Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (26 page)

“I
am
talking about the story,” he said. “Your version of me, I
remember it being pretty—ruthless. Some phrase stuck with me. ‘His sociopathic charm,' or some shit, and ‘his mannequin good looks.' Something about being a ‘trust-fund fake.' You were always so hostile toward people you thought had it easier than you—people you considered better looking, better educated, more socially adept. It would always come out in these oblique, passive-aggressive ways, but that story was the first time I saw it so clearly.”

“You should know better than to think a character in a story is—”

“You called me up, repeatedly asked, What do you think of that character? What do you think of whatever his name was?”

“The character's name was Ron.”

“You were so aggressive about it. Like you had this idea that I would see myself in the mirror and break down crying and apologize to you for the fact I got laid more than you did.”

“That's bullshit! I'm a fa-, fucking author, a fa-, fucking artist. That character was my creation. I'm not just some hack writing for cheap therapy. Fiction isn't real! This is just the kind of shit Edie does and now you're taking her MO, you're ta-, ta-, taking her side!”

“Paul. Listen to me. The guys at New Wye chose that title. If you've read the book, you know that it's clearly about more than that. Her hypothesizing about that murder is a small part of it, a mere thought experiment, couched in a very moving investigation into memory. I hope you can see that. I'm sorry we couldn't work together on this, but I tried. Edie tried.”

“She has no pa-, proof. Memories are nothing. Ramona v. Isabella! Orange ca-, ca-, County, 1994, set the legal pre-, pre-, precedent! Judge threw out the case!”

“Are you back to your fake stutter? Jesus, Paul, that cheap ploy didn't even work on eighteen-year-old Iowans. I thought you'd given that up long ago.”

“I ca-, ca-, can't stop!”

I had Chris's attention now.

Since I started writing this letter on June 3, that conversation with Oliver must have taken place on June 2.

It's now been two weeks since I wrote that last sentence, this sheet of paper having been stuck in this machine, waiting for me, the whole time. I had to take a break from this project—the summer semester was wrapping up, and I needed to get things back on track with Julia—though now that I think about it, I haven't really been taking a break. That's one thing Julia got right, I suppose. We just had a fight. She said I'd been lying to her about this. I said I hadn't been, though she's right that I haven't exactly put it out of my mind. But I know what to do now. I know how to end this. Orson Welles. It's all right there in the imagery. Julia and I watched
The Lady from Shanghai
tonight. It was our date night, our end-of-the-semester cooldown: a movie, a box of wine, the unspoken promise of sex. During the mirror scene at the end of the movie, it hit me. All those images of bisected bodies. I wish I had the TV right here so I could take a closer look at that scene but the TV is in the living room and Julia is now back in the living room and Julia is very angry. I can hear her stomping around in there.

I should back up. A couple of weeks ago when I was writing about the phone conversation I had with Oliver—what turned out to be, in a sense, our breakup—I found myself typing Cooley's name a lot, and it occurred to me that in all my research I had been focusing only on the
facts and I'd been ignoring completely how the Black Dahlia has shown up in film and fiction. Thomas Cooley's 1983 novel
Dahlia
is certainly the most widely known pop culture artifact featuring a fictionalized Betty Short, and I realized that I had not actually read it, so I ran out to the bookstore and picked up a copy. As Oliver said, they were making a movie of it, coming out in January, and the paperback I got is the movie tie-in version, the cover showing Winona Ryder made up like the Dahlia. Even though the story is an entirely fictional account of Betty Short's murder, it's the version that the layperson thinks of when he or she hears that sobriquet. Just as people assume that the real Richard of Gloucester was a hunchback because of Shakespeare's play (he was actually able-bodied), and that the real William Wallace was a lantern-jawed looker because of
Braveheart
(he was, according to contemporaneous accounts, a chinless man with bug eyes), people usually assume that the real Ms. Short was mixed up with lesbian smut films and gangsters like Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel, because of Cooley's novel. It wasn't until I read the novel that I realized I myself had harbored those assumptions going into this project, and seeing how much a piece of fiction can influence the popular understanding of history underscores how important it is to halt publication of Edie's book, especially since it will, presumably, be shelved as nonfiction.

Cooley's novel was a fun but surreal read. Fun because it reminded me of the pulp fiction I was obsessed with as a young man: a detective story full of double-crosses and double-entendres, dialogue so snappy it makes me feel very unclever. Surreal because, like Edie's book, it tangled the real and the fictive in a way that started to jumble all the facts that I'd been accumulating on the case. More
than once I had to stop and wonder if I was thinking about a plot point in Cooley's version, Edie's version, or my version—which is to say, the real version.

I heard the garage door just now. I think Julia is going out. It's nearly eleven at night, where the hell is she going? I think she just wants me to go out there, which I won't do. We've never had a fight this bad and I'm still twitchy with adrenaline from the yelling. We're not real arguers; we generally prefer condescension to catharsis. So I guess it makes sense that when we open the sluices it all comes rushing out.

But the point is that what really struck me about the Cooley novel was how it was structured like many
Rampart
episodes. It starts with the murder, followed by everyone hunting down the seemingly obvious suspect; our detective-protagonist has his doubts about this suspect and begins his own investigation, even though it makes him unpopular in a department where everyone wants to go with the simple answer. He eventually finds the real killer and the initial suspect is let go. What I took away from the novel was not any new evidence, not a new perspective, but rather a realization that the best way to exonerate my father is to find the real killer.

I know I shouldn't worry about where Julia went, I know that she's probably just driving around to de-stress, but it's still really bothering me. She's never just left in the middle of the night like this. She has a pager but she didn't take it with her. I know because I just called it and heard it beep on the coffee table in the living room. The night had been going so well, too! This was our special date night. We'd been planning it all week. Chris is spending the night at a friend's house (yes, he made a friend, a portly Asian boy he met through some Internet chat room
where, according to his explanation, people discuss wizardry—personally I think Chris can do better), so I made a curry masala and Julia made a garbanzo bean salad, and we sat together on the couch, our legs intertwined beneath a blanket that she brought back from a trip to Mexico (she insists the pattern is traditional but I think it looks like a psychedelic game of Space Invaders). I suppose things weren't entirely perfect; there was a little preliminary tension. She'd bought some box wine, which I made the mistake of grumbling about, saying I prefer the bottled stuff. My distaste for box wine has nothing to do with taste. Rather, it has everything to do with the uriney sound the wine makes when it comes shooting from that plastic spout, pressurized from the weight of those three liters of pinot. The sound of wine splashing into your glass should not have that kind of oh-my-god-I-barely-made-it-to-the-bathroom-in-time urgency. Any oenophile would agree. It should be a pleasant glug, a soft trickle, relaxing. I tried explaining this to Julia, but she didn't believe me. She said my resistance to drink from cardboard has to do with reverse class resentment, snobbery as it used to be called. She's wrong. I told her I'd quaff chianti from a penny loafer, so long as its pour didn't sound like I was in the men's room at Dodger Stadium. She said I was just being vulgar and not letting her enjoy the perfectly decent wine.

So there was a little tension at the outset of our evening—some of it, I admit, my fault. Chuck had called me earlier in the day to tell me he'd compared Edie's copy of the autopsy report to others from that era and it looks pretty legit. A little annoyed with Chuck's ignorance on a matter he'd claimed to have some level of expertise in, I was perhaps a bit too short with him. By the evening I was starting to regret some of the words I'd used in ending our conversation, and maybe that
frustration is what made me a little too eager to engage Julia in a trivial but passionate debate over wine.

But then we started watching
The Lady from Shanghai
and I brought the levity back in by making fun of Orson Welles's atrocious Irish accent, which sounds like the leprechaun in the Lucky Charms commercials. The movie has a classic noir setup: An average man—Welles's hapless mick—meets a beautiful woman and pretty soon he's being made an offer, which of course will turn deadly. It's amazing to me how many murder plots in the 1940s begin with a simple proposition that will eventually turn a good man bad, as if every man in the country was certain that all it took to become a monster was a sweet-enough deal, that they were all just saps ready to be turned into sociopaths. Welles plays a sap here, for sure, but he plays the role poorly, probably because in real life he was the furthest thing from a sap; he was calculating, megalomaniacal, a perfect auteur—Welles in this role is like Mephistopheles cast as Faust. You can see just how cunning Welles was in the way he staged all his signature set pieces: the extended tracking shot that opens
Touch of Evil
, every scene in
Citizen Kane
, and of course the mirror scene in
The Lady from Shanghai
, in which Welles and Rita Hayworth are hiding in a funhouse hall of mirrors when Welles learns that Hayworth has double-crossed him, and that's when her betrayed husband shows up. Everyone's image is reflected into infinity, distorted, refracted, so when they start shooting each other no one knows if they're shooting the person or the reflection. Glass shatters, everyone's image cracks, breaks, falls apart. All those images of bisected bodies set off alarms in my head. I jumped up from the couch and ran in here and started tearing through the three-volume biography of Orson Welles, titled
Orson
Welles
, which I have here on my shelf. Volume one: In his early days as a magician, Welles specialized in
cutting women in half
and he continued doing so well into his Hollywood career. He was even known to perform the trick with his wife, Rita Hayworth. Here's a photo of a young, pre-
Kane
Welles, mid-trick, his saw poised just above a coffin like box, the poor woman's head and feet popping out each end. Here, in volume two: details about how obsessed he was with getting every image in
Lady
's mirror scene just right, and here: pictures of Welles on the set, standing next to a lady mannequin, her body torn in two in
just the same way Betty Short's body was
, the mannequin's face mutilated in
just the same way Betty Short's face was
. I knew when I first saw those pictures of Short, when I first began my research so many months ago, that they looked familiar. Here they were, the obsessive's re-creation of the murder victim. Or prefiguration? Dress rehearsal? It says here he was filming in late '46 and early '47. I must have shouted something when I read that because Julia was suddenly standing behind me asking me what was going on. I tried to explain it to her but I must have been talking too fast because she asked me to slow down so I slowed down. I hope my explanations are clearer here in print than they must have been when I was speaking to her because she still wasn't following me. I backed up and took the Dahlia crime scene photos from my desk so Julia could see the similarities, and that's when she freaked out, started yelling at me that I was still working on this, that I'd been hiding it. She got a glimpse of what was in my desk drawer (these pages) and got angry at me that I hadn't sent this off like I'd said I did. I told her that this was just a rough draft, that I had in fact sent off the final draft last month and that I had completely moved on but she was already yelling at me.
She said I was hiding things from her. She asked me what else I'd hidden from her. I said, “Nothing.” She asked to see this letter. I said nothing. She moved to reach into the drawer and I blocked her, and she hit my chest with open hands and stormed out of the room. I followed her into the kitchen and said that she was overreacting and she called me a liar and said that lying is habitual. She said her father was a liar and so she knew that where there was one lie there were hundreds, thousands, and she said that if I loved her I would admit three other lies I'd told her right here and now. I have to admit it was exhilarating. I liked her calling me a liar and I kept defending myself because I liked the way it felt when she flung it back in my face. We went back and forth for a little bit and I didn't want it to stop, like on blow when half the exhilaration is the fear that the feeling will leave just as suddenly as it arrived and the knowledge that you just have to keep upping the ante, and so I wondered what would happen if I yielded a little, confessed another lie. So I did. I said that time when we first started dating, before she'd got back on the pill, when the condom broke inside her and I said I hadn't realized it until after I'd come—I admitted that I
had
realized it, that I just didn't want to stop, that I'd come inside her knowing that I was really coming inside her. Her eyes widened, she reset her jaw in a strange and skewed way. I thought this would be it: She'd now admit a lie she'd told me and we would go back and forth, confessing our equivocations, our fabrications and deceptions, and then we'd rip each other's clothes off, buttons flying off like sparks, and I'd hoist her onto the countertop, and she'd bite my lip when we kissed, draw blood, scratch my back with her fingernails, even though she bites her nails and really can't do much scratching with those soft nubbins—but no matter, we'd fuck with
brutal abandon. But that did not happen. What happened is that she just turned and ran into the bedroom. When I realized she wasn't coming out, I came back in here, started typing while this Welles revelation was still fresh in my mind. But I should come back to this with a clearer head tomorrow.