The Ledger

13.8 Asterisk

In this episode (13.8), a baseball star is the lead suspect in the murder of his limo driver. Why'd he do it? Briscoe and Green investigate. The episode loosely mirrors the case of Jayson Williams, the former basktetball star currently on trial for the apparently accidental killing of his own limo driver.

The episode begins with some young women picking up garbage in Central Park as part of their community service for a minor drug offense. As they talk, one of them discovers the body of the victim, whose neck has been snapped and is who is lacking a wallet or ID. All that's left is a scrap of paper with a to do list on it which Green decodes and focuses on the last item, "flowers for Susie." The victim also has a large tattoo of his dragon on his back. They stop by a tattoo parlor to determine who might have created the tattoo, but the proprietor says the artist is dead. They then check out another of the victim's tattoo's -- Japanese characters -- with a female Japanese detective, who tells them it says "Ike" (pronounced "ee-kay") which means both "life" and is a nickname for "Ikedo." Green puts two and two together and calls up directory assistance, asking for "Susie Ikedo." Bingo! It's the victim's girlfriend.

Susie tells the detectives that her bf had had some rough times in his life, but was now clean and straight. She tells them that he was working as a limo driver. They check the limo company, and the owner tells them that the victim had been out the previous night driving to Atlantic City with Kevin Seleeby, a young baseball star whom both Briscoe and Green apparently admire. They question Seleeby who seems cooperative. Back at the precinct, Lt. Van Buren chides the detectives for their hero worship of Seleeby and tells them to take a closer look at him.

The detectives check back with the girlfriend who tells them about a former meth dealer called "Doc" who the victim used to associate with. They visit him. He turns out to be a chemistry Ph. D. who has given up his meth lab in favor of a steroid lab. It begins to look like he was manufacturing steroids which the victim was selling to Seleeby. There's your motive, apparently.

The victim's limo, which had been missing, turns up, but is clean of forensic evidence. However, the odometer shows it had only travelled 10 miles, obviously too short a distance to account for a trip to Atlantic City. Looks like Seleeby lied to them.

They check in with Seleeby's agent and also his cousin, both of whom were with Seleeby the night of the incident. Their stories match down to the minute, a bit too convenient Briscoe and Green thing. Even the bartender's story matches theirs, and the detectives think that Seleeby got to everyone and asked them to change their stories. But a doorman at a hotel the trio visited tells the detectives that Seleeby arrived in a cab, not a limo. They bring in the cousin and the agent and question them separately. It's not long before the cousin rolls on Seleeby and tells what really happened: Seleeby had killed the driver for some reason, and called the cousin and the agent to help him cover it up. The detectives theorize that the victim was trying to blackmail Seleeby by threatening to go public with his steroid use, but they don't know for sure.

They arrest Seleeby (30 minutes into the ep), and he retains Alan Fenwick as his counsel. Fenwick and McCoy have a conversation about various professional athletes who have gone on trial for serious crimes -- OJ, Ray Lewis, Ray Carruth, Allan Iverson, etc. But the defense counsel says that his client is not guilty because of "steroid induced psychosis."

Skoda interviews Seleeby to see if this is true, and comes away sympathetic, though he does not conclude that Seleeby was actually psychotic. McCoy and Southerlyn still can't find a motive, however, until the defense counsel accidentally includes an internal memo in a psych. evaluation report they send to McCoy's office. Southerlyn takes the information from the memo -- a decision not to have someone testify -- and learns that Seleeby is gay and was involved in a relationship with the editor of a gay magazine. The new theory of the crime is that the victim somehow knew of this relationship and threatened to blackmail Seleeby with the info, so Seleeby killed him. Unfortunately for McCoy, crusty old Judge Bradley suppresses the memo and all the info that came from it, so McCoy is still left without a motive.

The trial begins (at 45 minutes in) and it doesn't go very well because McCoy has no motive. He tries to get the chemistry Ph. D. to testify, but the judge won't allow it because Fenwick tells the judge McCoy is going to argue that the victim was using Seleeby's steroid use to blackmail Seleeby, an argument McCoy knows to be false. Southerlyn gets mad at McCoy for attempting this back-door strategy, but McCoy makes it up to her by delivering a fine closing argument which results in a guilty verdict for Seleeby.

Posted by adm at April 9, 2004 05:42 PM

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