It is not at all surprising that Jim is believed over a young woman. That a wealthy businessman is believed over a young woman. About the only thing in this episode that’s surprising is when a cop believes a young woman crying attempted rape over a man insisting another young woman is a wanted fugitive. Even though it is in fact technically true.
Jim is hired by the slick and unappealing Charles Dexter (Tim O’Connor). His girlfriend, Susan Parsons (Lee Purcell), has disappeared. He’s worried about her, and he wants Jim to find her. Jim talks to her roommate, Louise Henderson (Linda Kelsey), who tells him that there had been a car watching the apartment. She is willing to give him the license plate number, but she wants Jim to let her come along. They go to Las Vegas, where Susan is hiding. Jim is not the only person after her.
Jim is not wrong that the casinos love someone who’s got a system. They count on it. You make them more money by following your system and believing you can get their money. He’s also true that the easy options will eventually bankrupt you because of the house’s cut. It’s gambling for you, but a casino is a business, and in many ways it’s one of the easiest businesses to make money on. There’s a reason that the prime example of fiscal incompetence is bankrupting a casino. The odds are all on the house, and if they aren’t, the casino finds a way to make them on the house, through buy-ins and similar.
A lot of the time on this show, women end up in the situation they’re in because they’ve chosen lousy boyfriends. They’re beaten up. They’re in fear for their lives. They’re pursued against state lines by guys who can afford $200 a day to make Jim do it for them. Even if Jim starts on the boyfriends’ sides, he usually ends up on the women’s sides by the end of the episode, but it’s also often true that he gets screwed over for it, because the system is on the side of all those abusive boyfriends and husbands.
Minor Actor Alert: The lieutenant whose deputy fails to take reasonable precautions with Susan and Louise is played by Bing Russell. Russell had a steady career, appearing in hundreds of TV shows and over fifty movies. He’s one of the many, many minor actors on this show who also did MAVERICK. But it’s probably worth noting that his last TV appearance—he kept acting in movies, but yeah—was in the 1979 TV movie about Elvis. He played Vernon Presley, father of Elvis, who was played by his own son, Kurt.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Concussed while searching a hotel room. A car chase. He breaks his hand punching a guy.
LA-based shows invariably have episodes set in Vegas, but IMDb claims that no scenes were shot there outside of establishing shots. I think at some point Jim does really get there.
Tim O’Connor is another one of Those Guys, most familiar to my generation from the Buck Rogers series of the late 70s and a two part episode of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman show that cast him in a role riffing on Michael Rennie in The Day Earth Stood Still. And of course he was on Columbo. Linda Kelsey would go on to star on Lou Grant, receiving multiple Emmy nominations.