- When Philip Larkin is killed, his stepfather Joseph Harrison, recently divorced from Philip's mother Ethel, is charged. With Joe in serious difficulty, Ethel asks Perry Mason to defend him, then disappears.
- At an import/export company, secretary Lorraine Stevens is working late when Philip Larkin again asks her out, but she refuses after a heated argument about his intentions. Later she goes to a jewelry store to pick up a package as asked in a note, but there's no package, the store's about to close, and she tries unsuccessfully to phone her bosses. At about the same time, Joseph Harrison is at his ex-wife's house discovering that his stepson Philip has been shot. He leaves but returns later to find the police investigating. His prints are found on the gun case for the WWI German gun used but not on the gun itself. After he is arrested, his ex-wife Ethel Harrison visits Perry to hire him to defend her ex-husband for her son's murder, which Perry and Della find strange. A piece of film turns up showing Joseph hitting Philip; this adds to the evidence, but Mrs. Harrison has disappeared. Perry and Burger look for her, but nobody will talk and Paul has no luck as Perry must deduce the relationships of the players.—Anonymous
- At the Larkin Import/Export company, secretary Lorraine Stevens (Andra Martin) is working late when company executive George Durell (Herbert Rudley) apologetically gives her an extra bit of filing to do. As he heads for the office of the boss, Philip Larkin (Terry Becker), Philip comes out and tells George to wait for him. Philip then proceeds to invite himself to Lorraine's place, but she says no. She angrily ended their relationship due to "cruel accusations" that Philip made. Philip waves an envelope in her face, saying it contains proof, which he intends to use to force her back to him. He's in the middle of an "If I can't have you, no one will" threat when senior secretary Irene Collaro (Virginia Field) reminds him that George is waiting.
Lorraine gets a note - she assumes it's from George - telling her to go to Alcorn's Jewelers and pick up a package. She arrives just before their 9 PM closing, and Mr. Alcorn (Chet Stratton) has no record of such a package. She tries calling George, but the phone is answered by George's wheelchair-bound wife Claire, who believes any woman who communicates with George is having an affair with him. She yells at Lorraine, calling her a trollop, but hangs up when George enters the room. Lorraine next tries calling Philip, but Philip can't answer because he's lying on the floor of his room, dead. Next to him are a gun and a nervous Joseph Harrison (John Hoyt). Handkerchief in hand, he picks up the phone and puts it back down, then leaves the house. This has the effect of making Lorraine give up on dealing with the supposed package, so she apologizes for keeping Alcorn past closing time and leaves the store.
A couple hours later, Joseph returns to the house to find Lt. Tragg and his men in mid-investigation. Someone must have given them a tip almost immediately after the murder. Joseph tells Tragg he has come to see his ex-wife, Ethel (Fay Wray), who is Philip's mother by her first husband. Tragg produces the murder weapon, a World War I German gun, and Joseph admits it's his. Tragg already knows that for 6 months Joseph was under a doctor's care in Utah, up until 2 weeks ago. Joseph confirms this and says he spent the past two weeks at Lake Tahoe and just drove back to L.A.
The next day, Tragg shows Burger that Joseph's fingerprints are on the gun case, despite his claim that he'd just arrived. They couldn't be old prints, as the Harrison's maid, Sarah Winslow (Nancy Kulp), reported that she'd polished the case earlier that day. There were no identifiable prints on the gun itself. She also told Tragg that Philip resented Joseph, who when he married Ethel took over management of the company her first husband had founded, dissolving his own smaller company. Philip somehow worked on his mother until she finally agreed to divorce Joseph and let Philip take over the company. This is enough for Burger - he tells Tragg to bring in Joseph.
In Perry's office, Ethel asks Perry to represent Joseph, who has been arrested. It's clear to Perry that she's still in love with her ex-husband. In jail, Joseph admits to Perry that he went to Philip's room arount 9 PM and found him dead. He guesses that he must have touched the gun case in a moment of panic after seeing his gun on the floor. Lorraine tells Perry about her fruitless trip to the jewelry and unavailing phone calls. This sounds like an arranged alibi to Perry, but Paul reports that Alcorn confirms it. Paul hasn't been able to learn why Lorraine stopped seeing Philip. What he does know, from a source he won't even tell Perry, is that Burger apparently has secret evidence that will send Joseph straight to the gas chamber.
Ethel has disappeared, and both Perry and Burger want her found. Paul goes to Irene's apartment posing as a gas company man. Unfortunately, Irene just had a visit from the real gas man two days ago. She says Ethel isn't there and won't let Paul inside. Meanwhile, Sarah visits Burger and tells him that Ethel packed and left shortly after talking to Perry. Burger, true to form, jumps to the conclusion that Perry is guilty of professional misconduct.
In court, Sarah recounts what has she already told. On cross-examination, she explains that she was in the kitchen at the time, therefore at a distant part of a large, solidly-built house. No phone near her location rang when Lorraine called, because Philip had a separate line. Perry asks about her prints being on a door to Philip's room. She says she must have opened the door to air out the room, but doesn't remember when. Burger forces Lorraine to admit that Joseph was affectionate to her in a fatherly way, and objected to Philip as unworthy of her. Burger then plays a silent home movie, although it's admissibility is subject to later voir dire. (The term can refer not only to jury selection but to things like establishing the qualifications of an expert witness. Apparently, something like that is intended here, with the film instead of an expert.) The film shows Joseph and Lorraine as she tries on a necklace. They laugh and smile at the camera, until Philip enters. There is angry arguing and pointing at the camera, climaxing with Joseph punching Philip, knocking him into a hedge.
During a recess, Joseph refuses to say what the fight was about. Meanwhile, Claire finds a torn-up letter from Ethel to George and draws her usual conclusion. Unconvincingly attempting to disguise her voice, she calls Perry and tells him to investigate Ethel, because she's in love with George. Perry points out that he doesn't know where Ethel is, so Claire reads the return address on Ethel's letter. It's Irene's apartment. Perry finds Ethel there, and she explains that the letter was just information she wanted George to pass on to Joseph. Perry says he needs Ethel in court, but Irene insists that this could hurt an innocent party. Perry realizes that Irene was the one behind the camera on that home movie. Tragg arrives, ending any debate about where Ethel will be tomorrow.
In court, Irene reveals that in the film, Philip was accusing Joseph of being Lorraine's father. Perry insists on his right to go beyond normal cross-examination rules because they're in a voir dire. He notes Irene's foreign accent and asks how she got her job. She says that while scouting for possible European branch offices, they came to where she was working in Paris, and she ended up working for Joseph. She never heard any hint that Joseph was Lorraine's father. Perry says there are records of Irene's monthly checks to Lorraine's childhood foster parents, and she got Lorraine her job. He concludes that all that pointing at the camera in the movie was because Philip was also accusing Irene, behind the camera, of being Lorraine's mother. She admits it's true. Perry has the court reporter (Richard Bull) read back the part of Irene's testimony where she said "they came", so it wasn't just Joseph. Who is she protecting? George confesses to being Lorraine's father and to murdering Philip, which was his way of finally trying to protect her.
Later, Della tells Paul that George didn't intend to frame Joseph by using his gun. He did this merely to confuse the case because, unaware of Joseph's departure from Utah, he thought the police would find that Joseph was a thousand miles away at the time. It was his note that sent Lorraine on the errand to the jewelry store, establishing her alibi around 9. He also tipped the police to the murder soon afterward, so they'd arrive soon enough to get a good fix on the time of death and rule out Lorraine as a suspect.
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