The Ledger

7.10 Legacy

In this somewhat memorable episode (7.10), a harmless-looking witness turns out to be a hitman responsible for several murders. Briscoe and Curtis investigate and McCoy and Cheekbones (Ross) put together a case.

The episode begins with a mother and her young daughter returning home from a birthday dinner for the daughter. Soon after, they hear gunfire on the street. Turns out it's the woman's husband. Briscoe and Curtis arrive on the scene and question various witnesses, including a nebbishy guy with a small white dog who identifies himself as Paul Sacket, a podiatrist. He says he saw a man he can't describe running away.

The husband is still alive, but has been shot in the head. Ballistics matches the bullet from his head to another bullet from a murder 2 years earlier. They talk to the original detective in the case, who refers them to the original victim's wife. She recalls seeing a man who matches Sacket's description and she remembers his dog! Van Buren produces a sketch of the dog, and Briscoe thinks back to his encounter with Sacket and realizes that Sacket was concealing his gun in a bag he said was filled with dog poop.

The dets continue their investigation by talking to the now-conscious victim outside the presence of his wife. He has no idea why someone would kill him, he says, so the detectives go back to trying to track down the man who called himself Sacket, which they now know was an alias. They visit a cigar store owner near the crime scene who saw Sacket and remembers him purchasing a specific kind of cigar ("Avil Pyramids" or something). They visit the few other tobacconists in the city who sell this kind of cigar, and one of them knows Sacket as "Howard." They stake-out the cigar store, and Howard eventually shows up, and they follow him to his home. Based on his address, they learn his name is Howard Phillips.

They continue to investigate and learn that the wife's first husband died while rock-climbing in Central Park. They talk to the wife's former mother-in-law Estelle (played by that actress who looks like Jessica Tandy), who was at the birthday dinner, too. She blames the new husband (the victim) for her son Rick's death in Central Park. Meanwhile, the wife is also interviewed, and based on the information yielded, the detectives conclude that Estelle hired Phillips to kill the new husband. They connect her to the hitman Phillips via her dead husband, who was a criminal lawyer.

The detectives talk to McCoy and Cheekbones to figure out how to proceed. They learn that Estelle's husband knew a loan shark named Morelli, and that another character, Bronson, connected Estelle to the hitman. Bronson, under pressure, admits this to police. This leads to a set-up of Estelle in which Briscoe goes undercover and pretends to be the hitman that didn't finish the job. While wearing his trademark undercover brown leather jacket he gets her to admit that she set up the shooting, and they arrest her. (28 mins)

The prosecution gets complicated when the US attorney steps in and announces they want to prosecute the hitman because they need him to testify against the mob. Estelle says she'll plead guilty to hiring the hitman if they pursue the new husband in the "accidental" death of the original husband (her son). She is very convinced that he's responsible. Ross interviews various people to determine whether the new husband, Mr. Shepherd, was having an affair with the wife while the original husband was still alive. She talks to a skeezy former roommate who apparently was a real player with the ladies, and flirts -- if you can call his ogre-ish passes "flirting" -- fruitlessly with Ross. Nonetheless, they can't gather any solid evidence of an affair, but they do determine that the first husband, Rick, was killed by a blow to the head with a baseball bat, not a fall from a high point. Based on this, they arrest Shepherd (42 mins) while he's in rehab for his injuries. On the stand, the ex-roommate changes his story about how he knew Shepherd was pursuing the wife, and this sends Ross scrambling to find another link between the two. She learns that they were both in Harrisburg, PA one weekend, but it turns out they weren't there to have an affair. To the contrary, Shepherd was essentially stalking the wife, but told her it was a coincidence that they encountered each other there. She realizes that her new husband, Shepherd, had been plotting to be with her all along and that he killed her beloved first husband. Shepherd is found guilty after 1.5 hours of jury deliberation, and she files for divorce.

Casting notes: the hitman broker Mr. Bronson is played by Mark Margolis, a very recognizable character actor who actually shot Phil Cerreta in Cerreta/Sorvino's last episode on the show.

Posted by adm at May 9, 2004 11:48 PM

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