Ever have a
really rough day at the office?
Maddie begins her first 'normal' weekday shift at Blue Moon, after the craziness of the pilot adventure, while the first client winds down his own career for a very different reason. Along the way, we get a look at some very different ideas of fate and what’s worthwhile to do with your life.
A man carrying flowers takes the bus to a hospital. The occupant of the room where he stops won’t be happy to see him.
The younger man greets the older gentleman in the sickbed. And pulls a gun. “Shut up,” the criminal says, “your time has come.”
The patient suddenly finds his strength and clobbers the attacker with a metal pan. He jumps up and assaults him with the IV bag. There is a struggle for the gun, which the older man recovers. It’s off down the hall, in a chase that ends in the linen room. “I know who you are. You’re Brewer, from Detroit.” He says he’ll kill the “stupid punk.” He knocks him out and throws him down the laundry chute.
Cut to a shot of Ms. Hayes starting her morning a little off schedule. She hops out of bed and gets ready. Then it’s into the miasma of the freeway. At last she reaches the office. Where it’s about as exciting as a graveyard. What’s going on? Why doesn’t anybody seem to be conducting any business?
Secretary Agnes Dipesto tries to put a brave face on it. She says things are a mite slow at the moment. A few years’ worth of moments, in fact. Nevertheless, Agnes cheerfully explains the routine around the place. A hairdresser comes by once a week; there’s a food delivery guy; and there’s a gym downstairs where a lot of people take classes. Says Maddie, “But when do we
work?”
There is someone else who could answer that question. Unfortunately, his response will probably be no help at all.
Dave is in his office across the way, gleefully tuning in to “Family Feud.” In comes Ms. Hayes. She asks him why the room outside seems so, well, inert.
“You look great,” David begins, bravely ignoring reality. “Did you check out the shower massage? Don’t thank me now…” He rambles on with his idea for a new tv show. “'Bus Station'!” He rattles off the cast he’d like to see, and sings music from “The Love Boat.”
Maddie isn’t exactly planning to set her recorder. She says there have been no calls or visitors while she’s been there. David scrambles to cover up. He was going to call someone, but the phones are out, and no one can come up because the elevators are on the fritz, and he was going to call the elevator repairman, but wouldn’t you know it—the phones are out!
Maddie doesn’t buy it. “There are no clients. There’s never
been a client!” She walks out, huffing in anger. David pleads that she isn’t giving things a chance. “I’m destitute, I should be selling my house!” Maddie yells.
David steps up with some vital information. Which, by the way, is a complete contradiction to everything he just said, but who’s counting? There’s a big client coming in, at 11:30. Ha ha! Day saved!
Maddie is pretty sure he is bluffing, but Addison snows her again, talking fast while he ushers her to her room. This gives him time to ask Agnes to hold the calls, and he bolts down to the elevators. Which don’t get there like they used to. They could stand a repairman, couldn’t they…
Dave rushes to the stairs, and in minutes emerges onto the street. He dashes through traffic and into another building. Across the way is Regency Investigations. Addison approaches the secretary and tells her the man sitting on a corner couch “has a bomb in his briefcase,” and could David help relieve them of the man's presence? Also, could he see the receptionist again when this is all over? It’s a yes on both counts. (Trust me. Dave has enough chutzpah to power a nuclear reactor.)
He uses the name “Mr. Tough.” But it’s fake. ;D
The gentleman, whom we recognize as the older man from the hospital, walks out with “Mr. Tough” and over to the other building. Dave cops to the truth and shakes the man’s hand.
Maddie is very pleased to meet an actual warm body who would like to use the agency’s services. The man keeps David’s secret. Addison shoots his boss a wiseacre grin.
Farley Wrye wants them to find his son, Michael. Farley says he is getting up there in years and wants to reconcile with the lad. He offers ten thousand dollars.
Maddie all of a sudden is a little warm to the idea of this crazy place. “We have a real case!” Dave, who must be equal parts happy and astonished he could carry it off, basks in the return of Maddie’s confidence.
“This is going to work! We’re really going to do this!” Ms. Hayes beams.
“Yes, we’re really going to do this,” Dave rejoins. “What do you think, I’m playing around here or something?” Um, hold that thought…Maddie runs to give him a hug. Dave, let’s say, is happy to accept the apology. ;D Only he has to do a little research before they’re off on the trail. He looks up ‘nefarious’: “Something unspeakably wicked.”
Maddie: “Unspeakably wicked?”
David: “That’s what it said.
Piece of cake!”
Maybe he shouldn’t eat dessert first.
They run all over town, to the cops and newspapers, but can’t find any information on the supposedly notorious Mr. Wrye. So Dave decides to look for a hoodlum in the natural environment. A dive bar. “Kind of a hiring hall for ex-cons,” Dave says, reeling off a list of the reprobates you could meet inside. He gets out. Alone. Maddie asks why he won’t take her along.
“Keep your head down, the windows locked, and don’t play the radio,” Addison tells her. “It kills the battery.” This is the first sign of, yes, chivalry—of David being very old-fashioned and wanting to keep Maddie from getting in any trouble. It’s also the first time Maddie interprets it as being condescending and unfair.
She waits a few seconds before getting out anyway. “I don’t have to wait. It’s my car, and my detective agency!”
“You are going to get
such a licking when your father gets home,” David grumbles.
“What’s the point of being boss if everybody’s always telling you what to do?”
David says the bar is too dangerous for someone like her. Maddie says she can change her looks—she used to do that for a living. Not good enough, David warns. “This bar is full of punks and killers!”
“Don’t you want me to meet your friends?” Maddie jokes.
“
They’re not my friends!”, David snaps. Right away, he doesn’t want to leave a bad impression on her, doesn’t want her to think he’s that bad of a guy. He’s not
quite as insensitive as he looks. Sometimes. “You just don’t have the right attitude. This is not something someone can tell you. You either have it…” He waves smugly at himself. “Or you don’t.” To her.
Maddie is hardly comforted by this. She stalks off. “We can just forget about this whole detective business. You can just take me home.” David follows. He also, right away in their career, hates the idea of not having an opportunity to make it look like he’s trustworthy and good at what he does. He wants to keep her around. So he does whatever it takes. Or asks her to.
First she’ll need to readjust her attire…
David tells Maddie she won’t need the top buttons on her shirt. Then there’s the hair. “Girls with attitude don’t have a ‘do like that.
Nuns and librarians don’t have a ‘do like that. Shake it.”
Hardly thrilled, but keen to go on the case, Maddie follows instructions. “I’m going to tell Mr. Bruce that you did this,” she threatens, then shakes her hair anyway.
That taken care of, David moves to the matter of her skirt. Literally. He tears one side of it, exposing her leg, then has her walk to show off his handiwork. Appalled, yet wanting to get on with it, Maddie strolls past him, and has to trudge through a puddle on the way. Perhaps a visual joke about how David is not such a gentleman after all—since a real man of the old times would have thrown his coat over the muck?
All in all, it works. They get inside. The bar is just as dodgy as Ms. Hayes feared. David walks up to the bartender and tries to fast-talk him into being free with the liquor. It doesn’t go over very well. The man picks up Addison and hurls him into a table. David struggles to get up off the wreckage.
“You don’t belong here!” the bartender shrieks. Ironically, it’s David who didn’t look the part of a regular, whereas once Maddie starts talking, and she is direct but more polite, her method works. The bartender asks them to go to the back room and talk.
“How do you want it to look?” the man asks.
“Want what to look?” they say.
“The body!” he returns. Michael Wrye is only the best contract killer around.
Suddenly it’s not so much fun anymore. David, on the way out, tells Maddie, he “wants off this case.” Oh?
Back to the Blue Moon office. David is in his room. In comes Maddie to say that Farley Wrye would like to take her to dinner.
David says he’s not so sure he wants to find Michael. The man is, after all, a hired killer, and won’t be so happy to be found out. He also riffs Maddie for wanting to go out with the senior Wrye.
“There’s something rather—“
“Old?”
“Distinguished about him,” Maddie finishes.
Addison questions if Hayes will be able to bring herself to say the whole truth of the story. “Your son is a murderer” is, after all, some pretty rough news to impart. Maddie insists she can do it, even though she’s nervous.
David offers to drive her there and wait at the restaurant. In case she can’t go ahead with the difficult words, he’ll step in and finish the job.
“A nice meal like this can take two, two-and-a-half hours!” Maddie states. “You would wait in your car all that time?”
David nods. “We’re partners, right?”
Oh my.
So they go to the restaurant, where Farley is full of interesting stories. He was in France during the war, and helped the resistance. “Sabotaged power plants, blew up trains, assassinated SS officers,” Wrye tells her.
Maddie is stunned. “What did you do after the war?”
Wrye says he became a musician, playing piano in bars. It made for interesting friendships. ;D Dinner, however, does not agree with him. Farley starts to choke. Once he recovers, he says that he hasn’t got long to live anyway. “It’s not the dying, it’s the living. If anybody ever gives you a choice between dying slow and dying fast, take the express.” Now, he wants to know, how’s his son?
Next shot is Maddie rushing outside to get help from David. ;D
Addison wants to know if she had the guts to say it. She did not. And she lets him know at a rather high volume. Her ear-piercing shriek causes him to flip up the sound on the car stereo. Then he asks if she at least could tell Farley they wanted to drop the case. No go on this either. Another scream from her, and David pumps the dial once more. “Great, now we’re
all going to die. Maybe we can get a group rate at the cemetery!”
“Just because his son’s a killer doesn’t mean he isn’t a nice person!” Maddie complains. She says she told Farley that they were still working on the file and had a solid lead. Technically, that wouldn’t be a lie. They “both made a promise, to find that man’s son!”
David says he did no such thing. “I know what a promise is, and I didn’t make one!”
“Well, I did,” Maddie avers. It’s another sign of their differing senses of commitment and gravity. Furious, she bolts out of the car.
“
Madeline,” he calls to her, “I thought we were just having a stimulating conversation. Where are you going?” He looks genuinely miffed that she would want to get out of there. Maybe he wasn’t that mad or skeptical of her abilities all along.
“Addison, we don’t belong in business together,” she laments. “We don’t think alike. We don’t agree on anything.”
Ah, but they do, he insists. There are a lot of things in life they share. Although it’ll take a while to get to some of them. ;D Maddie smiles in spite of herself. He wins her over with his crazy sense of humor. The man is relentless—a lesson Hayes will learn over again the rest of the time she is with him. They get back in the car. “If I get killed,” Dave warns, “I am never speaking to you again.”
“Is that a promise?”
Again they stop at Blue Moon. He walks in singing the Love Boat theme some more, back on his riff about the new show he’s planning—only this time, it’s “Parking Lot.” Maddie runs away with it, ribbing him about the actors, the characters ‘coming and going’—and Dave just runs away. He’s not too happy with how serious the kidding sounds.
Maddie heads to her office. Soon, she calls David to meet her.
“He wants you to come in,” she advises.
“He?”
Hiding in the shelter of the office door is one Michael Wrye. Toting one shotgun. Wrye thinks they want to hire him to do a killing.
Not so, the detectives protest. Maddie says Michael’s father sent them to find him. Michael says that’s not possible: his father passed away years ago. He brandishes the gun and tells them to get to the floor. It’s not their fault, Hayes protests: Farley had claimed to be the man’s father, and that he wanted to meet again before he died. This buys them a little time.
Maddie goes back to the restaurant and bribes the host to let her get the credit card receipt, which will show ‘Farley’s’ real name and address. David waits in the garage with Michael.
Soon Hayes returns with the paper. Seems the man’s real identity was Franklin Tate. Michael explains this was a rival hitman, long known as the best in the business. He’s flattered that the man was looking for him. Maddie, however, isn’t so warmed by the news. They’re essentially helping one murderer find another. “I want to die!” she spits, then turns to Michael—“I didn’t mean that!” ;D
Wrye says it’s all right to tell Franklin they found him. Maddie repeats she doesn’t want any part of it. Michael tells her the same thing is bound to happen either way, so might as well finish what they started. Once you cross a line, there’s no going back.
It’s time for the meeting.
Maddie goes with Franklin in his car. He takes out a check for the detectives’ fee. “No thanks,” Maddie says, but Tate is clear. He is very sick now, and wants to die in peace. “Maybe I just caught the express,” he laughs. “That’s not all bad, is it?”
David took Maddie’s car and is waiting with Michael. Addison tires of this and starts to walk away. Wrye asks what he’s doing. “My team’s in the other bleachers,” David explains. “Besides, it’s just my job to bring you here.” Despite his earlier bravado, David really does feel an attachment to Maddie, even at this early stage and although she wasn’t exactly the perfect example of gumshoe experience. Also, he’s not as lured in by the challenge of this case as he once seemed. Maybe he knows he is in over his head after all.
Michael says they shouldn’t feel sorry for Tate, who was a bad man too, and ‘had it coming.’ David, eager to get out of there, goes to the car.
Franklin and Michael hear one another and set up duel positions between the rows of car wrecks lining the junkyard. The setting is a fitting symbol of what both men will come to see as the wreckage of life.
David finds Maddie and asks if she has the check. Hayes is terrified they’ll sit by and watch as the two men try to kill each other. “They wanted it this way!” David asserts. “It’ll be easy!”
Not for long. Shots ring out. The fight is underway. The two men fire and duck behind cars.
Maddie wants to talk them out of it. David mocks what she could possibly say that would work—“Stop, please.”
They get behind a car as well. At last Maddie can’t stand to listen to the gunshots anymore. “If you’re not going to do anything, I am.” She starts to climb over the car.
“June, relax. I’ll have a talk with the boys.” Dave gets on the hood of the vehicle and waves his handkerchief in surrender. Michael fires. David drops to the ground. Maddie thinks he’s been hit. She screams. Michael keeps firing; David is trapped between the two combatants.
Franklin lands first blood. Michael is hurt.
David is still out in the open. (And as it happens, not wounded.) Michael grabs him and takes him hostage. Addison pleads for Franklin to come out of hiding. “I spent a lot of time with this guy, and he hears you. He’s a moody guy. He’s just being difficult.” Actually, Maddie spent the time, and knows him better if either of them do, but it’s the only card David has to play at the moment.
Franklin says there’s no point, he will have to kill Michael anyway. Wrye panics and drops the gun. Addison, free, walks away. “You’ve got to learn to relax and give a girl a chance.”
Maddie picks up the gun and points it in what she hopes is a menacing stance. Soon this fake aura wears off.
Franklin stands in front of Michael. Tate was the best for a long time, he says, but now that he’s sick, he’s had it with the career, and wants out. “You try to remember all the women…” Interestingly, the camera looks over at Maddie and David. Then back to the hitmen. “I remember the face of all the man I ever killed. Some of them, the ones in the dark—
I remember the quality of darkness. That’s my hell, Michael Wrye. That’s my hell.”
“What are you doing?” Michael gulps.
“Mercy, kid.” Tate drops the gun and starts to walk away.
David warns Michael not to touch the gun. “Don’t even think about it.”
Franklin tells Maddie, “Cash the check.” Then he strolls down the long row of scrap heaps. Fight’s over.
…And back to Blue Moon. David has now turned his planning skills to Broadway musicals. He rushes into Maddie’s office, excited to tell the boss about his scheme for the surefire crowd-pleaser—
“’Train Station’”?
Maddie guessed right. David, hurt again, quickly turns to leave.
Hayes runs after him. “It was just a lucky guess! It’ll never happen again in a million years!”
;D