Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (12 page)

“Happens to the best of us,” he said.

“I only came here for some information, some help on a—a thing I'm working on.”

“Well,” he said, “only help I can offer you is this: Get a bigger ball.”

Assuming this was some sort of testicle reference, an imperative to man-up at the specter of death, I said, “I had some bad tuna tartare for lunch. That was probably it.”

“No,” he said, “this,” pointing to my right thumb, which had become a little swollen around the joint. “I can spot bowler's thumb a mile away. You need a ball that fits.”

“I just use whatever they have at the lanes.”

“There's your problem. Put 'em up,” he said, holding up his hand as if to pledge allegiance. He made me put my hand, still clammy, against his own, which was cold and dry, and inspected our mirrored fingers. “You're about my size,” he said.

Then one of the drunk drivers opened the restroom door, saw these two middle-aged men, shod like babies, doing what surely looked like some sort of intergalactic gesture of peace, and said, “Uh, we're still waitin' out there.”

I'm still feeling a little queasy from today's adventure and wasn't able to eat much of Julia's potato skin salad tonight (it's truly disconcerting how concerned that woman is with dietary fiber), but before I left the morgue, Charles gave me his phone number, telling me to give him a call about a good bowling ball he might be able to sell me: So I now have a potential inside source, someone who might be able to help settle this whole issue of the autopsy report.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to 1947: In the days after the murder, the newspapers reported what gruesome details they had, but without the identity of the victim they were quick to fly off into flights of terrifying fancy. Aggie Underwood—a reporter for
The Herald-Express
who, by all reports, was one of the few who managed to keep her lunch down at the crime scene—suspected the work of a werewolf.
The Express
was Hearst's evening paper, which flirted with bald sensationalism more than his morning paper,
The Examiner
, where Will Fowler broke the story about the victim's identity. Fingerprints, Fowler reported on January 16, identified her as Elizabeth “Betty” Short. According to FBI files, she'd been born in Hyde Park, MA, July 29, 1924, making her twenty-two at the time of her death. The reason this was on record was that she'd been arrested on September 23, 1943, after causing a drunken disturbance with a few soldiers near an army base a couple hours north of Los Angeles. Already, a real person was starting to come into focus. Here on the front page was her old mug shot—her dark hair looking wild, her mouth slightly agape, her irises appearing too light to be focused on anything you or I could see, almost spectral—and here in the three-column article was the hint of a backstory: She'd come from the East, probably with dreams of stardom, a young woman seeking attention from men in rebellious ways. But as the real person was starting to emerge in Fowler's morning paper, by day's end Aggie Underwood was recrafting it into myth. Underwood followed Betty Short's tracks to a Long Beach drugstore where regulars had given Short the nickname “Black Dahlia,” a reference to her jet-black hair and clothing, but also to the popular film noir that had come out that year,
The Blue Dahlia
. In that film—written by Raymond Chandler, his only original screenplay, which got him his second Oscar nomination—the name refers not to the leading lady but to a nightclub, and yet when I found it at the video store during my research (as a devoted Chandler fan I'd already seen it countless times, just to be clear, but
needed to refresh my memory), the box featured a soft-focus photo of Veronica Lake above the title, suggesting that
she
was the Blue Dahlia, which underscores how the case of the Black Dahlia has eclipsed the film, even though, aside from this one thing, they really have little to do with each other—one no more than a footnote for the other—and you cannot find any clues to the real-life crime in the film itself. Repackaging
The Blue Dahlia
to capitalize on this unfortunate association would be like putting John Hinckley Jr.'s face on the poster for
Taxi Driver
. The video store clerk didn't seem to understand what I was talking about, and since there was a line forming behind me, I paid for the video, along with a healthy late fee for some video games Chris had taken out, and left. But whatever injustices the media machine did to Chandler's film, it's nothing compared to what they did to Ms. Short. Now that Aggie Underwood had a hook—the woman in black who haunted L.A.'s seedy underbelly—she didn't let go. It's fascinating seeing these two sets of articles side by side, those by Will Fowler in the
Examiner
and those by Aggie Underwood in the
Express
. Fowler focuses on specifics, on facts, clearly trying to understand, while Underwood focuses on abstractions, on sensational hypotheticals, clearly trying to sell papers. It's like a strange sibling rivalry playing out in two different newspapers both owned by Papa Hearst, and they're both fighting over the legacy of this woman. Fowler is clearly the better writer, while Underwood is mildly insane. But of course Underwood wasn't the only one who didn't let sanity stand in the way of a good story. Fowler's editor at the
Examiner
, James Richardson, “shared William Randolph Hearst's penchant for sensational news and . . . could be inhuman” in his pursuit. That quote is from Fowler's 1991 book
Reporters: Memoirs of
a Young Newspaperman
, in which I discovered that he too was the son of a screenwriter, so writing is really in the blood for both of us. Anyway, Fowler describes Richardson being so determined to get a scoop that hours before they ran the story revealing the victim's identity, he forced a young copy editor to call Betty Short's mother, who didn't yet know about her daughter. Richardson instructed the copy editor to tell the mother that her daughter had won a beauty contest, and then try to get as much information about her as he could. The mother was delighted and began chatting all about her wonderful daughter, and after Richardson—who was listening in—got what he needed, he gave the copy editor the signal to drop the façade. The copy editor then said, “Actually, ma'am, your daughter is dead. She was brutally murdered two nights ago.” Of course I don't know the exact words he used, but it doesn't matter. Blunt is the only way to break news of that sort. And it is just as well. Even when the messenger tries his or her best to pad it, to ease you into an understanding of what has happened, the news itself is so unimaginably blunt that it barrels over the actual words. I really can't recall the exact words Aunt Paige used when she sat me down and told me about my mother, but in my mind it's just Aunt Paige, that cheery, giddy woman, saying, “Your mom is dead. She was brutally murdered two nights ago.” Of course in my mind, for some reason, she's also wearing a
Save the Whales
T-shirt, which would have been anachronistic, since the Save the Whales campaign didn't get started until the late seventies, and my mother died in 1961, but that is probably a subconscious expression of my cetaphobia, which itself goes back to a terrifying trip to Sunday school where the teacher told us about a whale devouring poor Jonah, all of which has nothing
to do with my mom's death or the veracity of my memory. Who knows what Aunt Paige was wearing—it doesn't matter. I'm not Joan Didion, after all; I'm not trying to establish verisimilitude with meaningless sartorial details. What does matter is that Aunt Paige was the messenger because my father was locked in his office, leaving it to his sister to intercept me when I came home from school. The reason this matters is because Edie makes a ridiculously big deal about it in her book, seems to use it as proof that our father was uncaring and distant, when, if anything, it should be proof of the opposite (he was distraught!). This is fairly representative of Edie's rather confused use of evidence.

For another example, just take a look at this excerpt when she's describing the events that first led our mother to leave the country, almost a year before her death:

Then my mom's old childhood friend came to dinner, having come into town for a conference at USC. Looking like Rock Hudson, he was an anthropologist who'd been studying in Africa, and he spent that night telling us about the social structure of western lowland gorillas and what happened to the structure when the alpha male died. As soon as we were done with our food, my dad went back to his office at the far end of the house to continue work on some script, and Paulie plopped himself down in front of the TV. I stayed at the table with my mom and her friend. I remember the way the little Olympic ringlets of condensation from their water glasses linked their way across the table, and how my mom watched this guy with her chin in her hands and her pinky on her lip.

Three months later, my mom announced that she would be going on a missionary trip to Africa. “A little philanthropic vacation from my life,” she said. (62)

Look at the way Edie follows that “when the alpha male died” with our father leaving the table. In this context, she makes our father's writing seem like a self-castrating act, but what about our mother? Doesn't she have any culpability here? It was her decision, and her decision alone, to go to Africa. And while I admit that the water rings forming “little Olympic ringlets” is a nice image, describing Mom's friend as looking like Rock Hudson is just plain lazy and, considering what we now know about Rock Hudson, undermines Edie's attempt to prop this guy up as the alpha male whom our mother is replacing our father with. Besides, he didn't look like Rock Hudson at all. He looked like Vincent Price. But I can't blame Edie too much for blaming Dad for Mom first going to Africa, then getting macheted by Eritrean separatists when she was caught in what would become the Eritrean War of Independence, as I too was eager to blame our father. The difference being that I blamed Dad when I was an immature fourteen-year-old who was eager to blame anyone. Edie is a fifty-four-year-old woman and should know that things are far more complicated than that. That's what a great deal of
Rarer Monsters
is actually about, a fictionalized exploration of how I spent those years after Mom's death practically disowning my own father for what I perceived as his weakness. Consider this passage from an early chapter in that novel, which is still available for publication (the Peter character is the one loosely based on me):

Peter began spending more time at his friend Wyatt's house. He generally avoided hanging out at his own house for fear that Wyatt would notice just how empty it was becoming. But one day they decided to buzz their heads and, since Peter's dad had been a navy barber during the War [the backstory of Peter's father and my father are a little different, but the gist is the same], they went to Peter's house to use his dad's electric clippers.

In his dad's bathroom Peter opened the drawer to get the scissors and electric razor. Something else caught his eye: There, in the corner of the drawer, was a zigzagging link of condoms. White and blue packaging that said spermicidal lubricant. There was something toxic about that word, spermicidal, like spraying your johnson with ammonia.

Peter held up the link of condoms to show Wyatt.

“Wow,” Wyatt said. “I didn't think your dad still had it in him. I guess he really was in the navy. You should take one.” (23)

I should clarify that this part takes place before Peter's mom actually dies; at this point, she's just a missionary in Ethiopia. (She was not particularly religious, none of us were, so her becoming a missionary was just as shocking, and disconcerting, as her decision to go to Africa; but I've come to realize that in the days before secular plane tickets like the Peace Corps were a viable option, the church was simply a way for her to get to Africa, not to Jesus.) (And by “she” there, I meant my mother, not Peter's mother, just to be clear; in the novel I never really got into the spiritual leanings of Peter's mother.) (Or, who knows, now that I think if it, maybe Mom was finding
God. How am I to know?) The character of Wyatt here, I should also note, is generally a composite of different friends I had during that period, but his father is based entirely on the father of this guy Bobby. Bobby's mom was also absent, though I can't remember why.

The next day at school, the only thing that tempered their pride in their matching buzz cuts was the fact that the electric razor had turned the skin on the sides of their heads a patchy and painful red. It looked like they both suffered from some skin disease.

“My scalp burns like gonorrhea,” Wyatt said, meeting Peter at his locker.

Not that either of them would have known what that felt like. Neither of them had actually had the opportunity to catch anything from a girl. The buzz cuts—which they imagined would make them look more adult—were supposed to change all that. But the only attention they got from girls were sad looks followed by “That looks bad.”

After school, they walked back to Wyatt's house where they rooted through his bathroom, found some aloe and gooped it onto their razor burns. It looked like they'd tried to apply hair gel where they no longer had hair.

Wyatt sighed. “God, that feels good.”

Peter heard some banging coming from the garage. “What's your dad up to?” he asked.

Wyatt's dad Lenny worked security at Roth's Jewelry Store and often let his consonants slip to refer to it as Roth's Jewy Store. Lenny was not a security guard, Peter knew. Lenny made
a point of saying he was Head of Security: He didn't wear a rent-a-cop uniform and carry a flashlight as if it were a gun—Lenny wore a suit and a carried a real gun, which he was legally allowed to carry on his person, concealed, in a shoulder holster. Peter suspected that Lenny wore a blazer a size too small in order to emphasize that gun, the bulge of its handle noticeable under his arm.