It’s well established that Jim was a schemer and a scammer in the Army. A scavenger. He’s the kind of person Radar or Klinger would have traded with. Actually, I’d love to see a show of Jim’s days in Korea, though I suspect it would have a later days of M*A*S*H vibe. You know, where you have wacky hijinks interspersed with the horrors of war. That’s okay; that’s my preferred era anyway. But Jim’s an established draftee. His rank yo-yoed pretty regularly. And every time he tells us about his past, basically, it’s to tell us about some scam he was running.
Jim meets up with his old Army buddy Al Brennan (Ned Beatty). Then, a woman named Marcy Brownell (Veronica Hamel) comes to Jim looking for her missing sister, Linda, who used to date a man named John Stabila (Paul Stevens). Jim doesn’t take missing persons cases. Brennan convinces Marcy that he’s Jim’s partner and that he will take it. Jim takes the case so he can get it out of the way in time for a camping trip he’s got planned with Rocky.
Stolen art is a serious business. You might wonder what these people plan to do with it, but the point is that they have it and no one else does. They might show it to a trusted friend, or they might gloat over it in private. They aren’t interested in the legalities; they aren’t interested in anything but themselves. Oh, part of my issue is that I have basically no sympathy with thieves, but I also have strong feelings that art belongs to everyone and should be in a museum—if it’s a cultural artifact, in a museum controlled by that culture.
Honestly, I spotted the fact that the picture was fake right away. I don’t know why it took Jim a magnifying glass. Maybe it’s that fake pictures are much more familiar to me, both as a regular viewer of detective shows and as a person growing up in an era where the details of faking pictures are common knowledge. I’m just constantly astounded by what pictures take people in—I’ll never get how anyone was fooled by the Cottingley Fairies, for example.
Southern California for Tourists: The house that Stabila bought is listed at $750,000. With inflation, that’s about $3.5 million. That’s proof that the housing market in Los Angeles is ahead of inflation. Now, you can get quite a nice house in LA County for $3.5 million, but it’s not as expensive as they’re implying when they talk to the real estate agent. It’s a nice place, and I’d be shocked if you couldn’t get a couple more million for it than that for it easy.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Held at . . . flashlightpoint? Actually held at gunpoint. Threatened with a dog. Punched in the kidney. Shot at. (Those last four in about five minutes.) Hit from behind. Held at gunpoint again.