Table of Contents

Chapter 26

The Value of X

Finding the primary source of a movie link to Murder in Greenwich is often easier done than said. Your subconscious mind, knowing more than you conscious mind does, often takes you to where you need to go with little more input than a question and a sharp lookout for the answer. I’m talking about things like getting a “hunch” or a familiar feeling that you automatically associate with movies, actors or characters that have no conscious connection. Instead of dismissing those impressions, go with them and see what’s there. More times than not you will find the answer.  

You might go wrong by assuming you have found the only answer or the best one when all you’ve found is a thread in a web. Weeks and Fuhrman’s visit to the Greenwich police station to pick up the file on Martha Moxley is a case in point….   

I was looking for gas pumps in or around the rainy Cove Café scene with Nick Miller as the “Say nigger,” teenager or the man from Maryland. I didn’t see them so I played the Murder in Greenwich tape from the beginning and did a frame-by-frame search specifically for gas pumps in every outdoor segment. I found them outside of the Greenwich police station. I rewound the tape less than four minutes to Weeks and Fuhrman leaving Dorothy Moxley’s house where the wet pavement indicated a recent rain shower. I ran the tape at normal speed from there.  

The face of a female traffic cop morphs into the face of a man. Fuhrman calls him “Sport.” Hildy Southerlyn tells us later in the movie that he is a moonlighting cop named Lancaster. Lancaster stonewalls the book-writing duo for as long as he can before reluctantly turning over the redacted files. As the writers walk out of the station you see in the foreground a window over a park bench and defoliated tree limbs. A sign hides Fuhrman and Weeks from sight briefly. In the background you see Halloween balloons and two gas pumps as the camera follows Fuhrman and Weeks past a cop in uniform walking with a man in civilian clothes.

Looking through the papers in the files, Weeks says, “Half of these pages are blacked out.”  

Fuhrman replies, “That’s what redacted mans, collage boy.” 

“I know what redacted means.” 

“We just fill in the blanks. It’s algebraic. Find the value of x.”  

Everything about that sequence looked or sounded as though it came from somewhere else. I could see links to Fear (’89) with Allie Sheedy and Stan Shaw, When Dreams Come True (’84) with Cindy Williams, Stan Shaw and Lee Horsley, and The Pelican Brief with Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. I saw some of Murderous Vision with Laura Johnson, Fire Walk With Me (’92) with Chris Isaac and Kiefer Sutherland and some of Witch Hunt (’94) with Sheryl Lee Ralph. But for no good reason I could think of I kept seeing Jody Foster in my mind together with Paul McCrane. I also flashed on Robert Joy with Cybill Shepherd and Frank Drebin – no, not Leslie Nielson, Frank Drebin.  

I knew that “Sport” was linked to the pimps in 52 Pick-up and Taxi Driver and that Jody Foster and Cybill Shepherd were linked to Robert DeNero’s character in Taxi Driver. But there were no Taxi Driver links to Fuhrman’s use of “Sport” in Murder in Greenwich and I didn’t know who Paul McCrane was.  I could only see his face and hear his voice.  

Robert Joy was likewise only a face and a voice. His face popped into my head along with the name “Billy” during the country club scene after Lancaster came out on the terrace and said, “You’re on private property, Sport.” It had something to do with the piano in the background but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Using Fuhrman’s remark about Lancaster being the cop who gave him the files and Hildy’s “moonlighting” retort, I looked for connections to Bruce Willis or Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting. I ignored the name “Billy” thinking that I had simply taken it from Willis. Only when I learned that Robert Joy appeared in the “My Fair David” episode of Moonlighting with Irwin Keys and Billy Drago did I see how all of my impression fit together.

I thought I found the piano player nexus with Cybill Shepherd and Robert Downy Jr. in Chances Are but Robert Joy as Clark in Moonlighting’s “My Fair David” was the real nexus. Joy’s character is a 35-year-old pianist with a gambling addiction. Billy Drago and Irwin Keys are enforcers who go to his dressing room before a concert to rough him up because of his failure to pay a gambling debt.  

The “sport” is football.  Robert Joy as Clark is watching a football game on a portable TV set with a worried look on his face when the enforcers arrive. They throw the TV set across the room smashing the tube. Billy Drago says, “That’s you, Clark.” He gives Clark a choice of which part of his body they are going to break. In the next scene you see Clark on a concert stage in a tuxedo approaching his piano with a bandage across the bridge of his nose.  

Bruce Willis as David and Cybill Shepherd as Maddie get involved with Clark when Barbara Bain as his wealthy stepmother tells them he has been kidnapped.  She wants to negotiate the $100,000 ransom and offers them a dollar for every two dollars they can save her. Barbara Bain’s husband Martin Landau is a killer cop in No Place to Hide (’93) with Drew Berrymore, Kris Kristofferson and O.J. Simpson. Kristofferson is an FAA investigator in Millennium with Cheryl Ladd and Robert Joy. Bain starred with Landau in the TV series Mission Impossible with Peter Lupus. In the TV series Police Squad!, Lupus is Norberg. O.J. took his place as Nordberg in The Naked Gun movies based on the Police Squad! TV series.  

The Blue Moon detectives learn that Clark staged his abduction to pay his gambling debts without having to tell his stepmother the truth. Clark proposes that Maddie and David keep his secret, lie to his stepmother and collect their reward for saving her half the money she would have had to pay if his extortion scheme had worked. The lie he tells with dramatic piano flourishes of a daring rescue sounds good to David. Maddie reluctantly goes along with it. She regrets her decision when Clark appears to have been blown to bits by real kidnappers.

After revisiting that episode of Moonlighting, my Robert Joy-Cybill Shepherd association to the cop moonlighting as a security guard in Murder in Greenwich made sense. “The value of x” was “My Fair David.” Billy Drago was one reason I “heard” Billy in my head. Irwin Keys was another reason. Keys was the reason I “saw” Frank Drebin.  

Irwin Keys is a hitman named Luca in “Ring of Fear,” the second episode of Police Squad!. A security guard standing outside the dressing room of a boxer who won a fight he was paid to lose lets Luca, armed to the teeth, into the boxer’s dressing room. The guard stands his post yawning in boredom as bullets are fired, a man screams and an explosion rocks the walls. Luca emerges from the boxer’s smoke-filled room and strolls away. The guard gets a hunch that something is wrong and looks into the dressing room. Next you see Frank Drebin going to the crime scene where his boss suspects murder and corruption.  

Frank goes undercover to get to the bottom of the murder and the corruption. He wins the contract of a boxer named Buddy Briggs in a card game. Buddy specializes in taking dives for crooked gamblers. Drebin persuades him to go straight for the sake of Mary, the woman he loves. The mobster who fixes boxing matches kidnaps Mary to make sure Buddy throws a big fight with black actor Grand Bush (big Johnson in Die Hard with Bruce Willis) as The Champ. Drebin rescues Mary from Luca. Buddy, trying to recover from a knockdown blow, hears Mary as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. He gets up and knocks out The Champ. A cash register bell ring and a “No sale” signs spring up in the champ’s eyes (“Say nigger”). Tessa Richarde is Mary. In Cat People with Nastassja Kinski she is Billie.  

These Moonlighting strands of the web spiral out of the Murder in Greenwich sequence beginning with Fuhrman and Weeks leaving Dorothy’s house and ending with them leaving the police station. They connect to Paul McCrane by way of his appearance with Nastassja Kinski and Jodie Foster in The Hotel New Hampshire. You can construct the same web of associations beginning with McCrane as Emil robbing the gas station in Robocop. That sequence runs into a scene with a uniformed policeman at the Detroit police station trying to stop Robocop from getting access to files that link Emil to the murder of Alex Murphy.

The files that Fuhrman actually got from the Greenwich police contained references to the involvement of Detroit homicide detectives in the Moxley murder investigation. Detroit is therefore a blank you have to fill in with Fuhrman telling Weeks, “We just have to fill in the blanks.”  

Testing this proposition is easy. One way of doing it is to see if there are actors or characters in Robocop who match up to Mark Fuhrman or Stephen Weeks in their exchange about filling in the blanked out pages.  

You get Weeks in a character named Roosevelt, the technical supervisor of the Robocop project, and Fuhrman in a composite of his boss Robert Morton and Robocop. Stephen Berrier is Roosevelt. Miguel Ferrer (MF) is Morton. During Robocop’s construction a technician tells Morton that they can save Murphy’s left arm. Morton rejects the idea reminding his team that they agreed on total body prosthesis. He asks whether Murphy can hear what he’s saying. Roosevelt tells him that it doesn’t matter because they are going to blank his memory. In place of his memory he gets four directives: 1) Serve the public trust. 2) Protect the innocent. 3) Uphold the law. The fourth directive is confidential – a blank.    

Robocop goes online and performs up to his creators’ expectations until he experiences flashbacks of the men who killed him. When he walks out on his own a technician gets Roosevelt, who looks at his watch before rushing to see what he can do about the unexpected development with Robocop. This little gesture, as you will see, has everything to do with Stephen Weeks and finding the value of x in Robocop. Roosevelt’s estimate of how long Robocop will have to be taken offline to fix the problem is “A week, maybe 10 days.”  

The “week” is self-explanatory.” The Roman numeral value of x is 10.  

In The Prosecution Case chapter of Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman argues that the prosecution made a crucial error in using barking dogs and witness testimony to narrow the time of the Bundy murders. He says, “When you are building a timeline for a murder, you have to remain flexible. People are often wrong or contradictory in estimating time. Their watches and clocks are set differently and their memory can be hazy.” He argued for a fuzzy timeline “between 10:00 and 10:45. If your watch or your clock was segmented in Roman numerals to indicate this time range the long hand would be on XII and the short hand would be on X for ten o’clock. For 10:45 you’d get XII and IX.  

Fuhrman used this wide timeline approach in Murder in Greenwich to undermine Michael Skakel’s alibi by arguing that Martha was killed at 11:30 – XI: XXX.   

The stated value of x in Murder in Greenwich is Alex Grafton’s statement to police about Michael. This is where Stephen (not Steven) Carroll is grilling hotdogs and Fuhrman says, “That one is burning.” Carroll tells Fuhrman that Grafton’s statement is in the files. Weeks holds up a redacted sheet of paper and says, “No it isn’t.” Fuhrman looks at the blacked out page and ends the scene with, “I think we’ve found the value of x.” 

This exchange puts Fuhrman on a fast track to knowing that Michael Skakel killed Martha Moxley. Grafton leads him to the lawyer who leads him to the deduction that Michael must be the killer. His subsequent conversation with Hildy Southerlyn gives him the motive. His encounter with the Maryland Man after his encounter with the rude teenager in the Cove Café gives him a second-hand confession. The Maryland Man’s comment about the cold, when the rain stops, gives him an epiphany. He fills in all the blanks, writes his book and Michael Skakel goes to prison.    

Here are some Murder in Greenwich details that either bear repeating or have not been mentioned… 

Inside the Cove Café you hear metal tapping against glass. You see the cashier open the cash register and give Fuhrman money as the teenager taunts him. The girl in the motorcycle jacket follows them to the door. The first time you see Alex Grafton he is burning a pile of leaves. The last time you see him he is lighting a cigarette. Inside the police station Weeks tells Lancaster, “We’re the guys writing a book.” Outside of the police station, where you catch a glimpse of the gas pumps, Fuhrman calls Weeks, “college boy.” The scene morphs into a thick, billowy cloud enveloping passengers getting off a train.

Robocop gives you everything except the train.  

Emil pulls his motorcycle into a self-service gas station, walks up to the window and taps on it with the snout of his submachine gun. The sound stands out because the widow would have to be acrylic and the sound is distinctly metal against glass. Student of Alfred Hitchcock movies know how much attention he paid to getting sounds right. In Robocop you undoubtedly get the metal striking glass sound just because it’s sharper than metal striking plastic. Murder in Greenwich gives you all the right sounds from birdcalls to footfalls. The sound of metal striking glass inside the café is the right sound but there seems to be no reason for it.   

The attendant at the gas station Emil intends to rob has a book open and he is using a compass and ruler to make a measurement. When Emil gets his attention with the rap on the window he says, “Give me all your money bookworm or I’ll blow your brains out.” The attendant opens the cash register and forks over the money. Emil tells him that he wants a fill-up on pump number seven and goes to the pump with his gun aimed at the glass telling the attendant that he can shoot his eye out. While he’s filling up his gas tank he asks the attendant what he’s reading. The man holds up a Plane Geometry textbook, which prompts Emile to ask derisively, “You a college boy?”   

The first value of x is on a wall clock in the gas station attendant’s booth partially blocked, for the most part, by the attendant’s head. The clock face has only four numbers situated at the 12 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 6 o’clock and 9 o’clock positions. Break lines in the acrylic protective barrier distort the 12 and the 3. You can’t see the 6 and the 9 until Robocop arrives, Emil starts shooting and the gas from the ruptured hose sprays the window. The attendant moves out of the way. Even then the numbers are not sharply defined because you can see them only through the liquid beating against the window. The only number you can see distinctly is 9 (IX).  

The second value of x is the arrival of Robocop, a.k.a. Alex Murphy.

The number distortion on the clock is exactly what’s required for a graphic representation of Fuhrman’s bid to obscure Martha’s time of death. But that’s not all you get in the Robocop gas station scene. You get Emil lighting a cigarette, tossing it in front of an advancing line of spilled gasoline and the gas station going up in huge balls of fire and billows of smoke (The Birds/Elvira). You get a book of formulas (Elvira/Swamp Thing). You get Robocop collaring Emil and asking, “Who are you?” to fill the blanks in his memory of his own identity. You get a flashback to Alex Murphy getting shot to death. He flatlined on the operating table (Flatliners) and the doctor asked for the time.  

This is another example of why you can’t intentionally borrow one idea for a story from a movie without drawing into it a cluster of related ideas. Your reference source does not exist in a vacuum. It has an internal context of locations, props, costumes, sounds, gestures, background music, actors, characters, dialogue and names. Each of these elements has its clusters of internal and external connections.

Fuhrman’s manipulation of time in Murder in Greenwich, for instance, as well as the killer’s manipulation of time on Bundy connects to at least a dozen moves. In the pilot episode of Hunter an attractive blonde barmaid wearing a bright yellow pullover top with a scoop neck approaches Fred Dryer as Hunter. “Eleven thirty,” she says. The LAPD homicide detective looks at his watch and tells her it’s 11:00. She tells him that 11:30 is the time she gets off work.  

The time shift here is only a pick-up line but it has an immediate link to the timeline of Nicole Simpson’s death (her watch was stopped at 10:03) and Fuhrman’s story of O.J. stalking Nicole. It has an immediate link to a murder suspect who drives a Bronco, wears leather gloves and is played by a man who has the same birthday as O.J. Simpson. In Detour to Terror, starring O.J. Simpson, Anne Frances, Artie Johnson and Gerald O’Laughlin, Nicole Simpson in a bit part with no lines and no credit wears a pail yellow pullover top with a scoop neck.

Detour to Terror involves three young thugs who hijack a bus en route from Albuquerque New Mexico to Las Vegas Nevada. They plan to kidnap the wife of Martin Brain. Brain’s mistress is traveling under his wife’s name. The thugs rough up the bus driver, terrorize the passengers, kill one of them and kidnap the wrong woman.  

Michael O’Laughlin is Martin Brain. At the beginning of the trip to Las Vegas he wears a cowboy hat like the one Brian Dennehy wears as the stalker, killer, sociopathic psychiatrist in Hunter. O’Laughlin is police Lt. Ed Ryker who mentors the characters played by Georg Stanford Brown and Michael Ontkean in The Rookies. Georg Stanford Brown is the “special guest star” in “Ring of Fear.” Michael Ontkean is the chauffer in Maid to Order with Allie Sheedy. He’s Sheriff Harry S. Truman in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me.  

Kate Jackson is the third rookie’s wife. In The Scarecrow and Mrs. King with Bruce Boxleitner she is Mrs. King. She is a private detective in Charlie’s Angels with Jacqueline Smith and Cheryl Ladd. Smith wears a straw hat identical to the one Nicole wears in Detour to Terror. Ladd is the time traveler Louise Baltimore in Millennium with Robert Joy.  

Arte Johnson, a guest star on The Twilight Zone and a regular on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In with Goldie Hawn, is the Detour to Terror tour guide. A recurring bit in laugh in has someone standing up and saying “sock it to me,” and getting splashed in the face with a bucket of water.  

Arte Johnson, Goldie Hawn and Sammy Davis Jr. as “Da Judge” were frequent recipients of the sock-it-to-me splash. When you see a Detour to Terror passenger hold up a T-shirt that says, “Sock It To Me” you know that it is a cinematic homage to Artie Johnson just as “Pier 32” in The Naked Gun is a cinematic homage to O.J. Simpson. When you see Arte Johnson pull O.J. by his ankles from under the bus that is about to fall on him when the jack slips, you know where the Naked Gun 2 ½ idea came from of having Nordberg kicking his legs under a bus.

Arte Johnson’s association with Goldie Hawn tells you why her Bird on a Wire character is so closely associated with the bus driving past Marvin’s service station and Marvin pulling the legs from the fallen car. Most of the action in Detour to Terror takes place in the Nevada desert but the movie begins in an automated large vehicle wash with torrents of water beating down on the windshield of the bus.   

Anne Frances, Leslie Nielson’s love interest in Forbidden Planet with Jack Kelly as Farman, wears a wig in Detour to Terror. She also wears a read dress, which should remind you of Murder in Greenwich when you see her standing behind Nicole with the glass of the bus behind her. If it doesn’t, let me remind you of “The After Hours” episode of The Twilight Zone where Anne Frances is a shopper named Marcia White. When she tries to return a scratched gold thimble priced at $22.80 a store manager becomes so exasperated that he expresses a wish “to give her a bus ticket to anywhere west of Cleveland.” Marcia ends up on a floor where mannequins in suits, dresses, and ski masks come to life and she reverts to the mannequin she forgot she was on a one month vacation as a human. 

Rod Serling wrote many Twilight Zone teleplays including “The After Hours.” Charles Beaumont wrote many others. Sometimes the endings were impossible to guess. Other times the journey was all that mattered.  “The After Hours” is the only episode that begins with a close-up of a “human” eye – Marcia White’s eye. Later Twilight Zone episodes begin with a clock and a blinking doll’s eye. You see Marcia as a shopper at a department store. You see the saleslady as strange and the mannequins in ski masks as menacing. What you can’t see is how Serling, Beaumont and so many people and things associated with them ended up in Fuhrman’s notes, pictures and stories. That is, you can’t see them until you see Detour to Terror, Flatliners and Murder in Greenwich. 

In a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the object is to see who can link an actor or another famous person to Kevin Bacon with the fewest number of people between them. You can start with anybody you can think of and through a cascading series of personal associations or mutual projects you will eventually get to Kevin Bacon. The game is based on the work of famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram. In the 1970s he demonstrated experimentally that you could link any two people known to exist with connections to no more than six people between them. Fuhrman consistently comes in at one or two.  

There is no separation between Fuhrman and Christopher Meloni because they worked together on the same movie. Meloni appeared with Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride, which gives Fuhrman only one degree of separation from her. And Flatliners with Julia Roberts, Oliver Platt, Steven Baldwin, Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon gives you no degrees of separation between any of them. 

You can make Fuhrman connections that also involve the Simpsons or the Skakels with two degrees of separation or less because he dropped so many names in his books and in his movie. And these are just the people. With Fuhrman you also get direct links to unusual anniversary clusters, tombstone clusters, train clusters, time distortion clusters, false alibi clusters, aviator jacket clusters etc.   

Where you need a cash register bell and a woman wearing pink and white, you get a woman in pink and white and a cash register bell. Where you need a man in Nike running shoes you get a man in Nike running shoes. The creepiest connections are to O.J. as a security guard in The Towering Inferno, as a fake priest in The Cassandra Crossing and to Nicole Brown Simpson in Detour to Terror. You see her putting a rock on the makeshift tomb of a murder victim buried in the desert. Fuhrman’s false alibi for the night Nicole was murdered is that he was in the desert buying gas and a soft drink with a credit card. Nicole paid for her last meal with a credit card.  

The value of x in Detour to Terror is the February 22 MCMLXXX release date ($22.80). Nicole was Catholic. In The Rosary Murders a nun is murdered on March 14. On March 15, 1980 Fuhrman’s second wife left him. He told his police psychologist that if he had caught her and the man she was cheating with he would have killed them both.

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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Copyright © 2004 Smartfellows Press