CSI: Miami

Season 4 - Episode 14 - Fade Out

Written by Corey Miller
Directed by Scott Lautanen

As Leo and Sienna, the modern day Bonnie and Clyde duo, are counting their cash and about to make a clean getaway; the sirens start and the panic begins.  The police chase the bandits to the drawbridge and it’s just about to go up, now the two are trapped.   Leo pulls the car over and they try to make a run for it.  Sienna knows there is no way out and as the police surround them she reaches inside the money bag and pulls out a wad of cash and begins throwing it up in the air like it’s raining money.   The police are stunned, not by Sienna’s stunt but by the body of 30 year old, Jake Richmond hanging by his neck from underneath the bridge.   The team arrives at the crime scene.  Alexx briefly goes over the corpse and confirms that both Richmond’s eyes had been shot out, proving her hunch that Richmond was dead before he was hung up on the bridge.  She also comes across a joker playing card in his pocket.  The noose around his neck has a metal hook on the end of it; it’s a stanchion.  The joker is confirmation for Horatio that this was a mob job.  Richmond was quite the business man; he ran five of South Beach’s hottest clubs which might explain the stanchion noose. Calleigh confirms a match with the 9 millimeter bullet found in Richmond’s skull and that of a year old homicide case that involved Joey Salucci, Miami’s biggest mob boss.  Salucci denies he had anything to do with the murder of Richmond.  Wolfe’s eye is still not 100% and he has a fender bender on his way back to the lab.  Horatio takes him off the case until he gets into to see a doctor about his eye.  Calleigh and Delko arrive at the Burgundy Club, one of Richmond’s clubs and they talk with Cuzz Morales, the door man.  Morales confesses that Richmond was so paranoid of Salucci that he made him test his drinks and lite up his cigar every night.  Calleigh finds a scantron-type of paper spattered with blood.  Morales is cooperative, but says he knows nothing about the paper and hands Delko his telephone number.  Delko’s investigation of the scantron paper leads him to a film studies course at Dade University taught by professor Meyers.  Meyers confirms that the scantron paper is a test answer sheet and he has a stack of them in the trunk of his car.   Delko and Calleigh no only find the scantron’s in Meyer’s truck but they also find a massive amount of blood.  Meyer’s is shocked and is convinced that someone stole his car; he leaves his keys in his desk drawer at school so anyone could have taken the car. While dusting the car for prints they find a 9 millimeter bullet with blood and brain matter on it, and a missing ear bud from a headphone.  Their investigation confirms that Richmond was killed in Meyer’s trunk.  The prints from the noose belong to a Norman Stein.  Stein is a producer and he’s producing a movie titled The Clubland Murders.  He’s working with two young writers and he hooked them up with Morales to help them create a more realistic script.  Horatio spots a poster for the movie which reveals a man hanging from a drawbridge with his eyes missing and a joker playing card in the air.  Stein denies he had anything to do with the similarities and that they should talk with the writers.  Patrick Wilder and Ben Williams both twenty something, are hard at work on the script. Delko notices one of William’s ear buds on his ipod is missing.  Wilder tells them that Meyers has the script and is doing some rewrites.  Wolfe gets some bad news from the doctor that if a stronger antibiotic doesn’t kill the infection there is a strong possibility that he could lose his sight.  Meyers tells Horatio that he only gave Williams and Wilders the general plot for the story not specifics.  The script reveals that someone else was giving notes to the writing duo, and that someone else is Morales.  Horatio and Tripp find a 9 mil gun tucked away in Morales drawer.  Calleigh tox results reveal that Richmond’s cigar was drugged, leading to Morales as the prime suspect.  Calleigh confirms that the gun found at Morales’s office killed Richmond, and was also the gun used in the year old Salucci homicide, but the print on the gun is not Morales’s.  Stein rushes into Horatio’s office paranoid from the last part of the script he has just read, because it looks like there will be another murder, the mob plans on murdering the snitch.   Wilder gets printed and tells Horatio that when Morales left Salucci’s employment it didn’t go over well.   Delko and Calleigh are back at the Burgundy Club only to find that Morales has been beaten to death.  Williams is inside the club, he swears he didn’t kill Morales.  He tells Delko that Morales not only helped them write their script but he convinced them to kill Richmond too, he said with Richmond out of the way they would have access to everything.   He confesses after Morales drugged Richmond’s cigar that he and Wilder stole Meyer’s car and put Richmond’s limp body in the trunk.  Everything was going fine until Wilder shot Richmond’s eyes out.  Now, as Williams is telling the story he realizes that Wilder has set him up.  Horatio get Salucci to confess that he murdered Morales.  Delko assures Wilder that although he’s walking away from this as a free man, he better always watch his back not only for the cops but a friend or two of  Salucci’s.  Horatio sees Wolfe in the locker room and he can sense his frustration.  Horatio extends an invitation for dinner, but Wolfe tells him he’ll have to take a rain check.  Horatio tells him the offer is always open.