Sorry about the tabloid headline, but I’m pretty excited about this: Our most recent contributor, Paul Smolarski, has come up with an explanation for the red herring that set “Right of Way” in motion -- the map of methane deposits under the proposed Wilshire Blvd. subway route.
You won’t find it in the script, because it wasn’t time to reveal it. But Paul knows why that map exists, even if our protagonist, Russell Napolitano, still doesn’t. And he’s given me the go-ahead to share that info here in the hope that, down the road when the time is right, one of you will work it into the story in just the right way.
First, let’s review: In the script’s opening pages, Mayor Napolitano, under cover of darkness, slipped into a tunnel beneath downtown L.A.’s deserted Toluca Substation to retrieve something hidden there. Later, it was revealed to be the above-mentioned, crudely drawn map.
Two questions have been dogging perceptive readers (and potential writers) ever since: Who left Napolitano the map? And what is the significance of a hand-drawn document that seems to reveal nothing more than what city engineers would already know?
Paul addressed the first question in his pages, posted Tuesday night. The map was left for the mayor by an anonymous caller who said she did work for the powerful cult, The Order. Presumably, that woman was Susan Harmon, who later turned up dead near the secretive group’s Hollywood headquarters.
But now that the cops question Napolitano over the reason for the map’s existence, he finally articulates what many of us have suspected all along: He has no idea.
Obviously, it has significance beyond the depiction of the methane pockets, and it's something important enough to have gotten Susan Harmon killed. Could there be some message written in code? Or maybe it has to do with the map’s paper, which another writer, David Benullo, has already revealed to be of the same stock as the stationery at The Order.
Paul, whose job involves securing rights of way for a telecommunications engineering firm, has another theory. Maybe it’s something hidden in plain sight -- the parcel numbers and easement information included on the site map (example here). These weren’t pointed out earlier because they’re so routine and because the writer who introduced the map was, well, clueless.
But what if Susan Harmon was an assistant to a real estate lawyer who’s been poring over parcel maps for months on The Order’s behalf and has discovered a problem with an easement granted by the city 200 years ago when L.A. was a little pueblo? What if, this defect in title put the ownership in question?
And what if now, with the value of those Wilshire parcels above the subway route about to explode, The Order doesn’t want that information coming to light? That might have led to Larry’s death and to Susan’s. (The third murder, that of the big thug in the Rannoch Moor sweatshirt, could be explained as somebody tying up loose ends.)
I’ll leave it to you to work out the details, or to come up with something better if you can. But for now, we’ve got a hostage situation to deal with, and the mayor is risking his career and maybe his life to handle things his way.
I can’t wait to see what happens next.
