Where the Truth Lies (47 page)

He lifted a silver cover on the room-service tray, revealing two Polaroid photos. He tossed one over to me. I saw what I expected to see.

I asked, “Do you have one where I don’t look this heavy?”

Vince nodded and tossed me the other one. My essence had not been captured by Bob Guccione, but my butt looked cute enough and the angle flattered my breasts. He said, “That’s the best of the outtakes. Jenn took the camera and the rest of the snapshots with her. I’m meeting her in a little while. Some of the photos came out pretty nice, if I do say so myself.”

I tore up the one where I looked heavy and walked over to the door. “If I step into the hall and invite anyone to look in, they’ll see Vince Collins, in person, sitting in this hotel room. In your scenario, what would you be doing here now?”

He retrieved the pieces of the torn Polaroid, put them in an ashtray bearing the outline of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and ignited them with his handsome lighter. “I got a hysterical call early this morning from Jenn saying you’d drugged and raped her. I told her to clear out as fast as she could. I came over to confront you.”

I hesitated, my hand still on the doorknob. “Yes, but you’re wearing the same suit as last night. The waiters at the restaurant could verify that.”

“Obviously, I was in a hurry to get here—I just put on the clothing I’d draped over a chair in my bedroom last night.”

I pointed at the empty trays. “Ah. And in your anger you ordered room service?”

“No, in reality, Jenn phoned down the order before she left. She told them she was a Miss O’Connor who was staying in Miss Howell’s room. She asked room service to leave the trays outside the door at nineA .M. It will seem likeyou ordered a cozy breakfast for the two of you, not realizing how hysterical Jenn would be when she woke in the morning.”

I let go of the door handle and walked back over to him.

“Jenn is going to have to do a lot of lying.”

He got up from his chair. “My management company is going to see that Jenn has a great recording and performing career, if she plays her cards right with me. And as you know, she actually has talent beyond the skills she demonstrated so vividly last night. The two of us spent a very nice day together while you were in Florida. Jenn’ll say whatever she has to. She’s a pretty good little actress, too.”

“Yes, but if this sordid story got out, it would really tarnish her name.”

“No, the only one it’ll discredit will be you. You’re a grown-up journalist playing loose with the rules. She’s a young vulnerable singer you drugged and molested. Actually, it would be amazing publicity for her. Beautiful, victimized blondes are very big these days, or didn’t you know? I guess you don’t listen to pop music much. What, did you think she was going to record children’s songs?”

I sat back down on the bed. So far, Lanny had been wrong. Vince wasn’t any less clever than he thought he was. But I thought I was smarter. Now we’d see.

I asked him for one of his cigarettes. I hadn’t had my own at the Scotty Awards luncheon and I’d been bumming his yesterday up through dinner. He put one in his mouth and lit it, then offered it to me.

I shook my head. “No. Not one you’ve had in your mouth.”

He shrugged and handed me a new one.

I said, “Tell me: in this storyboard of lies you’ve come up with, exactlywhy am I trying to extort you?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet. Maybe it’s because you want the sole royalty on the book. Or half of my million dollars. It really doesn’t matter, honey, because no one’s ever going to know aboutany of this. Because you’re going to cooperate and then we’re going to get along fine. When we finish the book, I’ll even sleep with you if you want. Just the two of us this time.”

He said it very amicably, as if it were foolish for us to be quarreling this way.

I folded my arms. “What’s the deal?”

“We’re going to continue working on the book. You’re going to do a great job. I’ll continue to tell you all kinds of juicy, funny, heart-tugging stories. But you’re not going to ask me any questions about what happened to your ‘Girl in New Jersey.’ Dorothy Kilgallen covered it, Jack O’Brien covered it, Moe Cohn put the story to bed. I’ll give you my account of what I know, and you’re not going to ask me a single followup question. I suggest you tell your publisher that you tried every angle and could find nothing odd or suspicious in what I told you. I’ll even try to make my story more interesting than what’s been reported, so it won’t look like you completely failed. Spice it up with stuff such as how I’d wanted to sleep like a babe the night before the telethon, so to cover my bets I kept a few babes on hand.” He leered a bit. “Well, not exactly on myhand. That’s not my preference, as you may have gathered by now.”

He was sounding more like his ex-partner every minute. “And?” I asked.

“And that’ll be the deal.” He slapped his hands like a Vegas blackjack dealer relinquishing a table. “See? Not so terrible. You’ll get your best-seller, I’ll get my million, Jenn will get her hit record, and everybody goes home happy.”

“And if I don’t accept the deal?”

He frowned. “Then I’ll just have to go to Neuman and Newberry and lay out for them the incredible pattern of duplicity, immorality, and near-criminal behavior you’ve displayed toward this project, myself, and even Lanny. I’ll demand they pull you off the book and replace you with someone who’s more compatible and trustworthy.”

“Meaning someone who’ll write a puff piece.”

“Exactly.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand, Vince. Since Day One you’ve dreaded talking about Maureen O’Flaherty. If it was something you so wanted to avoid … why, why, why, Vince, did you ever agree to do this book?”

He looked sad, and his answer was even more pathetic. “Because I need the money.”

He raised his shirt collar, wrapped his tie around his neck, and became intent on making a Windsor knot. I wanted to kick him in the balls, but he had over half a foot and sixty pounds on me.

So I kicked him the best way I could. “Listen, Vince, despite my behavior this last month, you should be nervously aware that I actually do have some guiding principles. For example, I believe it’s the solemn obligation of a writer not to mind if something he or she reveals in the course of telling a story is personally embarrassing or humiliating.”

He was dismayed by the tie’s length and began the arduous process from the beginning again. “So?”

“Check your contract, Vince.”

The statement hung in the air. My invoking a legal document caused him to listen more attentively. He let the two ends of the tie dangle for a moment. “What about it?”

“Anything you say in my presence is mine to use. For example, for the last fifteen minutes I’ve been asking you questions and you’ve been answering. And since I am also allowed to include ‘contextual background’—where we were when you said things, how we got there, what you were doing at the time, who we were with—I can write everything, absolutely everything, about last night and this morning. How you set me up. Jenn’s involvement. How you tried to blackmail me into not asking you about the Girl in New Jersey. Hell, I’ll even put the Polaroids in the photo section.” I patted the remaining photo. “All photographs taken during an interview are the property of the publisher.”

He tied the tie perfectly this time and put on his jacket. “Neuman and Newberry are a respected outfit. They wouldn’t want to go near something this tainted. You’d be laughed out of the business. No one would ever take you seriously again.”

“I think they would take me seriously if I owned up to everything. Not excused myself in any way but admitted to all the colossal mistakes I’ve made, some with your able assistance, since we met. Owned up to my sheer stupidity, thinking I could play games with either of you devious little boys. I’ll tell it all, no matter how awful I look in the recounting, or in the Polaroids.” I grabbed his arm. “Listen, it could be the bravest thing I’ve ever done, Vince. If a journalist destroys her own career in order to tell her reader the truth, then she’s at least served the truth. I would have that, even as I was being laughed at. In my own destruction, I could at least gain something. And you’ll have nothing.”

He walked toward the door, ready to conclude this conversation. “It would be your word against mine,” he said and waved his hand, dismissing me.

“A person who makes a full and detailed confession to a crime and then names their accomplice has a hell of a lot more credibility than a person who says, ‘I didn’t do it but she did.’”

Suddenly, he wasn’t looking so masterful.

I pressed my point. “Real life generates its own details, Vince. A lie generates only the lie. If I walk down the fire stairs to the lobby, somewhere along the way there’s liable to be a bucket of sand. What color is the bucket? What floor is it on? If you lie and say you took the fire stairs, you don’t have that information. You just have the lie. I’ve got the details, Vince. You don’t.”

Vince stepped into the bathroom, pulled a few Kleenex out of the dispenser, and blotted some sweat that had beaded on his neck. He checked in the mirror to make sure he was fit for public consumption. He smiled. “I’ve never said anything to you that could be used against me.”

I shook my head sadly. “That’s subject to debate. But there are people who know things, Vince, and they’re talking to me, especially since there’s money in it for them. And remember: there’s nothing in your contract that limits how loaded my questions can be or how many loaded guns I can have up my sleeve.”

He stopped by the door, looking puzzled. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, contractually, there’s nothing stopping me from putting any information I wantinto a question I ask you … information that I’d like to make public or that the police might want to look into. Just so long as it’s in the form of a question. Kind of likeJeopardy! Would you like me to fire one of my loaded guns … sort of as a free sample?”

“Sure thing,” said Vince.

In fact, I only had the one gun up my sleeve, but I was going to shoot it now, when I needed it most. I took dead aim at his gut.

“Vince: in your suite at the Versailles Hotel in Miami, was it your idea or Lanny’s to put Maureen O’Flaherty’s dead body into the metal locker containing shellfish and ice and then have it shipped to New Jersey … or did the idea originate with the both of you?”

Oh, it did my heart good to see him turn the color of a corpse. What a shame Jenn had taken the Polaroid camera away with her. I would have loved to have shown that picture to Maureen’s mother. I raised my eyebrows. “No answer, Mr. Collins? So noted. Oh, incidentally, by not answering, you’re in violation of your contract. What a shame. I understood that you needed the money.”

Lanny was right about one thing: neither Vince nor I was as clever as we thought we were. Vince was stupid because, in trying to push me off a cliff, he hadn’t noticed that he’d gone beyond the edge himself. And I was stupid because I’d said all this without calculating that Vince might at that moment try to kill me.

He lunged and pushed me down onto the bed. In movies, when a man tries to strangle a woman, I had always thought, “But if her life’s at stake, surely she can summon the strength to fight back?” The answer is ultimately no, not if the man is stronger than you. He was choking me and it was working. I couldn’t get air into my lungs. I reached to grab the lamp or vase that’s always available in movies for women to hit their attacker with. There was no lamp or vase to grab. I clutched for the famous scissors, but there were no famous scissors. I was just going to die. I waited for the Great White Light and for the Caring Voices to ask me if I was ready, but all I heard was the ghastly sound of me trying to breathe, and Vince’s grunts as he tried to stop that from happening.

And then he simply abandoned the struggle. Apparently, he couldn’t bring himself to kill me.

I had froth and mucus all over my face. I sucked air painfully into my lungs, and I was making noises I had never heard myself make. Through my wrenching gasps, I asked him (because I had been hired to ask him questions), “Was that how you murdered Maureen O’Flaherty?”

He looked at me with the expression of a man who realizes there is no way out of his dilemma. His face was bleeding where I had scratched it with my nails. He croaked, “Ask Lanny that. He seems to be the one who knows.”

There was a rapping at the door of metal against wood. It might have been Alice, eager to pose for more photos, or perhaps Lanny, here to assist his ex-partner, or—“Housekeeping?”said a woman’s voice. A louder rap of a metal key against the door.“Housekeeping?”

The door opened and Saint Rina of Anaheim entered with her novitiate sidekick, Sister Esmerelda. I coughed out in my terrible Spanish:“żUsted conoce a Vince Collins, la estrella famosa del cantante y de cine?” I pointed at Vince, famous star of singing and cinema.

They made excited sounds and moved forward to greet Vince.

I stepped past them and stumbled to the fire stairs, needing to get away from that room, not wanting to wait for an elevator. On the third floor, I saw a metal bucket of sand. It was red. There were two cigarette butts in it. Also a chewing-gum wrapper. I observed these little details as I fell to my knees and retched into the bucket, over and over again.

TWENTY-NINE

It had not been hard for him to get the suite he wanted. The Versailles was still one of the fanciest of the hotels along the beach, but now, well into the 1970s, its era had passed. The beach had become “the Catskills with Cubans and melanoma.” The joke went, Take all that’s lovely in Bermuda out of Bermuda and you have Miami. Lenny Bruce said Miami was where neon went to die.

They’d thought it was odd, him wanting a two-bedroom suite when he’d arrived alone. Maybe he was planning to have company later that evening. He certainly had never lacked for it in the past.

He didn’t go into either bedroom at first. After the bellman had left, he had stood in the middle of the living room. The TV was different, a color model. All of the furniture was new. Well, after all, it had been nearly fifteen years. But the floor plan was still the same. Right in that spot. That was where the truth had come out. And that had been the end of everything.