Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (11 page)

By the time I finished, it was morning. The light was orange and thick through the windows, like that old vaudeville trick of holding a bottle of rye in front of the spotlight. Chris was up and pouring himself some cereal before heading off to school. He saw me in the living room, three hundred pages stacked on my lap, and said, “Just give 'em all Bs.” It took me a moment to register what he said, to realize that he thought I'd been grading papers all night again, and then I realized that I too had school to get to. It was Monday and I had four classes today, two sections of comp, two sections of lit. I stood up off the couch only to realize that my legs had lost all feeling, were now just two leg-shaped sandbags. They folded beneath me and I collapsed to the floor. Chris burst out laughing, a sound I hadn't heard in quite a while, though it was muddled and warbly from the milk and cereal in his mouth. I tried to shake my hips a little to urge some blood flow to my legs, but it wasn't working, so I just kept shaking some more. In response to all my twitching and writhing, still a pile of useless limbs on the floor, Chris said, “Oh, wait. Shit, are you having a seizure or something? Are you being real or just trying to be funny?” That “trying” rather annoyed me, since if this were an attempt at humor I'd say
it damn well succeeded, since he had, after all, laughed. Despite the fact that humor was not actually my goal here, and that slapstick is not my preferred mode even when humor is my goal (I'm more Noël Coward than Three Stooges, if I can say so myself), Chris never gives me enough credit as a wit. Anyway. There I was, twitching on the floor, calmly cursing Chris for not helping me, curses that I instantly regretted since he just walked away, leaving me to help my own damn self off the floor.

I managed to shake some blood back into my legs, walk around a bit, banging my feet on the floor until I stopped feeling like someone with cerebral palsy, just in time to brew some coffee and hit the road for my morning classes, my mind the whole time trying to process what I'd spent the entire night reading. It had been surreal, reading a narrative featuring people I knew, my father, my mother, my sister, myself even, being puppetted into characters, familiar people acting in unfamiliar ways. The George McWeeney in Edie's book both was and was not my father. I recognized the man: Her descriptions of him were eerily accurate, reminding me of details I'd long since forgotten—the patchy stubble that told us he'd been working too much, the smell of the cracked Naugahyde chair in his office, the way he just said “hmmm” in a warm way instead of laughing and how you knew that was somehow more genuine than a laugh. In one scene, while Mom was pregnant with me and visiting her parents in New York, Edie describes our father trying to water the potted flowers in our backyard: He's wearing slacks, wingtips, a tie, holding our mother's handwritten “while I'm away” instructions in one hand, the hose in the other; so focused on rereading the instructions to make sure he's doing it right, he doesn't
even notice that he's flooding the poor geraniums. That seems about right. But there are other scenes, other recovered memories, the crux of her case against him, of that same man doing horrific things—he was at once human and marionette to Edie's demented puppeteer.

“Yo, Mr. Weeney. Wake up.”

It happens sometimes, coming to in the middle of a class. It's a bit like arriving home and not remembering the drive; when the action is something you've done a million times, your brain just doesn't bother to record the particular glitches and record-scratches that distinguish it. Same with this class. I'd been teaching it for fifteen years, saying the same thing. I'd been on autopilot, a trance, a blackout, giving the same rote lecture I'd been giving since the eighties. Or at least that's what I assumed. “Oh, yes,” I said to the class. “Where was I?”

“Nowhere,” a young man in a Lakers jersey said. “You've just been standing there for like ten minutes.”

The young man was surely exaggerating to get a laugh from his classmates (which they enthusiastically gave). I shrugged it off and turned to the chalkboard. It was blank. I turned back to the class and—figuring it was the beginning of the semester and time to dive into some fundamentals—said, “The five elements of an argument,” instantly finding the groove, those words I'd said a million times suddenly cueing me back into the scene. “The five essential building blocks of academic rhetoric. With these five tools you will join in learned and erudite conversations with your fellow student-scholars. What are they? Pens and pencils at the ready. One, thesis. Two, reasons. Three, evidence. Four, warrants. Five, counterarguments.”

And so I got through the day, the whole time fragmented scenes
and errant imagery from Edie's insane narrative flashing through my head. The sound of George McWeeney washing his old medical tools in the pool house sink, “the sonar ping of the stainless steel.” The way Edie described our father with “a smile tucked into the side of his mouth like a toothpick.” The way these little snatches popped into my head throughout the day, it was not unlike her descriptions of what recovering memories had been like, how after her first sessions with Dr. Beach, she'd be going about her business, at the grocery store, waiting for the bus, cleaning the bathroom, and there'd be a little flash of something familiar but unplaceable, “like a butterfly darting in front of a movie projector, for one brief and unrecognizable moment the light shining through its diaphanous wings, projecting a new and strange color onto the screen, but the moment the audience notices it—it's gone.”

I realize that this is the second something-in-front-of-a-projecting-light metaphor in the span of four pages, the first one mine (the one about the light like someone was holding a bottle of rye in front of a spotlight), the second one my sister's (above), and sure, perhaps my sister's (admittedly) nice butterfly imagery could have been in my head when I'd been sitting there on the couch thinking that thing about the morning light, and perhaps part of my preoccupation that day was out of simple jealousy, that it was the sentences I wish I'd written that were bugging me, not the ideas they denoted, but we cannot be distracted by pretty sentences. A cute metaphor does not a truth make. We must address ourselves to the lie these sentences deliver. And I will, in short time, address the specifics of the case my sister makes against our father, thoroughly refute all of the so-called
evidence she produces to tie him to the Black Dahlia murder. But first, as Det. Mike Nolan says, “Let's start with the facts.”

When I was done with my classes that day, I drove over to UCLA's Research Library, where I spent the rest of the day hunched over a backlit screen reading microfiches of newspapers from 1947. I'm writing this from my notes, but the following are facts, without any of my sister's novelistic flourishes. I am laying these facts out in order to clearly distinguish what is known from what (in Edie's book) is imagined. Here goes:

Around 10:30
AM
, on January 15, 1947, a passerby was pushing her three-year-old daughter by some vacant lots in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles when she noticed the dead body of a young woman. The body was nude, and cut in half at the waist. The passerby called the police. A few blocks away,
Los Angeles Examiner
reporter Will Fowler and photographer Felix Paegel were in their car, heading back to the
Examiner
office, when they heard on their short-wave radio, which they kept tuned to the LAPD's frequency, a report of a “390 W 415” at a vacant lot in Leimert Park. “390 W 415” is cop-code for an intoxicated woman who is indecently exposing herself. Fowler and Paegel found only the second part of that. They were the first ones on the scene. If I can editorialize for a moment, I can't help but wonder if this fact, that the media were the first on the scene, was not prescient in that it prefigured how this would very quickly and forevermore be the media's case, far more than the LAPD's case. I'm not just talking about a simple harmony, a pat little anecdote; I mean to imply that there was some actual causation here. To wit: Two years ago, I took Chris on a vacation up to the Redwood National Park in
Northern California. I had gone camping there once as a kid (not with Dad; he was not an outdoorsy man; Mom took us; it was the year before she left for Africa and she was starting to get restless; I'd find out later that she'd been reading Paul Goodman; nonetheless it was fun; I went fishing), and, wanting Chris to have all the normal family vacation-type things that I'd had, I drove him up there. He was sullen the whole drive up, but as soon as we got into the redwoods, he perked up, became excited. Turns out they filmed
Return of the Jedi
there, and Chris, who used to harbor sci-fi-ish tendencies (I'm not entirely sure if he still does), was scanning the dense woods for Ewoks. Anyway, the point here is that when we got to the two-bed cabin I'd reserved (having no wish to have Chris watch me attempt any sort of tent building; those things have always seemed like some atavistic brainteaser, designed less to provide shelter than humility, the springy ribs of the construction always whipping back up at you and smacking you in the face like an errant tree branch), Chris was the first in the door, and he said in an alarmingly loud voice, “I call this bed!” jumping on what was clearly the better berth. Now, I know I was the adult in this situation, and it should have been written into my parental DNA to sacrifice myself for my child, but Darwinian evolution does not extend to bed selection, especially when one bed is near a lovely window and the other has to share a wall with the bathroom so its sleeper is forced to hear whatever nocturnal pissings the other has to make. Besides, Chris is not technically my child, so I'm exempt from parental selflessness and am allowed to desire the better bed. But of course, Chris had called it. He'd been the first in the door. He'd called it, so it was his. Those are the rules, which are surely
even more primal in their logic than are any of Darwin's, and so I had to let Chris have the better bed. So too, the police—though not consciously—ceded control of the Black Dahlia case to the media. The media were there first; they called it. The police, however, for their part, did figure out a few things. Det. Sgt. Harry Hansen saw that the body had been drained of blood, almost preserved, but there was very little blood on the ground, save for some red footprints. She had been murdered elsewhere, and dumped here—or rather, displayed. Hansen had police interview people who lived in the area. Mr. R. Meyer reported seeing a black, late-thirties Ford sedan parked near the crime scene for a few minutes around 6:30
AM
. Bobby Jones, a thirteen-year-old paperboy, said he saw a black Ford sedan when he began his route at about 4:00
AM
. While this was originally taken as an incongruity, according to Fowler's account, Harry Hansen considered that both could be correct when a man's wristwatch was found at the scene. The watch did not seem to be affected by the elements, so it was possible that the murderer had dumped the body around 4:00
AM
, then, realizing he'd left his watch, come back at 6:30 to look for it. The watch was, according to the
Hollywood Citizen News
, a “17-jewel Croton with a leather bound, steel snap band.” Just like the watch, the victim's body seemed unaffected by the elements, which confirmed that she'd been dumped there in the early hours of dawn. Her killer had not just cut her in half; he had brutally slashed her breasts and cut her cheeks in what I believe is called a Glasgow smile. She was so disfigured that she remained unrecognized and unidentified for two days. During that time, she was given a full autopsy—the real results of which Edie claims to have, even though it is still officially classified.
I've been trying to track down the real report in order to prove Edie's is a fake, and while I haven't actually done that yet, I have made some excellent strides in that direction.

The past week or so I've been trying to get someone at the coroner's office to talk to me, hoping to find someone who can thoroughly invalidate Edie's supposed autopsy report. It's been harder that you might think. Calling on the phone is no good. The coroner's office is so used to fielding calls from the media, cranks, and necrophiliacs that they've set up a directory so labyrinthine, so full of
push one for this and two for that
, that by the time it connects you to an actual person, it's just some intern—“This is Tommy, how can I help you?”—reading from a script—“I'm sorry, sir, we cannot give out that information.” Then, this morning, after a week of this same rote reply, when Tommy started getting snippy with me, I finally decided to head down to the morgue myself and find some answers. The county morgue is in the middle of downtown L.A., surrounded by courthouses and parking garages patrolled by tire-chalking attendants. It's the kind of square cement building that in another context you might mistake for a modern art gallery; you might think its austere anti-aesthetic was intentional. I walked in the only entrance that seemed exclusively for the living and found a lobby half filled with people studiously scratching at paperwork. I went up to the receptionist-like lady and, through the asterisk of holes in the Plexiglas window, said, “Hi, listen, I'm here on a little fact-checking mission. You see, I'm trying to find out if a document someone purports to be a copy of an official autopsy report is in fact authentic. I know it's a fake, but I need to be thorough. To whom should I speak about this? And please don't say Tommy. I've already spoken with him
and found him to be quite unhelpful.” Underneath the window, the receptionist pushed a clipboard with a ballpoint pen strung to it, along with a small plastic bag filled with what looked to be gauzy underwear. That's when I noticed she had earphones on, a Walkman sitting beside her elbow. I took the materials just as a door to my left swung open. A middle-aged guy with sweaty short sleeves and an oily comb-over said, “All right, everyone, get your gear on and let's get going. Follow me.” Everyone in the lobby had already opened his or her plastic bag and they were all now outfitting themselves with the contents: fitting sheer cotton booties over their shoes, latex gloves over their hands, and surgical masks over their faces. These masks were not the surgical masks I'd seen before, but rather made from two cotton flaps that came together in a horizontal seam across the mouth, making the whole thing look like the bill of a giant duck. I figured this might be a good chance to get behind closed doors and find what I was looking for, so I suited up and followed the pack into a small screening room. It wasn't until the main feature started playing—
The Dangers of Drinking and Driving
, a cartoon featuring an off-brand Donald Duck named Daniel—that I realized I'd snuck in with the wrong crowd. Though a cartoon, the video featured real-life photos of people killed in drunk-driving accidents. There was one body that had been caught in a car fire, and he or she was completely charred, black and crisp, intestines literally cooked and bursting out of the belly. Beside me, a teenage girl with a fishhook brow piercing said, “Mmmm, looks like giant pasta.” After the video, I tried to explain to our tour guide—whose name I'd later find out is Charles—that I was in the wrong place, to which he said, “That's what everyone says. Now follow me.” And so I did follow him, along with the rest of
the offenders, through two sets of swinging doors, into the morgue. “I almost forgot,” Charles said, “breathe through your mouth!” But it was too late; the smell hit me like pepper spray. When my eyes cleared, I didn't see any dead bodies, just the whole awkward bunch of us making our way through a bare, fluorescent-lit hall. Charles was leading the way, saying, “Now, everyone, I'm about to take you into the main holding area. Along the sides of the hall, you will see what your active little imaginations are haunted with right now—the potential consequences of your boneheaded actions: dead folks, lined up patiently like they're here for Aerosmith tickets. Don't touch them, and they won't touch you.” After months of poring over those crime-scene photos, I was expecting, without realizing it, the bodies to be black-and-white, two-dimensional, safely limited to the small rectangle of someone else's viewfinder. So when we turned the corner—“Have a good look, my little buzzards,” Charles said—and actually saw them—real dead bodies, on gurneys, no sheets covering them, naked, bloated, their skin looking moldy-fruit soft—I began to get sick. “Uh-oh,” Charles said, “we got a live one!” I thought for a moment he meant one of the bodies, like they'd accidentally interned a very sound sleeper who was just now waking to find himself toe-tagged in a morgue, but when Charles quickly ushered me to the restroom, I realized he was talking about me. After tearing off my duck-mask and retching in the surprisingly clean facilities, I walked out of the stall and Charles handed me a scrap of paper towel. “Thanks,” I said.