Paul is pushed to new extremes. Perry finds a hole in the prosecution’s case.
Season 2, Episode 5: ‘Chapter Thirteen’
Whodunit? Oh, we are so far past “whodunit” in this season of “Perry Mason,” folks.
We know exactly who killed Brooks McCutcheon now. As put forth by the prosecution and confirmed last week, it was Mateo and Rafael Gallardo. Their motive may be complicated, including a payoff from an unseen puppet master and a personal desire for revenge — their apartment was cleared and burned to make room for Brooks’s baseball stadium, which killed their kid sister. But their guilt is beyond doubt.
Fortunately for the second half of the show’s second season, there are now bigger questions to answer: Who paid whodunit, and why? Brooks’s unpopularity with, well, pretty much everyone who knew him doesn’t simplify matters. As Perry puts it regarding Brooks in his opening argument to the jury, “You won’t be asking who in this town wanted him killed, you’ll be asking who in this town didn’t.” To be fair, this is characteristic Masonic bluster, designed to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors without much to back it up … yet.
That’s where Paul Drake, the ace up Perry’s sleeve, comes in. In many ways, this is his episode; his story is that of a decent and dogged man who is forced constantly into humiliating or outright morally compromising positions, emerging largely intact but increasingly scarred each time.
For example, Paul is the fellow Perry dispatches to interview Councilman Taylor (Damian O’Hare), the influential brother of the mystery-shrouded Noreen Lawson. Perry’s team presumes that Brooks had something to do with Noreen’s current unresponsive state, but all the councilman will do is mindlessly repeat that she was injured in a car accident. Of course, he does this with a heaping helping of racial antagonism — an occupational hazard for a Black private investigator.
Paul is also tasked with tracking down Ozzie Jackson (Terrence Hardy Jr.), a low-level gangster whose trademark Converse shoes make him a standout. With help from his no-longer-estranged friend and housemate Mo, Paul learns that Ozzie works for Melvin Perkins (Christopher Carrington), the relatively benevolent racketeer currently mired in legal trouble thanks to pictures taken by Paul while he was working as a stringer for the district attorney’s office.
So Paul makes a deal with Perkins: He’ll render the photos useless in court by refusing to testify to their veracity in exchange for Ozzie’s location. When Perkins learns that Paul was the photographer in question, though, he forces the investigator to beat the info he needs out of Ozzie. Then he forces Paul to continue beating Jackson, even after the kid admits that he received the order from the husband of a rich woman to whom he used to sell heroin — until he was paid better not to.
Paul winds up crawling into bed with his wife Claire, touching her skin with the same hand he used to beat Jackson. “Am I … good?” he asks her. She assures him he is. What else could she say?
Unfortunately for the Mason team, a mysterious person — no really, that’s how he’s listed in the closing credits: “Mysterious Person,” played by Kyle T. Heffner — has eyes on Perry. He’s there when Mason visits the Gallardo family’s Hooverville to ferret out the initial tip about Ozzie and his Converse shoes.
Worse, this mystery man tails Della and Anita to an underground lesbian club. I’ve been wondering how long it would be before Della’s sexuality would be weaponized against her the way the more externally obvious fact of Drake’s race has been used against him.
It’s worth keeping in mind that District Attorney Burger is vulnerable along the same lines. Note also that he is under some kind of as-yet unidentified pressure to settle the case, despite seeming to be firmly in the driver’s seat. He offers a plea deal to Perry — not an exceedingly generous one, but still, a deal — over the obvious dismay of his ambitious lieutenant Tom Milligan. No one on Perry’s team can figure out why he would do this unless someone was forcing his hand. Who? Why?
Milligan doesn’t seem to care either way. What he wants to do is win the case, one virtually designed to put him on the map; the vocal support of the radio firebrand Frank Finnerty could make him a political superstar overnight. (His verminous epithet for Perry has caught on to such a degree that a witness refers to Mason as “Mister Maggot” on the stand.) Milligan helps wrap up the episode by asking Perry’s old pal Pete to turn against him; knowing Pete, he’ll do it if the price is right.
And the hits just keep on coming. Della is confronted by her girlfriend (Molly Ephraim) about her late night with Anita. Perry returns to his apartment after another assignation with the surprisingly forward schoolteacher Miss Aimes to discover that someone has set up his son’s model train set and left behind a still-burning cigarette. It’s one of the more whimsical ways of sending someone a warning that they can be gotten to, but it’s no less alarming for that.
The message is clear: You can either get on board, or get run over.
From the case files:
I’m a broken record on this point, I realize, but good gravy, the lighting in this show. This time we can credit the director, Marialy Rivas, and the director of photography, Eliot Rockett, for the way Perry’s cigarette smoke obscures his face as light streams through his blinds; for the near-blinding morning light that similarly illuminates Milligan’s office when Pete pays his fateful visit; for the cold blue-gray glow of the small hours when Paul staggers in from the beatdown Perkins forces him to deliver, a smart, stark divergence from the lighting scheme of pretty much every other scene.
I’m impressed with the way the show tied the Perkins story line, which seemed like a minor conflict driver for Paul, Pete and Mo, into the main plot. I didn’t see that coming — not that a mystery tyro like me ever sees anything coming on this show.
The closing credits begin unspooling over an image of a little girl’s shoes catching fire and burning up, a grimly poetic metonymy of the Gallardos’ tragic back story.
I enjoyed the contrasting demeanors of Burger and Milligan when they discuss the opposition. Milligan reacts with evident disdain when Burger tells him that Perry passed the bar with only a few hours’ preparation, a fact he imparts in order to impress upon the younger man how formidable his opponent is. Burger wears the unmistakable look of “I’ve made a huge mistake,” in terms of both tangling with Perry and relying on Milligan to take the matter seriously.
It’s minor in the scheme of things, but a ton of fun in as a scene: Thanks to the fortuitous placement of his shot glass, Perry discovers that the print number on the crime-scene fingerprint photo is reversed. This helps him uncover the fact that the print was bogus, placed on Brooks’s steering wheel in order to more thoroughly frame the Gallardos. It wasn’t enough for the Gallardos to kill the guy — they had to do so in a way that was guaranteed to be found out. Whoever hired them gilded the lily, and now the case against the Gallardos is weaker. When the judge says that “the jury will disregard” Perry’s statement about the fingerprint’s being planted by the cops, Perry simply murmurs, “No they won’t,” under his breath, and he’s right.
My favorite bits of physical acting this week: Chris Drake as Paul, wincing with misery every time he has to take a fist to Ozzie, and Katherine Waterston as Miss Aimes, matter-of-factly raising her leg to kick shut the front door when Perry shows up for a little romance.
Oh yeah: Della and Anita are now officially in love. So that’s nice! Unless you’re Della’s girlfriend, I guess.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
