Murder, She Wrote Season 3, Episode 17
“Simon Says, Color Me Dead”
Original Airdate: March 1, 1987
Writer: Robert E. Swanson
Director: Kevin G. Cremin
Cast: Angela Lansbury, Tom Bosley, William Windom, Diane Baker, Foster Brooks, Ann Dusenberry, Leonard Frey, Tess Harper, Steve Inwood, Dick Sargent, Chris Hebert, Phillip Clark, Daryl Wood
The Last Dinner Party
Jessica graciously accepts a last minute dinner invitation to the summer home of Simon and Eleanor Thane. Aging painter Simon (Dean Martin Celebrity Roast mainstay Foster Brooks) is a Cabot Cove celebrity whose seascapes fetch a pretty penny these days. Eleanor (Marnie’s Diane Baker) devised this soiree, fearing her husband’s become something of a recluse in his golden years. As Simon carves a roast for their guests, he boasts of new work to rival his previous artistic output. That’s great news to his art dealer, Felix Casslaw (Frey) and admirers George and Carol Selby. George, an investment-minded lawyer, is played by Dick “Second Darrin” Sargeant of Bewitched fame. Carol is Ann Dusenberry, who appeared in an earlier episode of MSW, “Murder By Appointment Only.” Eleanor is even more excited by the prospect of an upcoming Italian holiday. Simon toasts their love and Carol suddenly develops a headache. Hmm.
Eleanor defers all compliments on the meal to “the girl.” This is presumably the mousy woman dutifully carrying plates in and out of the dining room. Her name is Irene Rutledge (Harper) and she’s trying her best to remain invisible. That’s not going to pan out, sadly. At least she’s not Simon.
He’ll be dead in the morning, stabbed through the heart with the same knife he used to carve that roast.
The Girl
Earlier, Irene and her son Tommy (Hebert) endured some gnarly insults from a local mother alleging that Tommy stole her kid’s property. Fortunately, Amos saw through the slander; Tommy was just trying to return a bike abandoned out in the rain. He’s a good kid, the only boy in the Cove without a bicycle. When Jessica attempts to give him Frank’s old Schwinn, Irene proudly refuses such charity. Jess is sympathetic to this and smoothly reframes the offer as trade for Tommy’s help in the garden.
This whole scenario of Jessica helping out a single mother and son is recycled almost verbatim in a sixth season episode called “If the Shoe Fits.”
Jessica attempts to befriend Irene with an invitation to a volunteer drive, which the young woman summarily shoots down. It’s not just pride or Cabot Cove’s sneering upper crust keeping Irene from accepting Jessica’s olive branches. Even before Simon’s murder, she had reason to shy away from scrutiny. She took the name — and newborn baby — of a friend who died in childbirth, raising Tommy as her own.
As mentioned, Irene isn’t the best at remaining invisible. A police officer notices her speed-walking home from the Thanes’s at a little after 1:00 in the morning. Tommy then finds her struggling to scrub red stains from her blouse in the kitchen sink. Aside from that, Mrs. MacBeth, how’d you like the play? She and Tommy are also receiving the unwanted attention of local handyman Cash Logan (three-time MSW guest Steve Inwood). Turns out Cash is Tommy’s bio dad, newly released from prison for killing a man who threatened Tommy’s mother. Now he’s trying to get back into Tommy’s life, understandably confused that the boy’s being raised by a stranger using a dead woman’s name.
If I’m Jessica, I’m lifting this whole quagmire for my next manuscript.
Amos Tupper, All-American
When Cash finds a defaced nude portrait in the trash near Irene’s house, he stashes the mangled canvas in his pickup fearing it may implicate the woman in the murder. That and his trusty utility knife land Cash in the suspect pool, ultimately leading Amos and Jessica to learn about his past. It doesn’t endear him to Amos, who sees a kindred spirit in young Tommy. He, too, was the child of an impoverished widow. Even as Irene languishes in jail, the sheriff is lobbing spirals to the kid, telling tall tales of his glory days as a Cabot Cove Panther. Jessica is kind enough not to dispel such fantasies in front of starstruck Tommy.
Irene claims she never sat for Simon as a nude model, but he did sketch her in passing. Amos and Jessica assume the rolled up charcoal drawings of her face they find in her home were studies made before the painting, but the face was ripped out of the canvas. Irene is still holding on to the secret of taking on her friend’s identity and raising Tommy as her own, but her caginess is not helping her case.
Jessica walks in on art dealer Felix forging Simon’s signature on some fresh paintings. He claims Eleanor authorized this; the works are otherwise finished. Even if the demand for the old man’s art spikes posthumously, it doesn’t seem like Felix would kill off a cash cow still producing vital new work. Jessica also happens on a cigarette lighter in the pocket of Simon’s chore coat, but Eleanor doesn’t recognize it. This sparks memories of Frank for Jessica, who muses on the bittersweet process of putting away a man’s little everyday keepsakes in the days and weeks after death. George Selby offers her a ride home and in the process, some paint from the interior of his car transfers to the sleeve of her jacket.
A Long Hot Summer
Honing in on the cigarette lighter and the wet paint in the Selbys’ car, Jessica confronts the couple at their home. Carol’s been eager to arrange a celebration of Simon’s art since the dinner party, but George thinks it might be too soon after the unseemliness of a murder. Carol’s also been pressing him to arrange academic placement for Tommy, even volunteering him to provide legal services for Irene, who they assume is guilty. Dick Sargeant’s really good here, affecting a kind of tired aloofness and casual classism of an upper class lawyer without going for outright evil. Jessica intentionally spills her tea on their sofa, allowing for some sleight of hand with the cigarette lighter, pretending to find it between the cushions. When George recognizes it as a lost possession, she thinks she’s seen enough. However, it quickly becomes apparent she may have the wrong Selby.
Carol, we learn, had the very same lighter before going cold turkey some months earlier. It dawns on Jessica that it was Carol, not Irene, who must’ve posed for the nude painting. George gets the drift, too. Carol concedes to a torrid May-December romance with Simon, who was well over twice her age. She’d been devastated when he toasted Eleanor at the dinner party, realizing her devotion to him wasn’t mutual. She’d gone back to his studio that night to destroy the portrait for fear of humiliation. When he tried to stop her, she stabbed him in her frenzy. She might’ve gotten away with it if she hadn’t taken the ruined painting away in the car, leaving wet paint for Jessica to find.
In the end Jessica and Amos agree to forget about Irene’s identity theft and abduction of Tommy, permitting them to carry on as a happy family. Especially now that Cash Logan is spending more time with them as Tommy’s would-be new biological stepdad.
Next week, George Clooney inexplicably guest stars!
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