Last night I posted a simple diary called "A Scene from Malcolm X":
NT. A HEARING ROOM - DAY
A room, clinically empty; table, chair, and HOLWAY, putting papers into a briefcase; the hearing is concluded.
HOLWAY: There is just nothing l can do.
LOUISE: What do you mean, took his own life?
HOLWAY: You heard the verdict.
LOUISE: Verdict? A man takes a hammer and bashes in the back of his own head? Then he lays on the tracks and kills himself?
HOLWAY: We only act on the verdicts, we don't make them.
LOUISE: Do you pay or don't you?
HOLWAY: Read the policy, ma'am. lt clearly states...
Today, after reading Shaun King's excellent diary about the death of Freddie Gray, I realized that there's a different movie which comes to mind as well: "True Believer", a decent-but-not-great 1989 crime drama starring James Woods and Robert Downey Jr.
I should note at this point that I'm about to Spoil the Big Twist for you, but come on, the film is 26 years old.
Here's the relevant point. Downey and Woods play a young/older lawyer respectively who are investigating a gangland hit in Chinatown a few years earlier. They've been hired to try and prove the innocence of a young man who may or may not have been framed for the murder.
At one point in the film, the following exchange takes place between the two leads:
EDDIE: I've got a meeting in Chinatown.
ROGER: (resigned, sighs) Let's get a cab.
EDDIE: Um...Roger -- ?
Indicating with a gesture that they're only blocks from
Chinatown. Puzzled, Roger peers back the way they came.
ROGER: That's weird -- I pictured the morgue being way across town.
After two beats he turns around to find Eddie gone.
Later on in the film, after a Big Revelation, the following scene takes place:
EXT. POLICE HEADQUARTERS - LATE NIGHT
The lawyers bound down the steps, dart into the street--
-- and are nearly run down by an AMBULANCE that whizzes past,
pulling into the garage of the County Coroner's Office.
ROGER: ...Jesus!
EDDIE: Hmmm...at least we'd already be at the Morgue.
Briskly shaking off their brush with eternity, Eddie and
Roger proceed down the block.
ROGER: Let's make a citizen's arrest of Esparza! We'll need back-up... Who's the meanest motherfucker you ever got off?
As Roger ducks into a phone booth:
EDDIE: Fuck that, Rog. Esparza's nobody. This goes higher than him...
Roger feeds the phone.
ROGER: Gotta start somewhere. Gimme a name -- any client who owns a Magnum.
(beat)
ROGER: Eddie?
Eddie's staring at the PHONE BOOTH. It's pagoda-style, with
Chinese-red pent roof.
EDDIE: Wait a second.
Eddie squints down the street...
ANGLE
Even at this late hour we see enough decoration and signage
to recognize Chinatown, not seven blocks uptown.
EDDIE: (softly) How long did it take Badalato to drive Jimmy Chin's body from Chinatown to the morgue?
ROGER: About an hour.
(realizes)
ROGER: That's why I thought the morgue was on the other side of town!
Eddie fairly pushes Roger out of the phone booth. Thumbs
through the White Pages, finds the page he's looking for,
tears it out and stuffs it into his pocket.
In the film, it turns out that while the police didn't actually murder the victim, they deliberately tampered with the body during the ambulance ride from the crime scene to the morgue in order to protect the actual murderer.
I'm not accusing anyone of anything here. I'm just saying that this particular scene from this particular movie jumped immediately to mind the moment I saw this map in Shawn King's diary: