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Columbo: Now You See Him [9.5]

Episode Summary

The Great Santini is a master magician, but his employer discovers that he was a German camp guard during World War II and tries to blackmail him. Santini is forced to engineer a perfect murder - he kills the owner while apparently performing his famous "water tank" illusion on stage in front of dozens of witnesses. Santini in fact supposedly hides out beneath the stage, and uses a radio transmitter to convince a stagehand he is there when he's busy killing the owner. Columbo investigates and slowly unravels the fact that Santini was both not in the tank, and not beneath the stage where the stagehand claimed he was. Finally Columbo finds the one clue he needs - the owner's typewriter had a one-use ribbon. By unwinding the ribbon and reading it in reverse, Columbo discovers the contents of the letter that was going to be sent to the Immigration Department to incriminate Santini.

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