Where the Truth Lies (48 page)

That was why the girl had had to die.

She had stayed the night—a night that for her would never end—here in the living room, in its convertible couch. Imagine that: a Castro in Miami. (Joke.)

The boys had retired to their respective bedrooms, either of which could be reached by a door on either side of the living room or its own door in the hall. There was a lot to sleep off. It had not been a good evening.

How had the end begun?

He picked up the phone and dialed room service. “Hello, Room Service? I’m holding a service here in my room and I don’t have enough to make up a minyan. What? A minyan. It’s a Jewish prayer service, we’re doing a Kaddish tonight. I’m in Shul Twenty-five-oh-one, oh-two, oh-three, oh-by-the-way, what’s your name, sweetheart? ‘Robertson,’ yeah, no wonder you don’t understand me. Listen, I need three able-bodied men to fill out my minyan, but if you can find me three able-bodiedwomen, the hell with the minyan, we can have us a party. Joke. Forget it, listen, this is Lanny Morris in 2501. Yes,that Lanny Morris. Well, I’m a big fan of yours, too. No, I really mean that. Mr. Collins? Saw him quite recently, as it happens. He was looking really good, but then again, when does he not I should say, huuuh? Now look, can you send up three filet mignons done rare, rare, and rare, with béarnaise sauce, the usual stuff on the side. Great, and look, I don’t want you to take this the whole entirely way other, but you have a very sweet attendant down there, very lovely young lady, and she’s just terrific, you know who I mean? That’s her, could you do a favor for a tired entertainer and make sure she’s who brings the order up? Even if you have to pull her off some other room. For the Lanny-Man, okay? No, we got all the booze we need here but, say, have her bring up three bottles of Moët on ice, okay? She can wheel it all into 2502, that’s the living room. Thanks, sweetheart.”

He hung up the phone. That’s how it had begun. Vince was no longer with him now, which was a blessed relief. But it was kind of unnatural staying in three empty rooms like this. He thought of having a word with Reuben, who had his own smaller room down the hall, but then he remembered Reuben wasn’t on this trip either. So he sat in the dark.

Room service had become woefully understaffed at the Versailles. It wasn’t until almost an hour later that he awoke to a knocking at the living room door.

“Who is it?”

“Room service,” said a lilting female voice.

Still dozy, he opened the door.

She noticed the dark. “Oh, can you turn on a light?”

He fumbled around the room for a switch. Turning it on, he went back to sit on the couch.

The young woman was at most five feet tall, very slender. Her Versailles outfit fit her as if she were Lucille Ball farcically donning a bellman’s uniform for comic effect. She had rolled up her sleeves and cuffs and looked adorable. Her hair was long and gleaming black. She had almond eyes. She was not Maureen O’Flaherty.

“Three steaks with the trimmings. You want me to set up the table?”

He indicated that that would be very nice, even though he had no intention of eating a single bite. It was all for old times’ sake.

She busied herself, dressing a circular dining table by windows that overlooked the ocean, except that at night, of course, the ocean couldn’t be seen. She took out a folded tablecloth and flapped it into place, then started transferring covered dishes from the Sterno-heated box within the room-service cart.

“Are you Japanese or Chinese?” he asked.

“Korean.” She smiled. “The kitchen told me you’re a famous person. Why are you famous?”

“Beats me,” he replied. “What’s your name?”

“Mei Ling. Chinese name, but I’m Korean. Your name?”

“Lanny Morris. Jewish name, but I’m a nebbish. Joke. How long have you been in this country, Mei Ling?”

“One year, ten months. You ordered three bottles of champagne and they gave me three ice buckets, because we didn’t know if it’s one for each room or— You want me to open one now or do you want to wait until company comes?”

He smiled. “You can open all three, Mei Ling. You have a check for me to sign?”

She handed a billfold to him. “I do. Maybe I should get you to autograph something else too, because the kitchen said it would be worth something. You know, when you die.”

He was overtaken by laughter.

“Don’t forget a tip for Mei Ling,” she instructed him.

He alternated between adding an extravagant sum to the check and glancing at her face. “You know what, Mei Ling? You don’t look Korean.”

She checked the tip he’d left her and was very satisfied. “I’m Vietnamese, originally from the North, but who wants to get into that? The guests don’t, and I sure as hell don’t. I do a lot better with tips as Madame Butterfly than I would as Trinh Le Truong. Pour you some champagne now?”

He nodded that that would be all right. She took a champagne goblet from the cart and filled it to the brim. He asked if she’d like a glass herself, but she explained that she was on duty. He smiled as she handed him the goblet. She was definitely not Maureen O’Flaherty.

At the door, she said, “Listen, could I get that autograph from you? They won’t let me keep the one on the check.”

He nodded and went over to an end table. There was a notepad and Versailles pen there. He scribbled, “Thanks for servicing me (JOKE) … Lanny Morris.”

She looked at it with curiosity and tucked it into a pocket. “Are you really famous, Mr. Morris?”

“In my day. Before your time, I guess.”

She explained they’d had no TV, and American movies had been banned where she grew up. “What did you do, Mr. Morris?”

He thought. “I made Vince Collins’s life very difficult.”

She didn’t understand, but her policy was not to linger in the room of a solitary gentleman one second longer than was necessary. She wished him a good evening.

He went over to a shelf by the bar, took down a water tumbler, and tossed the contents of his champagne goblet into it. Then he took the first champagne bottle out of its nest of ice cubes and filled the tumbler to the brim. And drank the entire tumbler down.

He took his glass toward the room he’d slept in that night and headed for its bathroom. He turned on the single tap in the combination tub and shower. Water started spraying from the showerhead and he flipped the mechanism that diverted it to the tub, setting the water to “hot.”

While the tub was filling, he went to the desk in his bedroom and took out a sheet of Versailles stationery. Sipping now and then from his tumbler of champagne, he wrote a few lines so no one would misunderstand. For moral support, he placed a small bottle of pills before him on the desk while he was writing.

When he was done, he fetched the three champagne buckets from the living room and carried them into the bathroom, neatly setting them alongside the tub.

He then shed his clothes, turned off the water, and tested its temperature. Damn. It was scalding hot and he didn’t want to wait. Then he had a stroke of genius. He took the champagne bottles out of their respective ice buckets and dumped the ice into the tub. Then he nestled himself down into this cocktail of hot water on the rocks. There was poetry in it. Poetry that he was lying in a tub of water and ice.

He didn’t think he had the courage to kill himself, not just yet. But his plan, his clever plan, was to drink enough champagne, perhaps all three bottles, and to accompany the champagne with ample medication, so that eventually “ending things” would become a very acceptable, even a nice, idea. He thought he just might be able to manage that. He knew for certain he could no longer manage anything else. So the choice really wasn’t his.

He opened the bottle of pills and took one, downing it with a fresh tumbler of champagne. Things were so much better already.

Based on the contents of his note, his conversation with Ms. Truong, and my conversations with the Miami police investigators, this is my best effort at reconstructing his last evening.

A call came in early that afternoon to the Beverly Hills office of Irv Fleischmann, Lanny Morris’s business manager, from the operations chief at the Versailles in Miami.

Fleischmann took in the news. A maid had come to clean the hotel room. She almost passed out when she discovered the body floating in the cool water.

Fleischmann turned to the man who was seated comfortably across the desk, wearing tennis shorts. Fleischmann told him as gently as he could that Vince Collins was dead. He’d died of a drug overdose while lying in a tub at their old suite at the Versailles. There’d been a note, signed by Vince. There was no question but that it was suicide.

Lanny buried his face in his hands and sobbed for almost five minutes. Irv Fleischmann wasn’t a hugging person, and he felt Lanny wouldn’t have wanted that. He instead tried to be useful. He went out to his secretary’s desk, told her the news, calmed her down, said he would be taking no phone calls. Mr. Morris would release a statement later that afternoon, but he would not be talking to any press, at least not for the moment.

He phoned Reuben at Lanny’s home and told him to bring a change of clothing, including a dark suit and tie, over to the office. Lanny had been dressed for tennis. Reuben himself was almost as upset as Lanny, but he said he would come over with Dominic and his limousine, in case Lanny needed it. Irv thanked Reuben, took a box of Kleenex off his secretary’s desk, returned to his office, and closed the door behind him.

Lanny was doing better. He shook his head. “God, Irving. Why now? If now, why not fifteen years ago?”

Irving had no idea what to say to this bewildering statement. He knew that often people said strange things under such circumstances. He offered, “Maybe he went off his rocker. The fellow from the hotel said he told room service his name was Lanny Morris. Even signed an autograph that way. Maybe he just went crazy.”

Lanny shook his head. “No. That’s not it, Irv.” Lanny took a cigarette from a circular holder on Irv’s desk and lit it. “He just hated being Vince Collins.”

THIRTY

I did almost nothing for the first week after Vince’s death.

I’d wanted to write a book that dealt with Maureen’s death, and Vince really hadn’t wanted me to, but he couldn’t resist the money. A million dollars was a great deal of cash to earn for simply talking about oneself, more than Vince could have gotten for making a couple of movies.

I didn’t think it had been wrong for me to want to write the book. Vince knew that for the sum he was being offered, a puff-piece biography wouldn’t suffice. From the outset, I had told him we would have to grapple with the question of the Girl in New Jersey.

Connie called as soon as the news of Vince’s death came over the radio. She was very Connie about it. She didn’t waste time on sentiment or “what might have been.” She wanted to know if the material I had already accumulated was enough to fill out a book. I said that anything can fill out a book; Rod McKuen had proved that. But if we went only with the interview material, it would have to have a ton of nice pictures and the story would end before Vince met Lanny. She groaned and said Bernard Besser and Jay Drelitch were poring over the contracts, trying to figure out what their obligation was. They were grateful, she said without a wisp of shame, that Vince had killed himself rather than, say, been run over by a truck. By voluntarily “absenting himself” from the deal, it was likely he’d defaulted on the monies that were to be paid him.

She then broached a different notion: What if the book becamemy book, about meeting Vince, investigating Vince? What of that breakthrough I’d mentioned when I’d called her from Miami? Would that be enough, combined with the interviews, to make a real book, something juicy? I said I’d have to review what I had and report back to her.

What I had, as Connie was in no way aware, were tidbits of information, my sordid Lanny story, one huge theory about where Maureen was murdered—about which Vince would now never comment—and my infatuation, partial seduction, initiation into the sapphic arts, victimization, and physical confrontation with and/or by Vince. If the book were to be about me, I suppose there might be enough there. But was that a book I would ever want to write?

It had been Vince’s complaint when he first met me. “You werein the interview a lot. All over the place, almost every sentence. They were as much about you as about them.” I had told him it was the current style, but then, so were bell-bottoms.

It was early afternoon and a large gray envelope was tucked between my door and the four-gallon container of Arrowhead spring water that was delivered to me every two weeks. It bore no postal marks.

I picked up the envelope and, while I was at it, also retrieved my mail. One letter stood out amid the humdrum. It had been sent special delivery from the post office in Anaheim, postmarked the last day I’d seen Vince. There was Scotch tape around its seams.

I needed a pair of scissors to open it. I cut the side rather than the top, and out spilled a dozen Polaroids of me and Jenn. On the back of the most erotic one (God, that Jennwas beautiful) was written in a ragged hand “I’m sorry. Vince.”

Before I had a chance to rethink my decision, I had turned on the gas beneath the ceramic logs in my little fireplace and set the photographs ablaze.

Then I sat on the couch with the larger package. Perhaps granting the opposition too much credit, but too curious to wait, I assumed the envelope would be clean of fingerprints and tore it open.

It was a sheaf of pages, clearly Xeroxes. There was an accompanying letter, from Lanny. But the letter had not been written to me.

John Hillman, Esquire

Weisner, Hillman and Dumont, P.C.

7760 Sunset Boulevard

16th Floor

Note:This letter and enclosed contents are a private communication from a client, Lanny Morris, to his attorney, John Hillman, Esquire. All rights to privacy in a communication between client and attorney are to be strictly observed. The enclosed document is only to be unsealed by John Hillman, Esq., or his legal representative (who is bound by the same laws of privileged and private communications between client and attorney) and only after the death of Lanny Morris.