Any Resemblance to Actual Persons

KEVIN ALLARDICE

A NOVEL

COUNTERPOINT PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Kevin Allardice

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Allardice, Kevin.

Any resemblance to actual persons : a novel / Kevin Allardice.

pages cm

1.
  
Memory—Fiction. 2.
  
Psychological fiction.
  
I. Title.

PS3601.L4149A36 2013

813›.6—dc23

2013014414

ISBN 978-1-61902-257-7

Cover design by Faceout Studios

Interior design by Domini Dragoone

Counterpoint Press

1919 Fifth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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“Choose a suitable design and hold to it.”

—Strunk & White's
The Elements of Style

“Hold fast . . . ”

—
Macbeth
, Act 4, scene 3

Contents

Any Resemblance to Actual Persons

Author's Note

Paul McWeeney

344 Lawn Street

Los Angeles, CA 90028

June 3, 1996

New Wye Press

625 East 68th Street

New York, NY 10012

Dear New Wye Press, True Crime Division,

I am writing in regard to a book that you are set to publish this fall,
The Black Dahlia Dossier: Hollywood's Most Notorious Killer Revealed
by Edith (Edie) McWeeney. My name is Paul McWeeney. I am Edie's brother, and I have read a galley copy of the book, sent to me by Oliver Kelly, Edie's current (and my former) literary agent. I also have a very early draft in manuscript form, and, although I see that only superficial aspects of the book have been revised since then (which does not speak well of your editors), I will be addressing the content of—and any pagination mentioned herein refers to—the galley copy. First of all, I am not sure how much crossover there is between people in the New Wye
true crime wing and the folks in the literary wing, but if my name looks familiar, I should admit up front (in an effort to clear any and all accusations of bias from the argument I must make here) that over the years, I have corresponded, by way of Oliver, with your literary brothers down the hall. They have read, or at least used as doorstops, the manuscripts of my novels
Season of All Natures
and
Rarer Monsters
, and I, in turn, have read their dear-johns telling me, by way of Oliver, that I have a strong voice but that my work lacks narrative momentum and that it's just not right for them at this time, considering the market for literary fiction. Fair enough. I have not been all that impressed with their catalogue anyway. Since I imagine you guys in the true crime wing are of a different breed—comfortable with your low-to middle-brow output—and no doubt a little annoyed with those literary boys down the hall, just as a wayward youth is annoyed with his high-achieving older sibling, I assume you won't mind a little friendly trash-talking. It will bond us, this mutual contempt for the boys down the hall, those Eustace Tilleys all dressed in tweeds and monocles, their blood blue, their pens quivered. Anyway. I did not know until recently that New Wye Press even had a true crime imprint.

As I said, you are set to publish my sister's book this fall, a fortuitous date, I'm sure you know, as it anticipates the fiftieth anniversary of the infamous murder that Edie claims to solve, that of Elizabeth “Betty” Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia. The advance copy of her book, which I have here on my desk, is complete with dust jacket copy, and I see that you are not concerned with giving away the ending, since you actually name, right here on the back of the book, the person she claims is the real killer. I suppose this “spoiler” goes to show that the
conceits of the true crime genre are different from those of the murder mystery, and I was foolish to assume otherwise, although it's clear to me that, structurally, my sister's book is heavily informed by Agatha Christie's Poirot books, many of which I remember her poring over one summer at Lake Tahoe. My sister, for all the chaos of her life, is someone who has always been attracted to art that offers tidiness, solutions, order, so it makes sense that she'd try to emulate the British approach to murder. Her prose, however, is entrenched entirely in the American pulp tradition, which prized the grotesque, the lurid, and offered a powerfully ominous antidote to postwar optimism. If I were teaching this book, I could spend quite a lot of time on the tension between her sentences and her narrative. But I'm not teaching this book; I'm refuting it.

I understand perfectly well that you, as the publisher, make no claim to authority here. You are not the judge, my sister not the plaintiff, and publication not the definitive verdict. I understand that in releasing this book to impressionable readers, you are not claiming it represents a fair weighing of the facts. In short, I understand that you are not responsible for the claims it makes. Only my sister is. I understand that your motives here have nothing to do with truth and justice, and everything to do with money. A sensational book that makes a wildly erroneous claim will certainly sell. So I will try to couch my appeal for rationality and justice in monetary terms. I have consulted a lawyer—or actually, a colleague of mine who wrote her doctoral dissertation on media law, a course of study that one could argue (and she has, repeatedly) is far more rigorous than law school—and she has assured me that if you go through with publishing
The Black Dahlia Dossier
,
there would be sufficient grounds for a civil suit against you for libel and defamation. I'm sure you know that while the publicity surrounding a trial like that would certainly mean increased interest in the book, the ultimate cost to you, when I win, would be far greater than revenue from the book's sales.

I do not want to begin on a note of animosity. I simply need to make clear the stakes. But make no mistake: This is a cease and desist letter.

To get straight to it, then: My sister, Edie McWeeney, claims in this book that in January of 1947, a young woman named Betty Short—who would in short time be nicknamed by the media the Black Dahlia—was murdered by none other than George McWeeney, our late father. She claims to offer an eyewitness account of the murder itself, as well as “irrefutable” evidence not only of the murder but of a cover-up by the LAPD. She claims that George McWeeney had the motive, means, and opportunity.

I will disprove all of this. Our father did no such thing.

My sister is not of sound mind, and this should disqualify her from having a book published.

Since we're dealing with questionable claims of irrefutability here, I feel we should start with some truly irrefutable facts. A quick overview of the participants is necessary. My father, George Wendell McWeeney, was born on August 20, 1914, in Canton, Ohio. He attended the Ohio State University, class of 1936. That same year, he was accepted to Yale School of Medicine and moved to New Haven to begin his medical studies. In 1938, he took a leave of absence from medical school (which would turn out to be permanent) and enrolled in Yale School of
Drama. In June 1941, a month after receiving his MFA in playwriting, he married my and Edie's mother, Iris Lowell, and moved her to Los Angeles where he'd secured a job writing for the then-radio (soon-to-be TV) show
Rampart
. Edie was born on October 29, 1941. And on March 14, 1947, I was born. Edie and I had happy childhoods.

These are facts. All of the above can be verified, proven on paper. It is important to begin here, on neutral ground. In my composition classes, I tell my students that academic debates must always begin at a place of agreement. Author A and Author B must first agree on the problem before they can disagree on the solution. But perhaps the parallel doesn't quite hold, since these facts do not present a problem. I suppose the problem, then, is this: On January 15, 1947, passersby discovered the gruesomely murdered body of twenty-two-year-old Betty Short in a vacant Los Angeles lot. The police never found her murderer, but nearly a half century later my sister found evidence she claims links our father to the victim.

But I should start elsewhere. I should explain a thing or two about Edie as I know her today, explain how this book of hers came to be, as I think it will go a long way in shedding some light on its disturbing and erroneous content.

For her entire adult life, Edie has been something of a transient. She moves somewhere, quickly develops relationships, both platonic and not, of a rather disturbing intensity. Then those relationships get destroyed for reasons she is always evasive about later, and she moves on to the next city, repeats. (I always envied her ease in forging friendships—even if they are always toxic—and when I was younger I thought that's what adulthood would be like. It isn't.) This lifestyle of hers—and
as I just typed it, I realized how suspicious the word “lifestyle” now sounds, how it seems to imply, with a kind of right-wing condescension, deviant sex and depraved drug-use, and while we can safely assume her travels have included these activities, I do not mean to use the word “lifestyle” in that way, just to be clear—this lifestyle of hers will occasionally bring her back to Los Angeles, where I still live, just over the hill from the house we grew up in, and she will kick up a fuss about something; she'll stay at my place for a while, borrow money, complain about some crazy ex of hers who's trying to kill her. This whole book project of hers is simply the latest fuss she's kicked up. Up until last year, I hadn't seen her for quite some time. I would think about her on occasion but was content to assume that she was managing to take care of herself, or, to be more honest about where her true skills lie, managing to find someone to take care of her. And then our aunt Paige passed away, and Edie showed up.

I should back up again. Aunt Paige was our father's sister. She was seven years George's junior, and in 1948, after her husband died in an accident in a Coca-Cola bottling plant, she moved to L.A. for some familial support from her older brother. Their parents had both passed away by then, and Paige was adrift. (Please keep the adrift female relatives straight; there won't be too many of them.) When Aunt Paige came west, she stayed in our pool house—the same pool house where Edie sets that horrific and entirely fictitious death scene in her manuscript—but by the time I was old enough to form memories, Paige had moved into an apartment in Marina Del Rey and was teaching kindergarten. I remember her as a short, round woman in series of colorful sweaters, which she wore year-round, even when the dry, hot Santa Ana winds made
every housewife contemplate murder. (That last bit there I paraphrased from a Raymond Chandler story.) I remember her coming to our place in Van Nuys to babysit, dispensing hard mint candies that reminded me of the dentist, sitting by the pool in Cadillac-fin sunglasses, watching me and Edie splash, cheerily turning bits of our profound-sounding kid-speak into songs (“the sky is low” is how I apparently described an overcast day and she quickly set it to a swinging Bobby Darin–style melody).