I found a transparent plastic sleeve and slid the letter inside, then opened my desk drawer and took out the copy of the letter Max Outhwaite had written to Jeffrey Katzenbach, placing the two side by side for comparison. On superficial examination, the type font looked the same. As before, my name was misspelled. Thanks, it's two l's, please. The sender seemed to have a problem distinguishing your from you're and consistently reversed the two. The use of threw for through was the same, but there were other oddities of note. My letter was less than half the length of the one to Katzenbach, yet it had more spelling mistakes. To my untutored eye, the two sets of errors were curiously inconsistent. If the writer were relying strictly on phonetics, why would words like acquisition, aforementioned, and besieges be spelled right? Certainly in my letter, there were far fewer commas, exclamation points, and Capitalizations! It was possible there was a certain level of carelessness at work, but I also had to wonder if the writer weren't simply pretending to use language badly. There was something vaguely amusing about the use of the word amens instead of amends, especially in the context of a born-again.

From another angle, why affix the name Max Outhwaite to the first letter, tacking on the embellishment of a phony address, and leave mine unsigned? I had to guess that Outhwaite imagined (quite correctly, as it turned out) that an unsigned letter to the Dispatch would get thrown in the trash. It was also likely the sender had no idea I'd end up with both. While I understood the reasoning behind the letter to the Dispatch, why this one to me? What was Outhwaite's intent?

I took out my magnifying glass and cranked up my three-way bulb to maximum illumination. Under magnification, other similarities became apparent. In both documents, the letter a was twisted on its axis, leaning slightly to the left, and on the lowercase i a portion of the serif was broken off along the bottom. Additionally, the lowercase e, o, a, and d were dirty and tended to print as filled dots instead of circles, suggestive of an old-fashioned fabric ribbon. On my portable Smith Corona, I'd been known to use a straight pin to clean the clogged typewriter keys.