The second pilot. I liked the first one better, but this one was ok too . The ending was a bit disappointing, maybe, if you’ve seen so many stories as I have, but not too bad because after all it is coherent with the character, it is believable that she might act like that. It may seem stupid, but maybe not from her point of view…
In order, the whole plot:
Leslie kills her husband with a small gun as soon as he gets home, then she loads his body in the truck of his car and dumps it down a cliff. She has prepared everything to make it look like a ransom. She tells a friend to call her the next day at a specific hour and say just one thing to remind her of their tennis appointment, so that the next day after the friend ends the call, she stays on the phone and pretends that it was some stranger saying they kidnapped her husband. A police squad is alerted immediately, and they gather at her house, waiting for their call. Colombo is there only to tell them the police found the man’s car… they know that already (a phone call from the police, so once again, what’s he doing there?). He’s their local police liaison, which seems rather weird since he’s a lieutenant, a detective… they don’t expect him to do anything, because they’re the experts on kidnappings…and so Colombo follows everything from the side, observing… An envelope arrived with the mail, aerial maps of where she should fly a plane and drop a bag with the money, then the phone call, that we see is automatic from a very advanced telephone, that can be programmed to make a certain call at a certain hour. She programmed it by using pieces of a tape… I have no idea what kind of tape it is, because it said things like I’m busted, they want 300.000$… she cuts the ‘busted’ bit and keeps the rest. Then she refuses their bag saying she already has one ready, and uses her own - a white bag, she has two identical white bags - When nobody’s looking she switches the bags and then flies away. The police follow and all, but her plan goes well for her, she throws out an empty bag then comes bag, and takes the bag with the money home. Colombo goes to check, but she’s gone already. He already feels something’s wrong with it all. Most of all the fact that when she received the call, and it was her husband’s voice saying that ‘they want 300.000’, she never asked anything. Really, nothing. No ‘how are you?’, no ‘are you hurt?’ Or whatever, she never asked about him or what they could have done to him. Nobody else seems concerned by this, but it’s important, what worried wife, or person in general, would not need to know if the loved one was ok?
Shortly after the body is found, and it’s officially a case for Colombo now. Especially because he already thinks it’s murder, not a ransom case.
There’s lots of little things that make him sure of it, like the use of a small gun so that it would not pass the other side and touch the walls, or the fact that the ‘guys’ took the moey but left the bag, or the trajectory of the bullet, because they can tell that he was standing while the murderer was seated down, which is quite unusual if he really was the kidnapped, right? And yet Colombo doesn’t have one single proof.
Leslie is a famous lawyer, good at her job. Right after the ‘ransom delivery’ she sees that Margareth came home from Switzerland. She’s the man’s daughter, Leslie is the second wife after the first died. Margareth and Leslie do not get along, and Leslie hoped to be able to send her away quickly, but the girl is stubborn and stays around.
Colombo is good at billiard too :) and is already really fond of chilli with crackers. Margareth comes to talk to him (how she knew he was there is not known…) and tells him she suspects Leslie, because she never loved him. She married him because she wanted his connections, his good name to help her career, so they opened a law firm together, but lately Margaret’s father had talked to her, told her that Leslie admitted she never loved him and found him boring, I think she wanted him to leave the firm to her, she had already convinced him to do what she wanted in the past, but this time he refuses.
Colombo tells Margaret they haven’t found her dad’s car keys anywhere, so she pretends to find her, yelling that Leslie murdered him, but Colombo stops her, saying he knows those aren’t the right keys, and that they weren’t there before…
And then Leslie comes home to find Margaret waiting for her with a gun in her hand, she even shoots her, like it happened that night… luckily for her Margaret only shoots blanks. As soon as she feels sure of that, Leslie tries to get her, and chases her around the whole house… until Margaret finally tells her that she (Leslie) used her bank account to get the ransom, and now she wants back what it her due… so Leslie thinks she wants to make a deal. That’s rather common for lawyers, to reach a deal and close the case. So they bargain a bit for a price, and Leslie accepts to give her25 or 30.000 cash ‘but only if she flies away the next day’, which means that she has to find the money that same night. Margaret accepts and packs her bag to go back to Switzerland. Colombo is at the airport and they talk, after Margaret’s gone. Leslie thinks Colombo is on some other case, because this one he couldn’t solve and so he got assigned to something else… until Colombo tells her that she almost got away with it, but he thought long and hard and realized that the only way to prove it would have been to get her to take the ransom money. Given her character, she didn’t find anything strange with Margaret wanting to make a deal. She didn’t find it suspicious, she just wanted her gone from her life. So much that she took that money and gave it to her (well, she put it in a case that Margaret was supposed to bring with her to Switzerland and put in a bank). But Colombo took that case instead, checked that it contained the money, and then had her arrested.
Colombo’s dedication to his work can be seen from the fact that he goes willingly on a plane ride with her, only because he wants to observe her and asks a few questions… it’s not at all pleasant for the poor man, she even does a bit of turning upside down, and then goes as far as giving him the reins, so to speak. She says she’ll teach him how to pilot a plane, and the poor man has to do something… he’ll be very glad to have his feet back on the ground.
P.S. The Italian version was terrible, sorry but it was the wrong voice, I felt like De Niro was behind the corner, it was not right for the character. It also changed for the last scene… a disaster.
ITA Riscatto per un uomo morto
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