US Television: Blue Bloods, Episode 1.20 "All That Glitters"

Blue Bloods
Season One, Episode Twenty:  All That Glitters
Original Air Date:  April 29, 2011

When a tourist to New York City is killed during an apparent robbery outside a trendy lower-east-side restaurant, Danny and Jackie begin an investigation into the extremely high-profile case.  The evidence leads them to a Haitian immigrant who, by all means, looks perfect for being the suspect.  However, things become more complicated when the immigrant, an ex-policeman himself, gives them evidence that very well could mean the murder was more than a crime of opportunity.

A couple from Iowa, Lance and Margaret "Maggie" Olson (George Merrick & Tara Westwood), are dining at a trendy lower-east-side restaurant and discussing the fun day of sightseeing they had.  The waitress, Maya (Elizabeth Fye), comes to the table to close out for the evening.  Lance pays the bill and gives her a very generous tip while discussing his business back home.  He grows corn that is turned into ethanol.  He mentions having his after-dinner cigar and the waitress tells him to not have it in front of the restaurant because the smoke gets in and the customers hate it but to instead go down a little way to the left.  He promises Maggie he will be back before she can finish eating.

Erin Reagan arrives late to dinner with her father.  She is out of sorts because an old case has come back to haunt her.  Ian Boyd was shot dead that day by a convenience store owner he was trying to rob after he shot a young woman in the store who tried to warn the owner that she had seen a gun on Boyd.  She feels guilty that because she lost Boyd's last robbery case he was able to be back on the streets to rob and kill again.

Lance is enjoying his cigar and doesn't notice a man wearing a hood walk up a few steps away.  The hooded man takes a gun from his pocket while, inside, Maggie is speaking with another diner (Julia Haubner) about the cuisine at the restaurant.  Shots ring out as the ladies are talking and Maggie gets up and runs outside.  The hooded man runs past her and she sees her husband on the ground and begs for people nearby to call 911.

Danny Reagan and Jackie Curatola arrive to investigate the shooting.  Danny gets the details from a uniformed officer.  After the shooting, the diners inside the restaurant went back to eating their meals.  Lance was shot three times and all of his money and credit cards were taken.  He's at St. Benjamin's Hospital in critical condition.  The gun hasn't been found and in the canvass, some residents were sleeping and the ones who weren't didn't think it was that big of a deal.  Danny orders a second canvass in the event someone didn't answer the door and to widen the search perimeter for the weapon.

At the Reagan house, Frank and his father discuss Erin's bad news.  When Henry suggests some coffee Frank tells him if he wasn't awake he would be now as a message came in on his phone about Lance Olson's shooting.

Danny and Jackie go to see Maggie Olson at the hospital.  They ask if she saw anything and she tells them about hearing the gunshots and running outside.  She blames herself for dragging him to New York as she enjoyed the city so much when visiting with a friend.  After a second question of seeing anything from Jackie she mentions seeing the man wearing the hood that could have been blue walk past her as she came out of the restaurant.  Danny asks about Lance paying the bill with cash and asks if he usually carried large amounts of money.  She admits that her husband likes to pay with cash as he said businesses appreciated it.  Jackie asks who might have known he had a lot of cash on him.  She says they got into town, stayed at the hotel all night as this was kind of a second honeymoon for them.  She mentions the bell man, the cab driver and the waitress at the restaurant.

Jamie Regan and Sgt. Renzulli are at the scene where a 74 year-old homeless man was found dead.  Renzulli estimates he's been dead at least a day based upon the condition of the body.  Jamie stops Dr. Laura Trent (Jennifer Restivo) to ask about the death.  She found insulin on the body which indicated early on complications from diabetes but she found neon-green fluid in the mouth which could have been anti-freeze.  Tests at the lab will confirm if it is truly a homicide.  When Trent leaves, Renzulli, who has been watching the conversation teases Jamie for hitting on her over a dead body.

Garrett Moore (Gregory Jbara) arrives in Frank's office to point out that tourism is important to New York and is based on a sort of safari model.  The tourists want to get close to the lions and tigers but don't want one of them to eat them.  Moore insists Frank will have to play to the house on the Olson shooting just enough to show he shares the outrage over the incident.  Garret tells him he can stall until Monday without looking like they are stalling.  Frank wants a timely, but independent from case progress, press conference.  He wants no rush to judgment.

Danny has cleared the cab driver Maggie Olson named as his GPS had him in Yonkers at the time of the shooting.  Jackie is looking into the waitress, Maya.  She has no record but cannot be found.  She will not answer her phone or door.  Danny sees her as a possibility as she saw Olson's money and could have called an accomplice.  There were four armed robberies in the neighborhood in the past year.  Two are unsolved, one suspect is in Rykers and the fourth, Brian Stratton (Marc Bonan) walked because the victim didn't show up.  Jackie, who is still looking at Maya's information, sees that Brian Stratton is her emergency contact.  She finds that Stratton's number was called from the restaurant phone just before Maya clocked out.

They go to Maya's address and hear loud music coming from the apartment and the door open.  They go inside and find her and Stratton apparently on ecstasy and dancing to the music.  Jackie gets the call that Lance Olson died and they take the two in on questioning in a murder.

As Erin Reagan leads Maggie Olson from the hospital, the press converges on the two women.  Erin pushes them back saying Mrs. Olson has suffered a terrible loss and will have the full resources of the city at her disposal and gives them her word that the person responsible will be brought to justice.  Danny and Jackie watch the exchange on television then go in to question Maya and Brian.  Danny asks Maya what the plan was.  She tells him there was no plan.  They just went and scored some E.  Brian maintains that all he did was go to pick Maya up from work but Jackie maintains that all the expensive things in their apartment and all they spend on drugs has to come from somewhere.  He insists they didn't rob anyone.  Danny continues working on Maya and she asks if he'll go easy on the drugs and everything.  He tells her he'll see what he can do but she needs to tell him the truth.  She tells him that every once in a while they will get a bunch of customer credit card numbers and sell them for extra cash.  The guy she works with waits before using them so they won't track back to her.  He asks about the shooting and she insists they had nothing to do with it.  Brian picked her up from work and they went to East River Park to score some drugs.  He asks if she saw anyone outside the restaurant.  She says she didn't but admits that a couple of blocks away they saw a black guy tearing down the street in a hoodie that could have been blue and almost ran over him on Brian's Vespa.  With Jackie, Brian confirms the story.  Danny asks Maya if she can remember the face enough to work with a sketch artist and she tells him waiting tables you get a good memory for faces.

At the press conference, Frank reveals that extra uniformed officers and anti-crime teams have been rotated into popular tourist areas in the lower-east-side and other areas famous for nightlife destinations.  A reporter asks if it is acting too little, too late.  Frank replies it is acting appropriately to a tragic incident and stresses he's seen no uptick in the statistics they use that indicates Olson's death was part of a trend or wave.  Another reporter asks if Frank can honestly say the effect of the murder and profile of the city and tourism dollars they depend on can be minimized by his departments comforting statistics.  Frank lays things out plainly.  A well-to-do white male was murdered and it could be said, with a slant, that New York is a city of roaming predators and mean streets to sell newspapers and advertising minutes.  From his standpoint, all crimes, no matter what they are, are all equally unacceptable and the police try every day to do all they can to prevent them from happening again.

Jackie is able to confirm Maya and Brian's alibi as she found the drug dealer in the park and he identified them from pictures she showed him.  Danny received the artists sketch of the man Maya described and has gotten it into the hands of every officer on the lower-east-side.  Danny gets a call that a bodega owner (David Brown) recognized the sketch.  When they speak with the man, he gives them the name Pierre (Gbenga Akinnagbe), a Haitian man who drives a cab 12 hours a day then jogs the neighborhood afterward.  He gives them the name of the cab company Pierre works for, Steady Cabs, and says Pierre told him he only gets paid $80 for his full 12-hour shift and tells them that while most of his customers are a pain, Pierre is one of the good ones.

They go to the address given to them by the cab company and Pierre's wife answers the door.  When she turns to tell him the police want to speak with him he runs.  Danny gives chase inside the apartment and Jackie heads outside as Pierre goes through the apartment window.  They finally corner him in a gated parking lot and he maintains he did nothing wrong.  As they pull into the precinct parking lot with Pierre, the reporters begin swarming over the car.

In interview, Danny points out that innocent people do not run from the police and notes that he was thrown off the Haitian police force for stealing, something Pierre vehemently denies.  He tells them he was trapped in the earthquake for three days and prayed to live.  A man told him he was sent by God to dig and dug day and night until he found him and he knew from that point on he must always be a good man.  When he saw the others on the force stealing he told on them.  They made up the lies to silence him.  Danny asks if he saw or heard anything near the restaurant at the time of the shooting.  There was a man who walked past him quickly and turned his head away as if he didn't want to be seen.  His clothes didn't match.  He wore a big hoodie on the top and nice trousers on the bottom and shiny leather shoes, something he found strange.

The press runs with the story of Pierre's arrest.  Jackie learned from Pierre's wife that since she lost her job, her husband was more and more desperate for money.  Danny feels that Pierre was a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Jackie thinks everything points to his guilt but Danny insists it doesn't feel right.  Erin arrives at their desks asking about the good suspect she's heard they have in custody.  Danny informs her it is a matter of opinion, which, at the moment, is split.  Erin wants them to go back to Maggie Olson to see if she can identify the suspect, something Danny is reluctant to do since she didn't get a good look at the man at the time of the shooting and Pierre's face has been all over the television.  Erin insists that Maggie Olson should have the chance to try and identify the suspect, if she can.  Danny reluctantly agrees.

Jamie pays a visit to Dr. Trent to ask a favor.  He says he misplaced his notebook from the homeless man's death scene and wants to know if she can log him onto the system from her end so his boss won't know.  She does and, instead of researching the homeless man's case, he does a search for Lydia Gonsalves so he can read her death report.

Garrett Moore and Frank Reagan are under fire from the mayor's office about Frank's comments at the press conference.  The mayor wants a clarifying statement but Moore maintains every reporter at the conference understood what Frank was saying and there is nothing to clarify.  It's made clear the mayor requested the clarification, end of story.  Frank replies with a comment that the Commissioner regrets not making it clear that tourists needed to exercise reasonable caution in emerging neighborhoods where the underprivileged are being pushed out.  Where a bodega that still accepts food stamps sits next to a restaurant that gets $50 a plate for macaroni and cheese.  The mayor's representative gives up but she informs them the mayor will not and leaves.  When she's gone, Moore tells Frank he's an idiot and his position won't be compromised by embracing the fact tourism is good for New York City.

Danny and Erin go to Maggie Olson's hotel room and are met at the door by Maggie's sister, Leslie (Tracy Swallows).  She introduces them to her husband Mark (Greg Connolly) and Carl Perry (John Patrick Hayden), a friend of the family.  When she goes to get Maggie, Danny asks the men if they are from Iowa also.  Mark says they are and tells them they haven't had a murder in his town for five years and criticises the city for luring people there with fancy advertising and putting a fancy restaurant in a hell-hole while armed criminals roam the streets.  Leslie returns with Maggie and Erin tells her they could use her help if she's up to it.  She asks if anything has come back to her about the man she saw running from her husband.  When Erin says they'd like to put her in front of a line-up to see if anything jogs her memory, Maggie asks about them having arrested someone.  Erin asks if she saw anything about it on the news and Maggie says she hasn't as she can't bear to watch it.  Erin turns to give Danny a promising look then asks Maggie if she could handle a line-up.  Maggie says she will do anything to put Lance's killer behind bars.  At the precinct, five men walk into a line-up and Danny instructs Maggie to look at all the men and tell him if she recognizes any of them.  She identifies #5, Pierre, and Danny asks where she recognizes him from.  She identifies him as the man she saw running away from Lance.  When she leaves, Erin is pleased she was able to identify Pierre, but Danny doesn't feel the same.  He thinks they just served him up on a silver platter but Erin is pushing ahead.

At the Reagan family dinner, Nicky mentions reading eye witness testimonies are responsible for a lot of wrongful convictions.  Jamie and Henry point out that eye witnesses are the best bet in criminal cases and carry a lot of weight.  Danny points out that is fine as long as the witnesses saw what they say they did.  He finds it strange that Maggie didn't see a face then, after Pierre's face was plastered all over the television she suddenly remembered it.  Danny's kids say they saw Pierre on television and he just looked liked a scary bad guy.  He explains that you can't tell if someone is bad just by looking at them.  Jamie tells Erin she's in the worst position there but Danny disagrees and says the Haitian guy is the one in the worst position.  In the kitchen, Erin hastily does the dishes and puts them away as Danny enters and takes a cup from the cupboard.  Frank calls them down for their huffy behavior and asks Danny what makes him think Pierre is innocent.  Danny says he doesn't know for a fact Pierre is innocent but he thinks with all the pressure on the case he can use a devil's advocate on the inside as he gave them a good clue that only a good cop would know about.  Frank asks if that leads them to another suspect.  Danny admits it opens the door to the possibility that maybe it wasn't just another street crime.  Erin maintains Pierre has motive and opportunity and Maggie has identified him and she can't understand why Danny wants to complicate things.  Frank advises Danny to not let the fact Pierre is an ex-cop with a hard luck story to cloud his judgment and he says he isn't.  When Erin tells him he is, Frank interjects that she can't undo what happened with Ian Boyd with the Olson case, or any case.  After some thought, she asks if Danny is going to back off Pierre.  He assures her if he is the guy he wants him as bad as she does.  He also promises she will have solid evidence by the book if Pierre isn't the guy.  She quietly tells him she will hold off on the indictment.

Jackie and Danny go back to speak with Maggie Olson to tie up a few loose ends.  She asks if it will take long as she needs to meet with people to sign transfer papers to take Lance's body home.  Jackie tells her they are looking at the case from every angle before wrapping it up.  Danny informs her they've been looking at the shooting as a crime of opportunity but they wanted to at least consider the fact perhaps it wasn't random.  He asks if Lance had any enemies and she says he didn't.  Jackie tells her they revisited Lance's phone records, especially while he was in New York, but they decided to go back a few months and found a lot of calls to Carl Perry.  She explains Carl and Lance did business together.  Danny urges her to be honest with them as when they accessed Carl's phone records they found a lot of calls to her home at times when Lance's business records shows he wasn't home and her credit card records show three weekends at a Hotel Mandolin and she wasn't there with her husband and they have the hotel confirming she was actually with Carl.  She admits Lance was away so much and Carl thought he was in love with her.  The affair was wrong and stupid but she broke it off and swore to herself she'd make it up to Lance.  The trip was about that.  She thinks it's impossible Carl could have killed her husband but Danny points out jealousy is a strong motive.

At the precinct, Carl sees Maggie arrive and Jackie take her into another room.  Danny paces by his desk until Jackie comes back with what she learned from Maggie.  She and Carl met at a dinner for one of Lance's bio-fuel investors and there was a spark she just couldn't ignore.  At the hotel, she learned Carl was a junkie for champagne and breakfast in bed and bacon, extra-crispy.  Danny goes in to speak with Carl hoping they can use something to get at the truth.  He thanks Carl for the list of Lance's business associates then asks him about the fact he's a pilot.  He asks that, since he does preparation and planning as a pilot, if he would do a dry run if he wanted to kill someone.  He gets up to leave but Danny pushes him back into the chair.  Danny reveals he knows about the affair and drops that Maggie is saying a lot of things about him including what she told Jackie about their time at the hotel.  He also says she talked about the dry run he did.  Danny shows him a receipt belonging to Carl from the same restaurant where Lance was killed.  Carl explains the dinner as a meeting with Ray Lawrence on a business trip to New York and advises Danny to ask him about it.  He did and Ray told him Carl chose the restaurant.  Danny also knows that Carl asked a waiter where someone would go if they wanted to smoke, as Lance did.  Carl asks what him eating at the same restaurant as Lance and having a smoke there proves.  Danny tells him it proves everything Margaret is saying:  Carl wanted to be with her and he wanted Lance's money, too.  Jackie enters the room and asks how it's going and Danny tells her it is up to Carl.  Danny and Jackie talk about Maggie's convincing story and he tells Carl it would be a real shame if Maggie was able to pull it over on him, too.  Carl insists they are trying to manipulate him.  Danny gets up to leave saying Maggie gets her freedom and Lance's money while Carl gets 25 to life unless he has some info that contradicts her story.

Danny and Jackie go back in to speak with Maggie who wants to get back to the hotel.  He tells her to sit down and tells her Carl confessed to shooting Lance.  She becomes upset and asks why he would do it.  Danny shows her a phone which she identifies as belonging to Carl.  He plays a message where she called Carl and told him to fly her sister there and everyone would feel so sorry for her and then they'll be home free.  She claims the message isn't what it sounds like.  Jackie tells her Carl had an ace in the hole:  he kept a few choice messages she had left for him.  When Danny tells her he hates it when people do bad things and blame it on his city, she tells him she wants a lawyer.

Frank meets with Garrett at a bar and takes out a paper and begins to read.  It is a press release for Garrett's resignation.  All it needs is Frank's signature.  Frank tells him that, all-in-all, it's much better than the last one and asks Garrett if he has a pen.  Garrett takes one out of his pocket and hands it to Frank who draws a big "X" over the paper and slams the pen down then orders a drink on Garrett's bill.  Danny goes to visit Erin at her office, not to gloat, but to tell her Nicky was with Linda and the boys and they have a corner table at Chops.  He helps her on with her coat and the two leave for dinner.

Blue Bloods airs on Friday nights at 10:00 p.m. (Eastern time) on CBS.
For more information:
Blue Bloods Official Site:  http://www.cbs.com/primetime/blue_bloods/
The Internet Movie Database:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1595859/
TV Rage:  http://www.tvrage.com/Blue_Bloods