the plot thickens

...the leaping, ROARING flames in the night sky.

SLOW DISSOLVE TO:

INT.  CELL BLOCK, FLORIDA STATE PENITENTIARY - NIGHT

Absolute quiet.  The Camera-view moves over one barred space after another.  These people are, like, warehoused.

Ned Racine is asleep, lying on his back.

Suddenly he wakes with a start!  His eyes snap open wide; he is totally and instantly awake.  He speaks aloud, with true amazement.

"She's alive!"

INT.  VISITING AREA -- Fla. State pen. - DAY

Oscar Grace, the detective, sits across from Ned Racine at a table with a divider running down the center.  Grace listens, slumped back in his chair, still shellshocked with the whole thing.

OSCAR
(in a low voice, but with strong emphasis)
We found the body in the boathouse!

NED
But what if that was someone else's body in the boathouse?  What if it was already there -- when I got there -- dead, and waiting for me.  Maybe her friend...Mary Ann.

OSCAR
Her teeth were left, man.  We sent them back to Illinois.  The identification was positive.  That was her, that was Matty Tyler Walker.  That was her, and she is dead.

NED
You're -- not -- listening to me.  Maybe she was using this other girl's name...Since she first met Walker three years ago, since she first spotted him and decided to take him . . . one way or another.  Maybe Walker -- or any of us -- never knew her real name!

^^ Why would she want to hide her identity?

^^ I don't know.  (thoughtful) Maybe because there was something in her past, something so bad that she thought it would queer it with Walker if he found out -- that he'd never marry her.

("Mary Ann and I left Wheaton together....I got into bad trouble with drugs....I did things -- worse than you can imagine.")

Oscar Grace is profoundly skeptical.  But Racine is subtly energized.

NED:  Let's say (pause) that she's living as this other girl, this person from her past.  And there's only one person in the world who knows who she really is.

(The Camera-view goes smoothly, silkily in a circle around Grace and Racine  -- moving, panning, circling -- it is a Film Noir shooting style -- "the baroque freedom of the camera," as Lawrence Kasdan said -- the style heightens and tightens the mood and tenseness of the scene...)

"And then [Ned, continuing] just when she's got me on the line, she's finally going to collect, that person shows up.  That girl.  Finds her.  And threatens to expose her.  So Matty starts paying her off.  Maybe she even promises to cut her in on Edmund's money.  Now she's got to share it with two people."

--------------------
Body Heat -- screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan

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