One of the oldest episodes, and also one of the best. There’s lots of Colombo in here, and we follow everything closely and understand step by step, just like always but also a little better. A good one!
Carl Brimmer has a company that works in investigations, and of course there’s probably lots of jealous husbands wanting to know what their wives do… in this case, this needy weakness that is usually so pathetic has a bit of explanation, his insecurity is understandable : Mr Kennicut is so much older than his wife Lenora, he could be her father, as he himself admits. But Brimmer doesn’t tell him the truth, no, he tells Kennicut that there’s nothing to reveal, and then he tries to blackmail Lenora, but she thinks long and hard on it and refuses to be blackmailed, she tells Brimmer that she’ll confess it all to her husband and hope for forgiveness, but that for sure Mr Kennicut won’t forgive him for trying to blackmail her!
Lenore goes to his house to tell Brimmer this, and then she just wants to leave, after basically promising him to his face that she’ll ruin him. Brimmer doesn’t want to let her go, takes her by the shoulders; she struggles, he strikes her in the face, she falls backwards and hits her head and dies.
Accidental it may be, but honestly, this man would not have let her go on with her threat/promise to ruin him, he wanted to stop her in some way…
He cleans his house of her passage, then puts her in his car and drives her away, to leave her body and purse somewhere covered by night’s darkness.
When Colombo is called to the crime scene, of course everyone seems content to accept that she had been mugged and killed, but as always Colombo keeps looking at everything, and is particularly intrigued by a cut on her left cheek.
The husband is a rich, hard man who is deeply affected by her death and wants the murderer to be found as soon as possible. The first time Colombo goes to his house to tell him that, unfortunately , they have yet no definite clue, and that he thinks she was killed by someone she knew because her body was so very far from her house (and also Brimmer’s, they lived near each other). That’s when Colombo meets Brimmer. Mr Kennicut hired him to investigate after Brimmer ‘offered his help’. Colombo notices right away that Brimmer has a big ring on his left hand, and starts talking about horoscopes and hand-reading stuff for the chance to take their hands and ‘read it’.
Colombo also learns that Lenore had started playing golf, and she received personal lessons.
Colombo goes to the club to talk to the golf instructor, and see they had lots of appointments… the man Archer tries to deny it at first, but eventually he has to admit that he’s rather good at seducing women like Lenore, and that it was alright for a while, but then Lenore felt guilty towards her husband, that she actually loved or something like that, and broke it off. Archer says she was neber scared or her husband finding out, but he was, because he was sure that there was a man, military-type, that followed them.
Colombo visits Brimmer’s office to hand him every useful document on the case, and he learns that Brimmer is left-handed, or actually ambidextrous - to strike her on the left cheek, he hit her with his left hand. Than he learns that he has a house by the sea, like the Kennicuts, and that he knows where their house is when he says there two miles between the two houses. When Colombo talks quite a lot with one of Brimmer’s agents, Brimmer gets angry and orders him to stop gossiping, even though he was doing no such thing, not really, and thous proving he also has a bad temper. When Brimmer asks Colombo to dine together in his office, he also offers him a job at his company, promising that as a detective with great skills, he would probably gain thrice as much money as he makes now, but he won’t be working the Kennicut case anymore, no reason really… then Colombo talks again to Brimmer’s agent from before, asks about Brimmer’s temper, in case he actually came to work there, and how much money he could ask for, (at least 30.000 a year), and talking Colombo learns that Brimmer’s best agent, his favorite, is a military-type guy named Leo.
Colombo goes to the park to talk to Leo’s wife and little son, and learns that Leo is abroad, Brimmer sent him away just the night before…
Colombo has quite the whole theory clear in his mind, but has no idea how to get him, how to prove it, until he goes to renew his driving license - that he does not renew because he runs away thinking of his case, we can only guess he’ll do it another time :) Anyway, while he’s there he hears a woman talking about her new glasses, and suddenly he remembers that the picture in Mr Kennicut’s house of him with his wife showed a Lenore with big glasses… he very excitedly talks to Mr Kennicut about it, that the glasses were not found near her so maybe she lost them where she was killed… but Mr Kennicut tells him she never wore glasses, she thought them ugly or something, so she wore eye contacts, and indeed in her purse there’s the contacts case, empty, meaning she had them on. Colombo asks for his permission, of course, and them has Lenore dug up and checked. Brimmer runs immediately to learn what is going on, he always has someone follow Colombo. Colombo is very excited to tell both men that Lenore did indeed miss one contact lense, and it probably is where she was killed… of course Brimmer has to check, first at his house, and then his car. Since it didn’t start that morning, his car is now at the garage to be checked. Brimmer forces the door at night, to go inspect his car and what do you know, he actually finds the contact lense (which back then were only hard, not soft like now, and it wasn’t at all unusual to lose one).
As soon as he finds it, lights turn on and he can see that Colombo is there, with Mr Kennicut and several policemen. Brimmer tries to throw it away, but when he’s stopped he knows he’s been caught, and he tells Mr Kennicut that he hadn’t planned it, didn’t really want to hurt her, it was an accident… stuff like that (I’m not really touched, he never called an ambulance or tried to save her, he just saw her hit her head, thought ‘oh she’s dead’ and proceeded to hide his involvement, not the actions of an innocent.
Colombo of course suspected him from the first, as soon as he saw his ring and felt how sharp it was, when he took his hand to read it.
Mr Kennicut comments on the happy circumstances that Lenore would lose a lense and Brimmer’s car needed repair, and Colombo reveals that Lenore never lost her lenses, her body still had both, the lie was important to catch Brimmer. Colombo also reveals that he became a policeman to atone for all that he did as a child with his little gang, when he used to put a potato in the muffler/silencer of the car, and then laugh when it wouldn’t start… thus revealing that it was no coincidence Brimmer’s car needed repair…
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