Keep reading. You'll get more confused by the time line and unfinished references before you get less confused by them.
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Serial:
Catharine leaves The French Palace for the last time, hollow eyed and hysteric with Ed at her side and Grissom in his car in the parking lot. Ed's got his hands around her wrists- not careful enough, not respectful of her bird's weight ambition and Grissom doesn't understand how this could be what she needs. The lights are off in the cab and he can't get out of his car- hand on the door handle, unable to imagine what he would ever say.
Her shirt is half buttoned and she is not wearing a bra and Grissom thinks, "Damn it Ed, have you ever wanted to see her off the stage?"
When she refuses to get in the car- bracing and rigid and still strapped in to her pointy heels, he watches the car door drift soundlessly closed on her fingers.
For a moment there is no reaction and then she cries out, and then she just cries, and the pavement must be cold, finding herself suddenly near alone beside the car.
There is never any warning of these things.
Ten weeks later she reappears, a "vacation" having done her good or so the lie is told- but anyway, she has some color now and Grissom concedes that Ed may have been correct before.
"Vacation my ass," she says, sitting on the couch with her blankets on the floor. She was never one for cover. Grissom, however, reaching out for her wrist, instead drops his hand to the pillow she is gripping and settles on, "Don't dance, Cath. Ed's out, it's just me."
She is quiet a long time and nearly rasping when she whispers, "You almost called me Cat."
He finds he doesn't have it in him to apologize, degraded as she is.
Breaking the case:
When Maria wakes up on the closet floor he has done up her pants and is doing up his own. "Are you going?" she wonders and Grissom doesn't know what to say- what in the world she would like him to say.
"Home." He whispers and she looks down, hands covering her bare chest. Tugging at the edging corners of lace. There is a moment when he stoops to tie his shoelace. It is wet with spilt beer and he stands, wiping his hands on his pants before turning away. Three steps and she stops him, her voice echoing.
"Empty hallway or… empty girl?" Wonders Grissom with slight morbidity.
"I don't eat sometimes, y'know."
The latter then.
He turns back around, takes two steps towards her, and looks down to the closet floor. He hadn't known- he never thought to assume.
"Can we go for some… I don't know, some breakfast or whatever?"
And Grissom wonders if she will die, one day, from all of this.
Sight recognition:
It is when Ecklie stands that Grissom remembers…
A 4:19 at The Tangeres. Four days spent over an evidence table and a database with Brass, trying to figure out why a card counter would willingly run himself into an empty casino wing full of locked doors.
"And then kill a guard. Let's not forget that part," Says Brass on the fourth day of dropped casino chips and size ten Ferrigamo shoe prints.
"And then disappear, " adds Grissom with intrigued eyes.
Until 5 AM on the fourth day- "Or does that make it the fifth?" Brass wonders, tired and patched up hard on the buzz of his eighth coffee. "Where's that line- that day marker? We need one."
-That's when Grissom realizes they've been assumptive for 96 hours and it may be time to stop.
"He wasn't a card counter," says Grissom, "that's not his job… He doesn't have a job." And Brass, who is re-printing the dropped chips, has a green one in his hand when he turns to say, "Gil, the guy was a shark. Everybody has a job- I mean, you don't survive in Vegas without some cash flow unless you're-"
And now it's Brass who stops, latex fingers on his fifth green disk.
When the two men check the database they find it. His name is Dean Hamilton and he is in the system, an angry mug shot staring out at them.
"Shmo couldn't get a job- Guy's a convict. Escaped from prison two months back."
And with a raised brow, "Escape… artist?"
"None of the casino staff have full clearance. If he could pick his way through the building when they couldn't, he figured he could escape."
So Grissom concludes, "For him, the trick wasn't getting out with the money- it was taking the most difficult path."
"The dead security guard was the last one to see him so..."
"He must have picked a lock or taken a duct."
And at the same time now, both men: "Have they cleared the Scene?"
The crime scene:
Fifty meters of blood drops, invisible on red carpet, leads Brass to uncover a knife buried in a potted plant, free of the perpetrator's epithelial's. Fifty meters of hallway footage reveal to Grissom, a half of a brown leather Ferrigamo, stepping into frame and then easily out again. Fifty meters of crawling through ceiling ducts on their hands and knees reveals to the CSI's nothing but a puffer kept secretly in Brass' pocket that, "is not the reason I'm not Chief of Police!"
And it's fifty meters of chalky shoe prints that lead Grissom directly to the power toed foot of Tia Derek.
"The construction guys are here." Tia says, and looking at Grissom with a regretful smile, "You boys didn't find enough, did you?"
A long pause as Grissom stands, kit in hand and smelling of hallway cleaner. "Evidence, I mean. You're not going to find him?"
And Grissom says simply, "No." having no energy to make conversation with a woman in the Tangeres' traditional gold lamee halter and suit pants. A "Guide to Physics" book on his dresser at home. Elliot under his pillow where millions of fellow American's keep their nine mils.
The hallway is long.
The unwholesomeness of magnets:
The hallway is long enough that when he gets lost it takes him two minutes to find the elevator and once he gets to the parking garage, Tia Derek is sitting on his bumper.
"Win some lose some, right?" says Tia, lithe arms lifting herself from his second hand Porche. "You're still pretty sexy when you fail."
"Also," she says, "I'm the owner of the hotel so when we go to dinner- I'm paying for mine."
His hands are still chalky from the crime scene and the parking garage is overly dark because one of the light bulbs has burnt out. Her shirt catches sparks of light from the far off street lamp. It is the first time he has ever felt understood. And it is the first time he has understood what Maria Cristine might have felt.
These guys always walk:
A new guy at the lab. Calm enough, focused enough, but when Grissom meets him in the locker room, hand extended, the other man gives Grissom a tight smile and wonders, "Jeez Gil, do you ever get action in those shoes?"
While Grissom looks down at his worn sneakers the new guy continues, "You're level two right? You been promoted long?"
And Grissom, pondering the significance of frayed laces, responds earnestly, "Fifteen days I believe."
This is when the introduction is made. "I'm Ecklie. Conrad."
So with some small interest, "Well, welcome to the lab Conrad, if you-"
But Ecklie's not interested- eyeing Gil's creatures floating in murky jars, "It's a great space you've made here." And finally, eyeing Grissom, "Fifth highest solve rate in the country, right?"
Grissom hasn't checked the stats in months but Ecklie is already pulling on his own pair of expensive leather shoes and Grissom- recognizing them with eerie certainty- nods. "Yes. I guess it is."
"Yeah well, I've been a level two for a couple-a-months. Great lab though. Nice people."
So when Ecklie suggests they get a drink: "Just talk a little, lay out the foot work," Grissom is remembering fifty meters of hallway and a girl who was a billionaire, shoving him down onto the mattress on her floor. Holding him down to whisper in his ear-
"Alright," says Grissom- wondering where Conrad Ecklie's shoes could possibly lead.
The location:
The French Palace. Ecklie's shoes have led them to a strip club. Led them to a building where there is glitter falling into Grissom's hair and Ecklie saying, "Gil, I'll buy the drinks, okay, but I want you to meet my friend first…"
Conrad's friend is tall and voluptuous, a false red head with false lashes and false breasts. Apparently she has really opened up to him in the last few visits.
That's what Conrad says, emphasizing the words "opened up" just so, and now Grissom isn't sure he was witnessing innuendo or self-delusion.
"Excuse me," Grissom says to a heavyset man in a rumpled business suit, "may I take your napkin?" The man is intent on a curvaceous body in fishnets and doesn't respond when Grissom reaches past his drink and takes several.
Grissom has a pen in his pocket and purple glitter in his hair. With one he is nearly positive he can determine the means by which the other arrived.
It will be fifteen minutes before he is interrupted by a pair of heels. It will be ten seconds before he looks up from his ink soaked napkins. It will be two hours before her next break and it will be no time at all before-
It will be very easy to-
It will be the second time a pair of shoes has led to a pair of shoes has led to a pair of eyes has led him to-
It will be fifteen minutes. One hundred and twenty three dollars in bulk glitter.
Influence:
The night he leaves San Francisco, Sara Sidle doesn't eat dinner. Not hungry and too buzzed to sleep, she runs her apartment stairs thirty seven times before she loses count and grits her teeth, pressing her forehead against the railing. Don't.
She skips breakfast the next morning, watching her friends eat pancakes with frosting sugar and glistening berries at their Friday morning diner. That's okay, she still isn't hungry.
By Monday afternoon she calls in sick and Professor Gilchrist has a student- someone she doesn't really know and doesn't really want to know- come by with copies of the notes. But before he leaves she finds herself saying, "Do you know why you shouldn't put milk in coffee?" It isn't really a question but she is discouraged when he supplies no answer. The apartment door closes, the kettle boils. She hasn't eaten in four days and she's making tea.
By Tuesday evening she's under her blankets with the blinds slatted at an angle, casting shadows. Two and a half pots of tea, the dregs of which in cups on various apartment surfaces and the rest of which heaved violently into the bathtub while her friends were arguing over movie selection.
She'd had to run the taps on full to drown out the sound. She'd had to put her hands inside the bathtub to brace her. And when she was finally breathless- dry heaving, fingers down her throat and Carly knocking on the bathroom door- she had to consider the possibility that something was wrong.
Under the blankets the light is a curious cast of grey and yellow so that when she slides her hand down, and down, slowly, slowly- not even really sure what she's doing because, god, she's only ever done this once before in secondary school- she can still see her body, pale and suddenly very small. Don't don't don't.
When it's over and she comes (which she's also only ever done once before) she spends a moment, trying to remember if she even thought about him at all.
That evening she goes by the campus and shows up in her psychology teacher's classroom with Tai food and messy hair. He's just leaving and the house lights are already off, but when he sees her- take out boxes in her arms, he puts his brief case down.
They don't eat with chopsticks, which are too delicate an art for this occasion and she doesn't consider the possibility that she's just replaced one intelligent man with another. Instead she says, "I don't think I wasn't hungry so much as that I didn't want to be hungry." And when he nods she decides to believe he understands.
The Victim/Perpetrator dynamic:
"What are you doing?"
Two voices at once and hers is one of them.
"Calculating how long he can afford a pretty girl like you, right Gil?"
Ecklie's is the other.
She is standing on the stage in front of him, red G-string, red sequins appliquéd to her nipples in the shape of stars- these ruby red shoes and he's thinking, "not in Kansas anymore."
"I don't think I could," says Grissom, "afford you." and because he's not exactly sure what he means, he stands to leave. "Conrad, I think the evening is done for me."
But Ecklie is barely listening again, "Alright Gil, just remember what I said about those sneakers."
Ecklie is maybe thirty-four and when Grissom takes one last look at Ruby Slippers; finds her eyes to make amends for all of this, he recognizes the look on her face.
"I hope this is a phase he grows out of," says Slippers and Gil Grissom feels like laughing.
So he does.
He laughs and she smirks and makes a dipping motion with her hips- her form of an invitation. Sit down.
"Cat," she introduces with just a little too much drawl, "innuendo optional." And maybe he can stay another moment.
"Cat," he tries but the name is blunt and clumsy. "Well… if you want," he concedes at last.
"Like a flavored condom, right? Nothing real." And when he nods his head almost emphatically and makes reference to a particular chemical brand of cherry flavoring, she makes the suggestion that will change an impossible number of things.
"You wanna give me a new name?"