Women's Murder Club: Grannies, Guns and Love Mints (Episode 4)

Jill, Claire and Cindy (and from the other side of the tv, myself) are all hounding Lindsay about the date she had on last week’s episode – if you recall she met with a handsome kitty saving firefighter. But again, she’s evasive about her affairs and remains tight lipped.

This date seems to have given the rest of her male co-workers the push they needed to ask Lindsay out. This motivates Lindsay to climb onto her desk and give a little speech about how this lone date doesn’t mean she’s back on the market. She also takes the opportunity to instruct one particularly presumptuous officer Phong, to refrain from staring at her butt. Don’t you hate it when you get asked on dates when you’re trying to work a crime scene? Or when you get asked out so much you’re forced to announce to your whole office to stop pining for you? … I’m just saying she’s not doing her clitoris any favours. However, staring is never polite. Phong’s a pooper.

Anyhow, Claire finds something disturbing while performing a routine autopsy on an elderly woman, Edna James, who was found dead on a plane coming back from Mexico. The cause of death is a drug overdose from a ruptured heroine balloon. Granny was a drug mule! Ah, kids these days…

Lindsay and Jacobi go to Edna’s snazzy nursing home where they meet more than a few colourful geriatric characters. For example, there is a charming Alzheimer’s patient Winnie Spectre who believes Lindsay is her daughter. There’s also Harold, the wrinkly man with an overactive sex drive. The attending nurse actually said that he’s walked in on things no man should ever have to see. I think I speak for everyone when I say, “Ew.” That’s just not right.

Moving along… Lindsay and Jacobi interview the head administrator, Alan Douglas a.k.a. the doctor on Voyager – I love you Janeway! Sorry, I just geeked out a little bit. I’m done now. So Douglas says a group of seniors all went down to Mexico because one of their deceased roomies left them some money for a little fun in the sun.

Next stop is Reese Bentley’s house. She is the nursing home’s social director who accompanied the vacationing seniors to Mexico. Also, she hasn’t shown up to work since she found out about Edna’s death, *raise eyebrow here.* Well, she won’t be coming to work ever again. Lindsay and Jacobi find her dead with a gash to the head. They also find heroin, syringes and a scale. All signs point to Bentley as the drug mule instigator.

After having run the appropriate tests, Claire finds that Reese died of an overdose from the same strain of heroin found in Edna. However, Claire swears Reese is not a drug user. She was perfectly healthy.

Claire also finds the heroine is cut with some extremely lethal stuff. A lot of junkies have actually been turning up dead from this spiked heroine, including Jill’s old law school friend. She is completely heartbroken. They were very close: she had helped him get his act together before he fell off the wagon. This makes her doubt her already tenuous belief in the concepts of everlasting love and happiness. But Claire manages fixing it in a short pep talk. She basically tells her shit happens but friends and family help you get through the tough times. Claire’s husband was shot and forced into a wheelchair, but they got through it. This leads to a heart to heart between Jill and her boyfriend. She tells him she’s still not ready to have children, but she does want to grow old with him. See? We’re growing people!

But back to the crime at hand. Harold the geriatric womaniser turns up unconscious. He barely survives a bought of insulin induced hypoglycaemia. Somebody must have spiked his apple sauce. He tells Lindsay he may have been a target because he was “asking too many questions.” Ah, the man-who-knew-too-much syndrome. He had found out all the people who went to Mexico had had some money problems. They were being threatened with eviction from the nursing home by Douglas the administrator. Further, he actually caught Harold snooping in his office. Harold also tells Lindsay how Edna lost all her money: her son-in-law Denis, owner of the landscaping company which does work for the nursing home, kept milking her for money.

Claire also happened to find something interesting in her office. Denis came to collect Edna’s belongings and tracked in the same kind of dirt found at Reese’s apartment.

Meanwhile Cindy and Jill do some research. They find out Douglas was once trained as a nurse at a Mexican university. He was also in a lot of financial trouble: he had secretly invested some of the nursing home’s assets so he could keep the profits for himself. Unfortunately for him, he made some bad investment choices and lost it all. As for Denis, he did indeed have money problems, so much so he was forced to hire a bunch of ex cons as his employees.

So Lindsay grills Denis like it’s nobody’s business and in no time flat, he cracks. Douglas had the Mexico connection, and Denis had connections with local dealers through his ex-con employees. He says the old folks went along with it, as long as they were reassured they’d be allowed to stay at the nursing home. After Edna’s death, Douglas brought him to Reese’s house because Douglas suspected she knew something. Then, Douglas killed and framed her.

Lindsay and Jacobi proceed to make their way to the old home to find Douglas. A chase ensues finishing with Lindsay jumping into a pond and cuffing Douglas underwater. I’ll go ahead and give the writers the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure they wrote that scene to show off Lindsay’s spiffy underwater cuffing skills and not to get her in a wet t-shirt.

Finally, everybody goes out with their respective dates. Jill has dinner with Luke, Claire invites Cindy over to eat Chinese food with her family, and Lindsay takes out Winnie from the nursing home. We end the show with some wise words from the elderly lady: the best way to mend a broken heart is to fall in love with someone new… Or have a torrid affair with a total stranger. Fo sho Winnie, fo sho.