What exactly is it that causes Tulsa “truthstorian” Lee Raybon to compromise his journalistic integrity and sleep with a subject-cum-source? It could be as simple as going halfsies on a fifth of tequila with Betty Jo Washberg, the most gifted flirt in Tulsa. Or you could chalk it up to the bombshell that Lee’s ex — the one who didn’t “believe” in marriage back when it was Lee asking — has recently decided to walk down the aisle with a dentist. (She probably flosses, too.)

Personally, I blame Jeanne Tripplehorn. Even if Lee were sober and thinking straight, her alluring, blows-hot-and-cold Betty Jo would be impossible for a guy like Lee — reckless, reeling, distractible — to resist. He wants her to want him to want her. The backbone of this week’s episode, called “Short on Cowboys,” is the pair’s frenzied daylong bender, which begins with some light stalking and ends, inevitably, with Lee and Betty Jo stumbling into Dale Washberg’s bed together.

Lee’s day starts at Sweet Emily’s, if a day can be said to “start” when the man living it has yet to sleep. Instead, Lee and Francis stayed up, poring over Dale’s epistolary diary. As precious as it is to watch Francis ask for her first cup of coffee, an all-nighter is a suspect parenting choice: (1) It’s a school day, and (2) Lee has no idea what bonkers shit could be in these letters written by a scorned man at the end of his life.

Admittedly, Lee needs Francis. He’s struggling with the purple prose Dale uses to describe how his family came to rule the amber hills of Osage County. The Washbergs still live on the land Dale’s “pawpaw’s pawpaw” first “acquired” when the patriarch came west; though from what we know about Lee’s Heartland Press takedown and American history more broadly, it’s safe to assume Dale’s ancestral home belonged to someone else first.

Francis is better than her father at reading the letters with an eye trained on the facts. What do we know for sure? Dale was an ugly baby, but his brother, Donald, was always kind to him, up until the week of Dale’s death. That week, they had a terrible fight, and Donald said something so hateful to Dale that Dale couldn’t bear to write it down — it was “a most vile provocation.” We know Dale was working on his “opus,” The Dustbowl Kid, at the time of his death, and he describes a thwarted attempt on his life, which Lee believes to be the same job Blackie and Berta botched in Skiatook. The pair abducted Lee to make amends, and Allen killed them for outliving their usefulness, which was minimal anyway.

Which brings me to parenting concern No. 3: This situation is actually dangerous. I laughed when Lee told Francis his abduction was no biggie because of the lever in the trunk — a callback to the advice he got from Cyrus, too late to be helpful. But Francis is right to be scared, and Lee is wrong to involve her enough to make her worry. Sometimes being a good dad means tucking your kid into bed even when you’d both rather keep playing.

Their gumshoeing is eventually interrupted by Mom, who turns up to take Francis to school, probably because Lee can’t be trusted to get her there by homeroom. Stunned to learn Samantha is becoming Mrs. Johnny Smile, he heads back to his store just before his editor arrives with more bad news. Donald is suing the Heartland Press to smithereens; he has even asked for a temporary restraining order against Lee to protect the Washberg clan from being accosted. Where Elijah sees the end days of his career, Lee hears the ticking of an egg timer. If he wants to know what terrible thing Donald said to Dale, he has to move quicker than the courts.

Donald primed Betty Jo to turn on him when he offered her a measly $10,000 to give up her house and get off his family’s land in last week’s episode. Still, she makes Lee work for a scoop. After catching him tailing her in his big white pedo van, Betty Jo suggests lunch at a diner she knows. Isn’t this the kind of biscuits-and-gravy place Lee thinks Betty Jo would like? She read the hit piece, including Lee’s implication that she’s trailer trash hiding behind her married name. And she’s pissed at Lee for the scene he made at Dale’s funeral, too. She loved Dale. Their daughter loved him.

Duly chastised, Lee tries a less direct route. They head over to the Jack of Clubs for tequila shots, and things turn predictably confessional. Lee tells Betty Jo about his heartbreak. He may not have Samantha, but once she’s married, he will have lost her for good. Betty Jo tells him Pearl can’t stand her. Last week, she was a Washberg wife; now, she’s a has-been rodeo queen swapping tales of woe with a never-was writer. She’s singing karaoke in a dive bar in her best denim suit and telling secrets to the one guy you don’t tell secrets to. Naturally, Betty Jo invites Lee back to hers for a nightcap.

From the moment they step back into her contested mansion, the mood is dizzy, gleeful chaos. Betty Jo tells Lee she was asleep on the sofa the night Dale killed himself. Before Lee can say anything in response, she asks if he wants to watch videos from her heyday of cattle wrangling with heeled boots and high hair. Just as Lee’s getting comfortable on her sofa, she leaves the room and returns with Dale’s gun raised as “Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On,” by Oklahoma’s own Mel McDaniel, plays on the stereo. She’s not planning to shoot him; it’s just a bit of fun. Don’t be so uptight, Lee!

The gun, though, turns out to be loaded, and the errant shots that hit the wall and the window sober everyone up fast. Lee wants to know why Betty Jo is pretending to believe her husband committed suicide. He knows from Dale’s letters that Dale told Betty Jo about the attempt on his life in the days before his death. But she insists she didn’t believe Dale at the time. He was acting shifty and paranoid. He even thought his own brother and wife were out to get him. Can you imagine that, Lee?

Lee knows about the affair between Donald and Betty Jo, so yes, he can. And he knows, also from Dale’s letters, that the brothers were pitted against each other over a land deal in Indian Head Hills. Lee berates Betty Jo, and even though she’s tough as nails, it suits her to divulge the truth. If she doesn’t, this lunatic with a typewriter — it’s easier to imagine Lee huddled over his Hermes 3000 than a MacBook Air — might accuse her of mariticide in print.

The brothers weren’t fighting over Indian Head Hills at the time of Dale’s death, she explains. They were fighting over Pearl, who is really her uncle’s daughter. This affair between Don and Betty Jo is older than Betty Jo’s marriage to Dale. In fact, it’s the whole reason for her marriage to Dale. The Washbergs were never going to accept a trailer-trash bride for their firstborn son, but for their gay son, any bride who wasn’t a groom would do. She tricked Dale into thinking he was Pearl’s father. Donny and Betty Jo could stay close to each other as brother- and sister-in-law, and Dale loved his daughter dearly. Win-win-win. Lee and Betty Jo then sleep together because, for a truthstorian, there’s no greater aphrodisiac than spilled beans.

Meanwhile in the episode, Allen is on a bender of another sort. He’s two years sober, he declares at A.A., but lately he’s been drunk with guilt over lying to his boss. To be clear, he doesn’t feel bad about killing Blackie and Berta; he feels bad about keeping the killings from the man who showed him kindness back when he was a young skinhead fresh out of lockup. It’s delightfully perverse to watch a character with no integrity whatsoever — Allen’s a racist and a murderer — lament being out of integrity with himself.

Still, he does what little he can to make it right. After his meeting, Allen checks on Blackie’s worried mother, who stares at the groceries he deposits on her table like they’re a written confession: “I killed your son, but you still need eggs.”

Finally, when he learns Lee has been snooping around the trailer park, Allen decides to come clean to his boss. That’s where he’s driving when a man we’ve never seen before puts a bullet through his throat. The only boss we knew Allen to have for sure was Frank, the developer who keeps him looking fresh in those fleecy Akron gilets. But why would Frank want Dale dead? And why would Frank be so scared of loose ends that he’d kill his own henchman by hiring another henchman?

The bottoms of Lee’s feet as they dangle over the edge of the bed the next morning are exquisitely dirty — someone give The Lowdown’s makeup artist an Emmy. The lovers wake, and they bake. In lieu of sweet nothings, they make guesses as to who killed Dale. Betty Jo is exonerated in Lee’s eyes, but she wants to know whom Lee has pegged for the murder now. Donald seems too obvious. Does she want Lee to suspect Donald? Is she using him any more than Lee’s using her?

At the top of the episode, Lee suggests to Francis that they’ve been barking up the wrong tree. Maybe Dale’s murder has nothing to do with trusts or boardrooms or business deals; maybe it’s more personal. On his daily jog, Donald spots Lee heading to his car, stopping to scratch his back on the flagstone façade of Donald’s mistress’s house, right on schedule.

Lee is using Betty Jo, and of course Betty Jo is using Lee. But maybe it’s less consequential than covering up a murder or even keeping her house. Maybe it’s more personal than that. Maybe she just wants her boyfriend to be jealous.

 Lee gets a confession out of Betty Jo but not before having a little fun.