Where the Truth Lies (42 page)

He laughed one short snort. “When? After a reporter said, ‘Hey, Lanny, that girl whose hand you’re holding isn’t a schoolteacher named Trout like you’re telling everyone, she’s a journalist named O’Connor, I used to have drinks with her at the Old Town Bar, she’s writing an exposé about you, didn’t you know that?’ Would you have probably told me then?” He threw the beer can at me, but it hit the wall instead. I think he meant it to.

I snapped back, “But what about you, you bastard—you screwed me and left my body to be discovered by a maid at the Plaza hotel!”

“Fuck you. Don’t pull that ‘a strong offense is the best defense’ crap. You have no defense. Go take off your clothes.” He nodded toward the bathroom door.

I guess I was not the first imbecilic young woman to have entertained the thought “If he rapes me, maybe I can convert it into a seduction, and I can pacify him.” Usually these women die.

I felt guilty, I wanted him not to hate me … but he had also treated me horribly in New York and now he was saying hateful things to me. I invoked Marilyn’s spirit. I didn’t have to fuck anyone I didn’t want to.

“No,” I said. “If you touch me, I’ll scream loud enough that the cabana boys will come in through the window, and then it won’t matter whether I’m Trout or O’Connor or Bouton, you’ll be Lanny Morris, America’s Favorite Rapist.”

I thought he was going to hit me, and I thought I’d better make my first scream as loud as I could because I might not get out a second one. Instead he brushed by me and slid open a mirrored closet door. “Don’t flatter yourself. Put these on. We’re leaving, fast.”

On a hanger was a dove-gray shift in my size. From the shelf above the hangers he produced sunglasses and a blond wig. I turned to him and asked, “Do you always keep a woman’s change of clothing in your hotel rooms?”

He sneered like an intellectual Elvis. “You think my being here today was a coincidence? You thinkyour being here was either? I asked Jim Bouton to bow out as a favor to me yesterday morning, which he was more than glad to do. I told the committee if they could get you to present an award to the late Arthur Conklin, who was certain to be a no-show, I’d appear at the ceremony and accept it for him, as long as they kept my involvement totally secret from you, your publisher, and your publicist. They jumped at the chance.”

I inwardly winced. So my star was not yet on the ascendant. Lanny had gotten me the invite, for purposes of his own.

“How did you find out who I was?” I wondered if Reuben had spilled the beans, but then realized that he knew me only as Bonnie Trout. And he was not the type to rush back to Lanny with the juicy news that I was in town. If anything, he’d have tried to spare me any further contact with his employer.

“A friend of yours told me,” Lanny stated matter-of-factly as he examined the blond wig. Clearly, he was not going to elaborate. “Go change.”

I was growing increasingly nervous about what Lanny had in mind once I’d donned the outfit he’d had ready and waiting for me. “I don’t understand. Why do I have to disguise myself?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want to be seen with you in public,” he said airily. “You were just very visible at an awards luncheon, the press now knows who you are and about your current project, you did your little comedy turn, some of the same reporters may be staking themselves out where my limo is. If they spot the two of us, I’d rather they see me leave with a mysterious blonde than with a journalist who’s writing a book about me with my ex-partner. It might look like I’m endorsing the book, or even helping you with it, or anything other than trying to convince you, as my lawyers and I have been trying to do for some time,not to write the goddamn thing! ” He glared at me for a moment, then gave me a funny smile. “So go change.”

A few minutes later he was hurrying us down the inside hallway of the ground-floor cabana area. Most guests on this level left their rooms via sliding glass doors that verged upon the pool’s patio area, thick with foliage, from which they could walk to the hotel proper. It was a pleasant, sunny route. The alternative was to exit your room by the front door, which put you into a narrow hallway used primarily by the maids and room service. This was how Lanny led us away from the hotel and out a service entrance where laundry was delivered. We walked down a few steps and were in the rear parking lot of the Roosevelt. Above us I could see huge letters mounted on a grid atop the hotel’s roof, proclaiming its name proudly, if backward. There was a limo lurking behind a dumpster. A driver with a hard face and big arms in a uniform that was too small for him was leaning against the car, waiting for us. He opened the rear door the instant he saw Lanny and looked around for possible paparazzi. There were no members of the press to be seen. It appeared that Lanny’s attempt to disguise me had proven unnecessary.

“Okay, Mr. Morris?” asked the driver. “Home?” This was a much rougher-looking man than Michael Dougherty had been.

“We’re taking the lady to her next appointment, Dominic. Bel Air.” He looked at me. “You’re going to see Vince, right? That’s what Nita Cowan told me you told her. I was sitting with her at your table while you were up there pretending to be a comic.”

So this was the end for me. Dominic closed the dividing window and partition and we moved along Highland toward Sunset.

Lanny stared out the tinted window. The last time I’d seen him look this way, he’d been recalling the time he got beat up by a gang in Brooklyn.

“How’d you manage to get the seat behind me on the plane?” he asked at last. “That must have taken some doing.”

“It was pure coincidence,” I said sullenly. Clearly everything I’d done or said was now going to be appraised in its most cynical interpretation. “Now I get to ask a question. How could you have just left me there that morning at the Plaza?”

“Stop trying to build it up. You were asleep, unconscious from the workout we had. So was I, but Reuben woke me, told me I had to be a substitute performer-conductor with the L.A. Philharmonic that evening, at the Hollywood Bowl. Charity comedy concert for Lanny’s Club. It was supposed to be Sid Caesar but Sid, you know … I had to get the first flight out. I knew we’d be together again. And see? I was right.”

He smiled coldly at me as we passed the igloo of the Cinerama Pacific Dome.

“But you could have left me a note or called me there.”

“I didn’t want to wake you, airplanes don’t have telephones, by the time I got to L.A. you’d left the hotel, and I left you a note with my numbers,” he said, looking away from me.

“Where?”

“I don’t know, I think I left it on the pillow next to you. If not there, then in the living room. Maybe the maid threw it out.”

Not even a clever lie. “And when you didn’t hear from me, you didn’t think, oh, maybe you should try calling me?”

“I did. Your— Bonnie Trout’s number was disconnected.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I got a dead line. I called it more than once.”

There’s nothing that annoys me as much as when a man thinks a woman is stupid enough (or smitten enough) that she will accept his lamest excuses. The fact that we don’t always bother to challenge them is simply our prerogative. I’d called Bonnie myself almost every day since I’d left New York and always gotten through. And she’d called me from my apartment in L.A. with no difficulty whatsoever. I would soon have the phone bill to prove it. At worst, Lanny would have gotten the answering service. The number had never been disconnected.

“And you didn’t try reaching me, Bonnie, at my school?”

“Look, why are we eventalking about this?” he blared at me, obviously eager to get away from specifics. “Have you not understood me? I don’tlike you. I’m sorry we met. You put stuff over on me, I’m sure you probablylaughed at me—I’m one of the great comedians of this era; no one is ever supposed tolaugh at me until I cause them to do so!” He leaned forward and barked at Dominic, “Head up Stone Canyon Road.”

We turned off West Sunset Boulevard, following the “sane” route to Vince’s home that I’d figured out for myself after my first visit.

Lanny scoffed in a low voice, “Look, you’re not going to get around this. You told me you were someone else. You took me to your—sorry, to Bonnie’s—apartment and told me it was yours. You hadjust read my manuscript a few days earlier, something almost nobody on earth has seen, and you didn’t think you should have mentioned that to me when we met? Or at the very, very least before we had sex?”

“I was going to tell you.”

“When?”

The limo started to work its way up Tortuoso Way. “I don’t know,” I conceded.

It hadn’t been enough to go through this with Lanny. Now I’d have to witness theson et lumičre of Vince’s shock, surprise, anger, resentment, and disdain. I’d partaken of recent sex with Vince’s ex-partner and forgotten to mention it to Vince. I’d allowed Vince to think that our book was being done without Lanny’s involvement when in fact I’d not only read fragments of Lanny’s own reminiscences but heard them from Lanny’s own two lips, pried and plied by me. I’d invented a half brother and flung his ashes across the Everglades. Duplicity, thy name is O’Connor.

“How did you find me out?” I couldn’t help but ask.

Lanny leaned forward and said to the driver, “Stop here, Dom.”

We pulled over and, with a slow crunch of gravel and dirt, stopped alongside a Cape Cod–style house with blue shutters. On our left was that same unmarked driveway with painted white stones on either side that led up to Vince’s home. Lanny wore the satisfied expression of a detective revealing the murderer’s identity to suspects assembled in the study. “I had to be in Washington last Friday making nice with some congressmen. Lanny’s Club needs to keep its federal funding. Saturday I spoke at a Boosters’ Breakfast for my Kids and had the rest of the day to myself. They’ve got this new train service to New York, the Metroliner. It arrives just across town from where you live—I remembered the apartment building real well. I thought instead of flying back to L.A. out of Dulles, I’d book myself out of JFK. I’d been thinking about you. I thought I might surprise you.”

Translation: I was alone in Washington and horny.

“So I bought some flowers when I got there, put on my usual disguise, you know, that blond wig—”

“Illya Kuryakin,” I realized aloud.

“What?”

I thought of Beejay’s description of the hippie with the blond pageboy haircut. “You looked like Illya Kuryakin. The character David McCallum played onThe Man from U.N.C.L.E. ”

Lanny considered this. “Yeah, I guess the wig does make me look a bit like him. So now I buzz your buzzer. ‘B. Trout,’ it says. You ask, ‘Who is it?’ I say, ‘Flowers for Bonnie Trout.’ You buzz me up. I take the elevator. You open the door. It’s not you.”

Poor Beejay. Neither the vice principal nor the narcissistic actor had sent her the flowers. Worse, she had met Lanny Morris and not even known it.

“The woman who isnot you says, ‘Yes?’ I say, ‘Flowers for Bonnie Trout.’ She says, ‘That’s me.’ I feel like a jerk. I wanted to ask her, ‘Well, who is that girl who says she is you?’ But that might get you in some kind of trouble. I don’t know what the play is. I just know I don’t want this girl to recognize me. Lanny Morris is not supposed to go around ringing the doorbells of strange women living in the East Thirties. So I railroad myself back to Washington, completely confused. Sunday, I uncancel a speech I’d canceled at an Interfaith Luncheon. I fly back to L.A. that evening from Dulles.”

He knocked on the smoked window divider, and the driver lowered it. Lanny asked him for a pen and something to write on. Dominic produced a pen from his shirt pocket and a copy of the day’sHollywood Reporter. Lanny wrote something on the back page, shielding it from my view. He handed the magazine and pen back to the driver. “Dom, give this number to the radio operator on the car phone after we’re outside the car,” he instructed. “Keep your voice down, it’s a private number.”

Well, since Lanny already knew the number and since he was giving the number to the driver, it was a safe bet the person he was keeping the number private from was me. Lanny opened the car door, stepped out, and motioned for me to step out as well. There was no dial on a car phone; you had to verbally request the number from an operator. I guess all this was simply to stop me from hearing what the number was. Frankly, at the moment, I felt better being out in the open than in the back of a limo driven by a thug named Dominic.

A car drove by, its driver not surprised to see a man in a custom-tailored tuxedo standing in the sunlight outside a limo in Bel Air. To while away the moments, Lanny continued his story as breezily as if he were pitching a movie to a cohort over drinks at the Polo Lounge. “I have a firm here in L.A. that handles security for me. Did you know that if you have the right people working for you, you can access anyone’s phone records? So Monday, I give them Bonnie Trout’s name and address. Tuesday afternoon, I was supposed to meet with Vince and a journalist named O’Connor, but as luck would have it, I’m doing this huge shoot that morning with Morris the Cat. The gag is Morris and Morris, like we’re the new comedy team. And they’ve got us in a nightclub set and Morris is saying Vince’s catchphrases and I’m saying, ‘With those kinds of jokes, we’ll need 9-Lives,’ very distinguished stuff for a forty-two-year-old man. Only they’ve got the guy from the ASPCA, and apparently you can’t have Morris under the lights for more than five minutes each half hour, and the director thinks he’s Otto Preminger, only more Teutonic. I get out of makeup four hours later than planned and Vince tells me you’ve already left for New York. How’s your brother, by the way?”

I didn’t reply.

“By that evening, I have an accounting of Bonnie Trout’s telephone calls in front of me. I was particularly interested in the night I left you in her apartment after we both had flown from L.A. together. After all, you had just spent the day with ‘theLanny Morris.’ Who would you want to share this big news with first?” He smiled, aware how this sounded coming from his own lips. “Well, there was only one long-distance call made that night, but it was for three hours, no less! A collect call to a phone in Los Angeles, a Studio City exchange. So I dial the number and get your answering service. They answer in your name. The same name as the journalist I was supposed to meet with Vince! I have my people try to get a photo of you, but they can’t find one in any of the articles you’ve written, except once when you wore a mask. That’s when I contacted the Scotties people and made a barter deal with them to get you up on stage at the Roosevelt. So I could take a good look at you. Looking good, Bonnie.”