Cats in the Cradle

The show starts off much like my mornings do, with a cat shrieking in outrage at close range. We hear the cat before we see it -- at first, we see the Vegas skyline, then quickly telescope to a shot of the asphalt on a quiet, tree-lined street. Yes, you read that right -- a quiet, tree-lined street in Las Vegas. There's a privet hedge or two, and an impressive quantity of leafy, deciduous trees. Perhaps some quaint British village lost its climate in a bet to Las Vegas. That would go a long way toward explaining the landscape.

Anyhoo -- Pissed Off Cat In G-minor persists as the camera swoops ominously past the ivy-covered picket fences, moves into a backyard choked with greenery, trots up the stairs, and goes through a kitty door. Yes, we're seeing things from the cat's perspective. In that case, they should also be slightly blurry and tinted pastel. Anyway, the cat enters the house, meows loudly, and canters toward the living room, where several other feline silhouettes are slithering in and out of view. We hear different cats all making plaintive, hungry cries. Then the camera moves up for an aerial shot, the better to see a human body completely surrounded by cats. The cats commence eating. The background music goes into standard aren't-you-disturbed-yet mode, with lots of discordant strings meant to make us feel all unsettled. However, as I view these cats munching on assorted parts of this poor old woman's body, I'm not really horrified, in part because I'm not surprised. Should I die unexpectedly, my cats would begin eating me immediately. Hell, I take a nap and they're biting experimentally, just in case.

Cut to Buzz exiting the house. He'll undoubtedly lend the crime scene gravitas and empathy -- God knows I can't. Buzz greets Catherine and Gil at the sidewalk with, "Welcome to the Wild Kingdom." So much for the gravitas. We learn that the victim is one Ruth Elliott, eighty years old, and she had at least twenty cats. Buzz tells us that Animal Control is rounding up the cats now, and we see a hazmat-suited figure lifting one cat cage from a stack of four; its occupant doesn't sound happy. Oh, like that's a surprise. Catherine wants to know who called Ruth's death in; Buzz tells her that the mail was piling up, so the mailman looked in the window and called 911. Then he broke out his video camera and promptly sold the footage to Fox's When Animals Attack IV: Dinner Time! How sad that the mailman was the first to notice this woman missing, especially since her neighbors -- a tense-looking woman standing on the sidewalk, and a mother watching the scene with her two little girls from her picture-window seat across the street -- seem to be more than peripherally aware of her existence. The expository portion of this bumper over, Buzz cautions Catherine and Gil to take a deep breath before heading inside. As the dynamic duo heads toward the door, they pass an animal control officer coming out with two more caged cats. Predictably, the cats don't sound happy. My cats, incidentally, are beginning to look askance at the television as well. "Don't get any funny ideas," I tell them.

As Catherine and Gil enter the apartment, a cat mournfully wails in the background. Catherine's eyes go wide and she chokes, "Oh, God. I didn't think anything could mask a decomp." Then she's never changed a cat box. I kid! But there was the case of the cat woman last year in my neck of the woods: Marilyn Barletta of Petaluma, California kept more than 150 cats in a house last year, and police reported from the scene that the cats' collective excrement had warped the floor to the point of soaking into the sheetrock below. And that's not all -- the details were really quite grisly, but the most startling thing I remember seeing is the photo of one of the half-wild cats leaping out of the wall (yes, they had managed to insinuate themselves in the spaces between the walls) and toward an animal control officer. And then -- get this -- mere months later, Barletta was hoarding cats again. The smell's usually what tips people off to cat stashes.

Anyway, Catherine's taken aback by Eau de Cat Pee -- as anyone who's getting it at twenty times its normal strength would be -- and of course, Gil's taking it all in stride: "Male cat urine. To us, smelly. To a female cat, it must be like smelling aftershave." Well, there are aftershaves that smell like cat piss too, but I can see where Gil's going with this analogy. As Catherine and Gil prepare to suss out the scene, David the Emergency Backup Coroner comes over. Catherine notes that David's looking less than 100 percent; he responds that he's allergic to cats. And how -- you can practically see the histamines working overtime as he stands there. Shortly before drowning in a flood of his own lymphocytes, David gasps out that rigor mortis has passed, lividity is fixed, there's extensive marbling on Ruth's limbs, and she's been dead for three or four days. He then bolts off to take a Benadryl. We won't be seeing David for the rest of the episode; he's going to be lying on a spare morgue table, whacked out on antihistamines and rubbing cortisone into his knuckles while asking the world, "Have you ever looked at your hands? I mean, really looked at your hands?" Gil watches David go, somewhat startled by another human's display of weakness.

Then he and Catherine walk over to Ruth. The poor woman is chewed in a wide variety of places. Both Gil and Catherine look taken aback; Gil even comments, "Wow!" I get the feeling he doesn't do that too often. Catherine wonders aloud if perhaps Ruth died of natural causes and the cats, hungry for their meal, eventually fell too. Gil -- whose moue of disgust looks to be permanent -- says ghoulishly, "Meat is meat." A hissing noise makes them turn around, and they watch an animal control officer strong-arm a rather stiff and resistant feline into a box. It should be noted, the animal's got a collar and looks quite fat and happy; these were well cared-for cats. That's atypical among cat hoarders; by definition, ownership crosses the line into hoarding when the owner gets overwhelmed and cannot maintain baseline welfare for the animals. As Gil and Catherine watch the cat being shoved in a cage, Catherine says ominously, "Maybe they turned on her." Across America, cat owners laugh ruefully. The two CSIs then turn back to examining Ruth's chewed-on body. Gil notices a deep, flowing wound near the woman's heart. He hunkers down for a better look-see, commenting, "That's a deep wound tract." It sure is -- we see it up close and personal thanks to the TMICam. "This woman was stabbed," he continues. "I guess the cats are off the hook."

And we go to The Who, the better to disguise Johnnie Cochran's desk-pounding rage as he realizes his sophisticated "if it makes a meow, it can't make the ow" defense is no longer needed.

After we come back from commercial, Gil and Catherine are still in the cathouse. They notice a footprint on the floor; it looks as though it came from a woman's shoe. Catherine begins lifting the print. As she does this, the credits flash, and the husband and I have the following conversation:

Me: Hey! One of your television girlfriends is on this tonight!
The Husband: Oh yeah? Who?
Me: Diane Farr.
The Husband: Oh, yeah.
Me: One question -- is she still your television girlfriend if she's playing a different character on a different show on a different network?
The Husband: Yes. Our love knows no boundaries.

Catherine finishes lifting the prints as Gil comes in. She tells him most of the prints are partials, from animal control officers' boots, but she's found this non-boot print which looks quite interesting. "Distinctive heel and toe. What, high heel?" Catherine discounts the print as one of Ruth's, theorizing that an octogenarian would probably be in flats or slippers, and not likely to entertain. Gil notes, "You've got to be careful with isolation. It can escalate. Before you know it, you're the crazy cat lady living in the rundown house. People stop coming by to visit. You go outside, your neighbors run across the street to get away from you. Eventually, you stop going out altogether." This is Reason #45 to like Gil: he does a marvelous job of extrapolating situations where people who are usually feared and reviled are revealed as deserving of empathy. But before we slip too deeply into a meditation on isolation and the elderly, Warrick comes in and comments on the stench: "Who lives like this?" "Cat lover," Catherine replies. "You think?" he shoots back. I'm thinking Warrick didn't have any pets growing up. The three CSIs swap information; there are no signs of forced entry or theft anywhere. "I can see why," Warrick opines. He heads off to see if there is indeed anything of value in Ruth's house. As he walks into her bedroom, he sees a lock set in the closet wall. Warrick pushes aside the housecoats on the clothes rack and opens the door; it swings open to reveal an empty wall safe. Warrick notes this, then begins taking prints to see who might have opened the safe.