The Best of Connie Willis (24 page)

“But what would be the point? You’re a skeptic. You don’t believe in channeling. Would she honestly think she could convince you Mencken was real?”

“Maybe,” I said. “She’s obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make the spirit sound like him. And think what a coup that would be. ‘Skeptic Says Channeled Spirit Authentic’? Have you ever heard of Uri Geller? He made a splash back in the seventies by claiming to bend spoons with his mind. He got all kinds of attention when a pair of scientists from the Stanford Research Institute said it wasn’t a trick, that he was actually doing it.”

“Was he?”

“No, of course not, and eventually he was exposed as a fraud. By Johnny Carson. Geller made the mistake of going on
The Tonight Show
and doing it in front of him. He’d apparently forgotten Carson had been a magician in his early days. But the point is, he made it onto
The Tonight Show
. And what made him a celebrity was having the endorsement of reputable scientists.”

“And if you endorsed Ariaura, if you said you thought it was really Mencken, she’d be a celebrity, too.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do we do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You’re not going to try to expose her as a fake?”

“Channeling isn’t the same as bending spoons. There’s no independently verifiable evidence.” I looked at her. “It’s not worth it, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like Charles Fred. He’s making
way
too much money for a medium who only charges two hundred a performance, and he has way too many hits for a cold-reader. We need to find out how he’s doing it, and where the money’s coming from.”

“But shouldn’t we at least go to Ariaura’s next seminar to see if it happens again?” Kildy persisted.

“And have to explain to the
L.A. Times
reporter who just happens to be there why we’re so interested in Ariaura?” I said. “And why you came back three times?”

“I suppose you’re right. But what if some other skeptic endorses her? Or some English professor?”

I hadn’t thought of that. Ariaura had dangled the bait at four seminars we knew of. She might have been doing it at more, and
The Skeptical Mind
was in Seattle, Carlyle Drew was in San Francisco, and there were any number of amateur skeptics who went to spiritualist events.

And they would all know who Mencken was. He was the critical thinker’s favorite person, next to the Amazing Randi and Houdini. He’d not only been fearless in his attacks on superstition and fraud, he could write “like a bat out of hell.” And, unlike the rest of us skeptics, people had actually listened to what he said.

I’d liked him ever since I’d read about him chatting with somebody in his office at the Baltimore
Sun
and then suddenly looking out the window, saying, “The sons of bitches are gaining on us!” and frantically beginning to type. That was how I felt about twice a day, and more than once I’d muttered to myself, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?”

And I’d be willing to bet there were other people who felt the same way I did, who might be seduced by Mencken’s language and the fact that Ariaura was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.

“You’re right,” I said. “We need to look into this, but we should send somebody else to the seminar.”

“How about my publicist? She said she wanted to go again.”

“No, I don’t want it to be anybody connected with us.”

“I know just the person,” Kildy said, snatching up her cell phone. “Her name’s Riata Starr. She’s an actress.”

With a name like that, what else could she be?

“She’s between jobs right now,” Kildy said, punching in a number, “and if I tell her there’s likely to be a casting director there, she’ll definitely do it for us.”

“Does she believe in channelers?”

She looked pityingly at me. “Everyone in Hollywood believes in channelers, but it won’t matter.” She put the phone to her ear. “I’ll put a videocam on her, and a recorder,” she whispered. “And I’ll tell her an undercover job would look great on her acting résumé. Hello?” she said in a normal voice. “I’m trying to reach Riata Starr. Oh. No, no message.”

She pushed “end.” “She’s at a casting call at Miramax.” She stuck the phone in her bag, fished her keys out of its depths, and slung the bag over her shoulder. “I’m going to go out there and talk to her. I’ll be back,” she said, and went out.

Definitely too good to be true, I thought, watching her leave, and called up a friend of mine in the police department and asked him what they had on Ariaura.

He promised he’d call me back, and while I was waiting I looked for and found
The Great Monkey Trial
. I looked up Mencken in the index and started through the references to see when Mencken had left Dayton. I doubted that he would have left before the trial was over. He’d been having the time of his life, pillorying William Jennings Bryan and the creationists. Maybe the reference was to Mencken’s having left before Bryan’s death.

Bryan had died five days after the trial ended, presumably from a heart attack, but more likely from the humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Clarence Darrow, who’d put him on the stand and fired questions
at him about the Bible. Darrow had made him—and creationism—look ridiculous, or rather, he’d made himself look ridiculous. The cross-examination had been the high point of the trial, and it had killed him.

Mencken had written a deadly, unforgiving obituary of Bryan, and he might very well have been sorry he hadn’t been in at the kill, but I couldn’t imagine Ariaura knowing that, even if she had taken the trouble to look up “Boobus Americanus” and “unmitigated bilge” and research Mencken’s gravelly voice and explosive delivery.

Of course she might have read it. In this very book, even. I read the chapter on Bryan’s death, looking for references to Mencken, but I couldn’t find any. I backtracked, and there it was. And I couldn’t believe it.

Mencken hadn’t left after the trial. When Darrow’s expert witnesses had all been disallowed, he’d assumed it was all over but assorted legal technicalities and had gone back to Baltimore. He hadn’t seen Darrow’s withering cross-examination. He’d missed Bryan saying man wasn’t a mammal, missed his insisting the sun could stand still without throwing the earth out of orbit. He’d definitely left too soon. And I was willing to bet he’d never forgiven himself for it.

“But how could Ariaura know that?” Kildy said when she got back from the casting call.

“The same way I know it. She read it in a book. Did your friend Riata agree to go to the seminar?”

“Yes, she said she’d go. I gave her the Hasaka, but I’m worried they
might confiscate it, so I’ve got an appointment with this props guy at Universal who worked on the last Bond movie to see if he’s got any ideas.”

“Uh, Kildy … those gadgets James Bond uses aren’t real. It’s a movie.”

She shot me her Julia-Roberts-plus smile. “I said
ideas
. Oh, and I got Riata’s ticket. When I called, I asked if they were sold out, and the guy I talked to said, ‘Are you kidding?’ and told me they’d only sold about half what they usually do. Did you find out anything about Ariaura?”

“No,” I said. “I’m checking out some leads.”

But my friend at the police department didn’t have any dope on Ariaura, not even a possible alias. “She’s clean,” he said when he finally called back the next morning. “No mail fraud, not even a parking ticket.”

I couldn’t find anything on her in
The Skeptical Mind
or on the Scamwatch website. It looked like she made her money the good old American way, by telling her customers a bunch of nonsense and selling them chakra charts.

I told Kildy as much when she came in, looking gorgeous in a casual shirt and jeans that had probably cost as much as
The Jaundiced Eye
’s annual budget.

“Ariaura’s obviously not her real name, but so far I haven’t been able to find out what it is,” I said. “Did you get a James Bond secret videocam from your buddy Q?”

“Yes,” she said, setting the tote bag down. “And I have an idea for proving Ariaura’s a fraud.” She handed me a sheaf of papers. “Here are the transcripts of everything Mencken said. We check them against Mencken’s writings, and—” She stopped. “What?”

I was shaking my head. “This is channeling. When I wrote an exposé about Swami Vishnu Jammi’s fifty-thousand-year-old entity, Yogati, using phrases like ‘totally awesome’ and ‘funky’ and talking about cell phones, he said he ‘transliterated’ Yogati’s thoughts into his own words.”

“Oh.” Kildy bit her lip. “Rob, what about a computer match? You
know, one of those things where they compare a manuscript with Shakespeare’s plays to see if they were written by the same person.”

“Too expensive,” I said. “Besides, they’re done by universities, who I doubt would want to risk their credibility by running a check on a channeler. And even if they did match, all it would prove is that it’s Mencken’s words, not that it’s Mencken.”

“Oh.” She sat on the corner of my desk swinging her long legs for a minute, and then stood up, walked over to the bookcase, and began pulling down books.

“What are you doing?” I asked, going over to see what she was doing. She was holding a copy of Mencken’s
Heathen Days
. “I told you,” I said, “Mencken’s phrases won’t—”

“I’m not looking up his phrases,” she said, handing me
Prejudices
and Mencken’s biography. “I’m looking for questions to ask him.”

“
Him?
He’s not Mencken, Kildy. He’s a concoction of Ariaura’s.”

“I know,” she said, handing me
The Collectible Mencken
. “That’s why we need to question him—I mean Ariaura. We need to ask him—her—questions like, ‘What was your wife’s maiden name?’ and ‘What was the first newspaper you worked for?’ and—are any of these paperbacks on the bottom shelf here by Mencken?”

“No, they’re mysteries mostly. Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain.”

She quit looking at them and straightened to look at the middle shelves. “Questions like, ‘What did your father do for a living?’ ”

“He made cigars,” I said. “The first newspaper he worked for wasn’t the Baltimore
Sun
, it was the
Morning Herald
, and his wife’s maiden name was Sara Haardt. With a
d
and two
a
’s. But that doesn’t mean I’m Mencken.”

“No,” Kildy said, “but if you didn’t know them, it would prove you weren’t.”

She handed me
A Mencken Chrestomathy
. “If we ask Ariaura questions Mencken would know the answers to, and she gets them wrong, it proves she’s faking.”

She had a point. Ariaura had obviously researched Mencken fairly thoroughly to be able to mimic his language and mannerisms, and probably well enough to answer basic questions about his life, but she would hardly have memorized every detail. There were dozens of books about him, let alone his own work and his diaries. Plus
Inherit the Wind
and all the other plays and books and treatises that had been written about the Scopes trial. I’d bet there were close to a hundred Mencken things in print, and that didn’t include the stuff he’d written for the Baltimore
Sun
.

And if we could catch her not knowing something Mencken would know, it would be a simple way to prove conclusively that she was faking, and we could move on to the much more important question of why.
If
Ariaura would let herself be questioned.

“How do you plan to get Ariaura to agree to this?” I said. “My guess is she won’t even let us in to see her.”

“If she doesn’t, then that’s proof, too,” she said imperturbably.

“All right,” I said, “but forget about asking what Mencken’s father did. Ask what he drank. Rye, by the way.”

Kildy grabbed a notebook and started writing.

“Ask what the name of his first editor at the
Sun
was,” I said, picking up
The Great Monkey Trial
. “And ask who Sue Hicks was.”

“Who was she?” Kildy asked.

“He. He was one of the defense lawyers at the Scopes trial.”

“Should we ask him—her what the Scopes trial was about?”

“No, too easy. Ask him …” I said, trying to think of a good question. “Ask him what he ate while he was there covering the trial, and ask him where he sat in the courtroom.”

“Where he sat?”

“It’s a trick question. He stood on a table in the corner. Oh, and ask where he was born.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that too easy? Everyone knows he’s from Baltimore.”

“I want to hear him say it.”

“Oh,” Kildy said, nodding. “Did he have any kids?”

I shook my head. “He had a sister and two brothers. Gertrude, Charles, and August.”

“Oh, good, those aren’t names you’d be able to come up with just by guessing. Did he have any hobbies?”

“He played the piano. Ask about the Saturday Night Club. He and a bunch of friends got together to play music.”

We worked on the questions the rest of the day and the next morning, writing them down on index cards so they could be asked out of order.

“What about some of his sayings?” Kildy asked.

“You mean like, ‘Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’? No. They’re the easiest thing of all to memorize, and no real person speaks in aphorisms.”

Kildy nodded and bent her beautiful head over the book again. I looked up Mencken’s medical history—he suffered from ulcers and had had an operation on his throat to remove his uvula—and went out and got us sandwiches for lunch and made copies of Mencken’s “History of the Bathtub” and a fake handbill he’d passed out during the Scopes trial announcing “a public demonstration of healing, casting out devils, and prophesying” by a made-up evangelist. Mencken had crowed that not a single person in Dayton had spotted the fake.

Kildy looked up from her book. “Did you know Mencken dated Lillian Gish?” she asked, sounding surprised.