Where the Truth Lies (18 page)

“Nobody ever turns down Vince’s bed,” I said as a knee-jerk reaction, forgetting that the press conference was over.

Sally nodded. “We guessed you might want some sleep. We gave you our best bridal suite.”

The bellman opened the living room door and we walked in. Not bad. The view was fantabulous. You could see the Empire State Building, the RCA building, and the sparkling brown of the polluted midtown harbor. Standing on four angled legs, Danish modern in an antique white finish, was a giant RCA console TV, and I would not be a bit surprised if it was a compatible color model. On top of the TV was a turntable stacked with LPs, probably all Vince’s recordings. The immediate left wall of the living room was mirrored, a tan marbleized watermark rippling through it. There was a stocked wet bar on my right and art on all the walls, most of it on black velvet: a matador, a tastefully naked woman, a clown. If you couldn’t get laid in this suite, you couldn’t get laid.

“Fucking nice, huh?” asked Sally. Vince and I agreed it was very fucking nice. “People talk about having fancy hotel rooms and apartments on the West Side of Manhattan and what do they get to see? Fucking New Jersey. Here, you see the skyline of New York City.”

There was a scream. Not a funny scream. A real scream on our left.

A mother hears her daughter scream a million times and it’s almost always because another kid took her daughter’s toy, or because she fell off her tricycle, or because she’s scared of the witch inSnow White. And the mother will slowly stop a conversation she’s having with a friend and walk into the kid’s room to see what the problem is. But sometimes a mother hears her kid scream because her kid’s hand is caught in the garbage disposal, and the mother knows instantly that this scream is different from all the others and she runs to her child faster than she’s ever run in her life. Vince and I had heard a million screams in the last few years and we usually smiled and said, “Thank you.” This scream made us run to the source.

It took us a second to realize that it was coming from behind the living room door that led into one of the two bedrooms, the one on the west side of the suite. I ran to the door and tried to open it, but it was locked from the inside, as was usually the case with a hotel suite when you first check in. The two state police who had been admiring the living room with us had moved fast to the hall, where the door to 501 was open, with the maid’s cart still outside it. I ran after them, Vince following me.

“Oh, man,” I heard one of the cops say as I entered the bedroom. It was obviously a nice bedroom, but I didn’t take time to look at the decor. A woman in a maid’s outfit, about fifty or so with a squat Dutch face and braided hair, was kneeling on the floor near the end of the bed, vomiting onto the nice green carpet. I turned away, feeling reflex-sick myself, and saw the cops standing in the bathroom, looking at the bathtub.

Lying in the narrow tub was a young woman. The tub had just enough water in it to cover her face and drown her. An inch less and her nostrils would have been above the surface.

I remembered a cleaning woman in Crown Heights who’d banged her head on an overhead pipe and fallen unconscious into her bucket of water. She’d drowned in that little bucket, in a big basement room that was otherwise bone-dry.

The young woman in the tub would have been extremely attractive if she hadn’t been dead. Her red hair was still rich in color against her blue-gray face.

The medical examiner, who was summoned immediately by the state patrolmen, estimated she’d been dead somewhere between two and four hours. The good news was that both Vince and I had been watched by everyone from security police to airline stewardesses to a live TV audience of millions from Friday to Sunday, nonstop. Even when we’d been alone, we’d been guarded. And of course, we’d only been in the New York area for a few hours, during which time we were constantly with cops, reporters, and other witnesses.

This was more than a little important, because both Vince and I were acquainted with the young dead woman in the bathroom of what had been meant to be my hotel bedroom in New Jersey.

Her last name, we were to learn, was O’Flaherty.

Her first name was Maureen. She was the girl from room service at the Versailles Hotel in Miami, Florida. The girl Vince and I had both come to know.

TWELVE

I was dead, or at least dead tired even as I awoke. I felt like a battery that had spent the night in a recharging device that no one had remembered to plug in. The oxygen-rich air on my plane ride with Lanny had inspired me to drink well past my usual limit, and each burst of giddiness I’d felt yesterday was now memorialized by a burst capillary in my brain.

A Princess phone was ringing somewhere below me. To evade its miserable chirp, I tried to incorporate the sound into my dream, in which I was the pilot of the world’s first commercial hang glider (seating eighty in the folding chairs my family used to bring out each Thanksgiving). I was, of course, naked in the cockpit and there was a Princess phone on the instrument panel of the plane just above the eight-track player. The phone kept ringing so I asked my father, who was copiloting, to take over the controls while I awoke in order to determine who was calling.

I sat up in bed and cracked my forehead hard against the ceiling above me as if I were in the opening scene of a bad sitcom. My hand reached up to feel a smooth solid surface over my head, like the lid of a coffin. Panic genuinely overtook me, and I rolled to my left to determine if I was boxed in on all sides; I realized in the same instant that I wasnot buried alive but merely in that damn loft bed in Beejay’s apartment, perched just below her low ceiling—and with that comforting thought came the accompanying realization that my rolling to the left meant I was no longer on that damn loft bed but falling off its edge and now dropping to the floor, which I then hit. Why is there never a laugh track around when you really need it? Worse, a heavy metal bar landed on my shoulder; another sitcom moment. It was supposed to help barricade the front door, but Beejay said she preferred having the metal bar in bed with her, where she could use it on the intruder after he’d broken in. Such was Beejay’s logic.

Luckily, I hadn’t broken anything, though I’d banged my left shin quite painfully against the metal ladder that led from the floor up to the bed. The phone had stopped ringing on the fifth ring, after which all calls were automatically relayed to Beejay’s answering service, so my injuries were for naught.

What time was it? I had no idea. The chirping noise started again, and I scuttled under the roof of Beejay’s bed and found the Princess phone.

“Hello?”

Lanny’s voice said, “Bonnie?”

I started to pronounce “Yes,” but the word put up a struggle. God, how I loathed beginning the day by verifying this immense lie of mine, particularly before I’d had coffee. I’d hitherto thought I possessed some halfway decent ethics as a journalist, certainly more than rock writers of the period, who had no qualms about sampling a rock band’s cocaine while interviewing them in the men’s room at the launch party for their new album.

“Bonnie, you there?” Until such time as I could admit my deception to Lanny (and how I was already looking forward to that little chat!), perhaps I could at least reply to him without overtly perpetuating or progressing the already-scummy falsehood I’d conjured so glibly on the plane. From this moment on, I vowed to do my best not to actually confirm or embroider the lie. So instead of replying “Yes” to his “Bonnie?” I simply responded, “Lanny? Is that you?”

“No, it’s the Four Seasons featuring the sound of Frankie Valli. How’d you like the show?”

The show. “What show?”

“TheToday show. You did watch, didn’t you?” He sounded almost shaken. “You didn’t watch. Wow, that’s scary.”

I stumbled, “I’m sorry, I had more than I usually drink—I didn’t know I was supposed to watch. I’ve offended you.”

“No, you don’t understand, I’m not offended, just scared. When you’re a star, you live in terror, wondering if it’s all over yet. You find yourself looking for signs. You’re shooting a scene for a movie on a New York street and a crowd doesn’t form. You show up at Lutčce without a reservation and the maître d’ seats the couple ahead of you first. You meet a girl on a plane and tell her you’ll be on theToday show the next morning and she doesn’t wake up early to watch. Very scary. You know, I mentioned you on TV. On theToday show.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, I proposed to you on the air and everything. My guess is your apartment building is surrounded by photographers at this very moment.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yeah, sure I’m kidding. But look, help me out here. After I left you last night, youdid call someone and tell them you’d met me and I went up with you in your elevator, saw you to your door, we kissed, we’re supposed to see each other today?”

“Yes, I told a girl I know, my best friend.”

“Okay, that’s okay then.” He sounded very relieved. “By the way, when you told her I kissed you, she said, ‘Lanny Morris, oh, he’s such a geek,’ didn’t she?”

I hesitated. “No.”

“Sure she did. So when do you want to have lunch?”

I told him truthfully that I had a business appointment in midtown at eleven-thirty and that I wasn’t sure when it might end. He was surprised that a teacher would have a business appointment during summer vacation, but I explained I was exploring the possibility of a different kind of job, something in publishing, a copywriter or editor or proofreader, anything along those lines. I was trying to work my way toward the day when I would tell him I was in fact already in publishing and that I’d recently had occasion to review a portion of his own writing.

He sighed. “Okay, I’ll see if I can take a morning nap—I only got a few hours’ sleep last night. Why don’t you just come here to the Plaza when your meeting is done? Suite 2302. Mr. Merwin, remember? If I’m napping, Reuben will let you in. You remember Reuben.” I told him I remembered. He ventured, “You have anything else to do after your business meeting, or can I have you for the whole day?”

I said in so many words that he could, without knowing exactly what “have you for the whole day” might entail. I told myself it was what Neuman and Newberry would have wanted me to say. We hung up cordially, if not cooingly, and I reached for the cigarettes I’d been eyeing the entire time I’d been on the phone with him.

I always smoke when I’m uneasy and now, awake and sober, I needed very much to smoke. Of course I had every reason to feel anxious, with the curtain of lies hanging like a scrim between me and Lanny, a scrim that could be rendered transparent with the merest change in backlighting. I was also a smidge uneasy about my approaching business appointment at eleven-thirty. But I knew that the disquieting wariness I was feeling emanated primarily from something in the chapter that Beejay had alternately read and paraphrased the night before. And I didn’t know what that something was.

It wasn’t the identification of the Girl in New Jersey as sad Maureen O’Flaherty, the vividly redheaded room-service girl from Miami inexplicably found dead in the tub of Vince and Lanny’s virginal bridal suite in New Jersey. I had learned a lot about her already, having researched what there was to learn, until I likely knew more about the Girl in New Jersey than anyone, outside of the boys or the police who had originally handled the case.

Maureen was so absurdly Irish that simply stating her family background made it sound like you were starting up a joke. Her father was an Irish bartender, the son of an Irish cop whose brother was an Irish-Catholic priest, and her mother was either a niece or cousin to the great George M. Cohan himself. And like that Yankee Doodle Dandy, Maureen had lived in New Rochelle (a town in Westchester that is only “forty-five minutes from Broadway,” as goes the title of one of Cohan’s songs), and yes, of course, her mother’s name was Mary. Maureen had reportedly been a “good” girl throughout her adolescence and had talked about being an English teacher, possibly at a parochial school. During her senior year at Hunter College, she took a spring vacation in Miami for a week, which turned into a month, which turned into a few years, which turned into forever in a bathtub in Palisades Park, New Jersey.

All this I already knew, so hearing Beejay report the discovery of Maureen’s corpse wasn’t likely to be the cause of my uneasiness. No, it was something else lurking in or about the text I’d heard that was giving me lowlying jitters, and unlike a caffeine or nicotine fix, I didn’t know exactly where to find its remedy.

In times of inner panic, I find it comforting to make lists. The very useless act of setting down information in a numbered column with check boxes to the left of each item can infuse a sense of peace and purpose to my day.

So I spent the next hour making up a list. In the drawer of Beejay’s little desk I found a ream of paper obviously filched from P.S. 29 on Orchard Street. It had been a long time since I’d seen unholed, blue-lined notepaper with a red-lined left margin, the kind of paper history teachers handed out when a test included essay questions. I could hear the groans of old classmates in my head as I wrote:

1. The deep-abiding puzzlement I first felt during my time with Lanny’s manuscript at Hillman’s office has only increased. Why is Lanny Morris sending me these chapters? His lawyer’s explanation, at the time, had placated me: Lanny wanted to discourage me from continuing further work on my book by showing me that he was writing one of his own, one that would easily trump my own efforts by virtue of its authenticity. Fine. But with that established, why now send me another chapter?

2. Why is the Lanny I’ve met on the plane and on the drive to this apartment so different from the Lanny in the pages I’ve read and heard? Admittedly, nearly fifteen years have elapsed since the described events, but am I really thinking these pages were written when these events occurred? No, there are several comparisons to the present that indicate Lanny has written this fairly recently. Which Lanny is the real one?

3. Most unsettling: within the course of this new chapter, it’s obvious that something has changed in the working relationship of Lanny and Vince. There’s a sense of resentment and distrust, but I can’t immediately tell who is the more offended party.