John Carroll Lynch wears a Zodiac Sea Wolf

I keep thinking about the worst possible coincidence to be caught wearing. In the long interview scene at the center of David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), a detective notices the suspect's watch and asks to see it. John Carroll Lynch, playing Arthur Leigh Allen - the prime suspect police never charged, dead of a heart attack in 1992 - works it off his wrist and lays it in the detective's open palm, dial up, while another inspector leans in with a pen. It is a steel vintage diver with a pale silver dial. It is a Zodiac Sea Wolf.

A man being questioned as the Zodiac killer is sitting there in a watch built by a company literally named Zodiac, and the brand's logo resembled the crossed circle the killer used to sign his letters. Fincher did not make that up. The real Allen owned a Zodiac Sea Wolf, a gift from his mother back in 1968, and he kept it on his wrist until Vallejo detectives seized it in a February 1991 search warrant. It proved exactly nothing.

And where does the watch even come from? Zodiac the company started as Ariste Calame's workshop in Le Locle, Switzerland, in 1882, and it launched the Sea Wolf in 1953, one of the first dive watches ever sold to ordinary people - decades before a killer in Northern California turned the word into something else. On Allen's wrist that accident of naming reads like a confession, and that is the trap the whole case fell into. Everything pointed at him. Nothing ever closed it.