Chapter 18 - Where the Truth Lies

I HAD MYSELF A SECRET, oh yes I had. And I intended to keep it all to myself, idiot that I am.

Certainly I could have walked my brilliant deduction into a police station, although I had no idea how the largesse of an amateur sleuth’s inferences would be received. For that matter, to which police would I report my invaluable insight: Miami, Palisades Park, Bel Air? Who had jurisdiction?

What did it matter and whom was I kidding? I wasn’t about to tell anyone anything. Without intending to, I’d fathomed my way to exactly the scandalous revelation Lil Walker had stressed would be so helpful in selling the book. Whatever anyone was going to hear about the secrets I’d unearthed, they were going to hear from the media quoting from (and thereby plugging) my book… not from the police. I wasn’t about to tell anyone anything.

Of course, it would be infinitely better to know more. Such as, say, who murdered Maureen O’Flaherty. But I’d already managed to unravel something, leaving me with the same reassuring feeling one has after extracting the first knot from a child’s tangled shoelace and knowing that the rest of the task is now manageable.

To be sure, it had always been assumed that Vince and Lanny knew more about (or were more directly involved with) the death of the Girl in New Jersey than had ever been revealed to the Public, and said Public seemed just fine about this. Collins and Morris were a national treat, like Fritos or Skippy peanut butter, and no one had been prepared to abstain from the pleasure of watching them simply because some woman of dubious intent had been lying in wait for them (albeit deceased at the time) when they’d arrived at their hotel room.

But as ready to forgive them as the Public had been, the boys were not prepared to resume business as usual post-Maureen. Something had happened in the vicinity of that last telethon, something that had truly soured the team. They no longer behaved like brothers on stage. They behaved like brothers-in-law. The put-downs, always a mainstay of their act, seemed to hang in the air a half second longer than before. When Vince said his trademark “I’d kill you if you weren’t already brain-dead!” the audience laughed a half decibel less, and perhaps some of their minds flickered for the duration of an eye blink to the imagined image of that girl’s body in the bathtub.

The start date for shooting A Night at the Opera was pushed back six months because of “casting problems.” As production of The Maginot Line began (its roster including Vince Collins but not Lanny Morris), no one was very surprised when Lanny announced that he’d be playing his first dramatic film role in the Warner-Seven Arts motion picture Royal Flush, a heist picture with a juicy role for Lanny as a safecracker gone straight who is forced to return to crime to protect his ex-wife. Both movies were supposed to win the boys Oscar nominations, if not the prize itself. Neither film did, nor should have. The boys showed their good sportsmanship by appearing together at the Oscar ceremony to present the Best Supporting Actor award (Vince quipped that he’d been supporting Lanny for years), and that marked the last time the two appeared in public together or, as best I could tell, saw the other in person.

There are things that everybody knows. It doesn’t mean they’re true. It’s just that everybody knows about them and so they “are.” Documented U.S. Air Force encounters with alien spacecraft, the marriage of Rock Hudson to Jim Nabors, Dr Pepper containing prune juice, champagne goblets being made in the shape of Empress Josephine’s breasts (not referring to the stems, of course—there’s an image), Fidel Castro’s involvement in the assassination of JFK. We have no outright proof of any of this, and yet we all know it to be true because we’ve talked about it so much. We assumed Peter Lawford and Robert Kennedy were involved in the death of Marilyn Monroe, but that only made them more interesting, more worldly. They knew things we didn’t know, and we subconsciously admired them for this.

And we felt that way about Vince Collins and Lanny Morris, whom we knew had something to do with the death of Maureen O’Flaherty. Since it was rumored she’d been involved with one or both of the comics, we knew they were both knee-deep in it without hip boots… even if their impeccable alibi proved they couldn’t have been directly involved in killing her.

And now I alone—hurrah!—knew that their alibi meant nothing.

So here I was again about to have lunch with Vince, a man who might have done A Terrible Thing. Only now I knew he’d had the opportunity, if not yet an acknowledged motive. And astutely as ever, I was having lunch with him alone. In his home.

What was I supposed to do? When he suggested that our first interview take place at his house, would it have been diplomatic to say, “Do you mind if I bring a friend? Because I’m concerned that you might, in the course of my questioning, murder me.”

To be sure, I didn’t think I was really in any major danger. It wasn’t as if the further careers of Vince and Lanny had been littered with the corpses of other women. I wasn’t some room-service valet. I had an editor, a publisher; there were contracts signed with this man with whom I was about to lunch; people knew where I was going, they would know if I didn’t get back, and if anything happened to me, the police would rain down hard on Vince Collins. You can get away with murder, but usually not twice.

Still, I decided to regularly mail myself an updated copy of all I’ve been relating here. Today I again sent to myself all but these last two pages, and on the back of the manila envelope I’d printed in discreet block letters, so as not to alarm the postman, the melodramatic phrase TO BE OPENED ONLY IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH, and I will repeat this procedure every day or two. (I do hope you’re not reading this now because that event has taken place.)

I was so happy to be back in my home. My glorious day with Lanny, culminating in my utter ravishment, had been a total lie that still sat sour in my stomach. But I had remedies. The best medicine is not laughter but rather, of course, revenge. It would be wonderful if in writing about Vince, I could find evidence that Lanny had been directly involved in Maureen’s death. This would indeed regally reciprocate Lanny’s royal screwing of me.

And in the far more unlikely instance that I found Vince to be the guilty party, well, I’d just have to console myself with a monstrous bestseller. Although every part of me reverberated the belief that while Vince might know more about the death of Maureen O’Flaherty than he had ever spoken, he was not a murderer.

God, I was so glad I hadn’t slept with Vince. Imagine if I’d compromised myself so disgracefully with both men! At least I still could begin my work with him feeling halfway clean. There was, to be sure, the agreement I had made to sleep with him when we completed the project. At the time I’d thought I was being quite the alluring libertine. Now I could only pray the phrase “live and learn” still included the “live” option.

Vince had a villa in Bel Air, built in the late forties by John Lautner. Vince had dictated detailed directions to his home over the telephone. I was now wheeling my really-just-awful canary-colored convertible (which lacked power steering) up the privileged pathways of Bel Air, careening and nearly caroming along the twisted turns of its upper tiers like a tarnished pinball, yellowed with age. America might in theory be a democracy, but I was truly extending the Jeffersonian ideal by daring to drive the wretched refuse of my jalopy through what was a de facto private sector.

I’d been alternately referring to Vince’s directions and cursing them for the last forty-five minutes. I’d passed Anzio, looped onto Roberto, turned down the redundantly named Via Verone Street, swiveled up Portofina Place, and turned back onto Stradella, now firmly convinced that Vince lived in Tuscany.

He’d said, “You’ll need to hang a right on Tortuoso, and after you pass a kind of Cape Cod house with blue shutters, you’ll see an unmarked driveway on your left. It has some painted white stones on either side. Head up that until you get to a tall white iron gate. There’s an intercom on the left—the name on it is Otto Bloodwort.”

“Who’s that?” I’d asked.

“Nobody. I just assume that no one on earth wants to talk with anyone named Otto Bloodwort. Push the button, say today’s password, which is ‘Hi, it’s Kerry, I’m here,’ and I’ll buzz you in.”

The route conveyed to me by Vince was like one of those maze puzzles in a kid’s comic book that resemble the small intestine. Now my “car” was finally coiling its way up the tortuous Tortuoso and my instincts were telling me that Vince had by no means given me the most direct route from my apartment to his estate. In fact, I learned much later (and not from Vince) that years before he’d had mapped out for his use the most circuitous route to his home from all points of the compass, which he relayed to first-time visitors in the hope they’d be unable to retrace their path without written instructions and a road map, lowering the odds of uninvited return guests who might contemplate dropping by without warning.

“Yes?” asked the voice that emanated from the speaker grille below the name Otto Bloodwort on the gate’s intercom.

“Hi, it’s Kerry, I’m here,” I said. I was standing by the intercom, as I’d been unable to reach the intercom button from where I’d had to stop my car.

There was no reply but simply a low buzz akin to what I’d imagined the hum of the electric chair might sound like, and after a dramatic pause, the metal gate swung slowly open. I ran back to my vile vehicle, fearful that there was a time limit on how long the gate stayed open. “Lady Journalist Crushed in Dreadful Convertible.”

There was still quite a bit more driveway ahead of me after the gate. I eventually pulled my unforgivable transport into a motor court the size of a playground. Vince was framed in his doorway at the far end of a walled courtyard. He wore a fisherman’s sweater, charcoal gabardines, socks that looked like cashmere, and Bass Weejuns.

“Any trouble with the directions I gave you?” he asked.

“Only with the parts where I had to turn. It doesn’t usually take me an hour and a half to travel fourteen miles as the crow flies.” My, what an ornery cuss I was for the moment.

Vince shrugged. “I’m sorry. The price of seclusion.”

“Have you considered Yucca Flats?” I responded, pushing my luck. “Actually, it’s my fault, not yours. My car turns on a dime store.”

We walked into his home, stepping through a foyer that might have been an art gallery and down five softly carpeted steps into the living room. It was as handsome as I knew it would be and as comfortable with its manliness as Vince was with himself. Hues in every shade in which coffee can be taken. I was surprised to see so many books, not a one of them about show business.

There was a de Chirico hanging on the left wall, not one I knew but the usual setting: a sunny, eerily deserted Italian town square, a self-important statue, the long shadows of two people talking in an archway of the piazza. As always, the painter’s work looked to me like a holiday photograph taken a few seconds before something dreadful happened. Its muted oranges and yellows went well with the room, which had as its main ornamentation a marvelously slung-out view of Los Angeles, as if from the verandah of a manor house that oversees the valley that is its domain. “Good for you, Vince,” I couldn’t help but murmur to myself.

Vince asked if I’d like the grand tour, but we had work to do and some of it would not benefit from my being Vince’s pal. I was, at the very best, morally positioned somewhere between a sniper and a surgeon. “You know,” I said, slinging the bag that contained my cassette tape recorder and my writing tools onto a leather couch studded in dull brass, “we’re going to be doing this every day, and I’m sure I’ll have occasion to look around. We have so much terrain to cover—”

He nodded and went into the kitchen to get some coffee. I lavished praise on his taste in Italian modern art. He laughed. “What were you expecting, wide-eyed moppets? Or matadors, nude women, and clowns on black velvet?” Again, I had reflexively been patronizing him. As I set up the tape recorder, I asked him if he always fended for himself.

The thought of having live-in help was poisonous to him. “I’d have to talk with them, ask all about how their family was doing, hear what they thought about this and that, introduce them to guests and then tell the guests all about how their family was doing, so I’d seem to be a nice guy… That’s a lot of work, considering that what I most cherish in life these days is to not have to be ‘Vince Collins.’ ” That was why Reuben had been (and remained) Lanny’s valet exclusively, whom Lanny always paid directly. “I like to read, to think, and have the freedom to get up and leave any time of day without having to tell anyone about it, or even having to say goodbye.”

That first day we started with his parents and his childhood. I knew he half-expected me to open with the topic of Maureen. But I wanted to make it easy at the beginning for Vince.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted him to trust me. I wanted him to trust himself, to feel like a trial witness given the kid-glove treatment from opposing counsel for the first hour of a cross-examination. After a while, he begins to feel, Hey, there’s not much to this. He starts to get more expansive. He follows up his own answers. He knows you’ll understand since he’s already explained to you how things were. Eventually, he’ll tell you everything. The truth is: Everybody wants to confess.

Of course, I couldn’t wait too long to get to Topic A. I knew I had Greg Gavin all antsy in New York for hot copy and N&N’s Master magazine ready to run stunning excerpts from our book in its premiere issue. But it could wait three, even four days. I rationed myself that long to enjoy chatting with Vince Collins.

It was easy. He was self-effacing, funny, a nice mix of warm and tangy, like a perfect circle of lemon slice floating in a straight-up Manhattan. And when he talked about his childhood, I pictured how hard he’d worked to better his life. Somewhere in his early teens, he must have looked in the mirror, messing with his hair and some Wildroot Cream Oil, appraised his looks, and thought, “I can work this. I can get myself somewhere with this face.”

His father’s American name was Domenico Collins. Vince had been told that Collins was really some customs official’s version of Colline Metallifere, which is the mountain range in southern Tuscany where his father’s family came from. His father’s Italian name was Domenico Vincenzo d’Ambrosio. He’d always wondered why the customs official didn’t dub his father Domenico Ambrose.

I asked him, “Making you Vince Ambrose?”

“Does sound a bit lavender, doesn’t it?” he acknowledged.

His father came to the New World in his late teens, either because he’d heard there were lots of good prospects for northern Italian chefs in this country or because he had murdered an ex-boyfriend of his wife’s. “Oh, Madon’, what a goddess my mother was!” Vince reflected. He said he would look through his mother’s face and see from the Renaissance all the way back to ancient Rome. She was the one who’d encouraged Vince to sing, although he’d inherited his voice from his father, who was known for singing (not just robustly but memorably) while he cooked.

By a quarter to six, I heard the slightest rasp in Vince’s voice and I suggested we pack it in.

“Would you like to get some dinner?” he asked. I hesitated and he added, “We wouldn’t have to talk about me.”

Recent experience should certainly have caused me to say no to Vince’s suggestion, but I knew that if I searched my mind real hard, I could find a justification for saying yes.

My real reason for wanting to acquiesce should have been obvious enough for anyone to understand. If George Harrison of the Beatles meets you at a bar, takes you on a mini–Magical Mystery Tour, makes you feel that something special and unique is happening to you, has his way with you (which is exactly the way you’d have it), and then unceremoniously dumps you, what would be the one thing that could make you instantly feel better about losing George Harrison?

Correct, very good: John Lennon, of course. If I was Dorothy Lamour, then Lanny was definitely Bob Hope and Vince was Bing Crosby.

Not that Lanny was unattractive. But though his face could look fascinating and sensitive in the glow of a Plaza bedside table lamp, and though he had one of the three most adorable tuchuses it had ever been my privilege to grab, and though he was certainly (God fucking damn it) the best one-night stand I’d ever had, anyone but anyone would tell you that it was Vince who was the looker of the two, the man of the two, the more soulful of the two.

Aha. I’d thought of the rationale. Great. It hadn’t really taken very long. Being social and chummy with Vince would be a great way to, again, make him further drop his guard. Not to sleep with him yet, of course (of course), for, as a rule, when a man sleeps with a woman, this causes him to afterward raise his guard.

He took us to a favorite restaurant of his, across the street from the Riot House (which is what we in the trade had taken to calling the Continental Hyatt House, because this, along with the Sunset Marquis, had become the lodging place for second-tier rock bands or the roadies for first-tier rock bands).

The restaurant’s address may have been 8426 Sunset Boulevard, but you certainly couldn’t find it if you were standing at that address on the sidewalk. At this point, the streets off the Sunset Strip nosedived downhill to Santa Monica Boulevard, as if you were in San Francisco. At number 8426 there was simply a metal gate and a flight of stone steps descending into what seemed like an empty lot alongside a tattoo parlor. Vince opened the gate and gestured that I should follow him.

Once again I was being led down a long flight of steps by Vince Collins to an unknown terminus. This time there were Japanese lanterns hanging above the wrought-iron balustrades and thick foliage on either side of me. The air was wonderfully sweet. After descending some forty steps, we emerged onto a patio enclosed by shrubbery and trees far below the boulevard, where very smart people were dining as if in the garden of someone’s house, which in fact it was. Gas sconces challenged nature, negating the hint of a chill in the night. Well behind and above me, I could hear the soft whisking of traffic along Sunset Boulevard like distant comets sweeping across the night sky.

A fair-haired young captain instantly spotted Vince and ushered us to a table tucked into a corner of the sunken patio. It was a lovely place to be.

I learned that the restaurant, called Butterfield’s (and who Butterfield was I have yet to glean), had at one time been the guest house of John Barrymore and was preserved as such. Its most illustrious guest was Barrymore’s drinking buddy Errol Flynn.

Without Vince uttering a word, a fair-haired young waiter had placed before us fried parsley on a silver salver. We picked at it strand by strand as we talked. It was hot, greaseless, and sophisticated, as if Cole Porter had reinvented the potato chip.

I had a cream of watercress soup that was pleasingly thin with a mysterious flavor something like smoky asparagus. Vince started with sand dabs, which were new to me, a flat fish like a thumb-length halibut. They’d been dredged in flour, then pan-fried in olive oil and served with a green tartar sauce that I suspected contained Japanese horseradish. Vince had me try one of the sand dabs, neatly ushering it onto my bread plate. It was wonderful. He was wonderful. We were having such a nice time not talking about his career for a change… how lovely to discover there were other things in the world that interested us both.

Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad thing after all, I thought, that I’d agreed to make love with him when the book was finished. It was as if, having come to that agreement, the issue of sex was now off the table. Flirtation was unnecessary. Lecherous innuendo need not lurk at the end of every sentence. Some men I’d known would have made endless references to the promise, trying to make sure it hadn’t all been a joke on my part, reminding me of their intention to cash in the promissory note I’d issued, seeing if the redemption date could be advanced a little. Not Vince. Apparently when we were done with this project, he would get to deflower me of whatever was left of my petals, and that was that. So there was no need for either of us to toy around with each other. We could actually talk, as if we were people.

And that, undramatically, was how our evening went. No kiss, not even a “kiss-kiss,” no plaintive voicing of “God, if only we weren’t working together!” Just this sane, rational, very atypical for the time “See you tomorrow.”

For several days, it went just this way. We would progress through Vince’s life (by Day Three we were only up to his entry into the army, and there were still some points in his teens I needed to go back over) and then have a relaxed dinner, where we would make a graceful transition from narrator and inquisitor to two adults having a genuine conversation. We went to relatively low-profile places where Vince could dine as anonymously as was possible. By “anonymously,” I mean simply that people he didn’t know didn’t come over to our table and introduce themselves, asking for photographs to be taken or menus to be signed. Vince treasured certain restaurants where the majority of the patrons understood this code of behavior. Don’t think I’m saying that Vince could go anywhere without being recognized.

He did have a “don’t recognize me” face, which he sported on those rare occasions when he was momentarily out in public and vulnerable. He’d apologize, saying, “Sorry, I’ll be right back,” and tilt his head downward, keeping his eyes up and wearing what I could best describe as a stupid, openmouthed grin. He’d also raise the key of his voice a fifth and adopt a flat, genial midwestern twang, pushing the words a little. “Well, thanks very much, sir,” he’d say to the parking attendant, “we’d just like to have it back in one piece,” and one would see this shy but good-natured rube standing where Vince had been a second earlier. As we got to know each other better, he stopped apologizing and simply whipped out the face when necessary, as one might whip out a hankie if about to sneeze.

Thursday night he’d suggested a place out in Malibu, the Sandpiper, whose management guaranteed that the sun would set into the Pacific Ocean each evening. Vince being Vince, we had the best table, providing us with a clear view of the slick, hollow stone that jutted far out into the water, ocean spray spuming up through its ventilated surface like a rock garden of geysers.

As a kind of a test, I had casually asked Vince that night if he liked lobster. His response had no special tinge to it. He said he loved cold lobster, served in a salad, loved the look and feel of the red shell and red radishes set upon a bed of green leaves. Loved lobster bisque, especially at Wheeler’s in London, where they would flambé cognac and literally ladle the mysterious blue flames into the soup as it sat before you. He wasn’t nuts about boiled lobster, the meat sometimes getting too mushy or stringy, but split and char-grilled, that was heaven. Didn’t like dipping it in butter, though. “Then it just tastes like good popcorn at the movies, so why not have good popcorn and see a movie?” Enjoyed the act of cracking the lobster for the first few bites, but then it became simply too much work, considering that he was paying for the lobster in the first place.

He answered me in such a genuine, balanced way that I gratefully took this as further reassurance that if lobsters had been a part of any dark episode in his life, Vince probably didn’t know about it.

We had started our work on a Tuesday. At the end of Friday, as we unwound from reliving his first year in the army (he was almost court-martialed for addressing a colonel as “Kern”), he asked me if I wanted to continue through the weekend. I opted not to, for my own sake. I thought it was important I have the weekend to myself, to stay in touch with that world where people do laundry, buy groceries, and park their own cars. It would be too easy to lose all context, and that might take me off my game.

He seemed to understand but stressed that he was blocking all other activities out of his schedule to accommodate the book, and said that anytime I wanted to work straight through the week would be not only fine with him but preferable. I suggested Sunday as a possibility, but asked if he could give me until Saturday afternoon to confirm because it would require moving some things around. In point of fact, I had nothing planned for Sunday but simply wanted to keep my options open.

That evening I dropped off my four cassettes at the offices of Cynthia R. Lehman Stenographic Services, which were located in the dining room and sometimes also the kitchen of Cynthia R.’s little stucco house on a street called Formosa in West Hollywood. When I got home, I poured myself a white Graves and sat cross-legged on my bed with Cynthia’s transcribed pages from the day before. Flanked by my Klimt prints and antique perfume bottles, I read them with some satisfaction. I had drawn out Vince quite nicely, I thought, bobbing and weaving during his narrative like a sheepdog moving his flock through the paddock gate with a minimal amount of backtracking. None of what I’d acquired so far would cause Greg Gavin to click his heels and deem it a bestseller. But things would perk up next week when I asked Vince about Maureen O’Flaherty. I’d let him have smooth sailing as we began another week. But then I would ask him, perhaps on Wednesday. After that, I expected I would know much more. Oh yes I would.