Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In case we thought Jay’s suspicions were born of drug-induced delusions, “Matador” (I Am The Night Episode 4) opens with proof that Hodel is still running an illegal abortion operation — and apparently his patients are so bereft of other options that he has no compunction downing a snifter of brandy in front of the latest before leading her off for her procedure. “I guess you’ll have plenty of time to figure out your next move,” says her partner to Fauna’s tail, Sepp (Dylan Smith), who’s hunched over a chessboard mid-game with Hodel. “Nope,” Sepp replies, “I’m going to spoil this game.” He pockets the king.
After a mysterious, probably drunken phone call from Corinna offering to show him something, Jay has breakfast with Ohls — who’s been busted down from detective to beat cop for his part in Jay’s “Dark Flower” rescue — and his very old partner. Jay quizzes him on his memories of the Black Dahlia case; Ohls’s partner can’t recall any copycats, but comments that the murderer must have hated Elizabeth Short to have mutilated her as brutally as he did. “It doesn’t look like hate,” counters Jay. “It looks like something else.” Jay then returns to his copy of Crime Chasers, and notes a keyhole shape cut out of a victim’s flesh.
Shye takes Fauna up to the spot where Nero’s body was found, pours out a libation for him, and tosses the bottle over a ridge, rousing a homeless man below. To Shye’s question, the man recalls seeing both the cops who found Nero, and another guy who had parked his “big, black, shiny Buick” earlier. This jogs Shye’s memory of Fauna asking the other young people at Big Momma’s whether they’d seen a Buick driver following her. And when she returns to Big Momma’s, she finds out she just missed him: he left her an invitation from Corinna to “A Happening”; across town, Peter passes the one delivered to his paper’s art desk on to Jay.
Scored by “Play With Fire,” Fauna finds her way through the bewildering art performance; avoids the questions of Jane, another guest curious about Fauna’s relationship to the Hodels; and then spots Jay in the crowd, avoiding him by stepping into another installation, where Corinna is reclining on a concrete block. A pair of scissors is passed among the guests, each of whom takes a turn clipping fabric off Corinna’s gown. When the scissors come to her, Fauna drops them; the piece is over, and Fauna is summoned to a dressing room for another lecture from Corinna — this one about the difference between avant-garde and kitsch. It turns out Fauna understood the performance quite well: “I think you just wanted for us to be responsible for you. Joining in or even just watching, doing nothing — either way, you would’ve been the one getting hurt.” “Smarter than your mother ever was,” drawls Corinna, though this is not a cue that she’s ready to answer questions about Tamar; once Corinna’s flounced off, Fauna finds her address book, with a Hawaii address for a “T.H. Apate.”
Fauna’s victory is short-lived, as Sepp then appears behind her, knocks her out, and takes her to the Happening’s basement, and a space he’s set up to assault her and adorned with one of his masks. He threatens that if Fauna screams, he’ll cut off her calf, fry it, eat it, and puke it up in front of her: “I’ll show him Icarus. I’m ready for the next step….The real Happening.” Before Sepp can proceed, Jay is there; the two struggle until Jay stabs Sepp to death with a wrench sharpened into a shank, whereupon Jay hallucinates the same monster that was shut up in a room at the Hodel manse in “Dark Flower.” (We don’t see more than a red glow, but we hear its roar.)
Jay wants to leave the body, but since Jane and her companion have stumbled in and seen Fauna with a guy on the ground (though one they seem to believe has passed out drunk), Fauna convinces Jay to get him out; fortunately, no guest of this Happening is surprised to see a body passing them in a wheelbarrow. Fauna leads Jay to where Nero’s body was dumped, and they leave him in some brush, retrieving the murder weapon as well as Sepp’s wallet and the chess king from his pocket.
Jay is intoxicated as he brings Fauna back to his place, and has a vivid dream of being interrogated by Billis and his partner, Sepp, when Fauna wakes him up with a slash of cold water to the face. After thanking him for saving her life, she tells him Sepp has been following her for years. If Jay will help her find out who he was, they can go together to see Tamar. Jay then fills her in on the scandal at the heart of the Hodel story he’s been chasing, which Fauna can’t believe is about abortion; she refuses to help him write a story that hurts her mother or her family. When Jay says he just wants the truth, she’s sufficiently mollified to say she thinks Tamar is in Hawaii, and that if he’ll get her a plane ticket, Fauna will bring him to her.
Jay seems amused, but when Fauna asks to shake on it, he does.
The first stop in Jay’s investigation takes him to Sepp’s studio where, conveniently, he’s present to receive a hand-delivered invitation to another art show — this one sponsored by Hodel.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Lee has made it to Los Angeles; Fauna goes to see her sing in a club, to a mostly indifferent audience. Jimmy Lee is no more forthcoming about Sepp or Hodel than before, and when Fauna gets insistent, Jimmy Lee slaps her: “I’ll see you dead before I let them at you.” Fauna remains determined to find out everything.
Corinna is strolling through Hodel’s show at the Huntington Museum when Jay approaches. She’s on her way to some nearby security guards to have him ejected, but he’s already on the move, and ends up in a room filled with Surrealist pieces a placard identifies as being on loan from Hodel’s collection. At first, Jay does not seem impressed…
…until he notices how closely the dismembered women in the paintings Hodel’s acquired resemble the female corpses Jay’s seen at the morgue and in Crime Chasers. Not hate; something else.
Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano is the co-founder of TelevisionWithoutPity.com and Fametracker.com (R.I.P.), as well as Previously.tv. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210), and has contributed to New York, the New York Times magazine, Vulture, The Awl, and Slate, among many others. She lives in Austin.
