High & Low (Season 10, Episode 22)
Premise: A business student who secretly danced at strip clubs is raped and strangled in her dorm, and the trail runs from skinhead drug dealers to a banker leaking stock tips to a former porn star.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 10, Episode 22
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Adrienne Shelly as Wendy Alston, Peter Van Wagner as Jim Harris, Stephen Spinella as Andrew Polone, Bob Dishy as Larry Weaver, Lee Bryant as Patricia Harris
- Director
- Richard Dobbs
- Writers
- Story: William N. Fordes; Story & teleplay: Gerry Conway
Summary
The Investigation
“High & Low” opens during spring break, when graduate student Leslie Cavanaugh is found raped and strangled in her Hudson University dorm room. Her parents describe a shy dean’s-list business student with a part-time Wall Street job, but the investment bank says she had only applied for an internship. Her classmate Penny Rollins reveals that Cavanaugh paid her way by stripping and had just gotten breast implants; phone records lead to Long Beach clubs where she danced as Sybil.
Her surgeon names the friend who came with her, Elizabeth Torrino, who says two skinheads beat her and burned her fingers trying to learn where Cavanaugh lived, claiming she owed them drug money. A surf rack on their car, noticed by a club worker, leads to brothers Jay and Brad Hurley and a never-used ecstasy lab in their beach shack. Torrino cannot pick them out of a lineup, but their laptop holds software registered to the business of club owner Andrew Polone.
Told falsely that Polone has turned on them, Jay Hurley says Polone put up $20,000 for the lab and ordered the killing, which Brad carried out. Polone is arrested, and his finances show three well-timed stock trades, each just ahead of a takeover. The SEC finds a second small investor with the same trades: Wendy Alston, a retired adult-film actress known as Eva Moreau. A number in Polone’s calendar leads to banker Jim Harris, whose firm handled all three deals and who met Cavanaugh days before her death.
The Trial
Polone, Alston, Harris and the Hurleys are indicted together for first-degree murder. With his lawyer, Larry Weaver, Harris admits an affair with Alston and says Cavanaugh, who had worked out the leak, wanted a job in return for silence. Alston blames Polone alone. Harris’s secretary recalls him reading Cavanaugh’s address over the phone, and Harris admits giving it to Alston. McCoy grants him immunity on the murder in return for his testimony.
Harris testifies that he fed Alston tips and gave her the address believing she only wanted to talk. When McCoy asks about $75,000 he recently drew from an offshore account, Harris invokes the Fifth Amendment. Because jeopardy has attached, the judge declares a mistrial and dismisses the murder indictment with prejudice. McCoy answers by indicting Alston, Polone and Harris himself for conspiracy, citing Harris’s handing over of the address as the overt act.
Spoiler, the ending: Harris, now facing prison beside his lover, takes the same plea as Alston and Polone, and the judge sentences each of them to 10 to 20 years; Harris may still face federal securities charges. The Hurley brothers also plead guilty.
Why it stands out
- Adrienne Shelly, who plays Wendy Alston, was murdered in 2006, and her death later inspired the Season 17 episode “Melting Pot.”
- McCoy’s immunized star witness deliberately takes the Fifth on the stand to protect his lover, forcing a mistrial and the dismissal of the murder charges.
- McCoy recovers by turning the conspiracy statute on the witness himself, using Harris’s own act as the link to the other defendants.