Gayle Woodley has a problem. She has been receiving love letters from a stranger; a stranger who knows what she wears, what her perfume is called, what she does with her days. She returns the letters for a while, enjoying the sense of romance and the love from afar, but the letters have turned ugly recently, and she wants them to stop. The stranger has recently made threats to her and her husband, and she hires Blue Moon to find the stranger and put a stop to his postal services.
David and Maddie take the case and set up a stakeout at the post office box the mysterious stranger uses as a return address. It takes a couple of long, boring days, but they do end up tailing their suspect; a shabbily dressed man who picks up the letter and hops on a bus to a run-down hotel David generously describes as a "hovel."
Getting no response from the man inside, David kicks in the door and they find themselves face-to-face with a sad, deaf and mute man named Peter Macy. Macy doesn't seem to understand them until Maddie explains to him slowly (and somewhat cruelly) that "Gayle is frightened of you. She wants you to stop writing to her, and she will not be writing to you anymore." Unable to stand the heartbroken expression on the man's face, David and Maddie pay for the door and excuse themselves. Maddie says it all as she steps out of the hovel: "I hate this job."
The next morning, in a very funny turnabout scene, David is sitting in his office when Maddie bursts in and exclaims, in rapid-fire banter, that she has an idea and that they should go to Mrs. Woodley and ask her to keep up the writing for the sake of this man's broken and harmless heart. David tries to dissuade her, pointing out Macy's apparent mental instability, but Maddie persists, and they drive over to the Woodley's together.
They are greeted by police cars and emergency equipment. A dazed and grieving Mr. Woodley tells them that someone broke into the house and clubbed Gayle to death with a telephone.
Angry, Maddie drags David to Macy's apartment to confront him about the murder. They find a typed suicide note and Macy's body on the street several floors below. David cracks the case, however, and summons Maddie to the post office for the confrontation with the real killer and a chase through the inner workings of the mail service. The episode ends with David and Maddie privately considering leaving an anonymous love letter for one another.
In a side plot, Curtis Armstrong debuts as the object of Agnes' extreme affections, Herbert Viola.
Synopsis written by Don Gow.
Guest Starring:
Co-Starring:
Uncredited:
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