Rudy Conceals His Role in Cliff's Death

Rudy Baylor’s concealment of his role in Cliff Riker’s death turns an act of defense into a second crisis: while Kelly Riker is arrested, Rudy watches from hiding, then presents himself as her lawyer and builds a false account of how he came to be involved. His conduct is driven by fear and by the immediate wish to keep Kelly out of prison, but every attempt to control what the police learn creates another vulnerability.

Leaving the Apartment and Hiding

After Cliff attacks them, Rudy strikes him with the aluminum softball bat and stops only when Kelly pulls him away. She takes the bat, tells Rudy to leave, and urges him to hide; she says she has faced this situation before and will contact him later. Rudy leaves the apartment carrying the .38, closes the door quietly, checks for neighbors, and slips away into the darkness. The choice keeps his presence at the scene from the police, but leaves Kelly alone to explain what happened.

Rudy waits in his Volvo in a crowded parking lot as police cars and an ambulance arrive. He watches the building and the people gathered outside, hoping Cliff will be taken to a hospital rather than a morgue. When a coroner’s van arrives, he understands that Cliff has died. He moves into the crowd to listen for any report that someone saw a stranger leave, then watches Kelly emerge with two officers and be taken away in a patrol car. Her apparent vulnerability intensifies his fear, but he still does not identify himself as a witness or disclose that he was in the apartment.

A Lawyer’s Cover Story

Rudy goes to the police station and tells the desk sergeant that Kelly is his client and that he must be present during questioning. To explain his quick arrival, he claims she called him after dialing 911. At the station, he introduces himself to homicide detective Smotherton as Kelly’s attorney and asks what the police found. Smotherton describes Cliff’s death and Kelly’s account: she had returned for her clothes, Cliff found her, they fought, and she somehow got hold of the bat.

Rudy supplies the police with another part of his cover story. He says that a judge had recently ordered Cliff to stay away from Kelly and that he will provide a copy of the divorce papers. The detectives already know about Kelly’s bruises, and Rudy’s statement places the death against the background of years of abuse. In the recorded interview, he formally identifies himself as her lawyer and gives the date, location, and reason for being present, repeating that Kelly called him after contacting 911. His precise professional manner gives the explanation a procedural shape, though he later recognizes that the call cannot be verified.

As Kelly answers questions about the marriage and the beatings, Rudy intervenes when the detectives ask what happened after Cliff arrived. He ends the recorded questioning before she gives that account, saying that he needs time to consult her and investigate. The interruption protects her from further questioning in that moment, but also keeps the police from hearing the part of the story that would expose Rudy’s role. Smotherton decides that Kelly must be booked for manslaughter and explains that a judge, not the detective, would have to release her. Rudy promises to get her out as soon as possible; she is then taken away in handcuffs.

The Lies Under Scrutiny

At his office, Rudy tries to reconstruct the evening on yellow legal paper. He diagrams the apartment, the body, the clothes, the gun, the bat, the beer cans, and the positions of his car, Kelly’s car, and Cliff’s truck. He also writes down the sequence of events and considers how many screams might have been heard and whether a neighbor could have seen him leave. An evening that may have lasted less than fifteen minutes fills pages of notes. The paperwork is an attempt to impose order on a sequence that has already escaped him.

Rudy identifies leaving too quickly as his first mistake. He wonders whether he should have waited to find out if the neighbors heard the commotion, or gone to the police and told the truth. He reasons that he and Kelly had a right to be in the apartment, that Cliff had attacked them, and that the other witness would support his account. Yet he had followed Kelly’s instruction to leave, and, as he reflects, the change from being attacked to having killed a man came too quickly for rational judgment. His reconstruction therefore holds two positions at once: he believes he could justify his actions, but he is unwilling to expose himself to the consequences of telling the truth.

The car story creates another possible break in the cover. Kelly told Smotherton that she drove her Volkswagen Rabbit to the apartment, but Rudy later finds it still in the parking lot alongside Cliff’s pickup. He imagines explanations that could make her account plausible, including the possibility that someone disabled the car while she was at the shelter, but these remain fears rather than established facts. The most dangerous falsehood, in his view, is the claim that Kelly called him after dialing 911: the call has no record, and the police could discover that by checking the phone records.

Enlisting Help

Before dawn, Rudy wakes Deck Shifflet and gives him his version of events. Deck responds that no jury would convict Kelly, but Rudy distinguishes the eventual trial from the more immediate problem of getting her released. They make a plan to obtain arrest reports, court files, medical records, and the couple’s first divorce filing. Deck takes on the task of gathering information, while Rudy seeks help with bail.

Rudy also recruits Butch, an investigator and friend of Cliff’s, to search the apartment’s vicinity for anyone who might have seen or heard something. Butch accepts the assignment and says he knows what to do. Rudy calls Booker Kane as well, explaining that a divorce client has killed her husband and asking for help securing her release. He hopes Booker can reach a criminal court judge through Marvin Shankle’s brother and obtain release on recognizance or a very low bond. Booker jokes about Rudy’s transition from a major verdict to a divorce case; Rudy laughs, withholding how personally implicated he is.

The efforts to defend Kelly thus proceed alongside Rudy’s effort to remain absent from the official account. He gathers records and seeks witnesses who may help her, while concealing that he was present when Cliff died and preserving a false explanation for his arrival at the station. His legal skills provide ways to protect his client, but here they also furnish tools for managing his own exposure. By the end of the episode, the immediate danger is no longer only what happened in the apartment: it is whether Rudy’s carefully assembled story can survive the evidence he is trying to anticipate.