Look, everyone, it's the luxuriously shiny Vegas strip! Money, money, money! And now, marvel at the juxtaposition as the camera pans below an I-15 overpass and down to the shantytown below. In case you're wondering what it looks like: think of a music video from the 1980s, any one where the artist is Making A Statement about how terrible it is to be poor/homeless/a teenage runaway-turned-whore, and thank God they have royalties to save them from that fate. The video format usually entails the socially-aware star dancing and singing around a dark and squalid urban setting, while stylishly ripped-and-slashed street kids with heretofore untapped dancing abilities strike poses and stroll around like extras from Cats when they're not looking urchin-like and victimized by society. If this doesn't ring a bell with you, go watch VH-1 Classic and just wait for it.
Anyway, a fairly nice car comes by, and several women who might charitably be called long-term contract workers in the sex industry saunter on over to make small talk. The car rolls on, past the usual clutch of street people drinking over an oil drum with some sort of fire in it, and the people throw their bottles and look generally unhappy about the vehicular intrusion. It doesn't faze the clear-skinned yuppie behind the wheel. He just pulls up to the burning oil drum, and the , and then gets out of the car. We see a clutch of people watch him leave, the music gets all dramatic…
And then the shot fuels the fears of every person who's ever hissed, "Lock your doors! This is a bad neighborhood!" to the other passengers in the car as they drive through a section of town not yet terraformed by big-box stores or national franchises. The yuppie's on his back, several stab wounds puncturing his chest. Gil and Brass hunker down, and Gil notes, "No watch, no wallet, no shoes." "No service," Brass replies. The two men get up and walk away, making this the shortest CSI episode ever. Kidding! Brass comments on how the guy's lucky he still has the fillings in his teeth. Why? They can't really be used to fill the bleeding holes in his torso. Gil checks the corpse's teeth, just to be sure, and Brass chuckles. Ah, graveyard humor. Gil then notes the man's marvelous manicure, and comments on how well groomed he is. Brass replies, "I don't care if he was lemon-scented and Martinized, if he was on Washington and D, he was copping. You should have just said no!" Heh. Gil checks out the group of kids -- the same ones as before, dramatically backlit and lurking at the end of an alley. He takes us to the credits with, "Maybe somebody just wouldn't take 'no' for an answer."
Cue the Who. They'd like to know who didn't take no for an answer.
When we get back from the commercial break ("kitchen fresh chicken" is the most amusing rebranding attempt ever; I love how the KFC people are all "It's floured and cooked! The word 'fried' is verboten!"), the closed-captioning shows Sara asking the broody-and-therefore-intriguing Detective Cavaliere how long he's been in Vegas, but on-screen, it's Catherine purring the small talk at him. Sara pops in with, "Welcome to Trannytown. This is where the hustlers come." I personally want to see the mayor of Trannytown. I bet she's fabulous. Cavaliere replies, "I can see why. It's very romantic." All three people hunker down to check out the body stuffed in the tire. By the way, Cavaliere is played by Jose Zuniga, who was quite enjoyable in Stop Wonderland and Gun Shy. Anyway, Sara and Catherine note the traces of makeup the corpse has on, and Sara concludes that the dead body fits the profile for transvestism. She looks up at a dilapidated old bus and adds, "Honeymoon suite's across the way. Anonymous sex becomes anonymous sex crime." Catherine points out, "Murder's usually personal," since we have no serial-killer plotlines this week to disprove that premise. Sara muses, "Maybe whoever had the last dance left behind a corsage." Catherine would just settle for the guy's clothing.
Emergency Backup David comes on over, notices the guy crammed in the tire, and asks, "You think a hacksaw's going to do the trick?" Catherine thinks not, but adds, "That's why God invented Sawzalls." For those of you who were wondering, "Is this product placement? Or a swanky forensic tool?" the answer is: Yes and, um, I don't know. You can get an "orbital action" Sawzall off Amazon.com for a mere $185. That's a low price to pay for the "outstanding ability to cut through almost any material: wood, nail-embedded wood, steel, cast iron, aluminum, brass, drywall, composition materials, hard rubber, cement, brick, plaster, and fiberglass."
The Sawzall sawz away while merry forensic music plays, and Cavaliere helps Catherine and Emergency Backup David pull the corpse out of the sawed-up tire while Sara and some poorly lit secondary figure check out the honeymoon suite. There's a filthy blanket and the token disturbing prop -- a filthy beheaded Barbie doll. Sara heads over to the body crew and glumly reports her finding: "All we got is a decapitated doll." Catherine points out, "That's still legal in Nevada." And Lindsey ducks juvie once again. Emergency Backup David is looking at the body and shaking his head; Catherine asks him if he's found something, and he replies, "I was just thinking, I wouldn't be caught dead in those shorts." Heh.
Meanwhile, on the other crime scene, the contract workers I alluded to earlier are watching the fun, drawn to Warrick like moths to a flame. One of them asks Warrick, "Yo, baby. Why you rushing today? We got plenty of night left." Warrick doesn't even look at her as he replies, "I'm working, lady." "See, that's something we already have in common," she shoots back. I like her. Warrick comes over to see if she saw anything, asking the sassy prostitute if she was working the dead guy. She replies, "Him? No. No, sir. But I tell you one thing: good-looking white boy like that, I know plenty of women that would be tripping over their platforms to get a little something-something. But no, sir, he wasn't anybody's customer." Warrick skeptically replies, "Really," and then heads back to work. Hmph. I don't think anyone should treat Divine (as she's named in TV Guide) that way after she bothered to provide some information. Plus she's played by MadTV alum Debra Wilson. Nobody blows off MadTV players. If you want to blow off SNL players, go ahead: the alumni have left a trail of cinematic carnage no nuanced late-in-life Bill Murray performances will ever be able to clean up. But don't be hating on Mad TV.
Anyway. Warrick ambles on over to chat Gil up, noting that he doubts Yuppie Tartare hoofed it to the wrong side of the tracks on foot. Gil thinks they simply haven't found the car yet. And that's that. Wow, the pacing feels odd; it's like there's roughly ten more minutes of footage from this plotline that we've already missed.
Back at the morgue, David the Cryptic Coroner is busy giving Gil the rundown on how the guy died: "Multiple stab wounds, the deepest of which transected the thoracic aorta and the right mainstream bronchus." Gil asks if there's anything else, which is episode-speak for, "Got any more expository filler to sling my way?" David does: "His name is Ed Burnell. Matched his prints, prior for possession. And it's not the first time he's stared death in the face. Our man had a double dose of cirrhosis. That takes work: years of hard-core alcohol abuse, plus hepatitis probably acquired by dirty needles." Gil replies, "In Chinese medicine, the liver is the organ of anger. Addicts and alcoholics medicate their anger and consequently destroy their liver." Because so many addicts are completely serene when they're raddled with jaundice and facing hepatic coma. David takes this as a cue to divulge yet more exposition: "Half the liver is healthy. The new half." Gil comments, "A graft from a less angry donor." You know, that's assuming a lot about the donor. They could be a massive grudge-holder. David explains the reason for the graft: "Organ recipient procedure is pretty clear. They only do transplants on people who test clean for a year." Gil flippantly says, "Well, he probably got his new liver, figured he could start clean all over again." That seems unlike Gil: this is the guy who manages to find understandable human motives behind isolated old cat ladies and mentally-ill homeless women, and I can't see why he wouldn't have a more subtle understanding of the pathology of addiction. He could have at least read the interesting article "The Addicted Brain" in March 2004 issue of Scientific American, or "Junkie Foods" in the March 2004 issue of Allure, while he was waiting for an appointment with the ear doc -- oh. Right.
In any event, David sharply asks him, "Is that what you think? Once an addict, always an addict?" Either David's challenging Gil to explain his argument, or we've just witnessed some extraordinarily subtle characterization. Gil looks at David and raises an eyebrow. Oh, whatever.
Over in the Labitrail, Catherine's schooling Liam on how to use a scope to inspect a garment as evidence just like Real CSIs do. Liam is getting the most casual CSI education ever: it's like people only teach him when they remember, and there's been no evidence of coordination among any of the CSIs. Wouldn't it make more sense to actually lay out some sort of lesson plan for the boy? Or does that make too much sense? Liam finds semen stains and notes, "On a man's underwear, [they] aren't exactly probative." The one-liners in this episode are all that's keeping me from knocking it down a grade point. But then Liam adds, "Can't tell you how long they've been there, or how often the guy changes his shorts. I knew guys who could go up to four days on one single pair of tighty-whities." And they were understandably lonely guys. Catherine thanks Liam for putting that picture in her brain. Catherine tells Liam to outline all the semen stains, taking care to keep the dotted line one-eighth of an inch away from the edge of the sample. Liam asks, "And then cut them out and send them to myself in DNA?" Yup.
Then Catherine zips down to the morgue, where Sara is picking the dead guy's nose. Well, I'll be darned: you can pick your corpses, and you can pick your nose, and you can pick your corpses' noses. The two women check out the body, which doesn't appear to have been autopsied yet, as there's no giant Y-shaped incision bisecting the torso. Sara notices petechial hemorrhaging, and Catherine forlornly notes, "I would've thought he was strangled during some kind of sex play, but there are no marks." Sara wonders if it was suffocation, and across the morgue, Emergency Backup David cleans off another corpse while he off-handedly replies, "That's why undertakers love smother victims." Sara either ignores this obvious cue listing how the guy died, or she's absorbed it and moved on to notice the Vegas Brow under the guy's nails. Catherine says it's a showgirl thing, since the constant waxing and plucking can take a toll on a girl's eyebrows. Sara earnestly says, "We can kind of rule him out as a showgirl, and he's hairy for a drag queen." She then asks David to hit the lights, which he gladly does, since her hair's looking pretty good this episode. See what a little volumizer can do for your roots and ends? Anyway, David turns off the lights, and Sara trains an ALS on the guy's face, and Catherine says, "He kind of looks like a clown." And in an alternate universe, we'd promptly segue into a Cirque du Soleil plot, and the rest of the episode would be filled with aerial artists and contortionists with zero body fat and a lot of new-agey music. In this one, Sara shudders, "Ew. I hate clowns," and Catherine concurs, and then they decide it was suicide-by-tire-stuffing and invite Emergency Backup David to ditch the corpse he's working on and join them in a General Foods International Coffee break. Oh, wait. That's another alternate universe. I keep this up, y'all will need a CSI on Infinite Earths to keep the continuity in this episode straight.
Meanwhile, back on the set of the "Won't you care about the indigent? Care enough to buy my record?" video, someone is pinned behind the wheel of a car that's just crashed into a huge underpass support, and alternately ordering the firemen trying to extract him to address the urgent issue of the spiders on his face or stop impeding his ability to beam up and take his medicine. The mouthy young lad continues, "I'm the CEO of a five-bag-a-day corporation, you know that?" Well, it lacks the prestige of a Fortune 500 corporation, but it appears his overhead is lower. The fireman pry the guy out and stand him up to face the decidedly unamused Warrick and Brass. The boy giggles, "Y'all look like cartoons, man." He tries to walk, but the broken bones sticking out through his shins have kind of hindered him there. Warrick notices the boy's Cole-Haan loafers. Meanwhile, Brass engages in a property rights debate with the young man, whom I'll call B-Rad. B-Rad invokes the "possession is nine-tenths of the law" defense with, "Finders, keepers, baby. I gotta bag me some hos." Brass registers B-Rad's extreme lack of street cred and wryly asks Warrick, "What drug is he on?" Warrick replies, "Whatever it is, he either took too much, or not enough."
We get an aerial shot of Vegas, with twilight breaking over the place. I'm guessing this is our transition to day. Catherine and Sara are walking down a hall, and Sara's protesting, "Just because a guy looks like a clown doesn't mean he is a clown." She does not, however, supply an alternate hypothesis for why the guy was in clown makeup. Catherine points out that the dead body didn't match anyone in missing persons, and if Sara's got a better idea, feel free to share with the class. She doesn't, so the two enter the Buddy Ween clown agency. Catherine checks out the loitering clowns and remarks that they're in the right place. "Yeah, or they're casting a John Wayne Gacy revue," Sara replies. Love it! Keep the one-liners coming. Buddy Ween gets off the phone, fresh from driving a hard bargain, and tells Sara and Catherine, "Strippers are down the hall, girls." Catherine whips out the CSI ID; demonstrating excellent entrepreneurial adaptability, Buddy replies, "Why didn't you say so? We do lots of police parties." I sincerely hope it's in association with help-the-kiddies programs, and not a lot of grizzled detectives ordering up clowns and crying along to I Pagliacci while the clown does a sad routine. Catherine whips out a photo of the dead guy and shows it to Buddy Ween, saying, "The party has already happened." He shoots back, "What am I supposed to do with this." Catherine asks if the guy worked for Ween. He replies, "Let me put it this way: I rep clowns. That's Flappy, that's Flappy, Jr., that's Allen -- he doesn't work that much, Popo. Get it? All I do is book the face. I don't care what's underneath." He sounds like a model booker. Maybe that's why all those clowns are hanging around the waiting room; they're hoping to be dispatched on clown go-sees. Sara's flipping through a face book filled with clowns; Ween explains that the serial numbers at the bottom track to the National Clown and Character Registry, which ensures that each clown's look and face are unique, and will paint each unique face on a goose egg. The tradition goes back to the 1500s -- which is either kind of cool, or kind of a weird time to start a habit, what with many people having other things to do, like avoid marrying Lucrezia Borgia, avoid marrying Henry VIII, avoid hanging around London and asking, "Fill me in: who's queen again?" and so on. Anyway, Sara and Catherine walk off with the face book.
At Desert Palms, B-Rad shouts for some medication and a nurse shoots him a glare that should have knocked him out cold. B-Rad then composes himself to ask Gil and Warrick, "What are you two ladies looking at?" Gil adjusts his glasses and reads slowly, "Ahhh…Jamal? We're with the Las Vegas crime lab. It seems you were driving a dead man's car when you got into your accident." B-Rad -- named because he resembles the Jamie Kennedy character more than anything else -- points out, "Half the peoples I know be dead. It don't mean they can't own a vehicle." His concise summary of estate law and probate is a thing of beauty. Warrick fails to appreciate it: "Hey, Vanilla Ice -- at this point, you're looking at a murder rap, which may end you up on Death Row. And I'm not talking about the record label." That label wouldn't take him on a multimillion-dollar bet. Also, heh. B-Rad screams, "Nurse! This be cruel and unusual!" Poor B-Rad. He's trying so hard to be street, but he's coming off Ren Faire: "These sheriffs be inquiring in manners made private." Gil loses a little bit of temper and points out that the evidence doesn't look good for B-Rad, and says he might want to explain himself. B-Rad releases the first of the tiresome eloquent-junkie monologues this episode: "Explain what? I was laid up shooting speedballs all day. Feel me? Look, man, when I get off, I'm gone. Feel me? I can't see nothin', I can't hear nothin', where the high is, that's where I take the elevator up." Warrick looks disdainful; you think he'd at least be mindful of where he got his fixes before. As the CSIs stand there and look generally disapproving, the nurse comes over with some medication, and B-Rad attempts to tell her what's what. You know, there's a time and a place for negotiations, but I'm thinking that now is not one of them for young B-Rad. The painkiller kicks in, and B-Rad slurs, "Man's already dead. Why he be needing shoes anyway?" Warrick leans over and asks Gil sotto voce, "Was that a confession?" "I think a plea of insanity," Gil replies. The music winds down as B-Rad does too.
Back at the Labitrail, Warrick's looking through Dead Ed's car for evidence; he finds an "Everlast" condom. It's not like the principle issue most people have with condoms is that they speed things along, but whatever. Liam pops by to tell Warrick that the only blood on B-Rad's clothing is B-Rad's, and Warrick admits that the spatter is consistent with a front-end collision. So B-Rad didn't kill Ed in the car, but he's still suspected of killing Ed somehow. Warrick says, "What I want to know is how a strung-out junkie like B-Rad got a guy out of his car with just a knife." Liam's curious as to how the strung-out junkie summoned the physical wherewithal to stab the guy six times. Warrick's buying B-Rad's story right now; Liam asks, "If the motive wasn't robbery, what was it?" Warrick unearths a tiny plastic bag of something and concludes, "Maybe this will tell us." A short time later in the lab, Liam's examining the substance under a microscope.
Gil comes by then and says, "Heroin." Liam replies, "Negative on Marquis Mecke Froede." (Y'all know what that is already.) Gil wants to know what it is; Liam says he's never seen it before, and invites Gil to see the results of his color and crystal test. The results look like a screensaver. Liam says they look like an indole alkaloid; that's shorthand for a nitrogenous organic molecule that has a pharmacological effect on people (indole is an organic molecular categorization within the alkaloid group that includes hallucinogens). Gil asks if Liam's run it through the GCMS. Liam has, but nothing's coming up.
Meanwhile, Sara and Catherine spend some quality time with the registry and a copy of Photoshop, trying to create the clown face and ID the dead guy. They eventually stumble upon Doodles the clown, a.k.a. Donny Zanko. Buddy Ween confirms the clownish ID, whom he identifies as a "basic chucklehead…buy some getup, learn a few tricks and grab some scratch boring the crap out of nine-year-olds. He was a good birthday man, except when he, uh…" And trails off in the universal sign for tippling.
Sara asks incredulously, "So he made money boring kids." That's still legal in Nevada too. Ween explains, "Parents throw parties. They get clowns because they think their kid likes clowns." Catherine says ruefully, "Lindsey's fourth. Bad scene." They then move on to the last gig Doodles was booked for: a carwash a few weeks back. That doesn't quite square with Zanko being found in semi-clownface. Ween erupts in indignation: "That son of a bitch! He was working off the books! I never thought Doodles would try to stiff me." Sara smiles for a moment -- wow! Log that moment: it took place twenty-six minutes into the episode. We may never see another like it. Anyway, Sara smiles quickly and points out, "Actually, Doodles was the one who got stiffed." Ween looks sad. Actually, the whole clown business seems very sad: you've got people mocking you, and treating you like you're creepy, and all you want to do is dress up and entertain people with your floppy feet.
Brass ambles on into Gil's office to discharge his Captain Exposition duties: not only was Ed's tox report clean, he worked in a recovery center. Gil thinks this makes sense, as the stuff Warrick found in the car was Ibogaine. It's a psychoactive compound made from the African Tabernanthe iboga plant and is, as Gil says, "A choline-esterase inhibitor that acts as a stimulant in the central nervous system. In the liver it converts to an active metabolite, noribogaine. Noribogaine locks on to addiction receptors, blocking the feedback loops that reinforce dependency." And now would have been a fine time to illustrate this with the ultra-TMIcam shot of the little noribogaine compounds neutralizing the receptors -- or even illustrating and explaining the connection between noribogaine and choline esterase. But no, it's not meant to be. Gil parses for Brass, "In some people, one dose of Ibogaine can cure addiction." Brass asks if that comes with a free set of steak knives; Gil counters that it comes with a free trip, and alludes to the Bwiti tribe of western Africa's practice of using ibogaine to take metaphysical trips, and adds that "many ethnobotanists believe the Iboga [tree] is what the Bible is talking about when it refers to the tree of life." Now we get some sort of flashback. As informative as this all is, it's got the whiff of filler about it. Brass, however, is not up for the multicultural appreciation angle: Ibogaine is illegal in the U.S., and as far as he's concerned, Ed was either dealing in the addiction or the cure thereof.
Meanwhile, Sara and Catherine have entered Doodles's House of Yuks, which is more like a clown mausoleum. Sara takes a look around and deadpans, "I can see why Doodles drank." Meanwhile, Catherine's unerring sex instinct has led her straight to the porn, which is quite heterosexual in nature ("Big Bodacious Babes," for those who are interested, with hilariously PG-13 cover lines). She uses this to deduce that Doodles wasn't trolling for anonymous cross-dressing clown sex. Sara finds an inflatable clown with a weighted bottom; there's a big X duct-taped over the mouth, and she concludes that Doodles might have been working out some animosity issues. Then they hit evidentiary gold: an answering machine with messages. The first is from a woman who purrs about how "I can't stop thinking about your enormous feet." Because she loves big shoes? The second is from a threatening man who adds, "I do appreciate the irony of me leaving you a message." The last one's from a taxi dispatcher. Sara notices that Doodles's costume is missing, and the women realize Doodles could have been out on a job.
And now we're at a halfway house. We can tell because people are vomiting as they go through withdrawal in the background. There's some back-and-forth about the halfway house and ibogaine, and the halfway house guy cuts through the questioning with, "Look, the drug doesn't promise anything. You've got to earn it. If the user doesn't realize why he used in the first place, no power in the world is going to make him stop. Right here is a good case in point." He then opens the door on one of the most alarmingly thin actresses I've seen since most of David E. Kelley's shows went off the air or got a cast overhaul. She's a-planning on going. Halfway House Guy asks the thin woman if she's sure she wants to leave, and she says she does, because this place reminds her too much of Ed. Halfway House Guy asks her to reconsider, and she gently blows him off. He calls, "You did a good job here, Mindy!" She turns around and replies, "I'm still doing it."
Brass watches Mindy leave, then asks Halfway House Guy what her story is. HHG replies, "Ed got her clean. Let me show you what she looked like two months ago." We then see a slice of video that could have been on the outtakes reel from either 8MM (picture Nic Cage's eyes bugging out in an approximation of "acting" as he watches) or Fiona Apple's "Criminal" video. Or maybe it's an old Calvin Klein commercial. In any event, we can tell Mindy's still using because she hasn't washed her hair, and she's going on about how she's gotta get another hit, even if it kills her. Gil watches with a mixture of skepticism and pity as Ed promises a desperate Mindy that he's here to help her, and he'll take care of her. HHG asks rhetorically if Mindy was clean because of "the ibogaine, or the months that she spent here?" Gil's a little surprised that HHG is skeptical about ibogaine; HHG shoots back that he doesn't believe in miracles. Brass prods, "But Ed did." HHG advances the plot with, "Look, when Ed first came here, he was an asset to the place. And then he got…religious about it. You know, there's a reason why Mohammed kept his ass on the mountain. It was safe there. The thing about recovery is, it only works for those who want it, not those who need it." Gil counters that Ed came down from the mountain and brought the ibogaine with him. I'm surprised he doesn't bust out the tree-of-knowledge metaphor again so we can reference as many different religions as possible during the conversation. I also think the subtle allusions to the social aspects of religion as they parallel the social aspects of substance addiction are interesting. So does Gil, who says of Ed's ibogaine evangelism: "From one addiction to another."
When we return from commercials, we're in a blandly unremarkable house. The camera pans to a portrait of a clean-cut couple, then to the giant anvil whizzing down lest we miss the dramatic significance of the happy-twosome portrait, and then to the kitchen where the woman is all stunned that Doodles is dead. She asks how it happened, and Catherine replies, "We were hoping you would help us find out." Detective Cavaliere notes that Doodle's last taxi ride deposited him here. The husband says he hired the guy, and the wife explains, "It's my own special tradition -- birthdays, special occasions, I hire a clown. Kids love them." It's too bad Sara's not in this scene: her expression would be priceless. Hubby then chortles about the horrific scene that resulted from Doodles' last gig: "We hired a clown…what we got was a smackdown. Doodles was going through his bit when this mime comes through the kitchen, which, at first, we thought was part of the act." But no -- the mime pops Doodles's balloon, Doodles turns around, and the two of them begin wrestling. And not in a fun, puckish kind of way. Doodles punches the mime. Rather than cheer, the children look traumatized. Eventually, the mime ends up tossed in a cake. Apparently, there was bad blood between the mime and Doodles. Some rivalries are too stupid to ponder.
Cavaliere asks if the couple got the marauding mime's name. They did better than that: they got business cards for Joey Sizemore. We then find out that the guy took the traumatized kids out for ice cream while Doodles and the missus cleaned up, and then she called him a cab. Catherine presses for the name of the cab company, and the missus changes her story: Doodles was such a good sport -- mime mayhem notwithstanding -- that she gave him a ride home around 8:30 that night. Cavaliere rolls his eyes.
Cut to what I personally think is the most creepy and disturbing scene in the entire episode: a mime assaulting innocent passersby on a sidewalk and doing things like flinging his arms around them or grabbing their bags. I want clowns to beat him up constantly just for that. I am not at all cool with strangers in my personal space. Anyway, Cavaliere and Sara come on over -- it's good to see Detective Hot New Guy splitting time between the lovely ladies of the lab -- and Cavaliere hands over a Doodles shot to the mime, who pantomimes blowing dust off it. Sara barely suppresses another smile. And only twelve minutes after the last one! I don't know if I can handle the excitement. Cavaliere says, "You do have a right to remain silent, but unless you want a trip to the station, I really wouldn't keep it up." The mime speaks, if only to show the black eye he picked up at the Maguire house. (Finally! A name for the couple.) He explains to Sara, "Put a clown and a mime in the same place, it's like a cobra and a mongoose." No, not really. Let me reiterate: some rivalries are too stupid to ponder. Sara tells him, "You crashed Doodles's party. He kicked your ass. Now he's dead." The mime asserts that he didn't kill Doodles. Sara presses, "You left a threatening message on his answering machine. You declared war." Joey the mime claims that Doodles was poaching all his gigs. Cavaliere asks where Joey went after the Maguires; he replies that he had a strip mall opening out of town. Cavaliere asks if maybe Joey didn't wait outside Doodles's house for a little revenge, and Joey shoots back, "No! I got two hookers in Pahrump who can verify." Ack! Mime sex! There the hookers are on the bed while Joey's in silver-face, doing the I'm-trapped-in-a-box thing over by the door. Or he's into mime bondage, where he pretends there's a rope. Sara just looks amazed at what hookers will put up with.
Gil and Brass are walking around a palm-tree-lined neighborhood with amazing lawns and heading up the sidewalk to a big two-story house that wouldn't look out of place in any neighborhood built up during the 1930s -- wraparound porch a la the Craftsman bungalows, peaked roofs and gables, et cetera -- and knock on the door of the quaint crack house. We know it's a crack house because the door's got a sheet of wood replacing the panels, and people are smoking pipes and looking glazed. Brass negotiates with the doorkeeper to talk to Mindy. The guy wants a warrant, Brass protests he doesn't need a warrant just to chat, and so it goes. Gil notices the assorted drug paraphernalia littering the place. Eventually, Brass loses patience and just barges on in. They find Mindy lolling in the sunlight leaking through a dusty window. Brass is all, "Mindy Dupont? We heard you cleaned yourself up." And thus beginneth another round of the Junkie Monologues. Maybe I'm still feeling hostile towards the whole addiction-as-narrative-impetus conceit after watching Requiem for a Dream, or maybe I'm more partial to The Wire, where the junkies don't mope around whining about existential dread because they'd rather just do drugs -- whatever it is, I have no patience for the Junkie Monologues as delivered here. A few minutes of Mindy droning on about anhedonia and we're no closer to understanding what she has to do with Ed's death.
Back in the Bozo plot, Sara's telling Catherine that she's checked out the hooker alibi and come up with corroborating Polaroids. "There are some things you can't unsee," she shudders. Oh, she does not. But the combination of hookers, mimes, and Polaroids is just…it's like a Karnac answer waiting for a question. Catherine then focuses on the timeline of events, beginning with Mrs. Maguire's presumed lift home at 8:30. She asks, "His costume would have been a little skanky, and yet he doesn't change out of it?" Sara wonders, "What if he never got inside?" Catherine shoots back skeptically, "And he walks around town in his clown suit until he gets killed?" Why not? There's some ass capering about in mime drag. Besides, this is Las Vegas -- the tourons would assume it's normal. (For those of you who did not grow up, as I did, in a state where tourism is a top industry: "touron" is a portmanteau word consisting of "tourist" + "moron." Go forth, and use it to derisively describe others! ["I will. And God bless you. That word rules." -- Sars]) Sara approaches the problem from another angle, noting the fibers up Doodles's nose. Catherine recalls the semen stain, and helpfully adds, "We found an unknown vaginal contribution in the sample." Sara points out that Mrs. Maguire was the last one to see Doodles alive. The two women stalk off, wondering first if they've found their killer, and then if she's going to invoke the "Stephen King's It made me do it" defense.
Oh, crap, it's more of Mindy the junkie. She's sitting in an interrogation room with Gil and Brass, and Gil points out that they found a knife covered in Ed's blood in Mindy's basket of clothing. I'd like to know how they got that knife, since they waltzed in without a warrant. Good thing this isn't a procedural drama, or else I'd be all hung up on the details in the case. Brass asks Mindy to "help us connect the dots." Can you ask her to mime her confession? It'll be less tedious than another Junkie Monologue. Too late! She starts off with, "We all have this secret, terrible cave in our hearts…" and it only gets worse from there. Brass earns my undying love by cutting off the metaphorical talk and saying, "This isn't the halfway house, Mindy. You're looking at a murder rap, so let's talk specifics." Gil interjects, "There were 57 micrograms per milliliter of monoacetylmorphine in your urine sample. That means you were using for a while." But she apparently isn't now? To the surprise of nobody, Mindy says that Ed gave her ibogaine. Brass heads her off before we relapse into the Junkie Monologues with, "That was months ago. Where were you the night he was killed?" Too late! Mindy's off on another tangent. Gil sighs and sounds irritated when he asks, "Why did you have a knife with his blood on it? I think Ed Burnell knew you were using again, and he was out there that night looking for you." If the writers really wanted to plumb the addiction/religion parallels, they'd throw in a line referencing Luke 15:1-7. Instead, they really want to get back on the Junkie Monologues. Brass derails that crazy train by arresting Mindy for Ed's murder. Oh, Jim, I think I love you.
When we come back from commercials, we've hit the 48-minute mark, meaning that more actual plot advancement will be packed into the final minutes of the episode. Can you feel the excitement? Sara's wandering around the Labitrail when Gil accosts her and asks her, "Can you help me out?" She's game: "Yeah. With what?" "A woman," Gil replies. To her credit, Sara does not spit out, "Try to not-dump her after not-dating her during a perp's interrogation." She gives him a look, and Gil elaborates that he needs her help to process a female suspect for him. And so she does. The actress playing Mindy is extremely skinny. Like, Lara Flynn Boyle skinny. I hope she finished this job and then went to In 'n' Out for a double-double animal style, two orders of fries, and a milkshake. A piece of fingernail or something does fall out of Mindy's hair when Sara combs through it; she picks it up and saves it for later.
Sara then delivers the results to Gil: "Nothing but a few old track marks. No defensive wounds, no bruising. Junkies usually bruise if you breathe on them too hard. She is a pile of twigs, very frail." Gil is staring at her as if he wishes she had glasses so he could rip them off and shout, "Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You're beautiful!" Sara's just blinded him with science. Or observation, really. Anyway, Gil's all, "I haven't seen you for a while, have I?" Sara replies, "You see me every day," then takes off. On the starboard side, the ghostly prow of the Marie Celeste sails on by, keeping its fellow ghost ship, the S.S. Geek Love, company.
Then Sara heads on over to the Maguires to process the house. I wonder what pretense Cavaliere used to get them out of the house: "We think you're in danger of wild trapeze artists infesting the attic"? She heads inside with Catherine. Cat sighs, "So we're looking for clown sex." "And clown murder," Sara adds. Like "monkey" and "pants," "clown" is one of those words that makes things funny just by its inclusion.
Within moments, the two women have found a bolster pillow with fabric that matches the fibers found in Doodles's nose, and a pillow with a sham that's much different than the others. And yet the bed isn't glowing with semen stains, so it's kind of hard to make the case that the pillow was changed to cover up a murder. Catherine muses, "A white-faced clown covered by a pillow. There must have been some transfer." The camera switches back to Sara, who's rocking the Warhol Factory groove with her giant red goggles, and asks if they threw out the pillowcase or cleaned it up. They toss the place looking for the pillowcase. Found it! And it's got a face print on it, too! At least, the print is visible via ALS. And then, because the Maguires are stupid, Catherine finds Doodles's clown duds stored in the dresser.
Cut to Catherine talking to Mrs. Maguire in an interrogation room. She lays out the case: Mrs. Maguire was making Doodles her own personal clown, and she apparently hired clowns as often as six times a year. "That's a lot of clowns," Catherine deadpans. She's not even entertaining the possibility that Mrs. Maguire holds clown orgies, and the participants all head over there crammed in a tiny clown car. Mrs. Maguire is all, "I already told you: I like clowns." And how. Catherine opines, "I think you like them more than most people." Given what Catherine goes for, I don't think she's one to point fingers.
We then flash back to the seduction of Doodles. It's every bit as horrifying as you think it is.
In the other room, Sara's breaking the news to Mr. Maguire that he's being systematically cuckolded by clowns. Cavaliere looks distinctly uneasy with this idea. He offers the hypothesis that Mr. Maguire walked in on the wife while she was clowning around, then grabbed a pillow and smothered the guy in a fit of rage while Mrs. Maguire just watched. This scene is filled with pathos -- poor Doodles's nose squeaks while he's being strangled, and his floppy shoes flail wildly until he dies -- and yet it's very funny. I don't get why Mrs. Maguire just sat there, though.
Anyway, Catherine concludes the whole crime rationale ("If we dump the body, the whole thing will just go away!") and adds, "What I don't understand, though: Why did you keep the clown suit?" We flash to Mrs. Maguire, adulterous greasepaint stains on her face, holding up the suit for her husband while giving him a smoldering look.
In the other room, Mr. Maguire smugly says, "You don't understand. Merrill and I have been married nine years. We have two kids." "Not much left to get excited about?" Sara asks. I pause the episode to shout, "Baby, if we ever get so bored that we're resorting to clowns, let's just go out in a murder-suicide pact!" "Got it!" Mr. Sobell hollers back. To make a long story short, Al put on the suit out of a twisted love for his wife, and Merrill was all over him. She answers Catherine's original question: "If you found something that got you off, wouldn't you keep it?" Yeah, that's a defense almost as doomed as the "Stephen King's It made me do it" argument.
And now, it's time for Men on Fashion: Warrick is processing Mindy's tiny panties and commenting, "Man, there is something so heartbreaking about a woman with raggedy drawers." Nicky concurs. Holy cow! Someone must have fed him a sandwich, thus making him visible to the naked eye. Why did it take the powers that be 54 minutes to notice? Anyway, Gil comes in so that Warrick can carp about how they've gone through all of Mindy's stuff twice and there's no blood. Snicky points out, "It doesn't make sense. If she disposes of her clothes, she's not just going to forget about the knife." Before Gil can reply, Liam comes in and says that he's got a male skin sample collected from Mindy's hair. The skin tag has both Burnell's blood and another guy's DNA: Riley "Boom Boom" Renaldo. He's not only got assault and battery charges, he's also got a possession with intent to distribute. And he's the same guy who was giving Brass a hard time about the warrant earlier. He's currently an "apartment manager." Nicky realizes, "Renaldo was Mindy's landlord?" Warrick replies, "That'd make her a 'bag bride.' A strawberry. Paid her rent horizontally. So long as the dealer keeps a strawberry high, the strawberry does whatever the dealer wants." We then flash back to how the fingernail/skin sample got in Mindy's hair: after a bout of rough sex, Renaldo pulled Mindy up by the hair and lost a nail in the process. Frankly, I'm amazed that C-B-The-S-Is-For-Sorry showed that. Gil looks all thoughtful.
thing you know, it's nighttime, and Brass is leading a police raid on the quaint crack house. Renaldo and his bare chest open the door; he looks like he was in the middle of something. A sweaty, half-dressed woman behind him calls out, "Riley, you said I could have a taste when we were done. Riley!" Riley bids "Sunshine" to shut up. Brass snipes, "Nice. We keep Mindy for a couple of hours and you've already moved on." Gil piles on: "What's the matter? Lose faith in Mindy? She always comes back to you." Brass finally provides a motive: Ed was bad for business, on account of him helping junkies shake the habit and all. Warrick finally gets it, although he's no Snicky: "Yeah. Ol' Ed gets enough people clean, you get no love." Sunshine's getting a little more insistent in her demands. Whatever. She'll never top Chloe Webb's timeless Nancy Spungen portrayal, where she brays, "What about the farewell drugs?" God, I love Sid and Nancy. Gil watches this passion play with a look of detached curiosity. Riley's all, "I said shut up!" Gil keeps hammering home the point: "Mindy didn't need it anymore. That's why you helped her try to remember." Oh…trrryyyy to remember / that horse in September / you shot into / your collapsed blood veins…
Riley smugly gloats that they've got nothing on him, and Gil's all, "Au contraire! We've got skin and blood!" Brass Mirandizes Riley and frog-marches him off, leaving the two CSIs to watch Sunshine slide down a wall. They exchange a glance, and Warrick says, "It's her choice, right?" Gil, remembering Halfway House Guy's admonition that addicts had to want to be rehabbed, replies, "Yeah. Unfortunately." Warrick looks at Sunshine heading into withdrawal, and asks if Gil wants to take her into lockup. Gil replies, "Lateral move. She's already there." And off the two of them go, leaving Sunshine alone to toss the house for Riley's stash once she gets over the worst of the withdrawal.
Gil and Mindy have a final scene where he tells her she's free to go, and she replies, "Go where?" The piano of poignancy kicks in before Gil can reply, "That halfway house that was all about having you stick around, woman!" This ending presents false pathos. Ridiculous.
And now here's the real pathos: Catherine and Chris are off to a night of room service and clown-style sex at the Bellagio. Off they go, zooming towards the center ring.