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Plots, in ascending order of importance: Dixon, as usual, is led around by his penis, so I think at some point I have to refer to him as "Dick's In." A movie star and her odious producer are in Vegas shooting a movie, with the skeevy producer (you may remember him from The Wire) wanting Tommy Stone to ensure no one messes with her. Tommy, apparently a moron, hires Dixon to be her bodyguard, and he winds up seemingly smitten, and therefore shaken when he realizes she's canoodling with the much older, much uglier, much balder producer. Hollywood's heartless, Dixon.
The murder of the week is a diet Amway-like-product salesman who has two wives, one of whom is Hungarian and has a brother who discovers salesman's bigamy and shakes him down, but the killer turns out to be the head of the Amway-like company since the salesman discovered the entire operation is one big pyramid scheme, played by someone who is on The Big Bang Theory but to me will always be the teacher who sleeps with Tracey Flick in Election (and the phony tennis pro who offers his wife to Jerry Seinfeld).
Now for what everyone cares about: Jack trying to keep his girlfriend, his brother and now the FBI from knowing that he shot Rizzo. It's getting increasingly tougher, since Washington — on Kennedy's behest — has sent a Special Agent Byrne to town to set up a field office in Vegas. Byrne stops by to make his presence known to Savino. The FBI is making things difficult for our favorite casino manager, intercepting the skim — and since it's now twice what it was, this is twice the headache for Savino. He tries to enlist the help of Jack to keep the FBI and his brother distracted with a false tip about the time the skim's going out, so Savino can get it out a different way. It's a plan that's doomed to failure, since the FBI agent would have to be a complete moron to accept a tip from the guy sleeping with the woman WHOSE JOB IT IS TO COLLECT THE SKIM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
So yes, Ralph and the FBI agent don't fall for the distraction, but Savino's pissed and threatens to tell Mia about how her father actually died. Jack launches a preemptive strike and tells her himself first. I've never told a girlfriend that I killed her father in self-defense, but I do hope it would go a little bit better for me than it does for Jack. A disconsolate Mia kicks him out.
He heads over to the sheriff's office, where Ralph is waiting for him and ready with a bottle of booze. Ralph has figured it out, having noticed that a third print on Rizzo's gun has a telltale scar like the one his baby brother suffered in a spurs-related injury. Jack comes clean — it looks like he would have anyway — and Ralph burns the fake fingerprint card Jack submitted, saying they're going to get him out of this.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. Why must the Lambs turn the sheriff's office into a house of lies? Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Oh, here we go with the man-with-guilty-conscience-tries-wash-away-his-sins-in-the-shower routine. Jack is finding that the guilt isn't coming off, no mater how long the shower or how hot the water. Also, the scars from the cattle prod are still there. Is he keeping his shirt on when he has sex with Mia? It's an important question. Then, naturally, he gets out of the shower to stare at himself in the mirror for an hour or so.
When he finally surfaces, Mia makes fun of him for taking longer than a girl, but he's not laughing. He doesn't want her to go back to work at the Savoy, but she says if Vincent was involved with her father's death, she needs to know: "He may not have been the greatest man, but he was my father." Jack wants her to leave the investigating to him, but she says he can do things his way and she'll do them hers.
And there's a new murder to investigate, too: A man shot in the forehead whilst sitting in his car on the outskirts. The Lambs are on the scene, with Ralph confidently declaring the dead man knew the shooter, pointing to the fact that there was a car parked behind the victim's, and the driver's window (er, sorry, "winda," as per Ralph) was rolled down. The watch, wallet and wedding ring were all left, so it wasn't a robbery, either. The wallet IDs him as Robert Latimer (side note: That's also the name of a Canadian man who killed his teenage daughter with carbon monoxide poisoning to end her pain with cerebral palsy. Famous case, sparked national debates on euthanasia. Just made me wonder how many Canadians watching had the same surprised reaction I did.). He's got a series of numbers in his wallet and a trunkful of Fairline "diet shakes." Dixon tries one and spits it out. Serves him right for drinking the evidence, as Ralph points out.
At the Savoy, Vincent packs up the skim and hands it off to Cota, reminding him to make sure everyone is extra-careful, which can only mean something's going to go wrong. Sure enough, after a handoff of the suitcase in a cab from a younger woman to an older woman, it's intercepted by FBI agents as the sweet old lady tries to stow it in the overhead compartment on an airplane, all while we listen to Savoy entertainment crooning about pennies from heaven.
There's a guy in the suit watching the show at the Savoy, and Savino -- apparently a terrible judge of people -- sidles up and says the guy looks like a man who knows his way around a card table. The man introduces himself as "Byrne" and after explaining he's from Washington and likes "watching money" he has to explicitly say he's from the FBI for Savino to clue in. Byrne tells him they've seized the skim and Grandma's in lock up (you'd think Savino already knew that). He warns Savino that no money is going to make it back to the bosses in Chicago, which ought to make things difficult for him, and strolls out, complimenting him on how good the casino looks. "Shame it can't last forever," he says. And maybe Savino doesn't know who the guy is, but he's a well-known Canadian actor, especially out here in Newfoundland, where he was born and raised.
After the opening credits, Tommy Stone is watching the chorus line rehearse, and looks disgusted by some indiscernible difference that makes Rita much worse than the other dancers. "I could have gone to Tahiti in the time it took you to make that dunk," he tells her. We can only presume Rita goes back to her dressing room to binge and purge.
When Mia comes up to him, he dismissively assumes she's here to audition, and when he finds out she's actually his boss, he's only marginally more respectful, since he blows her off quickly to glad-hand with some big shot movie producer (played by Paul Ben-Victor from The Wire) with a starlet (played by Anna Camp, recently on The Mindy Project, which you should all be watching, if you're not) on his arm and entourage in tow. He mistakes the producer's declaration that the starlet, Violet Mills, sleeps only on violet sheets for a joke, and then recovers, when he sees the producer isn't laughing, by promising to get some custom made.
Vincent fills Mia in: The producer, Barry Silver, is shooting a Western in the desert, and Tommy thought bringing the bigwigs to the casino would be good publicity or something? You know, the way mob-run casinos are always looking for the limelight. Anyway, he's glad to see her back at work. If Mia really wants to find out what's going on, it's probably best if she acted a little more naturally instead of so obviously suspicious.
Over at Bert Latimer's house, the widow Latimer can't understand who would kill him. He loved his job. He was always traveling for Fairline, crossing the country and setting up franchises, but that changed recently when doctors found an arrhythmia in her heart. She's going to have this newfangled doodad called a pacemaker put in -- the time-period touch points can often be handled quite clunkily on this show -- and there's only a few places in the country that can do it; they were supposed to head to Buffalo soon to get it done. Bert was supposed to have been in Pittsburgh until tomorrow, though, a fact that furrows the Lambs' brows.
Outside, the brothers note the nice house and new Cadillac and figure that a lot of diet shakes must have been sold. Ralph tells Jack to look into Fairline, while he goes to lunch with Catherine. That doesn't seem like a fair distribution of duties, until Ralph points out that they're discussing the Rizzo murder.
Still, he's thrown for a loop when he arrives at -- where else? -- the diner and finds Catherine there with Agent Byrne, and it turns out that under Kennedy's direction the FBI is setting up a field office in the city, since there's just a tad of mob activity here. Ralph gets a little growly at what he seems to feel is someone encroaching on his turf (professional and romantic).
Byrne also brought the fingerprint analysis, but they don't have a match for the third man yet. Then he launches into a tired chess metaphor in the service of explaining how he's going to take Savino down, with the skim guys being the pawns, and... anyway, Catherine certainly seems turned on.
Anyway, over at Savino's office, the movie producer -- after he finishes with an "I am bald and have a tiny penis and here's how I compensate" story about fishing for sharks -- grossly tells Savino that he's worried about the "unsavory element" that might go sniffing around Violet when he's back in L.A. He's concerned merely as he would be for his own daughters, of course. Vincent volunteers Tommy to keep an eye on her, which Silver appreciates, even as it takes Tommy by surprise.
Mia comes in, toting the now cash-free suitcase used for the skim, thoughtfully left downstairs by the FBI. Savino's got to figure something out: "No way this wingtip puts me out of business," he says.
And as Fairline boss Dr. Thrane (played by Mark Harelik, who had sex with Tracey Flick) explains, Fairline partners buy at a discount and then sell to friends and family. So it's an Amway-type thing, so suddenly justifiable homicide seems a real possibility. The Lambs, though, are confused to learn that contrary to what Mrs. Latimer thought, Bert didn't travel at all. His boss explains that in the last few months, Bert's sales started dropping, and he missed meetings, and he was periodically getting threatening phone calls from someone with a Russian accent. In fairness, doesn't anything spoken with a Russian accent sound threatening? Or did I just watch too much Rocky IV as a child? [Note: Works for The Americans -- Rachel.]
Over at the Savoy, Tommy is already doing a shitty job of keeping watch over Violet because Mia happily gets to inform him Violet just left in a new sports car.
She's whipping through the desert, where of course Dixon is set up to catch all the speeders on this deserted stretch of highway. He has to top a hundred miles per hour to chase her down, and when he does, she gets the special kind of justice reserved for pretty women sto
pped by pigs like Dixon: He's willing to drop the theft charge as long as she comes to the station to pay her speeding ticket so he can hit on her some more. Essentially. She tells Dixon to give the ticket to the doofus pulling up behind Dixon, who is Tommy Stone, who I guess has some sort of homing device on Violet? Because otherwise I'm not sure how he knew where they were. At any rate, Violet drives off, and Tommy tries to buy his way out of the ticket, but Dixon won't accept the cash. Besides, they have bonding to do over what a hot piece of ass Violet Mills is, apparently.
Over at the sheriff's office, Ralph tells Catherine that Rizzo's prints were all over the phone, so I guess that means Rizzo lured someone there (or, you know, talked on the phone). Catherine's less than interested, since she thinks it's a dead end, now that flashy Agent Byrne is in town, with his chess metaphors and his desire to go after the bigwigs.
Jack comes in with the news that Latimer had been wiring money every week for the last ten months to someone named Nikisch.
The Lamb brothers head to the house of this Nikisch person, who turns out to be a lady. WHAAAT? She explains Nikisch is her maiden name, but her married name is Nadia Latimer, since she's married to Bert.
After a commercial break, Nadia explains, tears in her eyes, about how Bert came into the diner every morning, and then they got to talking and she fell for him right away. They were married six weeks later. As for the money, it's because Bert travels half the year, so he sends money for expenses. Alarm bells start going off for the Lambs.
Anyway, she's Hungarian, not Russian, but she came here with her mother when she was three months old. She has a brother, Tamas, who came here only five years ago, and guess what? He never liked Bert. In fact, they had a big fight the other night, over money.
So the Lambs' working theory is that Tamas found out Bert had a second wife. Ralph figures Bert might have been relieved to get shot. "Two wives? You gotta be one hell of a juggler," he says. Kidding aside, I'm always fascinated by stories about men with two families. WHERE DO THEY HAVE THE TIME?
Over at the Savoy, Mia's surprised to see Savino's car being towed in, and the valet explains that it broke down out in the desert Thursday night, and no one could get a hold of him. It's only being brought back now? Convenient for the plot, I suppose, because Mia goes right to Jack, having figured that "out in the desert" means "close to the place where my father was killed," I guess? She tells Jack she's convinced Vincent did it, or -- since his fingerprints weren't found out there -- had someone do it. Jack tells her he'll look into it, and he wants her to keep a cool head.
And now for Today In Why Dixon Is An Idiot: he accepts a side gig offer from Tommy, who wants him to keep an eye on Violet. This is stupid on the supposedly really savvy Tommy's part too, since they've already bonded over how much they'd enjoy having sex with Violet, essentially, and that's pretty much exactly what Barry Silver wants NOT to happen.
This is supposed to be a side gig, but apparently it's right out to the set for Dixon. Violet's surprised to see him there, and warns him she doesn't like to be watched. Her cockiness vanishes shortly after filming of the western begins, when Violet learns her big scene has been cut down to just one line. She demands to speak to Barry Silver, but the director is all, "Cellphones haven't been invented yet!" so her response is to jump on a horse and gallop away. "Does anybody here know how to ride a damn horse?" says the director in exasperation. That would be Dixon, who saddles up and chases after her.
At the sheriff's office, Tamas has been brought in for questioning, and he admits to shaking down Latimer for money, and appears to be under the misapprehension that what he was doing isn't actually a crime. He knows murder is, but says he didn't kill Latimer -- but he might have seen who is. He's not exactly willing to give it up, so Jack threatens him with a night in a cell. Tamas says in the Ukraine they'd call this jail -- with its heat and running water -- the Hilton. But he does give up that Latimer had stopped returning his calls, and so he followed him after work, which is when he saw someone in a white Cadillac with a black top (it was too dark to make out the face) shoot Latimer.
Well, Mrs. Latimer has a car matching that description, plus a lucrative insurance policy on Bert, so the Lambs swing by the house so they can bring her down to the station to talk about it. She wants to know why she would kill Bert when he was getting his money back from the company. Money back from the company? I feel like there was a line that was cut that was necessary to make that make sense. But Ralph says money wasn't her only motive, except she is baffled when Jack brings up Nadia.
She's stunned at the suggestion -- or seems stunned -- that her husband might have been cheating on her, so as usual we see that all you really need to do to eliminate yourself as a suspect in the Lambs' eyes is be a really good liar. Then Jack gets a phone call, summoning him to Vincent's office. I'm curious what he told Ralph about why he was skipping out of the office during a murder investigation.
At the Savoy, he discovers that Vincent wants him to share a tip with Ralph that the skim is going out in Savino's own car. Jack, being some kind of genius, assumes that means it will be going out some other way. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE THROWAWAY DIALOGUE EARLIER THIS SCENE ABOUT A VISITING CHAMPIONSHIP BASKETBALL TEAM.
Anyway, Jack tells him to go to hell, and Savino is all, "Why do I have to explain how blackmail works to you every episode?" and reminds him that however one chooses to interpret what went down, only one of them pulled the trigger that killed Rizzo. Because that might be of concern to Mia, of course. "Don't do it for me. Do it for her," says Savino. We go to commercial not knowing if Jack intends to do it or not.
And here's Dixon, trotting along on a horse with his love interest of the week as though anyone cares about the poor starlet whose scene in a major motion picture isn't as big as she thought it was going to be. But there's nothing Marilyn (presumably Monroe) can do that she can't, she says, so I guess she's tried posing nude, too. Anyway, Dixon suggests she perform the scene for him -- you'd better be prepared to offer her union scale, buddy! -- and it involves him being the wounded cowboy with his head in her lap while she professes her tearful love for him. "You're more than good! You're a star!" says Dixon, sincerely. He appears to be smitten.
And all of a sudden at the sheriff's office there's a Sandy Cooperman in for questioning, because dead junkie/Rizzo-stabber Myrna Callum shared a party line with eight other people, and Ms. Cooperman is apparently the line busybody. After being quite concerned she's a suspect, Cooperman says Myrna Callum called the sheriff's office that night, saying something about a vagrant. Ralph takes much amusement in Cooperman's breathless description of marauding men with knives in their teeth "stealing into women's boudoirs" for a moment, but asks her if she's sure about the call to the sheriff's office, because there'd be a record of that. Cooperman confidently says there must be something wrong with the records then, since there's nothing wrong with her.
So Ralph stares at the third-man's fingerprint analysis. The thumb print has a huge scar on it, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out how this is going to go. Then he strolls out to where Byrne is making himself at home, with Catherine fanning herself over the fact Byrne has stopped the Savoy's skim from getting out four times in the past two days.
Jack comes in, is introduced to Byrne, and then relays the tip about Savino driving the skim out himself. Byrne's skeptical, since his men have the Savoy covered. Unmentioned is the fact that if Byrne has seized the skim four times in the past two
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days, is there any chance at all Savino would expose himself like that? Byrne asks Jack if he got the tip from his girlfriend Mia. Jack asks him if he has a problem with that. "Sheriff's deputy dating a mob boss's daughter? I don't think that could ever be a problem," says Byrne. That right there is some federal sarcasm. Again, unmentioned: Jack has received this tip from the person whose MOST IMPORTANT JOB is doing the skimming in the first place, but Catherine is all "a tip is a tip" and Ralph brings up gift horses, so I guess that trumps the dude in the suit who has only been seizing skims like a dairy inspector since he got here.
At the Savoy, Tommy is queasy upon finding out that Violet galloped off the set, and the news only gets worse for him, when Mia gleefully tells him Barry Silver has arrived. Silver's three days early, but he appears to want to have sex with Violet, so Tommy's got to get him out to the set -- where she isn't.
Jack tracked down the numbers in Latimer's wallet, they're Fairline bank accounts, with some revealing info: The company's a big shell game, a pyramid scheme, so the new working theory is Latimer found out and Thrane took him out. Also, Thrane has a white Cadillac with a black roof, as shown in a handy pamphlet. That isn't enough for evidence, Catherine tells them. Might it be enough for a warrant, though? The upshot is Catherine figures they'll need a confession if charges are to stick, and the Lambs have great fun sarcastically pretending Thrane will just give it up to them.
So they send Tamas in, pretending to be extorting $10,000 from Thrane in exchange for keeping quiet over what he saw. Thrane gives in rather easily, but can't resist telling him the whole story while he's doing it. Latimer was going to destroy everything he worked for, because Thrane wouldn't pay for his wife's surgery. Thrane in fact had made out a check to Latimer, but then he changed his mind, and with that Thrane grabs a letter opener from his desk and starts going after Tamas, who fights back. Thrane punches Tamas in the stomach and hits a hard, rectangular object -- an absolutely massive tape recorder that Tamas had hidden under his jacket. Thrane bolts for the door, at which point he runs into Ralph's fist and goes down in a heap.
At the station, the Lambs discuss what to tell the two Mrs. Latimers (Oh, "Two of a Kind"! I get it now). Jack's not in favor of telling them the truth -- probably because lying is working out so well for him right now -- because he doesn't think it'll do any good. "It's still the truth," says Ralph.
Byrne comes in to tell them the skim is on the move. Ralph leaves right away, but Jack says he needs a moment to himself to make guilty faces.
And so out in the desert, Savino's car is pulled over by just one man in a cop car: Jack. "So where's the rest of the cavalry?" asks Savino, completely unimpressed. He warns Jack that if he backs out of the deal, he can say goodbye to Mia. Jack doesn't appear super-worried, and tells Savino that Ralph is picking up the actual skim. Savino sneers that they don't know where it is.
And there's Byrne and Ralph boarding the bus of the Plains State Bison basketball team, so it's a good thing Jack and Vincent established that that was a thing earlier! Ralph finds the skim in the nervous hands of what looks like a shooting guard or even small forward.
Speaking of nervous, Tommy has stalled Barry Siler for too long, and the producer is getting impatient, and wants to see Violet now.
Tommy's about to come clean, which of course means she's about to come strolling in, which she does, Dixon escorting her. She's in a much better mood, what with Dixon having stroked her ego, and Dixon is quite distressed to see her canoodling with the older, shorter, balder fella. Silver gives him the stink-eye when Violet explains about Dixon giving her a ride back, and when Tommy explains Dixon is the deputy he hired to look after Violet, Silver wants him kept away from her. It doesn't look like Dixon's sticking around long enough for that to be a problem. And forgive me if nobody exactly feels sorry for Dixon, who is alternately hitting on anything with a vagina or getting together with Yvonne.
Byrne proudly shows Ralph the "FBI Bust Basketball Cash Laundering Scheme" headline on the front page of the daily rag, which features a picture of Byrne showing off the seized money. The story is buried underneath "MAN ENTERS SPACE," however. It does get more prominent billing than "Food to Cost Less" and I'm really curious about that one.
Ralph is kinda growly about the FBI getting all the credit, even though he's pretending not to be, but Byrne appears not to notice and seems sincere about looking forward to working a lot with Ralph, who appears to be considering the ramifications of his gun "accidentally" going off while he's cleaning it.
Outside, Byrne runs into Catherine, who is coming by to congratulate him. He smoothly says he couldn't have done it without her, since her files were his bedtime reading for the past couple of months, and there is a little more law-enforcement flirting of this type before Byrne invites her to go get a drink. She says she'll go fetch Ralph, which is not what Byrne had in mind at all, and then Catherine figures Ralph wouldn't have wanted to come anyway. Well, not with that doodoo head Byrne around, anyway.
Jack is moping at Mia's house, as they sit down to dinner, and he says "I've been keeping something from you." Dude, if you're doing this, you could have done it before she cooked a nice dinner. He says Savino's going to tell her this, so he needs to tell her first. "He didn't kill your father," he says. "I did. I shot him." Mia's disbelieving at first, but as he starts to explain the whole self-defense thing, she yells for him to get out. He protests, but then gets up, wisely not asking to take a plate of food home with him.
He heads to the sheriff's office, where Ralph is of course working late, although I'm skeptical of the quality of work getting done with the half-drank bottle of scotch on his desk.
Jack walks in, looking pained, and Ralph pours him a drink, and then the brothers sit facing each other, before Ralph finally says, "How long have you known?" Ralph says he didn't know for sure until he saw the fingerprints, and then launches into the story of a spurs-related injury that sliced Jack's fingers good when he was five years old. "Scar never did heal," Ralph says. He points to the card that Jack put his name on, and says he doesn't know whose fingerprints those are, but they're not Jack's. Ralph looks less angry than I expected, but then again he already had some idea of what happened out there.
So Jack gives him the broad strokes, including Savino setting him up. "I don't regret it. I just regret keeping it from you," he says. He couldn't bear losing her, but he think he lost her anyhow. "You told her?" says Ralph.
Jack asks what they're going to do now. Ralph takes out a lighter and burns the fake fingerprint card. "Gonna get you out of it," he says. Can't say I was expecting that! With his secret off his chest, maybe Jack can stop running up the water bill.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He assumes the bust of the Plains State Bison basketball team had relatively few casualties. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
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