Revenge Is Best Served Cold

Give CSI some credit -- it doesn't beat around the bush. After opening with a shot of the Rio in the fullness of its neon splendor and a percussive soundtrack that all but spells out "this is ominous" in Morse code, the camera creeps into a high-stakes poker room. You can tell it's for high-rollers because of a chandelier that's opulent even by Vegas standards, and guards at the door to keep out the riff-raff. What then follows is a poker game between four individuals: an ascetic-looking man with close-cropped hair; a woman who, were this a movie set in the Old West, would be playing "the hard-bitten whorehouse madam"; a younger man whose beret suggests that he lost an earlier, high-stakes bet; and an older man. The game unfolds thusly.

Dealer: Start with you, sir?
Old Guy: One.
Ascetic Guy: [knocking knuckles on the table] Check.
Blueberry Beret: Doesn't bet, but he keeps a beat. You check. Someone's on a flush draw. Mmm, I'll take the free card. Check.
Hard-Bitten Madam: [in a voice that sounds as though she's gargled with Drano] I'll check. [She then breaks out the Visine.]
Dealer: What do you got, Candyman?
Candyman (formerly Old Guy): [pops a mouthful of M&M knockoffs] Check.

A blonde waitress enters and begins taking drink orders. Blueberry Beret drops two chips on her tray, and she thanks him. When the waitress gets to Candyman, he deposits the red plastic stirrer from his new drink into his old and picks it up without glancing at the waitress or tipping her. Blueberry Beret mutters, "Stiff...typical."

Ascetic Guy speaks up: "I can bet. Make it two thousand." Hard-Bitten Madam -- who is wearing a low-cut spandex top in roughly the same shade as Blueberry Beret's hat and a sizable bauble around her neck -- watches him lay down the cards. "The Grinder speaks," Blueberry Beret sneers, tossing some more chips toward the pot. The Candyman speaks again: "Raise. Four thousand. Call the bet." The dealer, stacking chips into neat piles, says clinically, "Two thousand, raise you two thousand." We get another shot of Hard-Bitten Madam and her strategically revealed cleavage, then Blueberry Beret speaks again. "It's all about you, Grinder." Grinder (a.k.a. Ascetic Guy) says, "I'm going to go get a $2000 slice of pizza." Hard-Bitten Madam smiles slightly, either because she's seen the card (nine of clubs) or because she's worked out in her head how this is all going to go down. Blueberry Beret pauses for a moment before saying, "Well. Might as well make it a poker game," before pushing his entire collection of chips into the pot. He then turns to Hard-Bitten Madam and asks, "What do you got, Southern Iowa?" She rasps, "A pain in my ass to the right side." She throws down two cards and two chips. The Candyman speaks: "Yeah. You might have a winning hand. You might just be trying to buy it. Johnny Chan thought I was too old too, back in the '86 series." Blueberry Beret replies, "You mean the series where the ball went through Buckner's legs?" They're talking about two different series here. The Candyman snaps, "Save the story, kid. Here's what's what. I got aces. What do you got? Maybe you got trips, maybe king, queen. Maybe you got two pair. Ace hits the board. I win. Club hits the board, I win. Eight, nine hits the board, I win." As he delivers this monologue, the Candyman continues popping little chocolate candies into his mouth. Blueberry Beret is unimpressed: "Here's the math, old man. Thirteen of every suit got in the deck, I see three clubs. That means you got ten coming, thirty-seven cards left in the deck. You like those odds?" "I like 'em a lot better than I like you," the Candyman replies. He goes to gather up his chips, but his fingers seize into claws, he begins shaking uncontrollably, and then he keels over and dies. And now, we have an answer to the question, "Who can take a card game, and ruin it with a death?" The Candyman can.

Cut to a shot of a casino floor, where row upon row of slot machines captivates the hoi polloi. We hear the usual noises, though they're quite muffled, and a low-pitched whine overrides everything. As the camera zooms closer and closer to Gil, the sounds of the machines increase slightly -- but so does the whine. I'm going to have to invent a new phrase to signify this auditory phenomenon, as I have a feeling we're going to be hearing it a lot in conjunction with Gil this season. Suggestions, anyone? The sounds snap into sharp focus; the machines burble electronically, coins drop into trays with metallic clinks, it's the usual cacophony of small-stakes greed. Gil smiles somewhat ruefully. Then Warrick approaches him from behind, gives him a searching look, then asks, "You lost?" Gil turns around, slightly startled, then recovers by saying, "I'm listening." "For what?" Warrick asks. Gil fills him in: "E-C-G. C-major chord. All the slots play the same notes. Perfect harmony. Makes people happy." Warrick brings home The Sledgehammer Of Unwitting Subtext when he quips, "Except when you're losing. Then you don't hear anything." Gil staggers slightly from that symbolic blow, then heads over to the crime scene in question.

The two men thread through a knot of people. As they walk by, a bland brown-haired guy says hi to Warrick and asks if Sara's with them; Warrick tells the man (Hank) that she will be soon. Hank asks them to pass on his greetings. Gil spares him a parting glance. The two duck under the crime-scene tape. The Candyman is being zipped into a body bag as Brass watches. As Gil and Warrick come over, Brass rises to his sworn duty: to provide exposition. We learn that the Candyman's name was Doyle Pfeiffer, he was the best poker player in the world, and he was on the tail end of an eighteen-hour poker game. Warrick checks out the table and notes, "That's a big pot. Casino's not satisfied with a heart attack?" Brass sets him straight: "We're not satisfied. This is high stakes. We're treating it like murder." Warrick asks about suspicious circumstances, but gets little in response. Gil suddenly fixes him with a look and asks, "You ever play poker [beat], Warrick?" GAAAAH! Kim Delaney is contagious! It's the pause, the pause! Quarantine her, lest this show be felled by her pacing as well! Warrick says he has not: "Poker's not gambling -- it's playing against percentages. It's a skill. I like to play for the thrill." Note the present tense. Gil gives Brass a look for some reason, then flips over a pair of cards, producing the king of spades and the king of hearts. He asks, "Whose hand was this?" From behind the crime-scene tape, Blueberry Beret bellows, "Mine! The pot's mine! He dropped dead before he went on cue!" Brass -- who is sustaining the blue leitmotif with a natty shirt-and-tie combination -- states the obvious by saying, "Some young loudmouthed player thinks it's his pot. Excuse me while I go off and glower at him." Or something to that effect. After Brass takes his leave, Gil begins musing, "Two cowboys...one in the flop, trips" -- this is where we see the king of clubs, the queen of clubs, and the eight of clubs) -- "pair of aces" -- (ace of clubs, ace of diamonds) -- "but no river card. Burn one, turn one," he commands Warrick. Warrick casts one card aside and flips over the one -- it's the ace of spades. Gil, thrilled to be hitting a double by demonstrating a flair for esoterica and a goofy line to take us to the credits, gives another mordant little grin before saying, "The death card."

Then, down in the morgue, David The Erudite Coroner is asking Gil, "Know why Steve Wynn hired Bobby Baldwin to run the Nugget, then the Mirage, the Bellagio? He was a great poker player. A great thinker." Gil says, "I did not know that." David's eyebrows shoot up and he joshes, "Stop the world." "Ha ha ha," Gil says. "You're fired." Oh, he does not either. He just thinks it. David gets down to business: "No violaceous lividity prominent above the level of the shoulders." That means no heart attack; "violaceous" is just a fancy word for purplish, which would bespeak impressive amounts of blood pooling where it ought not. David continues that he's not ruling out stroke, but he's very interested in the Mees lines in Pfeiffer's fingernails. The TMICam zooms up to see the white horizontal bands, then back out to David continuing the list of Pfeiffer's symptoms, which include milky, whitish fluid at the corners of his mouth and a single blue line running across his gums -- both of which indicate lead poisoning. Gil looks shocked: "I haven't seen a case of lead poisoning in years." David takes advantage of Gil's surprise to lead him to the x-rays, where they see that Pfeiffer had a bullet in his thigh that was, in theory, leeching lead into his system for years. "Enough to kill him," Gil asks. Well, let's look at the alternatives. Perhaps Pfeiffer was making like the women in Elizabethan England and painting it on his face for cosmetic reasons. Or perhaps he was licking the walls in an extremely old house. David says, "I'll know better when I get the tox screen back...and examine the brain." The little anticipatory smile he gets when he says that is both adorable and disturbing.

Gil goes off to examine the security camera footage of the poker game. We see the Candyman popping chocolates like Anna Nicole pops painkillers, and Hard-Bitten Madam using the Visine. Gil focuses on that, mumbling about how everyone has their tells (nervous fidgets), but then determining that the Visine may lead to something else. Visine -- it gets the red (herring) out.

Meanwhile, Liam is busy in CSI's longest-running black comedy, Exercise In Futility: The Courting Sara Sidle Story. In this week's installment, we see him telling Sara, "A whiskey sour, huh? I'm a 'Thug Passion' man myself. It's a Two-Pack thing." Sara corrects Liam's pronunciation: "Tupac?" Liam's busted, so he turns to attacking Sara's latest swain: "I bet with a name like Hank, he's probably got some hos sipping on 'yac." With a name like Hank, he's probably got some backwoods belles checking the still for a fresh batch of White Lightning, but let's not get into the cultural stereotypes here, Liam. After busting Liam for his mispronunciation of "cognac," Sara sets him straight: "That's none of your business. It's nobody's business, as a matter of fact." Liam fails to take the hint and tries that time-honored path to a woman's heart, blackmail. "I won't tell Warrick and Nick about Hank on one condition: you tell me what he's got that I don't got." Sara reminds him that they don't really have an extra half an hour, since this isn't one of those two-hour season openers. Actually, she's saved by the beep -- the mass spec reveals that there was tetrahydrozoline in the victim's drink. Liam's all, "I never got my answer." Sara's not exactly all torn up over that.

Back at the "Visine: Get The Red (Herring) Out" section of the plot, Gil is showing Warrick close-up stills of the security camera. Warrick says, "You're saying she killed him with eye-drops?" as only he can, i.e. with extreme skepticism. Sara defends Gil's far-fetched theory: "It's a vasoconstrictor. Obviously, it's great for bloodshot eyes." Which we then see being soothed by tetrahydrozoline, courtesy of the TMICam. Warrick now sees the light: "You ingest eye-drops, it constricts the blood vessels throughout your body, maybe even spikes your blood pressure, perhaps even cause a stroke." Sara's on a roll now, saying happily, "It's a perfect poison -- it's odorless, colorless, tasteless. Doyle would have never known it was in his drink." Gil puts a pin in that theory with one small observation: Hard-Bitten Madam (a.k.a. Lita Gibbons) was the last one to sit down at the table, and she never left her chair. "So," Gil asks, "how did the eye-drops get in his drink?"

Down in the morgue, David is giving Catherine the four-one-one on her victim, one Jace Felder, former meth dealer; the cause of death was a gunshot wound. As David tells us, "The wound penetrated the zygomatic arch and exited the right temple," we see it, courtesy of the TMICam. The splashing sound as assorted bits and pieces go flying is what really sells that shot. David also notes that Felder's right eardrum is gone. We confirm this with yet another TMICam shot, and all of us who have yearned to see what a shredded tympanic membrane looks like can now move on with our lives. David says that the presence of blood means that the eardrum burst shortly before Felder died; Catherine muses that they did find the body on an airstrip, so maybe he blew his eardrum out making like John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton in Pushing Tin. David says Felder's clothing smelled like gasoline, so he sent it off to Trace, then points out some perimortem bruising on Felder's torso. Catherine takes in the two symmetrical lines and correctly guesses that it was caused by a seatbelt. She then ponders what the guy was.

Cut to Nicky spending a long, long afternoon dusting the runway at Frenchman Airfield for tracks. At one point, he and Catherine conference at the top of their lungs over the probable nature of the mode of transit involved in the accident: the tracks they're finding are too narrow to be those of a plane, and there are two sets of tracks, and there's a spare rear-view mirror, so it's clearly two cars that raced one another. They deduce the racing portion of the scenario by remembering that cars only lay tracks if they accelerate unevenly. "Drag racing?" Catherine asks. "Or street racing. There's a reason it's illegal," says Nicky. Catherine laughs a little before deadpanning, "Kids end up dead."

Time has clearly elapsed since Nicky and Catherine's sunset session on the airstrip; now it's night on the Strip, and the two of them are walking through a thicket of cars and insouciant young people. I believe MTV refers to them as "our audience." Nicky fills Catherine in on the ritual of midnight drag racing: "my brother was a gearhead -- built a '65 GTO with three carbs. Ran the thing flat-out -- zero to a buck-thirteen in a quarter mile." "So your brother's cooler than you," Catherine asks. "My brother is DEAD, and it's because he lived too fast and died too young," screams Nicky. "And he didn't even leave a good-looking corpse because that '65 GTO BLEW UP!" Oh, he does not. He just grins and mentally rearranges the order of his coworkers on the list in his "the day I snap and shoot everyone" plan. Along comes Detective Lockwood, who apparently has the ability to teleport to suspicious scenes as needed. He's filling in for Captain Exposition tonight, telling Nicky and Catherine, "Welcome to pre-game. Every gear-banger in Clark County, all with the same question: 'What are you running under there?'" Catherine makes everyone feel uncomfortable by noting, "Foreplay is foreplay." The men look around for a moment until Catherine asks brightly, "So! When do they race?" Lockwood says, "It's not when, it's where. Racing locations are always in play. Once the call comes in, the street will empty out in seconds." Catherine asks if the kids drive all the way out to Frenchman Airfield. Lockwood replies that they do when it rains. Catherine muses, "It rained last night, rain brings up the oil from the streets, they gotta go somewhere to get some traction." Nicky, who has been sort of staring blankly, springs into relevance here, passing the yellow car Lockwood's been loitering near, and engaging the owner in small talk: "Centrifugal supercharger. Nice." The gearhead is happy to chatter: "Yeah, it's like the compressor side of a turbo, but instead of spinning on the exhaust, it goes through the gearset to the...crank." Good heavens, he's been hypnotized by Catherine's cleavage. If this were Fastlane, he'd be asking what she had under the hood. Catherine says to the gearhead, "More power, no extra weight." Then she turns to Nicky: "Every girl's dream." Nicky grins, and moves Catherine from number two to number one on his list. Well, that's another seven seconds someone else will get to live. "I like that!" says the gearhead. I shudder in anticipation of another building-inspector sexcapade. He invites Catherine to check the nitrous oxide feed. So when he drives, he laughs, and laughs, and laughs. Seriously, this turbo-charged casanova pops the hood on an engine evidently built in the Emerald Kingdom, and Nicky reads, "Nitrous oxide system." Catherine asks, "Nitrous oxide as in...speed." Tex Turbo explains, "Well, speed is ultimately limited by how fast you can mix oxygen with fuel and ignite it." He grins like he's Barry White at the end of this alleged come-on line. Nicky, sensing well-adjusted adult sexuality at play here, quickly changes the subject with, "Regular air is about 20 percent oxygen. Nitrous is 40. Double the burn, double the power." We then get the time-lapse TMICam, in which things ignite, combust, pump, and spin, ending up with a car making skiddy noises on the pavement. Catherine says to Nicky, "So the sudden boost of acceleration could account for the treads back at the airstrip."

Just then, a tacky yellow car goes rolling by, its engine bellowing like a bull with indigestion. Nicky calls out the shape of the harnesses to Catherine -- they match the pattern of perimortem bruising on Felder. Immediately after this car pulls away, another car pulls up; its occupants are intent on sharing their music with everyone in Nevada. Nicky is frozen in his tracks like a deer in the headlights; Catherine thinks a little more quickly and checks her CSI box of goodies for an Amprobe to measure the decibel level. After determining that Johnny Musicseed is registering at 131 decibels, she heads over there and introduces herself to the guy, who calls himself Thumpy G. Catherine informs him that he's some fifty decibels louder than a jackhammer. Thumpy G seems delighted with this: "You know the only way to beat a jackhammer is to bust 15,000 watts of Run-DMC's 'Dumb Girl,' or LL Cool J's 'Goin' Back To Cali,' you know?" Nicky mouths, "'Going back to Cali'?" incredulously. While he's caught in a reverie over the old-school grooves, Catherine and Lockwood determine that Thumpy's made it a personal mission to blow out as many strangers' eardrums as possible, and he does not know Jace Felder. As Thumpy turns to pursue a woman, Catherine gets his attention by threatening to impound his car, and Thumpy has a miraculous mental recovery. He now knows who Felder is. Nicky deadpans, "We're all ears."

The scene is all gears -- a close-up on a compact hand-held drill whirring in mid-air. The camera pulls back to Emergency Backup David holding the drill and regarding it with limpid eyes before asking David The Erudite Coroner if it's new. In a nice bit of parallelism with the scene, David confirms this with, "Yup. Turbo." Emergency Backup David makes more cooing noises, then asks if David needs help. David, who's been making a fine incision across Pfeiffer's forehead, peels back some skin and answers in the negative. Then he peels off Pfeiffer's face. Well, there go the plans for the open-casket viewing. Emergency Backup David chortles, "Cool." David then lowers his face-shield, takes the saw from Emergency Backup David, and begin sawing. We know he's hit brain when the blood splatters all over Emergency Backup David, who looks mildly nonplussed. That'll learn him for not lowering his face shield first.

We get an exterior shot of the Palms, and then we're back at a poker table where Lita Gibbons -- in another top that pushes her cleavage into "consult alternate baking instructions on the back of this package" altitude -- is busy playing poker. Brass and Gil watch her rake in another pot before Brass asks, "So how many pots is that?" "Too many," decrees Gil, and Brass walks over to interrupt Lita's revenue stream. The three of them decamp to what looks like an empty ballroom. Lita is sitting in one of the many empty chairs, while Brass and Gil stand over her. We hear her rasp, "Yeah, I live here. Tangiers is a damn smokehouse. Bothers my eyes." Brass asks if she uses eye-drops. "Bottles and bottles," she replies. Brass then asks if he can see them. "Pick a pocket," she invites. Gil then sits down and asks, "Miss Gibbons, what color are your eyes?' "Brown," she says. Still peering intently at her, he asks, "Why are you wearing just one contact lens?" Lita counters that she has 10/30 vision in her right eye. Gil whips out the penlight and inspects the offending eye. He asks, "Why is [the lens] tinted?" We then pull back to see a faint rim of blue around her brown iris. Gil tells Lita he'll need to take her contact lens.

Back in the morgue, David is reverently holding a bloody but intact brain aloft while Emergency Backup David gazes upon it with awe. As Warrick enters, David inquires, "Have you ever held a legend's brain?" Emergency Backup David adds, "Brain cried uncle." David corrects his backup: "Correct spelling u-n-c-a-l. Uncal herniation, a swelling at the base of the temporal lobe which compresses the posterior cerebral artery, resulting in a stroke." Warrick walks over to see in person, then says, "Let's back up here. Victim had chronic lead poisoning from a bullet that was left in his leg..." "Tox is pending," David replies. Warrick continues, "But what you're thinking is the lead from the bullet made his brain swell up with uncal herniation?" David muses, "Wild card was blood pressure. If he kept that under control, he might have had another twenty years." Warrick finishes, "Except that someone put tetrahydrozoline in his drink, which made his blood pressure spike, and now we've got his brain in a bowl." As Warrick turns to go, he sees the brainless parts of Pfeiffer. "Nasty."

Catherine and Nicky enter a garage, with Nicky saying, "Michelangelo? It's an odd name for a mechanic." Catherine points out that Thumpy G claimed to be an artist. Nick walks over to the man in question and makes the introductions. Catherine makes small talk by asking, "So how long have you been racing cars?" "I don't race them, I soup them. And it's $650 an hour -- you're costing me money." Catherine says he's costing them time. But, Catherine, there is time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of evidence and pleas. We establish that Jace Felder was somewhat well known in his small corner of the world ("the Steve McQueen of Southern Nevada"), and that Michelangelo might know the killer, as the killer was driving a Michelangelo. "I have many works of art," Michelangelo drawls. "Which one?" Nicky tells him it was a blue Honda with blue rims and tinted windows. Michelangelo comes back with a photo of the car -- "Billie Holiday. Built it for myself. Sold it to some punk kid. Never should have done that. Sold out. Kid walks in one day, $100,000 price tag in his head. Wants a racer off the showroom floor. No custom, no waiting, right now. Paid by check." Catherine asks if Michelangelo's got a copy of the check. No, he does not. He sure did toss that third-party insurance company check. Ah, Michelangelo. How should you presume? He's saved from a disquisition by the ring of the phone -- Lockwood found the car on a tent sale with the VIN number scratched out. As she walks out of Michelangelo's, Catherine authorizes Lockwood to buy the car. In the garage, the gearheads come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

Liam -- who could stand a little more obsessive self-scrutiny, if you ask me -- is busy crooning "we meet again" at a bottle of Visine: Get The Red (Herring) Out. He looks up to ask Sara, "Lita Gibbons wasn't putting this on her nipples, was she?" "You have been drinking too many Thug Passions," Sara spits. "The woman is twice your age, she may be three times your age." Liam grins: "Old case. Sorry." The mass spec machine beeps, the results are out, and Sara wants answers. Liam tries that time-honored courtship tactic (blackmail) again, saying archly, "You'll get your answer when I get mine." Sara is left to glare at him and silently curse the perpetrators of romantic comedy for promoting the idea that passive-aggressive ploys sugarcoated in an arrested-adolescent brand of cute will inspire torrid passion.

Back in the grown-up part of the show, Gil has laid out a deck of cards (provenance unknown) and is waiting for a lab tech to come in; the lab tech does. Gil pulls out a wand with a blue glass lens at the end and asks the tech, "Is this the same color as the contact lens?" The tech replies, "Only bigger. Glass is my life." Gil looks over, and the tech favors him with a tiny, bashful smile. He is adorable! Awww! Gil says, "Stick around. I may need your eyes." The tech blurts out, "As long as they stay in my head." Gil scans the cards -- laid out in four rows of thirteen -- and asks the tech to identify the aces. "How many are there?" the tech asks. Gil pauses for a moment, trying to wrap his brain around the idea of someone not knowing what a suit of cards is, or how many suits are in a deck. Then he meets the tech's face, realizes the guy is serious, and says, "Four." The tech takes the lens, and we see what he sees: one card in each row is marked with a substance that glows only when seen through a blue lens. The tech says happily, "Anaglyphics -- color contrast to see hidden marks." Gil fills us in on the scam: "Lita Gibbons was playing the daub." Remembering that he is among innocent glassmakers, Gil clarifies, "She was cheating. She marked the cards with lip balm." Sara, who has skidded in toward the end of this, says, "And that's all she was doing. The vic's drink contained .05 percent tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride, and .25 percent zinc sulfate. There was no zinc sulfate in any of Lita Gibbons' eye-drops. Different formulation." Gil closes his eyes for a moment, and his head shakes from side to side almost imperceptibly. When he opens his eyes again, he asks, "So she didn't kill Doyle Pfeiffer." Sara invites him to look on the bright side by saying, "Someone's eye-drops did."

Continuing along this plotline, Warrick and Gil are back at the casino, questioning the waitress from that night. She sounds a Michelangelo-like chord by telling Warrick that he's costing her money. He replies, "You didn't seem too worried about money the other night. We watched the surveillance tape. Doyle Pfeiffer didn't give you a nickel, yet you were all over him." Gil's attention has wandered to the bar, and he's heading in that direction while the waitress says derisively, "I can tell you've never served drinks. Catch him in the right mood, with the right pot, he can make your month." She shrugs facilely. Warrick asks, "Is that why you were giving eyes to the California kid?" The waitress corrects him: "I wasn't giving eyes to him." On the other side of the lounge, we begin to get the idea that her credibility is somewhat flexible, as Brass asks Blueberry Beret (who's sans beret here), "You tipped some waitress $1,500 the other night? You in business or you in love?" Blueberry Beret justifies the fiscal folly as being the understandable side effect of a streak, ending with, "I threw her a bone." Brass can barely contain his glee at such close contact with a double entendre as he asks, "Is that all you threw her? Put a shot in her? Anything else I should know? I mean, we're just talking here." Blueberry Beret says, "All I can say is, for $1,500 you get great service." Meanwhile, our girl in the service sector is saying, "Dammit, Warrick, I'm a waitress, not a call girl." Her strategy for tips to play one big spender off another. "Besides," she snots, "I thought Doyle had a heart attack." Warrick informs her that he had help, courtesy of a dosed drink.

Gil, meanwhile, is watching the mix-master at work, observing how syrup and carbonation come together to make soda. After smiling wanly at a waitress who's making eyes at him, Gil bellies up to the bar. The bartender asks, "What can I get for you?" Gil wants information. The bartender silently wonders if that's one of those shooters topped with whipped cream, or a girl drink with ice cream and mashed-up Oreos.

Over in the corner, Blueberry Beret has gotten chatty with Brass, and inquires, "Do you know what happens when you beat a legend? People see you different. They play you different. I wanted that edge." Brass wants to ride the edge for a little bit, and Blueberry Beret, demonstrating that he's thinking of poker even when he's not holding a hand, points out that beating the Candyman would be preferable to killing him.

Meanwhile, the bartender's revealing that the miracle of computers can tell us not only what drinks everyone ordered, but when the waitress took their orders and in what sequence she gave the order to the bartender -- "sodas first, mixers second, beers last -- no exceptions." Gil wants to know where the booze is, as the absence of bottles is conspicuous. The bartender jerks a finger toward his rear and says, "Back of the house." Gil gets all thoughtful, then orders a double bourbon on the rocks. We get the TMICam perspective of how such a drink makes its way from the back of the house to the bottom of the glass courtesy of assorted pressurized hoses. Gil invites the bartender to keep the drink and the change.

Alas, poor Warrick is still getting lip from the waitress; when he tries the Grissomian "Do you mind if I take a look in your purse?" she shoots back, "Yes, I do mind." So he just stares at her until she relents. Reaching into her purse, the waitress brings out a bottle of Visine: Get The Red (Herring) Out and says, "You bust me, you better bust all of us."

Back in the B-plot, Catherine is composing her own paean to the sterility of modern life: "No glass, no paint flecks, no personal effects. It's been cleaned." Nicky offers his own version of literary criticism by finding a bullet embedded in the ceiling. It's a nine-millimeter round with no visible body fluid. Nicky thinks it's a miss; Catherine wants blood. They whip out the luminol to see what develops. According to Catherine, "Well, the only void was in the driver's seat, means it was occupied by our victim, Jace Felder. So he was shot in the head, left to right, spatter on the passenger door's from the exit wound." Nicky's trying to figure out how to account for the blood all over the rest of the car; Catherine suspects Felder was shot while the car was in motion. She wants to meet the seller.

And so we do. He's in the tank, wearing the kind of unctuous grin that makes my hand itch in a subconscious effort to slap it off his face, saying, "Opportunity knocked. I answered." Nicky's all, "Let's back up and start over, shall we?" Hee. Nicky's patiently, if incredulously, walking with Mr. Masters through his story -- he and his brother were off-roading, they stumbled across the wrecked racer -- when Catherine gently interrupts him, then turns to Mr. Masters and snaps, "What were you thinking?! You took the CAR?" He replies, "Damn right! Engine alone is worth fifteen grand. What's a dead body, or our obligation to report it and thereby support the civil system we expect to support us?" Or something to that effect. Nicky asks why Mr. Masters didn't think to call 911. "You guys would have impounded the car," he replies, more or less unaware that he's just let himself in for a bigger world of hurt this way. Catherine fills him in: "You've just confessed to grand larceny and tampering with a crime scene. Detective Lockwood will get back to you on the murder charge." In the meantime, Mr. Masters can sit there and think about how the time opportunity knocks, he might want to pretend he didn't hear it.

Nicky and Catherine walk down the hall venting (Catherine: "Jackass." Nick: "Dumb-ass") before Lockwood catches up with them, hand-carrying the name of the man who bought the Billie Holiday: Tony Del Negro. Cut to a pretty, pretty, pretty boy saying coolly, "Yeah. I race." Catherine asks if he's raced Felder. The pretty, pretty, pretty boy's dad is more than a little agitated: "If you're looking to bust my son for street-racing, you get your partner out of my backyard." Catherine sets him straight by pointing out that she could care less about jackasses with over-hyped cars, but she does care about investigating the murder of one of these jackasses. Or something to that effect. Despite my Southern upbringing, I could not possibly care less about fast cars and the racing thereof, so anything from illicit drag racing to NASCAR will only bore and irritate me, and lead me to name-call anyone who pours an inordinate amount of time into souping up a goddamn Honda. So. Papa protests his son's innocence, but Catherine proceeds, commanding, "Tony, tell me about the race." We flash back to the cars racing -- it reminds me of the big race in Grease, which was probably not the intention -- and Tony says, "I put my pink slip up against his five grand. Guess you could say I won."