Chapter 17 - Where the Truth Lies

WE HAD INTENTIONALLY TIMED IT so that I wouldn’t leave for Los Angeles until after Beejay had returned to New York. Her morning flight was scheduled to arrive in the late afternoon; mine was to leave at nine that night. If there were no delays on her end, we would have dinner together before I took a cab to JFK.

I opened her apartment door and she screamed a shrill howl of delight that would have put a car alarm to shame. “Oh God, it is so weird for you to be on that side of the door and me to be on this side!” she laughed. She walked in, her suitcase banging into a small table she ought to have remembered was there, sending a deluxe box of Crayolas flying.

“Beejay, I’ve needed you.” I poured myself into her arms for sympathy, but she was having none of that. She’d already talked through the dearly departed Mr. Morris with me over the phone several times during the course of the past week. She gave me a quick hug and shook me off.

“Yeah yeah, there you were, saving yourself all these years for that special someone and then the Big Movie Star passes through town and he deflowers you.” She flung her beat-up Lady Baltimore suitcase—covered with Day-Glo vinyl daisies—onto the loft bed above her. “I refuse to let you act victimized here. What were you thinking, Kerry, that you’d be the third Mrs. Morris?”

We retired to the alcove beneath the loft, which Beejay gamely called The Conversation Pit. I took the beanbag chair, while she opted for the floor. “If I’d known I was going to be tossed out with the empty bottles of complimentary shampoo, I would have at least questioned him more about his career, about Vince, and especially about the Girl in New Jersey. But no, I had to get all dewy-breathed and exchange sweet nothings. So totally unprofessional of me.”

“Yeah yeah. He was good, huh?”

“Yes.”

“How big?”

“I had no complaints.”

“Come on, Kerry, this is me, length and girth, please: Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate…?”

I gave her the details she craved and a blow-by-blow description of what we did and she was placated for the moment. The fact that the sex had been really good made her slightly more sympathetic to me. Oddly, I’d found myself no less wounded or angry or rejected over the last several days. I hoped that putting New York three thousand miles away would put Lanny well behind me. I departed “The Conversation Pit” and started packing the last of my clothes in my open suitcase, which sat on the floor by the mini-fridge and stove.

Beejay tossed a manuscript alongside the pantsuit I was folding. It was the chapter from Lanny’s autobiography that had been sent to my apartment under such odd circumstances. I’d decided that some paralegal or trainee from the offices of Weisner, Hillman and Dumont had relayed it to me without a cover letter explaining its why and wherefore. I put the pages into my flight bag. I’d only heard Beejay’s synopsized version of the manuscript; my flight home would be a fine chance to read through it carefully.

Beejay lit a cigarette. “When are you going to start interviewing Vince Collins?”

“I’m planning to call him tomorrow and set up something for as early as the day after.”

“You going to tell him about you and Lanny?”

I’d been thinking about this all day. “I don’t see that I need to, or that I really owe him that information. Our agreement allows me to research his life, interview the people he’s worked with—”

Beejay smiled. “ ‘Interview.’ Is that what we’re going to call what you did with Lanny Morris?”

“No, if it’d been that, I’d have gotten something more useful out of him. But honestly, do I have any moral obligation to tell Vince who I’ve slept with in the past?”

“Well, it’s pretty bogus of you not to let him know, but then again, I suppose it could really screw up your working relationship with Vincenzo.” She was using the nickname that absolutely none of Vince’s friends ever used.

I’d been so busy calculating my side and Lanny’s side of the equation that I’d not thought much about how Vince might react to the revelation. He and Lanny had had a marriage of sorts, or at least their split-up had been like a divorce. “Excuse me, Elizabeth Taylor, I’d like to write a book in which you reveal to me all your innermost thoughts, fears, and desires—and oh, by the way, may I mention what a fantastic lay your ex-husband Richard Burton is! Yes, we just had sex yesterday. But back to you, Liz, and remember, you can open up to me as much as you want.”

God, I really had been stupid, hadn’t I? Beejay stubbed out her cigarette hastily. “Can we eat right away? I’m starving.”

“You didn’t eat on the plane?”

She looked annoyed with me. “I don’t get to fly like you do, I’m stuck back in coach. The choice of entrées were ‘meat’ or ‘not meat.’ I told the stewardess I was hungry enough to eat a horse and she said I should definitely pick the Salisbury steak. I haven’t had a good meal in over a week.” I asked why that was and a pained look came over her face. “Honeycake, may I be blunt with you about that painted desert with a sprinkler system you call Los Angeles? Your apartment is lovely, the men are prettier than I am, but what in God’s name do you people do for food out there? There’s nowhere ethnic, it’s the blond leading the bland! Italian cuisine means a pizza burger, Japanese is a teriyaki burger, French means fries. Mexico is less than a hundred and fifty miles away, but despite that, they’ve come up with this thing called ‘Taco Bell,’ and when I ate one of their burritos, I found myself saying, ‘Gee, Toto, I think we’re still in Kansas!’ ”

I’d only been half-listening while picking up her scattered deluxe Crayolas. “So—where do you want to eat, Beejay?” I asked.

She grabbed my arm. “Spice. Flavor. Nothing with cheese. No ground beef. I want to go to a restaurant where no waiter named Brad asks us if we’ve ever dined here before and then explains to us how it all ‘works.’ As a matter of fact, I’d prefer it if our waiter hardly spoke English at all. I want jagged, ballsy New York foreign food.”

The obvious answer struck me. “Look, Beejay, I know you’re the New Yorker here, but have you ever had Szechuan cuisine?”

Fuck Lanny Morris, I thought (while noting that I’d recently acquired much personal insight into that particular profanity). I considered how nice it would be to reclaim the Szechuan Garden on Doyers Street with Beejay, wrest it from Lanny, and make it our own. And it would be fun to watch Beejay’s expression as she tasted these shocking new flavors, like taking a friend to a clever whodunit you’ve already seen, and watching their reaction as they encounter the surprise twist you now already know.

* * *

We headed up a few steps into the restaurant. I wondered if Lee, the manager, would recognize me.

“Oh, I know you!” called out Lee, pointing at me with the index fingers of both hands. “You come here with Mr. Lanny Morris!” he proclaimed so that others in the restaurant would hear him, employing what I now knew to be a completely fraudulent accent.

“You want me to order dishes that Mr. Lanny Morris likes? He come here often,” he added loudly for the benefit of any nearby tables.

I very much wanted Beejay to taste the cascading flavors I’d recently experienced, which had gloriously flambéed themselves on my palate. She’d love every mouthful, I knew. But I was also smarting that Lanny was being fanfared by Lee more than I liked. We had walked in on our own, we had brought our own booze (Korbel “champagne”), and we would be paying our own check. But Lee was making me feel as if we were Lanny’s guests.

Then I realized the one thing I could order that would make me feel as if I’d momentarily trumped the Loathsome Lanny.

“Lee,” I said, “we’d love to have the, uh, king-pow chicken and the lamb in tea sauce, but you know what we’d also like to try? That, um, dish that Lanny sent back, lobster in chile sauce with, with…?”

“Lobster! I knew you weren’t a Jew!” he said more loudly than he probably intended. The restaurant went silent for just a moment. Apparently the predominantly Asian clientele understood English perfectly. As conversation resumed, Lee asked, “You ladies want to pick your lobster?”

Beejay, feeling her second glass of champagne, nodded. “Yeah yeah, I always like it when I go to a steakhouse and pick which cow will be slaughtered. Even better when I’m having veal piccata.” She got up boisterously, I fell in line with her, and we followed Lee.

The lobsters shared their bubbling water tank with a bed of understandably sullen crabs. To Lee’s credit, the water in the tank was as clear as a mountain brook. Black rubber bands held the claws of the crustaceans in check, to stop them from attacking one another.

“You see any particular lobster that looks delicious?” asked Lee. I wanted to inform Lee that “delicious” was a hard term to apply to any greenish-blue skeletal creature with antennae.

Beejay apparently didn’t have any qualms about selecting which arthropod would go to its doom. “Look at that guy, Kerry,” she smiled. “He’s got a lot of fight.” Beejay’s lobster had broken the rubber band that had been intended to emasculate him. “That’s the one I want,” she declared and, ever game, started to reach into the tank to pluck him out. “Where do I grab him?”

Lee caught her wrist with surprising abruptness and pulled it away from the tank. “Don’t do that! His cutter claw is totally capable of shearing off your finger!” he snapped, simultaneously betraying the sham of his front-of-the-house manner.

Lee had a net that was used to scoop up the doomed one, and we went back to our table, where a waiter was topping off our champagne glasses for us, but from that moment on…

… the rest of the meal, Beejay’s reaction to Szechuan cuisine, the taxi ride back to Beejay’s place, dropping her off and getting my bags, the limo I’d booked to JFK, boarding the 747, taking my favorite seat, more champagne, the takeoff, Captain Anderson’s reassuring prediction of smooth weather on the way to Los Angeles, the food that I waved away…

… not one bit of it went into the cerebral cortex where memory is stored. The events around me just sailed into and out of my cute little hippocampus as if it were the revolving door at Macy’s on December 23.

Something huge was troubling me, something so immense I couldn’t step back far enough to see what it was.

The lights were low in the airplane’s cabin. A number of people were watching the in-flight movie (I believe it starred Michael Caine); others were napping. I took Lanny’s manuscript from my flight bag and went up the spiral stairs to the first-class lounge.

It was empty. I sat down on the orange-cushioned couch that ran around three sides of the lounge and lit a cigarette. Out the window, a stark white moon oversaw a flat sea of cloud caps. Myself and the moon. Everything else was below us.

I began reading Lanny’s manuscript.

Let me explain to you here why two guys doing as good as we were doing at this point would find ourselves working in the state of New Jersey.

I was amused again by their gangster friend Sally Santoro. There really were such people. I’d met more than one, and it was always easy, or perhaps I should say convenient, to forget that one of the things such people did in the course of their workday was to arrange for other people to be killed.

And like so many of these gangsters, they tended—

Oh God.

* * *

The plane stopped. Or at least that’s what it felt like. But it was only my brain—and all its prior assumptions—that had come to a halt. A bolted door in my mind had finally swung open, and the acrid truth behind it was elbowing its way into my thoughts. Because of what I’d read. The huge troubling thing was still too big for my limited field of vision to grasp, but now I was getting glimpses from other angles, and a very different picture was forming. I hurriedly reread the part where Sally was trying to bribe the boys with gifts.

“… and I’ll have them send you up here your own shipment of lobsters and stone crabs from the Versailles. You like lobster?”

We said we did, because we really did.

“And a case of these grapefruits I get special down there, you never tasted—”

Lanny was saying that they liked lobster.

Maybe he was just saying it to humor Sally. I flipped the pages, searching for—There it was. When the boys were at the Versailles in Miami, the night before the telethon.

We got back up to the suite around seven and found that Sally had been more than good to his word. Laid out around the living room were various crates bearing the address of their destination, our suite at the Casino del Mar Hotel in Palisades Park, New Jersey. What I thought was a box of beach balls turned out to hold the thinnest-skinned, most dripping-wet grapefruits I ever tasted in my life. Likewise the promised six-foot metal locker filled with fruits of the sea, over a dozen lobsters shifting slowly across a bed of stone crabs and ice.

I read on.

… having presented them to us for our approval like a fancy birthday cake, the Versailles was to ship these goodies up to New Jersey the next day, where they’d be waiting for us at the new Casino del Mar on Sunday….

And just a little farther down the page:

We called down for Maureen, the room-service girl with the gorgeous red hair that you stopped staring at once you got a look at her body, the same Maureen who’d brought me champagne while I was helping out Vince by boffing Denise. Maureen brought us up three steaks (one was for her) as her last official delivery of the day. Much as I love lobster, all that shellfish nested on ice in the living room had actually put us in the mood for hoofs, not claws…

“Much as I love lobster.”

It was all there. He had told the truth without meaning to.

He loved lobster, according to his memoirs, or at least he did up to the night before the telethon. The same night (and the last time) he and Vince saw Maureen O’Flaherty alive.

In a hotel-room suite where there had been a coffin-sized metal case filled with lobsters and crabs packed in ice.

But by the time we dined together at Lee’s Szechuan Garden, Lanny detested lobster. Roaches, he’d called them. Creatures that (manager Lee had just warned Beejay) could nip a finger right off you. They had done the same to people wading in the water at the beach who’d made the mistake of treading near them. Those people had ended up missing toes.

Maureen O’Flaherty was missing some toes.

But she hadn’t been swimming or walking along the beach. The water she’d been in was bathtub water.

Because rigor mortis was in the process of setting in when her body was discovered, the medical examiner knew she couldn’t have died much more than six hours earlier. In fact, because her body was lying in hot water, rigor mortis might have started even sooner; she might have died as recently as two hours before she was found.

And then I could see the truth, and the truth was a terrible thing to see.

The only factor that could have changed the time of death would have been if Maureen had taken a bath in ice water. That would have delayed the onset of rigor mortis and some of the other earmarks by which a time of death is established.

But who on this earth would ever take a bath in ice?

* * *

A corpse might.

A corpse in a hotel suite in Miami who must be disposed of.

And so the corpse is placed in a six-foot insulated metal trunk filled with ice and lobsters and crabs and delivered to another hotel suite in New Jersey. And en route, one of the lobsters breaks the rubber band that stops its strong right claw from opening and closing and as it falls asleep from the cold, it snaps at whatever it can grab hold of and takes away two of the corpse’s toes. And it or another crustacean is also responsible for the weltlike marks on Maureen’s torso that brought no blood to the surface because her blood was no longer circulating.

And when the trunk arrives in New Jersey, perhaps one of Sally Santoro’s soldiers—for reasons unknown—puts her body in the bathtub and covers her in the ice, which puts a hold on the contraction of Maureen’s muscles. The lobsters (those creatures that Lanny Morris will never eat again) are taken away from the room. And slowly the solid ice becomes ice water becomes cold water becomes cool water becomes room-temperature water, and finally rigor mortis begins.

The truth was all there in a dreadful throwaway sentence, referring to the day after the night they’d last seen the girl. “Late the next morning, Maureen was sent packing.” Had he known what he was saying? Was it his cold-blooded little joke or simply a monumentally revealing slip in what he’d intended to be a lie?

Vince and Lanny’s alibis meant nothing. Every part of me knew that Maureen O’Flaherty had died before the telethon had even started.

She could have been murdered by Lanny. Or Vince. It could have been either one of the boys… or, for that matter, the both of them.