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The First of Sheila
From Mark
In part I, we are told that Lola Lasagna is internationally famous for her priceless collection of parasols and a prize-winning filly name Parasol. At a meeting with “the press” (a guy with a notebook and another guy with a camera) she whispers to her horse with a smile, “Shape up Parasol. All we’ve got are looks and your legs.” Just then, The Penguin waddles up, snatches the parasol from her hand and hurries from the crime scene.
When The Penguin learns that the parasol he stole is
Suppose you wanted to turn The Penguin’s murder attempt into the solution of a Clue game just to see if you could do it. As a student of the Batman series, what clues do you have to help you figure out who did it, in what room and with what weapon?
The room is the library. In the original English Cluedo, the weapon would have been a bomb. But in Clue, the Parker Brothers American version of the game, the only weapons you have to choose from are a knife, a wrench, a candlestick, a revolver, a lead pipe and a rope. Look closely at the binding of the book. There’s your weapon – a rope.
The perpetrator is a little trickier. Was it Mrs. Peacock, Mr. Green, Mrs. White, Miss. Scarlet,
The Penguin is himself a bird. In "The Sport of Penguins" Batman calls him a "bird of prey." The silver eagles worn by American Colonels are birds of prey. But the clincher is in the library scene as the episode credits role. All of the letters needed to spell Col. Mustard, except an "o" are in Special Guest Villain Burgess Meredith as The Penguin. The "o" is is the Onward and Upward slogan in the panel over the books on the top shelf. The solution to this Clue game must therefore be: Col. Mustard did it in the library with a rope.
What does any of this have to do with Mark Fuhrman and The Last of Sheila?
Remember that the first of Sheila in this line of inquiry came from the acknowledgements in Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich book; “Sheila – Thanks for the Pie.”
Rooms
We’re going to go through Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich movie (aka Dominick Dunne Presents: Murder in
The rooms are the easiest to find, starting with Mark Fuhrman’s study and the private library in Rob Mathers’ office. The kitchen is the Skakel’s kitchen or the Fuhrman's. The hall is the convention hall were Dorothy gives her "Martha's Day" speech. The ballroom is the Skakel’s living room. The lounge is the Greenwich Bar. The billiard room is “Batman’s” entertainment room. The conservatory is Alex Grafton’s greenhouse. The dining room is where Great Lakes Carbon attorney Jackson O’Connor is eating when Fuhrman and Weeks question him about Tommy Skakel. Look closely at the windows, drapes and furniture of the dining room on the Clue game board.
Now, compare the room on the Clue board to the O’Connor dining room scene in Fuhrman’s movie... This is the master key to all of the rooms in the movie because the overhead view of the plate and the contents of the room tell you what game is being played.
This game has nothing to do with the actual Moxley Murder case. The victim was killed outside with a golf club by someone who isn’t necessarily on anyone’s suspect list. It’s just an intellectual exercise to see if the visual components of Clue can be evoked in a game. The rooms in the movie suggest that Clue is indeed the game. But to make it complete you need the weapons and the suspects.
Weapons
Four of the weapons, namely the revolver, rope, knife and candle stick, are as accessible to straightforward identification as the dining room.
A good game maker would not make all of weapons that obvious or it would spoil the fun of figuring them out. It would also eliminate the possibility of plausible deniability. After all, what does a game inside a story about a real murder case say about the game maker?
For the other weapons, it helps to know how two Batman villains think. The Bookworm “blew up a bridge” by taking a photo of it and throwing a giant projection of the photo onto a wall. The Joker made a boat “a cigarette lighter” by tossing one overboard....
"Sometime words have two meanings..." are lyrics in Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. The lead pipe could therefore be Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven playing over the image of a kid with a hash pipe. The word lead has two meanings and two pronunciations. The band spelled it Led to insure the correct pronunciation. Lead pipes (pipes made of lead) were used in Thailand for smoking hashish. The wrench would be what Tommy Skakel does to his brother Michael’s right arm; he grips it firmly and twists it tightly behind his back. That’s what it means to wrench. That’s how the hardware tool called a wrench got its name; by what it does.
In Clue, the players have “detective notes” listing all the rooms, weapons and suspects. As each room, weapon and suspect is eliminated they are lined out on the notes – the way Fuhrman lined out Morris Banks and Rob Mathers as suspects on his notes. Who are the Clue suspects in Murder in Greenwich?
Alex Grafton, the Skakel’s former gardener, wearing a green plaid jacket in a greenhouse is an easy pick for Mr. Green. Professor Plum has to be Dr. Baden, a real life visiting professor at several post-graduate schools. The color purple is indicated by his use of the word lividity (see Origin for "plumb"). Hildy Southerlyn's sultry demeanor, black hair, black clothes and cigarette holder peg her as Miss Scarlet in the 1972 edition of Clue. Her cigarette holder draws special attention to her dark red lipstick. It can also be inferred by the shape, color and location of the cigarette-sized soap smear on a picture window relative to the left hand of a mannequin in a red dress. Mrs. White could be identified by her white blouse and her role as the Skakel’s cook. However, you get another Mrs. White as well as a Mrs. Peacock on the day that Martha's friend Sheila discovered her body with a friend of Dorothy Moxley wearing a white dress sitting next to Dorothy in "peacock" blue. There's something else about Dorothy Moxley as Mrs. Peacock that screams at you once you factor in the friend's red scarf, the couch colors, and the green and purple pillows on the couch. These have been the colors of the NBC logo for most of its television history in that it was the first TV network to broadcast in color. You get NBC's short-lived red and blue trapezoid logo of October, 1975 on a microphone in the scene were a reporter is interviewing Michael Skakel in front of his house. NBC = peacock before Martha Moxley's murder in October, 1975 and when Murder in Greenwich was released in 2002.
The NBC logo is a tip-off that a women in the movie could qualify as Mrs. Peacock, just as the one eye CBS logo prepares you for someone who could qualify as Colonel Mustard. All you need is one of each. More than one gives you insurance against a Clue suspect being left on the cutting room floor.
Third quarter of 1975 October 1975 2002
The young Rob Mathers gives you Colonel Mustard by way of his blonde hair, mustard-colored shirt and a character called Colonel Mathers in a 1958 British war movie. Morris Banks would also qualify by virtue a police interrogation scene where the camera zooms in on one eye behind a lens (a monocle) of his glasses. The colors in his plaid sports jacket are the same colors as Rob Mathers' shirt. Mathers and Banks were the names Fuhrman lined out on his notes. Then there’s Jackson O’Connor, first seen as a faceless man with a prominently displayed gold watch getting out of a Yellow Cab. President Andrew Jackson got his first army commission in 1801 as a colonel in the Tennessee militia.
Jackson O’Connor as Colonel Mustard gives you one suspect and a weapon (a knife) in the same room (the dining room) at the same time. He give you one unambiguous Clue game solution: Col. Mustard did it (again), this time in the dining room with a knife. The only things missing from the game seem be the tokens, "Mr. Body," and the die used to move the tokens from place to place on the board (the whole movie). That's not true. They're in the movie, too.
Consider this exchange between Fuhrman and Weeks as they leave Dorothy Moxley's house and walk to their blue (Mrs. Peacock token) rental car:
Weeks: You're pissed.
Fuhrman: Livid [plumb].
Weeks: Because Baden's testimony helped get Simpson off.
Fuhrman: Baden [Professor Plum] is fine. He's a scientist first, expert witness second.
Weeks: So what's the problem?
Fuhrman: That woman spent the last 22 years of her life thinking she heard her daughter die...
That was Fuhrman’s Clue game tucked inside of his Murder in Greenwich movie. If you think you can do all of that with any randomly selected movie, try it. See how far you get with the 9 rooms, 6 weapons or 6 suspects. Fuhrman got all 21 of them. Martha E. Moxley's body (Mr. Body) makes 22.
9 6 6 does something else. It gives you a side road to the Devil simply by rotating the 9 to make it a 6: This gives you 666, the mark of the Antichrist. If the screen shot of O'Connor getting out of the taxicab looks familiar to you, this could be the Satanic context in which you saw it before. The yellow cab also gives you a mode of travel corresponding to the Clue tokens, like Fuhrman's blue rental car and the "green" in the Greenwich police car that takes Rob Mathers to the Greenwich Police Station.
If you think the Clue game in Fuhrman's movie is still incomplete without all of the colored tokens for the suspects, Murder in Greenwich gives them to you in the form of wheeled vehicles. Fuhrman's rental car gives you a blue one. As Martha goes to a party at the Skakel house you see five vehicles in one shot. You see a white car, a red car, a yellow car and a purple van. The color of the car in the foreground looks blue in that shot. In the preceding shot it looks green. But the shade of the green token in Clue is light in some versions of the game and dark in others. The word green on the fender of the Greenwich Police car covers all hues.
Now, on to The Last of Sheila...
—Jasper |
Fuhrman’s point of view, 
only a look-alike, he goes to the Gotham City Library to steal a priceless folio of umbrellas and parasols from a glass display
case. He cuts through the glass, lifts out the book and tries to walk away with the librarian Barbara Gordon (aka Batgirl) looking right at him. She snatches the book from his grasp. He
argues with her, harboring murderous feelings for her from the past when she refused to marry him. Although he came to the library to steal the book, he also came prepared to commit
murder. He walks away leaving a ticking umbrella time bomb behind.
Professor Plum or Colonel Mustard? The
Penguin’s purple hat could indicate Professor Plumb. In one version of Clue, his cigarette holder could indicate Miss. Scarlet. But The Penguin wears a monocle, as Colonel Mustard does, in
most versions of the game. Also, a “full bird” in the American military is a Colonel. 
Greenwich) to get to
The Last
of Sheila and we’re going to do it with all 9 rooms on the
