Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (29 page)

I rang the doorbell and was surprised by its obviously digital chime. It had been so long since I'd stood on the doorstep of a stranger, rung the bell, waited nervously for them to answer, almost hoping they wouldn't just so I'd have a guilt-free excuse to retreat. I remembered collecting for my paper route when I was a kid, and something about this experience made me feel that same childlike sense of vulnerability: I was on someone else's property, anxiously invading someone else's space, hoping they would accept me. By the time Cooley answered the door, I was feeling so sheepish about my mission that my slouch must have taken two inches off my height. This was exacerbated when I saw just how absurdly tall Cooley really is. I hadn't noticed it on TV, but he's well over six feet. Instead of feeling intimidated, though, I felt an indignation that made me stand up straight, suddenly combative. Writing fiction, I've always felt, should be a short man's game. It's something for the underdogs, those of us who know that the world was not made for us. And yet I am consistently shocked by the number of novelists I encounter who are Cooley's height or taller. These lumbering giants bump into things, have no sense of their own body's cruel imposition on the world around them. This is all backward. It is the fiction writer's job to be acutely aware of how little space he does take up, of the cruel imposition the world makes on him. Making art is
something one should turn to only after serial failure with the opposite sex, and this is simply not something tall men are familiar with. I have thought about this a great deal and was willing to explain it all to Cooley right there on his doorstep, but when he glared at me, his eyebrows flaring like two animals bristling to fight, and bellowed, “What are you soliciting, sir? Something salacious, I hope?” it snapped me back to my mission.

“Mr. Cooley,” I said. “I have something very important I need discuss with you. It's about the Black Dahlia. I have new evidence.” I held up my satchel. “May I come in?”

He relaxed his brow and lowered his head toward me. “The Dahlia? My dark damsel. Yes, come in, sir.”

He stepped aside to let me into his living room and that's when I realized that he was wearing his fedora, the same one I'd seen on TV, even though he'd surely just been lounging around his home. He was also wearing a pinstriped suit, so wrinkled that the pinstripes were squiggles, his whole body a crumpled-up piece of lined paper.

His living room looked like it smelled, like the underside of a rock. Sofas that looked like large game animals—shot, dead, deflated—cluttered the room, but each one was covered in so many old newspapers and file boxes that they were no longer functional as sitting furniture. Cooley closed the door behind me and the room went dim.

“How did you find me, amateur shamus?” Cooley was suddenly in front of me, standing too close, though his tone was inquisitive and eager now, not threatening. “Unless you are no amateur? Do you have an affiliation? A badge?”

“Um. No.”

“Wonderful. Institutions of law enforcement have become lackadaisical, laconic—no, sorry, I mean lugubrious. It is time that real power be placed in the hands of the individuals. When the night is dark, the dumb will wait for sunrise, but the enlightened man will strike a match. Who said that?”

“I don't know.”

“Good. It's probably original, then. I'm going to write it down. I should probably change ‘enlightened' to something else, though. Might seem like a cheap pun. Puns are the lowest form of wit.”

“Right. Samuel Johnson.”

“No,” he said, suddenly angry. “Thomas Cooley.” He leaned in close to me and I could smell—or rather feel—a warm, chemical halitosis, and he said, “How did you find me?”

I hesitated. But he didn't seem paranoid. He seemed excited. “A private investigator,” I said.

There was a little smile, quickly concealed. “Really. Fascinating.” He idly smoothed the front of his suit. “Follow me.”

I followed him down a hallway, its walls covered in framed copies of his reviews, some of which, I noticed as I passed, were not positive.

I needed to focus, needed to turn my thoughts back to Welles, those production stills from
The Lady from Shanghai
, all those passages from his bios that confirmed his emotional instability, his violence, all those clips from
Macbeth
. My opening remarks would set the course for my entire case—they needed to be good.

He opened a door and led me into a dark room. He flipped on a light, but the light didn't stay still. There was a single bulb on a ceiling-hung cord, and as it swung back and forth it stretched our shadows all
over the walls, elastic and alive, creatures separate from us. That's when I saw what was covering the walls: He'd painted a single horizontal black stripe around all four walls of the windowless room. Pictures, note cards, and newspaper clippings were tacked to the wall above and below this line, each item connected to a specific point, along with a date. As far as I could tell, his timeline started just to the right of the door at 1924 (“Elizabeth Short is born,” read one note), continued around the room to the other side of the door, where it ended at 1983 (“
Dahlia
is published”). In between, I saw the usual crime scene photos of Short, the usual mug shots, but his timeline was more elaborate and detailed than mine—I felt a sharp pang of inadequacy—and became a dizzying web of connections when I saw that he'd taken string to connect points on one side of the room to the other, easily a hundred separate pieces of string connecting disparate points on his timeline, different parts of the room, more note cards dangling like ornaments from seemingly random points on the string. Standing in the middle of the room, in the middle of the web, I felt like we were caught in a cat's cradle.

“I've been investigating this case for nearly three decades,” Cooley said, “and I'm always so excited to find another Blackhead.”

“A what?” I squinted at the pores in his nose.

“A Blackhead, a Dahlia Devotee, the bearers of her torch. There are more and more coming out of the woodwork these days—it's marvelous. Tell me: Even though born and raised in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Short is buried in what city?”

“Oakland, California,” I said, thrilled and relieved to know the answer.

“Correct! In the 1975 made-for-TV movie
Who Is the Black Dahlia?
. . . who played James Richardson?”

I panicked. I'd seen the film. I knew who played Betty Short, it was Lucie Arnaz, daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, but James Richardson? I could see the actor's face, his amiable smile contrasted by his demonic eyebrows. But his name? I must have glanced around the room without realizing it, because suddenly Cooley grabbed my face with both hands and shouted, “Don't cheat! Don't look at the timeline!”

His hands were surprisingly soft. “I don't know,” I said.

He gave a quick and curt exhale, a kind of respirative punctuation, and his moustache hairs quivered. “One more,” he said, not letting go of my face. “Best two out of three.” He gave a long blink, and said, “As a child, Elizabeth Short had what condition?”

I thought I knew this one, but wasn't sure. He seemed to have worded the question in an intentionally ambiguous way. I took a breath. “Asthma?”

He let go of my face. The hand-sweat he'd left on my cheeks felt cooled by the air.

“Correct,” he said. He took a step back but didn't take his eyes off me. “You say you have some new evidence. I've been contemplating some new developments as well. Here!” He tried to walk to the corner of the room, but got tangled in his own web of strings, so he had to take a moment to untangle himself and duck under the string in order to point to one spot on the timeline: 1952, where a dense batch of evidence was clustered, crime scene photos I didn't recognize. “Rachel Cooley,” he said. “My mother, my Dahlia before I even knew who the Dahlia was. Murdered one nihilistic night by some pernicious predator. Her killer was never found. Look!” He was studying the grainy crime scene photo tacked to the wall, his nose an inch from the black-and-white glossy.
“The arrangement of the legs! Just like the Dahlia. Look!” He was pointing so emphatically at the photo, he seemed to be trying to push through it, to enter it. “The lacerations on the breasts. Just like the Dahlia. The vile villain's vicious violation has yet to be avenged!”

I recognized that phrase, or at least part of it. Vile villain, or something like that, had appeared in the climax of
Dahlia
. But it was not just his absurd phrasings that seemed hacked from his own work—the fedora, the crumpled pinstriped suit: They were from that novel too, worn by his detective-hero. I looked around the room, looked around the inside of this man's brain, while he continued his occasionally redundant alliterations (I'm pretty sure he actually said “fiendish fiend” at one point), and I felt the need to escape. Perhaps this man had succeeded in pushing himself into that picture, succeeded in becoming two-dimensional, black-and-white, one of his own improbable characters, stranded in another time. But that still didn't change the fact that I had to make my case, didn't change the fact that his judgment on the matter would be crucial. My evidence-filled satchel was in my hands. My spine was straight. Cooley was getting louder. There was a dog barking somewhere, a man yelling at a dog. I began to hear a ringing in my ears. I closed my eyes, saw dim, bruise-colored phosphenes marble and gel beneath my eyelids. I tried to think of my opening comments, but the only words in my head were
If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him
. “The hellacious horror!” Cooley was shouting. “The harlequin and the harlot!”
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it
. “We are the avengers! We are not the memory keepers—we are the memory makers!” I opened my eyes. The old man had gotten tangled in the strings
and was yanking them violently from the walls. The pictures, the note cards, the newspaper clippings, which had been clipped to the strings, were flying into the air, spinning back down. He crumpled one scrap of paper, threw it to the ground, a crash-landed dove.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon
.

Later, after I had left Cooley's house and headed for Pinz, having not said a word about Welles or my father, having just slipped out while Cooley had run off to another room to find one of Betty Short's shoes that he'd recently bought from a collector, I was just trying to concentrate on the seven-ten split I'd made for myself, when someone said, “Mr. McWeeney?” At first, I didn't realize it was a human voice. I thought my brain was simply taking the chaotic din of the bowling ally—the relentless crashes of balls and pins, the hundred shouted, beer-impassioned conversations, the pings and alarms from the arcade—and trying, as it often does, to find a pattern, a familiar sound, in this case the sound of a student with her hand raised. But then I heard it again, louder: “Mr. McWeeney, is that you?” I turned, ball in hand, and saw a large woman in overalls, middle-aged, holding the hand of a little boy in a conical party hat. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought it was you. It's Darlene Hendricks. I took your English class at COLA—oh, must have been a few years ago now.”

“Darlene Hendricks,” I said, my tone as flat as a roll call.

“You don't remember me, do you?” She didn't seem saddened, just oddly excited by the opportunity to tell me who she was. “I was having trouble with a paper for my history class and I brought it to you and you helped me with it even though it wasn't for your class.”

She raised her eyebrows, as if to tell me it was my cue to speak, my line. But I had nothing.

She continued: “I was stuck trying to make sense of these two different interpretations of the Great Depression, and I remember something you said to me.”

I tried to smile in a way that would suggest I remembered this without actually committing myself. I looked down at the boy at her side and realized two things: First, judging from his flat and affectless smile, he was probably mentally retarded.

“You said that history isn't so much about facts as it is a battle for authorship.”

And second, I realized I was probably smiling the exact same way.

“I got an A on that paper,” Darlene said. “I wanted to go back and tell you and thank you, but I didn't get the paper back until the semester was over and I wasn't around anymore because I had to drop my classes after that 'cause Dominic here needed me around.”

I was so desperate to remember this woman that I began forcibly inserting her into random classroom memories, grafting her face onto other students' bodies. What did she want me to say here? I'm not accustomed to students coming up to me like this, am unclear on the protocol.

“I've been wanting to go back for a long time now, finish my associate's. Grant's going to—Grant's my husband—he's going to be working from home more now, so I might be able to take a class or two. I'll be sure to look for your name on the schedule!”

As I struggled to think of something to say, I remembered Cooley tangled in those strings.

“Mr. McWeeney? Are you okay?”

The bowling ball suddenly felt impossibly heavy. I bent down
and put it in my bag, then said, “Yes. I'm well, thank you. It's great to see you, Darlene.”