Mary Alan Hokanson

            Although I’d already gone to Freshco on Saturday, I went again on Sunday because it's the only place around to buy the strawberry-rhubarb pie I was craving. I also bought a half-pint of raspberries.

            I spent most of the day getting caught up on my journal.

            That night during dinner I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This story begins with a lineman climbing a pole across from a large house. Inside a wealthy woman named Louise in a wheelchair is painting. Her male nurse Joe tells her it’s time for her to get to bed. It’s not nighttime and so she is obviously ill and in need of rest. She begs for a few more minutes and he gives in, saying he’ll go warm her milk. The man on the pole wires a lineman’s phone in to the pole and calls Louise. He tells her that he’s her next-door neighbour and he can see Joe lying unconscious on the ground outside. She goes to her window to look out and the lineman shoots her with a silencer. We learn later that Joe called the doctor and the police but when he learned that the gun they found was his he ran. Louise is alive but even more bedridden than before and dying. She hires Gunn to find Joe and clear him. At Mother’s a stoolie named Sean with a thick Irish accent and a cigarette that is more ashes than tobacco comes to sell Gunn information about Joe’s whereabouts. He takes him to a Christian mission with rooms upstairs but when Gunn enters Joe’s room he gets hit over the head and Joe runs. Sean tells Gunn that he ran errands for Joe to a gas station across town to ask a woman named Gloria for money. Gunn goes to see Gloria and discovers that she is Joe’s wife. Gloria’s mechanic Keller is the fake lineman that shot Louise. Later Keller tries to run Gunn over. Gunn goes back to the garage and finds Joe trying to break into the cash register. They fight but Joe gives up easily, saying he can’t run anymore. He says that Gloria initiated the plan for Joe to get hired by Louise and to compel her to put him in her will, but then he fell in love with her and asked Gloria for a divorce. Two days later Louise was shot. Just then Gloria and Keller arrive. Keller has a gun and he disarms Gunn. They are about to force them both into the van but Gunn pushes Keller, who falls on his gun and shoots himself. Joe corners Gloria and is about to kill her but Gunn talks him out of it. Joe is in the will but Louise dies having spent all of her money on medical care. All Joe receives are Louise’s paintings, which are worthless.

            Louise was played by Mary Alan Hokanson, whose career consisted of similar supporting parts, including as a secretary in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”.

            Gloria was played by Cece Whitney