Where the Truth Lies (55 page)

I walked back to the area by the loft bed and picked up Lanny’s third chapter. To mollify Reuben, I assured him, “If you detect any hostility in my tone, please don’t let that discourage you. I still think your tape will be very valuable, and I’ve never let my personal feelings stand in the way of a good story.”

Reuben took this as reassuring news and joined me. “I think you have misunderstood many things, but hopefully, in time, you’ll find you were wrong about me.”

I thumbed through the pages. “Look, you may have caused my life a little misery, and you caused Vince enough that he killed himself … but here’s where I realized you were a true Renaissance man.” Reuben was not altogether displeased with this characterization. “Now, if we assume, as your first glance at this document seemed to verify, that Lanny’s account of what happened that night is pretty accurate—” I looked at him for verification.

Reuben nodded. “From a quick look, they’re consistent.”

I said, “Okay, Lanny has just come out of the shower and he’s going to offer Maureen his robe in case she’s a little bashful, and he says,‘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.’ Eager little fellow.”

Reuben chuckled.

I continued, “Now, after the fiasco in the living room, Lanny is going to go back into his bedroom to give Maureen her three hundred dollars. He wrote:

“’I walked over to my bedroom door and told her, “In here.” She got the tote bag she’d brought with her and followed me into the room. I shut the door behind us. My wallet was on the dresser atop my silk robe, and I withdrew three one-hundred-dollar bills and tossed them onto my bed, which is how you’re supposed to pay whores.

“’She looked at me with an amused expression. I suddenly felt as bothered by my nakedness in front of her as in front of Vince. I unfurled the folds from my robe and wrapped it around me quickly, tying its sash in a huff. She was laughing at me.’ ”

I stopped reading and looked at Reuben, who shrugged and said, “So?”

I closed the portfolio. “Pretty cool robe Lanny had there. Throws it on his bed, and when he comes back into the room fifteen minutes later, it’s folded on the dresser and his wallet is on top of it.”

Reuben moved toward me. “Let me see that for myself,” he said, looking puzzled. I retrieved the document and handed it to him. He stepped to the kitchen to see it in the light. Suddenly he produced his lighter, as he always did so smoothly for Lanny, lit the corner of the pages, and tossed them into the french-fried peas. The crazed oil ignited itself and billowed high and white, engulfing the pages in a flare-up that smelled like nothing I’d ever encountered before. It’s a good thing the landlord had been smart enough never to install smoke detectors or the whole building would have been on alert. After a moment, the document had turned to fatty ash and Reuben transferred the pan to the sink, turning on the faucet so the pan smoked itself out. He didn’t seem to mind the momentary heat of the handle.

I sighed. “A shame that you would burn that letter, Reuben, when you went to the risk of stealing it from your employer’s files and making a copy for yourself. Those dramatic words at the start of the letter—’only after the death of Lanny Morris’—must have made it tempting reading. And then you were thoughtful enough to get a copy to me, because it made your tape a much easier sell if I was already aware of the secret it contained. I bet Lanny’s letter spells out what happened much more clearly than the muffled sound on that old tape. But equipped with the former, one could easily understand the significance of the latter. By the way, the copy you burned is a Xerox of a Xerox.”

Reuben now headed toward me, making no illusion of his attitude. I backed up a bit and found my head against the edge of the loft bed. I moved around in the opposite direction. I needed him facing me this way.

“So this is how I have it figured, Reuben, and you tell me if I’m wrong. You had let yourself into Lanny’s room, as you always did, to clean up and make his room ready for when he turned in. You had just folded his robe and put his wallet on top of it when you heard the fascinating activity in the living room, so you monitored the drama through the open door. When you heard Lanny coming toward the bedroom, you hid in the bathroom and overheard what serious danger the team of Collins and Morris was in. You stayed in the bathroom while Lanny put the chain across his door and fell into bed.

“Sleep came fast and heavy to Vince, Maureen, and Lanny. You sat there in the dark of the bathroom and realized that this could be the end of everything. Either Maureen would bleed the team dry or she’d go public with what she knew, spiraling them into oblivion. Either way, Collins and Morris were on the verge of ruin … and ifthey were ruined, where would that leave you?”

I stared at him coldly. Now there were no illusions on either side. “The only question in my mind, Reuben, is whether you found the tape recorder before or after you killed Maureen. Any hints?”

Reuben just glared at me as if I were a plump priest saying grace at a cannibal luau.

“No? Well, my guess is that you found it first. With the amount of drugs in the three of them, you could have held a Led Zeppelin concert in that living room and not awakened them. We already have a working postulate that you search women’s handbags as a reflex. Your first concern may have been protecting your world by silencing Maureen, but when you saw that tape recorder and realized what must be on it, the late Miss O’Flaherty was as good as consigned to the angels, may she rest in peace. For you realized that while she might have the upper hand at that moment, once she was deadyou would be the one with the tape,you would be the one with the upper hand.

“Surely no murder could have been easier to commit. Your victim was in a deep sleep, bordering on a stupor. There was a pillow right there. You held it over her face. She may not have even struggled. And she was gone. There went her ambition, and Moe Cohn’s very existence, and Kef Ludlow’s dreams, and her mother’s heart, and her father’s mind. And ultimately, Vince’s life. Not bad, Reuben. Six with one blow.”

Reuben was tensing himself now. It would happen any second. He asked, “How could I have killed her if all three doors were chained? You’ll have to tell me that.”

I moved closer to him. If he tried to kill me, it would confirm for me everything I was saying. A signed confession to the police would have been nicer, but it was never going to come to that.

“After you murdered Maureen, you left the suite by Vince’s room, knowing that Lanny’s door and the living-room door were already chained. You knew when you left that the boys weren’t going to wake up at eightA .M. without your help. In the morning, you banged on Lanny’s door, telling him you couldn’t let yourself in with your duplicate key because his bedroom door was chained from the inside. When you followed him into the living room, again, you made sure he’d seen that the door there was chained as well. While Lanny tried to revive Maureen, you ran into Vince’s room alone. Vince was still lying unconscious on the floor, where you’d walked over him to leave only a few hours earlier. The first thing you did when you entered the room was to fasten the chain. Then you called for Lanny, who found you bent over Vince’s body, and who saw that Vince’s door was also chained from the inside.”

“Now you had the tape, which you’d taken with you after you’d murdered Maureen. You had the goods on Lanny and Vince in many different ways. And so then you merely lived the not-very-unpleasant life of Lanny’s valet as you let the years tick by, taking you past the statute of limitations for the help you ‘loyally’ gave Vince and Lanny to cover up the murder thatyou committed. You let both of those men believe for all those years that one or the other had killed Maureen O’Flaherty. Vince Collins lay in that tub, slipping toward a lonely, stupefied death, believing into oblivion that he had committed murder. May you rot in Hell, Reuben.”

“Why don’t you get there ahead of me and do my unpacking?” he suggested. He drew himself up to his full height and oh, I was sore afraid. “So you were lying to me when you said Mr. Morris wouldn’t be in a position to employ me, that I wouldn’t see him at the Plaza ever again, and that you thought he might already be in hiding. You said that to make me drop my guard?”

“No, I was being very honest with you. He won’t be in a position to employ you because you won’t be free to work for a living. You won’t see him at the Plaza ever again because you’re not going back there again. As for him being in hiding—” Reuben grabbed my throat with both hands. Although not as strong as Vince, he was not as conflicted about his intentions.

But it had been foolish of him to interrupt me, because I’d just been about to tell him that Lanny Morris wasalready in hiding, under a sheet in the shadows at the back of Beejay’s loft bed, where we had only just finished making spectacular love twenty minutes before Reuben woke us from the contented sleep we’d been sharing. Although Lanny’s legs had gone to sleep from lying still for so long (I’d tried to make some noise at the stove to let him stir a bit, as well as to draw Reuben’s attention away from the loft bed), Lanny was able to hit Reuben hard (though not as hard as Lanny would have liked) with the steel bar that Beejay kept in her bed.

When Reuben came to, he found himself tied up in the bathtub with wet “rope” made from torn bedsheets. He could barely breathe through the gag in his mouth and, you know, we really weren’t all that worried about it. Neither Reuben, Lanny, nor I were one hundred percent clean. The difference was, neither Lanny nor I had ever killed anyone. We thought that was enough of a difference.

We could discern from Reuben’s cries that he wanted a lawyer.

Lanny said, “Why would you need a lawyer, Reuben? It’s not like you’re going to be arrested or tried or convicted or paroled. Relax. You don’t need a lawyer.”

Lanny then dialed a number he hadn’t called in many years. It was a New Jersey area code, and it must have been an extremely private number because Sally Santoro answered himself. Lanny made sure Reuben could hear him clearly.

“Sally. It’s Lanny Morris. Can we talk on this line? Okay, look, you know fifteen years now, I don’t think I’ve ever come to you and asked for a favor. Thank you. Well, I’m in Manhattan, and I have a package that I could use the Lattanzi Brothers’ help with. What? Good question, hold on.” Lanny called out to Reuben, “Hey, Reuben, Sally wants to know if this is temporary storage or final disposal. What do you think?”

Reuben, who’d heard about the trucks at the Casino del Mar that used to take passengers on two-way and one-way excursions to the Lattanzis’ landfill, screamed a terrible “Noooooooooooooo!” from behind the gag.

Lanny looked at me for my opinion. I had no idea what to tell him. I was busy trying to clean up Beejay’s sink before she got home. I felt just awful about the mess.

Lanny got back on the line with Sally. “Well, I’ll tell you, Sally, it’s a tough call. You see, this package blackmailed my partner, Vince. Yeah, your Vince, our Vince. That’s the reason Vince felt he had to end things.” Lanny listened to Sally for a moment. He had to strain to hear him, and my research had told me that the more softly Sally spoke, the more dangerous he was. “Well, yes, I understand,” Lanny responded to the almost inaudible voice. “And this is also the package that murdered Maureen O’Flaherty at the Versailles. Yes, that redhead. Well, the package brought her body up to New Jersey, which, as you’ll remember, ruined the grand opening of your new hotel. For which you and I and Vince worked so hard. Yes, Sally, I’m sorry, what?”

He looked at me. “The connection must be bad, I can barely hear him.” Lanny put the phone back to his ear but stared at Reuben as he continued: “What’s that? I don’t know, Sally, you’ve always been a fair man. Why don’t I just leave it up to you?”

THIRTY-THREE

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.”

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 so greatly already. I promise you I will write down now 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 knew I was talking about her.

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