Colombo - Agenda for murder

 I liked this episode and the scene where Colombo tells a joke is memorable, those two men laughing out loud never fail to make me laugh :)

The story is : Oscar Finch is an important lawyer, his best friend McKay’s career is flying since governor Montgomery, who is running for President, wants him as his second, and Oscar would get an important position as well.

Everything could be ruined by Frank Staplin. When Finch and McKay were young, they made a document disappear, saving Staplin from prison, and Staplin now wants Finch to do it again. Finch refuses and Staplin blackmails him with revealing that story. So Finch kills him in his house, making it look like suicide. Being a lawyer and therefore knowing about this stuff, he thinks of wearing gloves, and putting gun powder on Staplin’s hand, and leaving the fun where it should fall after the death but he also makes some mistakes. Some are not talked about, so it seems like they’re real mistakes, like: Finch touches the newspaper clip without gloves, and also when he presses Staplin’s fingers on it he only does it on the front, but nobody can take a neat piece of paper without touching its back…

But it’s no matter.

The mistake that matters the most to Colombo is this: when Finch shot Staplin, a drop of blood stained the floor, and when he finished to pu the scene as he wanted it, the gun ended up on top of the blood and yet didn’t get stained because the blood was dry. That screams of murder.

One thing Finch couldn’t know is that before opening the door for him, Staplin had just sent a fax to his wife with a handwritten joke on it; Finch told Colombo that Staplin sounded desperate when he called him, shortly before his death, and yet he had just sent a funny joke to his wife… the two things don’t match.

Finch left his car at his own parking lot, near his office, and walked to Staplin’s house. When he walked back, it rained a lot. In the morning, Colombo can see that under his car it’s dry and only there, and wet everywhere else. He hopes to get his suit from the laundry service, to prove he was out walking at that hour, but it gets cleaned by a zelous worker.

McKay gives Finch an alibi, and it really seems like Colombo can’t find any proof. Then, he takes a chewing-gum from Finch’s office bin, and his team succeeds in matching it to a piece of cheese on Stapliin’s desk, and to Finch’s dental records I guess, and it’s over for him. 

This Finch waas quite the character, always in a hurry to do something, starting his car with the turbo, so to speak, and thern there’s the joke. Colombo tells him Staplin’s joke, and Finch’s face is marble for a couple of seconds, then there’s a loud HAH! and then he starts laughing out loud, bent at the double, leaning on the car laughing, and I love that scene :lol

I really like Finch’s secretary, both the actress and the character, who gives Colombo a deodorant for the house to give his wife, who sends back a note of thanks. It’s weird to hear her say that she won’t accept his money for it because this is not from the office but it comes from her directly, she buys it herself… weird because it usually would be the opposite, like ‘since she took it from the office it gets lost in the many things needed and bought and she won’t lose any money by giviing it to him’ sort of thing. What a super honest woman :)

It’s sweet to see Colombo so awed by a fax machine :) but this episode has a rather weird solution, the teeth marks on the cheese… Colombo and the writers were proud enough of it to mention it in other episodes too, but really… what use is the chewing-gum? If it’s actually really possible, they’d need to match the cheese to Finch’s mental records, gotten from his dentist, or whatever. But the gum… if it has marks, it’s not from his front teeth! I don’t know but… I don’t care over much, I still like Colombo :)