Where the Truth Lies (56 page)

I stood. “Yes. Once no one else who’s innocent can be hurt any further. Can you understand my wanting it that way, having felt so much pain in your own life? When I was a girl, I was told, ‘The truth never hurt anyone.’ But I don’t think that’s the way it is, Mrs. O’Flaherty. I think a lot of the time the truth can hurt everyone.”

She opened the side gate for me and looked at me almost fearfully. “Did my daughter … did she do anything— I guess what I’m asking is, did she deserve what happened to her?”

I looked back at her with what I hoped was the reassuring conviction of a successful, sinful evangelist. “Your daughter was a wonderful, moral girl who did no one any harm, any harm in the world. You have my word on that, Mrs. O’Flaherty, and you can believe it. You can sleep well tonight in the knowledge that your daughter is with the angels.”

Her face had life in it for the first time since I had met her. “You swear that to me, Miss O’Connor?”

I placed my hands on her shoulders. “I swear that to you on my mother’s grave.” I didn’t think my mother would mind my saying this. She wasn’t dead yet.

The mother of Maureen Beatrice Margaret Cohan O’Flaherty searched every corner of my face. I let her do so like a Victorian virgin allowing her husband to touch every inch of her on their wedding night. I was confident she would find no lie anywhere. I had now learned not to care one flying fuck about the truth.

She drew back, satisfied, looking as close to contented as she was ever likely to be. “You’ve been very good to me. And my daughter. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mrs. O’Flaherty.”

I stepped away from her house and, reaching the sidewalk, turned as if to walk into town.

After two blocks, I made a right and found Lanny where I had left him, parked in the car that had been driven up to the steps of the Plaza for us after we’d had eggs Benedict as appetizer to a multiorgasmic Boff Royale. He had managed (he could manage anything, I suppose) to rent a 1960 Corvette, not the trendy new Stingray but the originalRoute 66 red convertible with cream-white top, those rakish side scoops with three vents for deep breathing, black interior, ballsy tube radio, 283 dual quad, and two hundred and seventy of the nicest horsepowers you’d ever want to know.

Lanny was half-dozing, a small straw hat covering his face. The car radio was playing classical music, something stormy and full of hot air—Richard Strauss was my guess. Strauss would have been insulted to hear his grand finale played at such a low volume. I got in the car.

Lanny straightened up and started the engine. “How did it go?” he asked.

“It went well, considering,” I said. I pushed a button on the radio, which slid the tuner’s upright pointer to an oldies station. We joined “Come Softly to Me” (and if ever there was an oxymoronic sexual command, surely it was that) by the Fleetwoods, already in progress. It was smooth and dreamy, as was our comfort with each other.

“Where to now?” he asked me.

“Anywhere.”

He thought. “South Carolina?”

“What’s in South Carolina?” I asked him.

“I have absolutely no idea.”

I nodded. “Sounds great to me,” and before the words were out of my mouth, he hadpow-pow-pow ed our car away from the sidewalk.

Now. Of the others. You will either half-forgive me or half-damn me when I tell you that, through Lanny’s intervention and my own, Reuben was not killed by Sally Santoro. Yes, he was taken by truck to the landfill, and he was forced to experience the deaths of his victims in ways even an unfeeling man could feel, but he was not killed. Reuben now lives (and he has no choice about this) back home. The Philippines have seven thousand islands and Reuben is on one of them, not even remotely close to Manila or his family. Our last report was that he is working as the lead buff-and-shine man at a carwash outside of Calbayog. We can only hope this is true.

A Lanny’s Club for the treatment of young burn victims now exists in New Rochelle. Not that this in any way compensates, but it bears the name “The Maureen Cohan O’Flaherty Wing” of New Rochelle Central Hospital. Maureen’s mother lived to be at its dedication and worked there as a volunteer six days out of seven virtually every week.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that the very secrets that led Vince Collins to commit suicide would, in our slightly more enlightened times, now be completely irrelevant. The duo might even have been able to incorporate Vince’s bisexuality into the text of their humor. It would be as if Lanny had killed himself simply because someone found out that he was Jewish. Though no consolation to our tortured friend, Vince’s recordings are as popular as ever on CD, and his voice is heard as source music in many a period motion picture. The movies of Collins and Morris have been rediscovered by a lucky generation that is getting to see them fresh, for the first time.

In addition to Mrs. O’Flaherty, Lanny was the other person I didn’t want to be harmed by the truth, and thus my second reason for not wanting this story to be told until after someone’s death. It wasn’t that he had done anything in this accounting that he would have disclaimed or been ashamed of. It was simply that he had many more years left in him of amusing and diverting people, even after his work in film, as both an actor and director, became somewhat more serious. I didn’t want the sordid aspects of this story to in any way confuse or cloud anyone’s perception of his work, which continued productively for many years.

It’s vital to our survival that there be people capable of amusing us and diverting us from the truth now and then. Lanny continued to have that ability virtually until the day of his death, an event that saddened the world almost as much as it devastated me.

Work being the best antidote to sorrow—as Sherlock Holmes once advised his Watson—I quickly set about organizing all that I’ve shared with you here.

It was, of course, particularly easy for me to access the chapters from Lanny’s intentionally incomplete autobiography, as the court had appointed me the sole and undisputed administrator of his estate, as is generally the case for an author’s widow.

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright Š 2003 by Rupert Holmes

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

RANDOMHOUSEand colophon are registered

trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holmes, Rupert.

Where the truth lies / Rupert Holmes.

p. cm.

e-ISBN 1-58836-328-7

1. Women journalists—Fiction. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.

3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Entertainers—Fiction.

5. Comedians—Fiction. 6. Singers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.O367 W48 2003

813’.54—dc21 2002037054

Random House website address:www.atrandom.com

v1.0

For Liza

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates;

but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.

CHARLESLAMB

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As a twenty-six-year-old woman, I had an undepleted girlish energy that allowed me the capability of living a life and writing about it at the same time. Astounding. Thus a majority of what follows was scrawled by this scrivener as it occurred in the 1970s, often within hours of the events described, the alphabetic characters and my own character being formed in the same moment and the same manner: recklessly, hastily, often indecipherably. However, I eventually came to realize that I could not publish any of what I’d written until at least one person who figures in this narrative had died.(It’s nice to have something to look forward to, don’t you think?) It was not, in fact, until this year that these pages could be printed, along with certain other writings that bear closely upon a story I’ve wished to tell for so very long.

I must admit I’m somewhat alarmed by the naĎveté I display in some of these pages, as well as the chauvinism of not only others but myself. Things were simply very different then.

I will also confess outright that I have occasionally touched up what I wrote (though perhaps you will think I have not touched up enough). Having admitted this, let me rush to add that most of what follows is actually worded as I first inscribed it, with only some proper names and present tenses changed. My Prose Nouveau (being of a vintage frequently purple, with a tart finish) remains largely as it was, to my immense mortification and, hopefully, your mild amusement.

The writings of Lanny Morris and related material derived from my conversations with Vince Collins are reproduced here by express agreement and may not be used without written permission.

K. O’Connor

Kiawah Island, S.C.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Author’s Note

About the Author

Copyright

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

A NOVEL

RUPERT HOLMES

RANDOM HOUSE

NEW YORK

About this Title

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