Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (30 page)

She seemed to take that as a concluding statement. Her smile became a little pursed. She wished me well, then said, “C'mon, Dom,” and scooted her child back to the arcade.

Dear New Wye Press, True Crime Division, I lied to the very kind Darlene Hendricks. I am not well. I need rest. I need a lot of rest. I have little pinprick pains in my chest and tremors in my hands. The penguin-shaped humidifier isn't helping my nosebleeds. I want to be rid of this. I have these two hundred plus pages on my desk, stacked beside my IBM Wheelwriter 1000, and when I mail it off to you, when it is finally out of my hands, when I've done everything I can do, then I'll be able to sleep. I set out, three months ago, to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my father did not kill Betty Short as my sister claims he did, though I am no longer certain that I have provided that proof. Perhaps all I can offer is myself as a character witness. Perhaps all I can really say is that my father was not the monster my sister remembers. I think I have done that. I hope I have done that. I will forever remember him as the man who watered Mom's geraniums while wearing a suit, so worried over the instructions he couldn't even see he wasn't following them. Certainly my memory of our father is more human, more believable, than Edie's. Just look—more proof. Here. Page 97. I mention him being distraught at the news of Mom's death. He's locked in his office, being distraught. See? Human emotions. There's more. On page 204: I remember him saying that funny thing at the dinner party. Humor: humanity. More. Page 214. A week after Mom's death, locked in his office. Page 235. He smiles when we got our passport photos. A
smile: human. And there's more. Because he's in here somewhere, he has to be, my version of him, because I knew him, I did, I knew him, I knew him. He's all over this thing, he's everywhere. See him.

Sure, I suppose that thing on page 214 is also Edie's memory, but I can remember it too—I was there, she says I was, down the hall, watching TV, so I can remember it too. I can't, however, provide any cross-memory confirmation of the last hundred or so pages of Edie's book, the part that covers her early adult years—the addictions, the endless string of abusive men, that part about searching for the child she gave up for adoption—I wasn't there for any of that, and it's of no real concern here. But there is just one small part toward the end I find myself going back to. It's in the second-to-last chapter when she is offering a kind of memory collage of our mother, interwoven with scene-snippets of how she coped in the months following our mother's death. A couple weeks after getting that tattoo, she was desperate to get out of the house and stayed on a friend's couch down in Long Beach until she could find an apartment of her own. She briefly mentions one night that she took me down there to hang out with her and her friend and got me drunk for the first time at the age of fourteen and at the end of the night she slept on the couch and

Paulie slept on the loveseat. He was short enough that it wasn't cramped for him, but when I woke up in the morning he was sleeping next to me on the couch, curled around my back, like we were about to tandem-jump from an airplane, his arms wrapped desperately around me. (312)

I just want to tell her that I remember that night. And I've been trying to tell her that. I've been calling her—I think she's still staying at Rory's—but no one answers. There used to be an answering machine, but now the phone just rings and rings and rings, little sonar blips sent out into the universe, bumping into nothing, refusing to echo anything back. I've been calling for hours now. Nothing. If she could just answer, I'd tell her that I remember that night. I'd say, I remember you picking me up at our house in Van Nuys, saying it was an early Christmas gift, one free night, and I remember the drive down to Long Beach, seeing that strangely beautiful wash of coppery lights in the expanse of industry just south of L.A. I remember your friend's apartment, the plywood-and-cinderblock bookshelves and mismatched furniture, the realization that life could be improvised in such a way. I remember sitting there while the two of you smoked a lot of cigarettes, drank a lot of beers, and you kept handing me beers, and they made me feel good, and I loved you for letting me drink them. I remember at the end of the night, when your friend went to bed, we lay awake for a little while longer, you on the couch and me on the loveseat, and like a lullaby you started humming the tune to “Alouette” and I was apparently drunk enough to start singing along in a whisper: “Alouette, jump into the water. Alouette, jump into the rain.” You stopped humming, looked over at me with a teasing smile, and made me repeat the lyrics. I did, and you laughed. “I didn't realize Mom's French was
that
bad,” you said. “You've misheard it all these years. It's not about water or rain or whatever you thought. Listen.
Alouette, gentile alouette. Alouette, je te plumerai
. It's about a kid, singing a nice little song to a bird,” you said, as if narrating a bedtime story. “And he says to the bird, ‘Pretty
bird, I'm going to pluck out your feathers. And I'm going to pluck off your head. And I'm going to break your beak. And I'm going to break your neck. And lastly, pretty bird, I'm going to break your wings.'” You rolled over, your back to me, and said, “Still a pretty song, though,” and you hummed the tune for a few more bars, the melody skipping lazily through your voice. At the end of the song, you said, “Now go to sleep,” and I did.

I remember waking up in the baby-blue light of dawn, cramped and thirsty, and getting up to get a glass of water. When I came back into the living room, I thought I could no longer feel the beers. You had some room beside you on the couch. Your frizzy brown hair had been pushed straight back, as if blowing behind you in some dream of running you were having, finally exposing your ears, delicate seashells of skin, and the Braille of moles on your neck. I sat down next to you and listened to the distant surf of your steady breathing. I'd never really slept in the same bed with anyone, and I often thought how strange that must feel. How could you ever get to sleep with another body right there beside to you, uncomfortably close? So I lay down next to you and stared up at the cottage-cheese ceiling. I could feel the warmth of your skin and closed my eyes and imagined you glowing with Technicolor body heat, blurry and bright. You stirred a little, a dreamy twitch of the arms, the movements dimmed through layers of consciousness, then suddenly you turned your body toward me, moving your arm under mine, your head onto my chest, instinctively taking the body next to you to be someone else, someone who could protect you. I reciprocated, with the same lazy ease you had, moving my arm over your shoulders and back, exposed by your tank top. Still asleep, you
reacted, nuzzling my neck, the anonymous comfort of another body. I was just going to stay like that for another couple of minutes, then get up and go back to the loveseat. But the next thing I knew, it was late morning and the sun's rays coming through the window were sharp and painful. I let my eyes adjust. You were no longer there.

I have to water the lawn now. When Chris and Julia come back, I want it to look nice for them.

Love,
                  

Paulie
              

Author's Note

This is a work of fiction—filled, as many works of fiction are, with (perhaps ethically dubious) appropriations of just about anything its author has encountered over the years, including anecdotes both personal and journalistic. In appropriating—or should I say commandeering?—any given “fact,” I have, more often than not, dressed it up, slapped a wig on it, told it to do a funny dance. To still call that poor little fact a fact after such a performance is questionable. In other words, any resemblance to actual anything is not so much coincidental as it is incidental.

That being said, all information, no matter how inconsequential, has its source, and even though a novelist's sources are always, at least to a certain extent, unwitting, I should still name a few of them. The following books provided both initial inspiration for some of Paul's troubles as well as specific “facts” (see above) with which to populate them. Most obviously, there was
Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius
for Murder
by Steve Hodel (revised edition, Harper, 2006) and
Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer
by Janice Knowlton with Michael Newton (Pocket Books, 1995), but also
Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder
by Mary Pacios (AuthorHouse, 2007), and
The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder that Transfixed Los Angeles
by Donald H. Wolfe (Regan, 2005).

Although Paul cites many sources, he is not the best researcher, and he is often inaccurate, or at least his sources differ from mine. For example, when he cites
Hollywood Citizen News
about the “17-jewel Croton [wristwatch] with a leather bound, steel snap band,” he might or might not be correct, but I got that from Hodel, page 266, and Wolfe, page 15. When he quotes William Fowler's memoir as the source of the quote, “[James Richardson] shared William Randolph Hearst's penchant for sensational news and . . . could be inhuman,” he's probably correct, but I found it in Wolfe, page 31. Paul claims Ben Hecht's diagnosis of the killer as “a dyke lesbian with a hyper-thyroid problem” originally appeared in
The Herald-Examiner
, but I doubt that's accurate; I found it in Hodel, page 182. When Paul cites
The Boston Globe
as the source of the quote “death on auto rides” (vis-à-vis Frances Cochran), he is, once again, probably wrong; for my part, I found that in Knowlton, page 86. Paul does not cite his source for the quote from Stephen Wolak's letter, “Infatuation is sometimes mistakenly accepted for true love,” but I can: Hodel, page 387, Wolfe, page 88, and Knowlton, page 98. And, finally, while Paul might be correct in citing
The Examiner
as the source for Mary H. Unkefer saying that Short “loved to sit so [the tattoo] would show,” I found that in Wolfe, page 41.

There are also a few passages in which Paul quotes, perhaps unintentionally, me. A handful of small moments during his adventure in the Los Angeles County Morgue first found articulation in my short story “Kamikaze June,” published in
River Styx
, 35
^th
Anniversary double issue #81/82.

Finally, I am absurdly grateful to: Nathaniel Jacks at InkWell Management; Jack Shoemaker and everyone at Counterpoint; early readers Memory Peebles Risinger and Hilary Zaid; Diana Thow, and my parents.

Thank you for reading.