Jack Webb: Sergeant Joe Friday

The Big Ad

Sergeant Joe Friday

Friday: This is the city, Los Angeles, California. It's a modern city, some say the one of the future. It's all electronic, and computerized. They've got computers here that can read and store a hundred and forty thousand words in 2.5 microseconds, others that can plot probability curves for anything you care to predict on a man's life. They can do the same for his death. The machines can tell you that of the average 25,000 people who will die in Los Angeles this year, three hundred of them, or 82-hundredths of one percent, will die by an act of murder. That's a small percentage, but it's one I deal with. I carry a badge.

Friday: [Friday, Gannon and Steve Deal are in Deal's apartment waiting for the phone to ring; people answering the re-placed ad. The phone rings] Hello?... Yes, that's right. I placed the ad. Same as last week. Oh?
[to Steve Deal]
Friday: Did you get a letter from a girl named Beverly?
[Deal makes a "forget it!" gesture]
Friday: Yes, I did, I got it. Well, no, no, that wouldn't work out. No, I wouldn't be interested. Yes, I am married. No, I wouldn't be interested, Lady. Yes, Ma'a'm.
[hangs up]
Officer Bill Gannon: What's the matter, Joe? You're not married, and a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks!
Friday: Well, you ARE married. Suppose somebody offered you a thousand bucks to get a divorce - would you take it?
Officer Bill Gannon: Joe, that's a terrible question to ask any married man!

Officer Bill Gannon: Joe, you'd better hold it up.
Friday: What's going on?
Officer Bill Gannon: Forrester isn't out trying to establish an alibi. He's inside that house right now. You can figure the rest.
Friday: I kill the wife. He kills me.
Officer Bill Gannon: Looks that way, doesn't it?
Friday: Yeah, and the only trouble is, it doesn't change anything. We still don't have anything admissible against him.
Officer Bill Gannon: Well Joe, maybe the woman's already dead. What's to stop him from killing you the minute you open the door?
Friday: He's afraid to kill his wife. If he wasn't, she'd have been dead before this. No, I think he has to have somebody else do the job for him.
Officer Bill Gannon: Who are you trying to convince, me or you?

Officer Bill Gannon: Relax. Don't let it get to you.
Friday: Someplace out in this city there's a man making up his mind whether or not to use me to murder his wife, and I don't like it.
Officer Bill Gannon: Well, there's nothing we can do until he calls again.
Friday: I don't know. Maybe I just should have pulled him in last night.
Officer Bill Gannon: You'd have blown the case.
Friday: Yeah, but maybe it might have scared him off.

Officer Bill Gannon: You think he's leveling?
Friday: He wants his wife dead, Bill. Now he's either going to have me do it, or he's going to get somebody else to do it.
Officer Bill Gannon: Yeah.
Friday: Or he might even do it himself.