A Movie That Never Got Made

The last time I saw John St. John we talked about making another movie about him, “Jigsaw John 2,” or something like that.

We met at a Downtown bar called the Redwood, as we had so many times before, at the suggestion of a television producer who thought it would be a terrific idea to do a movie of the week on St. John’s last case.

“What last case?” the old detective demanded grumpily, peering at me through his one good eye. “Who the hell says I’m retiring?”

He was responding to rumors that he was ready to put away his gun and his shield and spend the rest of his days fishing on the Klamath River.

“It’s just a suggestion,” I said. “We need some kind of reason to make a movie, and the idea of you solving a final case sounded appealing.”

St. John nodded and sipped at his V.O. and water. Then he folded his napkin carefully, unfolded it, and folded it again, buying time. He wiped a spot from the table with the sleeve of his polyester jacket.

This was all accomplished in silence. He was thinking about what I’d said and would not be hurried. When I first met him, the mannerism drove me crazy. Minutes would pass while St. John pondered and I waited.

But after 20 years of knowing him, I’d gotten used to the long silences and the distracting gestures. You can fold and refold a lot of napkins in two decades of drinking together.

“The trouble with retiring,” St. John finally said with characteristic solemnity, “is that two years after you quit, you die.”

As usual, he was right.

*

I thought about that the other day when the city desk called to tell me that St. John had died, exactly two years after he left the LAPD homicide division.

I wondered if he’d committed suicide, the way cops do sometimes, when the excitement of the street is gone and they’re feeling old and useless.

But even before I found out that cancer had taken him I’d decided that there was no way St. John would have ended his own life. He’d have faced depression head-on, moving toward it with the deliberate pace of an old rhino ambling toward the bush.

Nothing St. John ever did was rash. He drove slowly, talked at a kind of half-pace and even drank in a ritualistic manner, lifting his glass to a midway point, pausing, then bringing it to his lips. The glass was returned to the table in the same cautious, meticulous way.

I had the feeling he was always protecting evidence, the way a good cop does at a murder scene. You move carefully. You keep your hands in your pockets and watch where you step. You take your time. You look around.

“You never know” was a phrase he used often. He drove down alleys because you never knew what you might find there. He staked out murder scenes for hours because you never knew when a killer might return. And he wrote down the license numbers of suspicious cars because . . . well . . . you never knew.

The only mistake I ever saw him make was when he wrote a number in ink on the back of his hand one day as we drove down Sunset Boulevard, then absent-mindedly washed it away after using the bathroom.

It p.o.’d him mightily, and when we parted that day, he said he was going to take his hand to the crime lab to see if they could bring the number back. I don’t know if he ever did.

*

I wrote about St. John for The Times in 1974 in an effort to contrast a real detective with all the cops that were filling the television airwaves at the time. Then I wrote a book about him and a pilot script that became a TV series with Jack Warden.

St. John enjoyed the fame, and even ordered metallic business cards that bore a likeness of his Badge No. 1 and the name “Jigsaw John” under his real name.

But he was bothered by liberties the dramatic form always takes in order to make a movie entertaining. “I don’t do that kind of crap,” he’d say as we watched an episode together at the Redwood. We always seemed to end up there, in a corner booth near the door. “Where do they get that stuff?”

When I saw him for the last time, the interior of the Redwood had been remodeled and there was no corner booth anymore . . . and St. John wasn’t really interested in another shot at fame.

“Tell you what, Garcia,” he said to me, “when I solve the Black Dahlia case, then we’ll do a movie.” He called me Garcia because it was a character I’d made up for the pilot film.

He finished his drink slowly and placed the glass back on the napkin he had so carefully unfolded. Then we shook hands and he left, moving methodically around the tables, the old rhino gone back to the jungle, the old cop headed down another alley. He was an original. I’ll miss him.