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Shaking the Tree Dorothy gets a startling reminder that she's no longer in Kansas when she plucks an apple from the low-hanging branch of a tree and the tree slaps her hand – and gives her a stern lecture. The Scarecrow knows what to do. He tells his traveling companion that he will show her how to get apples. He proceeds to taunt the tree until he gets it angry enough to grab its own apples, twist himself into a pitcher's windup and hurl them at the scarecrow.
An Fuhrman's tree is a metaphor for what he believes is the "careless rich" culture of Belle Haven sheltering a killer. He's shaking the tree with incisive words and derisive gestures the way the scarecrow did. But the thing that puts those words in an Oz context is the way Hildy Southerland asks him about the progress of his Martha Moxley murder investigation. She say's. "So, any insights into what makes us careless rich tick and tock? As she says the words "tick and tock" she's holding up a glass in her left hand, which shows off her huge, emerald cut diamond ring. Moreover, if you spell "tick tock" as the name of a fictional character (like Hildy Southerlyn), you'd spell it the way L. Frank Baum did in his follow-up books to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. You'd spell it Tik-Tok.
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Oz moment in Murder in Greenwich will surely
grab you if you'd recently seen Walt Disney's 1985 Return to Oz
with Fairuza Balk as Dorothy. It's the scene that starts with
Fuhrman and Weeks crashing a cocktail party at the Belle
Haven Country Club and ends with Fuhrman telling weeks, "I'm just
shaking the tree and seeing what falls out."