Temperamental artist Max Barsini (Patrick Bauchau) effectively lives with three women: his ex-wife, Louise (Fionnula Flanagan), his young live-in model Julie (Isabel García Lorca), and his current wife Vanessa (Shera Danese).
But when Louise begins seeing a therapist, Dr. Hammer (George Coe), who is also her new fiancé, Barsini fears she will reveal that he killed his first agent, who was robbing him.
Oscar Finch (Patrick McGoohan) is a lawyer who uses underhanded methods to get his clients off, like coercing Paul Mackey (Denis Arndt), who worked for the D.A.
Staplin, facing another indictment, threatens to expose the long-ago favor and ruin Finch's and Mackey's political futures if he doesn't arrange the destruction of another document.
Vivian Dimitri (Helen Shaver) is a real estate executive whose recently deceased husband had been sent to prison by Columbo.
Dentist Wesley Corman (James Read) decides to get rid of his unfaithful wife, Lydia (Jo Anderson), and use her money to support his gambling habit.
When Adam Evans (Marshall R. Teague), a Hollywood heartthrob having an affair with Lydia, comes under his care, Corman puts a time-release poison made from digitalis under a crown.
Jess McCurdy (Brenda Vaccaro) fails to convince her sister, best-selling romance novelist Theresa Goren (Janet Margolin), to break up with her boyfriend Wayne Jennings (Andrew Stevens), a playboy/tennis bum half her age and a gold digger.
He allows Columbo to "catch" him for the second murder, to which he confesses, so that he is cleared of the crime when the autopsy proves Goren was killed by the first shot.