Where the Truth Lies (24 page)

FIFTEEN

Lanny (who had risen early the previous morning to appear on theToday show) was again up early, I deduced as I awoke and found myself alone in bed. He’d clearly been thoughtful enough not to wake me, and I was grateful for the extra sleep. We’d followed our first rage of lovemaking with talking—almost shyly and not about much, especially where I was concerned. I tried to keep my limited comments philosophical and nonbiographical. We both happily and idly explored each other’s bodies as we conversed. Eventually, he decided to devote his focused attention upon one fixed orb in the constellation of my already so totally exploited body. It began almost casually, but it continued, in a reassuringly mindless, steady way. I had been hypersensitive there only thirty minutes earlier, but now I was not and could allow him to do what he insisted he needed to do. It became difficult to tell which was his clever tongue and which were his fingers. The sensations were as if several very different types of men were simultaneously having their complete way with me, trading off tasks, comparing notes, pooling information about my responses, all totally dedicated to creating this dangerous, deep-seated rising within me.

I will tell you, because this is part of my job, that my second orgasm with Lanny was almost certainly the longest I’d ever known, even at my own hand. It would not peak, not for the most harrowing time. I actually thought I might lose consciousness, from lack of air and heartbeat. Surely it was over now. No? No. Still more to take. Slow breaths now. Take more of it now. “Stop,” I beseeched.

“No” was Lanny’s witty riposte.

“I’ll die,” I confessed.

“Not yet,” he managed to reply. It was so cruel of him. I had only given him whatever he wanted and here he was, causing me to die, and still I was not yet dead.

“Now you can die,” Lanny murmured.

My cries became so loud, truly as if I were being murdered, that Lanny had no choice but to clamp his hand over my mouth. I understood, even as he half-suffocated me. I, too, was afraid security guards might at any second break into the room.

Later I returned the favor. I can’t review my own work, but I had him so demonstrably hard and on the edge for such a time that I have to assume it was good. I was first a veritable hummingbird, then warm quicksand, and finally a belly dancer creating ornate spirals upon him with my hips. To my surprise, I found myself peaking yet again, even as he hoarsely cried out his own wordless epitaph beneath me.

After several long minutes of silence, we walked together to the bathroom and ran the cold-water tap in the sink at the Plaza Hotel, leaning down to drink at it like it was the high school water fountain, until we’d slaked our near-rabid thirst. Then we walked back to the bed together, intertwined ourselves comfortably, and instantly fell into sleep.

When I woke, I looked at the G.E. clock radio provided by the Plaza, but it had apparently become unplugged at 2:26A .M., most likely due to our thrashing about. I had a watch, but I’d left it in the bathroom along with all my clothes, and I just wasn’t ready to get up. In two consecutive Manhattan mornings, I’d awakened in two strange beds, and jet lag always hits me hardest on the second day. Considering the state I’d been in when I went to bed (there was a soreness within me whose cause I savored for a moment), I decided I still needed to sleep a good hour or two longer. I reached around for my new darling, but he wasn’t there. I considered getting up to find him, but thought I might shift the pillow a bit first. Perhaps he was in the bathroom or more likely making incredible breakfast plans—renting a Circle Line boat and having it catered by the Regency or Ratner’s … or maybe we’d have eggs Benedict here in bed. I pictured black olives dotting pastel-yellow hollandaise and livid-yellow yolks sacrificed on an altar of crimson bacon and charred muffin. I burrowed into the pillows.

I was slowly awakened again by the annoying drone of a vacuum cleaner outside our bedroom door, in the suite’s living room. That Reuben was one fastidious fellow, I’ll tell you.

I didn’t love the idea of greeting Reuben, who would justifiably regard me simply as the girl Lanny had picked up on the plane. Which, of course, I was. But it bothered me that I’d be perceived as a starstruck groupie. I was a published and trendy writer, I’d interviewed people just as famous as Lanny Morris, and I’d already chummed up to Vince Collins. I possessed documents from major publishing companies confirming my professional status.

Reuben’s vacuum cleaner banged against the bedroom door. I assumed he was doing that intentionally to get me out of bed. I looked for the robe I’d shed, but it wasn’t there. My purse and clothing had been moved from the bathroom and laid out for me neatly in a row on the dresser. I could not imagine Lanny doing this; it bore all the signs of the fussy Reuben. I didn’t like that he had done this while I was asleep. Was it really necessary for the room to be straight before I awoke?

I scooped up my clothes from the dresser and stumbled into the bathroom, where I dressed and did my best to make my hair and face look acceptable. Then I walked out through the bedroom door to the living room.

But it wasn’t Reuben who was vacuuming.

It was a maid in a blue-and-white Plaza Hotel uniform. She looked at me as if I were one of the toilets along her route. “Checkout today?” she said with a South American accent. I asked her, first in English, then in dreadful Spanish, if she could come back in half an hour. She looked annoyed, indicated her own wristwatch, and departed.

The room was bare of everything except that which the Plaza had provided. Already knowing the answer, I searched the suite for Lanny, for Reuben, for some note Lanny might have left me. Nothing. The second bedroom in the suite had clearly never been slept in. My guess was that Lanny had used it merely as a clothes closet.

I went to the bedroom’s phone, hit nine, got a dial tone, and dialed the number of the Plaza Hotel displayed on the phone itself, as if from the outside world. I asked the operator for Mr. Merwin. I was told (after a moment) that he had checked out.

What do you know? The dork had ditched me.

Technically speaking, I was now staying at the Plaza illegally. And I certainly felt very much like a squatter. Or diddly-squat. What was that Italian movie?Seduced and Abandoned. When any of my past couplings had ended with one of us leaving in the morning before the other awoke, it had invariably been me, and I’d at least left a note on my pillow, the bathroom mirror, or the refrigerator.

Bastard.

My initial impulse was to order a couple of bottles of Dom Pérignon from room service to run up Lanny’s tab, but I was already feeling far too much like a cheap slut who’d spread my legs in return for a ride in a limo, a burger, and a couple of drinks.

I had the sudden need to shower. The Plaza bathroom’s plumbing was ancient, with separate faucets for hot and cold welded into the tub, perhaps by rust. I turned on the higher-placed knob for the shower, waited a minute, and discovered that hot water was apparently hard for the management to come by. Perhaps some other hotel guest was taking a shower at this particular moment. Just as well, I thought, remembering the fate of previous women who’d occupied the tubs of hotel rooms reserved for Lanny Morris. Besides, once cleansed, I wouldn’t much feel like changing back into the bra and panties that I’d dirtied in my mind by the very act of removing them for his amusement.

I left the suite almost as hastily as had Lanny. The elevator was manned by Mutty Mickey, who’d given me a leering lift just yesterday. I saw the slightest tug of a smile on the far side of his mouth as he noted that my outfit was the same as the day before.

“Shut up,” I said.

In the lobby I went to the front desk and asked if either Mr. Merwin or Mr. Lanny Morris had left any message for a Ms. Bonnie Trout. The desk clerk instantly replied without consulting anything or anyone, “No, may we get you a taxicab?” His way of telling me to beat it.

I hit the Fifty-ninth Street exit. The wind was blowing south, wafting the smell of horseshit in my face all the way over from the hansoms and carriages on the opposite side of the street. I turned my back on the Plaza and the Autopub and started trudging west.

Whyhad I slept with Lanny? I couldn’t blame it solely on the two oversized martinis I’d downed, which was nowhere near my limit. And certainly I’d already interviewed enough celebrities to make it unlikely I’d been starstruck.

I entertained the possibility that subconsciously I’d slept with him as a delayed response to Vince’s overtures, that with Lanny I was simply completing the pass that Vince had thrown me. I couldn’t copulate with Vince, because we had lots of work to do first, but I could sleep with Lanny, because he wasn’t going to be part of the deal.

I liked this explanation a lot and decided to embrace it until further notice.

Meanwhile: that bastard.

He’d made me look worse than a slut. He’d made me look foolish. If only he’d acted like the repugnant Lanny Morris from the memoirs I’d read, I’d never have gotten into this situation. At the very least, I would have expected absolutely nothing more from him than the distinction of being Boff No. 331 and a leading contender for this year’s title of Miss Receptacle. I surely would have been more measured and calculated in the bestowing of my apertures and embouchures.

Ah well. In life, what’s important is to learn from your mistakes, to identify why others might have led you into making them, and to kill them. I am a person who, if someone steps on my foot, reflexively says, “I’m sorry!” Beware such people, my friends. We are, as Dickens once said, “secret and revengeful.”

I’d suddenly found an additional driving purpose for my book with Vince. It could be not only a fascinating study ofthe comedy team of the fifties, but also a fine opportunity to tarnish Lanny’s reputation, especially if it could be done with impeccable accuracy, detail, and documentation. (See also“hatchet job.”)

For the first time since I’d begun this project, I knew how to handle the dilemma of balancing Vince’s story (which I would be hearing directly from him with my own two ears) against Lanny’s story (which I hadn’t expected to hear at all).

The way I would handle balancing their sides of the story would be that I wouldn’t.

I reached Columbus Circle invigorated. This would be the finest payback I could manage. Whatever dirt I might find would have to be the truth, of course. But I would seek out “the truth” and, like the tabloids, accept only the data that confirmed my working hypothesis. Like a graph chart at an annual stockholders’ meeting, the truth can be most anything you need it to be.

I was at the stairs to the subway, where you could take the IRT or IND trains in any number of directions. I advised myself, “You should take the A train to get to Sugar Hill at 145th in Harlem, and after that to 175th.” There were two grand destinations at that last stop. One was the Tabernacle of Reverend Ike, which prior to being a tabernacle had been one of the great Loew’s movie dream palaces. The other was the Port Authority George Washington Bridge Bus Station.

I walked the dank concrete corridor from the subway steeply up to the station itself, which was definitely the poor sister to the huge bus terminal near Times Square. I knew that almost any bus leaving Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge stopped at the Bridge Plaza in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the way every northbound train out of Grand Central stops at 125th Street. I had a quick cup of coffee at the coffee shop (and was reminded that the coffee at most coffee shops isn’t very good) and took an escalator up to the outdoor shed, where all buses were launched directly onto the bridge.

A few minutes later, I climbed thirty concrete steps from the Bridge Plaza up to Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee, where there was a line of about forty custard-yellow Checker cabs standing idle in the early-afternoon sun, each with a big white baseball painted on its side bearing the name Babe’s Taxi. The first man on the stand, a burly muttonchopped fellow, waved me into the roomy backseat.

“Where to?”

“Palisades Park.”

He looked back at me. “The town or the amusement park? Some people get off the bus and want to go to the amusement park, but they closed it down a couple of years ago.”

“Shame.”

“Damn shame.” He scowled, turning the ignition. The Checker’s engine sounded like a tractor. “No reason on earth it had to close. Just people got greedy.”

“Can you take me to the police station there?” I asked.

“Sure, but complaining to them about it won’t do much good now,” he counseled, pulling away from the taxi stand.

I always think of police stations as having two big globe lights outside and a cigar-smoking sergeant at an elevated admitting desk. This one could have been the local library, except that if your book was overdue, they’d put you in a cell.

I asked the uniformed officer behind the desk if there was anyone still working there who might have been involved in the investigation of Maureen O’Flaherty’s death. I showed him the letter that permanently resided in my pocketbook, written by Connie Wechsler on Neuman and Newberry’s letterhead, confirming that I was researching a book commissioned by them about Lanny Morris and Vince Collins. If I’d been a male newspaper reporter, he’d probably have shrugged me off, but as I was a personable young woman writing abook, of all things—“Good for you, sweetheart,” he said and I half-expected a pat on the head—he was willing to help this little girl as best he could. After some consultation with his peers, he said that the only person anyone could think of who was still around the area was Jack Scaglia (he pronounced theg ), who’d been one of the two patrolmen who’d first seen Maureen’s body. He’d taken an early retirement and now headed corporate security for Lipton in Englewood Cliffs, just a few miles up Lemoine Avenue. The officer gave me the general number for Lipton’s corporate offices and I was able to get Jack Scaglia on the line. I didn’t pronounce theg in his name, and that, coupled with my celebrated ability to impersonate the vocal timbre of Ann-Margret over the phone, was enough to gain me an immediate audience.