Mr. Carmedy

Mr. Carmedy is the man who sets the down-and-out private investigator Ben Reilly on the case at the heart of the episode. Claiming to be the husband of the nightclub singer Cat Hardy, he believes she is unfaithful and pays Ben to follow her and gather proof.

When Ben returns with photographs but no affair to report, telling Carmedy his wife spent the night alone, Carmedy takes his money back and goes home, leaving the detective to weigh what he has actually stumbled into.

Mr. Carmedy resurfaces as a thread in Ben Reilly's investigation, tracked down once Janet turns up his address. Pressed on the job he gave Ben back at the start, Carmedy drops the pretense that he was ever Cat Hardy's husband, admitting he made the whole thing up.

He confesses he took the work purely for quick money, planning to use the photographs of Cat and Mayor Morris either as blackmail or to sell to the papers, and that he only knew about the secret meeting because he had been tipped off to it. The admission peels back another layer of the setup, confirming that the case Ben took in good faith was built on a lie from the very beginning.