When Peter Falk played the relentless detective Columbo, his character examined even the smallest detail. If Columbo encountered a corpse with a safety pin stuck thru the chest area of a perfect dress shirt, it surly would have raised his suspicion. He would never have rested until he had the answer to the question: what about the safety pin? This is a true story, not a TV script, and only I knew the significance of the safety pin.
It all started when a long time customer called me to tune his piano on a Wednesday afternoon. On Wednesday morning he telephoned me to say that he had been out of work and had just been called for a job interview that afternoon. Rather than cancel on me, he would leave the front door unlocked and my check on the piano. I was to let myself in.
When I opened his front door and entered the foyer he was dead, hanging by his neck from some clothesline rope attached to an upstairs hallway banister. A chair, he had apparently stood on and kicked aside, lay sideways on the floor. He was wearing dress slacks and a pastel dress shirt, both crisply pressed. A piece of notebook style paper was pined to the chest of the shirt with a hundred dollar bill taped to it and a message to me written in large blue letters, probably from a marking pen. The note said something like: Dear John. My wife is away. I did not want her to be the one to find me. Please call the police. Thanks. P.S. The money is for the tuning which you don't have to do plus some extra for your trouble. At that time the fee for a piano tuning was $35.00 so he was paying me almost triple.
I did not panic and run away for various reasons. For starters, this was not the first dead body I had ever encountered in my years of going into thousands of homes. It was about the third or forth. Second, two members of my family were homicide detectives and I knew from hearing them talk shop that the person who finds the body gets the honor of being the first suspect. Even if you are absolved form any involvement in the death, a coroner's inquest will tie up days of your time. So the thing to do was get out of the house with no clue that I was ever there. This meant the note had to go with me. I reached out to unpin the note, but, could not bring myself to deal with the pin, which would have meant touching the deceased. Instead, I tore the note from the pin. It came off clean leaving only the pin in the shirt. I made one more vain attempt to get the pin too, but, lost my nerve. I left the house making sure to leave the front door wide open.
This happened in the days before cell phones. I drove to the nearest pay phone and called the police claiming to be a concerned neighbor. I told them the door on the house across the street was wide open and I knew the owners were away. I also thought I saw men walking around inside. I hastily gave the address and hung up. I drove to a bakery, got a much needed cup of coffee, and drove back by the house about twenty minutes later to make sure the police had arrived. They had. For months I worried about that safety pin I left behind, or, if the deceased had written down the day and time of my appointment on a calender or something, but, nothing ever came of it. I guess there were no "Columbos" in that police department.
EPILOGUE: Many months later the deceased man's wife called me to help her sell the piano. Of course, I acted surprised to hear about her husband's demise. I asked if he had been ill or involved in an accident? She told me that he had taken his own life because he was depressed over the fact that his company had let him go, and, as an older man, no one seemed to want to hire him, despite his years of experience. She ventured that he had sent out hundreds of resumes. She told me that between his severance package, and what they had saved for retirement, he really had no need to worry about ever working again. There is a great difference between need and want.
