The Vegas skyline! It's so pretty and shiny and rich-looking! And isn't it spiffy how the lights turn into a pixilated pattern and then into the weave of a black tie? We're going from macro to micro there. And then we're going back up to macro again as we pull back from the tie to see that Gil's bungling the knotting of said accessory. He's in a dinner jacket, and he's not looking too bad in it. The tuxedo truly is the Little Black Dress for the masculine set.
Catherine comes up behind Gil and asks what he's doing. He whips out a bowtie-tying diagram that would be slightly more helpful if it were perhaps printed in Cantonese or Finnish, and tells Catherine dolefully, "I'm going insane. I don't understand this diagram." Catherine sighs before telling him, "You don't need a diagram. You need a woman." What, to act as his tie caddy? Catherine sidles behind Gil and ties his tie for him. He's got a look like, Well, I'll be darned. Maybe I do need a woman. Tie caddy, you say? So long as she never touches me and never comes between me and my bugs, this could work. Gil's looks are very voluble. As Catherine ties said tie, she mentions how she's looking forward to Gil's speech. If it's as eloquent as his eye-roll, we're in for something that would make any toastmaster cry with appreciation.
Cut to a formal dinner setting. Sheriff Dander Berkeley's busy making with the kind of fake-jovial office-speak that has the more surly and contentious types mentally updating their rsums and vowing to work anywhere that doesn't inflict affairs like these on them. As Sheriff Dander blathers on, Gil is busy tapping his forehead with a pen and thinking, "I had no problem generating mellifluous bullshit on demand when I was Senator Foghorn Leghorn in The Skulls. Ah, me!" Anyway, Sheriff Dander eventually gets around to toasting Ecklie. The man of the evening has been watching Gil write on his napkin with a nasty little smile, but he remembers his manners enough to smile at Sheriff Dander. And then, demonstrating how thinly tethered to reality the higher-ups in any dreary organization seem to be, Sheriff Dander begins to introduce Gil as Ecklie's "good friend." Fortunately, Gil is saved from the Hobson's choice of playing along or contradicting Sheriff Dander by his beeper. Catherine's head is swiveling like she's watching a tennis match; you can tell she totally thinks Gil needs to drop his pager in a glass of water and just give the damn speech already. She realizes he's not getting up to give the speech, as he's expected to, and says nervously, "Gil." He looks up from the beeper and says, "I got a 419." She tells him not to even think about it, and Gil protests that the swing shift's tapped out. I bet -- being willed into creation for subsequent plot contrivances can take a lot out of a crew. Ecklie's looking both smug and pissed at the delay. Gil hands Catherine the napkin and says, "Here. You give my speech."
Catherine struck speechless. Unfortunate, that. Gil gets up to give a cheeky thumbs-up and a "Good look, Conrad" to Ecklie, and holds the pager aloft, pointing apologetically. He heads off. The crowd does the usual "peas and carrots peas and carrots" dismayed murmur, and Sheriff Dander looks sufficiently hornswoggled at his keynote speaker blithely skipping off to a crime scene. Catherine opens up the napkin and sees that she's about to give the world's shortest laudatory speech: "What can I say about Conrad Ecklie?" She sighs, and Sheriff Dander pleads with her, "Help me out here."
“ Two years ago, two days before Christmas, I was stricken with a sudden onset of stomach flu -- the kind where your entire system instructs its contents to exit by any orifice possible. (Incidentally, I had just finished a CSI: Miami recap. Coincidence?) ”
Thus sprung from his toastmaster duties, Gil practically gavottes toward the crime scene. I believe he's in the Four Seasons; it's certainly swanky enough, and it's missing that tourists-in-matching-sweatsuits contingent that's spread across the Strip like a velour plague. As Gil meets an officer at the scene, the guy asks, "What's with the monkey suit?" "I was at a funeral across the street," Gil says. Heh. The uniform offers his condolences and explains that Gil will be taking the VIP elevator to the crime scene, not because he's special, but because the crime scene happens to be in the rock-star suite. As Gil enters the swanky elevator, the doors open and a woman in a slinky red dress lurches in. She greets Gil, and he politely replies with a hello and asks what floor she wants. The blonde looks at him and asks, "Where did you think I'm going?" Gil pauses and says slowly, "I wouldn't know." The blonde gives him a sidelong look and says, "You don't recognize me." "Apparently not," Gil says politely. I like how he reserves the snippiness for coworkers and perps. The woman helpfully says, "In the lab, I wear my hair up." The penny drops for Gil -- "Ahhhh, yeah." Insofar as meet-cute banter goes, this is a long way from Lucy and Jerry in The Awful Truth. Heck, it's even a long way from Clarice and Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs. We establish that the blonde is one Sofia Curtis, a CSI-3 who works the day shift under Ecklie. So if Gil is the anti-Ecklie, does that make her the anti-Catherine? Gil notes, "You work for Ecklie," and Sofia replies, "As of tonight, so do you." Duh-dunh-DUH!
Anyway, for all that it's her boss being lauded across the street, Sofia's working the case with Gil. Captain Exposition apologizes for dragging them away from the chicken cordon bleu, explaining, "It's the McKinley High homecoming. The dance is downstairs, but the cool kids' party is in here." Sofia checks the crazy-large suite and says, "This space makes the Rain Man suite at Caesar's look like my condo." What does that mean? The furniture here makes the Caesar's stuff look like it came from Ikea? Surely there are better ways to comment on the huge, opulent space -- like "This place could fit the Labitrail in it -- and we'd still have room to expand." Gil notes that the rooms are typically reserved for whales and royalty, so why is there a high-school homecoming party going on? To distract the student body from their killer parents, killer peers, and baseball recruitment scandals? I'm just spitballing.
Anyway, everyone does a 5K across the suite to get to the body lying on the wooden floor. The curtains flutter dramatically in the window, just so the death tableau looks more attractive. Meet Nicole Jenson, aged 17. She's lying on her side, with a whole lot of vomit all over the place. This is the point where Mr. Sobell leaves the room; our marital vows have an escape clause for depictions of vomit, real or fictional. He's got a phobia. No, really. An actual phobia -- emetophobia, it's called. Two years ago, two days before Christmas, I was stricken with a sudden onset of stomach flu -- the kind where your entire system instructs its contents to exit by any orifice possible. (Incidentally, I had just finished a CSI: Miami recap. Coincidence?) And as I was astride the throne, wondering if I'd have to explain to the emergency room doctor that I'd accidentally flushed my colon, my stomach gave a throat-clearing lurch and I called for Mr. Sobell: "Baby, bring the bucket!" The bathroom door opened, the bucket hurtled inside, and the door slammed shut. The last thing I heard before descending into my own plastic hell was the sound of rapid footsteps, and our TV turned up as high as it would go. Eventually, when I staggered out and collapsed on the couch, the husband turned to look at me. "I rinsed the bucket," I said weakly. "Sweetheart," Mr. Sobell said. I turned to him, expecting perhaps an apology for not being able to hold my hair back as my lunch and I saw each other once more. "Sweetheart," he said, "I need you to scrub it out with Comet too. And the bathroom. Right now."