Howie Tolkin is a former Bosseigh High classmate of Shawn and Gus's, graduating alongside them as part of the Class of '95. He's somewhat of a hero at the school as he was the quarterback for their football team, the Sabercats, in his last two years and contributed immensely to the state championship they won in his senior year. The school even honored him with a hallway "shrine", and his exploits didn't go unnoticed elsewhere either as he got to go to UCLA on a football scholarship. He ended up marrying his prom queen Eileen Mazwell, who also went to UCLA.
When Shawn is walking the halls with Abigail at their 13-year class reunion, he sees someone fall off the roof and initially assumes this must have been Howie when he finds someone's State Champs pin at the bodyless crime scene and remembers Howie wearing his when he came in. However, Howie walks into the gymnasium together with Eileen shortly afterwards and isn't missing his pin either.
In the hallway Shawn notices that someone has damaged Howie's football shrine, but when he brings this up to him and Eileen they shrug it off and claim they've moved on to bigger things now that Howie has officially announced his candidacy for the State Assembly last month. Shawn thinks the two are suspicious, and while Juliet agrees that his indifference about the shrine is an odd attitude "for a guy who's clearly stuck in the past" there's nothing they can do without hard evidence.
Shawn finally makes a break in the investigation when he's on the roof with Abigail and notices a shoe print in the asphalt. He realizes in a flash that the shape matches that of Howie's shoes and that his shoes have left traces of asphalt in the gymnasium. Gus is not convinced of Howie and Eileen's involvement when he sees them casually dancing it up among their fellow alumni, and Shawn also wonders why they'd stick around after committing a murder.
They go to the school library for research, and while looking at pictures of Howie and Eileen Shawn notices a "Duckie", the third wheel in their love triangle. They notice a picture of him taken in the school's auto shop and it's there that Shawn learns this mysterious student is Peter Colter. He and Gus go to the station together with Juliet and discover Howie and Eileen were involved in a car accident on 06/06/95 (three days before graduation) and Peter was charged with involuntary manslaughter as the driver. However, Shawn realizes it was in fact Howie who was driving at the time from a nasty bruise on his forehead in one of the accident pictures and the configuration of the driver's seat in another. They now have a strong reason to believe Howie and Eileen killed Peter, especially after Juliet mentions Eileen had taken out a restraining order against him only a month ago, but they are yet to find his body.
Shawn and Gus go back to the reunion and realize Howie and Eileen must have dragged Peter's body into the girls' locker room through a basement window. Once down there, they only barely manage to hide from the murderous couple and find Peter's body in a mascot costume. They move the body and lure Howie and Eileen onto the stage of the gymnasium by pretending they were voted the reunion prom king and queen. Shawn confronts them in front of all the other attendees and explains that Howie urged Peter to pretend he was the driver on that fateful day so that he wouldn't lose his UCLA scholarship. This changed the trajectory of Peter's life forever, and when Howie announced he was running for the State Assembly Peter couldn't take it anymore and needed the truth to come out. He contacted the two, leading to the restraining order which Howie and Eileen also hoped would deter him from coming to the reunion. However, he did show up and vandalized Howie's shrine before confronting him and Eileen on the roof. They pushed him off and hid the body, but didn't notice that the State Champs pin had fallen from Peter's letterman jacket. Following Shawn's revelations, Howie and Eileen are arrested and led away by Lassiter and Juliet.
Trivia[]
- He says he'll write "a motivational book for losers who need help" after "fixing" California, with the working title being Move It... or MOVE IT!
- He bullied Earlie back in high school.
- When Howie and Eileen enter the school, Shawn calls them "Andrew McCarthy" and "Molly Ringwald" in a reference to the 1986 teen movie Pretty in Pink (although he changes the reference to one about 1988's Fresh Horses once he notices Howie's shoes). This explains why he calls Peter "Duckie", as the film revolves around a love triangle between McCarthy's Blane, Ringwald's Andie and Jon Cryer's Duckie. Ringwald would go on to appear as Lavender McElroy in S6E6 "Shawn, Interrupted".
- Shawn introduces himself to Howie as "Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago". This is an alias used by Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the 1986 comedy that also inspired the title of the episode.
- It's unknown whether he's related to Lance Tolkin of S5E4 "Chivalry Is Not Dead... But Someone Is".