Any Resemblance to Actual Persons Read Online Free Page B

partner, a sidekick. The Nolan of the radio show was so outsized anyway, so superhuman, that in order to render him in the visual spectrum, he needed to be two men. Nolan was now the brains of the operation, while his new partner, Det. Rob Hawkes, was the muscle. Together they delivered on the promise of the radio show, giving audiences the perfect model of postwar masculinity: Nolan coolly shrugging off the ideals of brawn, ironically commenting on them, while Hawkes reconfirmed their necessity in such a violent world. Besides, now Det. Nolan had someone to talk to. On the radio, he would just soliloquize to himself, and on TV this looked rather lunatic. So that was my father’s contribution; he split the original Nolan in two, separating the brain from the brawn, and it ensured Rampart ’s place in TV history.
    In her book, Edie mentions this Nolan-Hawkes bifurcation only once, almost in passing on page 170, in order to suggest that since it occurred about a year after the Black Dahlia murder, our father, still traumatized by what he’d—allegedly—done, was in effect “splitting” his own psyche, separating the superego (Nolan) from the id (Hawkes). It’s a cute theory but smacks of high school–level psychoanalytic lit crit and presumes that Dad saw the character of Nolan as an extension of himself, which is utterly ridiculous. Nolan was not a stand-in for Dad; he was obviously an expression of the conflicted role governmental authority played in the shifting postwar nexus of public and private life. A grad student who interviewed Aunt Paige a couple years agowrote as much in his master’s thesis; I have a copy of it, and it is far more incisive than Edie’s reductive Freudian pronouncements.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to get to the specifics of Edie’s claims later. I will. I have three full boxes of evidence, each box labeled evidence , beside my desk. It’s all sitting right here, waiting to be unpacked before the jury, my sturdy blockade of justice. (The one hole in the dam, of course, is the autopsy report. Still need to track that down. And I will.) But before I get to all of that, I do need to get back to that day in our Van Nuys house, before Edie met Rory and concocted this whole murder theory, back when she was just a slightly lost middle-aged woman who, like me, missed her dead dad and was now pulling her huge suitcase (it had wheels and a leash) into her childhood bedroom.
    â€œFuck,” she said.
    Her room had not gotten the preservationist treatment that the rest of the house had received. Aunt Paige had apparently used Edie’s old room for storage. Boxes were stacked everywhere, each one labeled in black marker: Taxes 1989, Taxes 1990, Taxes 1991/Camping Stuff , and one that was labeled, simply and inexplicably, Cats . I counted three sewing machines and eight lamps.
    â€œShe hated me,” Edie said.
    I chose not to remind Edie of the reasons Paige had to hate her, most notably Edie’s 1972 Emmy theft, and said, “She just needed the space is all.”
    Paige’s old clothes covered the twin bed in the corner, and I helped clear them off.
    â€œI bet your bedroom is in pristine childhood condition,” Edie said. “Of course it is. You were the heir to everything George McWeeney.Don’t you think it’s a little sick? Like she was trying to keep you a child? I mean, she never could acknowledge us as adults. I don’t think she ever really saw me, like really saw me, you know? Even when we were kids, she showered you with attention and completely ignored me.”
    (On an impulse I just looked up Transformers: The Movie [1986, dir. Nelson Shin] in Fleeber’s Encyclopedia of Film , which sits on a shelf near my desk, and it turns out that the voice that sounds like Orson Welles actually is Orson Welles. I’m a bit baffled and troubled by this. Before I took up this project, compiling