Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 9: Glamazons

Dress Up magazine journalist Julian Simons (Matthew Maher) opens the episode writing his cover story on the Glamazons, the supermodels he named and shot alongside Tiff Giles for the magazine's iconic 2000 cover. Tiff's career ended shortly after that shoot, when a still-unsolved attack took half her vision and all of her confidence, and the NYPD never arrested anyone for it. Twenty-five years later she tends bar in Chester, Pennsylvania, far from the world she once ruled.

Madison Fortune (Nicole LaLiberte) comes to the bar herself, bag of cash in hand, to ask Tiff to attend the anniversary reunion. Her apology contains the mistake that changes everything: she says she and TJ felt terrible that morning after Tiff was found, but Tiff was not identified until the afternoon and the news did not break until that evening, when Madison was already on a photo shoot in Hawaii. Tiff, who had long suspected Madison and TJ of arranging the attack, accepts the invitation.

The anniversary photoshoot with all four Glamazons, including Nadine Clay (Laura Benanti), goes off without a hitch.

At the afterparty, TJ sets down his wine glass to throw Julian out for asking too many questions, and Tiff pockets the glass bearing his fingerprints. Later she mixes Madison a celebratory drink laced with a crushed overdose of benzedrine, and as Madison confesses that the attack was TJ's idea, Tiff shoves her off the model-house bedroom ledge to the floor below. Tiff plants TJ's glass in the trash as evidence, wipes down every surface, and slips out through the model house's secret entrance.

Madison's body is found the next morning, and Elsbeth works the scene with Detective Fleming and Officer Hackett. TJ's mancave alibi - no witnesses but his headphones and edibles - looks flimsy, and his visit to an insurance agent about Madison's death benefit does not help. Tiff tells the investigators that TJ was violent and that Madison had come to Chester asking for her support in leaving him, while Nadine insists TJ and Madison were devoted "partners in crime." Then TJ's real alibi surfaces: the laptop he and his lawyer hand over proves he was working on his finances for an IRS audit.

Cleared of the murder, TJ confesses to the attack on Tiff itself - inspired by the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan coverage, he intended disruptive rather than career-destroying injuries, but the Jewel CD that popped out of her Discman in the fall cut her face and eye badly - and the statute of limitations on that crime has long expired.

The case breaks at Officer Hackett's stand-up comedy debut, which Wagner, Fleming and Elsbeth attend. Bartender Ivy, whom Elsbeth knows from a previous case, explains that bartenders habitually pocket the foil peeled from wine-bottle tops - and Tiff's fingerprints turn up on the foil in her apron pocket from the night of the murder. Tiff is arrested, and Elsbeth recommends Nadine Clay to the young (S)Heroes models as their next mentor.

The arrest rests on a scrap of trash. Bartender Ivy explains that people in her trade reflexively pocket the foil peeled from wine-bottle tops, and Tiff - a bartender herself - kept the habit on the night she killed Madison. Her fingerprints on the foil in her apron pocket place her at the model house, and the frame-up of TJ collapses: his laptop proves he was doing IRS-audit paperwork at the time of the murder, and his confession to the 25-year-old attack on Tiff, delivered because the statute of limitations has expired, reframes the whole case as long-simmering revenge.

Unresolved within the episode: TJ walks with no legal consequence for the attack, since the statute of limitations has run out; the episode does not show whether Nadine accepts the mentorship Elsbeth proposes for the (S)Heroes; and nothing is shown of what happens to Tiff after she is led away in cuffs.