Last year I announced that I would no longer celebrate a day named in honor of a man who was a bloodthirsty monster even by the standards of his own time, and that henceforth I would celebrate the second Monday in October as a day honoring TV's greatest detective, Lieutenant Columbo. Happy Columbo's Day, everyone!
This year, I invite you to join with me in remembering the great Leonard Nimoy, who left us earlier this year, by appreciating his appearance in one of Columbo's best episodes: "A Stitch in Crime," which aired on NBC on February 11, 1973.
Nimoy plays Dr. Barry Mayfield, an ambitious young cardiac surgeon assisting an older colleague, Dr. Edmund Hidemann (Will "Grandpa Walton" Geer), on a new heart transplant technique; Mayfield wants to go forward with the technique on human patients, but Hidemann wants to wait until they've done more testing, even if that means losing the credit for the technique to a rival surgical team. When Hidemann has to go under the knife for a heart valve operation, Mayfield is the obvious choice to do the surgery... but nurse Sharon Martin (Anne Francis) doesn't trust Mayfield, and during the surgery she begins to suspect that he is up to no good.
After the surgery, Martin confronts Mayfield about the suture thread he used during the procedure: it didn't feel right to her, and she knows she didn't put it on the surgical tray. She accuses him of doing something during the operation that will kill Hidemann in a few days so he can take over the research project--and the credit--himself. As Martin leaves the hospital that evening, Mayfield confronts her in the parking lot, kills her with a tire iron, and takes the suture thread she was planning on using as evidence against him.
Our primary murder having been committed, it's time for Lieutenant Columbo to arrive on the scene, and he quickly begins living down to expectations, cracking his breakfast egg on the hood of the victim's car and, later, against the murder weapon.
The good lieutenant immediately zeroes in on Mayfield, observing the doctor calmly winding his desk clock while receiving the presumably terrible news of Martin's death over the phone. Later, in the obligatory
Columbo fish-out-of-water scene, the detective drives his shitty car up to Dr. Mayfield's opulent house and crashes a fancy cocktail party where Dr. Mayfield is in attendance, acting dumbfounded at the fancy hors d'oeuvres he is offered.
Following his usual practice, Columbo begins feeding Mayfield clues: the police found stolen morphine in Martin's apartment (actually planted there by Mayfield after the murder), so the police are looking at the murder as being possibly drug-related, but there were no fingerprints in the apartment or on the murder weapon, just glove smudges. Isn't that weird? Doesn't that seem like an awful lot of planning for a dope addict looking for a fix? After Columbo leaves, Mayfield calls up Martin's dimwitted roommate, Marcia Dalton (Nita Talbot), and asks her to come talk to him at the beach. Strolling arm-in-arm with Marcia along the Malibu Pier wearing the best sport coat ever, Spock pumps her for information and learns that Martin volunteered at a drug clinic for veterans. Perfect! In 1973, everyone knew that Vietnam veterans were all unstable dope fiends!
Columbo is waiting for Marcia as Mayfield drops her off at home. Sufficiently prepped by Mayfield, Marcia turns the detective on to one Harry Alexander (Jared Martin), a patient at the clinic where Martin volunteered, and whom she may have kinda sorta dated. Columbo tracks down Harry, who turns out to be a nice enough young man who cleaned himself up and works at a petting zoo, and leaves unimpressed after a short conversation. He returns to the hospital to pester Mayfield some more and get to know one of the lab monkeys.
Irritated by Columbo's meandering questions, Mayfield accuses the detective of suspecting him of killing Martin and planting the morphine in her apartment, and angrily denies having anything to do with it. Columbo demurs and turns to leave, but... oh, just one more thing, sir: a cleaning lady at the hospital told him that Martin was unusually upset after the surgery on Dr. Hidemann. Now why would she be so upset after a successful surgery? Very strange. Now thoroughly rattled and unhappy at his failure to implicate Harry Alexander, Spock breaks in to Harry's apartment late at night, chloroforms him, and injects him with a fatal dose of morphine.
Or so Mayfield thinks! It turns out Harry's morphine tolerance was raised by his former drug abuse, and he isn't dead at all, he's just trippin'!
Boy, is he trippin'!
Harry staggers outside, colors and moiré patterns swimming before his eyes, freaky 1970s electronic music ringing in his ears, and takes a header down the concrete steps of his crappy 1950s apartment building. Yep, that one got 'im.
Columbo delivers the sad news about Harry's death to Dr. Mayfield, who can't help crowing about correctly fingering the young dope fiend, but Columbo isn't convinced: Harry was left-handed, but the puncture mark from the needle was in his left arm, so clearly someone else injected him! It's another murder!
Now Mayfield knows Columbo is onto him, and is just looking for the motive. Columbo drops in on Dr. Hidemann, who is still laid up from surgery, and learns that Martin had made an appointment before her death with a chemist at a surgical supply company that makes suture thread. Specifically, they make dissolving suture, which melts away after it's done its job so the surgeons don't have to open the patient up again to remove it. If a surgeon used dissolving suture during a heart valve operation, Columbo learns during a queasy visit to an operating theater, the valve would separate as the suture dissolves, killing the patient a few days after the surgery. To an observer, it would simply look as though the patient had had a heart attack and died.
Columbo confronts Mayfield, who chuckles patronizingly at the detective's theory, telling him he has no proof of anything. With Dr. Hidemann's life on the line, Columbo loses his temper and drops the buffoon act for one of only a few times in his career. In one of the most famous moments in the history of the series, he slams a heavy water pitcher onto Mayfields desk and tells him that if Hidemann dies, there'll be an autopsy that will reveal whether it was due to a heart attack or to dissolving sutures, so it would be in Mayfield's best interest to make sure Hidemann stays alive.
Panicking, Mayfield fakes a medical crisis and puts Hidemann under the knife again under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Columbo, who is miraculously able to observe without getting nauseous, this time.
As Mayfield finishes his work on Hidemann, Columbo and the police swoop in with a search warrant to find the incriminating sutures that Mayfield removed from the patient... but shockingly, with only three minutes left in the episode, the old sutures on the operating tray turn out to be ordinary permanent sutures. Columbo is stunned. Did Spock just get away with it? Or even worse... could Columbo have been wrong?
As the storied detective leaves in disgrace, Mayfield finally allows himself a sigh of relief... only to have Columbo burst back into his office. He knew something was up, Columbo explains, when the normally unflappable doctor manhandled him in the operating room after the procedure. The suture had to go somewhere, and the only person the police didn't search was... Columbo himself. As Mayfield looks on in horror, Columbo reaches into the pocket of the surgical scrubs he had worn in the OR, and pulls out... the telltale suture.
Columbo: A Stitch In Crime is available for streaming on Netflix. Celebrate Columbo's Day today with someone you love.