Heads up, perverts -- this episode's for you. That's right -- "DUE TO MATURE THEMES, VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED." All I can say is, if trotting out the fetish du jour for sweeps ratings is what it takes to open an episode with something other than the Las Vegas strip at night, I am all for it.
This episode opens with an establishing shot of an opulent mansion somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, what with the lushly-tended grounds. Or maybe the owners are of the "obscenely conspicuous consumption" school and figure sustaining their own non-desert biome in Las Vegas is the ultimate statement about disposable income. In any event, the camera soon tracks to the inside, where we see a not-very-dressed man waddling down the hall, making all sorts of inarticulate noises.
And then we see him on the stairs outside, well below the window he had been heading toward in the last scene. His face is quite bloody; the rest of him looks like he's just been to Fantasy Sumo Camp. The CSIs are trying to work the scene while some TV reporter exposits that casino mogul Bruce Eiger has been found dead on the grounds of his palatial estate. We also establish that the sixty-year-old mogul was something of a twonk, rationalizing his poor public image with, "In Vegas, if nobody wants you dead, you're not working hard enough."
Ecklie arrives on the scene in a CrimeMobile with Gil. Oh, to have been privy to the small talk that took place on the car ride over:
Ecklie: So how's tricks?
Gil: Can't complain. Grasshopper, Adopted Son Number Three, is coming along nicely. Sofia's a pleasant dinner companion --
Ecklie: That so?
Gil: Conrad, whatever you want to say, just get it out in the open.
Ecklie: I wasn't going to say anything. I was going to ask how your loose cannon was doing now that she's been mothballed for my former second-in-command.
Gil: Come again?
Ecklie: Grissom, I am not going to enjoy solving your murder, but I am planning to enjoy anticipating it.
Gil: You've lost me.
Ecklie: Should I use smaller words? You've driven one subordinate to drink, and now you're taking out the other for dinner. If they don't kill each other, they're going to turn on you.
Gil: Conrad, do you really think everyone around here thinks with their loins?
Ecklie: Not always. But I have noticed flare-ups in November, February and May.
Anyway, the two men wander up the driveway and Ecklie asks for a rundown; Brass explains, "Wife comes home from canasta, finds him dead in the driveway. Calls 911, no signs of forced entry. The alarm was off, nothing seems to be missing, welcome to the party." Apparently, the hostess has forgotten her company manners: Catherine sees the guys show up and blusters, "What's going on? This is my scene!" Ecklie explains that the high-profile case woke up the supervisors, so "All hands on deck, Cath. Grissom's lead on this. He's the senior supervisor." Catherine smarts, "If it's all hands on deck, what are you doing behind the tape?" Ecklie tells her, "You know if I cross the tape, my name goes on the crime scene log that gets subpoenaed by the defense, and I have to testify. Juries find me reptilian and repellent. Something about an evil cackle and a deplorable tendency to twirl my moustache as I swirl my big black cape? So in the interest of keeping the conviction rate high, the DA's asked me to step off." Or something like that. Catherine smarts off by asking when the last time Ecklie testified was. Warrick looks up from the stairs he's working and bellows, "About the same time you worked a scene instead of peeing all over it to mark your territory, boss." Oh, he does not. He just works. Ecklie points out that his job is no longer to process crime scenes, but to herd all the little left-brained whiz kids who do. He points out, "I run interference for you guys, starting with the press." Thus primed for dealing with the public, Ecklie proceeds to throw meat to the hordes of reporters.
Catherine has to settles for rolling her eyes and looking irate. Gil says mildly, "It's nothing personal, Catherine. Cases like this rain down hard. You need all the help you can get." Catherine snaps, "I need help, not supervision." Oh, so the seniority and chain-of-command thing only works when you want it to, huh? Gil just assumes a martyred look, then heads toward the man who's made a career of long-suffering looks. He asks Warrick to give him the skinny on the fat man who fell. Warrick tells him, "Initial observations when we got to the scene: obvious impact on the face. Severe facial contusions -- broken nose, cracked teeth. No shoe prints. No tracks from the cast-off. No sign of a weapon."
That would be because they're standing on the weapon. Bruce took a face-first header into the stairs -- something we see in a special effect that was evidently laid off from Disney's Haunted Mansion. I can see why.
The Who would like to know who thought going to the credits with a hologram instead of a one-liner was a good idea.
When we return from commercials, we see Ecklie handling the press. He's very good at it, and it's very nice to see this character getting fleshed out; it makes him more interesting as a dramatic foil.
About 50 feet away, Catherine's concluding that Bruce either jumped, fell or was pushed. That, or someone stopped clapping their hands and believing in moguls. Warrick points out, "The facial impact is consistent with the blood pool, but not with the current position." Gil speculates that the head got moved. Nicky points out that they can't lay this one on Hank, the duplicitous, body-moving bastard -- "According to them, he had a broken neck." Gil's martyred expression is replaced by his ineffably smug one: "Well, then, he didn't roll himself over." Catherine continues to look vexed. She figures taking out her aggression on the wife will help. Wendie Malick will be playing the Frosty WASP Of A Certain Age tonight; I suppose Christine Baranski was busy.
In the scene, she and Brass are standing in the mansion's tremendous foyer, and she's answering Brass's question about any domestic witnesses with, "Oh, the staff always gets Thursday nights off. I don't get what the mystery was here -- he was murdered. Some guys collect art, Bruce collected enemies." Brass tells Frosty McWASPy that he's more interested in what happened after Bruce died. Mrs. Eiger takes umbrage at that line of thought, but Brass is undeterred by her Frost Ray and says, "Donna, your husband's boxer shorts -- he wasn't wearing them when he died, was he." Donna explains, "I pulled in, I saw Bruce lying there -- naked. I knew that the news was on its way. I didn't want the whole world to see him like that." Brass is all, "So you moved the body, huh?" Donna huffs, "Yes, I turned him over, I put his shorts on. What, is dignity a crime?" When it's shorthand for "moving a body," then yeah.
Gil goes poking around the garage, which is populated with a small fleet of cars. He feels the hoods to see which one was most recently driven, and when he finds it, he tries to door -- it's locked. He opens the garage door, wanders down to where Sara and Grasshopper, his Adopted Son Number Three, are standing, and says, "Question: you come home, see your husband lying in the driveway. What do you do?" "Make sure the insurance premiums are up to date, call the travel agent and -- ooops. Was that in the out-loud voice?" Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three wonders. Oh, not really. He actually asks if that's a trick question. Sara says, "Stop. Jump out. Run over to him." Gil counters, "Or take the time to pull into the garage, park and lock your car?" Sara looks around to see if there's a larger point here; Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three is still stuck on the trick question part.
Meanwhile, Ecklie's bumped up against the crime scene tape, trying to mend fences with Catherine: "Look, it's not that I think you're an incompetent hussy --" Oh, wait. That's the subtext talking again. It gets louder all the time, as per Catherine's "I smell crap." Even Ecklie looks startled at this incursion of the subtext, and asks "What?" Catherine orders him not to take another step. What do you know -- there's crap on the sidewalk. Since the Eigers have neither children nor pets, the real mystery is where the fecal matter came from. Catherine bags and tags it, then gets all subtext-y again with, "I saved you from putting your foot in it." Ecklie smiles tightly and tells her, "I appreciate that."
Up on the balcony, Nicky's finished getting Catherine's attention with "What supervisor art thou, that, thus bescreened in night / So stumblest on my counsel?" He's got Bruce's launch point. Catherine puts down her digital camera -- since God knows she'd never want to take pictures of the launch point or anything, and it would only drag her down as she attempts to scale the summit of Mount Mansion there -- and heads upstairs.
Sara's still working the ground. She looks at an oily stain on the driveway and explains to Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three that the rich aren't like you and I -- their cars run on chocolate, and pixies immediately lap up all unsightly stains. Or something along those lines. The point is, there's oil on the driveway and Gil's just told his flunkies to swab it and compare the oil against whatever nation's reserves the Eigers drained to lubricate their fleet of cars.
Catherine's finally made the arduous trek upstairs. She promptly places a call to Jon Krakauer asking if he's interested in writing Into Even Thinner Air. And then she wanders onto the balcony, where Nicky tells her, "Whatever happened, it happened right here. Planter could have been broken during a struggle, or been used as leverage." Catherine points out that anyone who pushed Bruce over the railing will be toting their own set of massive muscles. Warrick points out the prints on the wide balcony railing, and says he doubts they're Bruce's. Nicky wonders, "Maybe the killer hung out enjoying the fruits of his labor?"
The hallway's struggle-free. Catherine sighs, "The only clue is no clue." The swing shift then, uh, swings into Bruce's office. Catherine sing-songs, "The inner sanctum." Nicky muses, "If these walls could talk..." Then they'd protest the hideously stuffy décor. Catherine wanders over to the desk, and the minute a creepy, high-register lullaby-type tune begins playing, she notes that Bruce left a Scotch-and-milk and a half-smoked Cuban cigar on his desk. Nicky writes off the drink with, "Maybe he had ulcers," "You get as good as you give," Warrick shoots back. It's apparent he's of the "In the end, the love you make...is equal to the love you take" school of management. Nicky notices the same set of white, greasy handprints in the office -- this time, they're on the floor. Catherine asks, "What are they doing there?" Leading to a violent and confusing flashback that tells us nothing? That's my guess.
Meanwhile, Gil and Sofia are in the morgue with David the "I thought you were leaving?" coroner. They're all standing over Bruce's body. David says, "From everything I've heard, this guy was a considerable ass. Speaking of which, from the damage to his sphincter, I'd say he suffered repetitive insertions." Gil's all, "Rectal insertion?" "The ass comment didn't clue you in?" David snaps. Oh, he does not. But he should have. Instead, he confirms it and goes on to describe perimortem bruises to the hips, and a "peculiar rash around his genitals, slathered in ointment." Gil is wearing a look that says, "Please don't end that sentence in 'Texas style!' Because I would like to keep liking barbecue." David continues, "[The rash] doesn't read as an STD I'm familiar with. I swabbed the ointment. I also found a gallon of milky fluid in his stomach. Trace has that too, along with some fecal matter I scraped off his feet. For what it's worth. Nail are manicured -- all but one thumb, which has a groove in it." Gil's wondering if it's linked to drug use. David allows that it could be -- "His pupils were dilated to the size of pie plates. Tox has the blood." Gil concludes, "There's a lot behind the curtain of this guy's life." That will be the understatement of the year. Anyway, Bruce choked on his own blood, since the fall broke his neck, but he continued to breathe for a little while after that. Gil muses, "He might have lived if he hadn't been rolled."
Cut to the weirdest, most desultory personal exchange this season:
Gil: I'm glad you decided to stay, Sofia.
Sofia: So am I...for now.
Like, way to wrap that up, guys. Catherine barges onto the scene, thanking everyone for waiting and explaining that she hustled to get to the autopsy. Gil's all, "Don't worry. We went ahead without you." Catherine takes this about as well as she took him showing up lo these 12 minutes ago. This time, she decides that this is all Sofia's fault, and after tossing a glare her way, spits, "Grissom, what the hell? Am I going to have any part of this case, or should I just go back to my office and start shuffling papers?" Sofia steps in and calmly points out, "Catherine, it wasn't personal. The body was posted and we didn't think you'd be back for a few hours. There's the report." She hands it over, and Catherine snots, "Stay out of this." It's Catherine's ability to maintain perspective and avoid assigning blame unfairly that made her management material, for sure. Sofia gives her the "You? Are crazy" look and walks off. Catherine fails to recognize how unhelpful this is with solving the case and asks irritably, "Is this an Ecklie mandate, or is this just your thoughtlessness?" Gil says, "Look, I apologize, but this is a group effort." He apologizes? To someone who just called him thoughtless without real provocation? Catherine? Shut it.
And then Catherine's day gets worse when she plugs in the camera she left outside the mansion and discovers someone stole her 256 MB memory card and replaced it with a crap-ass 32 MB card. Oh, and the crime scene pictures she took are gone too. Catherine sits there, confused as to whether she should yell and Gil and Sofia some more or take responsibility for not keeping the camera on her at all times.
While Catherine debates, Brass amiably asks the Eiger family lawyer, "Am I being strong-armed by private counsel? Because contrary to what you may think, not everybody in Vegas is under the thumb of Bruce Eiger." The lawyer plays coy about why he's there, but eventually he admits to being there so he can "do everything within our power to protect Mr. Eiger's private life...Mr. Eiger was a very private person, and although he's no longer with us, his intimates are." Brass replies, "If this is about him being a sodomite, I already knew that." The attack lawyer's all, "Uh, what?" and Brass layeth down his version of the law: "After the case is adjudicated, you can have access to the autopsy reports. In the meantime, let me do my job, okay?"
Cut to Gil and Ecklie strolling through the Labitrail and having a civil, information-sharing conversation during which no personal barbs are exchanged. Coincidentally, there are several small piglets zipping around at a six-foot altitude, and the Devil just did a triple lutz in the background. Ecklie's talking about how Bruce had wanted to take over the Queen Regent casino from Sy Magli, the gaming commission turned him down, but after a party, the deal was in place. This is clearly meant to establish that Bruce's methods of persuasion were probably neither very orthodox or ethical. Gil replies, "If the wizard of Oz had nude photos of the Wicked Witch, Dorothy would have never lost her slippers." What? That makes no sense. Did Gil only watch the movie when he was stoned and listening to Dark Side of the Moon? Ecklie muses, "If [those blackmail] files exist, it gives us a list of suspects, but nobody knows if he has dirt on everyone or just wants them to think he does." Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three pops up right then to share his discovery: he's pored over Eiger's home phone records for the last year, and there are a lot of calls from Eiger to Magli -- "between midnight and 4 AM. What I like to call the 'love hours.'" Gil looks repelled by the idea of Grasshopper, his Adopted Son Number Three, not slumbering soundly 'neath his tucked-in Lilo and Stitch sheets, while Ecklie's wearing a look that reads, "Gil, if you hadn't already adopted him, I would have!" So Gil contents himself with noting caustically, "It wouldn't be the first time that hate mutated into passion." Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three crows, "Public enemies, private lovers...so Jackie Collins."
We then head to the inside of a skeevy casino lounge where the top act is Tanya "It's But Two Moves To Porn Modeling" Rollins. The billboard promises, "A Star Is Born." And at the end of a star's life, it turns into a black hole and sucks. Keep that in mind. Magli is actually telling his star in the making to shut her yap and head over to the piano, rather than carry on whatever it is she wanted to talk about. Brass and Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three watch her go with a certain amount of appreciation. They then introduce themselves to Sy Magli. This casino mogul sounds and looks a lot like Don Roritor; he's but an "Uh, right..." away from pressing some Stummies on Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three and Brass. Anyway, by her vocal stylings, Tanya's skipped through the life cycle of a star at interstellar speed and gone straight to the sucking. And by his unabashed glee over Bruce's death, Magli is practically begging to be taken seriously as a suspect, especially after he smugly asserts that indeed, he was keeping company with Donna Eiger.
Back in the Labitrail, Catherine heads into Gil's office with a renewed sense of teamwork, telling him, "We have a problem." Gil moans with feeling, "Oh, not again." Catherine barrels on, "The memory card in my camera was stolen and switched with a blank. The only time the camera was out of my possession was at the crime scene." Gil asks how that could have happened on a secure scene. Catherine's got no idea. And then she delivers the kicker: "All of the crime scene and blood evidence photos were on that card." Gil winces and admits, "We do have a problem." "Yes, we do," Ecklie says. ACK! He just appeared out of nowhere! What, did someone say his name three times? Sacrifice a goat in the corner of Gil's office when he was distracted by Catherine's kerfuffle? It ain't natural, that ability to appear on command. Gil sends Catherine scurrying back to the crime scene to take what photos she can.
And speaking of people who unsettle their coworkers...Hodges is smirking at Nicky, "The baddest ass in Vegas had diaper rash. The sample that Doc Robbins collected from between his legs at autopsy? Brenner's Ointment, used expressly for that purpose." The ointment is also responsible for the handprints -- and because the sizes are different, it raises the possibility that someone else was slathering Bruce's bum with Brenner's. Hodges says fervently, "You couldn't pay me enough to rub ointment on some old guy's butt." "What about a young guy's butt? If I told you I had a rash..." Nicky trails off, fanning his lashes coquettishly. Or not. He just compliments Hodges on being so morally unambiguous about which butts he'll baste with Brenner's. Nicky wonders, "How does a grown man get diaper rash?" "I'll take incontinence for $200, Alex," Hodges shoots back.
Catherine, meanwhile, is having the no-good, horrible, very bad day, what with arriving back at the Eigers' place right around the time Donna's draining Hoover Dam in her quest to hose off the steps. Shouldn't she have help for that? Blood doesn't come out of concrete that easily, and Donna doesn't strike me as a hands-on kind of gal. Anyway, Catherine begs her to stop, and Donna ratchets the overreaction up to eleven with, "Am I supposed to look at his blood?" Catherine's all, "Gotta take some photos, please, just -- oh, why don't you answer that cell phone call already?" Donna takes it -- and loudly reacts to getting dumped by Sy via the cell phone. I can just imagine him saying, "Um, right. It's not as fun to cuckold a dead guy..." Catherine shamelessly eavesdrops. Then again, anyone who conducts a personal conversation on a cell phone in front of someone else more or less deserves whatever eavesdropping they get.
And then there are a few very awkward moments where Catherine attempts to bond with Donna over what ungrateful louts men are, but Donna quickly shuts her down with, "The sisterhood thing you're trying to get going here, it's really not working for me. You can't con a con, sweetie." Catherine consoles herself by noticing the very full trash cans at the end of the driveway and bringing back their contents to the lab. Once there, she tells Warrick, "Sara and Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three went through these cans last night. They were empty." Warrick comments on what a busy little bee Donna's been.
While Warrick's hefting rolls of carpet, Catherine is pulling the world's largest diaper out of the trash can. The edges aren't clean. The creepy-little-lullaby music kicks in again; the music supervisor this season is doing a bang-up job. Warrick concludes that the safety pins could match the bruises on Eiger's hips. Catherine says, "We can probably get DNA from the blood, but to confirm that Eiger actually wore this thing? Mia's going to have to test the urine inside, lucky girl." Warrick resumes rolling out the rug. Catherine, meanwhile has fished out a very expensive-looking off-white slingback pump and asks, "Do you think Donna always takes her laundry to the city dump?" Warrick replies, "I've got handprints and feces on the carpet." Let's assume that he thought her question was rhetorical and was moving on; otherwise, this conversation's taken a turn for the surreal. Warrick continues, "He wasn't just incontinent, he was --" "A freak," Catherine says.
Warrick's fairly grossed out too. But he manages to rise above it and point out that there are indentations in the carpet; Catherine's convinced they'll have to go back to the house and put the rug in its original context. What, in the West Faecaltorium?
Cut to Donna standing in the foyer, warming up for a grand mal hissy, then getting deflated when Warrick hands over the warrant on his way up the stairs with the rug. Donna's enabler friend is busy yammering about how disrespectful solving Bruce's murder is for The Widow Eiger, and she should sue the city for having the nerve to treat her husband's killing like a crime. Warrick doesn't even turn around.
Unfortunately, putting the rug back in Bruce's office doesn't help, because the rug doesn't really fit the room. Or as Gil asks, "How do you explain a handprint half-covered by a wall?" Catherine points out that the rug could have come from someplace else, and Warrick replies, "I was going to say the same thing, but this rug has eight divots. It fits perfectly with this desk." "Think outside the rug," Gil advises. Good to see that he's back to his usual Zen self. Well, good for us -- Warrick's rolling his eyes in frustration. Catherine muses, "A man with secrets needs a place to hide them," and from thence it's but a camera pan to the wall of wood paneling that doesn't quite seem right. Gil notices the panel that has a seam, pushes on it, and reveals a low-slung passage one would have to crawl through to enter.
We get a shot of the expressions all three CSIs wear as they peer down into the passage. Warrick is the first to close his mouth and speak. His words: "Get the hell outta here!" We then head through the passage; Gil and company emerge in a nursery that gives every impression of being decorated by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters for a race of giants. The background music supervisor ups the ante on the creepy kiddie music, just in case a nursery only the Joker could love didn't have you instinctively recoiling against the possibility of whatever infant it contained. Eventually, someone flips on a light. Catherine says admiringly, "Just when you think you've seen it all..." "People lived in fear of this guy?" Warrick asks incredulously. "Imagine the fear he lived with," Gil responds.
For those of you just tuning in now, this episode is still fraught with perversion. At least, the bumper reading "DUE TO MATURE THEMES, VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED" implies as much.
Now the three CSIs are poking around the nursery while a music box emits its toxic twinkle in the background. Warrick muses, "A very powerful and paranoid man. A secret this big? It would kill him if anyone found out." Gil rebuts, "I think it did kill him." Catherine wonders if they've moved back to the suicide theory; Gil figures they can collect evidence now, theorize later. Just then, Nicky crawls inside with a thrilled look. "Whoa! Who's your mommy? This is the true inner sanctum," he exclaims. That, or a field study for Freudian theories in action. As if to prove my point, Nicky is immediately drawn to a sweet pink shirtwaist that features prominent cut-outs right around the bosom. "Maybe we're looking for the hand that rocks the cradle," he muses. Catherine says, "I think that Bruce just wanted the same thing as every other guy...easy access." With such a fair and balanced philosophy concerning the vagaries of romantic love, it's a mystery why a catch like Catherine hasn't found her prince yet. Why, the looks on Gil's and Nicky's faces confirm that Catherine's lovelorn status is as much a mystery to them as it is to us.
The team continues to work the oversized nursery. Gil finds a drawer full of enemas and muses. "This could explain the repeated insertions." Well, now someone's going to have to call Brass and tell him Bruce wasn't a sodomite after all; he was colonic junkie. Warrick's found the electronics panel that betrays the room's original use -- as a panic room. Conveniently, it's got a hard drive, so it's logged the electronic sensor data used to see when people entered and left the room. Nicky holds up an enormous pacifier and says, "I just don't get it, man." Gil whips around and snaps, "You never had a transitional object?" Looks like someone's touchy about his binky. Gil continues, "A stuffed animal or a blanket?" Nicky, failing to grasp Gil's larger point here, says, "I had a woobie, but who didn't?" Catherine's got a look like: "Woobie? What, like Chewbacca?" Warrick takes the shot, though: "Is that the blue thing that's in your locker?" Nicky laughs and says, "Don't even..." Don't even what? Mock the woobie? Why? Is the woobie the one that kept the rage diary all those years? Must the woobie be placated lest blood be shed? Gil's nattering on about how transitional objects help with separation anxiety and Eiger probably never got over his separation anxiety. Warrick could care less about Eiger's hang-ups; he's more interested in finding out where you can get those size 5XL sailor suits. Gil's found a tag -- "Forever Baby. For the Child in All of Us." Catherine, upon opening a fridge stocked with milk bottles, asks wryly, "You think they do takeout?"
We'll find out later. Back in the locker room, Catherine is changing into something that, shockingly, has a neckline not described by the words "plunging," "scooped," "dramatic," or "low-cut." Mia comes on in and confirms that Eiger was, indeed not going in the potty like a big boy. Oh, and by the way, there was something funky in his urine indicating a quickly-metabolized drug.
Speaking of oh-by-the-way, just in case you were wondering where those stolen crime scene photos got to...well, they're on the nightly news now. Someone must have sneezed, "Ecklie! Ecklie! Ecklie!" because there he is, watching alongside Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three and Catherine. But the guy's surprisingly calm: "I'll have our public information officer contact his counterpart at the station. We'll also call Judge Anderson and get a warrant for the memory card, any copies, and the name of their source." Catherine and Grasshopper, Gil's Adopted Son Number Three watch him go with a mixture of fear and admiration; the thought bubble over Catherine's head reads, "So that poster is true -- 'Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by those doing it!'" Ecklie shrugs as he walks off, "It's my job."
Cut to Gil and Nicky walking into Forever Baby. You know this only confirms that Gil, Catherine, and Brass are all in on some sadistic scheme to take their most naïve CSI to as many unconventional scenes as possible just for kicks. The sweet middle-aged lady behind the counter greets them with a sunny "Howdy!" and Gil answers with only a bit of wryness, "Well, howdy. I was wondering: do you carry adult diapers." Peering over the counter to check out Gil's tushie, the lady coos, "Oh, we sure do. What are you -- a 34, a 36?" Gil smiles sheepishly and explains that they're not for him. The lady turns to Nicky and gives him a 200-watt grin. She gushes, "Aren't you lucky to have such a nice daddy!" Well, give her credit for quick recovery. And for having a mind that's so open, it could probably double as a wildlife preserve. Nicky looks deeply alarmed. Gil gives him a look like, If I were your daddy, you would be the luckiest boy in the world, and you know it. Nicky smiles and says, "I'm going to have a look around." To his credit, his saunter comes off only as a half-sprint, so he's making progress.
The lady turns back to Gil and asks solicitously, "Mommy-shopping?' "Sort of," Gil replies curtly. Oh, that can be taken in so many ways. And all of them are hilarious. Oh, Gil, I think I love you for that comment alone. The CSI continues, "I was wondering, in your line of work, do you ever wear a uniform or a dress?" The nice lady offers to accommodate him, then asks, "Are you a drinker or a stinker?" And now, when faced with the evidence that all babies essentially boil down to one end that does the one and one end that does the other -- and forced to admit that if his darkest suspicions are true and he was actually, at one time, a human infant -- Gil has the freak-out moment. It's so fleeting as to be gone in the time it takes to pause the TiVo. He then tells the lady they're actually there to investigate the death of Bruce Eiger. Meanwhile, in the background, Nicky's idea of looking around means "pulling phone numbers off a flyer promising 'party planning.'" I hope he realizes the party planners advertising in their store are more likely to bring out ponies and clowns than pony kegs and dancers.
Oh, now Nicky begins looking around. After distractedly fingering something that looks an awful lot like a woobie, Nicky heads over to a toy chest. Back at the counter, Nanny Sweetness's voice has taken on a harder edge as she asks, "Are you with vice? Because nothing here is illegal. It's simply nurturing. Mommy and adult baby play. It's not erotic." Gil begs to differ with, "Freud had a somewhat different theory, but --" Nanny Sweetness interrupts with, "Well, I could show you in my playpen." Gil looks like he's considering the offer; then he deadpans, "You know, I don't think my department would let me expense it." Nanny Sweetness says, "Okay, then, I'll just cut to the short version. Some guys can never love any woman but their mother. And some never had a mother who loved them." Gil looks like a light bulb just went off in his head.
Back at the Labitrail, Catherine's talking to one Foxy Harris, freelance cameraman and petty thief. He lifted her camera simply by putting on a blue jacket and a pair of gloves, and walking onto the crime scene like he belonged there. And when Foxy isn't busy selling stolen property to the local news, he's working as a private investigator (or its photo arm), and he was snapping pictures of Sy Magli and Donna having illicit mogul sex. The thing that Brass keeps stumbling over: "Sy Magli hired you to take pictures of him sleeping with Donna Eiger?" As for the why, Foxy explains, "Eiger had dirt on everyone. Somebody that obsessed with secrets had to have some of his own. Magli asked me to find Eiger's but I couldn't find any." "So in the absence of scandal, Magli created some..." Catherine muses. Foxy thinks it's brilliant that Magli managed to get a little something-something on the side while he did too.
Meanwhile, Mia and Warrick are doing laps through the Labitrail. Sadly, that's not a euphemism for anything. These two are remarkably chemistry-free this week. Mia's explaining to Warrick that the milk in the bottles is not formula, but human breast milk. "ALL of it??" Warrick asks, now dreading the prospect of going back to find the secret stable of wet nurses required to pump out 48 bottles of fresh breast milk on a regular basis. He confirms it wasn't Donna's, and Mia dryly notes, "No, the Widow Eiger's DNA was definitely not a match." Reluctant as I am to ever take shout-outs, I might consider this as one; "the widow whomever" is one of my favorite addresses for bereaved women in these recaps. Mia also passes on the news that the one inexhaustible donor who pumped all those bottles was also the one wearing the dress Nicky and Catherine commented upon. "So we're looking for one very tired milkmaid," Warrick accurately observes.
Speaking of people on motherquests, deliberate or otherwise, Nicky's looking at a toy chest he brought back from the nursery to the lab and explaining to Sara that it looked like the one in the store, except the one in the store was twice as deep. "Well, he did like his secret spaces," Sara says of the dead, and the two of them peel off the front of the box to discover that indeed, it had a false bottom, and contained within the secret compartment are dozens of files. Among the subjects of the files: Sy Magli, Sam Braun, and Rory Atwater. I believe we're all familiar with the last one as Sheriff Xander Berkeley. I wonder what's in his file -- he sold drugs to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon? Nicky says the rest of the files include "gaming commissioners, judges, pro athletes..." and one unlabeled photo of a baby standing in a crib, drinking a bottle. The date on the photo's 12-20-01.
But why worry about a mystery baby when you can page through Sy's file instead? Evidently, he was a man who had varied tastes; in one shot, he's seen looking at a teenaged girl and wooing her with his patented "Uh, right..."
Meanwhile, Warrick and Grasshopper, Adopted Son Number Three are busy babbling about the security system to each other. Although this episode has featured a lot of snappy exchanges, this is not one of them, and it will never be confused with a boozy afternoon conversation at the Algonquin. So here's the relevant stuff: Donna's alibi, sadly, holds up; all of you who were entertaining women-in-prison scenarios in which she featured prominently are going to have to rely on your imagination for the details. In the three hours between Donna's departure and her return, Bruce took a header, the milkmaid left four minutes later, and twenty minutes after that, Donna returned. Grasshopper, Adopted Son Number Three, asks the entirely pertinent question, "[Donna] didn't make her call to 911 until 11:42. What was she doing for over an hour?"
We won't find out immediately. This is because we have to look at photos of Bruce tartare while Gil muses, "Count Basie said that it's the notes you don't hear that matter." You'd be in a position to judge whether or not that's true, o intermittently deaf one. Catherine points out two clean wedges of concrete amid the blood and says, "Two voids -- one pointing towards eleven o'clock and one towards o'clock." "Something blocked the [blood] spray," Gil concludes. Catherine thinks it's two somethings -- the discarded shoes. "Could [the shoe spaces] be explained by her rendering aid?" Gil asks carefully. Catherine thinks not -- "I think he was still alive, expirating blood. I wonder what was going through her mind as she stood there, watching him die." "I wonder what was going through his?" Gil asks. My guess? Blood.
When we get back from commercials, Donna's at the station with the faithful family retainer and going over her story about the Thursday night in question. Brass could not possibly care less about Donna's canasta habit, and skips straight to the interesting stuff by asking if she administered any help to her dying husband. "More like encouragement," she responds. We flash back to Bruce choking on his own blood as he stares up at his wife. She looms over him sneering, "Oh, dear. What happened to Mummy's widdle baby? Did Brucie fall down, go boom?" Back in the present, Brass asks, "So you're admitting responsibility in the death of your husband?" Donna rolls her eyes while the faithful family retainer rattles off some boilerplate disputing Brass's assertion. He concludes, "She merely delayed in calling for help." A contemptuous-looking Gil points out, "She watched him die." Donna snots, "He had a broken neck. If he'd have lived, he'd have been a quadriplegic." "So it was a mercy killing?" Brass asks quickly. The faithful family retainer is all, "Let's just take the word 'killing' out of the conversation, okay?" Gil takes a different tack, pointing out sharply, "You would have had to take care of him." "Bathe him, feed him, change his diapers -- a friggin' gift from God to him. See, the thing is, I just didn't want Bruce to have the satisfaction of being helpless for the rest of his life. Do you know what the last words I said to him were? You lose." Gil cocks a judgmental eyebrow while Brass actually focuses on solving the case by asking, "So, you. Not so much with the nurturing, huh?" Donna snaps, "Love. Honor. Cherish. Diapering was never on the list." And, by the sounds of the tender perimortem goodbye, love, honor and cherish had checked out a while back too. Let's hope the vows were farsighted and also included spite, scorn and callousness.
Gil's kind of interested in how one responds when one's married to a 250-pound baby. Answer: by shutting down. Donna says, "Look, I'm sorry, but you can't have sex with a man after you've seen him...behave like that. So in order to save our marriage, we had, uh, an arrangement. On Thursday nights, I go to the club with my friends, he hires a babysitter." Who the babysitter is doesn't concern her; so far as she's concerned, it was only a small variation of the piece-on-the-side routine that some magnates regard as their birthright. Brass asks, "Why didn't you leave him?" and Donna gives him a regretful look before answering, "Nobody leaves Bruce." Brass suggests that maybe Donna got Bruce to leave her by pushing him off the balcony. Which would totally not jibe with the timeline Grasshopper, Adopted Son Number Three and Warrick established from the security logs, but why let the facts get in the way of a good interrogation? Donna points out, "He'd already fallen when I got home. I turned him over, I watched him die. I got rid of his diaper. I rolled up the carpet, I changed my clothes, then I called 911. And I should have left him in the damn diaper! I don't know what I was protecting!" "Your reputation," Brass muses. "Donna may be an opportunist, but she is not a murderer," points out the intermittently faithful family retainer. Donna closes out the conversation by insisting that her husband didn't commit suicide, but she'd like the police to find the murderer so she can bestow upon their head all manner of reward.
Gil's escaped the interrogation and is now catching up on 1960s drug slang with Catherine as they go down some staircase. It turns out Bruce was dosed with what Catherine quaintly calls "Lucy in the sky with diamonds." Catherine wonders, "I don't get it -- acid trips last for hours. Why wouldn't it have shown up in his bloodstream?" Gil points out that the actual drug itself is in and out of your system in about 20 minutes; the trips last longer because the drug triggers cascading neurochemical reactions in the brain. Catherine shrugs, "There are good trips, and bad trips, and trips right off the balcony." And trips back to my fourth grade class where, infected by the zeal Nancy Reagan brought to her "Just Say No" campaign, some of my classmates put on an elaborate sketch for the rest of us, illustrating the dangers of LSD by...having a classmate "trip" on an LSD cigarette then fling themselves out of a window. "See you in the fall!" whooped the equally-high classmates before jumping off desks to their own untimely ends. That our drug education began and ended with "don't do it" and got a little hazy on precisely what it is we weren't supposed to do probably explains a lot about how so many people my age ended up Phishheads.
Gil muses that LSD is a strange drug of choice for a control freak, and Catherine hypothesizes that it may not have been Bruce's choice.
Meanwhile, Sara and Sofia are working together in apparent harmony. Sofia sums up the surreality of her job with, "So we're looking for a lactating female with a center whorl print." Sara's all, "Yup. Looks like." Sofia wonders, "How long can a woman lactate after giving birth?" Sara answers, "I had a professor in college...her six-year-old used to come in for lunch. I guess they'll go as long as you let them." Good God -- how on earth did Sara know this about her professor? Was it brought up during class? Did it take place during class? Office hours? The mind, she boggles. Sofia's a little boggled too -- "What? The boobs or the kids? That's a two-legged topless buffet!" Sara tries to get into the milkmaid's head by musing, "I'm thinking, you know, if you commit to something every Thursday night, you've got to be getting something good out of it." Har dee har har. But Sara's going someplace with this: based on the motor oil stain she processed, she's concluded that the something good someone is getting...is a Lamborghini. "How many lactating women drive one of those?" she asks. "So he either paid well or was a good gift giver," Sofia muses. Sara adds, "Maybe we're looking for a cash cow." "One with liquid assets," Sofia adds, with a small smile.
And now, we're on the downward slope of the episode, so things are happening fast. Hodges is explaining that unlike those of us who may smoke the occasional LSD cigarette (ha) or dose orally, Bruce got his fix anally. Yep, someone dosed his enema. "An enema?" Catherine says. "And people call me anal," Hodges says in aggrieved tones. Gil points out that the allure of having a mommy is having someone who can wipe your ass.
And moving right along...Magli gives us the "Uh. Right...the Lamborghini was a gift to Tanya Rollins" line when he meets with Brass in his casino. "You've got to woo the talent," he adds. Or placate a black hole to keep it from sucking so hard. Brass quickly establishes that he's got a photo of Magli "placating the talent" when the talent was only 15, and asks, "Don't you know that 15 will get you 20?" Magli's all "Uh. Right...what do you want?" Brass wants to know why Tanya's Lamborghini was in Bruce's driveway. That would be because "they were involved...Tanya always went where the best deal was. I rolled her, Bruce bankrolled her career. Smart move. Turned out she had other talents." None of which have been readily apparent in this episode, but do go on. It turns out Magli poached Tanya from Bruce's casino, adding, "Tanya said that he was a freak and she wanted out." Brass sighs, "Then what? 'Cause I got felony sex, infidelities and a picture of a baby I don't know anything about." Sy Magli has little time for the woes of Brass, and excuses himself from the suspects list with "I didn't want him dead. There's little sport in humiliating a dead man."
Back at the Labitrail, Catherine's talking to the milkmaid herself, Tanya Rollins. The fingerprints all over the nursery, plus the DNA all over the breast pump, more or less place her there; the LSD in her purse and the cell phone full of "Baby Bruce" pictures aren't exonerating her either. Tanya says, "Sy said all Bruce had was fear." "Yeah, there's really not much to fear about a crying man in a diaper," Brass says. Let's hope he's only generalizing in the abstract here.
And then we go into the flashbacks -- Tanya changing Bruce's diaper and promising him "something extra special" with the enema. And then, just to make sure the dose takes, she turns on the hippie-dippy, swirly lights and colors and begins singing, "Twinkle, twinkle little star."
Back in the present, Tanya brightly sums up the experience with, "And then he just started acting crazy!" "As opposed to soiling himself and gumming your nipples?" Brass asks. Heh. LOVE HIM.
Returning to flashback, we get Bruce having a big freak-out while Tanya merrily snaps pictures with her camera phone. She claims, "And then he just jumped off the balcony."
Catherine sidles on over and gets at the real question: if Bruce creeped her out so badly, why did she stay? "Nobody leaves Bruce," Tanya said, echoing Bruce's wife. Catherine asks why Tanya was afraid to leave -- what was she afraid of? "That I'd never see my baby again," she replies. "Bruce said that he wanted a baby. That he'd take care of both of us." Catherine blurts out, "And you believed him?" Tanya looks freshly hurt all over again, and says, "Yeah. Only after the delivery, he said he had to take the baby away. That he was going to take [the baby] for a while to be with [Bruce's] mom. You know, wait until my career took off -- until I was ready to be a mother myself." Catherine would look horrified, if her face were still capable of expression. Instead she has to settle for staring really hard.
Tanya continues, relieved to be telling her story and fighting back tears while she does it: "So then he took me to his nursery. He explained to me about infantilism. Said that it was in the Bible, and then he made me clean him." It is here that we establish perhaps the most fundamental difference between Tanya and me. Forget that one of us was running around shtupping casino moguls at age 15 while the other was tangling with Algebra II. Forget that one us has been working as a freelance milkmaid while the other...has not. The real difference between us: if I had been faced with someone telling me infantilism was in the Bible, I would have whipped out a concordance and demanded citations.
Brass, who is still capable of expression and is therefore looking both pitying and resolute, asks how long this has been going on. "Five years," Tanya replies. "Five years, and I would ask him every week if I could see my baby. And he would say, 'week. Sure, Tanya, week. week. No, maybe the week after that.' I guess in my heart I knew it was never going to happen. But that was the only connection I had there to my baby, you know? That and nursing Bruce."
Catherine immediately swoops in, points out that Bruce exploited Tanya for five years, and when he was vulnerable from his bad trip, what's to say that she didn't encourage him to jump? As a matter of fact, she did, running alongside the tripping-out Bruce as he exclaimed, "I can fly!" and telling, "You sure can, Bruce! Take off! Fly for Mommy!" And as Bruce leaps over the balcony, we hear the laughter of a baby. There's probably something symbolic there about immersing oneself in one's hang-ups, but we're not going to get into it at this late stage.
Immediately after Brass finishes with Tanya, he heads over to the senior Mrs. Eiger, who makes Medea look like the founding mother of Attachment Parenting. How convenient that Bruce can blame his mother for his being a total flaming asshole. By the by, he was lying about where he took the kid -- it wasn't parked at his mom's.
And in the last scene, Gil's taken Catherine out for a meal. He tells her he's enjoyed working with her, and she asks, "Which part? The part where I got in your face, or the part where I lost evidence? Or maybe you just miss me?" Good to see that at least she's got some self-awareness, however much it lags behind her in-the-moment actions. Gil says, "I did miss you. I missed your passion and your tenacity. I even missed your tush." Well, that's the way to Catherine's heart -- treat her like a collection of body parts. Brass comes over right as Catherine's choking on her drink. He sits down and explains, "So Bruce lied about the kid -- there was an out-of-state adoption." And won't the lawyers have a field day contacting those folks and explaining how it was done without the mother's knowledge or consent?
As for who's going to pay for Bruce's death? Tanya's on the hook for giving him LSD, but she's no more and no less culpable than Donna, it appears. Brass says, "What I can't wrap my head around: you get a guy who's tough enough to claw his way up to the top of this heap, and he ends up crawling around in a playpen?" Gil asks, "That's the point, isn't it? It's only the truly powerful who have the luxury to relinquish power." And on that moment of Zen, let's end it.