The Best of Connie Willis (26 page)

“Or what he got for Christmas when he was ten,” Kildy said. “We need to find a question Mencken would absolutely know the answer to, and if he doesn’t, it proves it’s Ariaura.”

“And if he does, it still doesn’t prove it’s Mencken. Right?”

“I’ll go talk to Riata about getting a private audience,” she said, stuffed the transcripts in her tote, and put on her sunglasses. “And I’ll pick up the videotape. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Right, Kildy?” I insisted.

“Right,” she said, her hand on the door. “I guess.”

After Kildy left, I called up a computer-hacker friend of mine and put him to work on the problem and then phoned a guy I knew in the English department at UCLA.

“Inquiries about Mencken?” he said. “Not that I know of, Rob. You might try the journalism department.”

The guy at the journalism department said, “Who?” and, when I explained, suggested I call Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

And what had I been thinking? Kildy said Ariaura had started doing Mencken in Seattle. I needed to be checking there, or in Salem or—where had she gone after that? Sedona. I spent the rest of the day (and evening) calling bookstores and reference librarians in all three places. Five of them responded “Who?” and all of them asked me how to spell “Mencken,” which might or might not mean they hadn’t heard the name lately, and only seven of the thirty bookstores stocked any books on him. Half of those were the latest Mencken biography, which for an excited moment I thought might have answered the question, “Why Mencken?”—the title of it was
Skeptic and Prophet—
but it had only been out two weeks. None of the bookstores could give me any information on orders or recent purchases, and the public libraries couldn’t give me any information at all.

I tried their electronic card catalogues, but they only showed currently checked-out books. I called up the L.A. Public Library’s catalogue. It showed four Mencken titles checked out, all from the Beverly Hills branch.

“Which looks promising,” I told Kildy when she came in the next morning.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “I’m the one who checked them out, to compare the transcripts against.” She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her designer tote. “I need to talk to you about the transcripts. I found something interesting. I know,” she said, anticipating my objection, “you said all it proved was that Ariaura—”

“Or whoever’s feeding this stuff to her.”

She acknowledged that with a nod. “—all it proved was that whoever was doing it was reading Mencken, and I agree, but you’d expect her to quote him back verbatim, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Randall Mars’s Lincoln and his “Four score and seven …”

“But she doesn’t. Look, here’s what she said when we asked him about William Jennings Bryan: ‘Bryan! I don’t even want to hear that mangy old mountebank’s name mentioned. That scoundrel had a malignant hatred of science and sense.’ ”

“And he didn’t say that?”

“Yes and no. Mencken called him a ‘walking malignancy’ and said he was ‘mangy and flea-bitten’ and had ‘an almost pathological hatred of all learning.’ And the rest of the answers, and the things she said at the seminars, are like that, too.”

“So she mixed and matched his phrases,” I said, but what she’d found was disturbing. Someone trying to pull off an impersonation would stick to the script, since any deviations from Mencken’s actual words could be used as proof it wasn’t him.

And the annotated list Kildy handed me was troubling in another way. The phrases hadn’t been taken from one or two sources. They were from all over the map—“complete hooey” from
Minority Report
, “buncombe” from
The New Republic
, “as truthful as Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound” from an article on pedagogy in the Sun.

“Could they all have been in a Mencken biography?”

She shook her head. “I checked. I found a couple of sources that had several of them, but no one source that had them all.”

“That doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” I said, and changed the subject. “Was your friend able to get a private audience with Ariaura?”

“Yes,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I have to go meet her in a few minutes. She also got tickets to the seminar Saturday. They didn’t cancel it like I thought they would, but they did cancel a local radio interview she was supposed to do last night and the weeklong spiritual immersion she had scheduled for next week.”

“Did Riata give you the recording of Ariaura’s last seminar?”

“No, she’d left it at home. She said she’d bring it when we meet
before her private audience. She said she got some really good footage of the emcee. She swears from the way he looked that he’s not in on the scam. And there’s something else. I called Judy Helzberg, who goes to every psychic event there is. Remember? I interviewed her when we did the piece on shamanic astrologers. And she said Ariaura called her and asked her for Wilson Amboy’s number.”

“Wilson Amboy?”

“Beverly Hills psychiatrist.”

“It’s all part of the illusion,” I said, but even I sounded a little doubtful. It was an awfully good deception for a third-rate channeler like Ariaura.

There’s somebody else in on it, I thought, and not just somebody feeding her answers. A partner. A mastermind.

After Kildy left I called Marty Rumboldt and asked him if Ariaura had had a partner in Salem. “Not that I know of,” he said. “Prentiss just did a study on witchcraft in Salem. She might know somebody who would know. Hang on. Hey, Prentiss!” I could hear him call. “Jamie!”

Jamie, I thought. That had been James M. Cain’s nickname, and Mencken had been good friends with him. Where had I read that?

“She said to call Madame Orima,” Marty said, getting back on the phone, and gave me the number.

I started to dial it and then stopped and looked up “Cain, James M.” in Mencken’s biography. It said he and Mencken had worked on the Baltimore
Sun
together, that they had been good friends, that Mencken had helped him get his first story collection published:
The Baby in the Icebox
.

I went over to the bookcase, squatted down, and started through the row of paperbacks on the bottom shelf … Chandler, Hammett … It had a red cover, with a picture of a baby in a high chair and a … Chandler, Cain …

But no red. I scanned the titles—
Double Indemnity
,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
 … Here it was, stuck behind
Mildred Pierce
and not red at all.
The Baby in the Icebox
. It was a lurid orange and yellow,
and had pictures of a baby in its mother’s arms and a cigarette-smoking lug in front of a gas station. I hoped I remembered the inside better than the outside.

I did. The introduction was by Roy Hoopes, and it was not only a Penguin edition, but one that had been out of print for at least twenty years. Even if Ariaura’s researcher had bothered to check out Cain, it would hardly be this edition.

And the introduction was full of stuff about Cain that was perfect—the fact that everyone who knew him called him Jamie, the fact that he’d spent a summer in a tuberculosis sanitarium and that he hated Baltimore, Mencken’s favorite place.

Some of the information was in the Mencken books—Mencken’s introducing him to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d published that first collection, the
Sun
connection, their rivalry over movie star Aileen Pringle.

But most of the facts in the introduction weren’t, and they were exactly the kind of thing a friend would know. And Ariaura wouldn’t, because they were details about Cain’s life, not Mencken’s. Even a mastermind wouldn’t have memorized every detail of Cain’s life or those of Mencken’s other famous friends. If there wasn’t anything here I could use, there might be something in Dreiser’s biography, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Or Lillian Gish’s.

But there was plenty here, like the fact that James M. Cain’s brother Boydie had died in a tragic accident after the Armistice, and his statement that all his writing was modeled on
Alice in Wonderland
. That was something no one would ever guess from reading Cain’s books, which were all full of crimes and murderers and beautiful, calculating women who seduced the hero into helping her with a scam and then turned out to be working a scam of her own.

Not exactly the kind of thing Ariaura would read, and definitely the kind of thing Mencken
would
have. He’d bought
The Baby in the Icebox
for
The American Mercury
and told Cain it was one of the best things he’d ever written. Which meant it would make a perfect source for a question, and I knew just what to ask. To anyone who hadn’t heard of
the story, the question wouldn’t even make sense. Only somebody who’d read the story would know the answer. Like Mencken.

And if Ariaura knew it, I’d—what? Believe she was actually channeling Mencken?

Right. And Charles Fred was really talking to the dead and Uri Geller was really bending spoons. It was a trick, that was all. She had a photographic memory, or somebody was feeding her the answers.

Feeding her the answers.

I thought suddenly of Kildy saying, “Who
was
Sue Hicks?”—of her insisting I go with her to see Ariaura—of her saying, “But why would Ariaura channel a spirit who yells at her audiences?”

I looked down at the orange and yellow paperback in my hand. “A beautiful, calculating woman who seduces the hero into helping her with a scam,” I murmured, and thought about Ariaura’s movie-star-handsome ushers and about scantily clad Victorian spirits and about Sir William Crookes.

Sex. Get the chump emotionally involved and he won’t see the wires. It was the oldest trick in the book.

I’d said Ariaura wasn’t smart enough to pull off such a complicated scam, and she wasn’t. But Kildy was. So you get her on the inside where she can see the shelf full of Mencken books, where she can hear the chump mutter, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?” You get the chump to trust her, and if he falls in love with her, so much the better. It’ll keep him off balance and he won’t get suspicious.

And it all fit. It was Kildy who’d set up the contact—I never did channelers, and Kildy knew that. It was Kildy who’d said we couldn’t go incognito, Kildy who’d said to bring the Sony, knowing it would be confiscated, Kildy who’d taken a taxi to the seminar instead of coming in her Jaguar so she’d be at the office when Ariaura came roaring in.

But she’d gotten the whole thing on tape. And she hadn’t had any idea who the spirit was. I was the one who’d figured out it was Mencken.

With Kildy feeding me clues from the seminar she’d gone to before, and I only had her word that Ariaura had channeled him that
time. And that it had happened in Berkeley and Seattle. And that the tapes had been edited.

And she was the one who’d kept telling me it was really Mencken, the one who’d come up with the idea of asking him questions that would prove it—questions I’d conveniently told her the answers to—the one who’d suggested a friend of hers go to the seminar and videotape it, a videotape I’d never seen. I wondered if it—or Riata—even existed.

The whole thing, from beginning to end, had been a setup.

And I had never tumbled to it. Because I’d been too busy looking at her legs and her honey-colored hair and that smile. Just like Crookes.

I don’t believe it, I thought. Not Kildy, who’d worked side by side with me for nearly a year, who’d stolen chicken guts and pretended to be hypnotized and let Jean-Pierre cleanse her aura, who’d come to work for me in the first place because she hated scam artists like Ariaura.

Right. Who’d come to work for a two-bit magazine when she could have been getting five million a movie and dating Viggo Mortensen. Who’d been willing to give up premieres and summers in Tahiti and deep massages for me. Skeptics’ Rule Number Two: If it seems too good to be true, it is. And how often have you said she’s a good actress?

No, I thought, every bone in my body rebelling. It can’t be true.

And that’s what the chump always says, isn’t it, even when he’s faced with the evidence? “I don’t believe it. She wouldn’t do that to me.”

And that was the whole point—to get you to trust her, to make you believe she was on your side. Otherwise you’d have insisted on checking those tapes of Ariaura’s seminars for yourself to see if they’d been edited, you’d have demanded independently verifiable evidence that Ariaura had really canceled those seminars and asked about a psychiatrist.

Independently verifiable evidence. That’s what I needed, and I knew exactly where to look.

“My mother took me to Lucius Windfire’s luminescence reading,” Kildy had said, and I had the guest lists for those readings. They were part of the court records, and I’d gotten them when I’d done the story
on his arrest. Kildy had come to see me on May tenth and he’d only had two seminars that month.

I called up the lists for both seminars and for the two before that and typed in Kildy’s name.

Nothing.

She said she went with her mother, I thought, and typed her mom’s name in. Nothing. And nothing when I printed out the lists and went through them by hand, nothing when I went through the lists for March and April. And June. And no ten-thousand-dollar donation on any of Windfire, Inc.’s financial statements.

Half an hour later Kildy showed up smiling, beautiful, full of news. “Ariaura’s canceled all the private sessions she scheduled and the rest of her tour.”

She leaned over my shoulder to look at what I was doing. “Did you come up with a foolproof question for Mencken?”

“No,” I said, sliding
The Baby in the Icebox
under a file folder and sticking them both in a drawer. “I came up with a theory about what’s going on, though.”

“Really?” she said.

“Really. You know, one of my big problems all along has been Ariaura. She’s just not smart enough to have come up with all this—the ‘aught-four’ thing, the not being able to read, the going to see a psychiatrist. Which either meant she was actually channeling Mencken, or there was some other factor. And I think I’ve got it figured out.”