Good day! Long story short: I don’t celebrate Columbus Day, because Christopher Columbus sucks. Instead, I use the second Monday in October to celebrate the accomplishments of America’s greatest fictional detective, Lieutenant Columbo. Happy Columbo’s Day, everyone!
If you’re new here, do check out my Columbo’s Day celebrations from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, when you get a chance. For now, though, sit back and enjoy our trip through “Rest In Peace, Mrs. Columbo,” which originally aired on ABC on March 31, 1990.
We open on a funeral taking place in the rain. We don’t have to wait very long to find out whose funeral it is, as the title card “REST IN PEACE, MRS. COLUMBO” appears within the first few seconds of the episode. Kate Mulgrew, nooooo! We can’t lose you now! Who will guide the USS Voyager home after it gets stranded in the Delta Quadrant? The camera zooms in on the grieving widower, and then past him to focus on a mysterious woman (Helen Shaver) boring holes in Columbo’s head with her eyes.
As she stares, we hear her thoughts, like in a soap opera, and I’m going to go ahead and quote the whole thing because it’s pretty over-the-top even for 1990: “Why don’t you cry? Dammit! I cried. Oh, yes, Lieutenant, I could give you lessons on that. Don’t you understand? Hasn’t it hit you yet? Your precious wife is gone for good. Dead and gone, and oh, how I’ve waited and prayed for this moment. Don’t worry, my dear friend, you’ll be joining her soon enough… but not until you’ve felt the pain the way I did. I’m entitled to that much. You don’t know what happened, do you? But you’ll know soon enough, because I’m going to tell you when it’s too late for you to do anything about it. You’re stupid, Columbo, just like Charlie was. Poor Charlton. He never saw it coming.”
The screen goes all shimmery, and we flash back to Vivian Dimitri, for that is the vengeful woman’s name, closing the deal on a $5.7 million dollar house with a couple of Virginia yokels. Driving her sweet Mercedes 560 SL along the coast, she grabs her fancy car phone and triumphantly calls her boss, Charlton Chambers (Edward Winter, best known as the insane Colonel Flagg on M*A*S*H), to give him the good news. Arriving at home, she plays an answering machine message from one Dr. Steadman, a psychiatrist. He’s concerned about her and encourages her to find a new therapist in Los Angeles. When the message ends, she picks up the phone and calls a bigshot named Leland St. John. Hey, it’s Ian McShane! God, I miss Deadwood.
Leland is a former real estate client of Vivian’s who is now cheating on his wife with her. They set up a date, with Vivian rejecting his restaurant choice and proposing her own. Next, while loading a silenced pistol, she calls the police department and asks for Columbo, saying she’s calling from his dentist’s office. He’s not in.
The phone calls having been completed, she drops in at the real estate office to visit Chambers, who’s watching a basketball game on TV and is in the mood to celebrate. Colonel Flagg reminisces about the good old days with Vivian; her husband Pete, who used to work for the agency; and Chambers’s own wife, Rita. Her demeanor suddenly changing, Vivian starts dragging Chambers about how he used to hit on her behind his wife’s back and for generally being a jerk. We get a lot of exposition here: ten years ago, Pete lost a bundle in the stock market and dipped into a client account to make up for it; the client threatened to go to the police and Pete killed him for it; a certain police lieutenant zeroed in on Pete and hounded him until they got him for the crime. Pete was sent to San Quentin and died of a heart attack there eight years later. Vivian, who had moved to San Francisco to be near Pete while he was in prison, fell apart until Chambers reached out and gave her a job with the agency and brought her back to LA. Whew! Vivian pulls a gun on Chambers and accuses him of being the person who originally ratted Pete out to the client and set everything in motion. “First you, then the cop,” she says, and shoots Chambers. She kneels down and retrieves the dead man’s wallet from his suit jacket.
Date night. Vivian hops in the car and drives straight to the restaurant to meet loverboy Leland, arriving at 8:40. They chat and eat, and Vivian excuses herself to go to the ladies’ room… but instead, she slips out the back door and heads to a nearby ATM. She uses Chambers’s card to withdraw some money and quickly returns to Leland waiting at the table. They ditch the restaurant and head to a hotel for sexytimes.
Vivian leaves the hotel around 2 AM, but instead of going home she returns to the office, plants the wallet and cash on Chambers’s body, and takes some files from his file cabinet. Driving away, we see her chucking the gun out the car window into a vacant lot. At home, she burns the files she stole.
Back to the funeral. This time we focus on Dede Perkins (Teresa Ganzel), a ditzy young woman who flashes back to the day she met Columbo. Dede is a receptionist at Chambers’s office, and she was the one who discovered his body, so it’s been kind of a bad week for her. At the office, we see the great detective gawking at Chambers’s photos with various celebrities, and at the check for $250,000 on Chambers’s desk. “When I bought my house, you could buy the whole block for $250,000,” Columbo reminisces. In Los Angeles? Columbo apparently bought his house in 1838. He examines a scrap of paper found in Chambers’s coat that has a bunch of nonsensical letters and numbers written on it. Weird. Columbo rifles the dead man’s pockets and finds an envelope from the Alden Hotel.
Columbo notices that the top drawer of the file cabinet is open, as Vivian comes into the room. She says she met with Chambers after hours last night about the house sold to the Virginians, then went home, ate dinner, had a bath, and went to bed. Columbo is perplexed: after Vivian left, Chambers went to an ATM and withdrew $200 at 9:45, and then came back to the office, where someone killed him. Wrapping things up, he asks another officer for a newspaper and examines it very closely, alongside the scrap of paper found in the dead man’s coat earlier.
To the Alden Hotel, which turns out to be the kind of place where hookers and meth dealers hang out. Columbo comes in as a guy in a loud suit (Joe Bellan) is barking letters and numbers into a payphone that are similar to the ones from Chambers’s scrap of paper. The detective correctly pegs Loud Suit as a bookmaker, and wants to discuss the numbers with him.
Columbo visits Vivian at her home for a chat. He says he’s been married for 28 years, which means he would have married Kate Mulgrew when she was 7 years old. Ick. Anyway, the reason for his visit is that they can’t find anyone who saw that Vivian was at home that night. She says that’s because she pulled the car into the garage, turned out the lights, and went straight to bed—which contradicts her earlier story about eating dinner and taking a bath. Moreover, a few neighbors saw her car in the driveway (not the garage) the next morning, but no one saw the car in the driveway the night before. Reluctantly, she confesses to the affair with Leland.
Back to the funeral. This time we zoom in on Leland, who wonders why he’s even here when he barely knows Columbo and doesn’t even like him very much. Yeah, actually that’s a good point. He’s pissed at Vivian for blabbing about the affair. Flashback to Leland on the golf course sinking a nice putt. He’s clearly on a practice green, yet he and his buddy are wagering on the holes. Is that even a thing?
Anyway, along comes Columbo to ruin his day. Under protest, Leland confirms Vivian’s alibi, but also says she excused herself for five or six minutes to use the ladies’ room. Oh, just one more thing, sir: This restaurant that happens to be just next door to the ATM where Chambers made his last withdrawal—did you choose it? No, Leland says, he doesn’t care for the food there, but Vivian insisted. Hmmm.
Columbo is eating lunch at his favorite health-code-violating diner when he is visited by Sgt. Brady (Tom Isbell). Brady informs him that the murder weapon was found in an empty lot at Falcon Ridge, a housing development where several homeowners had sued Chambers unsuccessfully for breach of contract—homeowners whose files were missing from Chambers’s office the morning after the murder. Columbo is unimpressed at Brady’s conclusion that of course one of those families were responsible for the murder. Columbo had learned that Chambers visited the Alden Hotel the night he was murdered to pick up his winnings from the bookie, then came back to his office. But why would a man with $1400 cash burning a hole in his pocket then leave two hours later to visit the ATM? The only thing that makes sense is that the ATM visit was the killer trying to establish a phony time of death. And that can only mean that Chambers died earlier than the ATM visit… much earlier. Like, when Vivian was at his office.
Columbo realizes that, although he’s already figured out the identity of the murderer, he doesn’t yet have anything the DA can bring to the grand jury. Another weird thing—Columbo got a call from his dentist’s office, but his dentist moved to Florida four months ago and he hasn’t gotten a new one yet. He’s pretty sure the call was from someone who wanted to know when he was back from vacation and going back to work.
Yes, we’re back at the funeral. We check in with Vivian, who villain-monologues to herself about how she’s set everything up perfectly and there’s no way this plan could possibly fail. We flash back to Vivian sitting at Chambers’s desk running things, when Columbo wanders in. We’ve been let in on Columbo’s thinking much, much earlier in the episode than usual, so we get to watch him toy with his prey like a cat. Golly gee, those folks at Falcon Ridge sure were angry at Chambers, and we found the murder weapon there. Anyhoo, Columbo is just there to extend his belated condolences on the death of Vivian’s husband, Pete Garibaldi… the man Columbo sent to San Quentin for manslaughter. All the color drains from Vivian’s face.
She went by a different first and last name back then, but Columbo recognized her from photos he found at Chambers’s home. She explains that after Chambers died she adopted her middle name and maiden name, and asked Chambers for a sales job to help her get over her grief. Noticing the affection with which Columbo talks about his own wife, she says she’d love to meet her. Columbo demurs, but she doesn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer. Anyway, Columbo says, he intends to find out which one of those Falcon Ridge bastards was responsible for Chambers’s death and bring them to justice.
At the station, Columbo is questioning Connolly, the Falcon Ridge neighborhood hothead, who is pissed about being there. He insists that he slept like a log the night of the murder and didn’t notice anyone driving up and dropping a gun. After Connolly leaves, Brady comes in and assures Columbo that he put on a show for the neighbors when he picked Connolly up, making sure that everyone knew Connolly was going downtown in a police car so Vivian would think her frameup was working. That certainly sounds constitutional.
Columbo drops by Vivian’s the next morning, as she is eating breakfast. She offers him an English muffin with marmalade, which he declines—his wife loves marmalade, he says, but he can’t stand the stuff. He tells her about Falcon Ridge and she casually lets slip that Connolly came to the office a week ago and she thought he was going to kill Chambers. She again presses Columbo to let her meet his wife, and bemoans the fact that he has an unlisted phone number because she would totally love to talk to the little lady herself. Columbo doesn’t bite. This Mrs. Columbo-killing business is going to be harder than Vivian thought. As the detective leaves, she regards the jar of marmalade on the breakfast table thoughtfully.
Back at Falcon Ridge, Columbo fills Brady in on the latest. Chambers paid for a security guard to drive past the office at 10 PM and 2 AM every day to check on things, and the security guard confirms that the lights were off at both times. But when Dede came in the next morning, all the lights were on—which means that Vivian killed him before 8:40, turned out the lights so the security guy wouldn’t investigate, and then came back after 2 to plant the wallet and leave the lights on as if the murderer had fled quickly after killing Chambers. Everything’s coming together, but as Columbo laments, they still don’t have any proof of anything.
Vivian drives up, and Columbo makes a big show of berating Brady for not getting any of these Falcon Ridge people to cooperate, especially Connolly. Brady scurries away, and Vivian approaches. She’s there to do real estate shit, she says, but she’s brought a gift. It’s a jar of lemon marmalade for Mrs. Columbo. The detective graciously accepts this offering of food from the widow of the man who died in prison after Columbo nabbed him for manslaughter. You can practically see the wheels turning in Vivian’s head. Clearly unable to take a hint, she also mentioned that she’s penciled the Columbos in for dinner for Saturday night.
Field trip time! Columbo catches a flight to San Francisco to meet Dr. Steadman, Vivian’s old therapist. It’s Roscoe Lee Browne, the distinguished African American actor who was in just about everything in the 80s and 90s. Steadman is dining alone at a fancy restaurant, and would clearly like to give Columbo the bum’s rush until the lieutenant amiably suggests that Steadman might want to get this over with now instead of spending the night at the cop shop. As Steadman attempts to enjoy his escargot, Columbo lays out his theory of the case—Chambers tipped off the client to Pete’s embezzlement, Vivian found out about it somehow, and evened the score. Steadman obviously can’t comment on any therapy sessions he’s had with Vivian, but he does note that someone who’s that obsessed with revenge might not stop with Chambers—she might also, say, go after the cop who put her husband behind bars. Columbo tells him that Vivian has been asking a lot of questions about his wife, and even wants to meet here. “I’m afraid that would not be a good idea,” Steadman says.
Speaking more generally now, they discuss the phenomenon of obsessed individuals taking their revenge by going after the spouse of the person whom they feel wronged them. Steadman confirms that this is not uncommon, and notes that such a person might care less about avoiding capture than about making sure their real target knows that they were responsible for harming the spouse. There’s a whole bit in here about Columbo ordering a BLT on white bread and getting a ritzy four-star version of a BLT and not wanting it; it’s the kind of thing you see in a lot of Columbo episodes. Anyway, Steadman all but tells Columbo that Vivian is definitely going to try to kill his wife, and the detective leaves.
Vivian is supervising repairs on another mansion when Columbo drives his shitty car up and buttonholes her. Yeah, this guy Connolly is bad news, alright, he’s got a felony assault conviction from a few years ago—which you would have known, Vivian, because it was in Connolly’s file from the background check the bank ran when he bought his house. Nope, Vivian says, Chambers handled that sale and she never saw Connolly’s file—but then how did she know Connolly used to live in Reno, as she mentioned when Columbo visited her at breakfast? Oh, Vivian replies, he was in the office once and they started talking about blackjack and Vegas and blah blah blah, that’s how she must have known. They’re interrupted as Brady drives up in a panic and tells Columbo his wife collapsed at home and was taken to the hospital.
Funeral. This must be one long-ass service, because the sun is now shining brightly. Columbo plays the grieving widower as Vivian comes over to comfort him. She does not find it at all strange that she, of all people, is the one person Columbo asks to come back to the house to sit with him. As they prepare to leave, another cop drives up and tells him that the coroner’s office saw something they didn’t like in the autopsy and they want to delay the burial.
Columbo’s house. He bustles around making coffee and toast as Vivian lingers on a photo of Mrs. Columbo, who does not look anything like Kate Mulgrew. He jabbers on about Connolly; the DA thinks they’ve got a case, it’s still circumstantial but maybe he’ll cop a plea, etc. He plunks the jar of marmalade down on the table and Vivian’s stomach drops through the floor.
Columbo spreads marmalade on his toast and starts eating it, and Vivian knows she needs to implement the last stage of her master plan right away. She chides Columbo for his “narrow, straight-ahead mentality” that doesn’t allow room for motive or extenuating circumstances, and talks about her husband being the kind of man who would go to any lengths to protect the people he loved, while Columbo pretends to start dying. She’s interrupted by the phone ringing. The autopsy revealed that Mrs. Columbo was poisoned! It was murder!
As Columbo sits down woozily, Vivian delivers the final blow. She knows Mrs. Columbo was poisoned, she says triumphantly, because she was the one that did it. Why? “For the same reason that I killed Charlie Chambers. Retribution, Columbo. A balancing of the books.” The detective feebly protests, and Vivian spills the rest of the beans. She was the one who made the ATM withdrawal; she knew Chambers’s PIN because he was always having her make bank runs. “In a little while,” she purrs, “the phone is gonna ring. And it'll be your friend Benny again with some more information from the coroner's office. Only this time, you won't be able to answer the phone, Columbo, because you'll be dead. Lying right here on your kitchen floor.”
“I don’t think so, ma’am”, the detective shoots back, his drowsiness suddenly gone. “You see, this is not my kitchen floor, and this is not my house. This belongs to my friend, Sergeant Brady.” Speak of the devil: Brady emerges from the next room holding a tape recorder.
The funeral was fake, the mourners were Columbo’s fellow police officers, and Mrs. Columbo is very much alive and sends her regards. Oh, and this is obviously not the marmalade jar Vivian gave Columbo to take home; he sent that to the lab right away and they found the poison, which is how he knew how to feign the symptoms. Yes, Columbo was stringing her along for most of the episode, and although he is sorry for everything she went through with the imprisonment and death of her husband, he must admit that his feelings are a little hurt that Vivian tried to kill him and his wife.
As Brady leads the broken woman away, the great detective telephones his wife, who’s down with a touch of the flu, to find out how she’s feeling. “Oh, and tell your sister Rita I got her picture,” he says, picking up the picture of not-Mrs. Columbo. “And when you're better, you and me, we're gonna go to a photographer and we're gonna have a decent picture of you taken.” Columbo bids a fond farewell to his wife, who has the rest of her life ahead of her to become Russian and get sent to prison with Piper Chapman.
You can watch Columbo: Rest In Peace, Mrs. Columbo for free on Peacock, the new streaming service from NBC. Go do it right now, and then check in with Gerry and Iain for their recap of the episode over at the Columbo Podcast. Have fun, and see you next year!