Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice Page B

“me” I mean Paul McWeeney , and I included my phone number.
    Then I went back to the phone.
    I see the first page of this letter is dated June 3, which means I’ve been writing for over a week now. I didn’t anticipate it taking this long. I thought I would belly up to the IBM Wheelwriter 1000, set down what I needed to set down, make my case clear, refute the points Edie makes in her book, send it off to you, and that would be it. I’d be able to get on with my life. Or at least that was Julia’s theory—just sit down, get it out, and walk away. Setting aside the fact that her almost scatological description of the writing process probably reveals her true feelings about writers, I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. I did not, however, realize the depth and breadth this refutation would necessarily have to take. I have been at this every night for over a week now and have not yet come to the most damning counterevidence, the irrefutable proof that Edie’s claim about our father is entirely without merit. To be fair, though, I have been quite busy, not just writing this but trying to figure how exactly to get my hands on that specific piece of counterevidence, which is proving more elusive that I anticipated. I’m speaking, of course, of the autopsy report. As a matter of policy, autopsy reports are public record, but the LAPD never released Betty Short’s. Their official stance was that they wanted certain information to be kept secret, information that could be used to identify the killer and weed out the nut-jobs eager to file false confessions. Still, fifty years later, ithas not been made public. I have now read countless tales of reporters trying to uncover this document and they have all failed. The very notion that Edie, an amateur investigator, and one clearly driven by dubious motives, would actually be able to recover this autopsy report—which is, let us not forget, the only real, tangible evidence she uses to validate her version of things—is ludicrous. Whatever report she claims to have is clearly an act of forgery, forgery being something Edie has experience with—not just being gullible and eager to believe the work of frauds (that time she bought a plastic Rolex for me), but on the flip side of naïveté, actually forging documents herself (fake IDs, fake report cards, even fake letters of recommendation). The only thing she writes about the origins of this mysterious document is that it is “a copy made by a former L.A. County Sheriff’s Department employee” (245). If I can get my hands on this document, and prove it a fake, then my sister’s case will crumble—I’m tempted to say “like a house of cards” but the image that pops into my head is of a gingerbread house, specifically the one Edie brought home from school one hot Los Angeles December, and which I, an excitable and sugar-starved seven-year-old, accidentally crushed when I pounced on its edible everything. So: Her case will crumble like a gingerbread house. But in good time. I’ll get to all that, I will. It’s just that the more I write, the more I realize there’s more to write, since I know what I need to offer here is not simply a dry wrangling of facts: I am also a character witness, after all, someone who can attest to the honorable character of George McWeeney and the mendacious, attention-seeking character of Edie McWeeney. But I’m running out of time. I’m trying to cram this into the two-week break between spring and summer classes. Next week,I’m back in the classroom, teaching four classes during the compressed and intensive summer session, and I won’t have time for anything else. And yet why am I taking the time to write that fact instead of plowing on with my case? It’s one in the morning. I should call it a night, go to bed. Tomorrow, I’ll have a clearer mind for this. But I can’t sleep. I took