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Chapter 30

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Most of this chapter and all of the next two will be taken up with Remington Steele. First, though, we have some unfinished business with David and Maddie in Moonlighting.

The "Eine Kliene Nacht, Murder" episode of Moonlighting begins with a light-colored van in a dark, underground parking garage. The camera dollies in on the driver’s outside mirror and you see a man’s hand and the flashing steel of a switchblade knife. Then you see a close-up of the man sharpening the knife on a stone. The next thing you see is the blade of a butcher knife in an entirely different setting. The woman using the knife to dice giblets is a cooking instructor. Maddie is taking a cooking class. The scene shifts back and fourth between Maddie’s side conversation with the woman standing next to her and the action in the parking garage. If your mind is on O.J., the ex-football player who drives a Bronco, you will note the way in which the van, football and the Bronco combine when Maddie’s new friend makes a comment about the Baltimore Colts.

Meanwhile, a car pulls into an empty space a few yards away from the van with his car parked at a slight angle. He gets out of the car, looks around furtively and you see the doorsill of the van as the door opens. The man stepping down from the van is wearing a pair of boots (Bruno Magli Lorenzos are classified as boots). The two men walk toward each other. The man who got out of the car hands the man in the boots a thick envelope full of money. Now you see who the man in the boots is. It’s Ray Wise. You see him count the money and pull out his knife as the scene shifts back to Maddie and her cooking partner. They are in an elevator headed down. The woman gets out and Maddie continues down.

According to Mark Fuhrman, O.J. parked his car in the ally in back of Nicole’s condo. However, the evidence strongly suggests that Nicole’s jeep was moved after Fuhrman arrived in the role of lead detective and her killer waited for Ron Goldman in Nicole’s garage. Ron was carrying Juditha Brown’s glasses in an envelope. The killer couldn’t be sure of what was in the envelope until he checked. He tore open a corner and left a bloody print on a lens where he apparently felt inside. The glasses were crucial to the story that the killer didn’t know that Ron was coming and he was a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You know Fuhrman’s story of the stick found on O.J.’s parkway being hurled forward from the undercarriage of his Bronco when O.J. brought the Bronco to a sudden stop. You know the Naked Gun 2 ½ link to that story with O.J. himself, laying on a wooden board with casters being hurled forward when the car he was under came to a sudden stop. You know Fuhrman’s bleeding killer theory and his part in linking the bleeding killer to O.J. If you read Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood you also know his theory of what happened to the knife. He said that O.J. threw it out of the passenger side window of his Bronco.

In "Eine Kliene Nacht, Murder" you see a close-up of Maddie’s high-heel shoes as she steps off the elevator to go to her car. She is startled when the man with the envelope stumbles from between a parked car and a pillar and falls against her, bloodying her coat, then falls to the ground and dies. The knife is sticking out of his gut. Then the killer sees her. She runs to her car and locks herself in. He retrieves the knife and goes after her. When he can’t get to her on the drover’s side, he runs around to the passenger side and tries to force his way in, bloody knife first, through her open passenger side window.

Maddie rolls up the window, trapping his arm inside and speeds away. In her frantic attempt to escape, she slams her car into a parked car. The sudden stop sends the killer, with his knife still in his hand, flying forward. Maddie gets out of her wrecked car and runs for the elevator. The killer, his face a mask of blood, rises from the wreck like the Terminator dragging his crippled leg behind him. Maddie narrowly escapes with the killer making one last desperate lunge for her ankle as the elevator door closes him off. Maddie locks herself in and uses the elevator phone to call for help. She tells the person on the other end of the line to call 911.

"Eine Kliene Nacht, Murder" is one of the last episodes of Moonlighting. The series ended in 1989, the year that Nicole was alleged to have made the phone call to 911 that resulted in Mark Fuhrman’s letter to the city attorney about his ’84 visit. Only in his letter, he didn’t say ’84. He said ’85, the year Moonlighting began, the year he began his friendship with O.J.’s "friend" Ron Shipp and the year that he started working on a screenplay with Laura Hart.

The previous episode of Moonlighting introduced Virginia Madsen (Candyman, Gotham) as Maddie’s cousin Annie who is visiting from Connecticut. Annie is staying with Maddie who is in her "off" phase of her on-and-off relationship with David (Nicole was in the "off" phase of her on and off relationship with O.J. when she was killed). Annie and David find each other attractive and get romantically involved, much to Maddie’s growing displeasure. It’s bad enough that Annie is having an affair with David (like Fuhrman’s second wife Janet Hackett) and living with Maddie. But Annie is married to a man who loves her deeply and Maddie resents being caught in the middle. Annie’s husband is Mark.

Maddie’s last big love interest was Mark Hamel (Ted Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger) as an astronaut named Sam. If Moonlighting had lasted another three or four episodes her next big love interest might have been Joseph Hacker as Det. Donnagan of the LAPD. Donnagan’s partner is the man who was murdered in a sting operation that went wrong. Donnagan is about 6’ 3" (Fuhrman is 6’ 3"). He is now Maddie’s official police bodyguard (Mark Fuhrman moonlighted as a bodyguard for Johnnie Carson in ’92).

David is as jealous of Donnagan as Maddie is of her cousin Annie. He isn’t alone. Curtis Armstrong as the ambitious neophyte Blue Moon investigator Herbert Viola is also jealous of him. Viola is romantically involved with Agnes and he has an ongoing rivalry with a fellow investigator named MacGillicuddy. The friction begins shortly after Maddie brings Donnagan into the office. Viola, Agnes and MacGillicuddy are drinking coffee. Maddie asks Agnes if there are any messages. Agnes is so taken with Donnagan that she asks, "Messages?" as though Maddie had used an unfamiliar word. Maddie answers. "Those little slips of paper with writing on them." She then introduces Donnagan to her employees who are, as is their custom, idly milling about.

Shortly thereafter Viola sees Donnagan and MacGillicuddy hitting it off famously when they learn that their parents were from neighboring counties in Ireland. When Mark Fuhrman met Kathleen Bell in ’86 after the time in the Marine recruiting office where she told him how much he resembled O.J.’s friend Marcus Allen, it was at his favorite local bar, an Irish pub in Redondo Beach. Their first meeting, of course, was the one where her comment about his height and build being like that of Marcus Allen, the kind of man her 6’ tall, white girlfriend Andrea Terry liked to date, sent him into a racist, genocidal rant. Keep this in mind for later. Also remember that Cybill Sheppard is nearly 6’ tall.

There seems to be no end to significant plastic bags or sheets of plastic in the Fuhrman collection. Considering how narrowly defined the conditions have to be to make it significant, that’s saying quite a bit. You also need one or more of the following: a tire, a shovel, a package, a corpse, a cop, the name Cathy, the cargo area of a truck or the trunk of a car. To that list I would add a cheating wife.

If Nicole was partly a surrogate for Fuhrman’s cheating wife, a connection like that would fit right in. In "Eine Kliene Nacht, Murder" Annie moves out of Maddie’s house and into David’s apartment. He brings home a package. Annie comes out of the kitchen to greet him wearing one of his shirts and a pair of socks. She’s cooking him a leg of lamb and has a blanket spread out on the floor for an indoor picnic. David gives her the box. In it is a throw pillow. When she points out the fact that he has no couch, he whistles and a parade of movers bring in a ten-piece-section couch wrapped in plastic. David and Annie embrace and collapse on the new furniture, falling to the floor between the split in two sections. Annie reaches for the plastic to pull it off. David stops her. "I paid good money for that," he jokes.

They remove the plastic and begin to make love. Slowly, smoke starts to fill the room. Annie runs to the kitchen, realizing that the food is burning. The smoke sets off a sprinkler, which drenches David and the furniture. The bottom line is that the plastic was more than merely present; it was an important symbol of something big to come.

Up until the sprinkler went off, things were going great. The couch meant nothing to David but he knew what it would mean to Annie. Like David’s box with Annie’s throw pillow inside, it was a symbol of something much bigger. It symbolized a man and woman making a life together. In the immortal words of David Addison, "First you get a couch. Then you get a coffee table…"

Are you expecting another pizza connection? Hold on. It’s coming.

First, however, we have a "Brentwood salute" connection and a few other things we have to get out of the way. Without me pointing out the many name associations to Twin Peaks in "Eine Kliene Nacht, Murder" you would have seen some of them. It even has a "Gordon" link (David Lynch, the co-creator of Twin Peaks with Mark Frost, plays Cooper’s hard-of-hearing boss Gordon). It should not surprise you to learn that the Brentwood salute connection (a.k.a. French connection) involves Det Donnagan (Donna Hayward) and his association with Maddie.

Donnagan has been wowing Maddie with his detective skills in a tough case that David and Herbert Viola are losing sleep over. Maddie calls Donnagan "a real detective" As usual, these few unchaperoned moments degenerate into an argument. Maddie accuses David of being jealous of another man on his turf. David struts away to his office with a bottom of the barrow allusion to a line that high-school boys are notorious for telling their complexion-conscious dates. To put it delicately, lets just say that David Addison and Bill Clinton had one thing in common and Clinton would not have been impeached if Monica Lewinsky had been more concerned about her complexion. David tells Maddie, "You should start hanging out with the Green Bay Packers. Matter of fact, you should move in with the Green Bay Packers. It might calm you down. Probably clear up your complexion, too." Green Bay is in Wisconsin, the Dairy State.

Shades of Jodie Foster as the Dairy High, Wisconsin cheerleader Frannie in The Hotel New Hampshire. Donnagan’s landlady is named Frannie. And wait till you meet Gordon. As far as I know, he did not play football for the Packers. But if size and build are any indication, he looks like he could have. You will recall that the Green Bay Packers played in the old Central Division of the NFL, also known as the "Black and Blue Division," with the Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions and Cleveland Browns.

Things get really complicated for Maddie when Annie’s husband Mark calls Maddie in California to speak to his wife. Maddie knows that Annie is with David so she lies and tells Mark that Annie is at the movies, "…a double bill," she says. She cringes at the lie she has been forced to tell and sets up a meeting at a restaurant with her cousin Annie to sort things out. Part of what she’s doing is out of concern for her cousin and part is out of hope that she can, in a civilized way, poison the well of Annie’s relationship with David to give herself another chance with him. Donnagan sits at a nearby table as the two women talk about the situation with David and Mark. A few minutes into the conversation where Annie says of her dissatisfaction with Mark that he is "all reason, order and stability," Maddie calls David "the connoisseur of chaos." That’s what Annie loves about him.

David walks in, invites himself to the table and makes a scene. Annie leaves and David accuses Maddie of being a desperate woman. On her way back home with Donnagan in the passenger seat of her car, the detective compares what he saw with David and Maddie at the restaurant with domestic calls he went on as a uniformed officer. She tells him what David costs her in psychiatrist bills and Donnagan tells her in a very smooth and seductive way that she is extremely desirable. He says of David, "He’s the one getting "the short end of the stick – letting someone like you get away."

Without the "real detective" Mark Fuhrman making so much of his deductive skills with the stick and the killer throwing the knife from the passenger side of the Bronco window, "the short end of the stick" in "Eine Kliene Nacht, Murder" means nothing. Throw in the killer with the knife being hurled forward and off to the passenger side when Maddie came to a sudden stop in the parking garage, and what do you get? You get the bleeding killer, the blood in the car (Maddie’s dress) the knife in the car, the knife being thrown out of the car window on the passenger side, the sudden stop, the stick on the passenger side of the car and the same driver, Maddie Hays.

In the 1980 made-for-TV movie Detour to Terror, O.J. Simpson is Lee Hays. Nicole auditioned for a part in the movie as a car crash victim. You saw the pictures of her in makeup as "evidence of O.J.’s abuse."

Now for the pizza connection I promised you….

To be valid the pizza link has to have a sold association or associations to the hand-written Cara Cal Pizza Kitchen note that Fuhrman said he saw on Nicole’s coffee table when he searched her house. Nicole’s friend Cora Fischman said in her civil trial deposition that Faye Resnick set up a three-way with Nicole and Ron for the night they died. Faye, who had been living with Nicole, moved out a week earlier. It wouldn’t be out of bounds, then, to look at Maddie and Ann as two different characters as well as one composite character.

In "Eine Kliene Nacht, Murder," Annie, who had been living with Maddie, writes her a good-bye note. She is going down the stairs with her suitcase when two men burst in with flashlights and guns. They are police officers. Maddie forgot to tell them that her cousin was staying with her. The cops are supposed to be there to search the house to make sure that it’s safe for Maddie. We find out in a dumb series of twists at the end that they are partners of the killer in a high-stakes car theft ring and all three of them are cops. They come and go very quickly and pop up again near the end. Meanwhile, we see all of that business with Annie, the "coffee table," and the kitchen in David’s California apartment. We see the scene that David makes in the restaurant and we see David apologize to Annie for being a jerk. Annie tells him how he can make it up. She says, "You can buy me a pizza."

Donnagan tells Maddie that he has to leave to attend a play for his nine-year-old nice as soon as his partner Gordon arrives to replace him. Maddie tells Donnagan that she knows next to nothing about him. He tells her that she has great eyes.

David drives to Maddie’s house expecting to see her with her bodyguard Det. Donnagan. The man who opens the door eyeing David suspiciously appears to be the right height and build but way too black to be Donnagan. David asks, "Maddie here?" Maddie pops into view behind the black man and says, "It’s OK officer. I know him." When the black man steps away and Maddie comes to the door, David says, with a lewd grin, "Maddie, shame on you." Maddie says, "He’s replacing Detective Donnagan." David replies, "What did you do to Donnagan, wear him out?"

David gives Maddie a copy of a will in the big case that he and Herbert Viola have been working on. He walks away. She calls after him and tells him that maybe they should take a vacation from each other. He tells her that he still has the airplane tickets that he bought for her to visit her parents in Chicago. She suggests that he cash them in and take Annie someplace. David questions her logic, considering his workload. She answers, "Desperate women do desperate things."

Around the time of the Bundy murders, Faye Resnick and Nicole Simpson where desperate for money. Nicole was having a tough time making it on the mere $10,000 a month that O.J. was giving her. With Faye’s $300-a-day cocaine habit and a growing habit of her own, it was little wonder. She tried to cheat on her taxes and tried to get O.J. to help her. The illusion she helped to create after her ’92 divorce of living in fear of O.J. appears on close examination to be a part of a plan to get more money from him.

The chilling call that Nicole made to 911 in 1993, claiming that O.J. broke down her French doors and was going to "beat the shit out of me," turned to smoke when you could tell what both of them were saying. It seemed like more because it started on a 911 tape with Nicole, sounding terrified, invoking O.J.’s "record" and predicting that he was going to cause her great physical harm. It sounded even more chilling after her dead body was discovered, like a voice from the grave naming her killer.

Driving away from Maddie’s house, David spots Donnagan by chance pacing in front of an occult bookstore. David sits in his car and observes as a limousine pulls up to Donnagan and he climes in. David follows the limo to a deserted lot and makes a call on a pay phone to Herbert Viola. He tells Viola to use his contacts at the Department of Motor Vehicles to trace the owner of the silver, stretched limo, license number J18X812. When the door of the limo opens, David hangs up and ducks around the corner. Donnagan walks directly to the phone, drops a coin in the slot and makes a call of his own. He tells the person on the other end of the line that "It’s going down tonight" and that he would be in the house with "her" alone. Donnagan walks away and David uses the phone to tell Maddie to hide under her bed until he gets there.

No one ever explains how or why Gordon simply vanishes – unless he is one of the SWAT guys who break down Maddie’s French doors to save the day. The eleven-man SWAT team has only two cops who wear gloves. The lone black cop on the team is one of them. But this is jumping to the end where Donnagan is revealed as the good guy.

Meanwhile, Herbert Viola traces the wrong license number of the wrong limo to an underworld leader and takes his discovery to a police station. He introduces himself to a uniformed sergeant as, "Special Agent Viola." What happens next can be attributed only to a hiccup in time – or a continuity error.

We can mark the duration of the time spasm using the words of Herbert Viola’s verbal report like ticks on a stopwatch. Bold Italics will indicate where things go wrong with a handcuffed man in the background wearing a black knit cap bending over to take the same seat twice. Viola reports: "…a certain rotten egg in this department was seen departing a white stretched limousine, license number 1,8,7,Xray, Bravo, 1, 2. The man in the cap first comes into view when Viola uses the word, "department." On "limousine," the camera switches to a full front close-up of the sergeant’s face as Viola continues off-camera in a slightly different tone. Then the camera switches back to Viola, roughly the same angle only closer, cropping the sergeant out of the picture. The instant Viola says the word "Bravo" the man in the cap comes into the picture again and sits down just as he did before.

Screenplays and teleplays are rarely shot in the chronological sequence we see or think we see on screen or TV. The actor playing the police sergeant sitting across the desk from Viola, for example, need not have been there after the man in the knit cap sat down (the first time). Maybe he couldn’t be there for some reason. No problem. By shifting the camera to his face while Viola was at a natural pause in his sentence, you get the impression that the action is continuous, that they are still sitting across from each other and the sergeant is listening to what Viola is saying. They could, in fact, have been hours and miles apart.

Except for a few hiccups in time Mark Fuhrman had the only story that matched the killer’s distinctive outfit, the stick, the murder weapon (one of them) and certain indicators that O.J. had the time that went with his discoveries. Pressing the story of the "missing Bronco" and the idea that O.J. got home at 10:45 or later was Marcia’s idea.

Marcia cherry-picked the evidence that said Nicole and Ron were dead long before 10:30 and ignored the evidence that said the attack on them couldn’t have even started until after 10:30. But she didn’t go back far enough to use all of the available evidence that the attack began much closer to 10:00. To capture as much of that time as possible to use as he wished, Fuhrman began his "Hypothesis of a Murder" chapter in Murder in Brentwood with the phrase, "Sometime after 10:00…."

The authorities got two calls from a woman around 10:30 asking if the bodies had been found. Nicole’s watch was on her wrist face down against the concrete, stopped at 10:03. Fuhrman hints that a witness saw a light-colored SUV between 10:03 and 10:30 in the alley where he said he found the match to the stick without actually stating the time bracket. Keeping the timeline "flexible" allowed him to put evidence wherever he wanted to in time to tell his story. That’s how it’s done on TV.

In the 1985 "Stronger Than Steele" episode of Remington Steele, a clever killer uses old movie-making tricks to manipulates familiar measures of time. The murder victim is a twenty-five-year-old director named Steven Spooner. You see him for the first time at a press conference to introduce the star of his movie version of a twenty-year-old TV series called Atomic Man.

Spooner begins his press conference with black and white clips from the 1961 to 1964 series. We see a man with a full head of hair in a lab coat mixing chemicals. We see an explosion. A voiceover explains, "A laboratory experiment explodes, transforming everyday scientist Mark Slate into the Atomic Man, a force with such power the world has never known." You see Atomic Man standing akimbo with gauntlets on his hands and a mask that covers his head like a ski mask with the lower half of his face exposed. You see him capture two robbers in ski masks. You will notice that he is pigeon-toed. You see him tear off the door of a burning car to rescue a woman before the car explodes and you see him lay down his cape to cover an open manhole that a blind man with a stick is about to step into. You will notice the stick next to the curb.

The voiceover says, "Mark uses his superhuman strength to rid the world of crime and injustice wherever he finds it in an endless effort to bring peace to mankind."

The clips end to applause. The lights go on and Spooner goes into his pitch. "…A series," he says, "that in spite of poor direction, simplistic writing, and at best adequate acting by the lead is enjoying phenomenal success in syndication today. Why? …Heroes. People wanted them then. People need them now." Spooner goes on to introduce Nancy Stafford (Michelle Thomas in Matlock) as his associate Jennifer Davenport. He does not say that they are lovers (like Fuhrman and Hart). He does not say that the movie was her idea, that she brought him aboard and that she cleared all the hurdles that brought the project this far. He does say that she help find the new Atomic Man for the movie. That’s when Conrad Janis as Maxwell Donnahue, an older, balder version of Mark Slate crashes the party saying, "And you’re a traitorous snake, Spooner. I’ll kill you before I let you destroy my creation." Jennifer quietly goes up to a security guard who promptly escorts the troublesome man away.

Note how the man who plays Atomic Man starts out a hero and gets softened up for the big takedown after his public altercation with the victim. Fuhrman popped in on the Simpsons in ’84 and reported in his official ’89 letter that he witnessed the incident with the baseball bat and the shattered glass of the Mercedes in ’85. He said how unusual it was to "respond to a celebrity’s home for a family dispute." He concluded, "For this reason this incident was indelibly impressed on my mind?"

If Fuhrman was that impresses with the baseball bat/shattered glass incident, think how impressed he must have been with "Stronger Than Steele." …Wait a minute. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? The item on the wall that looks like a brass rod with a ball on the end is a hint. It’s the murder weapon Jennifer is going to use like a baseball bat to bash Spooner’s brains out. It has Max Donnahue’s fingerprints on it because Max used it as a scepter in the original show and he sent it to Spooner when he heard about the movie. Jennifer will use gloves like the ones he wore on the show to preserve his fingerprints on the murder weapon.

Mark Fuhrman’s analysis of "the" murder weapon used on Ron and Nicole did not include the rounded brass heel of the German Stiletto, which matched the blunt force injury to the back of Nicole’s head. He said that he found a fingerprint on the brass lock of Nicole’s gate.

Steven Spooner seals his own doom when he tells Jennifer that he brought a famous director named Roger Forman (sound enough like Roger Corman for you?) out of retirement to produce the screenplay. Jennifer protests, "Why didn’t you tell me about Forman (sound enough like Fuhrman for you?). We’re partners (sound enough like Fuhrman and Hart?). You direct; I produce. That’s what you said when we signed the papers." Spooner tells her that he was thinking about making her his "executive assistant." Coming from him, she knows what that means. "So I can fetch your coffee and polish hour ego; no thanks."

Cut to 100 Century Plaza where the offices of the Remington Steel Detective Agency are located. Entering Laura Holt’s private office unannounced, Pierce Brosnan as Remington Steele is appalled to find Stephanie Zembalist as Laura enjoying a secret vice – Atomic Man reruns. Laura Holt began her detective agency with her name on the door. She attracted no clients until she invented a male superior who was literally too good to be true.

The suave Englishman that most people call Remington Steele has a laundry list of aliases, mostly from old movies. He’s a former con artist, snappy dresser, connoisseur of fine food and wine and master burglar, who stepped into the shoes of Laura’s make-believe boss in a case of mistaken identity that launched the series. There doesn’t seem to be a movie he hasn’t seen or a case he and Laura get involved in that doesn’t remind him of one of them. One of his all-time favorites is Gone with the Wind starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh (as in Fuhrman’s birthday match Jennifer Jason Leigh). He is a bit disconcerted to learn that Laura had Mark Slate, a.k.a. Atomic Man, in mind when she invented Remington Steele. He says, "Well, I’m not sure I like the fact that my origins have come from a comic book television hero."

Max Donnahue walks up to the gate of Steven Spooner’s studio wearing his Atomic Man outfit with is hood in his gloved hands. He tells the guard that he got a call from Spooner’s office. The guard (Ted’s father in Bill and Ted’s Adventure) tells him that his name is not on the list. The guard calls Nancy Stafford as Jennifer Davenport to find out if it’s okay to let Max in. She tells the guard, "Absolutely not. The man has been harassing Mr. Spooner for days. And be careful. He has a violent temper. This is what the woman who identified herself as "Nicole" said about her celebrity ex-husband when she called a woman named Nancy at a women’s abuse shelter a week before Nicole Simpson was murdered. It’s what Fay Resnick said about O.J. and Nicole in her book about them.

In "Stronger Than Steele," Max threatened in front of many witnesses to kill the victim. In the Bundy murder case, we have reports that Nicole said O.J. was going to kill her but only Faye Resnick reported that O.J. said he would kill her. The effect was the same. Once someone planted the idea, the evidence by the gate with the gloves, the cap and the distinctive boots, seemed to fit.

Max puts on his hood and tries to walk past the studio guard who stopped him at the gate. The guard calls his partner, a black guy named Sid. They restrain him and boot him out.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Davenport is shifting her murder plot into second gear by creating an alibi for herself. She loads an Atomic Man tape in the VCR, turns on the VCR and turns off the television. The studio tape she has loaded is of the same show that is scheduled for broadcast at 11:00. The actual time is 10:47. Jennifer sets the time to one minute before 11:00 and asks Hazel the cleaning woman to come in and clean her office now. She says that she has to make a call later on and she doesn’t want to be disturbed. She goes to her desk where she has hidden the remote control for the VCR. She then tells Hazel that she is having trouble with her contacts and she can’t quite make out the time. Hazel looks at the clock and reports that it’s 11:00. Time for Atomic Man.

Jennifer asks Hazel to turn on the television set. When she does, Jennifer secretly turns on the VCR. Naturally, Hazel thinks that it’s 11:00 and she is watching the scheduled eleven o’clock broadcast of Atomic Man. She has no way to know and no reason to think that she is being set up to give a killer an alibi and to frame an innocent man. Who would? Things like that happen only in the movies and on TV, right?

Hazel and Jennifer watch Atomic Man together. When the clock says 11:11 Jennifer tells Hazel that she has to make her call. Hazel leaves. Jennifer takes the phone off the hook. Dressed in an Atomic Man costume Jennifer sneaks into Spooner’s office, takes the scepter off the wall, and bashes him in the head with it. She hits him just hard enough to get his attention so he can see who’s killing him. Then she whack him in the head over and over the way a good cop would expect to see in a rage killing.

If you were wondering what I was talking about earlier with the ’84 baseball bat incident and the broken glass in the Mercedes Benz, this is it. When Jennifer is sure that Spooner is dead, she throws the scepter through his window, the shattered glass attracting the attention of the guards at the gate. She then climbs down the latticework from the widow sill to the ground. The guards chase her to a corner where they lose her because she ducks into her building. Once inside the door (remember the cap inside the gate that Fuhrman called a ski mask) she pulls her mask off of her head.

Fuhrman said nothing about the baseball bat incident to anyone until 1989 – not a peep, not a whisper, not a hint. When Mike Farrell, the detective assigned to investigate the ’89 incident, starting looking for a pattern of abuse, that’s when Fuhrman stepped in. He created an incident that could not have happened when he said it did (Nicole was pregnant with Sydney). He described O.J. like a pimp who thought he owned Nicole. And he implied that Nicole was in danger of being beaten to death. He used the word "shattered" to describe the cracked windshield.

Jennifer must have a secret way in and out of her private office because the next time we se her she’s wearing the clothes she had on the previous time she asked Hazel to step in. Hazel will remember that time because she looked at the clock on the way in, she watched the start of Atomic Man almost immediately and she saw the time on the clock eleven minutes later on the way out. She will remember this time, too, because Jennifer called her in to clean up coffee she spilled over some papers by the phone on her desk. She was cleaning it up when the closing credits of Atomic Man were running on the tube.

Laura Holt is devastated by the news that Atomic Man is being sought for murder. The evidence against him is convincing enough for Steele who is eager to start setting up security (Andrew Stevens in Night Eyes) for a carpet company called Mooney’s. He reminds Laura that Atomic Man is, "just an actor in a silly suit." That’s not enough for Laura, who ignores the obvious evidence against her childhood hero. "The Fugitive!" she exclaims, "David Janssen. A Quin Martin production, 1963-1967." Steele is as ignorant of TV as he is familiar with the movies. In a reversal of roles, Steele is the one who wants to concentrate on the evidence while Laura is certain that the key to solving the case rests in the premise of a TV series. She explains, "David Janssen played a man running from the police for a crime he didn’t commit. He’d been framed."

Laura makes a long shot attempt to contact Max with her Atomic Man decoder ring and Mooney’s live carpet ads on TV. She puts the coded message on Mooney’s cue cards. He reads it and Laura and Steele meet Max at an Atomic Man convention. When Gary Frank as Det. James Jarvis also shows up, Steele tells Laura and Max, "You two slip out the front while I occupy the Huckleberry Fenn of Homicide." He walks in front to Jarvis who says, "Mr. Steele. I haven’t seen you since…" Steele completes the sentence, "you hounded me for a murder I didn’t commit."

The meeting in question is in an episode called "Steele Framed." In that show a man uses a series of props, disguises, rumors, suggestions, a stolen body, an ice cream truck and an underground telephone switch box to phony up Steele’s phone records so he can frame him for murder.

The Huckleberry Fenn reference to Gary Frank is meaningful for three reasons: 1) Fuhrman used it to explain his use of the n-word in reference to its use in Forrest Gump, a movie about a Vietnam vet with Gary Sinese. Looking at the combination of Fenn and Forrest in the movies I found Sherilyn Fenn and Forrest Whitaker in Diary of a Hitman. 2) Gary Sinese is George in the ’91 version of the movie Of Mice and Men with Sherilyn Fenn. 3) Gary Frank is the Vietnam vet from Iowa in The Distinguished Gentlemen with Eddie Murphy and Sheryl Lee Ralph.

Max hasn’t convinced Steele that he’s innocent. His admission that his fingerprints might be on the murder weapon doesn’t help (although it should because the guards at the gate saw Max and the killer wearing gloves before and after they found the murder weapon). Max’s own story from his own lips (while holding his mask in the gloves on his hands) turns Steele around. The following exchange needs no explanation with respect to the real and imagined motives in the Bundy murders….

Max: People still thought of me as a hero. I liked that…If I kill someone I’d lose the only thing left from my career, my reputation. You understand that. You’re a hero, the amazing Remington Steele, who has never been stumped. The only difference between us is you are really Remington Steele. I’m just an actor playing a part.

Steele: We’re all actors Max, at one time or another. Some of us just have better roles.

Steele dresses Max as a security guard and convinces Mooney to let him stay there. While Max is in hiding Laura and Steele go over some things with Jennifer that don’t add up to Max as the killer but do seem to add up to her. Jennifer has moved into Spooner’s office, replaced him in the Atomic Man screenplay project and collected handsomely on his insurance. The latticework that was supposed to have supported Max breaks under Steele’s lighter weight. That brings to his mind another question. He asks Jennifer, "Why throw the murder weapon with your fingerprints on it through a window, alerting witnesses to your presence at the scene." Jennifer reply’s glibly, "He panicked." Steele says, "That doesn’t explain why he would wear his Atomic Man costume to commit a crime. I mean, hardly an ideal way to hide his identity, is it?" Laura adds, "Or why he showed up at the main gate instead of climbing over the wall."

If, at some point in that exchange, you didn’t’ flash on O.J.’s Nordberg/ color commentator costume (cap, gloves and boots) and the noise by the window-mounted air conditioner that alerted Fuhrman to the bloody glove, I can’t imagine why not. It’s all there, including the questions of why O.J. supposedly showed up at his main gate and why Fuhrman did go over the wall. Apart from a little twist here and there it’s the same scenario. Actually, even the twists are a part of the scenario. Laura is sure that Jessica is the killer. Steele tells her, "…Miss Davenport has an airtight alibi. So long as Hazel swears she was watching television with her we’re going to have a hard time proving she’s guilty."

"That’s it!" exclaims Laura. "Time! She changed the time."

"Nice try," says Steele, "but the station broadcast Atomic Man at eleven o’clock."

"Columbo," says Laura in a role usually reserved for Steele and his movies, "Peter Falk. Universal Studios, 1975. In an episode entitled ‘Playback’ Oskar Werner (Austrian name pronounced "Verner") kills his mother-in-law. He seems to have the perfect alibi until Columbo discovers he used a videotape to alter the apparent time of the murder."

Steele doesn’t quite get it. He asks, "Are you saying Spooner wasn’t killed at 11:00?"

Laura explains the twist. "No. I’m saying Hazel wasn’t with Jennifer at eleven. She just thought she was because Atomic Man was on."

Now Steele gets it. "She was actually watching the tape."

Convinced that a studio tape must exist, Laura and Steele break into Jennifer’s office at night to find it. He is wearing leather gloves. She is carrying a flashlight. They get the tape and Laura brings it with her to Mooney’s carpet store when she goes there to give Max the news.

While Laura and Max are in the store alone, carpet thieves break in. one of them happens to be black. Max becomes a real hero by foiling the burglary attempt and saving Laura from the burglars. That’s the good news. The bad news is Det. Jarvis shows up to arrest Max and Laura.

Steele talks Jarvis into releasing Laura but before he lets her go he discovers the tape with the studio label on it and puts it in his desk drawer. To get the tap back Steele talks Max into acting out a confession that will draw everyone out of Jarvis’ office while he and Laura break in through a window and steal it. With all eyes on Max who starts his "confession" in Jarvis’ office with a stenographer and takes his demonstration to another room, Remington Steel and Laura Holt get into the office through a window. Steele has trouble picking the lock and gives Max hand signals to draw out his performance. When Steele has the videotape, he gives Max the signal to cut his diversion routine – with his fingertips drawn across his throat like a knife.

Max’s confession does not agree with the evidence so Jarvis has to discount it. It is difficult however, to discount the fact that in Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman uses the same burglary diversion tactic as an analogy for what O.J.’s lawyers did with his use of the n-word on Laura Hart’s audiotape to draw attention away from the evidence of O.J.’s guilt. And let’s not forget the videotape he found in O.J.’s VCR.

Laura invites Jarvis, Hazel and Jennifer to watch Jennifer’s studio tape. She stops the action at the end of a fight scene that Hazel and Jennifer both swear they saw. She then replaces the studio tape with a copy of the tape that was broadcast on the night of the murder. In place of the fight scene is a spot for a commercial. Remington Steele sums it up nicely. "A killer caught by a lousy television show and a rotten commercial. There’s something poetic about that."

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