Chapter 15 - Where the Truth Lies

LANNY (WHO HAD RISEN EARLY the previous morning to appear on the Today show) was again up early, I deduced as I awoke and found myself alone in bed. He’d clearly been thoughtful enough not to wake me, and I was grateful for the extra sleep. We’d followed our first rage of lovemaking with talking—almost shyly and not about much, especially where I was concerned. I tried to keep my limited comments philosophical and nonbiographical. We both happily and idly explored each other’s bodies as we conversed. Eventually, he decided to devote his attention to one fixed orb in the constellation of my already so totally exploited body. It began almost casually, but continued in a tender, reassuringly focused way. I had been hypersensitive there only thirty minutes earlier, but now I was not and could allow him to do whatever he insisted he must do. It became difficult to tell which was his clever tongue and which were his fingers. The sensations were as if several very different types of men were simultaneously having their way with me, trading off tasks, comparing notes, pooling information about my responses, all totally dedicated to creating this dangerous, deep-seated rising within me.

I will tell you, because this is part of my job, that my second orgasm with Lanny was almost certainly the longest I’d ever known, even at my own hand. It would not peak, not for the most harrowing time. I thought I might lose consciousness, from lack of air or heartbeat. Surely it was over now. No? No. Still more to take. “Stop,” I beseeched.

“No” was Lanny’s witty riposte.

“I’ll die,” I confessed.

“Not yet,” he managed to reply. It was so cruel of him. I had only given him whatever he wanted and here he was, causing me to die, and still I was not yet dead.

“Now you can die,” Lanny murmured from between his clever lips.

My cries became so loud, truly as if I were being murdered, that Lanny had no choice but to clamp his hand over my mouth. I understood, even as he half-suffocated me. I too was afraid security guards might at any second break into the room.

Later I returned the favor. I can’t review my own work, but I had him so demonstrably hard and on the edge for such a time that I have to assume it was good. I was first a veritable hummingbird, then warm quicksand, and finally a belly dancer creating ornate spirals upon him with my hips. To my surprise, I found myself peaking yet again, even as he hoarsely cried out his own wordless epitaph beneath me.

After several long minutes of silence, we walked together to the bathroom and ran the cold-water tap in the sink at the Plaza Hotel, leaning down to drink at it like it was the high school water fountain, until we’d slaked our thirst. Then we walked back to the bed together, intertwined ourselves comfortably, and instantly fell into sleep.

When I woke, I looked at the G.E. clock radio provided by the Plaza, but it had apparently become unplugged at 2:26 A.M., most likely due to our thrashing about. I had a watch, but I’d left it in the bathroom along with all my clothes, and I just wasn’t ready to get up. In two consecutive Manhattan mornings, I’d awakened in two strange beds, and jet lag always hits me hardest on the second day. Considering the state I’d been in when I went to bed (there was a soreness within me whose cause I savored for a moment), I decided I still needed to sleep a good hour or two longer. I reached around for my new darling, but he wasn’t there. I considered getting up to find him, but thought I might shift the pillow a bit first. Perhaps he was in the bathroom or more likely making incredible breakfast plans—renting a Circle Line boat and having it catered by the Regency or Ratner’s… or maybe we’d have eggs Benedict here in bed. I pictured black olives dotting pastel-yellow hollandaise and livid-yellow yolks sacrificed on an altar of crimson bacon and charred muffin. I burrowed into the pillows.

I was slowly awakened again by the annoying drone of a vacuum cleaner outside our bedroom door, in the suite’s living room. That Reuben was one fastidious fellow, I’ll tell you.

I didn’t love the idea of greeting Reuben, who would justifiably regard me simply as the girl Lanny had picked up on the plane. Which, of course, I was. But it bothered me that I’d be perceived as a starstruck groupie. I was a published and trendy writer, I’d interviewed people just as famous as Lanny Morris, and I’d already chummed up to Vince Collins. I possessed documents from major publishing companies confirming my professional status.

Reuben’s vacuum cleaner banged against the bedroom door. I assumed he was doing that intentionally to get me out of bed. I looked for the robe I’d shed, but it wasn’t there. My purse and clothing had been moved from the bathroom and laid out for me neatly in a row on the dresser. I could not imagine Lanny doing this; it bore all the signs of the fussy Reuben. I didn’t like that he had done this while I was asleep. Was it really necessary for the room to be straight before I awoke?

I scooped up my clothes from the dresser and stumbled into the bathroom, where I dressed and did my best to make my hair and face look acceptable. Then I walked out through the bedroom door to the living room.

But it wasn’t Reuben who was vacuuming.

It was a maid in a blue-and-white Plaza Hotel uniform. She looked at me as if I were one of the toilets along her route. “Checkout today?” she said with a South American accent. I asked her, first in English, then in dreadful Spanish, if she could come back in half an hour. She looked annoyed, indicated her own wristwatch, and departed.

The room was bare of everything except that which the Plaza had provided. Already knowing the answer, I searched the suite for Lanny, for Reuben, for some note Lanny might have left me. Nothing. The second bedroom in the suite had clearly never been slept in. My guess was that Lanny had used it merely as a clothes closet.

I went to the bedroom’s phone, hit nine, got a dial tone, and dialed the number of the Plaza Hotel displayed on the phone itself, as if from the outside world. I asked the operator for Mr. Merwin. I was told (after a moment) that he had checked out.

What do you know? The dork had ditched me.

Technically speaking, I was now staying at the Plaza illegally. And I certainly felt very much like a squatter. Or diddly-squat. What was that Italian movie? Seduced and Abandoned. When any of my past couplings had ended with one of us leaving in the morning before the other awoke, it had invariably been me, and I’d at least left a note on my pillow, the bathroom mirror, or the refrigerator.

Bastard.

My initial impulse was to order a couple of bottles of Dom Pérignon from room service to run up Lanny’s tab, but I was already feeling far too much like a cheap slut who’d spread my legs in return for a ride in a limo, a burger, and a couple of drinks.

I had the sudden need to shower. The Plaza bathroom’s plumbing was ancient, with separate faucets for hot and cold welded into the tub, perhaps by rust. I turned on the higher-placed knob for the shower, waited a minute, and discovered that hot water was apparently hard for the management to come by. Perhaps some other hotel guest was taking a shower at this particular moment. Just as well, I thought, remembering the fate of previous women who’d occupied the tubs of hotel rooms reserved for Lanny Morris. Besides, once cleansed, I wouldn’t much feel like changing back into the bra and panties that I’d dirtied in my mind by the very act of removing them for his amusement.

I left the suite almost as hastily as had Lanny. The elevator was manned by Mutty Mickey, who’d given me a leering lift just yesterday. I saw the slightest tug of a smile on the far side of his mouth as he noted that my outfit was the same as the day before.

“Shut up,” I said.

In the lobby I went to the front desk and asked if either Mr. Merwin or Mr. Lanny Morris had left any message for a Ms. Bonnie Trout. The desk clerk instantly replied without consulting anything or anyone, “No, may we get you a taxicab?” His way of telling me to beat it.

I hit the Fifty-Ninth Street exit. The wind was blowing south, hurling the smell of horseshit in my face from the carriages on the opposite side of the street. I turned my back on the Plaza and the Autopub and started trudging west.

Why had I slept with Lanny? I couldn’t blame it solely on the two oversized martinis I’d downed, which was nowhere near my limit. And certainly I’d already interviewed enough celebrities to make it unlikely I’d been starstruck.

I entertained the possibility that subconsciously I’d slept with him as a delayed response to Vince’s overtures, that with Lanny I was simply completing the pass that Vince had thrown me. I couldn’t copulate with Vince, because we had lots of work to do first, but I could sleep with Lanny, because he wasn’t going to be part of the deal.

I liked this explanation a lot and decided to embrace it until further notice.

Meanwhile: that bastard.

He’d made me look worse than a slut. He’d made me look foolish. If only he’d acted like the repugnant Lanny Morris from the memoirs I’d read, I’d never have gotten into this situation. At the very least, I would have expected absolutely nothing more from him than the distinction of being Boff No. 331 and a leading contender for this year’s title of Miss Receptacle. I surely would have been more measured and calculated in the bestowing of my apertures and embouchures.

Ah well. In life, what’s important is to learn from your mistakes, to identify why others might have led you into making them, and to kill them. I am a person who, if someone steps on my foot, reflexively says, “I’m sorry!” Beware such people, my friends. We are, as Dickens once said, “secret and revengeful.”

I’d suddenly found an additional driving purpose for my book with Vince. It could be not only a fascinating study of the comedy team of the fifties, but also a fine opportunity to tarnish Lanny’s reputation, especially if it could be done with impeccable accuracy, detail, and documentation. (See also hatchet job.)

For the first time since I’d begun this project, I knew how to handle the dilemma of balancing Vince’s story (which I would be hearing directly from him with my own two ears) against Lanny’s story (which I hadn’t expected to hear at all).

The way I would handle balancing their sides of the story would be that I wouldn’t.

I reached Columbus Circle invigorated. This would be the finest payback I could manage. Whatever dirt I might find would have to be the truth, of course. But I would seek out “the truth” and, like the tabloids, accept only the data that confirmed my working hypothesis. Like a graph chart at an annual stockholders’ meeting, the truth can be most anything you need it to be.

I was at the stairs to the subway, where you could take the IRT or IND trains in any number of directions. I advised myself, “You should take the A train to get to Sugar Hill at 145th in Harlem, and after that to 175th.” There were two grand destinations at that last stop. One was the Tabernacle of Reverend Ike, which prior to being a tabernacle had been one of the great Loew’s movie dream palaces. The other was the Port Authority George Washington Bridge Bus Station.

I walked the dank concrete corridor from the subway steeply up to the station itself, which was definitely the poor sister to the huge bus terminal near Times Square. I knew that almost any bus leaving Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge stopped at the Bridge Plaza in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the way every northbound train out of Grand Central stops at 125th Street. I had a quick cup of coffee at the accurately named Terminal Coffee Shop (and was reminded that the coffee at most coffee shops isn’t very good) and took an escalator up to the outdoor shed, where all buses were launched directly onto the bridge.

A few minutes later, I climbed thirty concrete steps from the Bridge Plaza up to Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee, where there was a line of about forty custard-yellow Checker cabs standing idle in the early-afternoon sun, each with a big white baseball painted on its side bearing the name Babe’s Taxi. The first man on the stand, a burly muttonchopped fellow, waved me into the roomy backseat.

“Where to?”

“Palisades Park.”

He looked back at me. “The town or the amusement park? Some people get off the bus and want to go to the amusement park, but they closed it down a couple of years ago.”

“Shame.”

“Damn shame.” He scowled, turning the ignition. The Checker’s engine sounded like a tractor. “No reason on earth it had to close. Just people got greedy.”

“Can you take me to the police station there?” I asked.

“Sure, but complaining to them about it won’t do much good now,” he counseled, pulling away from the taxi stand.

I always think of police stations as having two big globe lights outside and a cigar-smoking sergeant at an elevated admitting desk. This one could have been the local library, except that if your book was overdue, they’d put you in a cell.

I asked the uniformed officer behind the desk if there was anyone still working there who might have been involved in the investigation of Maureen O’Flaherty’s death. I showed him the letter that permanently resided in my pocketbook, written by Connie Wechsler on Neuman and Newberry’s letterhead, confirming that I was researching a book commissioned by them about Lanny Morris and Vince Collins. If I’d been a male newspaper reporter, he’d probably have shrugged me off, but as I was a personable young woman writing a book, of all things—“Good for you, sweetheart,” he said and I half-expected a pat on the head—he was willing to help this little girl as best he could. After some consultation with his peers, he said that the only person anyone could think of who was still around the area was Jack Scaglia (he pronounced the g), who’d been one of the two patrolmen who’d first seen Maureen’s body. He’d taken an early retirement and now headed corporate security for Lipton in Englewood Cliffs, just a few miles up Lemoine Avenue. The officer gave me the general number for Lipton’s corporate offices and I was able to get Jack Scaglia on the line. I didn’t pronounce the g in his name, and that, coupled with my celebrated ability to impersonate the vocal timbre of Ann-Margret over the phone, was enough to gain me an immediate audience.

Scaglia had been in his mid-thirties when he’d escorted Lanny and Vince to their press conference for the Casino del Mar and then on to their hotel suite. He had a pleasant office now, with a plastic cube on his desk containing photos of his wife and two daughters, and a small plastic Oscar award inscribed BEST DAD IN THE WORLD.

I explained that I had no official standing, saying simply that if he were to provide me with information I would give him credit for his contribution within my book. He asked if I could make clear that his name was pronounced without the g, and I said that if I were to quote him in my book, I would do that. Thus assured, he offered, “Sally Santoro and his people—” He stopped and asked me, “Can this part be off the record?”

I nodded solemnly and assured him that I always retained total discretion in the event of such a request, which he foolishly took to mean yes. Reassured, he explained, “Sally had a pretty tight relationship with the state police—he still does—so when somebody said Sally needed some cops to work security for him, we were always glad to help. As long as he wasn’t committing an actual felony, we tried to keep a respectful, cooperative relationship with Sally’s people. They were very supportive of the police, except of course where crime was concerned. But they brought a tremendous amount of income into the area, as you can imagine.”

I could. It turned out it was Jack who’d found the cleaning lady (who was the first to discover the body) and then Maureen O’Flaherty herself.

“I’d never seen such a beautiful dead woman before,” he confided as I passed on his offer of a drink and watched him pour a Four Roses for himself in his office at three in the afternoon. “The water came just a little above her nose.” He held out his thumb and index finger to indicate. “That much. Imagine that much water being the difference between life and death.”

I asked him if the coroner had actually determined the cause of death. I knew most of this already from newspaper files, but I hoped maybe he’d have something new to say on the subject, especially if it might make Lanny look bad. He smiled patiently as he added some water to the Four Roses from a small pitcher on his desk. “You try lying underwater in a bathtub for a couple of hours without a snorkel. What do you think you’d die from?”

“So she drowned?”

“Of course she drowned.”

“Why?” I asked.

He looked at his watch. “Look, I thought—What do you mean, ‘Why?’ ”

I indicated a pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes on his desk. “May I?” I asked. He looked annoyed but nodded his assent. I took my time extracting one from the pack. “I mean, you and I take baths all the time. We don’t drown in them.”

He reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a book of matches from somewhere called the Bicycle Club and lit me. “There was some talk that she’d mixed sleeping pills and booze—not that she was a suicide, you understand. Just passed out.”

“No signs of violence?”

Funny. I felt like I knew more about this than he did, and he’d been there. He sat down in the chair next to mine and pulled at his lower lip. “Are we still off the record?”

People hear what they want to hear. I said, “Jack, no one is going to hear anything unless it’s with my say-so, and I guess you can imagine how I would feel about that. Do you even see me writing anything down? I’m looking for context here.” I said it fast and smooth and none of it was technically a lie.

Jack lit one of his hundred-millimeter-length cigarettes. “Okay. Well, look. The Casino del Mar was a huge deal for Sally Santoro, for everyone. It was a chance to turn the town into what Atlantic City thinks it’s going to be. Only we were close to Manhattan, so it could have been even bigger. It got launched with this tremendous publicity push from Vince and Lanny… and this dumb girl shows up dead. Nothing was going to resurrect her. It was in everyone’s interest”—he lowered his voice a little—“especially Sally’s interest, for this not to get blown way out of proportion. So the whole investigation was sped along, and she was cremated here, and that was that.”

I nodded. “I think I asked you if there were any signs of violence on her body.”

“The coroner said—”

“Jack, I’m asking you. You saw her body long before the coroner did. I’m just asking you what you saw, for gosh sakes.”

So he told me. Her body was blue. There were scratches on her torso, but they were a little unusual looking, because they weren’t really cuts but more like welts. The medical examiner hadn’t thought much of the marks, but Scaglia also conveyed in as many words that there weren’t a lot of great medical examiners outside of the big cities back then. In those days, a forensic specialist was generally assumed to be an alcoholic doctor with a strong conscience who’d opted to perform surgery only on people he couldn’t possibly kill.

The medical examiner had ventured that the marks might have come from some activity prior to Maureen’s death, perhaps something sexual. Scaglia told me that any time something couldn’t be explained, the coroner’s office tended to imply that there was a range of perverse sexual activity indulged in by the kinds of shameless people who allowed themselves to be discovered dead.

Looking for any wiggle room in Lanny’s alibi, I asked Scaglia what the consensus had been regarding the time of death. He said the coroner had based his finding on the onset of rigor mortis, the stiffening contraction of muscles after death. Where present, rigor mortis tends to start setting in about six to nine hours after the fact, or at least that was the rule of thumb back in the late fifties. However, in the case of Maureen O’Flaherty, the estimated time of death was placed as being considerably more recent than six hours, owing to the fact that the victim had died while taking a bath. The warmer the temperature, the sooner the stiffening kicks in. In a hot or even warm bath, her body would have responded as if she were living (or rather, dying) in a tropical climate, where rigor mortis often occurs almost instantly. When her body was found by Scaglia and examined by the coroner, the stiffening effect had just started. The coroner placed the time of death as being two to three hours, at the very most, before she was discovered.

The numbers provided by the coroner completely exonerated both of the boys. Even at the most outside time of twelve hours for the onset of rigor mortis, Vince and Lanny still had the best alibi available in the twentieth century: They’d been on camera, live, in front of millions of witnesses. Their “nap” breaks had been in their dressing rooms, which in the Miami studios had no windows; there was a guard posted outside their doors to ensure that no one accidentally or intentionally interrupted their sleep. Most important, the naps never went longer than a few hours, and the fastest private airplane could not get from Florida to New Jersey and back in that amount of time, even discounting traveling to and from the airports and, of course, the few additional minutes required to commit a murder.

The coroner had tested for the presence of semen—Scaglia had a little trouble telling me this part and even blushed a bit—and the response was a clinical positive, but he could find no actual presence of ejaculate (as Scaglia chose to put it). So the indication was that, yes, the victim had had sex sometime in the week before she died but with the limited science of the late fifties, that was all that could be deduced.

“Then from when you and your partner first arrived at the Casino, there was no time when Lanny or Vince wasn’t in full view of more than one other person?” I asked, knowing the answer. Scaglia said it was impossible for them to have slipped away, that not only had he and his partner, a man named Ted Dolinger, been at their side right up until Maureen’s body was found, but the press had been watching them too, in large numbers. They’d even done a live television interview.

So my trip to Palisades Park had only affirmed what the gossip columnists had reluctantly been forced to concede at the time: that Vince and Lanny couldn’t be pinned to the girl’s death, despite the fact that she was found in their hotel suite and (as later came out) was acquainted with them. What she was doing in their hotel (and in their bathtub, for that matter), how she had gotten there from Miami, and whether her death was by accident or foul play were unsolved mysteries and likely to remain so as the years went by. Through a supposed clerical error, Maureen’s body had been converted into ashes shortly after a lackadaisical autopsy had left a ton of unturned stones lying about in a heap. Her cremation’s inferno ensured that the scent would grow cold for any future investigations.

Once it was clear that our boys could not be directly connected to Maureen’s death, the powerful columnists of the time handled the story a variety of ways. Kilgallen’s was the cleverest: She immediately became their champion, countering all the wicked rumors and falsehoods that were circulating, thereby doing a splendid job of circulating all the wicked rumors and falsehoods. Winchell (who was slipping in popularity) saw the Mafia’s black hand in the girl’s death, and certainly Lanny and Vince had some gaudy mob ties that they weren’t shy of wearing in public. In a similar vein, Jack O’Brien speculated that the late Miss O’Flaherty had caught the eye of Sally Santoro in Florida and when the mob boss had learned that she had the hots for one of the duo, he’d had her laid out dead as a big wet surprise for our two lads. From his viper’s den in Miami, Moe Cohn was a spoilsport about the boys’ alibi; apparently, if he couldn’t say anything bad about Vince or Lanny, he opted to say nothing at all. He never mentioned them in his column again but instead heaped lavish, bland praise on their competition. It didn’t make for interesting reading, and by the end of the year, his column had been dropped, the Miami Sentinel opting for shorter, racier items with lurid pictures to go with them.

But although Maureen’s death couldn’t be pinned on Vince and Lanny, the yellow press had not hesitated to wonder aloud what she’d been doing in their intended suite. Perhaps she’d been taking a bath with the plan of slipping herself between the cool sheets to lie in wait (and wait in heat) for one of our two boys to tuck himself into her. If so, was this meant to be a surprise for one or both of the boys (perhaps coordinated by a grateful Sally Santoro)… or was Maureen there at Lanny’s or Vince’s request? There had been nothing in Lanny’s memoir to indicate that either man was genuinely smitten with Ms. O’Flaherty. Why would she be recruited all the way from Miami when there were undoubtedly a score of superbly skilled courtesans in the New York area?

Scaglia relayed most of what little new information he had to offer at the Bicycle Club, an upscale singles bar near the entrance to the Palisades Parkway. He’d said he could talk more freely there. Certainly he had to talk more loudly. Although he was a family man, I noticed that our waitress knew Scaglia by his first name and relayed an urgent message to him from someone named Cheryl, who was wondering why she hadn’t heard from him.

I asked him, with a look of passionate interest that I assumed he would overinterpret: “But is there anything else you can remember, Jack, something you alone might have noticed or heard at the time that might have been overlooked by others?”

He peered around furtively at the happy-hour crowd, then returned his eyes to me. “Listen, as it happens there is something else. But this wouldn’t be the place to talk about it. We’d have to… go somewhere private.”

Where would that be? I asked. He suggested a motel about four minutes away. Quelle surprise! So we got in his orange Datsun station wagon and drove down to the Cresskill Inn, nice as flophouses go but a bit tawdry for a Norman Rockwell type of village. He made the check-in arrangements with the manager, who, from my vantage point parked outside his office, seemed to know Jack almost as well as did the waitress at the Bicycle Club.

The motel room had all the amenities: a bed. There was also a chair by the combination desk and dresser. I sat on the amenable bed as Jack looked around the room, elated over its ice bucket. He suggested that he get some ice from the machine outside. He had a bottle of Four Roses in the glove compartment of his car—

“Jack,” I smiled. “We’re here so we can speak more privately. So let’s get business out of the way first and then… well, the night is young.” Actually it was a little after five P.M. and the sun was still shining brightly, so the night was barely embryonic.

Scaglia exhaled with a sigh. “You can’t say where you heard this,” he cautioned.

I laughed. “Would I be likely to put in my book that I checked into the Cresskill Inn with you?”

He frowned. “I mean that you heard it from me.”

“Oh, I would just say the information came from a reliable source.”

Jack Scaglia looked relieved. A Reliable Source took another drag of his Benson & Hedges cigarette and began: “The police like to withhold some information about a crime scene from the media and the public. It helps them sort out who might know something and who’s lying. So there was something strange about the girl’s body that was never mentioned in the press.”

“You mean the marks on her torso and legs?”

He shook his head. “No. This was something a little more unusual. I’m not sure if anyone noticed right away. Two of her toes were cut off.”

Okay.

“Two toes on one foot or one on each?” I asked.

“Two on one foot. Pinkie toe and the one next to it. Like they were cut at the same time, maybe with the same blade.”

“Was there blood in the tub water?”

“The water wasn’t bloody or anything, no. There was a little ‘stuff’ in the water… bodies can, um, leak a bit after death.”

“Was the cut clean?”

“Well, I heard it was. The coroner pointed it out to some of the detectives involved in the investigation. I didn’t notice her toes when I found the body. I mean, what I was looking at was not her toes.”

I’d heard of the Mafia cutting off someone’s fingers, professional cardsharps or dealers who were caught manipulating cards. Never toes.

People with diabetes might have to have a toe cut off if they developed oozing gangrene, but Maureen hadn’t been diabetic. If she had been, there would have been speculation that she’d suffered from insulin shock or gone into a diabetic coma.

One of Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off her toes to try to fit into the glass slipper (not in the Disney version, of course). Men used to shoot off their toes to stay out of the army. There were jokes I might have made, but we were talking about a dead young woman who, as far as I might tell from Mr. Morris’ memoirs, had done nothing worse than sleep with Lanny very shortly after meeting him. Anyone might have done that.

“Did they think she lost her toes before she died?”

“Actually, they thought it might have happened after. There being so little clotted blood where they were cut off.”

And that was the full extent of his secret. It made absolutely no sense to me, nor to him. I couldn’t see how it would help me taint Lanny’s reputation.

“Now how about that drink?” he asked.

I nodded agreeably. “You get the Four Roses from your car and I’ll get the ice,” I said, snagging the square ice bucket from the desktop. “And maybe I’ll ask the manager if there’s a pizza place that delivers. We might get hungry, sooner or later.”

Oh, he liked me talking this way. One edge that women have over men in the game-playing department is that men are unfailingly prepared to believe they’re desirable to any woman who hints that they are. Out of kindness, Christie Brinkley might say to a seventy-year-old deliveryman named Murray with hair growing out of his ears and a mole on his right cheek, “You’re so cute!” Murray would have no problem with that concept. “I guess I am pretty damn cute at that,” he admits. “Maybe Christie and I will go out sometime.” Here’s married Jack Scaglia and he really thinks I’m opting for a water glass full of rye, some slices of pizza, and a quick suck-and-fuck at the Cresskill Inn. And off he goes to his car, totally confident that this will happen.

By the ice machine, I picked up a yellow Babe’s Taxi courtesy phone mounted on the wall and asked for their flat rate to the East Thirties of Manhattan. Twenty-six dollars had me covered nicely. The cab pulled up two minutes later at the Rite-Way Dry Cleaners across the street from the motel, as I’d requested. The cab ride only took about forty minutes. Happily, I was going opposite the rush-hour traffic departing Manhattan for New Jersey.

Back in Beejay’s apartment, I finally took off the outfit that I had previously removed in Lanny’s bathroom at the Plaza while donning his silk robe. At the time, I had hoped he’d check out my body and find it desirable. Yes, he’d found it desirable to check out.

I looked at my naked self in the mirror as I called Beejay’s answering service, on the off chance that Lanny had left some explanation for his departure that might make everything lovely again. After all, he had called me here yesterday morning, so I knew he did have the number.

There were no messages for Ms. Trout.

I turned on the water in the shower. It was very hot, much hotter and stronger than the inexcusably tepid dribble at the Plaza. I let the water assail me. I stood closer and closer to the showerhead, and adjusted it so that instead of a steady downpour, it beat against me like the blades of a helicopter or a well-deserved caning from the headmistress. Eventually, I switched the showerhead back from massage to fine spray. This allowed me to make the water hotter still, and huge billows of steam filled the bathroom. I was having trouble with the lathering-and-cleaning-myself part, though. It’s not that Beejay didn’t have many, many bars of soap in her apartment. It’s just that there simply weren’t enough in the world.