Burt Reynolds Puts His Pants On...

Gila Bend. You pronounce it Heela Bend, and I get annoyed with people who give it a hard G, as in Garbo. It has some meaning to me. The first "serious" story I ever published (see Antioch Review, turn of the century) begins, "High above the desert at Gila Bend...." Ten years after I left the Air Force, my best friend, who stayed in and became a fighter pilot, took a plane into the desert in that area. I went out to get a look at what was left of him: a scarf, some medals and ribbons, a citation, all under glass in a large frame. They said it (continued on page 158) Burt Reynolds (continued from page 131) was an accident, but I never bought it. I knew him and I knew the way he drove. So it's important, at minimum, to get it pronounced right. Gila Bend. With an H up front.

In any case, I get going. I'm off to ferret out some answers to the celebrated Burt Reynolds--Sarah Miles Gila Bend puzzle, a case that brought temporary relief to the Hollywood community, victims of a long drought in scandalous activities. I don't know it at the moment, but I am not fated to be the one observer in a great horde to discover that the butler did it. Or the nanny. Or the busboy or the mayor. Before long, I'm going to be over my head in police chiefs, rattlesnakes, badassed wranglers, Japanese masseuses, CIA agents, relatives of Barry Goldwater, John Wayne--style mothers, you name it. At the moment, it's not important. All I know is that I am not exactly feeling like a tiger these days, and it's a chance to get out of the city. Amazing the way a lot of it slips off your shoulders when you get on a plane. Goodbye Valium, goodbye putdowns, goodbye taxes and the same identical people. Farewell to fighting your way to sleep at five in the morning. I'm on my way. To Gila Bend. A friend, who is a Southwest freak, tells me not to get cute with the wranglers.

"But I'm in shape."

"Not that kind of shape."

And he's right. Lean, crazy, stockyard guys, chair-throwing, eye-gouging, a lot of leaping over bars and throwing you through a window. Sumbitch. Yahoo, Jesus Christ, I hit this guy with everything I've got and he keeps on coming. I'll probably take my friend's advice.

Dropping down over Phoenix, it begins. Southwestern talk. The fellow behind me is describing something amazing, snowflakes that fell on his ranch in the Southwest, each one "bigger than a silver dollar." Each one with a different pattern, too, like fingerprints. I tell him I haven't been to Phoenix in 20 years and all I remember is a night club called the Flame.

"The Flame, eh? Well, you've been there."

What does he mean, I've been there? Because I know The Flame? And if I didn't know The Flame, I hadn't been there? What's so terrifically Southwestern about that? I let it go and tell him I'm headed for Gila Bend. Note the "headed." When in Rome, etc.

"That's rough country," he says. "I lost an engine flying over it. You can't fly out, jeep out, bulldoze out; you put one foot in front of the other foot. Otherwise, that's where you stay."

And now I'm there, Steve McQueen country. Not Randolph Scott, but Jack Nicholson, Lee Marvin, the Cadillac West, scene of the new contemporary Westerns that don't gross too well at the box office but that I love so much. Ben Johnson and Karen Black and the AnnMargret of yesteryear. Once in a while, Paul Newman drops in, but he doesn't stay. Stetsons, pickup trucks out the ass. Trailer camps and land development, sassy drum majorettes and Arnold's Pickle and Olive Company. Bulldozers plowing up choice land, leftover cowboys making up quick-buck schemes and losing everything. My favorite kind of West. I'm picking out Cybill Shepherds all over the place, except that no one's told them they're pretty. This, finally, is the quintessential home of prettiness. Except that I remember I've said that about London, Stockholm, New York, every place I've been. What I see around me are incredible mismatches. Jabbar guarding Dean Meminger. Rangy, long-legged Cybill Shepherds walking around with humpbacked little Southwestern weirdos, guys who've been thrown from a horse and kicked in the head. And the reverse. Lean, terrific-looking, blue-eyed wranglers, not an eighth of an inch of fat on them, led around by massive, shapeless Papago Indian brides; no one ever told them they were great-looking guys. Meekly, they walk along, and out of the side of his mouth, one says, "She's breaking my balls." Wranglers with Jewish-Papago moms? What an incredible country!

Sudden fags, too. A guy who ambles up like a cowpoke and hits me with a highpitched voice full of heavy Mae West into-nations. In a barbecue pit. "Gila Bend?" he says, lowering his eyelids. "Why on earth would you want to go there? There's not even a pitcher show. All you can do is go snakin'." This is too much for me. Southwestern wrangler fags who go snakin'. I like the pitcher-show stuff and the snakin', but I can't deal with the rest.

So now it's tomorrow; I rent a car and head down toward Gila Bend, except that a little birdie whispers to me that I ought to visit The Phoenix Gazette; they were close to the action; maybe there's something in their files. Maybe I'm not so anxious to get down to Gila Bend.

About the case. For that lonely band who might have missed out on it, it goes something like this: They're shooting a Western called The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. Big best seller. Not as big as they figured, but big enough. Big names. Burt Reynolds. Sarah Miles. George Hamilton. Lee J. Cobb. MGM. Sarah Miles of Ryan's Daughter fame, the wife of the man who is always described as "the distinguished Robert Bolt." He gets involved only with distinguished things. Lady Caroline Lamb. A Man for all Seasons. Sarah has a fellow around named David Whiting, who is described as her business manager. Young kid, 26, former Time correspondent, who gets infatuated with beautiful film stars: Candice Bergen ("In the bright sunlight, her spun-gold hair framing her face, a faint mustache of milky health elixir on her upper lip ... it is one of the world's most perfect faces"); Inger Stevens, Paula Prentiss and now the beautiful, unpredictable (she enters rooms on her hands), outrageously quotable Sarah Miles ("When nature calls, I must have a wee-wee.... It makes a pleasant sound--tinkle, tinkle--and it does relieve one so."). He begins by writing an article about her: "Sarah Miles: The Maiden Man-Eater," and somehow gets himself adopted by Sarah and Robert Bolt as "one of the family," an example of those tripleedged Pinteresque arrangements the British are able to handle without batting an eyelash. David is moody, unpredictable, alternately witty and deeply depressed, bordering on the suicidal. He threatens to take his own life if they ever unload him and, indeed, makes one such attempt. They keep him on board, Sarah taking him along for the filming of Cat Dancing. Though Sarah describes their relationship as brother-sister, he watches her with a wary eye, gets upset by her obsession with wranglers. ("By Christ, they're wonderful!" she tells the press.) They're shooting part of the picture near Ajo and the company stays at the nearby Gila Bend TraveLodge. On the fateful night, the way it's supposed to go is this: Sarah gets bored by a party for the company at the Palomino Bar and Café (to which David isn't invited). Even though she's knocked out by the wranglers, she's bored anyway. All anyone wants to do is eat. And she's got a jittery stomach. So she hops into Lee J. Cobb's Maserati-powered Citroën and they shoot back to the motel; she stops in at Burt Reynolds' room. Little haziness on just how long she stays. Time is a little hazy throughout the story. Unlike film-shooting schedules, everything is approximate. What's for sure is that Reynolds is being massaged by little ReTsuKo, a Tokyo-trained masseuse hired in Scottsdale to work on the company. After a hazy amount of time, Sarah goes back to her own room and walks right into Whiting, who leaps out of a clothing rack, foaming over with jealousy. Whiting: Where have you been, where have you been, where have you been? Miles: None of your business, none of your business, none of your business. Later, Sarah tells an investigating officer that David "slapped" her; but at the inquest, the slapping gets escalated into a "beating," with Sarah receiving "two goose eggs" on her forehead, a bloody nose and a cut lip. Whatever the case, according to published accounts, a 22-year-old cupcake of a nanny named Jane Evans (who is looking after Sarah's child, Thomas) enters, tries to pry apart Sarah and David. Sarah tells the nanny to call Burt, who, apart from being a genuinely fine actor (Cosmopolitan centerfold to the contrary), has carved muscles, trapezoids, lats, the works. This seems to cool it for Whiting, who splits the scene. Reynolds appears, tells Sarah, "My God, you look like a mess!" and takes her back to his room, where he looks after her for the night. This includes bathing her wounds. Next day, Sarah returns to her room and finds Whiting dead. Burt is called, takes his pulse ("Something I must have picked up in the movies") and, in what he later refers to as "an error in judgment," pries a pill bottle out of David's hand. Pills are found all over the place, 12 different varieties: sleepers, vitamins, downers, etc.

Eventually, the police chief is summoned and it looks like a routine O.D. case, too many tablets of methaqualone, a tricky new downer, very popular with the kids. But then, all of a sudden, it doesn't. When David gets rolled over onto his back. Too much blood, all pouring out of what becomes a famous "starshaped" wound on the back of the kid's head. And he's been banged up pretty badly, too. Bruises on his chest, wrists, pelvis, etc. Blood in three rooms, blood on towels, Kleenex, back in his own room. Furious round of activity. Important lawyers showing up, and then everyone, in the words of the local police chief, "hauling ass." There's an inquest, and then, pressed on by the dead boy's mother, Mrs. Louise Campbell, and a court order, the principals are forced to return and testify in person at a second session of the inquest. The autopsical verdicts divide. Dr. Bernard Brodie, a visiting professor of pharmacology at the University of Arizona, says that Whiting's drug level of .88 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood was only "one third of the lethal level, and not much higher than a doctor would prescribe." He's not buying the O.D. trip for a minute. But Maricopa County medical examiner Heinz Karnitschnig implies that Brodie's figures are old ones; he has new material indicating that the dosage was "lethal." There's a suspenseful wait for the verdict of Hollywood's famed "coroner to the stars," Thomas Noguchi, whose credits include Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Bobby Kennedy and Sharon Tate. The Japanese forensic specialist goes with Karnitschnig, says there's enough methaqualone in the boy's body to support the O.D. thesis. In the questioning of the principals. Mulford "Sonny" Winsor IV, local justice of the peace, is thrown off his game by Sarah Miles's clinging white blouse ("One way or another, I've been naked in all my films--by now I've got a veteran pair of breasts."), administers the wrong oath and admits, "You're so pretty, you shook me up." Upset at being called back for what seems to be a perfunctory questioning session, Reynolds calls the justice of the peace a "plumber" and the local folks get their backs up. Big dispute over whether he's a plumber or a "plumbing contractor." "I lost all respect for Burt Reynolds," Gila Bend police chief Tom Cromwell tells me later, "the day he cast aspersions on our justice of the peace, a man who knows the law and didn't have to drop his drawers in Cosmopolitan to get where he is." Variety's Army Archerd quotes Dan Melnick, MGM producervice-president, as backing up his star, Reynolds, by sending him a set of plumbing tools and saying, "If moviemaking gets too dull, you can always go in with the plumber in Gila Bend."

The inquest ends with an uncertain verdict from the coroner's jury: "We, the jury ... say: That the dead body inspected by us was the body of David Andrew Whiting, that he died at Gila Bend in Gila Bend Precinct, Maricopa County, Arizona, on the 11th day of February 1973, and that said death was the result of poisoning due to an overdose of drugs. Whether this overdose was taken intentionally or accidentally has not been determined. Also, it has not been determined whether or not physical injuries found on the body were contributing factors in the death or how these injuries were sustained." Very fudgy. Yet the jury checks with Mulford "Sonny" Winsor IV and asks if they can give a verdict like this. They're asking--but it's the only kind they're going to give. Press very restless. Too many unanswered questions. Too much blood. Too much courtesy, even shyness, on the part of the law. A quality of the perfunctory about the questioning. What about all that blood? And all those wounds? How come the stars' lawyers got to sit at the same table as the deputy county attorneys, while David's mom and her attorney, Raul Castro, had to sit in the spectator section? And exactly what was Sarah doing in Burt's room all that time? Sarah tries to clear that one up herself, outside the courtroom. It's right up her alley. "If anyone had been beaten up as badly as I was, it was not the most ideal circumstances to have sexual relations."

But the beat goes on. In fact, it just begins to get under way. A lot of heavy theorizing on New York's Upper East Side: Could Reynolds have beat the kid up and shoved some pills down his throat? Could Sarah have beat him up? Awful lot of speculating on the various affair combinations. Burt and Sarah. Sarah and the nanny. David and the nanny. Burt, Surah and the nanny. David, Sarah and the nanny. Bolt, David and Sarah. Endless combinations. None of them involve Lee J. Cobb. He's not linked with anyone. Neither, for some odd reason, is George Hamilton.

And what about the Japanese masseuse? And the star-shaped wound? That's the one that gets me. Like the organic prunes in the Howard Hughes--Clifford Irving affair. At Elaine's, someone comes up with a Phillips-screwdriver theory. It's the only thing that makes a star-shaped wound. The kind of tool you use on foreign cars. Someone clobbered the kid with a Phillips screwdriver. And people are buying it. It's very late. Someone orders a Phillips screwdriver, on the rocks.

At The Phoenix Gazette, a terrific-looking columnist, blue-eyed, well-muscled, British accent, sees me picking through the files and introduces himself. Paul Dean. Anything he can do to help me? He's an itinerant journalist, been around the world three times, settled in Phoenix because he likes it there. The only thing he can do to help me is to help himself by marching over to audition for some new James Bond picture. Or a Frederick Forsyth novel. (I'm suddenly aware that there are a lot of terrific-looking guys marching through this story. What's going on here? Is this a closet I see before me--with me living in it all these years? If it is, I'm staying right in there.)Dean likes the notion that Reynolds could have smacked the kid around. "After all, if a lovely lady is under attack, summons your assistance, you go after the blighter and punch him in the nose, don't you?"

"Not automatically. I size up the situation first. Look the guy over. Make sure I'm not getting sucked in by the lady. Then I decide whether to move."

He thinks that one over, doesn't seem pleased, but decides I'm all right and he's going to help me anyway. He tells me that the fabled Japanese masseuse, ReTsuKo, is living in nearby Scottsdale. Not only that but just the other day, chief Tom Cromwell of the Gila Bend police department called her, asked her some questions about Reynolds, the condition of his body while she was massaging him. Any marks, etc. What's this? The case is supposed to be closed. It ain't that closed. And I'm within spitting distance of the fabled ReTsuKo. I thank Dean and track the little rascal down to Jack LaLanne's International Health Spa in Scottsdale, right beyond the Camelback Mountains. Damned if they don't have a camel's back, too. I could have called ahead, but I decide to be very Columbo' very Harper, and simply drop by. Some ladies see me and think it's men's day at the spa, which it isn't. I run outside, haul them back in. ReTsuKo is busy with a lady client, but she'll see me in 20minutes or so. I'm assuming that she's got clients backed up for months on the basis of the Burt Reynolds publicity, but it turns out she hasn't. She's massaging very quietly, anonymously, on Camelback Road. I wait in the lounge, watching Scottsdale ladies work on those unsightly bulges; it's my view there's no way on earth they're gonna get 'em to disappear. They should just swing with 'em, but it's easy for me to say; they're not my bulges.

I spot ReTsuKo and she is small. I mean big-league small. You can put two of her in your pocket. A little embarrassing to admit this, but I get a terrible urge for Japanese food. I've just heard about a Scottsdale law that says women can't massage men, and vice versa, but when she comes out, I tell her that what I'm looking for is the exact same massage she gave Burt Reynolds. She's a very pretty little thing and I forget about her height and my yen for shrimp tempura. She says I have a pleasing personality, but she's a little edgy. I figure money talks, nobody walks, so I mention a pleasing figure to go with my pleasing personality. She's got to check with her husband, Mr. Roberts (her name is ReTsuKo Roberts), to see if it's all right to slip me this massage at her home. She can't do it, obviously, at Jack LaLanne's. Her husband, she says, is a former CIA pilot, who went through the window of his cockpit in Laos, escaped from the Laotian version of the Cong, but has poor eyesight and can't fly anymore. This is getting a little weird. It gets even weorder. She got to Burt Reynolds and Sarah Miles via Barry Gold-water's sister, who recommended her to the Hilton people, who passed her along to the MGM Cat Dancing company, Barry Goldwater's sister is crazy about ReTsuKo and calls her a "comedian." I notice she does a lot of giggling, but I don't see the comedic talent quite yet.

She suggests I check into the Scottsdale Hilton and she'll come over with her special massage table. I check in and it's not that hard to take. The Hiltons have done it again, building a beautiful new hotel that looks very Scottsdale, blends right into the landscape. None of this is getting me any closer to Gila Bend; it's getting me farther away, come to think of it, but I figure it's worth it. These spools have a way of unwinding; suddenly, the Gold-waters and the CIA are in the picture. At this rate. I may wind up in Beirut, talking to Palestinian guerrillas.

Nine o'clock on the dot, ReTsuKo is at the door and following close behind is her husband, lean, silver-gray hair, and a guy who can knock off a quick 100 one-armed push-ups. He can also pull out your Adam's apple and feed it to you, if he gets carried away. Somehow I'm not surprised to see him. We shake hands, he helps her set up a low-slung, finely tooled Sonylike table, which she could have set up by herself. Is he going to sit down and watch me get massaged? No, he just wanted to say hello. He'll be downstairs at the bar. It's not very relaxing, but I go along with it. He leaves and ReTsuKo is still a little edgy. This is just a massage, right? she wants to know. Of course, a Burt Reynolds massage. It turns out that Reynolds shamed her. How so? He wanted her to do "a little sexual."

"Well, maybe you shamed him." I explain all about massage parlors in New York, L.A., Places where it's almost impossible to get a massage if you don't want the masseuse to do "a little sexual." You ask for a straight massage and they think you're some kind of freak. She doesn't hear any of this. All she knows is that she's studied for two years, learning how to manipulate nerve endings, at Professor Nagasomebody's in Japan. I say terrific, and she can forget about the sexual, just give me the same massage she gave Burt.

"Better," she says, as I whip off my clothes. It's going to be better, because she didn't have her table at Gila Bend and had to work Reynolds on a motel bed. The table enables her to hop all over the place. She puts some cold eye patches over me and goes to work. I'm a little worried about the disgruntled CIA fellow down at the bar. Bare-asked, with patches over my eyes--I'm not exactly ready to deal with the CIA. ReTsuKo tells me Burt has a terrific body, but he isn't that natural a person. Sarah has a fine body, too, lean, really dynamite, and she's a little more natural. ReTsuKo would prefer doing women, because there isn't all that muscle to get through. At first, she was impressed by her assignment, the cast of Cat Dancing, but then it was just another massage gig. Who would have impressed her? Henry Fonda or Peter O'Toole, either together or separately. They're more her style. One nice thing about Burt is that even when she backed down on doing "a little sexual," he let her keep the extra bread. (The fee was $20; he gave her $40.) She felt guilty about this and threw in an extra massage for the lady hairdresser on the picture, a friend of Burt's.

I'm starting to get into the massage. She really does know about nerves and she's discovering entire communication centers of New York tension in my neck and shoulders that I never knew I had. She tips in at a fast 85 pounds soaking wet, but she gets all 85 pounds behind her fingers and each probe is like the perfect punch that Torres used to take out Pastrano. I've brought all this East Coast tension to Arizona and she's able to smoke it out, all the while saying "Poor baby, poor baby." For a split second, I'm a lonely GI listening to Tokyo Rose and really digging it. I'm ready to throw in the towel and go A.W.O.L. We're both really cooking, when there's this pounding on the door. The CIA guy. A lot of my tension shoots back in. He just wants to let her know that he's waiting. Of course, he's waiting. We all know that. He goes back to the bar and ReTsuKo apologizes, saying he's shamed because he can't fly and has to carry her massage table. Everybody is shamed around here. We go back to the massage, and now she really ups the ante. I'm not exactly sure how she's pulling it off, but whatever she's doing, it comes across as either heavy raindrops on my ass or light-footed Japanese ponies. Maybe a combination. Ponies and raindrops. She does an elaborate slapping thing on the soles of my feet and talks about relaxation. I'm going to be relaxed for a month. I'm not sure I want to be this relaxed. The CIA guy shows up again and he's a little testy now, but I'm too relaxed to worry about it. ReTsuKo tells him to relax and apologizes. He heads for the bar again and we're off. To tell the truth, up front, I was hoping for "a little sexual." I'm always ready for "a little sexual"--some kind of family thing that got passed on--but I swear to you this is better than sexual. Suddenly, I'm right behind Mayor Lindsay and his effort to throw the massage parlors out of the city--but only if he replaces them with a city full of licensed ReTsuKos. This has got to be a substitute for hash, coke, skag. Assign each junkie a ReTsuKo and you can close down the methadone clinics.

Meanwhile, ReTsuKo can't get over how big I am. Burt's got the lats and the pecs, but she's marveling over my bigness. This is some Japanese cupcake. No wonder Goldwater's sister passed her along to the Hiltons, who passed her along to MGM. I'm the most relaxed fellow in Arizona when the CIA guy comes back. This time, he shoves open the door and says, "Fuck it, I'm getting out of here." Very tense there for a moment, and I'm worried about my Adam's apple. ReTsuKo says don't worry, he's like a little boy, she can handle him, and then she finishes me off with more ponies and raindrops. She leaves; I make a feeble attempt to check the local Scottsdale action, but then I collapse, drugged, sure that I'm going to sleep for a week. I haven't made it to Gila Bend; I certainly haven't solved any mysteries; but I've gotten myself some son of a bitch of a massage. Miraculously, I wake up the next morning and decide she's overdone it a little; there are two pressure points at the base of my neck that are pounding away. Is it possible she and the CIA guy have slipped a finely tuned electronic gadget in there and that all my activities for the next month will be piped back to some underground headquarters? I've been reading too much about Watergate.

I say goodbye to the Scottsdale Hilton, but not before a blonde lifeguard right out of the Cybill Shepherd cookie cutter comes up and asks, "Is it possible, in your view, to sustain a one-on-one relationship for the duration of a lifetime?" What am I, some older, venerable sage type she's spotted? I tell her that the prospects are a little dim, in my view, and she looks forlorn. A single strand of pubic hair peeps out of her bikini bottom, but I'm not blowing Gila Bend for any public-hair strand. I've done that kind of thing. Maybe I'll catch her on the way back.

I hear it gets to be 126 degrees in the summer down at "the Bend" (they call it the fan-belt capital of the world, because everybody's fan belt breaks down there on the way to Tucson), so I get Hertz's two-door Montego special in tiptop condition before I head out. The garage mechanic says his dog just bit a neighbor child. Is he covered under normal insurance? I don't know about things like that. I just love the expression--neighbor child--and can't get over how casual he is. Of course, the neighbor child's father, equally casual, is liable to stroll over and casually put one between his eyes. A breakfast of old-fashioned buttermilk pancakes--"tender as a woman's heart"--and I start traveling, headed 60 miles south of Phoenix. Glen Campbell country. I pass the Triple A Ranch, the Quick Seed and Feed Company, Arnold's Pickle and Olive Company, a massive sheep farm, four-legged wooled sweaters, benign, fairy-tale animals, totally oblivious of the chaos in meat prices. I turn on the radio--Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Marvin Gaye--no matter where you are in the country, the music ties it all together. At a drugstore, I spot a classy-looking upright citizen, a pillar of respectability, sneaking out with a copy of Anal Nieces--with all this conservative stuff, they're just as horny here as they are back East. Now I'm in the craggy, ferocious Gila Bend desert country. I used to fly over it and I get a little nauseated, as I remember crawling along the bosoms of nasty-looking pock-marked mountains. I can still smell the sweet and sickening fuel as it leaked through to the cockpit of an old prop-driven trainer. The Air Force owns millions of acres in this territory, used it and still does as a gunnery range. The idea then was to build up simulated Korean villages and ammo dumps and let the new jet fighters practice blowing them to ribbons. Build them up again, blow them out. That was salute-the-flag, the-Marines-are-coming, gung-ho and my-country-'tis-of-thee time. It still is, at least for the Air Force.

On the ground, they've got F-84s disguised as MIGs, and also simulated SAM missile sites. The jets fly over and practice wiping them out. The poor bastards on the ground paste the targets back together and the jets zero in again. It goes on like this.

Now I'm in Gila Bend, and it's a lucky thing I jam on the brakes; otherwise, I'd be on my way to Tucson. I'm a pretty good describe!", but I'm going to pass on describing this burg. Someone back in Phoenix said it was "2000 people and that's a bunch. Two thousand if you throw in the rattlesnakes." You see the Santa Fe Railroad, some motels, a feed company, and then you're past it. You can't call it a small town; it just begins and then it's over. There's not even room enough to gossip. And they ought to be thrilled they have something to gossip about. They ought to send Burt Reynolds a small, mysterious weekly check for the material he handed them.

I find the now-notorious TraveLodge and it's more insignificant than advertised. I haven't reserved a room and say I'd like one. The fellow gives me the key to room 135, and, with a wink, says, "That's the one Burt Reynolds had!" Now I identify myself and he gives me the score card on room requests. Reynolds is way ahead. That is, curiosity seekers ask for his room more than that of any of the other principals. Sarah Miles follows close behind and David Whiting, the dead boy, is near the end of the list. Only a few people want to sleep in his pad. No one wants Lee J. Cobb's room.

The proprietor's wife says she doesn't like the smell of the whole thing. "It just wasn't right." I'm going to hear that a lot in the next several days. "Between you, me and the fence post, it just won't wash." The motel manager's wife says if there was all that screaming, if Whiting was, indeed, beating up Sarah Miles, how come there was no sound? She's got a point there.

Later, in Reynolds' room, the wind shifts slightly and the whole TraveLodge shakes. It's like a prop in a Victorian suspense novel. The manager's wife wants to know if I think any money changed hands to keep people quiet. I don't know, ma'am, I just got here, but it's my notion that it didn't work that way. "There wasn't all that much blood," she says, being very fair and judicial. The newspapers described a "massive pool of blood" around the boy's head. Who cleaned it up? I ask. Just one of the girls, she says, got the room back in shape in no time, just as if a guest had had a rough night and dropped his cookies. That's all there was to it. One more thing. She saw Sarah Miles after the "incident" and she certainly wasn't all bruised up the way they had her pictured in The National Tattler. Does she remember David Whiting? Nope. Nobody does. He just slipped around, was almost invisible. I'm going to be hearing this often in Gila Bend. All anyone knows is he ordered the same meal each time he entered the dining room: a club sandwich and a shrimp cocktail. Do I think Burt "bashed" the boy? Again--I don't know, ma'am. I just rolled in. If I find out, I'll sure let you know. How's business? I ask her. A little slow, actually. When it starts getting warm in northern Arizona, the "snowbirds" don't bother much with Gila Bend.

I go to my room. What did he mean, Burt Reynolds' room? It was my room first. That is, I've been in that room a hundred times. Anyone who's traveled has been in that room. It's the room I check into once in a while to get a cold, mentholated quiet so I can get a piece of writing done. Which I never get done. I think Truman Capote gets writing done in rooms like that. Or at least he did in Kansas once. Do I smell dried blood? I swear to myself that I'm smelling some. I once saw a homicide detective pick up a kitchen knife, little serrated job, with a drop of blood on the end. Looked like catsup to me--what there was of it I could see--but he pinned a stabbing homicide on the kitchen owner with it. I get carried away once in a while, but I'm no homicide dick, and I decide not to look around for bloodstains. What am I supposed to do with them if I find them? They found blood all over the place a couple of months before and the company went on making Cat Dancing.

It's too late to catch the police chief, so I go out to the TraveLodge bar and the first fellow I run into, a heavily muscled Mexican, tells me he's heard I'm a writer and that I might as well check right out, because the town was totally unaffected by the "shooting." Suddenly, it's a shooting. Everyone refers to it as either a shooting or a killing. Maybe they know something I don't know.

The Mexican asks me how I can expect the town to get excited about one shooting when at least four guys a month fall asleep on the Santa Fe tracks and get cut in thirds. What do they do that for? I ask. He can't help me. They get sleepy, so they lie down on the tracks.

"So death comes easy in Gila Bend."

"Nothing to it," he says. "Especially at some of the bars. You mix up Papagos, wetbacks, gringos, wranglers and you get a plenty hot fire."

A TraveLodge waitress, Ireland-born, freshly divorced from a gunnery-range GI, says she didn't think much of the Cat Dancing folks, figuring they were a bunch of "carnies"; that is, people who don't actually work for a living. She loved Burt Reynolds, though, and stood on her toes to slip him a kiss. Every woman I run into has the same story, and that would include the ladies in the old-age home if they had one. The women couldn't get over Burt and the men, for the most part, could just as well have passed. Dave, the TraveLodge bartender, on duty at the time of the "incident," is not among the Reynolds lovers. He turns out to be a Jewish guy from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and when two truckers ask for beers, he says, "Don't rush me, I'm not an A-rab, I'm a Hebe." I don't see the logic in that statement, but nothing surprises me anymore. It wasn't anything Reynolds said that got Dave pissed off but something in his eyes. "His eyes told me he thought I was a peasant. I'm from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn."

"Maybe it's because he's a new star. When he gets a little deeper into it, he'll ease up."

"For Christ's sake," says Dave, "ED Sullivan once shook my hand at Toffenetti's."

While I'm flashing back to the story about the guy who went around bragging that he once pissed next to Gene Krupa, Dave hints that he can tell me plenty, or at least he could if he weren't part of the management. I take him aside and all he's got for me is that Sarah Miles drinks grasshoppers and that the Big Four kept constantly checking one another's whereabouts. What am I supposed to do with that? What I do is try to figure out who the Big Four are. I think they're Reynolds, Sarah, George Hamilton and an actor named Bo Hopkins, whom I remember from The Getaway and who always seems to be in the picture. I ask Dave if there's any action in the vicinity and he tells me to forget about it. "Nothing between here and El Centro. The GIs at the gunnery range are dying for a chance to use penicillin, but there's no way." I see an inconspicuous blonde head slumped over at the end of the bar, except that it's not that inconspicuous. I recall the motel owner's telling me about a blonde girl reporter, staying at the TraveLodge. So he'd blown her cover the second I checked in. I march her over to a side table; she trots along like a naughty child. We almost exchange information. Turns out she knew and worked with David Whiting. I want to know about Whiting and she wants to know what I was doing in Phoenix. Mexican standoff. We decide to be friends and tell each other nothing. She says I have a big advantage being a man and I look at the piled-up blonde hair and I'm not convinced. I flash on the idea of bouncing around the world as a team, her getting the blonde-hair material, me getting what's left over--but then I drop it; it's probably a TV series.

What she's done is to get me thinking about Whiting. Really thinking about him. The reality of him. This was a friend of hers, about the same age, a writer, and he's dead; one way or another, he went out in one of those Burt Reynolds motel rooms. She gives me a little tidbit. "The key to David," she says, "is that he lost his father when he was very, very young." I give her a little tidbit in return, mentioning Reynolds' friend, the hairdresser on the picture, and we call it quits. Much later, I remember how cagey I've been and I don't like myself for it. I call her in Los Angeles and apologize for being so cagey. But that's much later. A trucker at the bar tells me no matter how badly I want action, to avoid the Owl Buffet at all costs, very rough wrangler place. I shoot right over to the Owl Buffet.

I take a seat at the bar and read a sign--or warning--between the mirrors:

There was an owlThat Sat in an oakThe More he sawThe Less He SpokeThe Less he SpokeThe More He HeardWhy Can't we all beLike this Wise old bird?

In other words, I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut or I'll get my head handed to me. At the end of the bar, I get my first wranglers, five of them, real vintage types; each of them looks as though he's been chewed in a giant mouth for a while and then spit out. The worst and most chewed-up one is named Earl and is shooting pool with his friend, a one-eared fellow. Each time Earl misses a shot, he picks up a chair and asks the bartender, "Can I hit him with this?" He misses another shot, picks up a spittoon and says, "Can I hit him with this?" And so on, with giant ashtrays, pool cues, beer bottles.

Very good-natured stuff, and the bartender tells me, "Don't pay them no mind." Everyone kids the one-eared man about the way he lost his ear. A girl slammed a ladies'-room door on it.

A third pool shooter insists that he doesn't care about the Papago wife who's left him. "I got all the pussy I wanted off that girl."

"Well, she hid plenty more from you," says Earl, "because I happen to know she's out there right now, passing it around at the trailer camp."

Big laugh from everyone, and then the man who lost his wife slumps over the bar and says, "Oh, hell, I can't drink, I can't shoot pool and I can't get a hard-on." The bartender rubs it in a bit, telling him he's so dumb he'd lend a man his horse so he could steal his car.

There's an awareness that I'm at the bar--let's not kid ourselves, with my beard and my California-casual outfit, I don't exactly fade into the wallpaper at the Owl Buffet. I decide to shoot some dice and take a try at old Earl.

"Those movie people ever come in here?"

He fixes me through an eye slit--a look that probably kills cattle swiftly and painlessly--and after a long pause, not exactly a Printer pause but more of a deadly Southwest wrangler pause, says: "No comment."

"Fine," I say, and then I decide to run right up the middle on him, none of this end-around stuff. After all, what's the worst thing that can happen? My Blue Cross is paid up and there's probably a halfway-decent doctor around. Maybe not in Gila Bend, but somewhere in the area, working with the Indians.

"I'll bet you've been waiting to say that all your life."

Second pause, much worse this time, and I feel an involuntary muscle start to go in my left arm, probably not a heart attack but definitely not a sign of physical fitness. Suddenly, Earl laughs, or guffaws, I suppose, wraps a bear's arm around me, says I'm all right and buys me a drink. I'd guessed right. There's a TV set in the Owl Buffet--that's the local pitcher show--and I'd imagined Earl watching the parade of celebs on the seven-o'clock news, each of them saying "No comment." I've always wanted to say "No comment," so I figured Earl did, too. The problem now is to get rid of him. I've got a friend for life. He tells me that during the inquest, a woman resembling Sarah Miles came into the Owl one night wearing a blonde fall and escorted by a fellow Earl saw later on television. The fellow placed a call on Sarah's behalf to New York, using a credit card, but when the call came through, Sarah, or the woman resembling her, ran and hid behind the jukebox.

Then both Earl and the bartender go to work on Reynolds. He's a man, just like they are, puts his pants on one leg at a time. The next day, the police chief is going to tell me the same thing. That Burt Reynolds puts his pants on one leg at a time. All the men in Gila Bend stand as one behind this theory: that Burt Reynolds puts his pants on the same way they do. What makes them so sure? He could really cross them up if he thought of another way of getting his pants on. And the women in Gila Bend would love to watch. As for Sarah, the bartender says she was good-looking but nothing to raise the flag about.

"You see, I'm different," he says. "If I want to raise the flag, I got a little woman sittin' back home who'll raise the flag and the whole damned flagpole!" Earl and the bartender lean in close now--I'm their new buddy and I'm going to get handed a blockbuster.

"Don't say you got it from here," says the bartender, "but just between you, me, Earl and the fence post, the whole thing don't smell right. It don't feel right. And that's the way most people around here figure." I promise not to let the cat out of the bag, and then I leave. Earl follows me out to the car. He wants to hang around with me. I'm not looking for new friends, but I can't tell him that. I say I'd like to, but I have to "mosey around some." He understands that and we say goodbye.

Southern-police-chief time: Big. Beefy. Heavy hands. Weighs in at 230. Ice-cold eyes. Got the right name, too: Tom Cromwell. Except that he's not Southern. He's from Illinois; they'll do it every time. We make some hard eye contact. Something like arm wrestling, except that I've gotten good at the eye thing. I try to think of someone who can stare me down. Maybe Chou En-lai, but that's about it. Has something to do with losing your father. After that, you can return anyone's stare. We go at it awhile, chatting casually, as though there's no duel going on. He's proud of a daughter who broke 100 words a minute in a typing contest. His biggest coup before the Reynolds-Miles case? Arrested the same man twice for two separate homicides. Fellow killed his brother in Ajo, then killed another man in Gila Bend. "Maybe he's not finished," I say, but the chief doesn't think that's funny.

The eye battle ends in a draw and the chief takes a deep breath. "The case," he says, "is officially closed." But the "officially" is in italics. The chief has been getting letters from all over the country. And they hurt. "How much did those Hollywood bums pay you to close the case?" The letters really sting.

"Hell," he says, "I didn't haul ass out of here, the MGM people did." He switches the subject around to how industrious the British reporters are--and I tell him, fine, but has he ever actually looked at the British tabloids? They make ours look like The Christian Science Monitor. He doesn't really want to talk about the press, although, obviously, all that attention from people all over the world had to affect him a bit. Mostly, though, he seems to feel he's been made a fool of. It really hurts. Hurts his stomach. "If only they'd stuck around an extra twenty-four hours," he says, "we'd have had a proper investigation, and maybe we'd have found exactly what the inquest found. An O.D. But every time I tried to talk to someone, there was an attorney standing in front of him." What would it take to reopen the case? Some hard evidence. Getting the coroners and pharmacologists together. One of the drugs in question was Mandrax. Shouldn't someone go to England, where the drug is manufactured, and ask the people there what the tolerance level is? There are just too many unanswered questions. Too much blood. Questions about keys. And mostly about time. Time is driving the chief bughouse. No one seems to have gotten the time straight and the chief runs through the case a hundred times, trying to break through on the time sequence. And the bruises. All over David's body. Markings on his chest, pelvis, hands, bruised knuckles, jawbone, the star-shaped, or stellate, wound.... And how about the way he was found, crumpled up in the dressing room? Think about it. When people O.D., how do they go about it? Marilyn Monroe, etc. They pop the pills in bed. Or they slump over in the driver's seat of a car. What's this dressing-room stuff? Ever heard of a guy O.D.ing in a dressing room before? I tell the chief there's nothing more attractive than seeing a well trained criminologist, customs man, homicide dick go to work with real precision. Spurred on, he says, "I may look dumb, but...," a line that comes to us courtesy of TV, then proceeds to lecture me with that precision I'm talking about--on the subject of rigor mortis, how you'd have to break the arm and crack off the fingers of a dead man if you wanted to get something out of his hand, and he was in a certain stage of rigor. But all of this thinking is unofficial. The case is closed. Crimes are solved by manpower, man-hours. He's got eight men on his staff and he's from Gila Bend. He's lucky if the L.A. police take his phone calls. "I just wish," he says, "I could take a year's sabbatical and go off on my own on this one. You bet your ass I'd come back with some answers."

I get the impression he doesn't think the answer lies in the area of the rumors that are floating around New York and California, that Reynolds took the kid out. I also get the impression he doesn't feel the story that came out at the inquest was right on target, either. The real McCoy was somewhere in between, and if the story were told, it probably wouldn't result in any new actions or arrests. Deputy County Attorney Douglas Peacock, who did some of the questioning at the inquest, seemed to feel the same way: "I wish somebody would have said what happened. It probably wouldn't have changed anything. It probably all was justifiable. But...." Did he mean that someone probably struck David before he died? he was asked. "Right," he said. To use the current phrase, this is where the chief's head seems to be at--and there is all this pressure building up inside him. It's going to drive him up the wall.

Before I leave, I begin to get the first fuzzy image of what David Whiting's mother is like. The chief is obviously down on Reynolds for mouthing off at the local justice of the peace in front of the national press; he has generally good feelings about the movie people who passed through, and MGM in particular. This is not a case of a small-town yokel pissed off at highfalutin showbiz types. On the contrary, he's a rather sophisticated man. He gets paternal about the dead boy, referring to him on a first-name basis. But the one he has a grudging admiration for is Mrs. Campbell, David's mother. "I've got to give the old girl credit," he says. "She came in here with her guns high and firing, determined to get some answers. [Attention, staff of Psychoanalytic Review: Robert Bolt, recording his first meeting with Sarah Miles: "She came into the party like a ship in full sail with all guns firing."] She poor-mouthed a lot, said she had no funds, but she shook the place up. That was her son, and damned if she wasn't going to find out what happened to him."

The police chief and David's mom have their differences, mostly disputes over David's belongings--his clothing and cameras, his last effects. Sarah claims the cameras are hers, and the chief is caught in the middle, unable to relinquish David's belongings without a court order. At one point, the old girl locks herself in the chief's office, shutting out the deputies--so she can call her lawyer. Everything she does, this "tiny, wrenlike" woman, throws the chief off his game; but in spite of the hassle, he comes up with unconcealed admiration for her. In one instance, she points at Cromwell's briefcase and asks: "Is that your briefcase or my son David's?" I'm beginning to get a little feeling of her, style. The more I hear about her, the more she reminds me of someone I knew.

Later in the day, I read some notes taken by Irene Guilbert, a local stringer for The Arizona Republic. They tell of her first impressions of the "subdued, mouselike little lady" arriving in Gila Bend: "She had been in [Chief Cromwell's] office but minutes when voices began rising, Cromwell's as well as Mrs. Campbell's. Soon Chief Cromwell strode out, red-faced, saying, 'I can't deal with her. Forey [a deputy], get the hell in there!' As the reluctant Forey obeyed, Cromwell said to me, 'He used to be a minister; he can handle her.' Evidently, it worked, because voices quieted. Cromwell entered again, voices rose. Exit Cromwell, angry, with Mrs. Campbell dashing around in his wake, shrieking, 'Is power so important to you that you can treat the mother of a poor dead lad like this?' The argument was over David's possessions. Mrs. Campbell wanted them immediately--Cromwell said they were impounded.... The police were left very shaken, because... they had expected to be solicitous and comforting to a grief-stricken mother and had not expected this."

I spend the rest of my time in Gila Bend picking my way through rumors the way you might step through a mine field. They're all over the place. The townspeople insist the whole affair meant nothing to them, that they plan to just go about their business, that Burt Reynolds puts his pants on, etc. But everyone has a little rumor to toss in, a theory. Several question Sarah's bruises. "The bruises began to get so bad," says Miss Guilbert, "that after a while it looked as though Sarah Miles was the one who was dead and David was alive." Even little Thomas, Sarah's five-year-old son, gets into the act. There's a story that his 22-year-old nanny was heard saying: "The reason Thomas is acting so precocious is that he was the one who broke in and found David dead." There's plenty more where these came from--but by this time, all I really care about is David and his mother. I've phased out my Hollywood stage of the story and I'm working on the mother-and-son legend. They wouldn't let David's mother speak at the inquest, but she insisted and finally got a list of testimonials read into the record: Time magazine's John Steele (David was a staff member for three years) found him "one of the brightest young men with whom I have come into contact ... a young man of high character and honesty." A film producer, Warren Kiefer, had this to say: "He was one of the very few men I have ever known intimately who demonstrated from the very first day I met him in London ... courage ... He became, for both me and my wife, in his short life, a standard of what in fact an exceptional young man can and should be." So where does Sarah Miles come off calling Mrs. Campbell's son "half-mad"?

Come to think of it, Mom's really got it in for Sarah. Her final words to the inquest jury: "We believe that Sarah Miles will find in her own conscience the best rebuttal of her allegations about my son." Somewhere along the line, I get my hands on David's last letter to his mom. It's dated January 15, 1973, and is written from London. Here's some of it: "All goes well here. My skiing trip was very successful. I have bought some splendid new cameras. I am just finishing the first draft of a screenplay. I have bought the film rights of a book called The Mistress, by Andrew McCall, and, generally, things are going very well here, indeed." Options ... screenplays ... new cameras.... David's mother would like to know if these sound like the ravings of a "half-mad" young man. I poke around some more, following Mrs. Campbell's trail a bit. A waitress at Mrs. Wright's Dining Room remembers her storming into the restaurant and saying, "I hear you have some god-awful barbecued food here and that all of your fish is frozen, too." But the girl recalls this with affection. She's one of those women who can get away with this kind of thing. Insult you and make you love it.

I had that kind of mother. She used to walk over to a baby carriage, look inside and tell the proud mother, "What an ugly child." I don't know how she did it, but she made the mother love it. The mother knew that, in some weird way, ugly meant beautiful. It's a tough one to pull off, but my mother had that knack. So, apparently, does David's mother. At least in the legend I'm creating. A Mr. Ferrante, of Western Auto Associate Store, who drove David's mother back and forth to the inquest from the Westward Motel in Buckeye, didn't see any of this edge to the woman. But he was with her all the way. He found her motherly, polite, considerate. "Mankind has to like people like her, especially middle-class people like us. You see, we get into battles and lose them. A woman like her just keeps on coming." Ferrante has a boy, 15, and an eight-year-old daughter. If one of them were to die, tragically, like David, would he wade in? "You bet your life. With everything I had. But the thing is, I'd probably have to drop out at some point. That's the thing about Mrs. Campbell. She'll never drop out."

Late at night, back at the Trave-Lodge, I stand in my room, the Burt Reynolds room, and it really gets to me. A kid is dead. A writer, too, 26, just getting off the ground. (To his credit, Reynolds points this out on the courtroom steps, right after he's taken a rap at the local "plumber." "Let's not forget," he says, "a boy is dead.") And his mother is not taking no for an answer. She plans to keep no coming. And brother, do I know that kind of mother. We all had them, all 35 of my friends in the Bronx. 34 of whom became dentists and doctors. And me. We all had John Wayne for a mother. The fathers were invisible, so the mothers took over, but at least there was one John Wayne in the family, even if he was wearing skirts. We paid a big price for having this kind of mother (see Krafft-Ebing, any chapter will do). Once in a while, there was a kid whose father was in the rackets, a "bad Jew," but I notice those guys didn't turn out so terrifically, either. Whatever the case, David is dead, but at least he's got a John Wayne mother on the case. Taking on coroners and police chiefs and lawyers and movie studios. With no intention of quitting. The way those tough Bronx mothers wouldn't have quit. The way my mother would have hung in there. Even in Arizona. In the Andaman Islands, if that's where the trail led her. Forget about why these mothers hang in there. The textbooks might hint there's a little guilt in the picture. Maybe they didn't do too hot a job on the kid when he was alive. Not important. Mrs. Campbell is going to keep on coming. David is out of private day schools and St. Albans and Time and London and his mother now lives and works in Berkeley and is married to a former official in the Truman Administration. Neither David nor his mother ever set foot in the Bronx, but put all that aside for the moment. She's some kind of Bronx Jewish John Wayne mom, at least in the story I'm making up. Standing in the Burt Reynolds room, I start to focus on David and I'm tempted to check out his last room, but I don't do it. What's that going to accomplish? All these goddamned rooms are the same, anyway.

Driving up to L.A. through the desert, Instart to see David as some kind of tortured Seymour Glass type, pill popping, sporadically brilliant, unable to cope. His colleagues in the Luce group remember him as being "flaky--a star-struck manchild with a Bond Street wardrobe, lavender glasses ... a lust for the life of the Beautiful People." Well, that's not quite Seymour Glass, but I make an adjustment; I force it to work. Quirky, brilliant, erratic--all of it snuffed out just as he's starting to cook. The trouble is, as they say at Watergate, it just won't wash. For example, when I get to L.A. (I miss Candice Bergen--one of David's crushes--by ten minutes; she's off to China, and I don't know the Zip Code), I take another look at David's last letter to his mom. Here's a paragraph I missed the first time around: "What I need is roughly six pairs of boxer shorts. I find the English variety abominably badly cut. They should be for a 33" waist; thus the size should be either 32"--34" or more likely simply 34". Plaids, stripes and other bright colors would be appreciated, and I suggest you unwrap them, launder them once and then airmail them to me in a package marked 'personal belongings.' ... There are various kinds of boxer shorts, but it is the most standard normal cut which I want."

This is kind of sad, in a way, but it's a little hard to work with. "Abominably badly cut" boxer shorts. He's got to have the most standard normal cut. Where's the quirky brilliance? Where's the failed genius? What happened to Seymour Glass? This guy is into boxer shorts. And they have to have the right cut or he's not going for them. That's what happens when you fool around with legends. They have a way of backfiring on you. I even swing with the boxer shorts for a while; I figure I'll give him the boxer shorts. But then I get my hands on some of his magazine stuff. I try an article called "Dick and Paula: Two Real Fun Kids." Right off, he's got Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss "bounding into the living room of their Manhattan apartment like frisky elk. Dick with his hand-in-the-cookie-jar grin and Paula with breasts squirming like live puppies beneath her jersey top. "Now I'm in big trouble. It's going to be hard to work with those live-puppy breasts. All right, the kid was 25 when he knocked off the piece, but you just don't do live-puppy breasts. Even if you're just getting off the ground. You take live-puppy breasts out, even if it hurts. And particularly if you want to be Seymour Glass. I have to remind myself that he doesn't want to be Seymour Glass. I'm the one who's making this all up. And his magazine work, give or take a live-puppy-breast allusion or two, is readable. Competent; slick. Not that easy to pull off. Try keeping someone glued to the page with 6000 words on a starlet and you'll get the idea. But there's no way I'm going to get Seymour Glass out of him. And the deeper in I go, the more trouble I'm in. I round up one of the female stars of whom he was temporarily enamored, and all she can remember is that he was "sweaty."

For a while, I was working with a young Robert Ryan or Hurd Hatfield vision of David (I'd come off Seymour Glass), and she hands me "Mike Nichols with a paunch." If you had to do him in the films, which actor would you pick for the part? Art Garfunkel. she says. "Kind of a WASP Art Garfunkel." I can't deal with this and I decide to quit while I'm behind. Not fool around anymore. I forget all about Seymour Glass and live puppies and WASP art Garfunkels and I decide to go back to my original made-up (but possibly truer than the real thing, the way the Italian spaghetti Westerns often achieve an epic form that's more accurate than the American realistic films) version of the story, the one I like about the gray-haired little old lady sailing into a strange Arizona town, guns firing, loaded for bear, absolutely determined to find out what happened to her son, her masterpiece, and nobody better stand in the way. I'm not sure what happened to David Whiting that night (early morning?) in Gila Bend, and that troubled police chief isn't, either. As David's writer-girlfriend put it: "Every one of those thousand journalists who covered Gila Bend has a little piece of the truth. If you could put all those pieces together, you'd have the answer." More important, if I were on the stand in Maricopa County and I had told even a little fib, I wouldn't be sleeping very easy--not with my legendary mother on the case. Not with this woman who obviously plans to keep on coming.

So I'm going to stick with my mother-and-son legend for a while. I don't know how it squares with the facts, but it would make a terrific film. You'd need someone young, wide-eyed, a real believer, to tackle the screenplay. Come to think of it, a David Whiting would be perfect. Got all the stuff and he'd probably work cheap. Except that ... well. ...