After Lee joins in singing “Happy Birthday” and gives Francis an (unwrapped) Eve Babitz book as a present, he gets a call from Ginger, and the two sleuths compare notes. Ginger says that Nathan’s mother, Deborah, told her he was in the diversion program, which she suspects worked him to death. Lee tells Ginger everything he learned about the program on his fact-finding expedition to Judge Jed’s gavel-and-rifle branded ranch. Ginger is visibly delighted by Lee in this scene, despite the warning of her co-worker Darla (Lee Eddy) that when you fall for a writer, your nudes can wind up front-page news.
But when Ginger and Lee go to Deborah’s house to follow up, they find her corpse being loaded into the back of an ambulance. The cop conspirators got to her before they could, and Ginger blames herself. She rejects Lee’s offer to stand watch over her house, saying she needs to be alone.
Her night only gets worse from there. While at a gas station to buy cigarettes, she gets a call from Pookie, her foot-fetishist informant in the county lockup. He tells her the word among the prisoners is that Mekko — the man she loves and his trying to find — is the one who killed Nate.
She is still in denial when she’s interrupted by Lonnie and McMann, who force her into their trunk at gunpoint. Well, not force, exactly: She crawls in voluntarily, irritating McMann, who feels that shoving her in would have added to the intimidation factor. Lonnie’s polite “Watch your head” as he closes the trunk on her probably isn’t helpful in that regard, either.
While it’s short on the riotous mystery-comedy-thriller antics of the past couple of weeks, this episode has plenty of laughs. Hawkes’s sinister Judge Jed provides some of the funniest moments, whether he’s declaring “I’m the law!” like an Oklahoman Judge Dredd, showing off the “Dances with Wolves” poster on his wall (“Now that was a movie,” he declares) or lowering his home movie screen at a glacially slow, cringe-comedy pace. By the time it completes its descent, Governor Washberg seems on the verge of asking the judge to grab a gun and put him out of his misery.
Elsewhere, Austin Amelio and Shane McRae have terrific comedic chemistry as Lonnie and McMann, the rogue-cop Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the piece. And the inventively obscene way the sardonic Deidra (Siena East) rebuffs a teenager’s romantic advances takes more twists and turns than, well, the plot of “The Lowdown.” Finally, there’s something charmingly cheeky about putting a bowling ball in the hands of the most Dude-like character on television.