Chapter 30 - Where the Truth Lies

I DID ALMOST NOTHING for the first week after Vince’s death.

I’d wanted to write a book that dealt with Maureen’s death, and Vince really hadn’t wanted me to, but he couldn’t resist the money. A million dollars was a great deal of cash to earn for simply talking about oneself, more than Vince could have gotten for making a couple of movies.

I didn’t think it had been wrong for me to want to write the book. Vince knew that for the sum he was being offered, a puff-piece biography wouldn’t suffice. From the outset, I had told him we would have to grapple with the question of the Girl in New Jersey.

Connie called as soon as the news of Vince’s death came over the radio. She was very Connie about it. She didn’t waste time on sentiment or “what might have been.” She wanted to know if the material I had already accumulated was enough to fill out a book. I said that anything can fill out a book; Rod McKuen had proved that. But if we went only with the interview material, it would have to have a ton of nice pictures and the story would end before Vince met Lanny. She groaned and said Bernard Besser and Jay Drelitch were poring over the contracts, trying to figure out what their obligation was. They were grateful, she said without a wisp of shame, that Vince had killed himself rather than, say, been run over by a truck. By voluntarily “absenting himself” from the deal, it was likely he’d defaulted on the monies that were to be paid him.

She then broached a different notion: What if the book became my book, about meeting Vince, investigating Vince? What of that breakthrough I’d mentioned when I’d called her from Miami? Would that be enough, combined with the interviews, to make a real book, something juicy? I said I’d have to review what I had and report back to her.

What I had, as Connie was in no way aware, were tidbits of information, my sordid Lanny story, one huge theory about where Maureen was murdered—about which Vince would now never comment—and my infatuation, partial seduction, initiation into the sapphic arts, victimization, and physical confrontation with and/or by Vince. If the book were to be about me, I suppose there might be enough there. But was that a book I would ever want to write?

It had been Vince’s complaint when he first met me. “You were in the interview a lot. All over the place, almost every sentence. They were as much about you as about them.” I had told him it was the current style, but then, so were bell-bottoms.

* * *

It was early afternoon and a large gray envelope was tucked between my door and the four-gallon container of Arrowhead spring water that was delivered to me every two weeks. It bore no postal marks.

I picked up the envelope and, while I was at it, also retrieved my mail. One letter stood out amid the humdrum. It had been sent special delivery from the post office in Anaheim, postmarked the last day I’d seen Vince. There was Scotch tape around its seams.

I needed a pair of scissors to open it. I cut the side rather than the top, and out spilled a dozen Polaroids of me and Jenn. On the back of the most erotic one (God, that Jenn was beautiful) was written in a ragged hand, “I’m sorry. Vince.”

Before I had a chance to rethink my decision, I had turned on the gas beneath the ceramic logs in my little fireplace and set the photographs ablaze.

Then I sat on the couch with the larger package. Perhaps granting the opposition too much credit, but too curious to wait, I assumed the envelope would be clean of fingerprints and tore it open.

It was a sheaf of pages, clearly Xeroxes. There was an accompanying letter, from Lanny. But the letter had not been written to me.

John Hillman, Esquire

Weisner, Hillman and Dumont, P.C.

7760 Sunset Boulevard

16th Floor

Note: This letter and enclosed contents are a private communication from a client, Lanny Morris, to his attorney, John Hillman, Esquire. All rights to privacy in a communication between client and attorney are to be strictly observed. The enclosed document is only to be unsealed by John Hillman, Esq., or his legal representative (who is bound by the same laws of privileged and private communications between client and attorney) and only after the death of Lanny Morris.

FOR THE EYES OF JOHN HILLMAN, ESQ., ONLY

Dear John,

First, if you’re reading this letter, I’m gone. So I really hope you aren’t reading this letter, my friend. But if you are, thank you for all your help over the decades.

John, as you are already aware: For a variety of personal reasons, reasons which I believe justified the effort involved, I have in the last year written several chapters for what might have someday been memoirs of my times with Vince Collins. I purposely wrote them in the style of delivery that the public knew me for back in the fifties, because the times were brash and vulgar, we were brash and vulgar, and this was the way we spoke privately and (with some censorship) publicly as well. It was the way things tasted, and I wanted to invoke those flavors for the reader, raw and sour as they might seem now.

Although I was writing specific chapters for specific purposes, I knew when I began that there was only a slim chance I might complete the work. If I misled you into thinking otherwise, I apologize. Sometimes people are deceptive for what they hope are good reasons. The white lie is, for me, one of the things that keeps society from turning into anarchy.

John, one of the chapters I wrote is already on file in your office and will hopefully serve one of the purposes for which it was intended. A copy of it and two additional chapters are enclosed in this envelope. They might be of passing interest to anyone writing about show business in the late 1950s. The first chapter certainly depicts, in a fairly unflattering way, two rakes having their way with the world and women. I don’t back away from this. The second chapter, which covers a period later in the same year, continues that depiction and also clearly lays out a timetable showing the absolute impossibility of our involvement in the death of Maureen O’Flaherty.

John, the third chapter enclosed here is sealed. It contains my brief, frank, and honest account, voiced again in my language of that period, of certain events that occurred one evening in Miami that ultimately ended my working relationship with Vince Collins. I’ve intentionally made its tone compatible with the first two chapters, so that anyone reading all three (God forbid) will hear the same “Lanny” speaking. Even writers of comedy material for crass showbiz duos have their artistic ego, you know.

John, I have worried that, after my demise, things might someday be said (perhaps even by Vince) that I would not be able to contradict, and it’s been of grave concern to me that only two people now living know the truth. Therefore, without trying to make this more important than it is, I am going to burden you with this knowledge as well. My hope and guess is that you will never need to cite any of it. I leave that to your good judgment, with the request that you err on the side of discretion.

Thank you, John, for your assistance and your friendship.

Warmest regards,

[Signed: Lanny Morris]

Lanny Morris

I skipped past the second chapter, which seemed to be identical to the one Bonnie had brought to me from Los Angeles, and looked at the third. It was typed with the same Selectric ball that had typed the two chapters I’d already read from Lanny’s autobiography (which apparently was not as far down the road to completion as I’d been led to believe). That manuscript follows.

We knew we wanted to make an early night of it, with the telethon coming up, so Vince suggested we dine in, ask Maureen to join the two of us, and have her maybe really join the two of us for dessert. I told him Maureen thought that, the way we sometimes boffed the same girls, we might be joined at the hip, and Vince said we’d give her the chance to discover otherwise. I said she’d be hip to that (joke).

I picked up the phone and Vince, always my best audience, listened to me order. I said, “Hello, room service? I’m holding a service here in my room and I don’t have enough to make up a minyan. Yeah, it’s the Lanny-Man, who else? Now look, can you send me and my pally here three filet mignons done rare, rare, and rare, with béarnaise sauce, the usual stuff on the side. Great, and look, I don’t want you to take this the whole entirely way other, but you have a very sweet girl down there, very lovely young lady named Maureen, and she’s just terrific. Could you do a favor for a tired entertainer and have her bring the order up? Even if you have to pull her off some other room. For the Lanny-Man, okay? No, we got booze but, say, have her bring up three bottles of Moët on ice, okay? She can wheel it all into 2502, that’s the living room. Thanks, sweetheart.”

I knew it would be Maureen’s last call of the night. She got dinner up to us pretty quick. God, was she beautiful. We sat around the table, she sat between us, and she knew where we were going with this. To help us get in the mood I did a Tuinal, and she did one, and Vince, he did two ’cause he was always doing one. (No joke.) We got into the second of the three bottles of Moët we’d ordered, Vince switched over to his Jack Daniel’s, and Maureen started unfolding the convertible couch in the living room (we thought it would be fairer to keep the action in neutral territory). She also chain-locked the front door to the living room, to make sure that someone from housekeeping, eager to turn down our beds, didn’t walk in on a Versailles employee having a ménage à trois with the hotel’s headliners.

When I got out of the shower, I was going to bring her my robe, in case she felt a little bashful, since she’d only slept with me before, not Vince. 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. But she said we had plenty of time and we all popped another Tuinal to make sure of that.

Listen, she was a beautiful, willowy, goyish lay. She had that terrific Irish thing, all downy and auburn. Her lips were placed high and small, and to enter her was a mysterious privilege.

Vince realized he’d been hogging the action, so he stepped aside for a minute and I was on top of her fast. I like, maybe even need, to see her face, to watch the cross-fade thing happen, never once looking away from her eyes, as she goes from allowing this to demanding this. Unless she’s acting (I like to think I can tell the difference), I’ll learn in that moment who she really is. I’ll be going long and steady, no end in sight, and discover a lost soul, or a spoiled brat who knows her comeuppance is overdue, or an innocent who hopes I know what I’m doing.

Maureen was just beautiful. We blurred together, our movements steady and certain. The telepathy that Vince and I shared was coming into play now, and for the moment, I was the main beneficiary. We had only done a threesome once before, with mixed results. But now he was slowly primping her nipples and cradling her breasts, giving them a life of their own. I could hear her sigh as she readily succumbed to both of us.

Jesus, I felt good. Some of it may have been the pills, but Maureen was a one-woman harem. Vince and I had done a routine in From Brooklyn to Bali where four female dancers were lined up behind each other and the camera’s angle made it appear as if they were the goddess Kali, one dancing girl with eight arms. I felt like I was making love with that goddess. Maureen’s hands were expert, and she was stroking me in ways that didn’t seem humanly possible. I looked over my shoulder and discovered that two of the hands moving around me were Vince’s.

I said, “Hey, compadre, watch it, will you?”

Vince offered a bleary smile. “Sorry, it’s a little hard to tell who’s who.”

Maureen snapped with some urgency, “Shut up, I’m close! Go faster.”

Then Vince did the coolest thing. He reached his arms past my hips and slid his hands smoothly under Maureen, pulling her into me with each thrust. That did something crazy-wild to her, yeah, and to me as well. A look of helpless release swept over her, as if the team of Collins and Morris had drawn her into something bigger and stronger than herself. And who could argue that we hadn’t? We were bigger. We got paid the best, had the best suite, made the audience beg for more. What we were doing with Maureen was just what we did onstage each night. We killed.

I saw the tendons in Vince’s wrists flex as he repeatedly, rhythmically drew her into me. He and I had become a rowing crew, our breaths sharp and synchronized, drowning out Maureen’s faint gasps. She couldn’t keep up with us.

Now Vince was shifting his weight and it dawned on me—being in all ways a thoughtful partner—that he and Maureen might appreciate a changing of the guard. I considered (and rejected) a joke that where our contractual billing was concerned, Vince was always supposed to come first.

Instead, I asked over my shoulder, “You want to cut in, pally?” the response to which was a prodding against my tailbone. I sputtered, “Hey! Give me a chance to step aside.”

I suddenly felt Vince’s chest hard upon me and his bourbon breath damp around my ear.

“C’mon, you’ll love it,” he assured me. “You never felt anything like it.” Mother of God what was this!?! The doped-up drunk meant to burrow into me! I tried to squirm away but he had Maureen’s body and his own arms around me like a cage. Maureen hadn’t stopped, she was going for her own finish, while Vince was insanely reassuring me, “Believe me, it’s like from another planet. I’d never hurt you, Lanny.”

“Get the fuck off me!” I cursed, but he had me pinned. Maureen grunted beneath us, my weight and his strength pressing her into the mattress.

He crooned, “No, no, no, trust me, baby, it’s like double the sex. If you don’t like it you never have to do it again, don’t say you never thought about this.” What was he saying in his red Seconals and Jack Daniel’s delirium, vouching for what a great idea this was? “I never thought I’d like it the first time either but wait till you feel it, pally, it’s like you never came before.”

In trying to push him off me, I hit Maureen in the face with my elbow, which probably ended the magic. I was off the bed in an instant.

“We don’t FUCK, Vince!” I screamed, in shock and horror, and Vince appeared terrified by both my reaction and his miscalculation. “We’re buddies, we’re pals, we’re partners, a duo, a twosome. We adore each other, I worship you, you’re my big brother, we hug, we kiss, we love each other, but we don’t FUCK!!”

He stared at me, unable to speak.

I cried out to him: “Oh man, Vince… when we tell the world we love each other… you don’t really love me, do you?” I waved my arms to the heavens. “Oh God, don’t tell me this is, this is—We don’t fuck, Vince. Shit! Don’t put that into it, not, not when we’re beating the world! We’re not British or in ballet. We’re not flamenco dancers or figure skaters or chorus boys. We’re stars! We live together, travel together, go out together—we’re like firemen, we can’t be queers! People would laugh at us and it wouldn’t be funny!”

I looked at Maureen. Her nose was bleeding, and she was wiping blood from her face with the end of a bedsheet.

Vince had moved into the bathroom, where he got a towel and wore it back into the room. He sat in a shiny gold tufted armchair in the corner and busied himself with the lighting of a cigarette.

I looked back at Maureen, but didn’t know what to say, never having been in this situation before. “I’m sorry.”

“About what?” she inquired.

“Well, for the bloody nose. It’s not broken, is it?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She wadded a corner of the bedsheet into her right nostril to staunch the bleeding, which looked pretty goofy, but I guess making a sexy impression on us was no longer the number one thing on her mind.

She snapped a finger at Vince. “Got a butt?” she asked. Then she looked back at me with a flat expression. “No offense intended.”

Vince tossed her his pack. Whatever he was feeling, he was keeping it to himself. She extracted a cigarette, lit it thoughtfully, and took a very short drag.

“I guess the question,” she said, her low tone pushing smoke out over her lower lip, “is who pays me.”

So she was the House Hooker.

I hadn’t considered the possibility before, but it made such sense that I had to admire her. What a fabulous setup, I thought. Work for room service in a hotel, tons of horny guys, even a few horny couples. Everybody’s on vacation, fun in the sun, she brings booze or champagne into the room, stunning looks, tight uniform, there’s a bed right there and a bathroom in which she can gargle and wash up before departing. What a tidy package. And if you’re a man on vacation with your wife, the Versailles even lets her have a room of her own for a few hours. Hubby can say he’s having a couple of drinks with the fellas, and off he goes for a quickie in Room 308 with a view of a ventilator shaft just above (joke coming) the Ballroom.

Give the room-service manager and the house detective a piece of your action and you’re set. No problem with the Vice Squad. “I was just delivering his eggs over easy, Lieutenant.” Fourteen hundred bedrooms with clean sheets to flop in… sure. She was the hotel’s on-call call girl.

Vince and I had a lot to talk about, a whole fucking lot, but we sure as hell weren’t going to do it in front of Maureen. I felt awkward being naked in front of him, if not her. I walked to my bedroom door and indicated “in here.” Grabbing her tote bag, she followed me into the room, shutting the door behind us as I 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 equally bothered by my nakedness in front of both her and Vince. I unfurled my robe and wrapped it around me quickly, tying its sash in a huff. She was laughing at me.

“What’s the big joke?” I asked.

“You’re flouncing,” she said, putting a lisp on the c. “I guess I’m seeing you in a whole new light.”

“Yeah, same here,” I snapped. “Take your money.”

“No thanks,” she smiled.

“That’s good money, considering you didn’t get anybody off,” I pointed out.

“I’m not a prostitute,” she said. “I use sex in my work to the minimal extent necessary. Sometimes, when I’m not working, I also enjoy sex, to the maximum. This evening was a case of a happy overlap. And it seems I’ve just found a skeleton that you two boys would probably prefer to keep in the closet. You wouldn’t want it to come out of the closet, I’m sure.”

She was worse than a whore.

She said, “Lanny, I went to Hunter College—”

“That’s no excuse,” I sneered.

“And I want to do things. Things as big as what you’ve done. To do so, I sure could use a lot of money, and to get it, I sure could use this information I’ve acquired. All that matters is who pays me, and how much. If it’s you, it’s going to cost a lot. But it’ll only cost you once. If someone else pays me for the information… it’ll cost you forever.”

She walked back into the living room. Vince was over by the bar, hitting the Jack Daniel’s. God knows how much he had drunk while we were out of the room. He looked hurt, and resentful.

Maureen picked a bottle of champagne out of the ice bucket and poured herself a glass. “You guys sleep on it. Think about what it’ll be worth to you. I’m so fucking tired, I’m not even going home. It’s those Tuinals.” She dropped her tote bag by the couch and got under the sheets of the bed we’d been in.

She gave me a sweet, sleepy smile. “Hey, Lanny, nothing personal. The other times, you were a wonderful lover and you’ve got the sweetest little butt.” She smiled at Vince. “Guess you noticed that about him too, Vince.”

Vince snapped off the light by the bar, took his bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and looked back at her from the doorway of his bedroom. The living room was dark.

“Anyone can say anything about anyone, Maureen,” I snapped.

“You know I’m not stupid, Lanny. I can make it stick. If we don’t come to terms, the world’s going to hear the dulcet tones of Vince Collins crooning his swan song.” She yawned. “We’ll do business over breakfast. Order me French toast, will you? And think big, guys. Think very big.”

The bitch pulled the sheets over her head. I looked across at Vince, who’d ruined everything. He was too wasted to waste my words on. He gave me an attempt at a smile but fell against the doorframe to keep himself standing.

I would never be able to love him like I had.

I closed the door connecting my bedroom to the living room. I put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and fastened the chain lock in case the maid didn’t believe in signs. I left a wake-up call for eight and went to sleep, knowing that the telethon was the least of the ordeals I was going to face in the morning.

* * *

The Tuinals had really conked me out, and I slept through my wake-up call. The operator called Reuben in his room down the hall to see if he could wake me, but he couldn’t get in with the key he had because I’d chain-locked the door. He had to pound for two straight minutes to get me out of my stupor. I staggered to the door, unfastened the chain, and let him in.

I went into the living room and saw Maureen in the bed. I knew from across the room that she was dead. There was a mashed pillow over her face, and her body was lying at a funny angle. All the same, I shook her and tried to see if she had a pulse. I wondered if someone could have broken in, but no, I looked at the living-room door and it was still chained. I yelled for Reuben to get Vince while I worked on Maureen. Reuben ran out from my room, saw Maureen, almost fainted, and ran into Vince’s room. Next thing I know he’s calling me, saying he thinks Vince is dead too, but Vince is just unconscious; I’ve seen him that way a dozen times. One too many Tuinals and eight too many whiskeys. I looked at Vince’s door and it was chained as well.

* * *

John, my friend, I have no idea when you will read this, but I’m not now reliving that night in 1959. In all the ensuing years since what I’ve described took place, here’s the thing I am stuck with: Maureen’s autopsy in New Jersey showed no indications of poisoning. She’d been alive when I went to bed. All three doors to the suite were chain-locked from the inside when I awoke and found her dead. Whoever killed her had to still be in the suite. Which left me with nothing better than this:

She didn’t kill herself.

I know I didn’t kill her.

And Vince couldn’t remember anything that happened after I left the two of them, she in the living-room bed, he framed in the doorway of his room.

So that, John, is how I’ve known for many years that my former partner and friend Vince Collins murdered Maureen O’Flaherty. I know this simply by default. It’s mathematics. Two possibilities minus me equals him. I don’t like those numbers, but that’s how they add up.

The one other possibility I’ve thought about over the years, John, is that somehow I did it, that I was the one who had the blackout and that Vince, out of affection or loyalty, let me think it was he who had committed the murder. This would have been a noble sacrifice, but there were so many bitter words between us when we split up shortly after this terrible event that I think something would have slipped out or been said in anger.

I think Vince can be forgiven for two reasons. The first is, I honestly don’t think he knew what he was doing. I don’t think he’s pretending not to remember. I think he was so far out of it that night that he truly doesn’t know what happened. That must be some kind of hell to live in.

The second reason to forgive Vince is that he was justifiably terrified that his incident with me (and whatever feelings may have been attached to it) would become public knowledge. In the fifties and early sixties, the slightest rumor of homosexuality could destroy a show-business career in an instant. At that time, there were many arranged marriages for leading men with “tendencies.” One successful TV actor, playing the part of a man in your profession, John, even created a story of a wife killed in a tragic plane crash when no such wife had existed or crash had occurred. In the climate of those times, I can understand Vince’s totally appropriate fears.

Obviously I’m no babe in the woods here. You must have guessed by now that Vince and I together covered up his crime and found a way to relocate Maureen’s body to a hotel in New Jersey. I cannot explain how we accomplished this, for reasons that I’d prefer to keep to myself. This is the one criminal act that both of us committed, but if you’re reading this, then I’m beyond the reach of the American judicial system and will have to plead my case in a higher court.

For Maureen, I feel the least amount of sympathy I can feel for a victim of murder. I have never fully understood what game she planned to play with us. But upon witnessing Vince’s indiscretion, she clearly intended to gain the maximum benefit for herself or inflict the maximum damage on Vince and myself. I now believe that, from the outset, she got close to me with the sole intent of trawling for whatever she could turn up in our lives that might profit her.

I do feel terrible pain for her parents and I’m glad that by protecting Vince all these years, I’ve also protected them from learning more about their daughter than they should ever be told.

Finally, there is the obvious fact that I’ve known of Vince’s guilt and have never reported what I know to the police. Part of the reason for this is that I can’t prove anything. Not to the police, not to you, not to anyone but myself. The only way I know that Vince killed her is simply because I know that I didn’t.

Without our supposedly ironclad alibi, if the police knew anything of what I’ve just told you, they could probably pin the murder on both of us, since we both had so much to lose and were both locked up in the same suite with her the night she died. Florida’s electric chair has taken the life of more than one innocent man. What I’ve told you here could add me to that list. Certainly it would be the end of my career as someone who makes people laugh. You can surely understand why I kept this matter secret until my life was over.

John, that’s the truth as best I know it and can convey it.

I sat in my sunny little apartment, the smell of freshly burnt Polaroids adding its own wicked spice to the scent of Jungle Gardenia that usually inhabited the premises.

The document was extremely revealing, to say the least.

Or extremely self-serving.

Really, while all breathless revelation, it was just the “truth” as Lanny was choosing to depict it. And conveniently, it pointed all the blame at Vince.

The entire document really meant nothing. It hadn’t been notarized or witnessed in any way. The fact that it was purportedly addressed to John Hillman gave it no legal authority. I could write the same letter and mail it to him myself. Anyone could.

For that matter, there was nothing saying this had ever been sent to Hillman or to anyone other than me. And suppose one were to ask John Hillman to verify that he’d received this letter, what could he possibly say? After all, he wasn’t supposed to read it unless Lanny Morris was dead. Even if he had, all he could say to anyone about it (including the police or a judge in a courtroom) was that it was a privileged communication between attorney and client and that he could not reveal or comment upon its contents without his client’s permission.

On the absurd notion that Lanny Morris might have died last night, I turned on my TV. The local ABC affiliate had an afternoon news show that would be on in a couple of minutes. If Lanny Morris was dead, it would definitely be mentioned. Ah, there was my good friend Rona Barrett with her five-minute update on Hollywood. An informed public is a nation’s greatest asset. Funny, she hadn’t called me yet to cohost. Show business is so fickle. One day you’re someone’s best friend…

But what if this document was what it claimed to be? What could I glean from it, and, by the way, why in God’s name had Lanny sent it to me?

If this was the truth as best Lanny knew it… then I at last had my answer to the question of why Maureen O’Flaherty had died. She’d known too much and had intended to profit from it.

ABC was running a commercial for a special that night about the Watergate scandal. There was a shot of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and a clip of John Dean testifying. Behind him was his wife, Maureen, who had sat behind him every day, her blond hair pinned tight around her head like a halo. She’d been a stewardess, of the “Coffee, tea, or me?” variety, according to John Dean. That’s how he’d met her. I was willing to bet that, like Maureen O’Flaherty, she wasn’t quite as angelic as she was making herself appear for the benefit of Congress. Probably she—

A thought occurred to me. I went to the big legal portfolio in my bedroom, where I kept Xeroxes of clippings and articles written about Collins and Morris in the fifties. Kilgallen, O’Brien, Earl Wilson… Moe Cohn. There he was.

The scandal columnist out of Miami whose columns had, surprisingly, chosen not to speculate about the Girl in New Jersey. Cohn had faded from the scene fairly quickly, but he’d certainly raked up the local dirt in his brief prime. The byline photo showed a bald man in big sunglasses with a cold-blooded smile in the shadow of an oversized nose…

Quickly, I grabbed a pencil and filled in his bald head with black lead. I was generous with it. And I tried to imagine rheumy, watery eyes behind the sunglasses.

I recalled that Maureen’s mother had been related to a more famous denizen of New Rochelle: the great George M., whose last name had also been her family name. Cohan. And a standard diminutive of Maureen (as John Dean would tell you) is… Mo.

Yes. Of course.

Maureen O’Flaherty was Moe Cohn.

And her front man, delivering the dirt she’d acquired in her various jobs and liaisons, had been Kef Ludlow, who used to leave the apartment at eight A.M. wearing sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat that hid the fact that he was venturing out without his toupee. He made his morning deliveries on Sundays through Thursdays because Moe Cohn’s column ran on Mondays through Fridays. No wonder he was whistling as he left the apartment. His betting tips as “the Swami” might have been written for a humble racing form, but he’d bragged to me that they were published by the majors; he’d had the connection to the Miami Sentinel that Maureen had lacked. When he’d shown his superiors the dirt he’d written in a wry and scathing voice (penned by the talented Maureen, who’d told Lanny she planned to go places), they’d given the column a shot… not realizing that this forty-six-year-old male hack was merely the front for Moe Cohn, the pen name of a promising if promiscuous young woman. She’d gained access to (and the confidence of) celebrities, financial players, and assorted hotshots, chatting with them across a table or a pillow, and what they didn’t tell her, she could overhear or see as she wheeled her way into their rooms with food and drink. After all, no one knows who’s been sleeping with whom in a hotel better than the person who brings them their breakfast in bed.

But after Maureen died, Kef Ludlow had nothing to report. His blind items became bland items, echoing local press handouts. His column was dropped by the end of the year. Losing whatever his cut was of the income that Moe Cohn had been generating, Kef had no choice but to bid a wrenching goodbye to his secondhand Buick LeSabre and dinner at the Embers. Painfully, he’d had to revert to the spare lifestyle that “the Swami” could afford, living off the meager salary from his dog-racing column, supplemented by the occasional winning streak at the track. And, of course, he’d lost Maureen. It was easy to imagine how she might have led him on in the beginning… and how she had really felt about Kef Ludlow.

My discovery gave the ring of truth to the entire document Lanny had sent me. I read it through carefully again, as if it were all Gospel, as if Lanny’s recountings were as accurate as he claimed, as accurate as the memory that had allowed him to remember intricate dialogue for comedy routines on live TV, to remember ninety-minute monologues for the one-man show he’d done on Broadway.

And I saw it. One fact after another tumbled in place… like four or five little patches of a jigsaw puzzle, those mini-assemblages that you’ve kept sitting outside the rectangular frame of the Big Picture (because you believe they can’t be from this puzzle, that they must have been included by accident). Then suddenly you find a place for one—and look, this goes with this, and that’s part of the farmer’s tractor, and this is just the top of the haystack… and a huge section of the puzzle is suddenly complete.

The police love a suspect who’s a good talker. They’ll order him doughnuts and a BLT on white toast and send out for cigarettes and bring in fresh coffee and fresh cops to shoot the breeze with, anything to keep him talking. Because no one can talk forever without telling some bit of the truth, even if they have no idea they’re doing it.

Why Lanny would send this document to me now, I couldn’t begin to grasp.

But if I were to believe what he’d written, then he’d revealed much more to me than he’d realized when he’d floated these pages onto my lap.

Like Vince and me, maybe Lanny wasn’t quite as clever as he thought.

The ABC afternoon news concluded without mentioning Lanny’s demise. Vince’s funeral had been in the news several days earlier, though. Lanny had spoken, it was reported, both eloquently and affectionately.

Sally Santoro had attended the ceremony as well and afterward was seen to be openly weeping. Through his sobs, he announced that he would open the Salvatore Santoro Wing of a Pittsburgh hospital “in Vince’s honor.” When asked which hospital, he said he’d be announcing further details once he was inconsolable. Sic.

I wondered who had spoken at Maureen’s funeral. And as I thought of Maureen’s burial, I felt a cool bristling of the hair on my neck as it dawned on me that now, like Maureen, I knew far more than was healthy for a growing girl to know, especially if I hoped to grow older. I knew what was in this third “memoir” of Lanny’s. I had also divined how poor Maureen had been transported to New Jersey, a promiscuous princess lying in state on a bed of ice, surrounded by a court of condemned crustaceans. The knowledge stored in my brain was very dangerous to the liberty of Lanny Morris, and unfortunately, it is generally assumed that human brains do not retain their stored knowledge once death has occurred. If Lanny Morris was to get any inkling of how much I knew, I assumed he would be delighted to hear of (or arrange for) my immediate demise.

So in that great tradition of idiocy that was rapidly becoming my permanent modus operandi, I tried to figure out how I could speak with Lanny as soon as possible.

I had no phone number for him. All my dealings had been through his attorney’s office. The message I had for Lanny, concerning what I now knew and why he might want me dead, was not one I was likely to leave with a third party. I had to contact him in person. Luckily, being a seasoned journalist, I knew how to obtain such clandestine information as his home address. I drove to the Sunset Strip, where there’s always this guy standing in traffic, from whom I bought a Map of the Homes of the Stars.

Off North Beverly Glen Boulevard, there is actually a street called Scenario Lane. The end of the lane overlooks the Stone Canyon Reservoir, and Lanny lived there in a brick Gothic manor patterned after Toad Hall from Walt Disney’s Wind in the Willows (a book that at one time had been written by Kenneth Grahame). I pulled up to its black iron gates and pushed the button on an intercom similar to the one at Vince’s home.

A woman’s voice answered. “Yes?”

“Delivery for Mr. Morris,” I informed her.

“You can leave it in the mailbox.”

“Sorry, it’s too big,” I countered. “And it requires his signature.”

“Mr. Morris left for New York City an hour ago. He won’t be back until Monday. I can sign for it if you want, I’m his housekeeper. But if it has to be his signature, he won’t be back until Monday.”

“Can you tell me where in New York he’s staying? Maybe we can forward it to him.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t give out that information,” she told me.

That was all right. I was certain I knew where to find him.