Episode 'White Collar' Season 3 Episode 2: 'Where There's A Will' Recap

Peter (Tim DeKay) and Neal (Matthew Bomer) stand silhouetted, facing one another on opposite sides of a massive stone head that's just barely shorter than they. Peter asks Neal point-blank if he's thinking about how he'd steal it. So much for that pesky "truce" at the last episode's end.

Neal brushes it off: it weighs several tons and is worth a paltry few thousand dollars, he tells Peter.

"Pass."

Peter persists that he still thought about how he'd do it.

"Involuntary reflex," replies Neal matter-of-factly.

As they approach an oppulent home, we learn from the conversation between the two that Nathaniel Roland's $40-million inheritance is at stake, and his two sons have accused one another of forging their father's will. Neal asks if they're really that stupid.

"Well, that's what we're going to find out," Peter replies.

Neal begs to differ.

"Well, that's what I'm going to find out."

Roland's sons, Josh and James, show up and bicker briefly before Neal sits down with the two alleged wills and Peter banters a little with James' young daughter Savannah about how Neal has an ankle bracelet, "Just like mine!"

Pray yours is never just like his, Savannah.

Interrupts the playful banter with a surprising revelation: both kids may be screwed, because both wills are forgeries.

After a hard day's work, Mozzie (Willie Garson) awaits Neal at his apartment. When Neal asks his quite literal partner-in-crime if he wants to know what Mozzie is hiding under a cardboard box, Mozzie cues some dramatic fanfare from a speaker and paraphrases the Gipper, telling Neal "It's easier to trust, when you can verify." He lifts the box and reveals a security camera feed on Neal's laptop, showing the pair's cache of Nazi-owned art nicked from a recovered German U-boat after Mozzie staged what appeared to be a fire that destroyed the collection. Mozzie tells Neal that he's dying to sell one of the pieces so that the two can make a break for it once and for all, getting Neal out of his FBI servitude -- clearly, with neither being aware yet of the recovered shipping manifest that Team Fed is watching to spring a trap if a single piece of art listed shows up somewhere.

Back at FBI HQ, Neal gloats when Peter verifies that both wills are, indeed forgeries but his jubilation doesn't last long. Peter points out something Neal's momentarily gob-smacked that he missed: characteristics of the signature that are common to ambidextrous handwriting point to Nathaniel Roland himself forging both copies' witness signatures, which are different (and fake-sounding) names. The two quickly - almost simultaneously, actually - pick up that the sigs are in fact anagrams containing the same letters.

Hold on to your cerebellums, folks. The riddles only get more needlessly complex from what's about to follow.

Tycho Brahe

Somehow, the two both pick up the anagram "Tycho Brahe," the name of a 16th-Century Dutch astronomer. The last line of both wills is "In the end there should be nothing between you, which is everything," referring to the brothers' sibling rivalry.

Neal lays one will over the other, holds them up to a light and finds numerous symbols, the most prominent of which is what appears to be a compass rose. They aren't holding wills. Combined, they're holding a map.

Neal is later dumbstruck by the attractive blonde he spots at the FBI office, who Jones warns him against, saying he’s already struck out with her himself. Neal seems differently interested: he makes her, later identified as Agent Matthews (Anna Chlumsky) as an Art Crimes agent from the FBI’s D.C. office judging from her Smithsonian Institute attaché – “A D.C. Art Crimes gift of choice to new recruits,” Neal explains to Jones.

After chatting her up briefly at the elevator, he joins Peter, who he finds just a tad giddy at the concept of a massive puzzle. Later, the two convene with Josh and James at Nathaniel’s home, who not only are familiar both with the “treasure hunt” concept and with the compass rose as a replica of a public park sundial, but completely wary of the hunt concept. James explains that with their father dead, they’re no longer obligated to his games.

Neal wants the two to have a freelance look-see, and he knows Peter’s interested, but Peter begs off that there’s no authorization to look into it and besides, he has a lunch date with Elizabeth (Tiffani Thiesen). He just wants the wills logged into evidence and returned to the appropriate attorneys.

So of course, a-hunting do Mozzie and Neal go.

The two figure out that the sequences of numbers on the “wills” correspond to times of day but can’t figure where of any interest the dial will point at the first listed time, 4 p.m.

“We have four hours to find out,” Mozzie says.

Peter and Elizabeth are chatting about a gallery gig Elizabeth may have snagged, but Peter keeps getting nagging texts from Neal that he won’t answer until Neal drops Elizabeth a line. Reluctantly – OK, almost with a sigh of relief – Peter joins Elizabeth in giving the puzzle the once over, and deduces that a flower scribbled on the map corresponds actually to the sun’s position at 4 p.m. in the spring, not its current fall position. Mercifully, Elizabeth suggests that the two “go play with Neal” a while.

Neal and Mozzie shut their noise-holes just in time about the Art Crimes agent that’s just blown into town as Peter and Elizabeth approach with a few mirrors and a sextant. Peter positions Elizabeth and Mozzie with mirrors, makes a few adjustments and finds that the first time of the three ones listed points to the letter “B” on the dial’s inscription. The next points to an “S.” The last, to an “H.” Between them, they have no Earthly idea what the three letters could represent.

It’s brought to a head, though, as Jones phones and informs Peter that Savannah has been kidnapped, as we see a live-feed video on a laptop of Savannah holding that day’s newspaper with a clock counting down from 5:18:58.

After the break, the clock is down to 5:05:01 as Team Fed convenes to see Savannah calmly coloring, seemingly unaware there’s a camera at all. The website – called, I swear, kidnapsavannah.com – includes a tab labeled “Demands,” which indicates a request for $6.4 million, the exact amount James was to receive from the inheritance. That tells the Feds that the kidnapper has a familiarity with the family and the will. Josh is the first suspect, but claims that Savannah is the only reason he and James still speak at all. He wants to find the will and pay the ransom, so Neal asks about “BSH.”

Josh picks it up immediately. It was his father’s favorite acronym, standing for “big sky hunting,” his playful name for trips with the two boys to the planetarium. Peter tells Josh to hang back and work with James on a suspect profile while he and Neal investigate.

Planets Align

At the planetarium, the gratuitous complexity reaches dangerous levels of deep hurting. Try and stay with me as best you can.

The two learn that Nathaniel last visited the planetarium at 2 p.m. on Dec. 3, which desk attendant Felix tells them was “A big deal when he would visit. It usually meant someone was getting a new telescope.” They’re momentarily confused that they can’t find his signature on the guest registry, until Neal spots “Tycho Brahe” in Nathaniel’s handwriting. He also signed “happy birthday to me.”

Felix, off the top of his head, is able to identify Dec. 14, 1546 as Brahe’s birthday. Neal and Peter somehow deduce just from that information that they’re to examine the position of the stars on Brahe’s birthday. In the theater, as Felix projects the star positions on that exact date, Neal recalls the will referencing “Big sky hunting with his favorite twins” in the will, though Josh and James aren’t twins. They find Gemini and find the twin constellations split – one above, one below. Peter recalls that Brahe had a twin who died shortly after birth. Felix recalls that Brahe wrote a letter to his dead twin in his first published work – which the planetarium, of course, has on display, a gift from Nathaniel.

The letter is on page 273, but there’s a catch: Nathaniel’s odd, specific instructions for the aged book: it’s to be kept in a controlled environment with a mechanical arm that turns each page once per hour until the end, then reverses the process. Felix’s hands are tied; they can’t flip directly to the page. Peter and Neal split so that Peter can resume work at HQ. He says he has to trust Neal to do this on his own.

Neal and Mozzie confer at Neal’s apartment, spouting off their scammer’s playbook looking for the right play. It occurs then to Mozzie that every keypad operates on the same security code.

“Blind Man’s Bluff,” he announces.

“We’re gonna need a dog,” Neal chimes.

It’s off to Elizabeth. They need to borrow loyal Labrador Satchmo for an afternoon. There’s a leap forward for Peter, too: back at HQ, they’ve zeroed in on high-tech security expert Brett Gelles, who handled the security needs to the Roland family for years and knew Savannah, always telling her “I’m the guy who keeps you safe.” He also has serious credit problems.

Back at the planetarium, Neal is decked out as security guard “Sam” and Mozzie is hanging about as a blind man with Satchmo dressed up as a service dog. Neal starts dropping a jerky trail that leads right into Felix’s office, with a keypad lock on the outside. He also momentarily closes the Brahe exhibit and directs the audience instead to check out the next showing of “Across The Galaxy” in the theater.

With the door propped open by Neal, Mozzie sets Satchmo loose for a snack run and starts panicking, drawing out Felix. Satchmo slips inside Felix’s office and the door shuts behind him, just as planned. Felix gathers and calms Mozzie, knows the dog has gotten into his office and punches the code to get him out, which Mozzie glimpses over Felix’s shoulder and texts to Neal inside the exhibit.

Meanwhile, at HQ, Peter and Co. have narrowed the search for Gelles to four homes of clients who are currently on vacation. Peter advises careful surveillance.

Back again to the planetarium, where Mozzie joins Neal as he hacks the system and announces that he’s fencing one of the paintings that evening. The mechanical turning mechanism keeps flipping right past the page they need, so Mozzie instead drills a miniscule hole through which they can slip a polymer film to turn the pages.

That hole quickly lets the aging process catch up with the book quicker than a Joan Rivers facelift popping a seam.

Naturally, that has Peter ready to commit a decidedly non-“white-collar” crime: double murder, with the motive in place of making his dog an accomplice to a robbery for which the planetarium plans to prosecute. Annoyed, Neal tells him to calm down. He explains why the volume is clearly a forgery.

Brahe lived on an island with his own paper mill, and wrote the book on tulip-tree stock, which he points out has a notoriously low acidity. “The real manuscript could be living in a Turkish bath house without risk of harm,” Neal says, in contrast to the manuscript that turned into a “shrinky-dink” as soon as the air hit it.

Sun and Moon

The two find symbols of a sun and moon on the binding, leading them to believe the manuscript was meant to be destroyed. Also, they match charms found on Savannah’s anklet, which was a gift from Nathaniel. Meanwhile, Peter learns that power surges have possibly tracked Gelles to one specific location. Neal gets on the phone with Gelles to lure him out of the location so that Savannah can be recovered, and does so using a truly desperate measure for him: the truth.

He tells him about the false wills and the treasure hunt, and almost talks him out, before Gelles hangs up on him. On the website feed, the clock instantly suddenly runs to zero and the screen goes black. James panics, but in a tender moment, Josh leaps up to comfort him.

As the team checks in on the surveillance, it turns out that the power surge was caused by an air-conditioning unit – not an excess draw while running the feed.

Back at Nathaniel’s home, Gelles calmly enters the team’s room and holds up not only a bracelet, but a video call on his cell phone showing Savannah in a panic. He warns the Feds that if anything happens to him as he leaves the home, “you can all sit around and watch her die.” He won’t tell anyone where she is, until he has the money in hand. He orders the Feds out of the room.

He hands Neal the bracelet and suddenly, the brothers are in for the hunt. The other charms correspond to gifts the family gave each other at one particular Christmas, which the brothers recognize corresponds to a prominently displayed family picture. Gelles tells Neal this is all because when he was having money problems some time ago and asked Nathaniel for money, Nathaniel told him simply “Make a plan, see it through.”

“Advice-taken,” says Gelles.

“Crime isn’t the hard part. Hard part’s getting away with it,” Neal reminds him.

Peter is redirected to the correct location and obtains Savannah. He tells Jones to take down Gelles, and texts Neal that she’s safe. Jones bursts in and takes him down, just as the brothers are about to open up the hollow part of a display case where they’re sure the will is kept.

Josh and James appear reconciled over the will – and the real original first manuscript of Tycho Brahe’s work. Later, Peter and Neal congratulate one another, noting that the brothers gave both the manuscript and a generous endowment from the will to the planetarium.

Back at Neal’s apartment, he spends a little time alone gazing lovingly at what could be his meal ticket. He then sets to work crafting himself a fake INTERPOL I.D. and reading up on Agent Matthews.

He meets Mozzie later at a posh bar, where Mozzie has been keeping tabs on Matthews. He excuses himself to go to work fencing the painting, while Neal introduces himself as “Agent Chris Gates,” with INTERPOL’s own art crimes division.

The two set to chatting over martinis, and Matthews spills about the manifest and the plan to snare the believed thieves. “Gates” excuses himself and calls Mozzie. Nearly short of breath, he orders him to hold off fencing the painting, the game suddenly clear . . .