'A lonely GI far from home. A girl, young in years, but filled with the ancient knowledge of the East.
Listen to me, will you? It's funny, though. You see somebody looks exotic like that, you think it'd be special. But it's just in your mind.'
'You've looked at clouds from both sides now.'
'Oh, go fuck yourself,' he said.
'Everybody tells me that.'
'Yeah, and I can see why. Here, I got a copy of this. I don't think I was supposed to, and I know I'm not supposed to show it to you, but I'll bet you anything it's in the paper by morning, so why should you be the last person in town to see it?'
And he handed me Will's letter.
* * *
'It's all wrong,' I said. 'Will didn't write this.'
'If Will was Whitfield,' he said, 'and assuming Whitfield's not playing possum, then all of that goes without saying, doesn't it? Of course he didn't write it. Dead men don't write letters.'
'They can write them before they die. He already did that once.'
He took the letter from me. 'He's got references to the column of McGraw's that ran yesterday, Matt.
And he talks about Tully's threat of a TWU strike, and that's only been news in the past week or ten days.'
'I know that,' I said. 'There's plenty of evidence to disprove any theory that Adrian wrote this and arranged to have it mailed weeks after his death. But suppose I never even suspected Adrian. You could still take one look at this and know that the same person hadn't written it.'
'Oh? Style's pretty close.'
'Will Number Two is literate,' I said. 'He's got an ear for language, and I'd guess he made a conscious effort to mimic Will Number One. I haven't got the other letters handy to compare them, but it seems to me I can recognize phrases that I've read before.'
'I don't know about that. I'd agree it has a familiar ring to it. But wouldn't anybody copycatting Will make an effort to sound like the original?'
'Not everybody could pull it off.'
'No?' He shrugged. 'Maybe it's harder than it looks. You know, he didn't just copycat the style of the writing. He got the rest of it right, too. See the signature?'
'It's printed in script.'
He nodded. 'Same as the others. I was talking to a couple of the guys while the rest of them were in there trying to make your head spin.
I asked about the forensic side.'
'I was wondering about that,' I said. 'It seems to me it shouldn't be much of a trick to prove that the new letter was typed on a different machine.'
'Well, sure,' he said. 'If it was typed.'
'If it wasn't,' I said, 'he's got a funny kind of handwriting.'
'I mean typed on a typewriter, which it wasn't, and neither were any of the earlier letters. They were done on a computer and printed on a laser printer.'
'Can't they identify the computer and the printer forensically?'
He shook his head. 'With a typewriter the keys'll be worn differently, and this one'll be out of alignment, or the E and O's'll be filled in. Or the typeface is different. A typewriter's like a fingerprint, no two alike.'
'And a computer?'
'With a computer you can choose a different typeface every time, you can make the type larger or smaller by touching this key or that one.
You see how the signature's in script? You get that by switching to a script font.'
'So you can't tell if two letters came out of the same computer?'
'I'm not a hundred percent in the loop on this,' he said, 'but there's a certain amount you can tell. With Will's letters, the ones from Will Number One, they think there was more than one printer involved.'
He went on to tell me more than I could take in, about ways in which you could compose a letter on one computer, copy it on a disk, and then print it out through another computer and printer. I didn't listen too closely, and eventually I held up a hand to stop him.
'Please,' I said. 'I'm sick to death of computers. I can't have a conversation with TJ without hearing how wonderful they are. I don't care about the typeface or the paper, or if he composed it on the East Side and printed it out on the West Side. I don't even care about the writing style. What's so different it jumps off the page at you is what he's saying.'
'How do you mean?'
'His list.'
'The original Will wrote open letters to the vies,' he said. 'This one writes to McGraw. Plus he lists three at once.'
