A nice episode, I liked it. I liked the fact that the whole time I was waiting to see how could Colombo bust our murderer, Harold, and then he gets killed too. Nice twist a-la-psycho.
And I liked a lot this Dolores character, played by Tyne Daly.
The plot:
Harold is a compulsive gambler which means he is full of debts. His uncle Fred is rich, owner of a football team, but he’s tired of Haroldd’s debts, so Harold plans to kill him by placing a bomb in his car. In the morning though, he learns that Fred has been run over and is now dead. There’s police officers everywhere, there’s nothing he can do to get that bomb out of there. He even finds Colombo in the car! ‘Luckily’ Colombo never tried the engine :)
Fred’s funeral sees Harold stick to Dolores like glue because she’s the heir and he wants access to that money. She is not his aunt, he’s known her only five years and they’re occasional lovers, but now he seems to have a lot of competition :p she likes the company of all those football players :lol:
He tries to ‘win her back’ with lots of words, but when she refuses to give him 15000$ he changes his tune and blackmails her. This is when things change.
I had not thought about it because all the attention had been centered on Harold, but his words make sense, when he accuses her of having killed Fred herself. The fact that she agrees to pay means she did it, and now she knows he’s a threat so she kills him to shut him up. She tells Colombo that Harold called her that morning, scared because he was being threatened due to his many debts, so he wanted to run away but had no money, so she went to him with 1000$ and found him already dead. The policeman says a professional entered the house using a glass cutter (we saw Dolores putting one of those in her bag) and made noise knocking over the cat’s milk bowl (she also put milk in her bag), so Harold tried to reach for his gun but got killed first.
But Colombo sees many things the others just ignored :)
First of all: Harold was indeed a murderer because he didn’t say a word and let the old gardener try to move the car, so he got blown up.
Colombo figures out how he attached the bomb to the car and that he left marks when he pushed himself below the car with his boots’ heels (it’s a funny scene when he goes to a car dealer with the same type of expensive cars and starts mumbling about where a bomb could be put, and after explaining he’s police he starts crawling underneath the car to study it personally, and people stop outside the window to look at him an when he notices he’s sitting there and smiling at them like a child ).
Colombo even shows Dolores a recording of Harold closing his eyes and averting his face right before the explosion, sign that he was expecting it.
Regarding Harold, he had 5000$ in his room, and wet socks inside his boots. This meant nothing to the other cops because it didn’t go along with their perfect, simple theory, so they just ignored it, but not Colombo. He does a proper investigation: Harold had been at a Casino all night, where he won the 5000 and had a haircut. This is important because Colombo saw Harold’s cowboy hat in Dolores’ house, and it contained freshly cut small hairs, meaning he had lefty it the same morning he was killed.
Busted.
ITA il gioco è fatto / asassinio per gioco
