Fight Night

The episode opens with an anonymous voice gloating, "Three hundred pounds of pressure. Let the bassline getcha!" The camera swoops into an opulent casino (my bet: Mandalay Bay, since they have the boxing facility), and we see a boxing banner that reads, "Steele vs. Molina. Revenge in the Desert. November 9, 2002." Well, it beats "Two Old Geezers at Caesar's," but not by much. We see a sleek blonde in a floor-length dress being squired in by someone who's apparently recognized by the press, we see the cameras snapping in the ring, and we see someone whaling away in the ring. There's a boxing match going on; I suppose I could cover it by writing, "Jabs! Uppercuts! The ol' one-two! Overhand right!" but the truth is that I've always thought of boxing as a barbaric vehicle in which crooked men make a lot of money off fixed fights, and if I want to see two people pretending to have a fair match, I'll go with the infinitely more entertaining WWE. So I really can't recap the fight for you. I can, however, note that a small bald man is hauling ass across the casino floor, and I don't blame him; it looks like he's being pursued by Bel, Biv, or possible DeVoe, and their accompanying thug posse. The music keeps playing ("Time to test it/let's give it your best stuff/don't sweat it/time to test it/let's get messed up/throw your best stuff") and the boxers keep boxing, and as the blood flies, I am reminded once more why I despise this alleged "sport" on the professional level. The ref lets the bald fighter lean against the ropes while the other boxer beats him to a bloody pulp; in the stands, a cheap blonde in a tacky red dress and one of those diamond necklaces Madonna would have worn during her Material Girl phase is standing up and cheering loudly for the pummeller. After the bald man's been sufficiently pounded, the referee snaps out of his reverie and calls the round. The bald man, Laroi, heads back to his corner, where Roma Maffia awaits. Hasn't he suffered enough for one night? In any event, his keepers cajole him into going another round. A girl in a gold bikini saunters out with the card -- I'll be darned, this is taking place at the Venetian, not the Mandalay Bay -- and we see the cheap blonde in the red dress one more time. She's brought a cowboy with her. The bikini babe walks by, the man tips his hat, and the blonde elbows him and shouts something unintelligible, but clearly meant as a rebuke. Laroi's handlers exhort him to go back into the ring, a decision they come to regret as the round ends with Laroi, unable to dodge any of his opponent's blows, dropping dead.

In the scene, someone has rolled Laroi over from the position in which he died -- on his stomach -- to his back. My guess is that it happened when someone tried to revive him, but why Laroi wasn't rushed to the hospital is anyone's guess. I can't see him being left in the ring, especially after what was supposed to have been a high-profile bout. Getting people out of that arena must have been a nightmare. Gil walks in, looking dolefully at the body. Warrick is at his heels. Brass, who's already in the ring, leans against the ropes and says, "Laroi 'Fists of' Steele." I can't help but think this might be a shout-out to this site and its editorial tendencies toward christening characters with interstitial nicknames, cf. Mark "You Make My Face" Greene. Warrick, who evidently follows boxing, says, "WFB welterweight champion. Nineteen wins." Gil looks down at the body and says, "One loss." Brass looks unsurprised at Gil's reaction. Gil continues, "Boxers have died in the ring before. Why is this one a crime?" Brass tells us: "Casino management got a heads-up from the sports book. Five hours before the opening bell, Steele went from a two-to-one favorite to a five-to-one underdog." Warrick asks, "Fight fixing?" Brass nods. Gil says, "That's a felony. If death occurs during the commission of a felony, that's a murder." Gil stands there, satisfied that he's gotten in the last word as The Who's opening chords are about to whisk us to the credits...and then his beeper goes off and his expression morphs into huh? Gil pulls out his pager as Warrick stands there, looking askance, as if he's expecting to see Pete Townsend performing windmills to his immediate left. Gil checks the message, and we hear the song rewinding. How meta! Now that is a shout-out, y'all.

Gil is now ducking under police tape and walking over to where our young bald friend is -- that is, lying on the pavement. Guess Bel, Biv, or DeVoe caught up with him. Or maybe Bobby Brown -- he seems to be something of a wild card. Catherine -- who's sporting a new, curly do that caused the husband to emit low growls from the depths of the couch (they sounded disturbingly like, "Yessss! Yessss! Pretty hair! My precious!") -- puts down the camera --

The husband: How are you slandering me now?
Me: This is coming from the same person who used to pout if he wasn't in the recaps.
The husband: After that kitchen comment, you make me sound incompetent. I make a damn fine meatloaf, I make a damn fine mousse --
Me: You make a damn fine mess too. I said nothing about your cooking, which is wonderful, by the way. Just the mess.
The husband: Now you're making me sound disturbed.
Me: Well, you disturbed me.
The husband: Now you're just being hateful.
Me: Baby, no! What can I do to make it up to you?
The husband: Do your hair like Catherine's! It's soft and smells like flowers, I know it.

Catherine tells Gil, "Gang member." The non-hot, non-Lockwood police officer (we've seen him before) tells us, "Tenth Street Vandals." Will they be feuding with the Fourth Avenue Huns, or the Cherry Lane Burgundians? Do they owe allegiance to the Visigoths or the Ostrogoths? Am I milking this joke for all it's worth? Gil's full of questions too: "Isolated incidents, or on a roll?" Detective Vega replies, "Hard to tell. The Vandals are based in L.A., but on a weekend like this...brings the knuckleheads in." I wonder what they say about Comdex? Gil asks if there were witnesses, and Catherine replies, "They were all in the bathroom." Gil rolls his eyes with a baroque flourish and says, "Aren't they always?" He looks pretty tired -- must be pre-credits fatigue. The camera pans over the body and a bloodstained flyer for the fight lying on the ground to it. Gil's beeper goes off again, and he reads the message: "Call Nick Stokes." It's 11:24 on a Saturday night. Do you know where your rage-filled Texan is?

Why, she's at the jewelry store, saying, "I am not giving this back until I get my ring!" Hey, it's the cheap blonde from the fight scene, living in her material world and making life miserable for a store manager who is patiently explaining that Little Miss L'Oreal is going to have to wait for her bauble, what with someone having broken into the store and stolen it, along with a great many other costly trinkets. The man in the cowboy hat just stands there, subdued. Perhaps he's too drunk to care. The manager tries again with, "Mrs. Ramsey, it is not our policy to allow clients to --" Ramsey cuts in with, "Oh, really? Well, I guess you need a new policy, don't you?" I guess she needs a lesson in how to deal with human beings. The manager snaps, "Now you are being unreasonable," and the two fade into the background as the camera swoops over to where Nicky and his CSI vest are busy taking pictures. I wonder if it's protocol to wear that after certain types of crimes, or if Gil just got tired of Nicky being held at gunpoint, flung through windows, et cetera, and ordered him to wear protective gear? Gil comes over, and Nicky fills him in: "Smash-and-grab. Left that behind." "That" would appear to be a length of lead pipe. Gil asks how many people did it, and Nicky says, "One." Gil's eyebrows go shooting up, and Nicky explained that the lone stranger waited until the manager was alone -- and presumably fatigued after assisting Mrs. Ramsey at the beginning of the evening -- and "knocked her out. Hopped the counter and got away with a whole sackful of stones. It takes some stones to pull off a job like this." Before Gil can snap, "They're called gonads, Nicky!" Sara's walked up. She asks, "What've we got?" Gil tells her, "Well, you and I have got a dead boxer. Nicky, you're going to get to run this solo." Nicky decides to keep the cartwheels until Gil and Sara are a respectable distance away, and contents himself with saying, "Yeah?" Gil, instead of conceding that perhaps Nicky's actually capable of doing this, says, "We're tapped out. Welcome to fight night."

And now The Who kicks in.

After the commercials, we're back in the ring. By the way, the CBS ID floating in the bottom of the screen, reading "CSI:" with nothing after the colon, really irks me. Why have a colon if it's not introducing items in a series, linking an independent clause to a second independent clause that amplifies or interprets the first, or introducing a statement or quotation? That's like having the title "Hack;" or "Robbery Homicide Division --." This punctuation gaffe must be stopped. Sara's working in Steele's corner, and Warrick's in Molina's. Sara asks Warrick what she's looking for, and Warrick tells her, "Blinding agents in the Vaseline, stimulants in the water..." Sara begins appraising the area, asking, "So everything goes to Tox?" Warrick confirms this. Sara reads my mind and says, "Nice sport." Warrick replies, "It's only dirty when you make it dirty. You know, boxing's about discipline." Sara replies, "Two guys beating their brains out in a race for early-onset Parkinson's." The connection between Parkinson's Disease and boxing-related triggers is still not fully understood; the evidence is piling up that anyone who sustained repeated blows to the head is at risk for developing Dementia Pugelistica, which can bring about early onset of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, but there is a suspicion that boxers who develop Parkinson's or Alzheimer's had a genetic predisposition towards those diseases anyway, and the repeated head injuries exacerbate the onset (Jordan BD, Relkin NR, Ravdin LD, et al: Apolipoprotein E epsilon4 associated with chronic traumatic brain injury in boxing. JAMA 1997;278(2):136-140, Corder EH, Saunders AM, Strittmatter WJ, et al: Gene dose of apolipoprotein E type 4 allele and the risk of Alzheimer's disease in late onset families. Science 1993; 261(5123):921-923).

Warrick elects to skip over the science, and says, "No, no, mind and body. If you train one and not the other, you're half a person." Warrick then walks over to where Sara's crouching over a bucket and asks, "What'd you find?" Sara, who's wearing a Joker-like grin, grits, "Sa-liva." Warrick gaily replies, "Oh, the spit bucket!" Still grinning, Sara slowly walks the bucket over. Warrick wants to know what's so funny, and Sara explains through a locked-jaw grin that "smiling, uh, suppresses the gag reflex." Warrick's incredulous: "This is coming from the same woman who processed fecal fat from a ruptured colon." It's wrong to laugh at the phrase "fecal fat," and yet, I'm cracking up as I sit here, softly repeating it. Go on, say it a few times. The whimsical music kicks up in the background as Sara explains, "Every crim's got a problem area. Mine's saliva." Warrick offers to take it for her. Sara refuses. Warrick asks, "You sure?" and Sara reiterates. He's pretty amused by this, and wanders off to let Sara handle the spit herself. Meanwhile, some clown in a bow tie -- oh, he's the referee who was napping during the rounds -- explains to Gil and Brass how the two boxers hated each other, and how Steele had beaten Molina like a drum in their two prior matches. Brass muses, "Two wins by knockout, tonight he dies. What's up with that?" The ref asks what Brass might mean, and Gil tags in: "Did you notice anything out of the ordinary about either fighter? Slowed reactions, unusual strength?" The ref replies, "All I noticed is that boy took one hell of a beating." Couldn't the ref have, you know, refereed that? Did nobody learn from the Gabe Ruelas/Jimmy Garcia fight? (I got that reference from the husband, who tells me that it's a boxing match which went on for far too long and ended in Garcia's death.) Gil just gives the ref a look.

Meanwhile, Catherine and Vega go wandering among the parking lot where the bald boy was killed. Catherine notices a spent shell casing and drops the yellow crime scene marker (#1) down to it. She then notices a gun, but the thrill of discovery is quickly diminished as Vega finds his own gun a moment later. Catherine keeps wandering about (looking for a telltale copy of "That Girl Is Poison"), and after finding a third gun, as Vega finds the fourth, she comments, "We could put up a couple of booths and have ourselves a gun show." Vega explains, "Disposable firearms. They know we can't link them to the weapons if we can't find the weapons on them." Catherine assesses the gun -- "Smith & Wesson 40. High end" -- and Vega says, "They're stealing their way to better guns." Catherine's not happy about this, what with Bel, Biv, or DeVoe using Vegas as target practice.

While Catherine collects firearms, Nicky meticulously works the broken jewelry case, noting the blood on some of the glass fragments and deducing that it came from a careless thief sticking his or her hand in at the wrong angle. He swabs the blood, and the manager comes over, handing Nicky a sheaf of paper and saying, "That's everything he's got." Nicky wants to know why it's highlighted, and the manager explains, "It's a Riviera necklace. We loaned it to a couple for the fight, and they refuse to return it until we return the ring that they brought in for cleaning." Nicky says, "Which was stolen along with the other items, right?" The manager says petulantly, "Exactly. And they won't leave until they get this all sorted out. Can you help me out here?" Nicky says, "Sorry. Mediation's not really my thing. Rage is. Want me to add them to my Kill List? There's room in the top twenty-five if you act now." Or maybe he stops after the mediation part. The manager sarcastically thanks him; he says, "No problem," which is either humor that's so subtle it sailed over my head, or her tone sailed over his. Then Nicky pulls out the phone, hits a button on speed-dial, and gets Buzz the detective. He tells him, "Listen, I'm at a smash-and-grab, lot of glass, a little blood. Do me a favor -- check out the local hospitals, anyone comes in with a forearm laceration could be our guy." While Nicky's talking, we get a better look at the Ramseys. She looks like she's searching for Spouse #2. He looks like he's searching for someone to put him out of his misery.

While Sara and Warrick are left to ponder this paradigm of personal responsibility, ballistics tech Bobby gives Catherine some good news and some bad news. The good news: All the bullets came from the same gun -- six right, .380. The bad news: "We're oh-for-two matching the bullets to the guns y'all recovered. I did find something on one of them shells if you want to take a look. It's set up for you over there." Catherine's happy: "It could be biological. I'll send it to Trace." Bobby's thinking that's the way she's going to have to go, since the bullets are now zero-for-three on matching the guns.

Back to Sara and Warrick. As they're leaving Molina in the hospital, Warrick's whipping out the cell phone and calling Brass, asking for the 411 on the ref. Sara's bobbing along behind him when along comes Hank. The two of them peel off, and Sara awkwardly tells Warrick, "I-I'll be right there." He seems oblivious. Sara and Hank make their way over to the ambulance bay, and Hank tells Sara, "We gave Molina a ride in." Sara's thrilled: "You did?" Hank stems Sara's expectations of punch-drunk confessions: "He didn't say much, which is no big surprise, considering. There's not much in here, but I know how, uh, you like to see everything." Some men say it with flowers; Hank says it with evidence. You've got to give the boy points for effort. Sara looks genuinely touched, and says, "Thanks." And Hank really did give her the gift that keeps on giving: Molina's hand wraps, which happen to have mercury on them.

Meanwhile, David the Anti-Boxing Coroner and Gil are going over Laroi's body. After assessing Laroi's massive soft-tissue damage, David wonders, "Are they letting guys go at each other with clubs now?" Gil shoots back, "Only on cable." David looks at a giant mass of swollen tissue on Laroi's face and comments, "It never ceases to amaze me, the damage one human being can inflict on another." If Sara were here, she'd talk about how people were getting paid to do so. Gil focuses instead on the resiliency of the human body relative to what it can sustain: "A heavyweight can land a punch at a thousand pounds per square inch. The energy of the punch is transferred through the cerebrospinal fluid, compressing the brain against the skull, temporarily disrupting neural activity. It's like a short circuit. Too many short circuits, the brain shuts down." As Gil explains this, we see it happening in slow, TMICam motion, where Laroi is getting the snot pounded out of him while his brain rattles around absorbing all that pressure. Eventually, he falls. Gil and David stare at the pulpy face for a little bit, and Gil finally notes that the bruising around the chin seems a little heavy. David noticed that too, and he walks Gil over to the results of the postmortem angiogram he did. He explains, "It's a basilar subarachnoid hematoma, the result of a massive vertical trauma to the chin." Which we also see in TMICam, so that each droplet of blood vaults in a lazy arc toward the viewer in stark red on a black-and-white screen. Thanks, guys!