about the mess.

Lanny got back on the line with Sally. “Well, I’ll tell you, Sally, it’s a tough call. You see, this package blackmailed my partner, Vince. Yeah, your Vince, our Vince. That’s the reason Vince felt he had to end things.” Lanny listened to Sally for a moment. He had to strain to hear him, and my research had told me that the more softly Sally spoke, the more dangerous he was. “Well, yes, I understand,” Lanny responded to the almost inaudible voice. “And this is also the package that murdered Maureen O’Flaherty at the Versailles. Yes, that redhead. Well, the package brought her body up to New Jersey, which, as you’ll remember, ruined the grand opening of your new hotel. For which you and I and Vince worked so hard. Yes, Sally… I’m sorry, what?”

He looked at me. “The connection must be bad, I can barely hear him.” Lanny put the phone back to his ear and stared at Reuben as he continued: “What’s that? I don’t know, Sally, you’ve always been a fair man. Why don’t I just leave it up to you?”