Working Mom (Season 7, Episode 14)
Premise: A retired cop turned corporate security chief is shot with his own gun on a Manhattan prostitution stroll, and the trail leads to a suburban mother who works as a call girl.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 14
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Felicity Huffman as Hillary Colson, Elaine Stritch as Defense Attorney Lanie Stieglitz, Jodie Markell as Sondra Benton
- Director
- Jace Alexander
- Writers
- Jeremy R. Littman & I.C. Rapoport
Summary
The Investigation
“Working Mom” opens when car thieves find a dead man in a parked car on a street known for prostitution. He is Gilbert “Gilly” Keene, a retired police officer who ran security for golf-club maker Bernum Woods, shot with his own Colt. A young streetwalker named Iris has his wallet and pager but insists he was already dead. A page from “Jane” leads to Jane Tennick, a clerk who says Keene used her theft of some old golf clubs to pressure her into sex.
At Keene’s wake, a former colleague says Keene had asked about suspicious charges from a vendor called Topaz Enterprises, which turn out to be on Keene’s own company card. The trail runs to a White Plains post office box paid for from Mount Kisco, where Hillary Colson and Sondra Benton run a decorating business, Fox Hill Decor. Hillary’s prints are in Keene’s car and her lipstick is on him, and Topaz clients identify both women as high-priced call girls. They are arrested at their sons’ basketball game; Sondra admits to prostitution but backs Hillary’s alibi, and Hillary is charged with murder.
The Trial
McCoy threatens Hillary’s husband, Louis, with an obstruction charge that could put the children in foster care, which Ross calls coercion. Hotel staff link Hillary to company owner Mac Bernum, who admits he became obsessed with her and sent Keene to find her after she cut him off. With new lawyer Lanie Stieglitz, Hillary says Keene threatened to expose her, showed his gun and forced a sex act on her, and that she grabbed the gun and shot him. Ross and McCoy clash over how much weight a prostitute’s rape claim deserves.
At trial, Stieglitz raises past complaints prostitutes filed against Keene as a police officer, and Tennick describes how he coerced her. McCoy gets Louis to contradict his earlier claim that his wife told him nothing, then presses Hillary about the 70 or 80 men who paid her and the pepper spray she carried. In closing, he argues that she shot a blackmailer to protect her double life, not a rapist.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Hillary Colson guilty of second-degree murder. Stieglitz files an appeal, and Ross wonders whether the jury convicted on the evidence or because Hillary was a prostitute.
Why it stands out
- Ross objects when McCoy threatens a witness with losing his children to foster care, and the two later split over how to weigh a prostitute’s claim of rape.
- Defense attorney Lanie Stieglitz frames the case as a test of whether any woman, whatever her profession, has the right to refuse sex and defend herself.