Trama

Perry Mason defends an old wartime buddy, Frank Lawton, who is framed for murder. He is a handy man accused of having an affair with the woman he works for and killing her husband. The evidence is piling up against him en masse.

Scott Shelby is jealous of the attention he believes handy man Frank Lawton is paying to his wife Marion. Scott sneaks his shotgun out of the house in a golf bag after loading it being careful to put no fingerprints on the shells. At a location away from his home he fires one barrel of the double barrel gun and then returns it to the rack in his house. That night from the boat house he calls Frank for help and to get his shotgun as he cuts the phone line there. Frank hears a shot, dresses, and retrieves the shotgun. He runs to the boat house but finds no one until Marion arrives. Meanwhile, Perry receives a telegram from Frank saying his unlucky army buddy is about to be arrested for murder. Perry and Della leave to meet Frank only to find the sheriff's department there looking for the missing Scott Shelby. The telegram and Frank's writings force Det. Sgt. Phillip Dix to arrest Frank. Perry believes Shelby skipped town due to being in debt but when his body turns up, the burden of evidence against Frank is overwhelming.—Anonymous

At her house by Pinewood Lake, Marion Shelby (Phyllis Avery) is getting some sun as shirtless handyman (and aspiring writer) Frank Lawton (Stewart Bradley) offers her a drink of water. She's pleased with his helpfulness, but her husband Scott (Tom Palmer), observing from the bushes, is clearly not. He storms back into the house, loads both barrels of shotgun (avoiding getting his prints on the shells), and puts it in his golf bag. He drives to a remote location, fires it once, then returns it to his gun rack. Marion enters the room and shrugs off his remark about what she does with the help. He gets a call from his Ellen Waring (Barbara Lawrence), his partner in the real estate business. She was expected to come to the Shelby's that evening, but says she and her friend Arthur Williams (Jonathan Hole) can't make it. Shelby is disappointed, but says he'll call her tomorrow.

Perry and Della are working late again when a telegram arrives: "Need help desperately. Expect to be arrested any moment. Contact me in care of Shelby, Pinewood Lake. Frank Lawton." During World War II, Perry and Frank served in the same company (implying Perry was in the Army, contradicting other episodes that had him in the Navy). Frank was shot twice in the war, after which his wife was killed in an accident, and he's seemed to be jinxed ever since.

Meanwhile, Shelby, in his pajamas, takes wire cutters and a flashlight from his car and walks down to the dock, which has a phone. He calls Frank, who lives in a bungalow on the property, and says "This is Shelby. I'm at the dock. Bring my shotgun. Hurry!" He disconnects the phone's handset with the wire cutters, which he then throws in the lake. Frank hastily gets dressed, grabs a set of keys, and runs to the main house. As he unlocks the door, he hears "No! Don't! No!" followed by a gunshot. He grabs the shotgun and runs to the dock, where he finds the flashlight but no Shelby and no response to his repeated calls. Marion arrives, asks Frank "Where's my husband?", and breaks into sobs.

The next day, Detective Sgt. Dix (Claude Akins) questions Frank's account, and shows him that the phone from which he said Shelby called was disconnected. Perry and Della arrive to find that the police are searching for Shelby's body, presumably in the lake. Dix notes that the shotgun Frank had was fired very recently. Frank is surprised to see Perry and denies sending the telegram. Dix gives the suspect a few minutes with his attorney. When Perry asks if there was a romance between Shelby and Ellen, Frank admits he can't be sure. Ellen often visited, sometimes alone but often with Arthur, and occasionally Arthur came alone. He's an accountant who had done work for the partnership, and also is quite the camera bug. Frank says that Shelby's appearance of wealth was just a front, used to impress people so he could con them out of their money. Frank says he could have been in love with Marion with some encouragement, but she never gave him any. Dix returns, having found Frank's notebook, and quotes a passage in which Frank wonders why someone like Shelby is permitted to remain alive.

Later, Perry tells Paul that he suspects Shelby is alive. He was being hounded by creditors, so he could have engineered his disappearance to elude them. Paul says he couldn't have just rowed away, since no boats were missing from the dock. Perry thinks Shelby could have had a confederate, perhaps Ellen, waiting in a boat for him. They go to Ellen's apartment building and look in the garage for her unit. The passenger seat of her car is soaking wet, as are a blanket and men's shoes they also find there.They call Sgt. Dix, and when he arrives Paul mentions that as they waited outside he spotted a man through the window of Ellen's apartment. Ellen lets them in and lets them look into the bedroom, where a woman is sleeping. Ellen says it's her mother. The man Paul saw was Arthur, who lives in another unit in the building and had dropped by for coffee. Arthur comes to the door and needs to be told what's going on, as he hadn't heard about Shelby. Asked about the wet things in her garage, Ellen explains that she and Arthur went on a lakeside picnic the previous day, to celebrate their upcoming wedding. Arthur tried to do some fishing, but slipped and fell in the lake. Sgt. Dix calls his headquarters, and learns that Shelby's body has been found in the lake, his head blasted with a shotgun.

In court, D.A. Howard Black (Peter Hansen) has Dix identify Frank's notebook and the shotgun. On cross-examination, Perry makes him admit that he couldn't swear that this shotgun was the murder weapon. Marion testifies that, half asleep, she heard loud voices, then a gunshot. Now fully awake, she went to the dock and found Frank calling out for Shelby, holding the shotgun. On cross, she says her marriage lacked affection, because of her husbands flagrant affair with Ellen. On her turn on the stand, Ellen, now Mrs. Williams, denies this accusation. She describes the picnic and mentions that Arthur took photographs, which he hands over to Black and Perry. The D.A. intends to call Arthur so he can introduce the photos into evidence, but first there's a recess. Paul and Perry use the time to visit the site of Ellen and Arthur's picnic.

When the trial resumes, Arthur identifies the photos and produces a receipt from the camera shop where he took the film to be developed. It's dated 10 AM the day after the murder, and Arthur explains that the shop was closed by the time they returned from the picnic and opened at 10 the next day. On cross, Perry questions him about what he found in the course of his accounting duties, and he admits that there was a "slight" discrepancy of about $120,000 in Shelby's books. Perry introduces a bank statement that shows Shelby withdrew $121,700 the day before his murder. He also shows Arthur a receipt that he and Paul got from the same camera shop, and there's no time shown on it. Arthur admits that he specifically asked for the time to be included. He says that he took the picnic photos between 2 and 5:30 the afternoon before the murder, but Perry shows that the shadows point west, implying the photos were taken in the morning. With his fake alibi exposed, Arthur admits that Shelby had hired him to help him vanish. However, Marion paid him more to double-cross him, but he just stood by while she shot him. She screams a denial, but Arthur says that to protect himself, he brought along his camera, loaded with infrared film. Ellen hands over a photo of Marion kneeling over Shelby's corpse on the dock. Marion collapses.

Later, Perry is with Frank, as he packs to move out of the bungalow and ponders his own ability to misjudge women. Perry says that Marion never particularly wanted to frame Frank. That was Shelby's plan, and Marion merely took advantage of the opportunity it created. Sgt. Dix enters and says that the missing money and murder gun were found under a plank in the dock. Frank also gets his notebook back, but he tears out the pages and says that in the future he'll leave all the writing to guys like Hemingway. He won't even write telegrams, and if he ever needs Perry's help again, he'll send smoke signals.