Jerry Orbach credited as playing...
Detective Lennie Briscoe
- Ed Green: Hey, Williams.
- Jerome Williams: Quite a mess.
- Lennie Briscoe: You want to give us a tour?
- Jerome Williams: Sure, if you feel like having a ceiling collapse on your head. Should be safe in a couple hours.
- Ed Green: How many people were in that club?
- Jerome Williams: Between three and four hundred. Paramedics have already taken at least seventy people to three hospitals. Burns and smoke inhalation, mostly. Broken bones from the pushing and shoving. I'd say we're lucky there weren't more fatalities. Typical Friday night.
- Lennie Briscoe: Yeah. In Tel Aviv.
- Tom Champa: This is a nightmare. My life savings was in that club.
- Lennie Briscoe: Oh, really? I know twenty-three families who really don't give a damn.
- Anita Van Buren: Twenty-three people are dead because of an opera?
- Lennie Briscoe: The Germans. What are you gonna do?
- Anita Van Buren: I'll tell you what the taxpayers want me to do. They want me to string someone up. That's what.
- Ed Green: And we would like nothing more than that. But the problem is who? Wotan violated a contract. They didn't break no laws.
- Lennie Briscoe: The fire marshal can't say how or when the damn thing started. For all we know, somebody in the crowd lit a candle.
- Ed Green: The bottom line is ain't nobody saw nothin'.
- Jerome Williams: It's gonna be hours before I can get you in there. Bunch of cretins. It was like tossing a match into a haystack.
- Ed Green: They don't have sprinklers?
- Jerome Williams: They're not required in a public facility with a maximum occupancy of seventy-four or less.
- Ed Green: Wait. Didn't you say there were between three and four hundred people in there?
- Jerome Williams: The nitwit at the door didn't major in math. That gets the owner a fine. Can you imagine? Nine bodies were found near the front doors; trampled trying to get out.
- Lennie Briscoe: There had to be other doors, right?
- Jerome Williams: Sure, in the back. Nobody could see them. "Exit" signs were dark.
- Lennie Briscoe: That's gotta be a code violation.
- Jerome Williams: Bad lightbulb gets them fine number two.
- Lennie Briscoe: Twenty-three people are dead. Somebody's gonna do more than pay a couple of bucks.
- Lennie Briscoe: I'm no expert, but I saw these guys a half a lifetime ago. And back then, they always lined the stage with flamethrowers.
- Jerome Williams: They still do. Prometheus 530 flame projectors, to be precise. The thing is, there's no way that Prometheus should spit out fire high enough to hit the ceiling.
- Lennie Briscoe: What's the ceiling got to do with it?
- Jerome Williams: Made of polyurethane.
- Ed Green: Which burns fast as hell.