'True Detective' Detective: Don't Be Tardy for the Hooker Party

Warning: This recap contains storyline and character spoilers for this week’s episode of True Detective.

We’ve been hearing about “hooker parties” for so long this season on True Detective, it’d be kind of disappointing if we finished the season without actually seeing one. Well, no disappointment here: This week’s episode ended with a full-on hooker party, presented with all the nudity an HBO show can provide.

But did we get any closer to finding out who killed Ben Caspere? Or did the waters just get a lot more muddied? Yeah, we’re leaning towards the latter.

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We start out where we left off last week, with Ray knocking on Frank’s door, demanding answers about the guy he killed years ago who he thought was his ex-wife’s rapist. (He wasn’t.) This leads to Ray and Frank sharing a very tense cup of coffee, with both packing heat underneath the table.

Frank pleads ignorance about the name he gave Ray: “I thought the info was solid.” But Ray can’t believe he killed some random guy for Frank: “I sold my soul for nothing!” Eventually, Ray calms down and accepts Frank’s word that this was all an honest mistake; Frank promises to follow up and find out who gave him the bad info. Frank also tells Ray, “You might be one of the last friends I got.” God, that’s terribly sad, isn’t it?

Ani and Paul are still at that torture shack they found in the woods; there’s female blood on the walls, which they suspect belongs to that missing girl Vera. But they’re still on the Caspere case, too: Paul is tracking down where those blue diamonds came from, and Ani’s taking her sister Athena’s place at an upcoming hooker party. And she’s getting her hair and nails done for the big night! Just kidding; she’s practicing her stabbing, of course.

Ray is pretty distracted this week by his own personal issues. First, he goes to see his wife’s rapist — who’s still alive, and in prison. The rapist doesn’t admit to anything and chalks his crimes up to “a brain condition,” but Ray’s not having it. He threatens to “have every inch of your flesh removed with a cheese grater, starting with your dick” — and it gets less cordial from there. Let’s just say that rapist is hoping he never gets out.

Then Ray has an incredibly awkward supervised visit with his son Chad, with a family court official looking on and taking notes. Ray wants to make model planes, but Chad just wants to watch Friends reruns. (Hey, us, too!) This propels Ray into a ridiculous coke-and-tequila bender later that night, punching the air one minute and collapsing into tears the next. He eventually calls his ex-wife and promises her he won’t fight her custody request and will get out of her life entirely — if she’ll skip the paternity test. She agrees… but we kind of don’t believe either one of them will stick to their word.

Meanwhile, Frank really wants to meet Irina Rulfo, the woman who pawned Caspere’s belongings after his death — and he’s willing to put nails through a guy’s hand to find out where she is. Frank and his goons get an address and bust down a door, only to be greeted by the Mexican gangsters from last week. They say they can put Frank in contact with Irina… if they can run drugs through Frank’s nightclubs.

Frank does get on the phone with Irina and finds out she got those items she pawned from another guy: “Thin, white… he was a cop.” He wants her to ID the guy, but by the time he meets her at an abandoned construction site, Irina’s throat is slit. The Mexican gangsters did it, because “bitch was working for cops.” So which cop did she meet with? It can’t be Dixon, because no one would describe him as “thin,” right? That, along with the riot bullets Ray was shot with in Episode 3, has us thinking someone in law enforcement wanted Caspere dead.

Anyway, forget all that: It’s hooker party time! Ani puts on a little black dress and boards a bus full of girls headed to the party, posing as Athena — although with her darting eyes and perpetual scowl, she sticks out like a sore thumb.

She gets dosed with a spray of “pure molly” before heading into a room filled with old white dudes in tuxedos. Things start to get a little hazy for her, and while she’s being chatted up by one of the guests, she starts having visions of a gross bearded hippie guy calling her “the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.” Ew… looks like Ani was molested as a kid while growing up in her dad’s commune. Because she didn’t have enough of a Tragic Backstory already.

While Ani’s infiltrating the party from the inside, Ray and Paul are doing it from the outside, neutralizing a couple of security guards (rather easily) and getting near a window — where Paul just happens to overhear that land developer guy McCandless closing a $12 million deal with Osip the Russian investor. Oh, Frank’s not gonna like this…

As Ani is throwing up in the bathroom, she sees a familiar face among the girls: It’s Vera, the missing girl! She’s not dead after all! Ani tries to get her out of there, but she’s cornered by the guest who liked her earlier. Ani beats him up, but then almost gets choked to death by a security guard… except she stuck a knife in his ribs. She and Vera escape with Paul’s help, and they jump into Ray’s car for a speedy getaway.

They have Vera. And thanks to Paul, they now have a bunch of signed contracts stolen from the house’s office. Two episodes left… and more questions than ever.

Loose Clues:

* We didn’t even mention the very strange scene where Frank and his wife visit the widow of his dead henchman Stan. (Yeah, we don’t really remember Stan, either.) Frank sits down with Stan’s young son for a heart-to-heart, telling the kid how his dad dying will make him “a better man” — and that what’s inside the kid is “pure solid gold” (!). He did everything but call the kid “champ.” Did we really just see that? What the hell are we watching?

* We’ll say this for the hookers at that party: Even when Ani stabbed that security guard to death in front of them, they just kept right on having sex. Now that’s dedication!

* We didn’t get a five-dollar vocabulary word from Frank this week, but he did give us this gem of a line, when he and his crew were accosted by the Mexican gangsters: “That’s one for the bucket list: a Mexican standoff with actual Mexicans.”

* Ani seemed awfully rattled after killing that security guard. Is it possible she’s never killed anyone before? Just feels out of character for her to be so thrown by that. She loves stabbing!

* We couldn’t help chuckling when Paul announced in the getaway car what he had found: “These contracts… signatures all over them.” Yeah, Paul… most contracts have signatures all over them. That’s what makes them contracts. Paul’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is he?

True Detective airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.