Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (22 page)

So last night I canceled my bowling game with Chuck, claiming, perhaps with Italy still on my mind, that I'd eaten a spoiled cannoli (“Paul, you puke more than a sorority sister,” Chuck said), and drove over to Canoga Park. After sitting in my car across the street, staking the place out for a few minutes—noticing that Rory's apartment in the gateless complex faced an unlit alley—I grabbed the green flashlight from my glove box and walked over to his front door. I promptly learned just how much either (a) detective novels, for the sake of narrative momentum or out of authorial ignorance, radically gloss over the difficulties involved in clandestinely and forcibly entering another's residence, or (b) home security has greatly improved since the days of Philip Marlowe. While fidgeting with the window beside Rory's front door, I remembered Marlowe, in an early chapter of
The Lady in the Lake
, slinking into a suspect's house so easily that Chandler writes (something like), “A hard push sprung the window.”
Sprung!
—as if the house were a jack-in-the-box waiting for you to open it up. Not quite. I suppose I should take a lesson from the aforementioned “narrative momentum” and not waste too much detail on the problem of entering, but suffice it to say I was out there long enough, and suspiciously enough, to be thankful that Rory lived in a community apparently apathetic to home invasions, as when an old woman pushed a cart of groceries hunchingly past me I quickly offered her the explanation that I lived here and was simply locked out before realizing that she hadn't even bothered to look up, much less give a shit that I was prying my way into a locked window. Regardless, I did eventually—bloodied
fingernails and a busted bottle opener later—manage to get inside the apartment. I flipped on the flashlight, shone it around. I knew what I was looking for, but the problem was that no matter how banal an object is—a broken umbrella half opened like a giant spider, an unstrung Spanish guitar, a still-wrapped pack of plastic coat hangers—when framed in a little spotlight surrounded by total darkness, anything can look important, like a detail in a scene that the director irises in on to let the audience know it's a clue. So I did get a bit distracted, had to investigate the grocery list magnetted to the fridge. In Edie's still girlishly loopy scrawl, there was listed
Pepsi, Cap'n Crunch, Kraft Singles
, and in what I assume was Rory's handwriting, so sharp it looked like a Richter-scale readout, was
broccoli, black beans, wheat germ, whole-seed mustard
. Below that, Edie had added
Gas-Ex
, which Rory had crossed out and replaced with
ha-ha
, and Edie had written
Gas-Ex
again in insistently blockish letters. In the living room, on the entertainment center, there was a half-Stonehenge of VHS tapes. Rory had hand-labeled a few:
Frasier
,
Civil War doc pt 3, Super Bowl Commercials
. Edie had labeled one
random
. I turned on the TV, turned the volume all the way down, and put
random
in the VCR. The first few minutes were a chaotic collage of the beginnings of everything she'd recorded on this tape, a few hazy seconds of
Kids Say the Darndest Things
deteriorating into static, then the ghostly image of Barbara Walters forming from the fuzz only for the pixels to reconstitute themselves into an episode of
Friends
. The effect was less like channel surfing, where each jump is a glimpse of a world in medias res, those images continuing on after you look away, and more like witnessing the arbitrary destruction of those images in order to make room for the next, the space being
so finite. Similarly, when I start to notice what my own memory has lost, I worry what sort of contemporary detritus I've supplanted it with. What insipid piece of trivia has replaced that thing my mother said to me that one time? How many students' faces did I have to remember before the details of my father's began to deteriorate? And that's when I saw it—or rather, me—in the midst of the snowy transitions on the TV. Having a decades-old image of yourself ambush you, only for it to fade away in a second, it's like déjà vu transmitted by a cattle prod. Moments later, when my brain was able to make sense of what it had seen, I realized Edie had taped an episode of
Loose Cannons
, presumably watched it. Then she'd taped over it.

I got back to work, focused myself to my real task, went over to the red filing boxes on the kitchen table and started flipping through them. I was right: Here, labeled and (occasionally) laminated, were all the supporting documents for Edie's book. Here were copies of some of the same newspaper articles I'd found in my own research. Here were the same crime scene photos. Here, even, was the (so titled) “Profile of a Killer” that James Richardson at the
Examiner
had commissioned from our father. It was typewritten, spelling errors
X
'd out. Now that I saw it and was able to read it in its entirety, I realized that perhaps it is authentic after all, and that those passages Edie quotes from it—which she claims are so self-revealing (e.g., “The Killer clearly has medical training, but also a flair for the theatrical . . . a curious combination of interests”) that they can only be his veiled confession—are obviously, when seen in context, our father having a bit of fun, just as Ben Hecht was doing with his sardonic profile. Edie never did get our father's sense of humor. I kept on looking and eventually found,
laminated in hard plastic, the copy of the autopsy report that Edie pins so much of her case on. I quickly read the thing over. And while, yes, it does say the things Edie claims it says, I was looking for the flaws in its composition that would prove once and for all that it, like so much of Edie's book, is a work of fiction—until I realized that I was not the person to do this. To me, it just looked like an old tax form that someone had filled in like a psychotic Mad Lib. (Similar to a favorite game of Chris's when he was younger, playing Mad Libs “in character,” picking words as Darth Vader, or Hannibal Lecter, or Queen Elizabeth, depending on his mood.) Chuck will have to be the one analyze the report, to show me the specific methodological anachronisms that reveal it to be a fake, and I will record those as soon as he does. But beyond the evidence I recognized from Edie's book, the filing boxes also contained some primary sources she hadn't made use of. Here was a postcard, addressed to Edie, dated late September 1961, just after our mother had returned to Africa. One side showed a touristy painting of the Egyptian pyramids, and the other side said,
We had a storm last week. The rain was so loud on the tin roof of the Quonset hut it sounded like rat-a-tat-tat! Dori and I sang songs all night long. –Love Mom
. Her omission of the comma after
Love
made it seem less like a sign-off and more like a command, or a plea. I wondered who Dori was, wondered if they sang “Alouette.” I'd like to think they did, shouting the lyrics to hear each other over the rain. I put the postcard back in the filing box.

So that was last night, but back in April, when we were discussing the issue of the autopsy report in my English 1 classes, and the only thing I had to prove that it was an unreliable source was the fact that Edie, in her book, fails to offer any reasonable explanation for how
she obtained a still-classified document, my students didn't seem to be bothered by its obvious unreliability. “I mean, it's probably pretty real,” said one guy who always hid behind a large backpack on his desk.

“Probably?” I asked. “How do we know? This is a matter of evaluating sources. Is an unsubstantiated rumor as reliable as an encyclopedia? Is an issue of
People
magazine as reliable as an issue of
The Economist
?”

“I suppose, if it's in print. . . ” I didn't catch who mumbled this, but people started making assenting noises.

I could feel myself getting angry, so I decided to earmark that debate for another time and change routes: “Remember that this supposed autopsy report is anomalous here. Physical evidence is not a big part of this author's repertoire. What is she basing this all on?”

“Her memories,” said a woman in a red Circuit City polo, a pin stuck to her breast that implored people to
Ask Me!

“Exactly,” I said. “The mysterious recovered memories. And how reliable a source is that?”

“I think it's probably pretty reliable,” the Circuit City woman said.

“Her memory is completely unreliable!” I said. “She has nothing to back it up!”

“But what about the car?” she continued. “That kid said he saw a black Ford where they found her body. It says here that Edith's father had a black Ford.”

“It proves nothing! The Ford Mercury was one of the best-selling cars in the 1940s, and black was the most popular color. It would have been strange had George
not
had a black Ford sedan.”

“There's also the watch. According to her mom's old diary, her grandfather gave George a . . . ” She riffled through the photocopied pages on
her desk until she found the watch passage. “A 17-jewel Croton wristwatch. And at the crime scene, the cops found a 17-jewel Croton wristwatch.”

“Again,” I said, “that was an incredibly popular wristwatch at the time. Every wrist in the country had a 17-jewel Croton strapped to it.”

“I've never heard of that brand before,” she said.

“But we're getting off topic,” I said. “Most of Edith's case is based entirely on memory and that in and of itself throws everything into question.”

“But why?” she said. “What's the difference between that and someone testifying in court?” She was talking faster now, leaning forward over her desk. “I mean, I understand that it sounds shady, but memories are all we have. They might be unreliable at times, but if we start distrusting memories simply because they are memories, then we're left with nothing but . . . I don't know what.”

She suddenly seemed self-conscious about how worked up she was getting, so she just looked down at her desk and remained silent for the rest of the class while I moved to smaller-picture issues and pointed out some of my sister's more lamentable writerly tics, like slipping into the passive voice and overusing the word “basically.”

After class, the woman in the
Ask Me!
pin came up to me as I was packing up my satchel and said, “I'm sorry, Mr. McWeeney. I didn't mean to be contrary.” She was small, probably in her thirties, a thin scar dividing her left eyebrow, her fingernails painted hammer-thwapped purple.

“It's okay . . . ”

“Yolanda.”

“I appreciate your energy, Yolanda.”

“So . . . have you, like, talked to your sister about all this?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Your sister. That's Edith, right? I'm sorry. I know you don't want us to know, with the last names blacked out and all. Please don't be mad. I looked you up online and it said your dad was named George and wrote for that cop show, and that's pretty much this guy, so I just figured . . . I'm sorry, please don't be mad at me.”

I finished stuffing my stuff into my satchel and then turned to wipe down the whiteboard. COLA had been circulating many passive aggressive memos about making sure to leave each classroom as tidy as you had found it.

“Are you mad?” Yolanda asked. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry. You seem mad. I'm sorry, I'll leave.”

The following week, I was happy to leave the issue of memory and get the class back to assessing tangible evidence through textual analysis. A few chapters after Betty Short's death, after Edie describes the deterioration of George and Jack's relationship (though I have to admit that the scene in which Edie eavesdrops on George telling Jack just how wrong things went is chilling, even if it is entirely fictitious), and George's retreat into his work (pointing out that there was a marked increase in
Rampart
episodes that dealt with homicide after it moved to television in 1948, which I suppose is true but the new medium also demands more sensationalism, so what Edie claims is our father “working stuff out” is really just an issue of subject supply and demand), she takes aim at a now little-known book that Jack Hale wrote called
Badge and Gun
, published by Random House in 1952. This was the peak of
Rampart
's success and the book sought to blur the line between the
television show and reality. Jack had, since the show's radio days, worked closely with the LAPD. Officers (including, briefly, Det. Harry Hansen) served as consultants, offering their wisdom, guidance, and even personal experience to help shape the weekly narratives. This seemed to be Jack's territory, rubbing elbows with men he considered real men, while my father was more inclined to sit in his office by himself and fuss with a story until it took shape. Jack understood, perhaps more than anyone, the value of making these working relationships known to the public: If the television audience knew that this show had real police officers' genuine seal of approval, it did more to establish verisimilitude than an airtight plot or a character's sympathetic backstory. In the end credits of each episode, there appeared two brief notes, the first one—
Any Resemblance to Actual Persons is Entirely Coincidental—
at the insistence of the legal department, and the second one—
Thank You to the Fine Men of the Los Angeles Police Department for Your Guidance and Wisdom—
at the insistence of Hale: a formal and suspiciously defensive disavowal followed by a wink-wink, the latter being, in Hale's mind, the most important element of the show. His book
Badge and Gun
is a collection of real-life cases that he had heard about from his LAPD consultants, stories that inspired
Rampart
, but which, due to the constraints of the form, could not be translated directly into episodes. The book, then, according to Hale's introduction, was his attempt to give those stories a voice, as well as, according to my own gloss of the material, an attempt to further connect, in the eyes of the average media-consumer, the fiction of the television show with the reality of policing the mean streets of L.A. Edie points, quite naturally, to chapter 5 of
Badge and Gun
, called “The Black Dahlia.” It is the only
unsolved murder that Hale addresses in the book. The rest of the cases were all solved in hyperbolically heroic fashion. So in such a lapidary book, why bring up a murder that, five years later, had not been solved? It's a fair question for Edie to ask, though she and I answer it in different ways. Hale places all the blame on the media, saying that the reporters who arrived first at the crime scene stomped all over crucial evidence, and that in the months that followed they riled up the public with the sensational aspects of the case, which led to a glut of false leads and false suspects. “So many red herrings,” Hale writes, “the big fish got away” (30). Edie's claim here is that Jack is covering for the LAPD, that his effusiveness and refusal to blame the police for the case still being open is proof that there must have been some sort of quid pro quo: They must have been covering for him. From there, she gives a series of absurd—and rather irritating—rhetorical questions designed to lead the reader to her outlandish conclusions. I disagree with this tactic not just as a writing teacher but as the perpetually annoyed younger sibling: This long string of rhetorical questions, each one increasing in shrillness, is an old habit of Edie's. I remember the night our mom left for Africa for the second time, I found Edie sitting in the living room. She had what I would later be able to identify as red-wine mouth but at the time I thought was simply the result of a pen leaking in her mouth—as she was always chewing on pens, pencils, her fingernails—and she was idly playing a few notes on the piano. No one in the house knew how to play that thing; it had been an investment in bourgeois refinement and then our parents were too busy to sign us up for lessons. But here was my sister, walking her fingers down the black and white sidewalk, each step plunking out a note, so gently I could hear
the soft pad against the wires. I asked her how long she thought Mom would be gone this time. She stopped playing, looked at me, and said, “Do you think she's coming back? Or do you think she's hightailing it out of this family? Do you think, maybe, that she's had enough of this place, had enough of this family, and has finally found her escape? Do you think that maybe,” leaning in close to my face, “just maybe,” so I could smell her tannic breath, “she knows what's good for her—and we're not it?” Though it was an effective rhetorical move at the time (I could feel the tectonic shifts beneath my feet, suddenly aware that my fears were well founded), here, in her book, it's just baldly manipulative. The series of rhetorical questions she poses to the reader attempts to lead them from the evidence (that Hale adamantly defends the LAPD on their handling of the Black Dahlia case) to the illogical conclusion that they must have been covering for him, that they knew all along that he was involved somehow in the young woman's death (explaining why they never followed through on the supposed evidence connecting both him and George to Betty Short). The problem with this is not just the distance one has to leap from evidence to conclusion—it's a chasm of logic!—but that it completely ignores the much simpler explanation for why Hale brownnoses the LAPD. Not only did Hale have an enormous amount invested in blurring the line between his show and the LAPD, but he had an enormous amount invested in advertising his patriotism. He wrote most of this book in late 1951, just after the House Un-American Activities Committee began holding trials again. The Committee had begun officially Red-baiting the entertainment industry in 1947, most notably with the Hollywood Ten, a group of unfriendly witnesses who stood up to the McCarthyite tactics.
After that, the industry began self-policing for a while, blacklisting many of its own who might appear even the lightest shade of Red. I have no idea how my father managed to escape this firestorm of paranoia in the late forties. He never spoke about it. It's one of the many things I wish I could ask him now. I suspect it had to do with the fact that both he and Hale were pretty small fish in 1947, still only on the radio, but by the time the Committee returned in 1951—asking directors, writers, producers, actors, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”—
Rampart
was a hit TV show and suddenly vulnerable. One of the first to get added to the blacklist this time around was Waldo Salt. He was: an up-and-coming screenwriter who'd gotten a lot of attention for the now sadly forgotten Western
Rachel and the Stranger
, a confirmed member of the Communist Party who refused to testify before HUAC, and a rumored guest at Jack Hale's 1946/47 New Year's party. Shortly after getting blacklisted, Salt resumed his writing career under the very comfy nom-de-screen Mel Davenport. Many in the Hollywood community were hip to blacklisted writers using fronts and pseudonyms, and rumors spread about which projects were really the work of suspected Commies. According to
Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey—
an excellent documentary from 1990 that follows Salt not just through this dark period but also through his late career renaissance when he steps off the blacklist and picks up an Oscar for
Midnight Cowboy—
one of the many projects he was rumored to be involved in was
Rampart
. I really doubt that he had anything to do with
Rampart—
for the simple reason that by this point my father was doing all the writing and was never a very gregarious collaborator—but the rumor was enough to potentially harm Jack Hale.
So it's no coincidence that Hale then churned out a book that sought to not only align himself and his show with the LAPD but with the good ol' US of A as well. Just look at the evidence: In the Black Dahlia chapter, he says that among the hundreds of letters the LAPD received that professed to be from the real killer, Det. Hansen gave particular credence to one typewritten note that said, “I killed her because she came to Hollywood to become a commodity” (32). Hale spends a solid paragraph on the Marxist rhetoric of this one-line note, concluding that Reds are by their very nature sociopathic. The way he tells it, you'd think the LAPD was waging its own McCarthyite war on the streets of Los Angeles. And yet, in my research, I've come across no other reference to this note. Not one, except for those that reference Hale's book. I am not saying that the note did not exist, just that, if it did, Hale is clearly giving it unnecessary importance. Once we see
Badge and Gun
from this perspective, what's more likely? That (a) Hale was attempting to cover for the LAPD in exchange for them covering up his (and my father's) connection to Betty Short? Or that (b) he was attempting to align his show with the LAPD for higher ratings while simultaneously trying to quell suspicions that he was Red-friendly? Since I've already chided my sister for her annoying use of rhetorical questions, I'll just go ahead and answer this one: The correct answer is b.