Jackie Coogan

            After the food bank of Saturday I rode home in the rain to put my groceries away and then I headed back out to No Frills. I didn’t need much there and so I just bought grapes, raspberries and Greek yogourt.

            When I got home I put my bags down and went back out to the liquor store to buy a couple of cans of Creemore. I took the beers home and put them in the fridge and then I went out again to stand in front of Bike Pirates. When I’d been there on Thursday night I’d intended to take my twisted rim home with me as a souvenir but in my tiredness after having been there for seven hours, I forgot. I figured that since I’d been there till closing time on Thursday and they weren’t open on Friday that there was a good chance that they wouldn’t have thrown out the scrap yet if I showed up when they opened on Saturday. Dave unlocked the gate about ten minutes late. I found my twisted rim and I also grabbed a couple of garbage tire tubes to use for my shoulder exercises.

The twisted rim looks kind of cool when it’s spinning horizontally, so I think I could do something with it. I wonder if it’s too heavy to hang from my ceiling.

I had considered going to the police station on Saturday to file a report about my accident but it was raining and I didn’t want to ride around in the wet. Besides, I had writing to do.

That night I had an egg with toast and a beer and watched two episodes of Peter Gunn.

A man named Sam, in town for a bowling tournament is alone in the bowling alley at night doing some paperwork. An attractive woman named Emily approaches him. She said she waited for him. He says they shouldn’t see each other anymore. Two men approach, one shows him a picture of him and Emily together and they demand $5000. Sam punches one of them and is about to take on the other when the man he’d punched hits him over the head with a bowling ball and kills him. Sam’s body is found elsewhere but he was still wearing a badge from the bowling tournament and so Lieutenant Jacoby is investigating at the bowling alley. Gunn arrives because he’s been hired by Woolrich, the chairman of the tournament to get some pictures back from the same trio that we saw at the beginning. She told him her name was Francis and took him to her place where the pictures were secretly taken. Gunn goes to the woman’s address and talks with her landlady. Later Woolrich tells Gunn and Jacoby that he’d found out that Sam had been a member of one of the visiting bowling teams. Gunn thinks there’s a connection between the blackmailers and the murder and so he asks for one of the tournament badges so he can pose as one of the bowlers. He goes to the club where Emily picked up Woolrich and eventually meets her. He pretends to be a naïve yokel from Illinois and puts on a pretty good performance. Emily calls herself Margaret this time and tells him to meet her at her place. Jacoby is nearby and hears her give the address. While Gunn is with Emily her two partners come in with a camera. The problem is that one of the blackmailers recognizes “Henry” as Peter Gunn and punches him. They plan on killing Gunn but he punches one of them. The other is pointing a gun when Jacoby bursts in and shoots him. Jacoby refuses to take him to the hospital until they confess to Sam’s murder.

Emily was played by Mara Corday, who started out as a dancer and model. She appeared in a lot of B movies, starred in the horror film “Tarantula” and had bit parts in a lot of her friend Clint Eastwood's movies, including the scene in which he says, “Go ahead, make my day!”

Emily’s landlady was played by Lillian Bronson who was the first female judge in a Perry Mason episode. A muralist painted a portrait of her on the side of a building near the Hollywood freeway’s downtown interchange that became known as “The Old Woman of the Freeway”.

Woolrich was played effortlessly by Hollywood legend Jackie Coogan, who was on stage in Vaudeville with his parents from the age of four. At the age of seven he starred in The Kid with Charlie Chaplin. By the time he was nine he was one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood. When he came of age his father had died and his mother had remarried. His parents refused to give him the $4 million he’d made as a child and after a lawsuit he only got $125,000. At 23 he married Betty Grable but only for three years. His career dragged for several years until at the age of fifty he became Uncle Fester on The Addams Family”. He said the thing he was most proud of was that no one has ever beaten him at Scrabble.

The second store begins in a prison as a fake priest with a fake Bible visits a prisoner named Joe and gives him a gun. Joe uses the gun to break out. Next we see Gunn go to see a man in a wheelchair with his face covered in bandages. He wants to hire Gunn to find his “brother” Frank Norbert but not to reveal that he’s looking for him. He pays him $2000. Gunn is suspicious from the start and hands the money over to the police. He finds out from the cops that Frank owns a barbershop that is a front for something but they haven’t found out what. Gunn goes there looking for Frank but the barber threatens him with a razor. At Mother’s, Edie sings “How About You?” by Burton Lane and Ralph Freed. After Gunn leaves Mother’s he is forced at gunpoint into a car and taken to a meeting with Frank at his barbershop. Joe had been a partner with Frank in an armed robbery with a haul of $300,000 but only Joe got caught. Joe wants his share and Frank wants to keep it. They are about to force Gunn to take them to Joe when Gunn begins to fight. He flips one of the men into the other and smashes the light bulb before Frank can shoot. He throws talcum in Frank’s face and escapes. Gunn finds out that Frank has a father who owns a restaurant with a small room at the back where Frank hides out. Gunn calls Joe and tells him he can find Frank there. Meanwhile Gunn and the police stake the place out. Joe confronts Frank and Frank has a tin box containing the money and when Joe sees the $300,000 he lets his guard down long enough for Frank to grab a gun and shoot him. Frank escapes through the window but is surrounded by cops. There’s a shootout and Frank is killed. The box breaks open and the money is blowing all over the street.