The Real Eve (Season 1, Episode 3)
Premise: Toronto’s Major Crime Unit investigates the stabbing of a celebrated painter and art professor, whose estranged husband wakes up drugged with no memory of the night.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 3
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Amanda Brugel as Lee Cole, Sonja Bennett as Eve Kinwood, Greg Bryk as Rick Kinwood, Negin Kamali as Nikki Trettini, Gabriel Darku as Jasper Claes
- Director
- Holly Dale
- Writers
- Jillian Locke
Summary
The Case
“The Real Eve” finds painter Rick Kinwood asking gallerist Lee Cole (called Lee Sloane in the episode) to represent him again, days before she opens a new gallery with a show by his estranged wife, Paletto Award winner Eve Kinwood. At Lee’s lecture at the art school where both teach, a drunk Rick heckles and is hauled upstairs by Eve and Jasper Claes, her graduate student and boyfriend. A janitor finds Eve dead in her office the next morning, stabbed in the back and at the base of the skull; a colleague, Ming Suyin, heard an argument and a thud around 5:30.
Rick’s DNA is in Eve’s office and his car left the area at 1 a.m., but he says he remembers nothing, and a test finds heavy amounts of zolpidem, a sedative, in him. Corn starch from powdered latex gloves on the murder weapon, an intaglio printing tool, hints at a frame. A key leads to Eve’s secret studio in a rented garage, where one canvas is still wet: someone else is painting her work. Her former assistant Melinda Mitra, fired a year earlier, admits showing Lee photos of canvases she found there, but she did not paint them.
An art therapy class Eve taught leads to Nikki Trettini, whom Eve helped get off opioids and supported while Nikki made the paintings. Nikki is found dead of an apparent overdose with zolpidem in her blood, though she had been clean for a year. Forrester wants proof, and Lee’s parking-lot alibi falls apart when Mark finds that her assistant, Callie, paid with her own PIN. Texts show Lee knew who was really painting.
The Interrogation
At the gallery opening, Bateman confronts Callie, who admits she drove Lee’s car out of the lot, while Graff reads from Eve’s real artist statement: Lee knew Nikki made the work when she put Eve up for the Paletto. He lays out the rest: Eve and Nikki planned to come clean on opening night; Lee saw the statement at the print shop, drugged Rick’s wine, stabbed Eve first at the brain stem so she could not cry out, moved Rick into the office, wrote a replacement statement and later killed Nikki. Lee denies it until Graff reveals that the real statement links to a film of Eve posing as a heroin user and Nikki as a prize-winning professor, and that it is already out.
The ending
Spoiler: Lee erupts that neither woman would have a career without her and that she was protecting Eve’s legacy. No arrest is shown, but she is told she will soon learn what “forever” means, and the detectives hope Nikki finally gets credit for her work.
Suspect’s fate: Lee Cole, other or unclear.
Why it stands out
- Daniel Kash is again credited as Detective Andy Manek, his second credited appearance after the premiere.
- Catherine Disher plays Rick’s lawyer, credited as Deb Sutton, who sits in on his police interview without being named on screen.