In the middle of the fourth season of Murder, She Wrote was the episode Doom With a View. An episode set in New York City, it also features Jessica’s nephew, Grady. There is always something special about episodes with Grady since he is the reason that Jessica is a literary titaness who travels the country solving murders—he is the one who showed her first manuscript to a publisher when Jessica was just a retired school teacher and was unwilling to show her manuscript to anyone.

Jessica arrives at Grady’s apartment as he is being temporarily evicted because of cockroaches (they moved in from the apartment above when that was sprayed). Instead, they’ll be staying at the Montaigne plaza hotel, an extraordinarily expensive hotel owned by Cornelia Montaigne. They’re going there because his old college buddy, Garrett, married Cornelia and is going to comp him the hotel room. Jessica is surprised because Cornelia Montaigne is Jessica’s age, at least, though she doesn’t phrase it that way. How a retired school teacher from Maine has any idea who Cornelia Montaigne is, I don’t know. Even if she is supposed to be a fictionalized version of Paris Hilton’s mom, this was before reality television and people outside of the hotel industry had any idea who owned the things. (That said, perhaps Cornelia was featured in a woman’s magazine, which Jessica read while having her hair done a the beauty parlor. I almost forgot about that possibility since I never read women’s magazines or went to beauty parlors.)

In the next scene we meet Garrett and Cornelia:

They are not the two lovebirds with but one soul that Grady described them to Jessica as, though. We catch them in the middle of an argument. She spent the entire night vacating the 32nd floor and he went and put the countess into one of the rooms! If he weren’t her husband, she’d have his job for it! Oh, when will he learn to check with her first?

Cornelia’s right hand man, Mark Havlin, interrupts to say that he moved the Countess to the blue room on the thirty ninth floor an hour ago.

Cornelia asks why he didn’t tell her and he replies, “Oh, If I let you know all the wonderful things I do around here, you’d have to give me a raise.”

Garret sees Grady and excuses himself. He greets Grady and Jessica affectionately. In the course of conversation with reminiscences he invites them to dinner at 7:00 sharp. His mother will be there, and he could also invite Sandra Clemens. Grady gets wobble-kneed at the mention of her. She was at homecoming, third cheerleader from the left. Jessica doesn’t remember and attributes this to being distracted by watching the game.

They walk over to Cornelia and she greets them even more affectionately than Garrett did, commenting that Grady has lost weight and that she’s absolutely delighted to meet Mrs. Fletcher. Interestingly, she doesn’t pretend to have read Jessica’s books. “I must confess, I don’t have time to read your books, or anyone else’s, I’m afraid, but I am delighted you’re staying with us.”

She excuses herself because she’s expecting a call from the Secret Service to make arrangements for the following week.

Jessica and Grady go up to their room. On the way, they run into Sandy.

(I love those 80s shoulder pads.) Jessica identifies her as the third cheerleader on the left at homecoming, and Sandy comments that Jessica has a remarkable memory. Jessica denies this; she explains it as Grady having a picture on his coffee table. I’m honestly not sure if she’s trying to embarrass him or be his wing-woman. Jessica goes on to their room, leaving Grady and Sandra alone.

Grady can barely talk, despite Sandy’s smiling encouragement. Sandy invites herself to dinner, tells him to pick her up at her room, 4553, at 7, and excuses herself since Grady clearly won’t be able to say anything for a while.

In the lobby Garret sees her and walks up to her, asking if she saw Grady. She replies that she did, and met his Aunt, and in a very changed voice from when she talked with Grady says, “You know Garry, this is dumb. This is really dumb.” Garret replies, “Look. Anything to keep Cornelia off my back. If she catches on, the party’s over… for both of us.”

Until this moment I had expected Cornelia to be the murder victim, but it strikes me as now just as likely for Sandra to be the victim.

There’s also a curious aspect to this story that we’re being let in on evidence that Jessica doesn’t have. I’m not sure what to make of that. I’ve argued that play-fair rules of evidence in mysteries are good for mystery construction, and I stand by that. I don’t think that it follows, however, that it’s good to give the reader clues that the detective doesn’t have. It’s frequently a form of misdirection, but where it isn’t, I think it serves the dubious purpose of making leaps of logic on the part of the detective more believable. We are naturally less interested in the specifics of how a person came to a conclusion we already know to be true, so authoritatively telling us the conclusion before the detective gets to it means that the writer doesn’t need to construct the plot to justify the detective’s deductions.

That evening, Grady shows up at Sandra’s room to pick her up for dinner. Right after she lets him in, she receives a phone call, which she takes while Grady looks for somewhere to put the flowers he brought her.

I love the opulence of the hotel. Set decoration did a really good job making this seem like a truly high-end hotel. This is not directly related to the plot, but it’s part of what makes the episode enjoyable. It’s fun to look at pretty things and spend an hour vicariously living in the lap of luxury. This is something to keep in mind when evaluating plots; a little weakness in a plot that makes for a more enjoyable setting can be a worthwhile tradeoff.

Sandra tells the person that she’s speaking to that something won’t do, and neither will a second option presented to her. “Look, I can’t really get into it right now. Can I call you back?” She puts the phone down, fetches a pen and an envelope from her purse, then writes down the number. That completed she looks over at Grady and notes that he put the flowers into vermouth (she had just made them martinis).

We then go to dinner, where Garret, his mother, and Jessica are sitting at the table waiting for Grady and Sandra.

Garrett’s mother is a very overbearing woman. (As a side note, it’s interesting to see how well Charlotte Rae played this character because she is best known for the kindly maternal figure Edna Garret in the TV show The Facts of Life, which she left the year before.) Not merely overbearing, she’s manipulative and somewhat mean-spirited, though she has an excellent sense of how to avoid stepping over the line of plausible deniability.

She asks Grady for a kiss and kisses him on the cheek, then loudly tells him, “I hope you enjoyed that, young fella, because that’s about as good as it’s gonna get for you, tonight.”

Sandy asks, “another fun-filled dinner, eh, Nettie?” Nettie replies, “Speak for yourself, Sandra.”

Jessica asks for the menu and looks it over, saying that the wine list is excellent. She then insists that tonight, the wine will be on her.

Nettie says, sotto voce, “Forget the wine list, Jessie. You’re missing the big picture. Look at her. Look at her.” (the camera obligingly does.)

“Her eyes haven’t left this table since Grady arrived with Miss Sis-boom-bah. She knows we’re talking about her, too.” (Here, she waves at Cornelia.) “Mark my words, Jessie. There’s gonna be fireworks tonight. And I love it.”

The last few words are said intensely, almost in a growl. It’s a powerful performance which demonstrates one of the real advantages that television has: actors. The words are not insignificant, but Charlotte Rae gives them a great deal more significance. In the context of this performance, Nettie is a force to be reckoned with.

The scene shifts to after dinner where Cornelia accuses Garrett of cheating on her with Sandra. Garrett tries to convince her that she is merely Grady’s friend, but she’ll have none of it.

The scene shifts to Jessica and Grady’s room, where Jessica is laying on a couch reading a manuscript.

She is having trouble staying awake for it, though. “If I read one more paragraph tonight, this manuscript is going to start looking like one big typo. I’m gonna go to bed.”

Grady asks if she wants to play gin rummy, and she says, “not tonight.” She encourages him to go out to enjoy himself. It’s pouring rain, but he has two good friends right here in the hotel. Grady asks if she’s sure she doesn’t mind, and she replies that not only doesn’t she mind, she insists that he does. He excitedly leaves.

The moment he’s out the door, it turns out that Jessica was lying to her nephew. She sighs in relief, then picks up the manuscript and goes back to reading.

Grady goes over to Sandra’s room, but the door is open. He goes in, calling her name, but the lights are off and no one responds. He goes into her bedroom to investigate.

Murder, She Wrote sometimes goes in for artsy shots, but it’s hard to not notice that the silver tray with the flower and chocolates there in the foreground had to have been put there by someone, and that’s going to establish a time after which the murder had to have happened. (It may seem like I’m spoiling that the murder happened, but in the episode they’re playing murder discovery music so we know by this point Grady is going to find a body.)

He has to walk a little further into the cavernous bedroom, but then he finds it:

At not even fifteen minutes into the episode, this is pleasantly early for the body to be found. Grady checks for a pulse, then when he doesn’t find one gets up and goes to the telephone to call the police. There he sees Garrett in a mirror.

Garrett looks for a moment then runs away.

In the next scene the police are there, as is Mr. Rice, the head of hotel security:

Rice complains that Grady should have notified him first. They don’t like to bother the guests with accidents. Jessica is astonished that he said accident. Shirley, he can’t be serious. He is serious, though, and don’t call him Shirley. (They don’t actually make the Airplane reference, but Jessica does say, “You can’t be serious, Mr. Rice,” and he assures her that he’s very serious.)

Garrett walks by and catches Grady’s eye. He excuses himself and goes into the hallway to talk to Garrett. Grady demands to know why Garrett was in Sandy’s room, and he explains he came to see how it went between them. When he got there he saw Grady bending over the body and figured that he should go get help.

Then Inspector Matheney arrives.

Rice apologizes for Matheney having to be dragged out for this, and Matheney says that it looks routine, and with luck he can get back to the ballet in time for the Rose Adagio. The Rose Adagio (I had to look this up) is a scene in the ballet Sleeping Beauty. It’s a scene in Act 1—of 3, there is also a prologue—so Inspector Matheney seems to expect to spend very little time here indeed.

The inspector asks where “Mrs. Harper” is and Rice replies that they’re trying to locate her. The Inspector looks around and concludes that he’s not needed, and begins to head off to the ballet. Jessica stops him on his way out and remarks that Mr. Rice has described this as an accident. Matheney replies that he’s sure that Rice has. “Mr. Rice has an instinct for… public relations.” Jessica replies, “but perhaps not for homicide? May I show you something?”

Matheney willingly comes with her.

Jessica then asks what she tripped over? The spacious room doesn’t have much in the way of tripping hazards nearby. Matheney points out that she might have had a fainting spell.

Jessica admits that it’s possible, but then points out the pillow on the foot of the bed.

The pillow is crumpled and stained with lipstick and makeup. Perhaps, says Mr. Rice, she had to lie down because of a fainting spell. But if she laid down, asks Jessica, why is the rest of the bed unrumpled, and freshly turned down.

A small note about what turn-down service is: this is where the bed is stripped of things that are unconducive to sleeping, such as the decorative heavy comforter, and the sheets are pulled back a bit to make it easy for the person to climb into bed. We never get a full view of the bed, but I think that the writers, or at least the set decorators, confused turn-down service with making the bed in the morning. (The silver tray with the flower and chocolates would be a normal part of turn-down service in a fancy hotel, though, so they got that part right.)

Jessica then suggests that if they can’t find Mrs. Harper, whoever she is, that he speak with Mark Havlin, the hotel manager. Inspector Matheney says that he will wait for Cornelia for a few more minutes, which suggests to me that they changed Cornelia’s last name in the script at some point and didn’t change it in all of the places. Actually, having looked it up, Harper is Garrett’s last name, so Mrs. Harper is, presumably, referring to Cornelia by her married name, and this is merely confusing because no one has done that yet.

He then adds that if there was foul play, he’d like to speak to Grady, which disconcerts Jessica greatly. “My dear Lady,” says Inspector Matheney, “He was alone with the corpse. He was intimately involved her. How intimately, I don’t know… yet.”

Jessica sighs in frustration. For a mystery writer and a great detective, she tends to be very bad at seeing things from other people’s perspectives, at least where her relatives are concerned.

In the next scene Jessica gets Mark Havlin out of bed. She apologizes for it, but explains that his phone was off the hook. Why waking him up by calling him on the phone would have been superior, she doesn’t explain. He merely says that the situation is dreadful and Jessica says that it won’t get any better with Mr. Rice representing the hotel. Havlin agrees. He puts the phone back on the hook and explains that he had been up for twenty four hours before he managed to snatch three hours sleep.

He then says that the Sheik arrives at midnight with all 36 of his wives, which means 37 bathrooms and all on the same floor. As he says this, he puts down his old, wilted carnation and picks up a new carnation from the silver tray that’s part of turn-down service.

Since they switch to clue-cam, we know that this has to be related to the murder, somehow. Presumably it establishes something about a time, since turn-down service happens at a particular time and clearly happened in his room. (Incidentally, the clock shows that it’s 10:30, Havlin’s arm didn’t obscure it for the entire shot.) The obvious conclusion is that he was not sleeping when he said that he was. That doesn’t guarantee that he is the murderer—it could be a red herring of a liason with a woman or conducting a drug deal or receiving a late night shipment of stolen lobsters or something like that, but they don’t zoom in on things like this without it being quite significant.

The thing about a Sheik having thirty six wives is pretty strange, by the way. “Sheik” is an Arabic term that refers either to scholars or to kings and other rulers within the Islamic world (it literally means “elder”). The problem, here, is that Islam forbids a man from having more than four wives. Having thirty six wives would be a very public thing, too, not like having a private stash of alcohol brought out for guests. A Sheik wouldn’t get to half of thirty six wives before running into quite a lot of trouble and rapidly ceasing to be whichever kind of Sheik he is.

If you want a character with thirty six wives in 1987, you’d have to make him an extraordinarily wealthy African king, and even that would be stretching things. (Back in grad school, a fellow grad student was from Cameroon and his father had, if memory serves, about a dozen wives, and he was the chief of a moderately large tribe.)

Anyway, back to the episode, Havlin remarks, “and now this accident. Death. Whatever. Night shift came on at 8:00. At least all the beds have been turned down.” (Which means that his room would have gotten turn-down service half an hour after he’d gone to sleep, if he was being precise when he said that he snatched three hours of sleep.) He then leads her out.

We next see Jessica talking with Grady in their room. Grady is depressed because Matheney suspects him. Grady laughs at the inspector thinking that he and Sandra were intimately involved. The most exciting thing that happened was when he put the flowers in the martinis. He then relates, in detail, the phone call and Sandra writing the number down on an envelope. Jessica’s ears perk up at this. She insists that Grady tells the Inspector about it because the phone number might be important, but Grady replies that he did and the Inspector said that no envelope was found. He wonders if the killer might have taken it because his phone number was on it.

Jessica asks what Sandra did for a living, and Grady said that she was a computer operator. Jessica wonders how she could have afforded to stay at the Montaigne, and Grady suggests that Garret probably picked up her bill.

Jessica goes to Mark Havlin and talks to her about Sandra. She wants to do something to help, but flowers seem insufficient. Perhaps if there’s any trouble about her hotel bill?

Havlin tells her that she can put away her fishing rod; he is as perplexed as she is about how Sandra could afford to stay at the Montaigne. She paid by credit card, and there’s never been a problem with it. The tantalizing question is: who’s been paying the credit card bill?

Jessica next goes to see Nettie, who is staying at the hotel. As she comes up to Nettie’s room, the door is open because room service is leaving.

Nettie is having a loud conversation with Garrett on the telephone, which Jessica can’t help but listen to. Nettie even has her back turned to the door.

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What’s so complicated, Gary? However it happened, it’s a stroke of luck. Now you really can divorce Cornelia.”

She then turns and sees Jessica in the doorway and hastily ends her phone call then invites Jessica in. They sit down and Nettie offers Jessica hotel chocolates, which she says she has to steal like everyone else. She even gives Jessica a box.

Jessica then says that this is a condolence call, as she’s sure that Nettie was devasted by Sandra’s death. Nettie disclaims this, saying that she and Gary hardly knew the girl, or at least never really saw her since the kids went to Purdue. Jessica is surprised, since Sandra stayed at the Montaigne regularly. Nettie replies that she didn’t know that and Gary must have forgot to mention it. She shifts the subject to how sorry she feels for Grady. “A fool could see how he felt about Sandra. And then to find himself mixed up in her death.”

Jessica says that Grady found the body, that’s all. “Oh, but of course. Did I sound like I implied otherwise? How terrible of me. Oh, no no no no. I’m sure he’s going to get off. I don’t think they have a lick of real proof that he was involved in any way. Mmm. Oh, try one of those dark ones on the end. Brazil nuts and brandy.”

Jessica looks at the chocolate, then looks away and declines.

Jessica then folds her hands and doesn’t know what to do. Nettie is not a likeable character, but she is very good at what she does, and that’s impressive to watch. Few people can really see Jessica off when Jessica is sniffing for clues, but Nettie does it masterfully.

Speaking of masterful, this is actually an excellent job of setting Nettie up as a suspect. She is demonstrated to be cunning, cold, and self-possessed. The part where she blurted out the clue about Garrett now being able to divorce Cornelia was a bit absurd—she didn’t leave the door open, that was room service, but I can’t believe that she was really stupid enough to have this conversation in front of a hotel employee. People sometimes treat hotel staff like movable furniture, but schemers tend to be even less trusting than they are inclined to take menial staff for granted. Every person a true schemer meets is either someone to be manipulated or a threat. This clumsy and out-of-character way for Jessica to get the clue aside, Nettie seems very capable of murder where it would suit her ends. There’s a further skill of execution, here, in the way that Nettie uses the chocolates as a prop. Back when we were looking in clue-vision at the silver tray in Mark Havlin’s room, there were two things we saw on the tray. One was the carnation which Mark exchanged. The other were two hotel chocolates.

There is not, at this point, an obvious connection with Nettie’s chocolates, and there may in fact be no connection between them. Nettie may not be the murderer, in which case there probably wouldn’t be a connection. However, there is a possible connection here which helps to make her a truly plausible suspect.

In the next scene, Garret and Grady have lunch among some very yellow tables, chairs, and umbrellas, presumably on the patio of the hotel. Garrett is scared because there is an incriminating bracelet which he gave Sandra years ago and she still has. In fact, it’s in the pocket of her bathrobe. Garret needs Grady to go into Sandra’s room and retrieve it for him. Grady is reluctant, but Garrett reminds Grady of who dragged him out of that beer joint when three goons from Ohio State were going to turn Grady into a pretzel. He then gives Grady the master key. Grady, overly loyal and not the brightest, does it. Also, not being the brightest, he does it badly:

Grady cuts open the letter on the door which is acting as a seal using the master key, tearing it very obviously. He made no attempt to peel it off so he could replace it, and didn’t even try to cut it subtly. Which probably doesn’t actually matter that much because when he sneaks into the room, he leaves the door wide open.

He goes into the bathroom, and there hanging on the door is a bathrobe.

Well, some sort of robe. That sheer silky thing doesn’t exactly look very absorbent. I really want to know how Garrett knew where the bracelet was. There’s no obvious way for him to have, and the implication that he had been hiding out in the living room when Grady came in really doesn’t fly; we saw the room in previous shots and there’s no obvious place to hide, nor is there an obvious reason for Garrett to have hidden even if he was the murderer.

Grady reads the inscription: “To Sandra. Forever, G.”

That’s conveniently vague.

Speaking of convenience to the plot, House Detective Rice catches him:

It turns out that ripping the “keep out” notice and leaving the door wide open were as bad an idea as they seemed.

We cut (presumably after a commercial) to Jessica walking through the grand lobby of the Montaigne.

It takes Jessica several seconds to cross it, which is part of what makes me think that there was a commercial break here. When one scene directly followed another, it was important to keep things moving, lest people change the channel. After a commercial break, by contrast, it was important to give people a few seconds to realize that the commercials were finally over—often people would be in other rooms with one person left behind to watch and call out, “it’s back on!”

As she walks on, Cornelia Montaigne calls her name and rushes out to talk to her. She just heard about Grady and she can’t believe it! Jessica can, however, since Grady has a frequently misplaced sense of loyalty. Cornelia is shocked that Jessica thinks that Grady committed the murder, and Jessica sets her straight. Grady was found with a passkey, that had to come from Cornelia’s husband. Moreover, the bracelet probably was a gift from her husband, not from Grady, and Grady was merely retrieving it. Moreover, it won’t be hard to prove.

Cornelia admits it, and says that the bracelet only confirmed her suspicions. She had the hotel manager—Mark Havlin—looking into Sandra for weeks, but he hadn’t come up with anything. She hated herself for being jealous, but had been sure that there was something. Jessica expresses her condolences but excuses herself as she has to get Grady out of jail. Cornelia decides to be helpful. “If it’s Matheney you want, I wouldn’t waste my time going to police headquarters.”

She’s right. Matheney is… somewhere. “…but even if the exhibit is a trifle deficient—certainly not the best of Van Gogh—at least it is Van Gogh. Although there’s always the possibility of forgery, given the recent developments in…”

Then he spies Jessica and excuses himself. I suppose that this is some sort of opening of an art exhibition. I can’t imagine who the people he’s talking to are. They all are listening to him with a rapt air, but this implies that they value his opinion. A police inspector on the NYPD is not going to command the attention of high society people in New York City merely by virtue of his rank. This suggests he not only enjoys high culture, but has something valuable to say on it. That has the makings of an interesting sort of detective, which makes it a pity that we barely see much of him in this episode.

Anyway, he makes his way over to Jessica, who demands to know what Grady has been charged with. Instead of answering her, Matheney merely replies that when a prime suspect in a murder investigation breaks into a crime scene to remove a piece of evidence, it’s hardly surprising that he’s been incarcerated.

Jessica then tells him that (she suspects) Grady was doing a favor for Garret, who was the person who gave Sandra the bracelet and whose initial was on it. He replies that Garret Harper would hardly have bought a mistress such an inexpensive trinket. Jessica replies, “If you spent more time on this case and less time at art exhibits, you would know that Gary Harper didn’t always have money.”

She also accuses him of not following up leads such as the envelope with the phone number that Grady told him about. How she would know whether or not he’s following up that lead, she doesn’t say. I’m not even sure what following up that lead would even look like. Is Inspector Matheney supposed to be scouring every garbage can in New York City to find an envelope that, had the murderer removed it, he surely would have destroyed, or kept as a souvenir, or done anything with it besides leaving it somewhere that the police could find it?

He tells her that she certainly as a writer’s imagination. I’m not sure that a highly active imagination is really required to look into a phone call that the victim received within hours of being murdered. Jessica thanks him, and he said that he didn’t mean it as a compliment. Jessica replies that she knows what he meant and she didn’t come to pick a quarrel, she’s only interested in getting the ridiculous charges against her nephew dismissed. Matheney’s reaction is expressive, but of what, I’m not really sure.

Oddly, though, this works. The next scene is of Jessica and Grady walking into their room. That said, I don’t think that the charges against Grady were all that ridiculous. He was caught red-handed breaking into a crime scene to tamper with evidence in a murder investigation. That seems more like an open-and-shut case, than ridiculous.

Anyway, back at the hotel room, Jessica asks for the truth. Grady says that he was just helping a friend. Garrett said that his wife would be jealous, and he owed him that much, considering everything he’s done for Grady. Jessica asks what Garrett has actually done for Grady besides giving him a free room in his wife’s hotel. Oddly, Grady doesn’t tell Jessica about Garrett rescuing him from the Ohio State goons in the beer joint. Instead, he says, “That’s not fair. He was very supportive when we found Sandra’s body.”

This is an odd thing to blurt out because it’s simply not true. Garrett wasn’t supportive in the least. In fact, he ran away the moment Grady noticed him, and the next time he saw Grady he begged Grady not to tell the police. There is no way whatever to characterize that as “supportive.” I think that the writers just needed Grady to tell Jessica about Garrett being there and this was the best that they could come up with.

Jessica tries to convince Grady to go to the police and tell them, but he’ll have none of it. Jessica has Garrett all wrong. Jessica tells Grady to take a good, hard look at the case—there’s a real possibility that Garret is the killer.

This seems very unlikely. It would entail him having gone into Sandra’s room leaving the door open, killed her, then hid out in the living room for a while in case Grady should happen to come by, then when Grady actually did come by instead of sneaking out of Sandra’s suite he went up to the door to the bedroom and looked straight at Grady in order to catch his eye, then left. The murderers in Murder, She Wrote are not always geniuses, but this strains credulity.

Grady takes this hard, though, and goes for a walk. Jessica then receives a phone call from Inspector Matheney—he’s got something he thinks Jessica would find interesting. She goes over to police headquarters immediately.

He hands Jessica Sandra Clemens’ bank book—back in the day, bank transactions were often recorded in bank books (by the bank) to make it easy for the person to review their finances, and people might keep these books, though rarely on their person unless they intended to go to the bank. Jessica looks it over while Matheney summarizes.

Twenty to twenty five thousand dollars each, over a dozen of them. Where does a computer operator get that kind of money, Matheney asks? Jessica says that while it could be a lot of things, the one that jumps to mind is blackmail.

Matheney replies, “Yes, I know. But who? And why?” I like Matheney. The actor who plays him does a good job, and moreover he’s actually intelligent, which is rare for a Murder, She Wrote detective.

Jessica asks how long it would take to get a list of all of the dates that Sandra stayed at the Montaigne, and Matheney replies he ordered it yesterday and it arrived this morning. As I said, I like that Matheney is competent, and it’s also interesting that he’s taking his job more seriously than Jessica thought when she was indignant that her nephew was arrested for the crime he provably committed. They look over it together.

“Just as I thought. The deposits and the checkin dates match exactly.”

Matheney points out that while that tells them that she came to New York to get her payoffs, it still doesn’t tell them who the victim was. Jessica points out that the visits and the deposits started shortly after Garrett married Cornelia. Matheney responds that even if Garrett was the victim, with Sandra dead we can hardly expect him to tell them what he was being blackmailed for. Jessica muses that perhaps they don’t need the victim to tell them.

Jessica goes to see Nettie.

She asks Nettie about the conversation which Nettie had with Garrett, where she said that now Garrett could divorce Cornelia. If there was a time when they couldn’t get divorced, perhaps it’s because they were never legally married. Nettie demurs, but Jessica points out that the marriage which took place wouldn’t be valid if Garrett were already married to someone else.

When she claims that it would be easy to prove, Nettie breaks down and admits it. “Do you know how much anguish, and cash, that secret has cost over the past years?… Gary was foolish. So foolish. And that little tramp carried the marriage license in her purse and waved it under Gary’s nose until the day she died.”

The scene then shifts to a jazz club, where Grady and Jessica are waiting for Garrett.

This is a weird place to meet Garrett. It is true that a crowded place can be a good place to meet somebody, but that’s somebody you don’t want to be seen meeting. There’s absolutely no reason for Garrett to not just come to their hotel room.

This scene also has odd television timing. It begins with Grady exclaiming “So Garrett and Sandy were married?!?” but shortly afterwards Jessica doubts that Garrett will show up because he’s already an hour late. Why would Jessica have waited an hour to tell Grady about the marriage?

Anyway, Jessica doubts that Garrett will level with them now. The only reason that Nettie blurted out what she did was that she thought that the death of the first wife made the marriage to Cornelia valid. Even Grady is surprised at such a mistake, but no one’s perfect, not even Nettie. That said, Jessica then says, “That’s why she was pushing for Gary to go for a settlement now, before Cornelia found out that her own marriage was invalid.” That is the opposite of what Nettie believed, though. If Nettie believed that the marriage was now valid, she would have no reason to believe that there was a rush to obtain a settlement.

This is a weird mistake because it’s fixable; Nettie could have thought that with the marriage having become retroactively valid, there was no longer a need to wait to try to obtain a settlement.

Grady then makes a non-sequitur of a response: “You mean, Gary was paying Sandy blackmail money?” There is absolutely nothing in what Jessica said that means or even implies this. Again, this would be easily fixable; Grady could have said, “So what was Sandy doing there? Trying to win Gary back? But then why was she pretending to be interested in me?” And with a knowing look from Jessica, Grady could have then come to that conclusion. Or Jessica could have made the conclusion for Grady.

Grady then points out that this doesn’t mean that Garrett murdered Sandra because Nettie had (approximately) as much of a motive for murdering Sandra as Garrett did. Unlike much of the earlier conversation, this both makes sense and is appropriate to what came before it.

Grady then apologizes for earlier, when he was rude and wouldn’t listen to Jessica about going to the police. Jessica kindly replies, “Look, Grady, the day that you and I can’t have a good old-fashioned argument, I’m gonna start wondering where I went wrong.” This is a nice bit of characterization and, for a change, is actually appropriate to a retired school teacher from a little town in Maine. Unlike in big cities, where moving on is always easy, in small towns the ability to reconcile is an important skill.

The next scene is on the roof of the hotel, where Garret finds Cornelia, who had gone there to be alone.

They argue. She seems to already know that Garrett had been married to Sandra and had been paying him blackmail, though it’s not obvious how she would have learned that. The argument goes on for a while, but Garrett is slick and woos Cornelia back. (He makes an interesting gambit of asking her to give up the money and power and go live with him in a little cabin in upstate NY.)

This is one of the longer scenes in the episode, but it’s not very germain to the mystery and I don’t like either character much, so it seems to me an unfortunate use of time.

In the next scene Garrett offers House Detective Rice $5,000 to “remember” something which will fix the blame for Sandra’s murder on Grady.

Rice accepts, though only if Garrett throws in a raise, too.

Unfortunately for Garrett, Grady was right around the corner and heard everything.

Grady gives Garrett back his master key, which I suppose the police allowed him to keep for some reason despite it being evidence of the crimes that Grady was caught committing. Garrett tries to pass what he did with Rice off as testing Rice to see how far he’d go.

Grady replies, “You know something, Gary? You’re good. Ten, maybe eleven years, and I never saw it. I guess maybe I’m not too bright. But the funny thing is, there was a time when I probably would’ve taken the rap for you. But like I said, I guess maybe I’m not too bright.”

This is interesting characterization. Eleven years is a bit long to be led on like this, but on the other hand for years of it they hadn’t seen each other, so it’s probably not too unrealistic. Guys like Garrett—smooth liars who can explain everything—really do exist, and Garrett is a good representation of them. His downfall is that he gets sloppy. There was no real need to pay Rice to frame Grady, and it was foolish to do it in a hallway rather than someplace private. But the thing is, liars like Garrett tend to get sloppy. Success goes to their head, to some degree, but it’s as much that the reason that they lie their way out of everything is because they’re lazy and don’t want to do things for real. They don’t want to spend time and energy actually apologizing to people. They don’t want to put in the work of patching up relationships. This same laziness makes them take chances, and sometimes, to use a gambling metaphor, they roll snake eyes.

Grady is also very realistic as the loyal sort of person who wants to believe Garrett and thus is easy prey. They really want everything to be OK, they want the liar to actually be honest, so they make excuse after excuse and bend over backward. They will keep doing it as long as they can because they really want everything to work out—and they want the work they did making allowances for earlier lies to have had some value. They may be gullible and hopeful, but they also have a memory, and eventually the idea that all of the lies were true becomes unmaintainable, and the relationship snaps.

In the next scene, Grady is moping while watching the TV and Jessica tells him come with her to dinner. They’ve got a reservation in forty five minutes, and the exercise will do them good. Jessica tells Grady that he’s not allowed to bring his long face, however, and he tells her that she’s his favorite person in the world. As they’re leaving they run into the maid who came to do turn-down service.

Because this was too subtle, Jessica stares at the silver tray and we look at it in clue-vision:

Jessica then tells Grady that they have a stop to make, first. This is the notice to the viewer that if you’re placing bets on who the murderer is, this is the last call to get them in.

The clue-vision show of the silver turn down service platter prettymuch guarantees that the silver turn-down service platter that we got a clue-vision shot of in Mark Havlin’s room was the key to solving the mystery, though it doesn’t guarantee how. It makes it likely that Mark wasn’t in his room when he claimed to be, though why he wasn’t is not as certain. That said, the only other serious suspect at this point is Nettie, since she had a real motive. Cornelia would too, actually, if she knew about the marriage and the blackmail, but as far as we can tell in the episode, she didn’t.

So really it comes down to Nettie and Mark. She’s the better suspect, but he’s the one in whose room the first clue-vision focused on a silver, so it turns out to be him.

Jessica confronts him with a made-up story about Cornelia having gotten into her head that Mark and Garrett contrived together to bring Sandra Clemens into the hotel. She claims that Garrett implicated Havlin, and that it was Havlin that was principally responsible for rekindling their college romance. Havlin asks if Garrett also told them that he and Sandra had been married for the past several years. Jessica laughs and corrects him that Sandra was Garrett’s mistress, not his wife. He goes to his safe and pulls out the marriage certificate to prove it, then hands it to her. He claims that it came in the mail this morning from the Fort Wayne hall of records.

Unfortunately for him, that’s the envelope that Sandra had written down the phone number on. (Oddly, as you can see, the envelope is not even addressed, so claiming that the certificate had come in the mail that day was especially silly.)

Jessica calls him on it, but he denies it. She mentions how Nettie told her that Sandra kept the marriage certificate on her person at all times to wave under Garrett’s nose. She then calls to Grady, who had been hiding out in the next room. He walks in and identifies the envelope. “That’s the envelope, Aunt Jess, I’m sure of it.”

Being able to positively identify a blank envelope with a phone number on it is… not impossible, but Grady never—that we saw—got a good look at it. Given how he never took his eyes off of Sandra, and he was about fifteen feet away from her when she wrote the number down, it’s not even very plausible. On the other hand, it would not be hard to check with the Fort Wayne hall of records to see if they ever sent Mark Havlin a copy of the marriage certificate, so I guess this can just be chalked up to being a shortcut.

We then come to the motive, since there wasn’t an obvious one: Mark Havlin wanted to blackmail Garrett himself. He demurs, but Jessica points out the problem of the turn-down dish, and how if Havlin had gotten three hours of sleep ending at 10:30 he had to have gotten to bed at 7:30 and turn-down service is at 8:00 and it would be easy to check with them if he was asleep in his bed when they came in. That said, if he got to bed at 8:05 instead of 7:30, that’s not much of a discrepancy.

That clinches it, though. Havlin decides to confess. Every time he asked Cornelia for a raise, she turned him down. So this was his ticket. It wasn’t hard to figure out where Sandra was getting the money from. He went to her room to propose splitting the blackmail money with her, but she laughed in his face. They argued, and he hit her hard, which knocked her down and she accidentally hit her head on the dresser. While she was barely conscious, he smothered her with the pillow so he could have it all. “If she hadn’t picked up that phone call, it would have been perfect.”

I mean, sort of. It would have been awkward when he went to blackmail Garrett. Still, he might plausibly have gotten away with it.

The next day, Grady and Jessica are checking out. Grady says that he’ll feel much better when they’re out of the hotel. He asks if Jessica ever found out what the phone number that Sandra wrote down was. Jessica did, it was Sandra’s periodontist’s office. They were calling to reschedule an appointment with her. (According to perio.org, “A periodontist is a dentist who specializes in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of periodontal disease, and in the placement of dental implants.” The periodontium is the support structures of the teeth, including the bones that hold them, the ligaments that hold them, and the gums which cover them.)

This is a very curious explanation. On the one hand, it’s interesting that Mark Havlin’s undoing was something trivial. That is a theme one finds in murder mysteries, where a brilliant murder was undone by one of those trivial details that no one can control. You see that in the first Lord Peter Wimsey story, Whose Body?, where the murderer is undone by the victim having chanced to meet someone in the street who he knew while on his way to the secret appointment at which the murderer killed him. (It took most of the book to figure out the significance of that chance meeting.) It is almost something out of Greek tragedy, where hubris is always punished; the murderer is playing at being God and his inability to control details proves that he isn’t.

The only major problem here is why would a periodontist’s office be calling to reschedule an appointing at 7:00 pm?

Garrett and Cornelia come up to give them the good news that they’ve had a long, hard talk and worked things out and are going to give it another try.

Jessica takes the news in stride. She remarks, choosing her words carefully, “Well, I can’t imagine two people more ideally suited to each other.”

Garrett then says to Grady, “Now that Havlin has confessed, how would you like to be my best man?”

Grady responds that he’d really like to but he’s going to be busy that day. When Garrett points out that he hasn’t told Grady the day, Grady merely smiles and replies, “I know.”

The desk clerk gives Grady the bill. Garrett tells her that he’s taking care of it, but Grady refuses and takes out his wallet. He is then stunned that it comes to $2,5000 (that would be approximately $5,900 in 2021 dollars). The desk clerk then tells Grady that there’s been a mistake… they forgot to add the restaurant charge.

And we go to credits.

Overall, I’d say that Doom With a View is in the top twenty percent of episodes. It’s got a lot going for it, including an efficient setup, an early appearance of the corpse, more than one plausible suspect, a beautiful setting, and a creative problem that drove the mystery. (As much as killing a rich person for his money never gets old, it’s nice to have plots which aren’t that, too.) That last part is especially difficult in a modern context where easy divorce and loose morality means that there’s very little left to blackmail anyone for. Doubly so in a big city where most people wouldn’t even mind if an acquaintance had committed a string of murders—if anything, it would give them something to talk about at cocktail parties. (Obviously the police would care, but there’s a big difference between sufficient evidence to blackmail somebody to avoid exposure to his friends, and sufficient evidence to blackmail somebody to avoid criminal conviction.)

I know that in my own mysteries I have all too easy a time forgetting to include the pleasures of a setting that the reader might have a fun time vacationing in, so I always like to notice this when it’s a feature of a Murder, She Wrote episode. A super-fancy hotel is this in spades. The cavernous rooms are actually fun, rather than head-scratching, as they often are when they’re business offices.

I also really like the timing of this episode. A typical Murder, She Wrote episode often has the murder happening twenty or even twenty five minutes into the episode. The setup is nice and efficient, with the full introduction of characters taking place as much after the murder as before. That tends to be a much better construction, as much of the point of a murder mystery is that the investigation of the murder creates a liminal space in which people can say and do things that would not normally be permitted on either side of that threshold.

I also really like the driving force for the episode. As I said, blackmail is not nearly so easy to pull off in modern times, since the evidence threshold to obtain legal consequences is quite high and the loose morals and complete lack of principles of modern people mean that social blackmail just isn’t as effective as it used to be. This is doubly true with anything sexual. To pull off a plausible blackmail story with regard to a marriage is, therefore, quite impressive. I also like the construction of the blackmail victim not being innocent. That’s not unheard of, in blackmail stories, but an awful lot of them consist of “I wrote a letter to a former lover which was indiscreet and suggested more than actually happened”. (That said, when the fair lady tells the great detective that the letter was merely written with poor word choice owing to youth, it’s not obvious how much we’re supposed to believe this versus it being revisionist history which the great detective politely does not inquire into.) In this case, Garrett is pulling off a scam, and he’s being blackmailed about that scam. There is also the interesting psychological insight that a woman who would marry Garrett is not going to be an honest woman. There’s even a good chance that she could have stopped the wedding to Cornelia but instead let it happen so that she could take advantage of it.

In that light, I even like the choice of murderer. Blackmail is a dangerous profession, but that’s usually because the victim may take revenge. In this case, it’s dangerous because someone else might want to take over the blackmail. I also like that at first Mark Havlin only wanted to be cut in on the money. It’s not that often talked about, but blackmailers are, themselves, open to blackmail. Not merely for revealing the crime they’ve committed by blackmailing, but possibly even more forcefully, by threatening to cut off their cash flow. (If the secret gets revealed, there is no further reason for the victim to pay the blackmailer.)

That being said, I think that Nettie would also have been a good choice for the murderer. Cunning, manipulative, and ruthless, she would have been great for the part. I suppose because of that she might have been a touch obvious, but at the same time it could have been worked out well. The scene of Sandra’s death would have had to have been better disguised, probably framing someone well, and Nettie would have been harder to catch. Probably the way to have caught her would be in a defect of framing someone else. Even with the path the writers took, though, Nettie was a great red herring to distract from Mark Havlin.

All of that said, this episode was not perfect. One of the key clues was blurted out by Nettie in a gratuitous and, frankly, out-of-character way. Havlin using evidence he stole from Sandra, rather than holding his tongue or actually requesting a copy of the marriage certificate from the Fort Wayne hall of records, was a bit sloppy. Also, the timing on his claim to have snuck in three hours of sleep when at most he could have gotten about two and a half hours of sleep is… almost Enclopdia Brownic in its fixability by the bad guy. “Did I say three hours? I meant two. I haven’t got much sleep lately and arithmetic is not my strong suit when I’m tired” would have entirely fixed that slip. (Encyclopedia Brown stories often catch the culprit by a slip which the culprit could easily explain away.)

I also thought it disappointing that Inspector Matheney disappeared from the episode after showing Jessica the victim’s bank book and travel records. He was an interesting character and, for a pleasant change among policemen in Murder, She Wrote, competent. For all that Jessica complained about him, she complained that he wasn’t doing things that he either was doing, or couldn’t have done. And while he wasn’t quite Dennis Stanton, his suave, cultured manner was fun. His initial entrance where he basically said, “a healthy young woman slipping on the carpet and hitting her head on the corner of the desk seems entirely routine, nothing to look at here” was a bit silly, but his manner was as much that the forensic team would do a sufficient investigation of the crime scene and his investigation would need to be along different lines.

Overall, it’s a really fun episode that was well constructed and its flaws were mostly of the easily fixed variety, which are the most forgivable sort of flaws.