I don’t remember watching this show as a child—I’m sure we must have, given my mom and James Garner, but I don’t remember it. In fact, I don’t remember watching it on the kind of TV we would’ve had in those days. So I don’t know if Jim’s striped sports coat strobed quite so badly on ’70s TV. You’d think they’d have known better, if they did. It’s really obnoxious on my TV, I can tell you that, and while I won’t say he looks bad in it, that’s in no small part because James Garner never looks bad.
We see in flashback that Jim was in a happy relationship with Karen Mills (Pat Delaney), beautiful single mother of Julie (uncredited!). They go on a trip to San Francisco. When they get home, he puts her sleeping daughter to bed. By the time he does so, Karen has vanished. The cops find a corpse in her yard. Naturally, Lieutenant Diel thinks Jim is a suspect. He also assumes Jim has killed Karen. Because no woman would leave her purse and, more importantly, her three-year-old daughter behind.
Jim’s right; Diel’s theory doesn’t make any sense. Yes, it makes a certain amount of sense that Jim could’ve disposed of Karen anywhere in the stretch of time he says they were driving from San Luis Obispo to LA. It’s certainly possible to make up time on the road after midnight. But the corpse is just the guy next door, and Jim’s right that there’s no reason to have killed the guy. Even if he didn’t see Karen, there are ways and ways Jim could explain that without committing a murder where he leaves the body behind. Jim’s too smart for that.
On the other hand, he’s mad because he feels Diel should know him well enough to know he wouldn’t murder his girlfriend, but he’s already, sixteen cases in, seen enough to know that it happens all the time. And that’s without all the things that happened before he got to the pilot, such as being in prison. Men kill their girlfriends. If Diel didn’t ask the obvious suspect, that would be just as myopic as insisting it had to be Jim.
Initially, I assumed that this was a play on Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, for reasons that make sense as the episode goes on. However, it can’t be. This episode aired in January 1975. Jimmy Hoffa wouldn’t disappear until July. Still, there are plenty of underworld figures who could have been attempting to stage disappearances in similar ways. Probably there’s at least one that this is a deliberate version of. It is kind of funny that Jim’s solution to the whole thing is what got him in trouble last time—a fake report.
Take Care of Rockford Files: A guy tries to punch Jim, and Jim’s not having it. A car chase.