Where the Truth Lies (54 page)

“Reuben,” I said gently, “you were very consoling, very thoughtful to me when we met at the Safeway back in Los Angeles. Let me help you around your squeamishness by saying it for you. You quite logically think to yourself,‘Once they have the tape, what if they don’t give it back, or turn it over to the police, or to a radio station that plays it and it goes into the public domain?’ Then this thing that you’ve saved for nearly fifteen years—for a rainy day, as it were—would be worthless to you. Understand, I can’t speak for Neuman and Newberry yet, but how would something like this sound to you: we set a price for the tape. You get half up front, whereupon you give it to us. We listen to it, with you present. If it’s as represented, you receive the second half then and there.”

He nodded gratefully. I could have sworn there were almost tears of relief in his amber eyes. I asked him if he had any kind of ballpark figure in mind. He leaned forward modestly and asked, “Would you think … would you think a million dollars would be too much?”

I coughed a little. “Reuben, Reuben, listen. Vince was being paid a million dollars for his entire life. You’re asking the same for an hour of it?”

Reuben nodded slowly. “The most interesting hour of his life. I’ve heard the tape. I assure you, this is explosive material.”

I sputtered, “Well, I can try, I mean, I guess I can see … I mean, they’re only going to have to pay Vince’s estate the initial advance to use the material wedid record, so maybe if you were to lower your price— Hey. Wait a second. There might be a way … Reuben, you have this tape, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I have a transcript. At least I think I do,” I said, moving to my portfolio with considerable excitement. I produced Lanny’s third chapter and showed it to him. “You put allyour cards on the table, I can return the favor. Look, your boss left this for me outside my apartment. It’s his version of what happened that night. It would be amazing to put this side by side with a transcription of your tape. You understand, Reuben? On their own, these pages are absolutely useless to me. I could have typed them myself, I can’t quote from them …but if they closely match what’s recorded on your tape, it would make them very credible. That makes your tape even more valuable. And guess what? If the tape were to differ greatly, then that would tell us that Lanny is trying to shift the blame onto Vince. Either way, I think suddenly your tapecould be worth a million dollars.” He beamed. I added, “That makestwo amazing things that have transpired between us today!”

“What’s the other?” he asked, excited.

“You called me!” I said, elated.

He laughed back. “Yes? And?”

I looked at him. “You called me.That’s the amazing thing. You called me from a pay phone to tell me you were across the street.”

He looked mildly puzzled. “Yes?”

“But since you and Lanny left me high and dry that morning at the Plaza, Lanny has said that every time he tried to call me, this phone was disconnected. Of course, I knew it hadn’t been, so I just figured he was a liar.”

Reuben nodded. “I’ve told you about him.”

“Yes, you have. But today, when I was at the hotel, I had him call Bonnie Trout. He got out a number written on a list you update for him now and then, and dialed it, and you know what? Itwas disconnected. Because it was the wrong number.”

Reuben shrugged. “Then I wrote it down incorrectly. I’m very sorry.”

I reached into my portfolio. “But he says you’ve given him the phone number several times on other pieces of paper. He told me you’re his human Rolodex. Sometimes, if he doesn’t have his list with him, you write the number out for him on a small piece of paper. He found this one in his wallet for me today.” I showed him a folded yellow square of paper with a number in his handwriting. “Again, the wrong number.”

Reuben said, “I guess I got the number wrong when I first took it down. Very bad of me.”

I shook my head. “But you called me this afternoon and you got the number right.”

Reuben smiled. “I’m afraid I foolishly didn’t have any of my phone lists with me. I had to call Information.”

“The number is unlisted, Reuben. You’d know that if you’d ever bothered to check the number, as Lanny did when he found that it was disconnected. Lanny was going to have his security people try to figure out what was wrong with Bonnie’s phone, but before he got around to it, he found out I’d lied to him about my identity, and he didn’t plan to speak to me ever again.”

Reuben sat placidly.

I said, “You had the right number. You gave him the wrong number repeatedly. You never checked with Information to see if you had gotten the number wrong because youwanted the number to be wrong. The one you gave Lanny was identical to Bonnie’s, except you flipped the fifth and sixth digits; that’s why Lanny didn’t notice the difference when he got hold of Bonnie Trout’s phone records. He was only interested inwho she had called, and when he found out it was me, he wasn’t interested in calling her or me ever again. You must have dialed variations on the correct number until you found one that was nearly the same but out of service. Now, why would you have done that?”

He looked at me kindly. “Perhaps, Miss O’Connor, I just was trying to spare you some hurt and rejection. I told you how he deals with women.”

“I know, and oh, how I agreed with you about how loathsome he is. But why do I have this opinion? First, because of how he depicted his behavior fifteen years ago in his mock memoirs, which I believe was for calculated effect; second, because he never called me after checking out of the Plaza, which is hardly despicable if you kept giving him a disconnected number; third, because he left me no note. Of course, Lanny said he did leave me a note explaining why he’d left and where I could reach him, either by the bed or in the living room. But in the exhausted, blissfully unconscious state I was in, it would have been the simplest thing in the world for you to take Lanny’s note and pocket it while you were packing or doing a last-minute check of all the rooms before you and he left.”

Reuben shook his head. “But why would I do that?”

I smiled. “Why would you give him the wrong number so he couldn’t contact me? Because you were afraid of what he’d do to me? Or because you were afraid of what I might do to him … and you?”

Reuben got up in dismay. He walked as big a circle as a circumnavigation of the room would allow. “Oh, for goodness sake. Is this what being a journalist does to people? Makes them see conspiracies in simple mistakes or honest concern? Why would I have been afraid of a public-school teacher by the name of Trout?”

“You weren’t. You were afraid of a snoopy journalist by the name of O’Connor.”

He stopped dead. “Nowyou’re being a foolish girl. I only learned your true name and profession just now, when I read that letter written by your publisher about you.”

I got up and walked to the kitchen for a glass of brown water that I didn’t want. I needed him to be on that side of the room, where there were overhead fluorescents, which I now switched on.

“No, you learned that at the Plaza when you read that letter written by my publisher about me. It was in my pocketbook there, it’s always in my pocketbook, and when I woke up, my clothes and pocketbook had been lined up on the dresser for my departure, the way they line up your luggage outside the boardinghouse door when you’re evicted. That’s when you went through my bag. That’s how you learned I was the one who was going to write about the one thing you didn’t want anyone writing about: Collins and Morris. And since the letter was addressed by Connie Wechsler to me at my home address, you then knew where I lived. Which is how you were able to follow me that day to the Safeway supermarket.”

Reuben laughed richly as I drew myself a nice thick glass of water. “No,you followedme !”

I raised my eyebrows at him and took a much-needed sip from my glass.

“Now, that was a very odd response, Reuben. The correct reply would have been ‘We met by accident!’ or ‘That was sheer coincidence!’ But not ‘No,you followedme !’”

For the first time, he let the dark brew of his anger show. As he joined me in the kitchen area, his golden face was turning to dull copper, tarnished.

I said, “Sure, you let me think I’d spotted you. Who knows how long you followed me around the store, giving me the chance to believe I was Nancy Drew. How you must have been laughing at me! You let yourself discover me at the checkout when I’d made it humanly impossible for you to credibly ignore me any longer. But if I hadn’t spotted you, I’m sure you would have bumped into my cart in the parking lot. And once I’d ‘found’ you, you conveyed to me your profound mortification at the treatment Lanny had given me, andall women … and I bought the big depiction of heartless Lanny, when all I really had to base it on was your word and a rejection you engineered. You made me abandon any thought of trying to contact Lanny again or of telling him who I was, you made me feel I was less than nothing to him, because you were playing your own complex game with both men, and the more I was in the picture, the more I might open up lines of communication between the two of them, talking to Vince during the day and Lanny during the night. You needed me controlled and contained.”

Reuben started idly opening and closing a drawer, casting a curious eye into it. If he wanted to attack me with Beejay’s boxes of Saran Wrap and aluminum foil, I’d accept that challenge. He asked slowly, “What was this complex game I was playing?”

I thought that it would be a wise idea to make a little noise, so I reached for a skillet and placed it on one of the electric burners atop Beejay’s combination demi-fridge and electric stove. I turned on the burner to “high.”

“You don’t mind if I cook dinner while we talk, do you?” I asked. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

I opened a drawer and took out some oven mitts. There was a half-full bottle of Wesson oil, which Beejay had told me she had used to facilitate a variety of enterprises (the least interesting of them being frying), and I poured the remainder of the bottle into the skillet.

I turned to face Reuben. “Oh, right, you asked me what the complicated game was.” The pan quickly began to crackle amid the subtle hum of undisturbed oil reaching a boil. “You were blackmailing Vince Collins with the tape you’re now offering to Neuman and Newberry. You wanted a million dollars. That’s why Vince needed the money.”

I opened the fridge below the electric burner and rummaged around the shelves for something to fry, rejecting three Spanish olives in a jar full of brine and a souring half-full container of Light n’ Lively plum yogurt.

“It would be interesting to know which Vince feared more: his sexual secret on the tape being made public, or the fact that this would have given him a motive to murder Maureen. Or the secret thatyou carried around in your head, Reuben: that both of the boys had theopportunity as well as the motive to kill her. And that Vince couldn’t remember what he did that night. So many different secrets. With so many diverse ways to blackmail Vince, it’s a wonder he didn’t try to kill you.”

Reuben, still trying to stay within striking distance of his public persona, and very much within striking distance of me, said, “Mr. Collins was a tragic man.” He casually opened the next drawer. It held silverware, plastic knives and spoons, some short birthday-cake candles, and a few long ones in case of a blackout.

I found a box of frozen peas in the tiny freezer area of the fridge and straightened up. “Yes, he punished himself more than anyone. He tried to kill me once and couldn’t do it. Did you suggest to him that he try blackmailing me into writing a puff piece?”

Reuben simply stared sullenly.

“That would have been perfect for you. He would have had the money, but the book would have been harmless, leaving you and your tape to still be the only threat. The odd thing, Reuben, is that I was both your greatest ally and enemy. My book was supplying the million that Vince would pass on to you, but if it unearthed the truth about Maureen O’Flaherty, you’d have lost your hold over him. And then, when I told him I wasn’t going to knuckle under, that he’d either talk to me about that night or go home without his million—in which case you’d squeeze your million out of what money he already had, which wasn’t much more than that—he could only see one certain way out of his nightmare.”

I dumped the frozen peas into the fat, and the green ice pellets sizzled madly, emitting a huge cloud of blue steam. “Of course, once Vince died, you were really screwed, weren’t you? You had a very tough choice to make. You weren’t prepared to quit your ‘day job’ as valet to Lanny Morris. That was your safety net between the poverty you’d known and the luxuries you enjoyed, being in Lanny’s company. You’d never overtly blackmailed Lanny about covering up Vince’s crime. You’d let the rewards come voluntarily from him. First-class travel, staying in the same accommodations, dining at the same restaurants. As long as you showed loyalty, it was hard to know who had the better life: lord or master. If you tried to blackmail Lanny, that could all end, and yet the tape wasn’t as damning to him as it had been to Vince.

“And then you realized there was one other player who might cough up the same kind of money you were trying to squeeze out of poor Vince Collins. Myself, funded by Neuman and Newberry. How foolish you’d been to try to get the money from Vince when it was N&N’s money you were after all along. When you heard me say today, as I meant you to hear, that my publisher would pay anything for something like your tape—oh, Lordy, what music that must have been to your ears.”

The french-fried peas had settled down into a slow, spattering sizzle. My hand was very near the pan’s handle, just in case.

Reuben said, “So you knew I had this tape when you were at the Plaza this morning?”

“I thought Maureen’s confident statement that she could make a private incident—one that both Vince and Lanny would certainly deny—’stick’ meant that she must have had some form of proof. The fact that she took her tote bag into Lanny’s room when she had no need for it there made me wonder what might be in it. And her threat that the world wouldhear the dulcet tones of Vince Collins crooning his swan song sounded suspiciously like she was referring to a recording. But all these ideas coalesced in my mind when I made the most fascinating discovery of them all.”