Where the Truth Lies (53 page)

It had been raining on and off, with thunder grumbling intermittently. The sun was nowhere to be seen. Reuben’s golden face lit Beejay’s dark New York apartment, where, on the brightest of days, sunlight could come streaming in the window if you simply moved to a different apartment across the hall. I apologized for the dinginess, advised him to duck his head, and we sat ourselves in the space beneath Beejay’s bed. He eyed her beanbag chair warily and opted for the small, straight seat.

“This is wonderful that you were able to come by,” I said after he’d passed on my offer of Beejay’s tap water, which was so brown I could have palmed it off as iced tea. “Where does our Mr. Morris think you are?”

He told me Mr. Morris had a meeting at CBS. They were interested in a sitcom that would star him as the widowed veterinarian father to a headstrong daughter and two monkeys who had become like members of the family. They would be in negotiations until dinnertime. Lanny had instructed Reuben to “mind the store” (I pictured Reuben selling fresh produce out of his Plaza hotel room) until three, after which he had the rest of the day off. Reuben had taken a subway from Lexington and Fifty-ninth and arrived at Thirty-third Street only a few minutes later.

He asked me how my meeting with Mr. Morris had gone. I told him I’d uncovered a few things. He kept calling me Miss Trout, and I thought it was time to set him straight. He said he’d been confused because the last time we had talked, I was looking for a new job in Los Angeles, but it seemed like I had found work here in New York. He had been particularly thrown to hear me speak about my publisher being willing to pay anything to complete my book about Vince. He had known me to be a schoolteacher, and yet now I was working on something related to the late Mr. Collins … ?

I told him I had a confession to make and that I hoped he would still be willing to talk to me once I had told him the truth. I then related, as honestly as I could and without trying to make excuses for myself, a thumbnail history of my professional involvement with his employer and Vince Collins. (There was, of course, no need to tell him of mypersonal involvement, because he had packed Lanny’s bags around my unconscious body as I’d lain in Lanny’s bed at the Plaza.) To confirm that I was not some groupie who had delusions of being a writer someday, I showed him the permanent residents of my pocketbook: the letter addressed to me from Connie Wechsler on N&N stationery confirming that I’d been commissioned to write about Lanny and Vince, and my plastic sleeve of past articles and interviews. The one part of my story that sounded slightly suspect, even to me, was that my being seated near Lanny (and directly next to old Reuben himself) was pure coincidence. I pointed out that if you had been flying first-class to New York that particular day on American Airlines, the chances were not one in a million but one in four (American had four nonstops to JFK) that you’d be seated somewhere near Lanny. But Reuben seemed to accept my word at face value.

When I was done, and he had with some initial hesitancy started calling me Miss O’Connor, a mildly stricken look overtook his face. He took a deep breath and then said he had a confession of his own to make, one far more serious than the one I’d made to him. He asked me if it was true that things he said to me “off the record” could not be repeated by me. I had sometimes danced around this concept, but I felt I owed Reuben an honest answer. I told him that every journalist was their own police force as far as confidentiality was concerned, but that courts had ruled differently at different times on how much that confidentiality was protected by the First Amendment. I said that if there was anything he didn’t want anyone else to know, the only way to absolutely guarantee that was to tell no one, including myself. I added truthfully that in my experience, when more than one person knew the same secret, eventually many others would.

He hesitated and then said he instinctively felt he could trust his confession with me, and that he had always tried to go with his instincts in his life, as they had rarely failed him, whereas sound logic sometimes had. Then he made a statement that would have shocked anyone who knew this reliable and gentle man. “I have consulted with two different criminal attorneys, whom I hired on my own, and without giving them any details that would implicate any other parties, they have advised me that my own actions are now legally past the statute of limitations for prosecution.”

Although I already knew from reading Lanny’s letter to John Hillman that Reuben was aware of Maureen O’Flaherty’s murder that night, it was still eerie to hear him own up to that. I’m sure for him it was very strange to be letting light fall upon this secret that he, Lanny, and Vince had hidden away all these years. I thought it wise not to turn up the lights in Beejay’s shadowy apartment, as there are some things that can only be spoken of in low tones and in the dark.

Most of what he told me was identical to Lanny’s account. He’d been called by the hotel operator in his room at about ten after eight in the morning because Lanny hadn’t answered his eightA .M. wake-up call. He had a key to Lanny’s room, but there was a chain across the door. He banged on the door and called to Lanny, who took more than a few moments to get to the door and unchain it. While Reuben started to collect things from his employer’s bathroom that Lanny might need at the telethon, Lanny called to him from the living room. He rushed in and saw Lanny trying to revive Maureen, although Reuben knew enough from his war experiences in the Philippines to assume she was already dead. Wondering if someone had broken into the suite, he looked and saw that the door to the living room was chained. He raced to Vince’s room and found Vince, seemingly as dead as Maureen, passed out on the floor. The door there was chained as well.

He called for Lanny, who came in, and the two of them revived Vince. Lanny insisted that the last time he’d seen Maureen she’d been going to sleep in the living room and Vince was looking at her from the doorway of his own room. Vince himself couldn’t recall anything that had happened beyond that moment. He became hysterical, and Reuben and Lanny had to literally slap him silent. They made Vince lie down, and then the two more levelheaded men decided that they had to get Maureen’s body out of the suite and far away from the hotel. If either of the two performers were suspected of murder, that would be the end of the world for Reuben as well. “If one cannot be a rich man, Miss O’Connor, then the next best thing is to be a domestic servant for a rich man. You eat much the same food, you often drink the same wine, you stay in smaller rooms in the most luxurious hotels, you travel in limousines… . My life in the Philippines … you here in the United States cannot imagine what some levels of poverty are like. I could never go back to that. I would sooner die. But my only skill, my trade, is to do”—Reuben held his hands out—“what I do. I would have helped Mr. Morris and Mr. Collins out of loyalty alone. But I had a second motive that made it even more urgent for me to assist them: my own security and comfort.”

I interrupted Reuben and asked him if they had thought of turning to Sally Santoro, who owned the Versailles, for help.

He shook his head gravely. “To ask for that kind of assistance from a man like Mr. Santoro, that would have been like the leader of an African tribe going to the Deep South before the Civil War and asking a plantation owner if he would employ him.” He almost laughed at the image. “As it was, Mr. Morris and Mr. Collins always tried to be ahead of Mr. Santoro when it came to favors. That’s why they were willing to fly up to New Jersey without taking time to rest after the telethon. What had seemed like a burden now seemed like an opportunity from heaven for both of them to establish an alibi.”

It had been Reuben who had thought of using the metal locker of lobsters, crabs, and ice as a hideous coffin for Maureen’s body. It was always to have been under his supervision when he moved Vince and Lanny’s things from the Versailles to the Casino del Mar Hotel. It seemed incredibly providential. Reuben’s wartime experience with battlefield corpses when he was a medic for the Philippine Scouts made him well aware how extreme heat or cold could confuse any efforts to establish a time of death, at least by the standards of the late fifties, and much to the advantage of the men’s alibi. They hid Maureen’s body under the covers of the pullout bed (which was easy to do, since it wasn’t as if she was moving around) and had two bellmen bring the metal locker back up from the meat freezer, purportedly for Lanny and Vince to show to some friends. Vince being completely useless at this point, the grisly task of loading Maureen into the metal locker had fallen to Reuben and Lanny, who said that he could never eat lobster or crab again. Vince raced off to the TV studio, eager to put the suite and the Versailles and the memories he couldn’t remember behind him. Lanny and Reuben resealed the locker and had it taken away to be flown up, along with Sally Santoro’s other boxed gifts, to New Jersey, under the watchful eye of Reuben.

All went well up to a certain point. Reuben saw that all the men’s luggage and crates were taken up to their Casino del Mar suite. They had discussed what they would do with the body once it was in New Jersey. The main thing for them was that it be foundthere rather than at the Versailles, where the boys were. It had been Reuben’s hope to get Maureen’s body into one of the wooden crates once they’d been emptied, and to get his brother-in-law, who lived in Park Slope and had a pickup truck that he used for his lawn-maintenance company, to help him move the crate out of the area. However, the hotel manager, one of Sally Santoro’s lieutenants and eager to be of help, said that he would have some men bring the lobsters and stone crabs down to the Blue Grotto, where they could be stored in water tanks reserved just for Lanny and Vince. Reuben had only a few minutes alone in which to move Maureen and the ice into the bathroom. He then watched as the metal locker, now containing only a little ice but still bearing its fruits of the sea, was carried out of the suite. Reuben, who’d been unable to reach his brother-in-law by phone (it turned out Reuben’s sister had gone into labor with a third child), found himself in the vulnerable situation of potentially being in an empty hotel room with an unexplained corpse, so he made a great show of leaving with the men, turned the keys to the suite over to the desk clerk, and rushed to Park Slope, trying to locate his brother-in-law and waiting for the shoe to drop once Vince and Lanny appeared. Since he figured the time of death would be moved to within hours of Vince and Lanny’s arrival, he knew that he would be free from suspicion as long as he was seen nowhere near the hotel but rather at the hospital in Brooklyn, where he made sure his alibi was established as solidly as that of Collins and Morris.

With some shame, he told me that since he had merely helped to conceal a murder (he would not legally qualify as an accomplice, since the deed was done before his involvement), the statute of limitations on the potential charges he might have faced for his crime had long ago passed.

“Well, obviously,” I said at last, in the murk of apartment 4D, “this is stunning information, Reuben, and I understand your reticence in relating it. So tell me: whyare you telling me?”

As an answer, he leaned forward (as if there could be anyone other than the two of us in this cramped studio apartment who might hear him) and asked me how my meeting with Lanny had gone.

I told him, with complete honesty but in strict confidence, that I didn’t think Mr. Morris would be in a position to employ Reuben very much longer and that I hoped Reuben had made plans for such a circumstance … that I suspected Mr. Morris was actuallynot at a meeting at CBS but already in hiding … and that my guess was Reuben should not expect to see him at the Plaza that evening or possibly ever again. And that was as true a statement as I’ve ever made to anyone.

He nodded and said he was not altogether surprised. He said that since Mr. Collins had decided to tell me about his life, Mr. Morris had been very concerned that some of the awful truth we’d been discussing would be uncovered—that at best both their careers would be ruined and at worst both of them might be indicted for murder. And he would no doubt have to give testimony that would verify those charges.

“I’ve already told you that I have some serious objections to certain aspects of my employer’s personality, Miss Tr—” He corrected himself: “Miss O’Connor. Is it terrible of me to be worried not only for Mr. Morris but also for myself? If his world collapses, so will mine.”

I said that his concern was only human.

I knew there was more, and it was difficult for him. At last he fumbled, “I … I heard you say at the hotel today that your publisher is looking for some way to add to the book you were writing. That they would pay a great deal for something that could achieve this.”

I said that he had heard correctly.

“Miss O’Connor … I have a tape recording of the night Miss O’Flaherty was murdered.”

He’d found it after Vince and Lanny had left for the telethon, in her tote bag, which she’d brought with her to their suite. It had been a little battery-powered Grundig reel-to-reel, the reels being three and a half inches wide. It had been in a tight case that kept its operation silent, and there had been a small omnidirectional mike stitched into the top of the tote bag itself. At its snail-pace slowest speed (unsuitable for music but acceptable for speech), it could get an hour’s worth of conversation onto a reel.

I quickly explained to Reuben why such a tape recorder would have been standard kit for Maureen in her dual identity as Moe Cohn. He understood better. “I don’t think the tape will tell you whether it was Mr. Morris or Mr. Collins who murdered her, but I’ve heard the tape and it will definitely tell youwhy. It will amaze you, I think. And it will also make a book that contains a transcript of the tape very, very successful.” He explained that he had personally transferred the tape to the new medium of cassette but would make both versions available for Neuman and Newberry. There would have to be arrangements, of course. He couldn’t just “loan” them the tape. His golden skin flushed orange at the embarrassment of discussing such things.