I liked this episode. I so did not like the Haplering character, but I guess that was the point, he’s not a good character, but I quite enjoyed the rest, and especially seeing Colombo in a different setting, like when he talks to a reknown thief, and suddenly Colombo seemed more at ease, on his own ground, with no need to affect anything or to feel uncomfortable.
Details:
Mark Halpering is Columbo’s chief, and Hugh Caldwell is his neighbour and friend. Since Mark works in the police, Hugh runs to him when he ‘accidentally’ kills his wife. Well, he puts it like that, I don’t, there’s nothing accidental in strangling a person until she dies! He says he was angry because she had lovers and he did it in his rage… and Mark forms a clever plan in his mind. He doesn’t really choose this course because it’s the best for his friend, but for himself!
By doing this, he paves the way for his own wife’s murder,, sets a precedent, another woman killed by the same thief…
So Mark tells Hugh to stay at the club and call home at a specific hour, when he’ll be there to answer it, and stay there until the police finds him.
Mark goes to Hugh’s house, changes the woman’s clothes putting a nightgown on her, one that he took from the wardrobe. He answered the phone, of course, he set the whole scene.
When he went to his own home, he talked to his wife (their problem is that she likes to ‘help people’ with the money she inherited and that is only hers, while he’d want to spend it all on gambling and women).
Then Mark looks out the window and pretends to see a man coming out of Hugh’s house, so he calls but of course nobody answers, so he calls the police.
To the journalists and everyone, he says that the thief who alreary robbed three houses in that area, this time got seen and so he killed the house owner that saw him… and he also says that both he and his wife saw him, and she might be able to recognize him… which obviously is not true, since there was no man at all.
Shortly after that, he goes home to his wife having a bath and drowns her in the bathtub, then puts a dress on her and asks (demands) Hugh takes her body and throws it in the pool at a specific time. To show that he’s taking it very seriously, he joins the helicopter doing patrol, and again he says he saw someone, and looking closely they can see a man throwing a woman’s body in the pool. He jumps out and pretends to try and save her, the scum.
He swirls it like the thief came to shut her up because he said that she might recognize him…
Colombo of course doesn’t believe any of it, there’s lots of little things!
Things that probably nobody else would notice, as usual, because he looks deeper. Knowing that the thief never leaves fingerprints,the cops weren’t going to check, but he insisted!
Of course Mark was wearing gloves, but that’s not the point. The maid had cleaned everything very throughly during the day, and it’s still very clean. There’s no fingerprints on the phone or on the wardrobe, and how could the woman answer the phone and open the wardrobe without leaving any? Also, she would have taken the nightgown she had under the pillow, not another one in the wardrobe, her husband knew about that.
Colombo also asks the coroner to look into Mark’s wife’s lungs, even after he’s told that there’s no way he can find any chlorine because it gets absorbed fast or something, but once again Colombo insists that he take a look, and he’s rewarded by quite the finding: there was soap in her lungs! Of course we knew it, and now so does Colombo.
So: Colombo doesn’t believe the thief-turned-murderer theory but his boss insists, of course, so he has to play carefully. There’s only Mark’s word, but it’s not easy to speak against it.
Colombo talks to another cop, who’s specialty is thieves, and gets the name of the most likely man to have done the first three robberies, and he goes to talk to him. This man initially goes out of his mind, thinking they’re trying to pin the murders on him (well, Mark is, but not Colombo), and then he stops and listens because Colombo knows he didn’t kill them, and he also knows who did it, but he needs proof and wants his help to get it.
This is what I was talking about at the beginning, here Colombo has to deal with a known thief, and his attitude is different, less humble. With rich people, who are usually arrogant and demanding and entitled, he’s all apologies, ,but with the thief there’s no being sorry to bother him or stuff like that. They talk and they understand each other, and the man agrees to help Colombo because he knows that otherwise someone will succeed and he’ll be labelled a murderer.
The thief (sorry, but I really can’t remember his name) calls Hugh saying stuff like I know you killed her, I saw you… and he wants to meet to ask for some blackmail money. Hugh tells Mark everything, and Mark looks for informations on the man among the files on Colombo’s desk, searching for the man’s address. Once he finds it, he goes there to hide under the mattress the jewels that he took from Hugh’s house, then he has the police arrest the man while he was meeting Hugh to get the money (nobody wondered why an innocent man would agree to be blackmailed? If there was nothing true about it?).
Colombo keeps telling him that he does not believe him guilty, that it’s a mistake, but Mark insists on going to the man’s house with a search warrant. Colombo quietly explains to him all that he knows about how things went on, especially on how Mark himself killed his own wife. Mark doesn’t yield and when the cops finally find the jewels, he’s all victorious, thinking that now he can pin it all on the thief, no matter what Colombo knows or suspects.
His joy is short lived though, because Colombo out-played him here. They are not at the thief’s house, not at all, it’s Colombo’s, well, a new place that he rented recently, probably just for the occasion, and it worked. Only Mark could have put the jewels there.
Busted, he doesn’t know what to say.
P.s. the apartment had to appear lived in, so Colombo filled it with his clothes and stuff, there were even pictures of his family, well, of a man and then of two children who were his nephews or something.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento