The Two-Million-Dollar Stowaway

While being arraigned in a Los Angeles courthouse for swindling various people out of over two million dollars, Warren Custer (Bobby Van) escapes custody and boards a cruise ship bound for Mexico, posing as a worker in the ship's engine room and planning to jump overboard and swim to a small boat piloted by a Mexican fortune hunter (Thom Christopher). Also aboard the ship are the United States Marshal he escaped from, many of his swindling victims, and Eddie and his girlfriend. Custer eventually spots the fortune hunter's boat and jumps overboard, but a couple aboard the ship sees him and reports a man overboard. Both the cruise ship and the fortune hunter attempt to rescue Custer; the fortune hunter's partner makes off in the small boat at the first sign of trouble and leaves him struggling in the water as well. After the cruise ship brings Custer and the fortune hunter aboard, Custer is found to have died of multiple stab wounds; it appears either that someone aboard the ship stabbed him just before he jumped or that the fortune hunter stabbed him in the water, and the ship's captain asks Eddie to find the killer. Meanwhile, the fortune hunter reveals that Custer had converted the stolen money to diamonds and had a key to a safety deposit box in Nicaragua, prompting Eddie and various other people on the ship, including multiple suspects in Custer's murder, to look for the key. James McEachin, Gloria De Haven, Julie Gregg, Patricia Crowley, Guy Stockwell and Ron Masak also guest-star; Masak's appearance in the episode helped get him his long-running role of Sheriff Mort Metzger on Murder, She Wrote. Filmed mostly aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.