I liked it, more than I usually would have with such a character, but I liked all the investigation bits, and also the expressions of the wife, it was a nice episode.
The male lead is Nelson Hayward, candidate for the Senate I think, saying that the judges granted him a police escort that he was forced to accept, but that nothing and nobody will stop him in his war against crime… he uses his own words, but that’s the spirit, and back then there were men who actually believed that when they said it, but then they were killed and the others got the message…
Harry Stone is the man that manages his campaign, but he’s not paid by Nelson, he’s put money in it and now he expects Nelson to do everything he says and be elected.
Vickie is Nelson’s wife, and Linda is his lover; she’s also Vickie’s assistant.
To be sure to avoid all possible scandals, Stone wants Linda out of Nelson’s life, not just for the elections, but for good. Nelson has no intention of giving her up though, and since Stone insists he says that the other really gives him no choice, and goes ahead with the plan he made. He says he can’t break up on the phone, he has to talk to her in person to make her understand, and since they can’t have policemen or journalists follow him to Linda’s house, he has Stone take his jacket and his car and go to his beach cottage, so they’d follow him instead. But Nelson doesn’t go to Linda’s house, he goes to the cottage and shoots Stone, then changes his watch - because Stone’s own watch was of the made-to-last type, and Nelson needed a more fragile one, so that he could smash it and provide the police with a time of death, one when he would be sure to be noticed elsewhere of course.
Nelson hurries back home, where he has planned a surprise party for his wife, and has invited lots of people. Colombo will reach him there to tell him that Stone has been killed, probably by someone who thought they were killing Nelson instead…
So, since Nelson needed the body found when he had the alibi of his wife’s party, he sneaked into a room and called the police, pretending to be some anti-Nelson-Hayward criminals and saying that they had just killed Nelson, true to their threats… and that was what Colombo knew at first, he heard on the radio about Nelson being killed while he was in the dentist’s chair (poor Colombo, he really doesn’t like it, I can empathize…) and he keeps thinking it for a while, he arrives at the crime scene thinking Nelson died, but then he learns the truth and starts investigating. Everyone assumes Nelson was the intended victim, even Colombo at first, but he doesn’t let that blind him to other possibilities…
Colombo as always investigates all the little details, not keeping anything to himself.
For example, there was no way the murderer could have called the police at that hour after having murdered the man only a few minutes before, because there’s nothing around but a garage, and that night the garage closed early. Which means the murder had to happen earlier that what the watch suggests…
The watch itself, it does not agree with the rest of Stone’ss tuff, all his clothes are of the made-to-last kind, he would never have bought such a fragile watch, which suggests someone changed it in order to smash it to provide an hour…
Colombo is there to see when Nelson is delivered his tailor-made jacket, a sort of copy of the one that got ruined when he shot Stone, meaning his jacket that he gave Stone to wear, and Colombo asked the tailor and the jacket had been ordered ten days earlier.
…
Colombo starts asking questions that rather suggest that Stone was the intended victim after all, so Nelson makes himself some threat letters and has Linda pretend to discover that on his desk, and then since Colombo doesn’t really buy it, and Nelson knows that Colombo suspects him, he puts together another big scene. While alone in his hotel room, he shoots at the window from outside, on the balcony, so the bullet goes into the wall inside the room. With a silencer nobody heard it, and then he went out becausehe could not wait, he had to join his wife and go voting, there were journalists waiting for that.
I think they said it was three hours later that they got back to their hotel room (I don’t remember if it’s yet known who won…) and Nelson used a firecracker to pretend someone shot at him right then, and when the cops enter the room of course he’s alone, and he makes it a big deal of how it’s pretty obvious now that someone wanted and still wants to kill him, and it should be enough even for Colombo… but it doesn’t, and Colombo still thinks and claims that Nelson murdered Stone, and now he has proof. Thing is, Colombo kept a closed eye on him, had a cop warn him if Nelson was ever alone anywhere, and so he was told when Nelson went into a room alone saying he had to make some calls, and he looked at the communicating phones, there should be a light when the phones are in use, and there never was a light… and so he wondered what was Nelson doing if he was not calling anyone, and so he entered the room while the others were all out and searched it. Of course he found the hole in the wall, he took the bullet and sent it to their lab, which confirmed it as fired from the same gun that killed Stone… but there’s no way Nelson can explain that. He was just now yelling and insisting someone ‘just’ shot at him…
About Linda, they talked much about avoiding scandals and all, and yet Nelson starts calling her for everrything. Nelson suggested Linda follow him on his campaign, so he could bring Linda and he’d have a valid excuse to see her often, and then they thought it was normal that she kept bringing him stuff or that he kept asking her to do something… only the wife looked unhappy about it, I really liked her exression when she saw them… I mean, he had his own assistant, it made no logical sense that he should ask Vickie’s assistant to fetch him things…
Let’s not even talk of how after hearing that firecracker both women got worried and hurried at his side… that would have been clue enough for everyone, had it mattered at all, which it didn’t because at that moment Nelson got busted :p
P.s. in this episode, Colombo is stopped by the road police for a check, and even after they learn he’s a lieutenant they go through with their inspection and give him a list of things he has to take car of - like he has a burned light, stuff like that, and good man that he is, he immediately does it, leaving the car at the garage nearest the murder scene, so he can keep investigating while the man works on his car.
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