CSI - Episode 721 - Ending Happy

In the cold open, we see shots of a boxer past his prime training intercut with the same guy throwing a succession of women down on beds and screwing them while they stare dead-eyed at the ceiling. It's a bit of grim tone to set, since the rest of the episode is so darkly humorous. Anyway, the boxer ends up floating dead in a pool and Grissom and Sara have been called out to investigate. The boxer, Lorenzo "Happy" Morales, was found dead at a brothel, the Sugar Cane Ranch. Grissom and Sara investigate the body and note contusions, as well as two large holes in his neck that might be gunshot wounds. Sara observes that the water in the pool is warm and Grissom tells her that brothels keep them heated so the girls are encouraged to swim topless. At her look, he adds, "So they tell me." Heh. Credits.

Brass talks to the Sugar Cane Ranch's owners, Binky and Doris. Binky is played by Peter Stormare, who appears to be interpreting this role as a cross between his Prison Break character Abruzzi and his Armageddon character Lev Andropov. Basically, crazy and incomprehensible, although I suspect the same could be said of every role Peter Stormare plays, bless him. Binky tells Brass that he was a fan of Happy and when the boxer fell on hard times, he offered him a trailer and a gym on the ranch. He says everyone loved Happy and Doris backs this up, then informs Brass that he's eligible for their police special - a drink, an appetizer, and a girl, all for free. Two drinks, Binky adds. Hee. Outside, Nicky and Sara are processing the pool area and he finds an unsmoked but completely burned-down cigarette. Back inside the ranch, Greg collects DNA from all of the girls, then Brass questions each one. At first, they all claim to have loved Happy but when he puts the screws to them (er, so to speak), they admit he was an asshole who thought he could use the girls anytime he wanted to without paying. Binky even yelled at him once to leave them alone, but Doris loved Happy. The girls think she was having an affair with him. Later, Brass talks to Doris in the...I guess you'd call it the whorehouse control room? Anyway, she's got cameras set up that capture real time footage, no recording, and each of the rooms is wired for sound. She says she heard nothing unusual last night. Grissom and Sara head over to Happy's trailer and Sara takes the opportunity to teasingly ask him if he's ever paid for sex. However, he answers her seriously and says that he finds sex without love pointless and sad. Sara, with a quirk to her eyebrow that saves this from being too needy, says she's pretty sure she doesn't make him sad. He smiles and earnestly tells her that she makes him happy. Awwwwwww! I'm PMSing tonight and I have no chocolate in the house, so I am not ashamed to admit that I teared up a bit at this scene. The sweetness may give me a toothache by morning, but it'll be worth it.

In Happy's trailer, they find a ton of medications but no prescriptions; from the Spanish on the bottles it looks like he got them from Mexico. True story: I once got a prescription for Ambien from Mexico and I did not die or grow a third eye or something like that. Not that I think everyone should follow my illegal example, mind you. I'm just sharing because I want to feel closer to you guys. We're, like, total BFFs now, right? Um...where was I? ANYWAY. Grissom and Sara also find blood in the trailer. Back at the lab, Doc Robbins is with Warrick and Catherine, getting ready to examine the body. The most notable thing they discover after cutting off his clothes is that Happy died with a seriously infected penis. Bleh. Thank god this show is on CBS and not HBO where they probably would've shown it. Happy also has a contusion on his head and Catherine spots what looks like a pattern. She realizes they're backwards letters and when she takes a photo and mirrors the image, it spells out "IN CH." Over Binky's protests, Nicky examines the girls' rooms and eventually finds a crowbar with the stamp "MADE IN CHINA." The room's resident, Dreama Little, is brought down to the station. Brass is all, "Is that name for REAL?" and Dreama, who is the type of person my grandmother would've politely called "country" but I think "white trash" is probably more accurate, launches into "Dream A Little Dream Of Me." Brass: "Do I look like Paula Abdul?" HEE. He tells Dreama about the crowbar found in her room and she stands up, showing him several bruises on her torso courtesy of Happy, and said she clocked him one when he barged into her room wanting to party when she wasn't in the mood. She insists he walks away but Brass points out that if his head injury caused him to fall into the pool, then she's responsible for his death and he's arresting her for murder. She bursts into noisy sobs but Brass looks satisfied, until his phone rings and Robbins gives him the bad news that Happy's head injury didn't kill him.

Back in the morgue, Robbins reiterates that the head injury didn't kill Happy, although he doesn't yet know what did. However, he shows Catherine needle punctures and adds that the wounds on his neck were caused by something that went in one side and out the other, but it wasn't a bullet. At the ranch, Sara and Nicky are poking around when they're hollered at by an old dude, part of the elderly community that lives in the trailerpark near the ranch. He's got a photo of his deceased wife with an arrow stuck right in it. Inside his trailer, the old dude starts quoting Longfellow and Nicky rudely interrupts him. WTF, Nicky? Sara spots a hole in the window and sends Nicky outside to follow the arrow's trajectory back to its origin. It ends up at the side of a shed, where another arrow is stuck in the ground, and Nicky bags it for processing. Back inside the old dude's trailer, Sara finishes his Longfellow quote and he looks touched at her consideration. How much do I love Sara right now? THIS MUCH. Later, a print on the arrow comes back to Connor Foster, the ranch's bartender. When Brass asks to speak to him, he literally passes out behind his bar. Heh. After he's brought back to interrogation and sobered up a bit, Connor admits he shot at Happy, who he describes as a "bigass lizard monster guy," to defend the girls. Connor's flashback scene is a hilarious black and white Frankenstein homage, with Happy stomping around and bellowing, the arrow through his neck looking remarkably like bolts. Connor says Happy didn't die from being shot but Brass pulls the same thing that he did with Dreama, pointing out that if the wound caused Happy to drown in the pool, Connor is guilty of murder. Can you guess where this is going? Yep, just as Connor starts crying, Brass' phone rings. It's Robbins, and he says Connor isn't the killer. Brass: *headdesk*

Robbins' latest find: anaphylactic shock. Happy had an allergic reaction to shellfish, although there was no shellfish found in his stomach contents. Greg and Hodges sift through the evidence collected from the girls' rooms to try and find any trace of shellfish, while Hodges shares a charming little story about being arrested at 17 for soliciting a hooker. Greg is all, "TMI, dude." Greg finds a syringe inside a tampon applicator and Hodges says he's found a few of those as well. Hodges also finds shrimp tails with lipstick on them and, in a Science Music Video, he runs a match on the lipstick while Greg processes prints found on the tails. The prints match Binky and Doris but since it's unlikely Binky wears lipstick, it looks like Doris gave Happy the allergic reaction. How? Well, remember Happy's infected penis? Yeah, that's exactly right. When questioned about this, Doris begins wheezing and Binky leads her away into a room to calm her down. Remembering that Doris has all of the rooms wired for sound, Grissom and Brass listen in and hear Doris accuse Binky of setting her up. Binky feigns ignorance of her affair with Happy, then realizes that they're being listened to. They try to cover but Brass has heard all that he needs to arrest them. Alas, it is seriously Brass' unlucky day and Doc Robbins pops up to tell Grissom and Catherine that Binky and Doris aren't guilty.

Down in the morgue, Robbins says Happy had snake venom in his system but he wasn't bitten. Someone injected into him with a needle, using two injections to make it look like a bite. Grissom recalls that Greg found a syringe in Dreama's room and she's brought back in for questioning. Brass tells her about the snake venom and drops the bomb that her DNA was found on the needle that was used to inject Happy. He also says he knows that she and Connor planned it together but Connor blamed her for the whole thing. She doesn't believe it, saying that Connor's in love with her and wouldn't give her up. However, she plays right into Brass' hands and says it was her idea because Connor's not smart enough to think of it, and that she caught and milked the rattler herself. In his interrogation, Connor says Dreama might have come up with the idea, but he's the one who actually injected the venom into Happy and then dumped his unconscious body.

Later, Grissom tells Catherine and Nicky that the DA doesn't know who will be charged for Happy's death and they need to work out an accurate timeline. Going through the evidence, they recap the events as they likely happened. First, Dreama and Connor gave Happy his "snake bite." Waking up, Happy staggered back to confront Dreama but ran into Doris, who comforted Happy with an allergic blow job. Going into anaphylactic shock, he's heading back to his trailer for an epi shot when Connor fires an arrow into his neck. Happy makes it back to his trailer, gives himself the epi injection, but instead of calling it a night he heads back out to Dreama's room where she bashes him on the head with the crowbar. Finally giving up, he makes it over to a chair by the side of the pool, finds a cigarette, and lights up. Smoke disgustingly billows out of the holes in his neck as he relaxes, then loses consciousness. The chair leg snaps, pitching him into the pool where he drowns. So, technically speaking, everyone and no one is responsible for his death or, as Nicky figures a good defense lawyer will say, "the lawn chair did it." In the morgue, Doc Robbins is coming to the same conclusion as he types up his report, listing Happy's cause of death as "Unknown/cardiac arrest."