Photo: Michael Parmelee/CBS
Although each of the murders in Elsbeth so far has been driven by factors specific to the relationships between the killers and the killed, in the end, they’re all about how very poorly some people behave when they don’t get their own way. A spurned undergraduate is going to inform her dean about the lecherous professor/director who treats his cast members as his own private dating pool? Murder! A troublesome reality star threatening blackmail against the executive producer who plainly loathes her and all of her costars? Murder! An imperious and deeply irritating octogenarian refusing to relinquish her vise-like grip on her co-op? The only possible solution: Murder!
This week, it’s a greedy, unexpectedly sweet himbo from Teaneck who gets it in the neck. Well, in the skull, but that’s neck-adjacent! And why does this handsome fellow — known to his trust fund-rich wife Lainey Belfort as Gabriel Erwood and to everyone who knew him before they met as Dennis Pagano (Ryan Cooper) — meet a grisly fate at the hands of his co-conspirator, celebrity matchmaker Margo Clark (Retta!), and her handy brass statuette of Cupid? Because over the course of his 18 months with Lainey (Paloma Garcia-Lee), he had the misfortune of falling in honest-to-God, actual true love with her and couldn’t bear to file for divorce, as he had previously arranged with Margo.
As was the case in “Reality Shock,” the killing here is an unplanned crime of extreme vexation by a rank amateur among murderers. It’s just as well that New York isn’t chock full of people who know how to dispose of a corpse successfully at a moment’s notice, but it does make the job of detecting pretty easy. Elsbeth and Officer (perhaps Soon-To-Be-Detective) Kaya quickly arrive at a pretty clear idea of who (Margo) and how (smashy-smashy), giving them plenty of time to pursue why (money, control, staying out of prison for fraud) and where Margo has dumped the body and her weapon (some fishing waters close to shore at the Hamptons). A lot of Elsbeth’s actual detecting time is spent on the Hamptons jitney — not, as she had imagined, some old-timey trolley system, but “a really nice bus with a bathroom” — and in a gilded, glittering antiques shop with a very chatty owner.
More importantly for the season-long arc, she also has time to pursue her investigation into Captain Wagner and the charitable foundation he runs with his wife, Claudia Payne (Gloria Reuben!). Claudia is another glamorous New Yorker whose style and persona Elsbeth immediately wants to emulate. Like Margo, Claudia knows what she wants and insists very cleverly on getting it. Commandeering some of her husband’s schedule to go over seating arrangements for their upcoming gala fundraiser? Check. Tolerating no refusals when Elsbeth tries to get out of attending said gala? Check plus. Things go more smoothly for Claudia in this episode than they do for Margo, in part because of the higher status afforded to her as a slender, lighter-skinned Black woman who is the wife of a distinguished police captain, and in part because she seems to have far better impulse control than Margo.
We’re meant to like and root for Claudia, just as we are meant to like and root for Captain Wagner. Casting beloved character actors in these roles is a smart move, and it’s hard to imagine better choices than veterans like Gloria Reuben (the kind and ultra-competent Jeannie Boulet on ER) and Wendell Pierce (the boozing and unfaithful but fundamentally decent, justice-pursuing Baltimore PD Detective Bunk Moreland on The Wire). Their rapport is genuine and warm — Pierce’s face as he introduces Claudia and watches her in action is pure, adoring Wife Guy — and Claudia reciprocates Elsbeth’s instant liking for her. Absent this pesky secret corruption investigation Elsbeth is conducting, they could be friends!
Elsbeth and Officer Kaya eventually learn all of what we know and more as they pursue the truth about Gabriel/Dennis, starting with the impressive fake identity Margo developed for him. Under her guidance, Dennis Pagano of the Teaneck Paganos was transformed into Australian multi-millionaire cryptocurrency maven Gabriel Erwood. Unlike Dennis, who was “an Uber driver who never finished a semester of community college”, Gabriel was the university-educated son of a family in Brisbane (sadly estranged from each other). Also, unlike Dennis, Gabriel had perfect teeth, no tattoos, and was dedicated to physical fitness. He was, in other words, a true catch and was a dream man for Lainey because his entire personality was created by Margo for that express purpose.
And how did the meet-cute happen between these two schemers? A tale as old as time: they were arrested on the same day for different crimes (a his-and-hers package of shoplifting and shoving a police officer), booked at the same NYPD precinct and obliged to cool their heels in adjoining cells. The timing was perfect for both, as Lainey had just given Margo a deadline of just a few months to find her a just-right match or face the career devastation of Lainey outing her as a fraud, and Dennis was good raw material with an increasingly long rap sheet. Each of them was a good investment of money and time for the other, especially after they agreed to put an expiration date on their collaboration by having Gabriel divorce Lainey after one year of marriage.
If only Dennis hadn’t actually fallen in love with Lainey and decided to come clean with her rather than serve her with divorce papers! Put another way: if only he’d come clean with Lainey before informing Margo of his plan! Or yet a third way: if only Margo had thought for five minutes about hiring a remorseless shark of a PR rep to manage the fallout after she preemptively dropped Lainey as a client! Alas, none of these three fictional silly gooses reached out to request my sage advice!
Once again, the solution to the crime hinges on Officer Kaya’s ability to discern the larger truth embedded in a stack of file folders and Elsbeth’s knack for observing small and seemingly extraneous details. Without Dennis’s meticulous receipt-keeping and Arthur, the chatty antique dealer, it would have taken far longer to catch Margo out. Arthur’s comment about Margo’s replacement rug — in exactly the same colorway she’d had before, after Margo had already told Elsbeth she wanted a rug in a different shade — was one thing, but the Cupid statuette in a photo from a recent feature on her home in a recent interior design magazine is another.
It becomes even more of another thing when Elsbeth notices that the statuette is missing from Margo’s actual home, and an extra helping of another-ness when the exact replica that Margo rush-orders is not as exact as Arthur assured her it would be. The original statuette was made of fairly lightweight brass (all the better for administering fatal blunt force trauma) and featured three arrows in its quiver, symbolizing the three arrows necessary for a good love match (looks, money, and personality). The not-so-exact replica only has two arrows in its quiver and is made of far heavier solid bronze. Margo believes that the original, which had lost part of its third arrow to being lodged in Dennis’s skull, is long gone to a new home at the bottom of the ocean and that she’s mere inches from the finish line of this game of Catch Me If You Can, but Elsbeth has one more trick up her sleeve. Sure, Captain Wagner has denied her request for some NYPD divers to search for the statuette, but she’s nothing if not resourceful and friendly. The nice fishermen who found Dennis’s body were only too happy to return to their fishing spot with a metal detector, and what do you know? That darling little brass fellow turned right up.
Margo seems more offended than furious at having been caught. If she knew that Lainey had paid less than $50 for the brass knock-off she’d used to brain Dennis, she’d be even more annoyed. The not-so-exact copy set her back $60,000, and it didn’t even fool anyone!
Having solved the crime and reassured Lainey that even though he was a fraud who had also been maintaining a relationship with his longtime girlfriend in Teaneck, Gabriel/Dennis did genuinely love her, Elsbeth and Kaya head to the Payne Wagner Foundation’s gala. They both look stunning. In my selections for Outfits of the Episode: Elsbeth is wearing a dress made of stretchy, super-textured fabric with cape-style three-quarter sleeves, all in abstract swoops of black, red, pink, orange, and deep turquoise, while Kaya is sporting a long-sleeved black bodycon minidress that features lots of silver beading. After Lieutenant Noonan invites Kaya to regale the detectives with how she and Elsbeth solved the case, Elsbeth asks Claudia about the foundation and the identity of the important-looking man Captain Wagner is speaking with. He’s the owner of Flair-All, a successful fast fashion company. Wait, isn’t Flair-All where the irate Wally from a couple of episodes ago worked? Hm.
As Wagner and Claudia are falling asleep later that night, Claudia mentions how curious Elsbeth is. We close on Wagner’s suddenly horrified face as he realizes that he is now the prey Elsbeth is pursuing using her seemingly innocuous endless questions technique. Yikes!
• I don’t endorse amassing great knowledge of how to dispose of an inconvenient corpse, but if I did, I’d ask one Tom Ripley to be among those providing seminars on the subject. Without spoiling anything for those who may not yet have watched Netflix’s fun and stylish documentary series covering some of his 1960s Italian exploits, I think some of his techniques could have helped Margo avoid being carted off to prison.
• A very close second in my affections for Outfit of the Episode: Margo’s cream-and-camel ensemble when she bumps into Elsbeth at the antique shop. It’s the extra-wintry shearling version (complete with a very cozy hat) of one of Joanne Lennox of Joanne Lennox Realty’s looks from “A Classic New York Character.”
• I enjoy all of the very New York-specific geographic and cultural references in Elsbeth, but I must draw the line at this episode’s rampant slander against the great state of New Jersey. Most New Jersey residents do not have enemies at all, let alone ones the police would already be aware of in the unlikely event of our early demise, and we’ll thank Lainey Belfort for keeping her snobby presumptions about our finances to herself. Justice for the Garden State!
• Elsbeth herself snags the best line of the episode, remarking that lawyers and lawyers may not be the best romantic matches because they’re “always having sex on desks – you never see the stapler … ’til it’s too late.”
