Jessica Fletcher has plans to depart from fiction and write a book about a real case. She hires private detective Floyd Levine to dig into the old case which was controversial because the guilty man swore up and down he was framed, kind of like Bruno Hauptman for the Lindbergh kidnapping. The man is killed up close and personal by someone he had no fear of. A whole lot like Jerome Cowan in the Maltese Falcon.
And like Cowan he has a partner who wants to do something about it. This episode marks the introduction of Jerry Orbach whose path would cross with Angela Lansbury a few times in the series and Orbach would get a short lived series of his own with his Harry McGraw character.
It's an uneasy alliance here and truth be told Jessica Fletcher is really butting in. But between the two of them they figure out which one of three cases led that Levine was working on including the one Lansbury hired him for led to the homicide.
Poor Orbach he really went through a meat grinder in this story. One of the people he is watching is gangster Alex Rocco who has him worked over a couple of times.
Things get bit lighter between Lansbury and Orbach in the future.
And like Cowan he has a partner who wants to do something about it. This episode marks the introduction of Jerry Orbach whose path would cross with Angela Lansbury a few times in the series and Orbach would get a short lived series of his own with his Harry McGraw character.
It's an uneasy alliance here and truth be told Jessica Fletcher is really butting in. But between the two of them they figure out which one of three cases led that Levine was working on including the one Lansbury hired him for led to the homicide.
Poor Orbach he really went through a meat grinder in this story. One of the people he is watching is gangster Alex Rocco who has him worked over a couple of times.
Things get bit lighter between Lansbury and Orbach in the future.