Fri, Sep 19, 1975
A small time druggie commits suicide and Pepper poses as her sister to nab the dealers, until it turns out they've seen her photo - and they've realized it isn't Angie. So the squad moves in on the bad guys who have Pepper in the meth-shack, and she jumps through a glass window before a shell hits the building and the whole place blows up.
Fri, Oct 10, 1975
Ian McShane plays an insurance scammer and Ida Lupino is his partner. They fake and contrive accidents to collect the dough. Pepper "foils" a purse-snatching by getting knocked-down in a parking lot, falling in a pool and getting hit by a truck within a matter of a few seconds. In the hospital with a rag on her head, Pepper overhears the ambulance chasers pressuring the other patients on the ward. Pepper intuits a plot and once Bill finds her, they scheme to scam the scammers. Pepper charms McShane instantly into telling her all their secrets and, just as fast, a security guard quite unconvincingly blows her cover by insisting he hadn't seen her since he retired from the police force - all within earshot of Lupino. Exposed but unawares, Pepper still thinks she's undercover despite being told by an aging and suicidal lawyer in this "firm" that they're onto her. And, the revelation that she's got a badge doesn't guide them to get out of town but instead to kill her with a vat of gasoline in the trunk of a car. So when she tells the driver they're being set up for death, he just pushes her out the door onto the street and then angrily drives into oblivion. Conflagrations ensue on the highway. Pepper then goes to the apartment of the wife of the now-dead driver (one of the firm's partner/victims) and promptly gets shoved in a closet and the room is set on fire. Crowley arrives just in time, shooting the arsonist, and breaking Pepper out of the closet in the back of the smoke filled room. They meet Lupino in a darkened mall who starts shooting at them. Pepper being Pepper, she has no gun. An unconscious person on the floor literally trips Lupino and she falls, and is promptly arrested - By Crowley. Pepper and Crowley show up at a "fancy" restaurant and arrest McShane.
Tue, Dec 16, 1975
An angular blonde gets off the plane at LAX and takes a cab to her brother in law, Julian's house. She's looking for her sister, Beth, missing six weeks. In his study, there's the woman's portrait, looking suspiciously like a brunette version of Pettet - they are sisters after all. Mute from a childhood growth and resulting surgery, the sister can only communicate through sign-language. Her brother-in-law's secretary, his lover, makes their relationship obvious by her unsuspecting, "Darling!", as she enters the study, and Beth's sister leaves in a huff. While in the middle of another fur-heist case Pepper gets drawn into the case of the missing Beth as she can understand sign language. When the blonde sister winds up stabbed in the shoulder in her hotel room and found by a maid, she claims her brother-in-law is responsible. In interrogation by Pepper and Crowley, the brother-in-law irks the pair by calling the sister "pathetic" and questions Crowley's authority and competence. The brother-in-law denies responsibility for the stabbing. The sister reveals letters that Beth wrote to her which seem to implicate the brother-in-law in something unwholesome. These lead the squad to find a decomposed, decapitated body buried in Northern California they think may be the sister, Beth. During an inquest, the DA verifies that Robert Webber sometimes has the opportunity to use lye in his business, the substance used to speed up the body's decomposition. Webber looks pretty guilty, until Pepper, at home with Pettet downstairs on the couch, gets a call from Crowley: the forensic lab has determined the body is that of an elderly woman. That, and a phone bill revealing a call to the Pettet's native Nova Scotia, prompts Pepper to dial it. The fussy Nova Scotian housekeeper is irritated by the late-night call and when Pepper asks for the sister, she's informed she died six months ago but that her sister, Beth, is out in California. Pepper smells a rat, and goes downstairs to find the sister off the couch doing midnight dish duty. Pepper realizes that the sister is, indeed, Beth herself, and has dyed her hair and adorned contact-lenses in order to pull the ruse. Unable to coax her to put down the loaded gun she's had stuck in Pepper's face for several minutes, Pep jumps her, they fall behind the couch; the gun goes off, and Pepper gets up - and promptly collapses. The guys get there and receive an improbable call from the airport revealing that the sister's flight out will be delayed by a few minutes. Everyone recognizes this as the unlikely plot device it is and they rush for LAX, leaving Pepper behind. There, they spot Joanna Pettet and chase her down, Crowley pulling the fake scar from her throat, thus permitting her to scream.