Chapter 31 - Where the Truth Lies

I KNOCKED ON THE DOOR to 2302 at the Plaza Hotel.

You can rest assured I’d confirmed that Lanny was at his usual suite at the Plaza before I made another transcontinental flight for no good reason. Yesterday, I’d hung up as soon as the operator had rung Mr. Merwin’s room and I’d heard Reuben’s voice answering the phone.

Now Reuben opened the door to Lanny’s suite. He was dressed in one of his white houseboy jackets. The golden glow of his face beamed a little brighter when he saw me.

“Oh, Miss Trout!” His pleasant greeting faded as a concerned look came over him and he signaled to me with his eyes, indicating that Lanny was seated at a table, having breakfast with a woman. I could only see the back of her head, but her suit was trimly fitted and well made.

“Hello,” said Lanny, looking up from a cup of coffee. “How are you?”

I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t act surprised to see me. In the taxi on the way up from Beejay’s, I had somewhat savored the mini-melodrama of my reappearance at the scene of his crime of passion.

I set my portfolio down on a coffee table as if I’d been invited to stay. “Well, I have a publisher ready to kill me for not getting more on tape from Vince Collins than I did, and the same publisher equally ready to pay any price under the sun for anything that might salvage my book about him… but no amount of money is going to bring Vince back, right?”

I moved to get a better look at this woman, his latest Plaza Sweet. Good luck to you, sugar, I thought. I took a few more steps and felt foolish (and, foolishly, relieved) when I saw that his breakfast companion was old enough to be his mother. Very nicely groomed, with expensive jewelry, but unless Lanny was into a level of kinkiness he’d not displayed with me, this septuagenarian was probably not his latest playmate. Although who knew with the boys. Then I remembered that the plural didn’t fit anymore. Now there was only “the boy.” Lanny asked if I wanted some breakfast.

“No thanks. I’m not a big breakfast person,” I said. “I just like to wake up, stretch a little, remember where I am, and be told by the maid that I have to leave.”

Lanny’s companion gave me a bewildered smile. Reuben had been moving the breakfast things onto the cart from room service, and he cast me a sympathetic glance.

Lanny said, “Do me a favor, Reuben, would you move the cart to the service room by the elevators? I hate dirty dishes sitting outside my door and I have people coming in later. And then I’m going to need some privacy for a little while, okay?”

“Certainly,” said Reuben. He spoke to Lanny but looked at me as he said, “I’ll be just down the hall in 2307 if you need me.”

The door closed behind him. Lanny did the honors. “This lovely lady is Dorothy Vanderheuvel, she does an absolutely incredible job raising funds for my charity. Dorothy, this is…” He looked bewildered. “I’m sorry, what name are you using today?”

Dorothy Vanderheuvel, sensing all was not serene, said she had to be at the Gulf and Western building by ten. Lanny nodded. “Go get ’em, Tiger,” he laughed as he showed her to the door.

We were alone. But I’d made sure to tell Beejay where I was going, and asked her to ring Lanny’s room and demand to speak to me if I hadn’t called her at the vice principal’s office by noon. I thought it would be a good idea to let Lanny know this in advance, so I told him what I’d done. I also pointed out that Mickey the elevator operator had seen me walk in, and Reuben knew I was there. “And Bob down at the front desk remembered me from last time, which astounded me since there must be so many women going in and out of this place,” I commented tartly. “Is that why you rent a two-bedroom suite? Four beds, no waiting?”

I had meant to get to business with him but found myself unable to stay off the topic of my past humiliation. I walked over to the bedroom that we hadn’t visited on my previous visit and opened the door. It was clearly unused, although there was quite a bit of luggage about the room.

Lanny shrugged. “I don’t like the room where I sleep to be cluttered with bags and files and work. I use the second bedroom as a storage room. And—look, I’m no psychiatrist, but for a number of years, Vince and I always shared a two-bedroom suite. I think if I were in a one-bedroom setup, I’d feel lonely.” He grimaced a bit and went to shut the door to the second bedroom. “As for the traffic in and out of here, I think you flatter me a little. Let’s get this straight. I got laid all I needed to get laid in the fifties. But I’m not the person I was then. Oh sure, I can put on ‘Lanny’…”

Remarkably, he did just that; without him even speaking, “Lanny” flickered on and off his face.

“… but that’s just a character I play. Over the years, the character and I have grown farther and farther apart, just as Vince and I did. One of these days, not too long from now, I look forward to breaking up the team of Lanny and Lanny.”

He went to the window. Outside, you could see all of Central Park. How it hadn’t been sold off and made into apartments and parking lots over the centuries was one of the great miracles of modern times.

“So,” he said, taking in the view, “here you are again. What can I do for you? I assume it has something to do with Vince’s death. You’re pretty much up a creek there, aren’t you?”

I stared at him, but he said no more. He was waiting for me.

I began, “I have some wonderful material that I was able to draw out of Vince, about his early years, almost up to the time he met you. It’s not really enough to make a book out of, but it would be nice if this warm, funny side of Vince could reach the reading public, especially in light of the way he died.”

He came back over to me. “That’s swell that you care so much how Vince is remembered. Seeing as it was your project that turned the screws on his psyche. You remember the day when I was going to see you and him—when your ‘brother’ died? He’d called me after years of not talking, simply because he was scared out of his mind. Scared he’d say the wrong thing.”

“What was he scared of saying, Lanny?”

Lanny glared at me. “I don’t know. That’s the answer I’m giving you and anyone else who asks me why he killed himself. I don’t know.”

I thought, Ah but you do, Lanny. I said, “Fine. But why I came here, with the full approval of Neuman and Newberry, is to propose that the material I have on Vince, along with all my extensive research and notes, be joined up with your own book. Clearly, Neuman and Newberry would love to publish the result, but if you don’t wish that, some sort of co-publishing structure could be arranged. I think my chapters on Vince would make a marvelous preamble to your own story.”

Lanny looked at me suspiciously.

I added, “Obviously, I wouldn’t be looking to take any share of the writing credit for any of your story, Lanny. A secondary, smaller credit on the title page would be appropriate. My name wouldn’t be on the spine. Basically, I just hate the thought of this material not having a life. Can I ask how much of your own book you’ve written?”

“Not a lot,” he said, still watching me as if I might be carrying a concealed weapon.

“How much is not a lot? Assuming that the chapter I read at John Hillman’s offices was a chapter—which was very entertaining, by the way—how many chapters? Eight, twelve…?”

“No, not that many.”

“Well, do you have a sense of when you might be finishing it?” I asked in the most casual of tones. “Just so that we could—”

“It’s not going to be finished. I’ve abandoned it.”

“Of course you have,” I said. “Of course you’ve abandoned it.”

He looked down at me. “What does that mean?” he asked.

“Oh, Lanny, you never were writing any book. You were simply doing what you’d done for years.”

“What was that?”

I took a cigarette from my bag and enjoyed making him wait while I lit it and exhaled. “You were writing for Vince Collins.”

He sat back down on the couch.

“You’d always written the material for the act, hadn’t you? And now Vince needed you to write him a new act. And because you loved him, and feared for him, and feared for yourself, you did. But as an opening act, kind of a warm-up, you did something that makes me want to lower my eyes and blush.”

He nodded, deeply interested. “And that was?”

“You wrote a chapter for me. Me and anyone else who might ever try to write a book about the two of you. You wanted to nip any such project in the bud before a seed was even planted. So the purpose of your first chapter—the one you instructed your lawyer to have me read—was to accomplish just that. And, Lanny, the way you wrote it was ingenious. You purposely depicted two ravenously heterosexual men who went through the opposite sex as if an orgasm was a sneeze and every woman was a Kleenex.”

Lanny grimaced. “Hate to tell you, but that was pretty much how we were.”

“Well, maybe you two were a little like that back then. But you, the man you are today, you would never write now about those days in the incredibly callow voice you chose, as if a rooster had been given the power of speech. That voice was an invention, a combination of your ‘Lanny-Man’ and a libidinous Lothario without an ounce of shame. You may be a lot of different things, Lanny, but you know how to behave in public. If you’d really been writing your memoirs for posterity, you’d never have presented that side of yourself for mass consumption. You’d tone it down and dress it up and try to rationalize your behavior. The chapter was all for effect, the effect being that your mythical book would give the reader such a sordid, unvarnished, and explicit depiction of you and Vince that anyone else’s effort to do the same would seem as bland and watered down as a press release. You could afford to write as unflatteringly about yourself as you did because you knew the pages were never going to leave the confines of your lawyer’s office! And their second but equal purpose, of course, was to make sure that anyone who might read them in the course of writing about you guys would hear all about the women, the women, the women you and Vince slept with.”

I was pushing it, but I had to see his reaction. His face clouded over, threatening a squall. “I understand the first part of what you’re saying, but I don’t get the last thing.”

“You will soon enough, Lanny.” I got up and removed the jacket I was wearing. “The only thing that undercut your very excellent creation was that you never knew that I, the writer for whom you wrote the chapter, was going to meet you and get to really know you. My love”—I said these last two words without irony—“if you had known who I was when you met me, you would have behaved much more like the ‘Lanny-Man’ character you wear in public. I even noted to myself the incredible disparity between the man talking on the pages I read and the man who talked with me on that plane trip and that drive into Manhattan. It might have been understandable if the pages you had written were penned fifteen years ago. But they weren’t! They were written in the last year. It would be like Shirley Temple writing her autobiography in baby talk!”

He smiled at this. “Okay. But why do you say I was writing for Vince Collins?”

I reached into the portfolio I’d brought with me, produced the second chapter of Lanny’s memoirs, and tossed it onto his lap. “Because of this.”

He picked up the manuscript that had been delivered to my home when Beejay was staying there. He flipped the pages and looked up at me angrily. “How did you get this?”

“It was delivered to my home.”

“Bullshit. You stole it.”

“From whom?” I asked. Lanny just glared at me. I added, “At first I thought your lawyer’s office sent it to me. Maybe by accident.”

Lanny said, “My lawyer never had a copy of this.”

“I know. And then I thought that you might have sent it to me, though I couldn’t imagine why. Tell me that you did, Lanny.”

“I didn’t. There’d have been no reason for me to do that. Why would I keep the first chapter under lock and key at my lawyer’s office but hand over a second chapter to a journalist, no less! If I wanted you to read it badly enough, I’d have had you go back to my lawyer’s office.”

I nodded. “I agree with your logic.” I stretched, if only to remind him of the breasts he hadn’t had a chance to fondle lately. “So if you didn’t send it to me, then I can tell you exactly who did. It was Vince.”

I noticed he was not disagreeing with me.

I said, “Vince was the only person other than you who had a copy, because he was the only person who needed a copy.” I took the manuscript back and started thumbing through the pages. “These were Vince’s crib notes. His cheat sheet. The script he had to study. You even embedded reminders in the text for him: ‘This is important to remember’… ‘Don’t forget’… They weren’t the asides of a chummy narrator. They were your margin notes for Vince! This was your way of making sure that you and he agreed on every detail of what happened the night Maureen O’Flaherty died. How you spent that night, why you did the telethon, why you were obligated to fly directly to Sally Santoro’s hotel, how you had an alibi for every minute prior to the discovery of Maureen’s body. You wrote it in the same style as the first chapter in case you ever felt it was necessary to show it to me, or anyone else, in order to give the official, certified, Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, annotated, and unexpurgated ‘white paper’ of the events surrounding that night. You even invented a couple of extra babes for Vince to sleep with that evening, and made a little joke about it.”

I held the sheaf open to the page I’d located:

“ ‘Vince and I had both popped a couple of Tuinals to ensure that we’d sleep like babes, and Vince bought insurance on his bet by having a few babes on hand. Well, not exactly on his hand.’

“Imagine my surprise when Vince, as he had a couple of times before, quoted exactly your own words from a manuscript supposedly no one had seen… or asked me if I expected him to have paintings on black velvet of matadors, nude women, and clowns… the same three images in the same order as described twice by you in your memoirs. As if he’d memorized a brand-new Lanny Morris routine, despite the fact that you hadn’t seen each other in almost fifteen years.”

I tossed the manuscript onto the couch next to Lanny. “It was Vince who sent me his copy of the chapter you gave him. As soon as he’d agreed to do the book with me, he got so panicked that he decided, ‘Hey, let’s make sure she has the Monarch Notes too, so that when I say the same thing, she’ll know it’s the truth.’ I think in the end he’d hoped I’d just paraphrase your version as an undisclosed source. That’s also why he wanted you there with him when I was going to question him: He knew you’d serve as his guardrail if he got off the track that you’d paved for him.”

“The big jerk,” said Lanny reflexively. He instantly looked back at me, realizing that this simple response confirmed everything. But I wasn’t done with him yet.

“Listen, Lanny, you’re a wicked little tyke. Because look what you did throughout this chapter: You put in just enough of the truth, of the sinister, scary stuff, to remind Vince of what it was you weren’t saying. You talked about the case full of lobsters and ice, the reference to sending Maureen ‘packing,’ that you slept the ‘sleep of the dead’ that night, just to remind him that you had even more beans to spill than he did, and that if he were to reveal to me his own rendition of the truth—setting you up in the process—Lanny Morris was the master at delivering the killer punch line. No joke. Even as you were showing him what to say, you were warning him that he’d better say his lines as written.” I smiled. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”

While he tried to absorb all this, I picked up the jacket I’d shed and my portfolio and walked into the bathroom of his bedroom.

I knew I’d said too much, but I’d done so intentionally. I had work to do, and fast, while he calculated the implication of what I’d just said and what I therefore knew.

To him, I was surely at this moment the most dangerous person in his world.

It took only a few moments before he knocked lightly on the door. I instructed him to come in.

What he saw was a young woman in her mid-twenties with a figure that a number of men (and one younger woman) had found pleasurable to partake of, snuggled invitingly against the length of an empty bathtub, naked. I was facing him, my weight resting against my left buttock and the length of my left leg. The room was cool, the porcelain tub cold. That, along with fear, left my skin goose-bumped and my nipples their most erect. His eyes roamed the length of my body, starting with my toenails, which were French-tipped in shades of coral. Along the way, he may have noticed that I had shaved for the occasion, everywhere. If one is to be nude, one might as well stop at nothing. When he reached my fingernails, similarly coral, it would have been very hard for him not to notice that my left hand was handcuffed to the old-fashioned faucet of the Plaza tub. Although I hoped I was pretty damn fetching (I have an ego, you know), my aim was not so much seduction as self-preservation.

He said softly, “What is this?” His eyes darted around the bathroom. “Where are your clothes?”

“My clothes are out the bathroom window, floating down the Plaza’s light shaft, unless a benevolent wind has wafted them over to the Central Park Zoo.” I indicated the seat cover of the toilet. “Sit down. We’re going to have ourselves a little chat.”

He sat down slowly. “You’re fucking crazy,” he muttered.

“We’ll see. The way I figure it, for the next hour you and I are going to have a little heart-to-heart. You’ll tell me the truths you know, and I’ll tell you the truths I know… make a clean breast of things.” I glanced down at my own immaculate assets, for which he’d shown keen appreciation the last time we’d been alone at the Plaza. “Then it occurred to me that, somewhere in the course of this discussion, you might consider killing me. And I thought, What would make Lanny rule that out? And lo, a voice came unto me, saying, ‘Lanny could ill afford to have another nude, dead young woman found in his hotel bathtub, could he? One such corpse might be a tragedy, but two would be a trend.’ ”

I looked to see if he was getting it, and he was.

“I mean, it would be kind of hard to say that I’d had a nasty accident that had removed all of my clothing from the premises and handcuffed me to a faucet, wouldn’t it? And if you broke the faucet, they’d notice the damage. And if you threw me out the window…”

I turned, revealing my back. The vain part of me wanted to think that Lanny’s eyes went first for my rear end, which had earned the approval of Mickey the elevator operator, but I knew eventually Lanny would notice that across my shoulder blades in red laundry marker was emblazoned PLAZA HOTEL—RM 2302. I’d had Beejay write it on my back before she went to school that morning, after assuring her that it would fade away in a few months.

“Your friend Dorothy Vanderheuvel and Reuben both saw me here, fully dressed, by the way. So in case you get any bright ideas, Lanny, rule them out. When we’re done, I’ll tell you where in this suite I’ve hidden the key, you’ll uncuff me, loan me that nice Burberry’s trench coat of yours hanging up in the other bedroom, and I’ll call Beejay from a pay phone on the street. Of course, if she doesn’t hear from me in an hour, she’ll send in the police. You may be able to think of some way to counter this gambit of mine, but I don’t think you can get a six-foot metal crate of lobsters and ice up here in under an hour.”

Lanny looked at me with stunned surprise, grudging respect, and cool contempt. “Always so smart,” he said.

I hadn’t told him that I was so smart that I had a second key to the handcuffs hidden on my person. I’d prefer not to tell you where; suffice it to say that a handcuff key is quite small and there are many uses for Playtex tampons even when it’s not that difficult time of the month.

I just shook my head and admitted, “I haven’t been smart at all, Lanny. But this seems kind of a fitting conclusion, don’t you think? Maureen and I? Two women in our twenties, both eager to make our mark in the print media, not too careful about our morals, all means serving our ends, both of us involved with you and Vince… and here I am, just like the late Mo Cohan O’Flaherty… lying naked in a bathtub in your suite in a hotel near the Hudson River. The only difference is, I’m still alive.”

Lanny stared at me ominously as I looked around the room. I nodded toward a wall phone near the toilet, a sinful luxury of the Plaza.

“Call Bonnie Trout’s apartment,” I instructed him.

He looked puzzled. “You said she was at her school.”

I nodded. “Uh-huh, she is. But I’ve got a surprise waiting for you at her apartment. Go ahead. Make the call.”

Lanny took out a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a list of frequently dialed numbers, most of the page typed, but with some new numbers added in ink at the bottom. Lanny scanned down for a number and jabbed the digits into the buttons of the touch-tone phone.

I watched him do this, knowing that in a few seconds I’d discover all that was left to know of the truth. I’d already discovered in my teens that the truth can hurt. Hurt enough to kill you.