Where the Truth Lies (20 page)

I felt like my high school boyfriend’s erection after I’d innocently asked him, “Is that as big as it’s going to get?” Like “it,” I now began to shrink perceptibly with each pulse of my heart; but luckily my bluff had deflated Greg first.

“There’s no need to put it in writing,” he mumbled, closing his binder sulkily. “I’m sure your word is good enough for all of us.”

The three men left us, as if they were heading for brandy and cigars in the billiard room and we three women were now free to discuss childbirth and the crocheting of antimacassars.

After an appropriate silence, giving the men time to get down the hall, Lil asked Connie in a modulated tone, “Who the hell is he?”

Connie shrugged and looked at me. “I was secretlykvelling when you asked him straight out. No one else ever has.” She looked wistful. “But we still don’t know.”

She offered Lil an assisting arm to help her to her feet. As Lil fumbled a bit with her cane, she advised me, “Look, forgetting—what’s his name, Gavin?—forgetting that he’s clearly an idiot, there is something I feel I should pass along to you. There are unique concerns with a book where a large sum of money is being paid in the hope that a large number of copies will be sold. You must try to come up with something that the newspapers will consider a story all on its own. Not for the gossip columns or book-review section or arts supplement. Something they could run on the front page, as news. Quoting the book. Quoting you. No price can be put on that kind of publicity.”

She leaned on the cane for support and put her right hand on my arm. “Where you put yourself in all this requires careful judgement. I’m assuming Connie here will help you with that. You can’t underestimate your readers’ interest in Mr. Collins, nor overestimate their interest in you. On the other hand, you’re standing in for the reader, who is in the company of this famous person courtesy of you. So although it goes against all my principles of what reportage should be, I tell you that, in this instance, it will be acceptable, even desirable, to let your presence be felt in a very small way—to let yourself be tasted, if only so much as a dash of nutmeg floating on a punch bowl of well-spiked eggnog.” She looked at Connie. “I think in this case, it would be all right.” Connie nodded and Lil looked back at me, issuing final dispensation. “It’s all right to make yourself a part of the story.”

I smiled thankfully, and I really did respect her, but the truth is, I wasn’t paying much attention. For the last five minutes, I had been far more concerned with whether I should have the taxi go uptown on Sixth or on Madison to get me to the Plaza hotel, where I had a date with Vince Collins’s ex-partner, Lanny Morris, who was apparently going to have me for the whole day.

THIRTEEN

I walked up the Plaza’s main steps, at 750 Fifth Avenue. (Yes, it has a street number like any other building.) Above me the flags of whatever foreign dignitaries were staying in the hotel that day hung motionless in the heat between banners for Old Glory (Betsy Ross, 1775) and Old Money (the Plaza hotel, 1909).

I never thought of the area just inside its Fifth Avenue entrance as a lobby. It wasn’t as if you could sit there and read a newspaper. It was simply the largest and most elegantly carpeted vestibule in midtown. Directly up one flight to my right were hair salons and a barbershop. I’d once been treated to a pedicure there as a gift from a rock singer whom I’d interviewed. Later he asked to see the results, and it wasn’t until I felt his tongue eeling its way between my toes that I realized he expected a gift in return.

On my left was the former entrance to El Morocco, recently closed while the management debated whether to make the nightclub into a discotheque or lease it out as a clothing store. Below me, I knew from past experience, were the mysterious yet graceful cloisters of an underground ballroom, floored in rosy marble and framed by creamy arches, as if it were a petite cathedral for society’s divine.

I crossed the threshold into the Palm Court, which I considered to be the Plaza’s true lobby, then passed the cloakroom for the Edwardian Room, now rechristened the Green Tulip. The management was hoping to somehow blur the line between nouveau design and nouvelle cuisine with a kind of hippie herbal attitude thrown in for good measure, as if when Oscar Wilde had walked about London with a lily in his hand, he had intended to smoke it. The overall effect was that of Bob Hope growing long sideburns to become relevant to the youth movement.

I reached the Plaza’s small reception area and a bank of manned elevators, one of whose exquisite cages opened to take on passengers. I stepped in.

“Twenty-three, please,” I murmured.

“Who do you want?” asked a mutty-looking attendant none too politely.

“Merwin.”

“Hold on.” Mutt the attendant took a step out of the elevator and signaled to a man in a blue suit standing near the checkin desk. “Bob? She wants to see Merwin.”

Bob stepped over. He could have been the long-term president of any junior chamber of commerce in the Midwest. He gave me the twice-over through steel-rimmed glasses and nodded to Mutt. “She’s okay.” The question in my mind was whether my being “okay” meant that Lanny had described me to the front desk and I fit the description, or whether it simply meant that Bob knew Lanny’s taste in women and I met those standards. Or maybe he just wanted to make certain I wasn’t too overt a hooker, meaning that I was white, properly attired, and could pass for a schoolteacher as I circulated about the hotel. On the schoolteacher part of the disguise, I had apparently been doing quite well since yesterday.

The twenty-third floor was swiftly reached. Mutt terminated the car’s ascent with a lackadaisical double-clutching of his hand throttle, and I felt that sick-making feeling as my stomach slightly overshot the elevator for a full second, then slid back down within me. It was a nauseating sensation achievable only by the ineptitude of human hands, one I’d not felt since automation had replaced elevator operators. Mutt pointed to the end of the corridor.

“End of the hall, the three doors after the uh—”

“Alcove?”

“Yeah. Center door is the living room. Tell him Mickey says, ‘Hi.’”

I walked down the hallway, waiting to hear the elevator cage close behind me, but it stayed open. I didn’t mean to flatter myself, but Mickey was no doubt checking out his rear view of me. I walked in as close to a military gait as I could muster in order to display minimal buttock-toggling for his viewing pleasure.

The hallway was not decorated all that beautifully, considering the hotel’s reputation. A major hotel chain had acquired the dowager Plaza and was more than pleased to call it their flagship, but beyond changing their corporate stationery to denote this, they didn’t want to do too much else about it. They’d splashed a coat of white paint everywhere, but it was that sloppy, thick slapping-on of paint that leaves the window jambs sealed and closets difficult to open.

The main door to Lanny’s suite had a doorbell to the right. I reached out to it, then hesitated, realizing I should collect my thoughts.

My name is Bonnie Trout. I am an elementary-school teacher, although we’re going to try not to talk about that anymore. A new school year will begin shortly. I’ve just come from a job interview at … well, if I had to name somewhere, Neuman and Newberry would do. Even if Lanny checked, he’d be asking about a girl named Bonnie Trout, wouldn’t he? My meeting could have been with any one of a hundred people there.

I also had to remember that I had not read what I’d read in Hillman’s offices. That I had no special insights into Lanny’s personality, that all I knew of him was what I’d encountered on the plane and at Beejay’s—my—apartment. That Vince Collins was a total stranger to me. That I wasn’t even a particularly big fan of the duo. And I knew nothing about the Girl in New Jersey, not who she was, nor what her connection was to the two men, nor anything at all that was mentioned in the second chapter that Lanny had sent to me.

Butwhy had he sent it to me?

Then again, he hadn’t sent it to me. He’d sent it to a journalist named O’Connor who lives in Los Angeles. He’d had no idea that I was—

Did he know who I was?

I had made a convincing case for why it was not all that odd for a celebrity and a civilian, both flying first-class to New York, to end up sitting next to each other.

But would it be that hard for someone like Lanny Morris to hire some bright young fellow with a master’s degree in criminology and personal security to find out which flight I’d booked and to purchase the three seats next to mine? Was a flirtatious Lanny really interested in the seemingly susceptible Bonnie Trout, or was he more—

The door opened. I hadn’t rung the bell.

Reuben was standing there with a wastebasket in his hand. His golden skin seemed even more saturated in hue against the white houseboy jacket he was wearing, apparently oblivious to its “Hey boy, chop-chop” connotations. I couldn’t imagine Lanny forcing him to wear it. It must have been what Reuben felt most comfortable or appropriate in. It did have a stylish look to it, the line between a busboy’s outfit and a Nehru jacket at that time being thinner than Gandhi.

Reuben seemed as flustered as his Sea of Tranquillity face would allow. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you ring,” he said, instantly setting down the offending wastebasket. “Won’t you come in, please?” He really had the warmest voice. He gestured for me to enter, looking guilty that he’d been derelict in his duties.

“I didn’t ring,” I reassured him. “I was just composing my thoughts, as Mozart was wont to say.” My cajolery registered nil on him, as my cajoleries often register on people from Earth. “After all, it isn’t every afternoon you meetthe Lanny Morris.” The regret I felt at this schoolgirl simpering was in the next moment replaced with a much greater regret as I realized that this comment could be overheard bythe Lanny Morris, who was seated on a couch to my extreme right and engaged in an energetic phone conversation with someone.

“Okay, but if I do it, you got to have a Lanny’s Club Day next season,” he negotiated, giving me a lovely wave. “For all my club members.” Lanny’s Club was the dread tag phrase for preteen burn victims, who had become Lanny’s new charity since polio had been regrettably stopped in its tracks. The phrase “Lanny’s Club” still brings horror to my heart. Believe me, the last thing in life you ever wanted was to be a new inductee into Lanny’s Club, unless debriding dead skin from your own body is your idea of a hobby. “And I don’t mean you put my club members in the grandstand, either … field box. Yeah, you heard me. In the shade, under the press-level overhang. Okay, deal. I’ll be at the players’ entrance at three.” He hung up the phone and appraised me. “Hope you like baseball. The Mets need somebody famous to sing the National Anthem this afternoon. Vikki Carr was going to do it, but she didn’t make her connection in Denver.”

“So you’re singing it?”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal. I do this for them, they come up with eighty seats the next time they play an expansion team. You like Chinese?”

“There’s a Chinese expansion team?”

“Food. Or did you have lunch already?”

I said I hadn’t. He turned to Reuben. “Look, we’ll never get down to Chinatown on four wheels fast enough—we’ll take the subway. Call Dav-El limos, we’ll meet that Mike Whatever-His-Name-Is down there.” Lanny turned quickly to me and asked, “You were okay with him, right?” as if such issues were subject to my approval.

As he was saying all this, he did something that was new to my range of experience. He put on a disguise, as if this were no different from putting on a blazer and a tie. He reached into a hatbox near the couch and adjusted a blond wig that gave him a coif not unlike that of the late Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. To this he added a pair of granny glasses with smoked lenses. He took off his shirt in front of me (he had a much nicer physique and quite a bit less chest hair than I had imagined) and donned a silk one that bore a hand-painted western landscape, over which he wore a light-navy sports jacket with gold piping. A beaded choker around his neck completed what was, in that era, quite a smart outfit and which, in any other era, would have caused him to be laughed out of town.

We took the service elevator down to the Plaza’s kitchens, then up a flight of stairs that Lanny knew about and out a service entrance onto Fifty-eighth Street. Soon I was doing the best I could to keep up with Lanny, who kept his head bowed but chivalrously took my arm as we plunged down the steps of the Lexington Avenue line. Amazingly, Lanny had a platinum subway-token dispenser in his pocket (probably worth three or four hundred times the price of the five tokens it contained). He put a token into a turnstile and, ever the gentleman, gestured for me to pass through first. As I did, a Number 4 train rasped into and against the platform; its doors opened with the snorting sound of a Brahman bull.

There were no two seats alongside each other free, so we stood holding on to a pole by the doors, my hand and Lanny’s hand and the hand of a man who didn’t know us stacked as if we were all swearing to some solemn pact. Lanny obviously didn’t want to speak for fear of betraying his identity, so I occupied myself by reading the banner ads along the top of the car. Channel 11 was now showing reruns ofPerry Mason every weeknight at eleven. Women were being warned in Spanish not to do some particular thing if they were pregnant. It was apparently assumed that women who spoke English already knew not to do this. Anbesol was recommended to relieve the pain of those jagged red lightning bolts that so often float in the air outside your jaw whenever you look pained. Alongside that, it was fervently suggested that we not move between the cars while the train was in motion and that we not spit on the train or platform. I had, of course, just been about to spit in front of the mop-topped Lanny Morris, but somehow managed to squelch the impulse.

By now the Canal Street station had rolled into place outside our subway car. We got off the train and headed up the stairs.

These were the days before Chinatown became overrun with Asians. To be sure, there were lots of quaint Chinese men and women neatly tucked away behind glass-topped counters by the cash registers of Chinese restaurants, fronted by a bowl of after-dinner mints and a juice glass full of loose toothpicks, or in little Chinese shops selling funny things like Chinese daily newspapers or Chinese girlie magazines with pretty, flat-bottomed girls in pastel-colored bikinis on the cover.