Chapter 33 - Where the Truth Lies

SHE AND I SAT PEACEFULLY in the backyard together, with unhurried silences between our spoken thoughts. The peach tree was empty, but its leaves were still green. Her long, pointless harvest was over for the year. The fruits were all resting in comfort near the tree that had given them life. The summer was almost over.

I had told her, “Your daughter learned something about Vince Collins that he didn’t want anyone to know. Because of that, she was killed. If it’s of any small comfort, she probably didn’t suffer at all.”

“Except in that she didn’t get to live the rest of her life,” said her mother softly.

I nodded, corrected.

She went on, granite entering her voice: “I want the person who killed her to be punished, Kerry.”

I paused, allowing the hesitation to assist me in a deception. “Vince Collins is dead. He committed suicide.” I looked at her meaningfully and permitted her to misunderstand me.

“Then he was the one who killed her?”

Again I paused. “He could outrun what happened that night for only so long. If you want someone to suffer for your daughter’s death, it might help you to think of him these last fifteen years as a man on death row who fights his execution every way he knows how, delaying it without there being any real hope of a retrial or reversal. A stay of sentence is not the same thing as being free.”

She rose from her chair. “I want people to know about this man. I want them to know what he did.”

I didn’t rise with her but took her hand and gently pulled her back down into her seat. I continued to hold her hand. “Do you trust me?” I asked. She foolishly nodded assent. “There is someone in all this who is totally innocent of any involvement in the events of that night but whose life will be made infinitely worse if I tell the truth at this time. I want to protect this person from any further pain. They’ve suffered greatly already. I swear to you I will make public the truth that I’ve learned, but I have to let matters lie until this person has died and the truth can no longer touch them.” I saw no indication in her face that she understood I was talking about her.

“But you promise that someday you’ll let people know what happened?”

I stood. “Yes. Once no one else who’s innocent can be hurt any further. Can you understand my wanting it that way, having felt so much pain in your own life? When I was a girl, I was told, ‘The truth never hurt anyone.’ But I don’t think that’s the way it is, Mrs. O’Flaherty. I think a lot of the time the truth can hurt everyone.”

She opened the side gate for me and looked at me almost fearfully. “Did my daughter… did she do anything—Kerry, I guess what I’m asking is, did she deserve what happened to her?”

I looked back at her with what I hoped was the reassuring conviction of a successful, sinful evangelist. “Your daughter was a wonderful, moral girl who did no one any harm, any harm in the world. You have my word on that, Mrs. O’Flaherty, and you can believe it. You can sleep well tonight in the knowledge that your daughter is with the angels.”

Her face had life in it for the first time since I had met her. “You swear that to me, Kerry?”

I placed my hands on her shoulders. “I swear that to you on my mother’s grave.” I didn’t think my mother would mind my saying this. She wasn’t dead yet.

The mother of Maureen Beatrice Margaret Cohan O’Flaherty searched every corner of my face. I let her do so like a Victorian virgin allowing her husband to touch every inch of her on their wedding night. I was confident she would find no lie anywhere. I had now learned not to care one flying fuck about the truth.

She drew back, satisfied, looking as close to contented as she was ever likely to be. “You’ve been very good to me. And my daughter. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mrs. O’Flaherty.”

I stepped away from her house and, reaching the sidewalk, turned as if to walk into town.

After two blocks, I made a right and found Lanny parked in the sports car where I had left him.

It was highly indicative of my newfound depth and compassion, and a clear demonstration of how profoundly I’d grown as a human being, that I was able to forgive Lanny his many sins, particularly once I sat down and took the time to analyze how few of them he’d actually committed.

Surely I couldn’t blame him for our first night at the Plaza. I’d easily been his equal partner in crime that luscious evening: ready, willing, and (we like to believe) able-bodied straight on till morning. I’d been increasingly charmed-to-smitten with Lanny from the moment we met on the plane, and I made certain I drank enough at the Autopub to facilitate giving temptation the great big O’Connor welcome.

In truth, I only began to loathe Lanny after he’d treated me so inexcusably the morning after, leaving me high and dry in his hotel suite and never calling me after that. But that had all been Reuben’s doing. Lanny had left me an explanatory note and telephone numbers at which to reach him; he’d expected me to call and had tried to get in touch with me when I hadn’t, even bringing flowers to my supposed apartment to offer to the supposed me.

That was when he discovered, to his shock and humiliation, that I’d lied to him up and down and all around the town about my identity and vested interest in his life. Tell me, please, who in this equation was the cad and who the caddee?

But what about Lanny’s indefensibly callous way with women? My vast knowledge of his horrendous behavior came primarily, one, from his supposed memoirs (which he’d embellished and embroidered in order to give a self-promoting journalist named Kerry O’Connor exactly such a false impression, hoping both to scare me off and to protect Vince Collins); two, from Reuben’s lying lips in the supermarket parking lot, where he’d convinced me on hearsay alone that I was but one in a string of summarily dismissed and discarded damsels; and, three, from my jaundiced, prejudiced imagination after Reuben had sufficiently washed and spin-dried my brain.

But when I reviewed my time with Lanny, the real hours and real conversations and real lovemaking we’d shared, he’d been, at worst, a chivalrous man trying to charm me as best he could, and at best… someone I loved being with, and wanted to be with again.

Yes, Lanny had gone too far at the Scotty Awards, where he’d handled me coarsely and roughly before turning me over to the appellate court of Vince Collins. But surely I could forgive him his rage, since he’s forgiven me my extended (if unpremeditated) deceit that had caused it.

He had managed (he could manage anything, I suppose) to rent a 1960 Corvette, not the trendy new Stingray but the original Route 66 red convertible with cream-white top, those rakish side scoops with three vents for deep breathing, black interior, ballsy tube radio, 283 dual quad, and two hundred and seventy of the nicest horsepowers you’d ever want to know.

Lanny was half-dozing, a small straw hat covering his face. The car radio was playing classical music, something stormy and full of hot air—Richard Strauss was my guess. Strauss would have been insulted to hear his grand finale played at such a low volume. I got in the car.

Lanny straightened up and started the engine. “How did it go?” he asked.

“It went well, considering,” I said. I pushed a button on the radio, which slid the tuner to an oldies station. “Fool on the Hill” by Sergio Mendes was already in progress. It was smooth and dreamy, as was our comfort with each other. The last time I heard the song, I’d been entering the Hollywood Way gate of the Burbank studios to meet Vince Collins for the first time.

Lanny turned off the radio. “So. Where to now?”

“Anywhere.”

He thought. “South Carolina?”

“What’s in South Carolina?” I asked.

“I have absolutely no idea.”

I nodded. “Sounds great to me.”

And we were on our way.

Now. Of the others. You will either half-forgive or half-damn me when I tell you that, through Lanny’s intervention and my own, Reuben was not killed by Sally Santoro. Yes, he was taken by truck to the landfill, and he was forced to experience the deaths of his victims in ways even an unfeeling man could feel, but he was not killed. Reuben now lives (and he has no choice about this) back home. The Philippines have seven thousand islands and Reuben is on one of them, not even remotely close to Manila or his family. Our last report was that he is working as the lead buff-and-shine man at a carwash outside of Calbayog. We can only hope this is true.

A Lanny’s Club for the treatment of young burn victims now exists in New Rochelle. Not that this in any way compensates, but it bears the name “The Maureen Cohan O’Flaherty Wing” of New Rochelle Central Hospital. Maureen’s mother lived to be at its dedication and worked there as a volunteer six days out of seven virtually every week.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that the very secrets that led Vince Collins to commit suicide would, in our slightly more enlightened times, now be completely irrelevant. The duo might even have been able to incorporate Vince’s bisexuality into the text of their humor. It would be as if Lanny had killed himself simply because someone found out that he was Jewish. Though no consolation to our tortured friend, Vince’s recordings are as popular as ever on CD, and his voice is heard as source music in many a period motion picture. The movies of Collins and Morris have been rediscovered by a lucky generation that is getting to see them fresh, for the first time.

In addition to Mrs. O’Flaherty, Lanny was the other person I didn’t want to be harmed by the truth, and thus my second reason for not wanting this story to be told until after someone’s death. It wasn’t that he had done anything in this accounting that he would have disclaimed or been ashamed of. It was simply that he had many more years left in him of amusing and diverting people, even after his work in film, as both an actor and director, became somewhat more serious. I didn’t want the sordid aspects of this story to in any way confuse or cloud anyone’s perception of his work, which continued productively for many years.

It’s vital to our survival that there be people capable of amusing us and diverting us from the truth now and then. Lanny continued to have that ability virtually until the day of his death, an event that saddened the world almost as much as it devastated me.

Work being the best antidote to sorrow—as Sherlock Holmes once advised his Watson—I quickly set about organizing all that I’ve shared with you here.

It was, of course, particularly easy for me to access the chapters from Lanny’s intentionally incomplete autobiography, as the court had appointed me the sole and undisputed administrator of his estate, as is generally the case for an author’s widow.