law & order
smoke (24/24)

The veteran crime drama concludes its 13th season tonight. In the season finale, a fire at the apartment of a famous comic leads the cops to uncover a history of child abuse.

Detectives Briscoe and Green are called to a fire in a hotel apartment rented by a famous comedian named Monty Bender. The case takes on a tragic complexion when it emerges that the comic’s baby was dropped from the window while being held away from the smoke. As the distraught comedian is treated in hospital, the cops interview the other two occupants of the apartment: Monty’s stylist and nutritionist. Close similarities in their stories prompt Green’s suspicions, before the hotel manager reveals that a fourth person was in the flat: Monty’s masseur, Harvey.

At the police station, Harvey claims to have left the apartment before the fire started. Pressed on the exact nature of his relationship with Monty, he insists that it is “purely professional”. However, Harvey is eventually forced to admit that his work for Monty comprised of more than giving massages. “I was just the talent scout,” he says, before explaining that he would drive an ice cream van while Monty hid in a compartment and spied on young children. “When he saw one he liked, I’d invite the parents up to his estate,” Harvey says. The parents would bring the children to Monty’s house where he could “play” with them.

The detectives are shocked by the revelation, and Van Buren finds it hard to believe that the parents knew the nature of Monty’s interest. “People get around fame and they get stupid,” Green suggests. With a child abuse case building against the comic, the cops discover that Monty was making regular payments to a man named John Mireles. Mireles claims these payments are royalties from a script he wrote for Monty, but Green discovers evidence to the contrary on a website. Somebody has leaked a court deposition from a civil suit against the comic six years ago, in which John Mireles’s 11-year-old son, Sammy, accused Monty of sexual abuse. It would seem that Monty paid the Mireles family to drop the case.

The comic is arrested and charged with sexual abuse, only for his slick lawyer James Granick to argue that the deposition from the website cannot be used because it is a sealed document: “Bottom line – it’s inadmissible,” he says. McCoy also has trouble convincing DA Branch of the deposition’s veracity: “If it weren’t true, don’t you think Monty would have already filed suit for libel?” he says. However, the judge agrees with Granick, and, without a victim to testify against Monty, the case is dismissed.

Southerlyn, meanwhile, has little luck trying to convince Sammy Mireles – now a college student – to testify against his abuser. “He’s confused and angry,” she reports back. “I think he’d like it if it all went quickly away.” But McCoy has other ideas, and hits upon the strategy of charging Sammy’s parents with complicity in the abuse. “Monty was paying them, not Sammy,” he says. “They’re part of the conspiracy.”

Sammy’s parents are promptly arrested, only for Mrs Mireles to reveal their true reasons for accepting Monty’s payments: “Our younger son was sick,” she says. “We couldn’t pay the doctors’ bills. We had to take his money!” Southerlyn sympathises with their plight, but McCoy is undeterred: “This isn’t parenting,” he declares. “It’s monstrous indifference!” The trial against Mr and Mrs Mireles gets underway, but Sammy refuses to testify against them and claims that he made up his allegations against Monty. Any hope of convicting Monty of his crimes recedes as the case against the Mireles family breaks down. Is there any way Sammy can be convinced to tell the truth?