Killing Ghosts

Cowboy actors Gene Autry, Dick Curtis, Roy Rodger, and their investors had developed Pioneertown as a western movie set in the 1930s. By 1960, the trend toward filming on location, a water shortage, and a threat of wildfires nearly closed it down. For the next few decades, the town struggled on as a tourist attraction, and as a set for low budget films that never made it to a multiplex, and music videos filmed in the watering-hole known as Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace. With the new millennium, all that changed. Music icons like Robert Plant and Gram Parsons begam stopping by Pappy & Harriet's and sometimes jamming with the locals. When Sir Paul McCartney did a spontaneous gig for the first three hundred people who arrive with $50 cash-in-hand during a break in a rock and roll marathon in La Quinta at which tickets to his performances cost thousands, Pioneertown was on the map again.
When Covid-19 struck in 2020 and the Morongo Basin experienced the Greater Los Angeles Yuppie Invasion. With Pioneertown's outdoor stages and outside dining, and its proximity to Joshua Tree National Park, Pioneertown not only survived: it thrived. Actors and screenwriters who had fled the desert tinsel town in the 60's returned if only for the sunsets, or to bask in the glory that had since eluded them. Among them was 1950's cowboy actor and self-made multimillionaire Raymond Grant whose corpse had been positioned at the entrance to a ramshackle screen set named for the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. For a celebrity quoted gCowboy actors Gene Autry, Dick Curtis, Roy Rodger, and their investors had developed Pioneertown as a western movie set in the 1930s. By 1960, the trend toward filming on location, a water shortage, and a threat of wildfires nearly closed it down. For the next few decades, the town struggled on as a tourist attraction, and set for low budget films that never made it to a multiplex, and music videos filmed in the watering-hole known as Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace. With the new millennium, all that changed. Music icons like Robert Plant and Gram Parsons begam stopping by Pappy & Harriet's and sometimes jamming with the locals. When Sir Paul McCartney did a spontaneous gig for the first three hundred people who arrive with $50 cash-in-hand during a break in a rock and roll marathon in La Quinta at which tickets to his performances cost thousands, Pioneertown was on the map again.
When Covid-19 struck in 2020 and the Morongo Basin experienced the Greater Los Angeles Yuppie Invasion. With Pioneertown's outdoor stages and outside dining, and its proximity to Joshua Tree National Park, Pioneertown not only survived: it thrived. Actors and screenwriters who had fled the desert tinsel town in the 60's returned if only for the sunsets, or to bask in the glory that had since eluded them. Among them was 1950's cowboy actor and self-made multimillionaire Raymond Grant whose corpse had been positioned at the entrance to a ramshackle screen set named for the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. For a celebrity often quoted tagging Wyatt Earp as a Great American Hero, being shotgunned in the abdomen at close range and having his body posed in a derelict screen set seemed an inelegant way to die.
The Captain of the Joshua Tree substation whose friends called him Nine-Charlie after his call sign grimaced as he and his companion DDA Liz Jameson surveyed the setting. Neither were new to fresh crimes scenes, and both of them recognized the corpse.
'Well, Lizzy. Now you know why the guys downtown wanted you here?'
'Yeah, I do. We're looking at a forensic nightmare. This is a Pi-town movie set, not a crime scene. Everything we're seeing has been staged. And that white van with all the electronics on top means we're playing to an audience.'