- Sam Burris awakens his wife Betsy, saying he heard a shot at a neighbor's house. Through binoculars they spy Belle Adrian prowling about the house. Fortunately, Perry Mason on vacation comes to Belle's aid when she is charged with murder.
- Carla Adrian is watching home movies with neighbor Mark Cushing who is in a wheelchair after an accident. After the movie, Cushing makes a pass at Carla ripping her blouse causing her to leave. Later that evening Cushing's neighbor Sam Burris awakens his wife Betsy telling her he heard a shot. They then hear a scream causing Betsy to get up and look at the Cushing house with binoculars. She sees broken glass followed by Belle Adrian, Carla's mother, walking inside the house. Sam calls the sheriff who finds Cushing murdered and Carla's car parked nearby. Due to rain that night, footsteps are found connecting the Cushing house with the car, the Adrian house, and the Burris house. Perry on vacation in a nearby cabin receives an early visit from Belle asking for help in keeping her daughter's name out of the commotion surrounding the case. However, Perry soon finds himself having to defend Belle from the charge of murdering Cushing based on evidence the Sheriff found at the Adrian house and nearby including the gun.—Anonymous
- On a rainy Friday night at his lakeside cabin in Bear Valley, Mark Cushing (Eric Sinclair) is showing home movies of him waterskiing to Carla Adrian (Barbara Eden). He ended up in a wheelchair with a broken leg, but that doesn't stop him from making a determined grab for Carla. He tears her blouse, and gets a good slap in return. A couple cabins away, Sam Burris (Malcolm Atterbury) rouses his wife Betsy (Dorothy Adams) from bed, telling her that he heard a shot and the sound of broken glass. Soon, they hear a scream, and use binoculars to check what's going on at the Cushing cabin. They spot Belle Adrian (Sylvia Field), Carla's mother, and Betsy convinces Sam to call the sheriff.
The next morning, Sheriff Elmore (James Westerfield) is conducting a crime scene investigation of Cushing's place. He's dead, and the main clue seems to be broken glass from a mirror. Sam arrives, at the sheriff's instructions, but doesn't have much to tell. He still hasn't spilled the beans about seeing Belle and Elmore can tell he's holding something back. He knows that Sam disliked Cushing. Sam admits that he's convinced he was once cheated in a business deal with Cushing, but says that something like this - murder - is an entirely different matter. Perry is vacationing at a neighboring cabin, so Belle calls on him to ask for assistance. She explains how Carla figures in what has happened, including the fact that Carla had a flat tire later that night. However, Belle omits any mention of her own late-night visit to Cushing's cabin. She wants Perry to find whoever it was who screamed that night, so Perry puts Paul on the job. The sheriff also comes calling, and is very suspicious of Belle's story, since it doesn't fit the evidence of the various tracks of footprints left is the rain-soaked ground.
Later, Perry goes to Belle's cabin, meets Carla and her boyfriend Harvey Delano (Peter Nelson), and learns from Belle that the sheriff has been by with a search warrant. He's taken a pair of Belle's shoes, Carla's torn blouse, and a woman's gold compact, inscribed "From Mark to Carla with love", which was found hidden in a boot. It seems that the broken mirror found at the murder scene is a good fit for this compact. Sheriff Elmore reappears, and with his help Perry draws a diagram of the location of the relevant cabins, plus Carla's car and the various footprint paths between them all. The sheriff mentions finding fingerprints on the car, mostly of people with legitimate reasons to touch the car, but also a single print he couldn't identify. He found a gun near the car, which Harvey recognizes as one he lent to Carla so she could learn to shoot. Others knew she was doing this, so there was no point in trying to keep it secret. Finally, the sheriff reveals that Belle's shoes had traces of blood and glass particles on them, so he arrests her for murder.
Paul gets a report from an operative who had been assigned to check out Cushing's funeral, looking for any candidates for the mystery screamer among the mourners. He's tracked down a Marion Keats (Joan Weldon). Perry visits her, but she's hostile and uncooperative. Perry serves her a subpoena for the upcoming hearing. Meanwhile, by bribing a desk clerk, Paul has learned that on the murder night Marion received a phone call, in which the party at the other end said merely "Yes" and hung up. Then Marion got her car and drove off, later checking into a hotel in Bear Valley. She could have been in the area as early as 1:30 AM.
At the hearing, Sheriff Elmore admits that the evidence of Belle's shoes isn't as conclusive as he thought, since there's no glass that could have only come from Cushing's cabin. Betsy Burris testifies about seeing Belle that night, a fact that Belle had still kept from Perry. In a recess, Belle gets a lecture from Perry, then admits that she went there when she heard the scream and tried to cover up anything that would connect Carla to the murder. She took the compact, wiped away fingerprints, washed glasses, etc. Back in court, Sam describes the murder scene as he saw it the next day - the body, the evidence that two people had been watching home movies, etc. The D.A. (Paul Fix) berates him for his earlier reticence about Belle, and says he'll sit back and watch Perry rip him apart in cross-examination. However, Perry has no questions at this time. Della reports that Paul has learned who left the mystery fingerprint on Carla's car. It was Nora Fleming (Eve McVeagh), Cushing's cook/housekeeper.
Perry now calls Marion, but her lawyer George Lansing (Addison Richards) intervenes, accusing Perry of harassing his client. Perry insists on his right to question her, but after his first question both the D.A. and Lansing object, saying that Perry has no specific and relevant purpose to his question and is on a fishing expedition. This gives Perry the opening he needs to lay out exactly what he aims to show. Marion was Cushing's jealous girlfriend and had made arrangements with Nora to call her if Cushing brought a girl to his cabin. Nora is the one who called that night, and off Marion went to Cushing's cabin. Marion blurts out "He was dead when I got there!". She explained that when she arrived in the area, the first thing she saw was Carla's car, which angered her, and she took Carla's compact from the car. Then she went to Cushing's cabin, saw the body, screamed, dropped the compact, and left. Perry recalls Sam, and notes that in his description of the crime scene, he mentioned seeing a glass with lipstick on it. But he couldn't have seen that the day after the murder - Belle had cleaned it up! Sam knew about Carla's borrowed gun and used it to kill Cushing. Then he went to bed and roused his wife, pretending that he had just heard a shot and broken glass. Marion's scream coming then was a lucky coincidence.
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