Chapter Five
Grissom sits before the female Hotel Concierge of the Bellaggio.
"Mr. Grissom, I feel I need to flirt in a creepy and sexually suggestive way with you even though I'm a 25-year-old attractive then blonde woman who could probably have anyone."
"I love being a producer. Anyway, I'll pretend not to notice you're flirting openly with me. This establishes me as a professional… and unintentionally a little gay."
"What would you like?" she asks, crossing her legs and biting the end of her glasses.
"Information about this betting chip in relation to a murder."
"That's not ours – it's a fake," she says, removing her bra and shaking out her hair.
"I know. Do you by any chance have any disgruntled ex-employees with access to some kind of betting chip maker?"
"Well," she begins, unbuttoning her blouse, "that's kind of ridiculously complicated, but it just occurs to me that the girl's father and sister were both laid off the night of the murder."
"Naturally this helps our case only on the father. Well, thank you for your help. You seem to have misplaced these," he says, handing back her panties.
He leaves. She is confused… and naked.
At the morgue, Doc is cutting open the little girl to an appropriately sad piece of modern music that the producers could get cheap. This is effective. This is also a way of wasting time so the writers can show what's going on in every aspect of the case: Catherine is looking around the crime scene sadly, Sara is at home with Nick drinking heavily from the whisky jug, Greg is looking through a microscope and Grissom is being groped by showgirls as he leaves the hotel/casino.
"Hodges, did you get the prints off of the betting chip?" asks Greg, entering the lab.
Prepare yourself for hilarious Greg/Hodges banter.
"Greg, I'm really backed up at the moment," says Hodges in a nasty way. We hate Hodges because he is mean to Greg (who is nice and funny). Hodges is bad, but not evil. That's Ecklie's job.
"Have you ever noticed how lab techs are always complaining about heavy work loads, yet we never hear about cases lasting more than 48-hours?" asks Greg. We like Greg. We want him to stand up to mean Hodges. This is pretty much the whole point of these scenes.
"Unless it's an old case Ecklie worked on and screwed up and Grissom or Catherine need to go back and investigate," says Hodges in an annoying way because he is a suck up.
"You also ever notice how you and Ecklie are never in the same room?"
"There can only really be room for one unnecessarily incompetent and evil character at one time. Anything else is overload."
"So what about my chip?"
"Curse you, Sanders – curse your witty dialogue, cute hair and character development! I shall now mock your CSI work up to date. You don't label things properly sometimes – ha!"
"I'll be mildly offended but ignore you."
"Our interactions really aren't as funny as the writers seem to think," says Hodges.
"No, but by comparison I suddenly look like a model lab tech," reminds Greg.
"Funny how that happens."
"Again, not really."
"So the prints… they're the Father's," says Hodges, now that enough time has successfully been wasted.
"It definitely tightens our case on the dad."
"Plot twist time," says Hodges.
"The Father has an air-tight alibi," says Catherine, entering Grissom's office unannounced as usual.
Grissom is inspecting one of his spiders. Grissom is "quirky". If this wasn't a TV show, however, Grissom would be the kind of guy you cross the road to avoid passing on the sidewalk.
"There isn't anyone else to suspect…" says Grissom, at a loss for ideas and wracking his brains. "If only there were an obvious second choice equally close to the girl with the same kind of professional credentials as the father…"
"I know," says Catherine, "Let's head down to the morgue. This story's getting slow and we need Doc's morbid sense of humor as filler."
Doc is missing either one or both of his legs. Pay attention: this will probably be mentioned or at least alluded to.
"Hey, I have at least one prosthetic leg and a cane!" says Doc, limping into the room. Making fun of this further would be cruel, but I can say I told you so. "I'll probably make a strange reference to sex or materials pertaining to sex. Prepare to be massively weirded out."
"What important yet strange things have you found, Doc?" asks Grissom.
It's like watching two walls talking to each other until a bizarre joke is cracked. Then neither will emote. We're led to believe therefore that they are both great actors."
"With a child her age, I expect to find Lunchables and Gummy Bears. But this little girl was full of Cocaine and Cognac. This reminds me of my honeymoon."
"I really hope this guy hits his wife!" says Grissom, starting to get mildly Grissom-angry.
"Why?"
"It's kind of like a slot machine – if all three of my "problem-cases" combine, I fly off the handle. They usually pull this stuff out for sweeps."
"I thought the Dad was cleared," says Catherine.
"We're going to stay with that suspect until there's no way we can refute the real killer. I'm going to go do a bug experiment with a pig."
Catherine turns to Doc as Grissom leaves rudely (only it's Grissom so it's quirky and admirable).
"Our cut-to-commercial out-tros really do suck."
Somewhere Horatio is not smiling.