Police are soon on the scene, with Lieutenant Columbo chief amongst them. In all the hoo-hah, Brandt slyly winds up the spool of incriminating wire and pockets it. Two society members investigate the stairs, while a supposedly distraught Brandt slumps by the record player. Bursting in through the main door, the far exit slams shut – clearly someone has escaped them by milliseconds, and that person gunned down dear Bertie. However, the convivial chat is shattered by the sound of gunshots and a heavy weight hitting the library floor! Got all that? Good…īrandt nonchalantly returns downstairs where he converses with fellow brainiacs. As for the gun, it goes into the umbrella, which is stashed up the chimney. He attaches the wired clamps to the player’s arm rest and places the marker pen beside the arm. Taking the cash from Bertie’s wallet to make it look like a burglary gone wrong, and opening the secondary door to a stairway exit, Oliver cues up the auto-record player, which will play a single song before resetting. Oliver calmly reaches for the hidden gun and fires twice – Bertie’s face a picture of disbelief as he slumps dead to floor. “ I’m going to tell the whole world what you are,” he screams, spittle flying. That takes the wind out of Bertie’s sails, but when Oliver delivers another tickling, the pint-sized egg-head goes berserk. “ I intend to kill you.”ĭoes anyone else think Bertie’s head resembles an egg? It’s there that Bertie reveals that he knows all about his partner’s embezzling – and that he intends to expose the misdeeds to the wider world. Bertie begs for a private audience with Brandt and the two head up to the library. Once the lecture’s over, the intelligentsia retire to the bar for highbrow chat.
He leaves the marker pen by the record player, then bustles away and makes a show of entering by the real front door as if he’s simply late for that night’s lecture – cruelly tickling poor Bertie on the way. Oliver also leaves a window open and preps a state-of-the-art programmable record player to select a particular tune from a Tchaikovsky LP and balances the humongous dictionary precariously on a small table beside the record player. All of these items are left in various places around the room, along with the gun. The squibs are attached to the inner spokes of his umbrella, and attached, in turn, to little alligator clamps on a spool of wire. Using the side entrance to the Sigma Society – a club of geniuses where he and Bertie are members – Brandt sneaks up to the library and puts the pieces in place. The ingredients? An umbrella some squibs a marker pen alligator clamps a record player a heavy dictionary and a concealed, silenced gun. In order to ensure his cover isn’t blown, Brandt uses his fiendish intellect to concoct a recipe for perfect murder. Setting up a murder has never seemed such fun! She has no idea he’s up to such skullduggery, but his business partner and life-long friend Bertie Hastings has just found out – and he ain’t happy. Genius accountant Oliver Brandt has been embezzling funds in order to keep his high-maintenance wife in fine frocks and tropical getaways. Significant locations: Sigma Society ( 2501 9th Ave, Los Angeles, 90018) Brandt residence ( 10451 Bellagio Rd, Los Angeles, 90077) Episode synopsis: The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case So let’s prep our robo-record players, fetch our umbrellas from the chimney and get ready to hang with Theo Bikel and his fellow geniuses down at Sigma Society HQ… Dramatis personae I hope to successfully make my case to you here about just why this Columbo outing has no equal. But to my mind this is a truly special 70 minutes of television, deserving of the highest praise. Is there a hint of hyperbole about the above? Perhaps. It was the day the best-ever Columbo episode hit our screens it was the day The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case first aired. Was a red-letter day in televisual history.
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