OK, I’m just not understanding anything about this one. Alfred Hitchcock Presents has been my refuge from the frequent non-stories of Ray Bradbury Theater, the often hokey mess of Night Gallery, the uneven tone Tales From the Crypt, and frankly the 60 minutes of Outer Limits (which is usually pretty good, but it’s still an hour of my life). AHP has a great track record for being interesting, logical and pretty leanly written.

Gangsta Eddie Slovak has called a TV repairman (a guy who used to actually come to your house and fix your TV).  His wife is baffled that Slovak intentionally sabotaged the set, then called a repair shop in far away Queens.

Repairman Pete Williams rings the bell, so the appointment must have been three hours earlier.  Eddie opens the door and both men are all smiles as they recognize each other as old army buddies.

Slovak’s wife Faye rats him out for purposely busting the TV so he could call Pete to take a look at it.  After she leaves, Slovak tears into Pete. He wants Williams to call him a coward for his actions in Korea. Williams seems like a nice guy and says he hasn’t thought about that incident in years.  Slovak says he hasn’t forgotten for one day that he “went chicken one day” and Pete covered for him at risk to his own career.

The titular percentage is the edge that Slovak thinks Pete has on him by keeping this little secret of his cowardice.  He offers Pete big money, even a house to make them even in his mind.  The more Slovak offers, the more Eddie insists he doesn’t want anything except what he can earn on his own.  He is perfectly happy with his modest life.

Slovak is baffled by that and wants to know how much it would cost to keep quiet about him being chicken.  “I gotta pay you back!” he yells at Pete.

They agree to go out to dinner with their wives and he tells Pete’s wife he wants to put some big money in Pete’s pocket.  His wife tries to talk Pete into taking the money, but he just won’t accept anything he hasn’t earned.  When Slovak goes to see Pete’s wife to see how it went, she is all over him.

When Pete gets home, Slovak berates him for his cheap home, car and furniture, but Pete seems perfectly happy with his life.

A few days later, Pete’s wife invites Slovak over to talk about how to get Pete to take the money, and also to fool around.  Slovak is really only interested in evening up the percentage.  When Louise says she has not really talked to Pete about accepting the money, Eddie kills her.

Slovak is caught red-handed by Pete.  Slovak says to Pete that they are even now. “She made a play for me and I did the best thing I knew.  For your sake, Pete.  All for you. She was no good.”  Slovak implores Pete to make up a story to protect them both just like he did in Korea.  So he thinks he did Pete a favor by killing his wife who he clearly adored?  Pete rats him out to the police immediately.

Pete goes straight to Slovak’s house. He tells Mrs. Slovak that her husband killed Louise and then they kiss. Hunh?  There was no foreshadowing of this at all.

Everyone did their job, but maybe they should have saved this one for the hour-long season of AHP.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  The two wives are still alive.  Don Keefer (Pete Williams) just died last year at 98.
• Slovak was possibly named for Eddie Slovik, the only American to be executed for desertion since the Civil War.
• Nice guy Eddie could have been named for Nice Guy Eddie, except Eddie was a dick here — Pete was the nice guy.  And Nice Guy Eddie came along 30 years later.

Prosecuting Attorney Warren Selvy is being chewed out by his boss as he throws file after file on his desk of cases in which Selvy has failed to get a conviction.  Whether any of these defendants were actually innocent seems to be irrelevant.  To make matters worse, his boss is also his father-in-law.

Selvy would like to be District Attorney, but his father thinks that this losing streak is going to be a problem.  Not only that, his father-in-law says he believes his daughter Doreen is getting impatient with Selvy’s slow rise to the middle.  He tells Selvy that the jury doesn’t just want logic.  In the current Rodman case, he needs to show some passion, put on a show.  So the old man is a visionary, foreseeing the OJ trial 30 years down the road where evidence doesn’t mean shit.

His father-in-law tells him that if he can send Rector — er Rodman — to the chair, his political future will be secure.  Unfortunately he has an adversary in the courtroom named Vance who is a master of self-promotion.

All charged up, he returns to the courtroom and demands a guilty verdict from the jury, and also that they send Rodman to the electric chair.

Selvy calls his wife — who is way out of his league, by the way — down to a local bar to await the announce-ment of the verdict.  In a surprisingly quick decision, Selvy finally wins a big one.

That night, he receives a visit from an old man who says that he is actually guilty of the murder that Rodman was convicted of.  Selvy is torn — he doesn’t want an innocent man to be electrocuted, but he also wants to win the trial and not have to marry some other woman who is in his league.  When the old man realizes that he will get the chair for committing the murder, he recants his confession.

The old man comes back later, a few minutes before the scheduled execution, and threatens to go public with his guilt, Selvy is worried about the effect on his marriage and political career so clocks him with . . . . er, a clock, killing him.

His wife and father-in-law return home just in time to see the dead man on the floor.  The father-in-law recognizes the old man as a crank who confesses to crimes all the time. As Selvy stands there in shock at having killed an innocent man, the clock he used to kill the old man rings for midnight and the execution of Rodman.

KInd of a strange episode. Normally, the clock striking midnight in Selvy’s hands, signifying the death of Rodman would have been a gut-punch.  Here it is just a reminder that the real criminal was put to death.  Big deal — as Ernie Banks said, “Let’s fry two!”

On the other hand, I expected that Rodman was going to ultimately die and be found innocent, so the episode faked me out.  Which is a good thing.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  Georgann Johnson, last seen in One for the Road, still hanging in there.
• Selvy (Pat Hingle) was Commissioner Gordon in the 1980s Batmans.
• Edward Schaff gets only a few seconds on screen, and I’m not sure he had any dialogue.  He got more exposure as Hitler in Russ Myer’s Up!.  But not as much as Kitten Natividad.  Or Raven De La Croix.  Or Candy Samples.  Etc.

After last week’s misleadingly titled murder-free outing  The Deadly, we get back to basics.  Here we get three deaths, although all are off-screen and one is not human (although he thinks he’s people, yes he does).  Shut up — cats are bad-ass.  Crazy cat ladies have given them a bad rep.

Speaking of crazy cat ladies, Miss Paisley fits the profile.  Even though she does not start off with a cat, she has crazy to spare.  For one thing, she talks to herself . . . a lot.  One night as she is chattering away, a cat crawls in her window and she decides to keep it.

As she is leaving the next morning, she meets Jenkins the building super on the stairs. He asks if the cat is hers.  With an honesty that will cause her trouble later, she admits that it is.  Jenkins tells her to be careful because he saw the cat coming out the window of her downstairs neighbor, a bookie.

To keep the cat from straying, she feeds it raw meat and puts a collar on it with her name and address.  It doesn’t seem to work as one morning she sees her neighbor kick the cat out his door.

As the cat does the trot-of-shame up the stairs, she confronts the man, but he makes it clear that “if I catch him in here again, you won’t have no cat!”

She later sees the cat in the bookie’s window, and leans in through the window to retrieve him.  For a bookie that the super describes as handling thousands of dollars, he’s pretty cavalier about security, living on the first floor and leaving the window open.

When she comes home that night, the cat is missing, so she peeks in the bookie’s window again.  She doesn’t see the cat, but does see his collar in a trash can.  She reports this to the super and he reluctantly shows her the dead cat in a garbage can in the alley.

Back in her apartment she again talks at length to herself.  Eventually, she bores herself to sleep. When she awakens, she no longer has her coat on and the lights are off.  A neighbor tells her that Jenkins has been arrested for the killing of the bookie.

She somehow concludes that she must have blacked out and that she killed the bookie, not Jenkins.  For every reason the police give her that Jenkins is guilty, she has an alternate theory that incriminates herself.  For every reason they say she couldn’t have done it, she further insists that she is guilty.  She is the Anti-OJ.

The detective humors her, but still believes that Jenkins is the murderer.  The cops figure their work is done here — he tells her the brain can play all kinds of tricks and goes to get some donuts.

Six months and three days later, Miss Paisley still misses the cat.  When she finds the cat’s collar behind a chair cushion, all her memories come flooding back to her of how she did indeed murder the bookie and dispose of the evidence; along with six months of crumbs and loose change.

She cheerfully puts on her coat to go to the police station.  Then says: Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  A couple of 90 year olds left.
• Under 6 months from the murder to Old Sparky — gotta love AHP justice.  Oh, Jenkins was probably guilty of something.
• I’m not sure what to make of this constantly cheerful old woman.  Is she crazy from loneliness?  Does she have dementia?
• The detective was played by Jed Clampett’s banker, Mr. Drysdale.

This takes place back in the old days when all women were housewives.   And they go to the train station to pick up their hat-wearing husbands after their train commute from the city.

On the way home, Margot tells her husband they have a leak in the water heater in the basement.  He says he will take a look at it.  It was back when men did that too, rather than just calling a plumber.

Margot is cooking dinner when her husband comes up from the basement.  She asks if he got it fixed, and he says, “No, it’s too dark down there to see what’s wrong.  I guess you’ll have to call a plumber.”  So what he really needs isn’t a plumber, it’s an electrician. Or a flashlight.  I take it back — this guy is not the handiest of men.

He also tells her to get an estimate, “and if it’s more that $10, he can forget it.”  I got nothin’.  That’s just mind-boggling.

The next morning, the doorbell rings.  Just like June Cleaver, she already has her pearls on by 9:30 am.  She looks out the window and sees the truck for Mike Staley Plumbing & Heating.  She opens the door and somehow seems surprised that her visitor is the plumber . . . who she called . . . and whose truck she just saw.

He makes way too much small talk with Margot, all smiles and charm. He is a little too familiar, guessing her husband’s salary and calling a neighbor by her first name.  After a few minutes in the basement, he tells Margot that he has to go upstairs to shut off the water in the bathroom to equalize the pressure, “that’s the trouble with the Stetson Valve, otherwise, they’re very good.”  I have a feeling he might just as well said he needed to get a Langstrom 7″ Gangly Wrench and Margot and I would both have been just as clueless.

She finds him admiring some artwork in the bedroom over the bed.  He compliments her taste on furniture, bedspreads, everything.  She is creeped out by this guy.  He picks up her nightie off a chair and compliments that too.

He comes back downstairs and after admiring the kitchen and house, he gives her an estimate of $500.  Extrapolating from the estimated $10 plumber’s bill, that would be $12 million in today’s dollars.  He explains that the exorbitant estimate is for him to keep his trap shut.  If people heard him talking about her bedroom, the artwork over the bed, the fancy bedspread, the pink negligee, they might get the wrong idea.

He also points out that his truck has been outside her house for two hours just to give an estimate for a leaky valve — what must the neighbors think?  That he’s getting paid by the hour, for one thing.

When he returns for the money, Margot has assembled all the housewives of whatever county this is.  He has blackmailed all of them and now they want their revenge.  He has spent all their money, so they start lining up jobs he can do to work off the debt, or they will call the police.  He whines, “but that’s blackm . . . .”.

Luckily for him, he is a pretty good looking guy, so some of these dames might ask him to lay some pipe.  Another corpse-less episode, but a fun story with good performances.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  Coupla live ones.
• Title Analysis:  The Deadly?  Hunh?  There are no deaths or even any threats of violence.

Evan and Janet Wallace are showing Janet’s old battle axe aunt around California and she hates it.  She hates the desert, hates the rocks, hates everything.  When Evan points out a 200 year old Spanish mission, she has to trump him by saying, “Westminster Abby was consecrated in 1050 — that’s over 900 years old.”  Although she and her niece are supposed to be English,I don’t detect much of an accent.

She does, however, appreciate the mission in contrast to her feelings about the dreadful modern buildings that Evan designs — which she is not shy in sharing.

She insists on going to Tijuana despite not having the papers to get back into the US –this is back when there used to be a border.  Luckily, they get a pretty lax officer who peeks in the car, sees a nice couple and an old lady snoozing in the back seat, and waves them through.

After they cross the border, they try to wake up Janet’s aunt but discover she is dead. Of natural causes?  On Alfred Hitchcock Presents?  WTH?  They pull up to a cantina and throw a coat over Auntie while they have a drink and plan what to do.  If nothing else, a dead body in a hot car in Mexico might draw some flies away from the cantina.

No slur there — there is a huge roll of flypaper hanging in the restaurant, so they must have a problem.  That’s gonna cost them a Michelin star.  When they come out, they see the car has been stolen.  Not wanting to involve the police, they go to private detective Peter Lorre.

Back at the hotel, they get a visit from the Policía.  They have found a car like the Wallace’s. They go downstairs and confirm that it is their car, but it is missing its third wheel — Auntie has disappeared.  It wouldn’t be such a big deal, but they stand to get a large inheritance and need Auntie’s body to prove she is dead.

They go back to Lorre to see if he can locate the old bag.  He consistently nickel-and-dimes them like Mr. Haney on Green Acres.  He finally comes up with the body.  They follow the hearse to a funeral home in the states.

The funeral director calls them in to view the corpse — Lorre has sent them home with a man, man.

Strange episode.  The heart of the story is really Lorre’s huckster private detective rather than the . . . well, there really is no crime.  The dead body is just a macguffin — no murder, no cover-up, no irony, no self-incrimination.

With the story and the cast, more could have been done with the episode.  The opening of the casket feels more like the cliff-hanger of a two-parter than a satisfying conclusion.  Part two would be where Evan drives back to Mexico and beats Lorre like a piñata.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.
• Sadly, no way I could I could reference Michael leaving Egg in Mexico.