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From a bar, Anita Wenger (Kornelia Boje) calls the police for help - but once the police arrives, she has already been run over by a car just outside the place. And that her pockets and handbag all seem to have been thoroughly searched suggests her death was not an accident. First, investigating inspector Derrick (Horst Tappert) and his assistant Harry Klein (Fritz Wepper) zero in on Anita's husband (Josef Fröhlich), but he's so puzzled by all of this that they quickly drop him from their radarn but make the acquaintance of his son (Claudius Kracht), who's apparently really attached to a damaged toy of his. Derrick and Harry pay a visit to the bar to find it to be a rather upscale place - until they find out about an illegal casino in the basement. Derrick pays a visit to the casino after blackmailing gambler Dr. Bergmann (Pinkas Braun) to vouch for him, but he can't fool those who run the casino for long, and they send lovely Irene (Eva Christian) over to seduce him. Derrick sees through the ruse of course, and after initially pretending to be more than eager for her company, he suddenly ditches her, and he and Harry follow her to some village in the country where she apparently works at a retirement home for the very rich. And those very rich are apparently also good people, as they're relentless in donating money for an organisation to fight the famine in India. But then Derrick learns from one of the retirees that the money's actually routinely embezzled by the head of the retirement home, Keppler (Karl Michael Vogler), and Derrick and Harry take him for questioning on a whim. But even if they know how his scheme works, they have no evidence, and Keppler's not one to budge easily. But then Harry remembers Wenger's son's damaged toy, and guess what they find inside ...

Actually, one of the better episodes of Derrick, if mainly for the fact that this one doesn't give its game away way too early in the plot and zeroes in on just one character but lets Derrick and Harry do some actual investigating instead. And the many different suspects as well as different locations sure do the story some good. That said, at the same time the murder mystery also seems to be a bit too random, with the casino and the retirement home subplots not sufficiently linked to one another, as if the plot was made up of two half-finished scripts. On the positive side though, the stilted dialogue that screenwriter Herbert Reinecker has over time become famous for is kept to a minimum here, and mainly to the first few scenes with Wenger. Basically though, this might not be too bad of an episode in comparison to others, but really good crime television it certainly isn't.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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