Forget Me Not (Season 3, Episode 4)
Premise: A retirement-home resident left to freeze in a park turns out to be a retired mob hitman living under a false name.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 4
- 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
- David Eisner as Benny Donahue, Claudia Ferri as Rose Galatti, Al Sapienza as Dario Galatti, Francesco Filice as Matteo Galatti, Aidan Devine as Detective Novak
- Director
- Zoe Leigh Hopkins
- Writers
- Tassie Cameron & Stephen Cochrane
Summary
The Case
“Forget Me Not” opens at Gracewood Manor, a retirement home where resident Benny Donahue trades stories with neighbours and enjoys a monthly visit from Dario and Rose Galatti, who perform for him. That night someone wheels him into the cold, and he is found frozen in a nearby park. The tracks show that someone else was wearing his slippers. The autopsy finds hypothermia helped along by a heavy dose of buprenorphine, fingerprints burned off with chemicals and a genetic condition, neurofibromatosis, and the doctor listed as Benny’s son says his own father died nine years ago.
Care worker Gia Frank, who took a menorah and tried to pawn Benny’s gold ring, confirms he was showing early signs of dementia and talked about a woman named Prim and about tailoring. That leads to a shop hiding a gun collection; Benny was Benjamin Cohen, a feared freelance mafia hitman suspected in at least 15 killings. His bank records show $10,000 a month from a numbered company tied to Matteo Galatti, son of mob boss Dario, known as the Butcher. Dario says Benny saved his life during a home invasion and offers a charity poker alibi, and the home’s director, Charlotte Malboeuf, admits wiping Benny’s visitors from the log, among them someone named Ethan.
The Interrogation
Ethan O’Hagen, a corrections social worker, is the son of narcotics officer Vincent O’Hagen, shot dead at a Lake Simcoe cabin 15 years ago. He admits he planned to kill Benny but says Benny confessed and told him his father was on the Galatti payroll and had robbed a mob stash house in 2010, leaving five dead, a six-year-old among them. Vincent’s former partner, Detective Novak, warns Rose to stay quiet. Confronted, Novak describes, as a hypothetical, giving up his partner’s hideout under threat, and reveals his insurance: photos of Benny’s long affair with Rose.
Matteo’s car was near the home that night. At the family bakery, the detectives point out the café-au-lait birthmarks on Matteo’s hand and neck, a sign of the same condition, showing that Benny was his biological father and that Rose is Prim, short for Primrose. Rose confesses she took Matteo’s car, played their song, gave Benny scotch and enough drugs to spare him pain, and held his hand before leaving him in the cold, fearing that if his loose talk exposed them, Dario would torture him to death under the mob code.
The ending
Spoiler: As the detectives move to take Rose in, Matteo begs to take the blame, and Dario walks in demanding to know what is happening. Afterward Graff and Bateman wonder whether Dario will hold to the code against his own son, and conclude that every vow can be broken.
Suspect’s fate: Rose Galatti, arrested.
Why it stands out
- Yohannes’s mother, Aida, lives at the same home with early-onset dementia, and he tells a colleague about her illness.
- The detectives place one of Benny’s stories at Muhammad Ali’s 1966 fight with Canadian boxer George Chuvalo at Maple Leaf Gardens.