Trama

While repositioning his car in the driveway, Bertrand Allred finds the unconscious Robert Fleetwood. It appears that Bertrand's step-daughter struck Fleetwood as she was driving toward the house but the cover-up results in murder.

After her stepfather Bertrand Allred finds a body in the driveway, Patricia Faxon fears she's the one who may have struck him while backing out. The injured man, Robert Fleetwood, is alive but has seemingly lost his memory and has no idea who he is. Concerned that her daughter could be charged with a criminal offense, Patricia's mother retains Perry Mason as her attorney by sending him a check in the mail but no other information. When Perry contacts Patricia she readily admits what happened. Her mother and step-father took Fleetwood to a motel where they were tending to him. Perry and Paul go there but find the motel room open and empty. Perry returns to see Patricia and Lucille for further details. During their conversation, Lt. Tragg appears to pick up Lucille for the murder of Fleetwood but while there he learns it was Lucille's husband who was killed instead in her car at the bottom of a cliff. Fleetwood is found by Paul staying at nearby farm. In the end Perry matches wits with an experienced tracker to solve the case.—garykmcd

Bertie Allred (Neil Hamilton, Commissioner Gordon on "Batman") asks his wife Lucille (Ann Lee) if dinner can be delayed, as his employee Bob Fleetwood (Harry Townes) is coming. His stepdaughter Pat Faxon (Yvonne Craig, Barbara Gordon on "Batman") says Bertie should move his car, which is partially blocking the driveway. She clipped the hedge while maneuvering around it. When Bertie does so, he finds a collapsed Bob near the hedge and brings him into the house.

On Monday morning, Della brings Perry a check for $2500 and a letter from Lucille asking him to represent Pat or her if it should become necessary. Perry visits Pat, who explains about possibly hitting Bob with her car. Luckily, he wasn't dead, just unconscious, but he woke with amnesia. Bertie and Lucille took him out of the house, but Pat doesn't know where. She mentions that Lucille plans to get a divorce, which upsets the greedy Bertie, since her wealth isn't community property. Perry suggests an alternate explanation: someone slugged Bob to frame Lucille. If it's Bertie, that makes him dangerous.

Paul has learned that Lucille is at the Mountain View Hotel, so he and Perry drive there in heavy rain. The door to her unit is open and there are signs that a man and a woman were there until recently. Perry finds Lucille at her home. She says that she and Bob were waiting for Bertie in her unit, but eventually Bob went back to his adjoining unit and when she checked on him discovered he'd left and driven off in her car. She called Pat to pick her up. Lt. Tragg arrives with the news that Lucille's car has been found at the bottom of a canyon, with a dead Bob. The car was in neutral, so it's murder. He says that Lucille was seen to have left with Bob, then returned on foot before Pat came to take her home. After getting word from another detective, Tragg makes a revision: despite having Bob's identification, the corpse is definitely not him, but Bertie.

Paul has learned that Bob is staying at the ranch of P. E. Overbrook (James Bell) a few miles from the hotel. Perry and Della go there, with Della posing as the amnesiac's wife Mabel. He denies ever having seen her before. When Perry asks how would he know, he says it's just a feeling. They manage to get him to leave with them, and turn him over to LAPD, where he's questioned and then sent to the hospital. Tragg tells Perry that Bob remembers walking along the hedge when something hit him, but nothing after that.

Lucille denies going in the car with Bob. She says she walked down to the road from the hotel to attempt to hitchhike, but changed her mind and came back, where Pat found her. She says that Bertie was a liar and a cheat. He might have gone as far as murdering her to prevent her threatened divorce. Perry notes that Burger can use that as a motive for her to kill him first. Paul reports that Bob was visited at the hospital by his girlfriend, Bernice Archer (Frances Helm). They visit her, and she says she wasn't worried because Bob had experienced bouts of amnesia before, and when he called from the hospital he said he wasn't mixed up in anything.

At the hospital, Perry and Tragg confront Bob with inconsistencies in his supposed amnesia. He says that at his job he'd discovered papers showing that Bertie had forged a survey on mining property in order to swindle his partner out of a fortune. Unfortunately, he exclaimed "What's this?" on seeing the evidence - Bertie heard this, figured out what it was about, and knocked Bob unconscious. On Monday night, Bertie came back to the hotel with a gun, obviously intending to murder him, and perhaps Lucille too. He forced Lucille to get into the trunk of the car and made Bob drive. On the steep road, Bob suddenly accelerated then slammed on the brakes, causing Bertie to bump his head on the dashboard and drop the gun. Bob grabbed it and conked him on the head with it. He went to Overbrook's ranch because he was aware that Overbrook was another person Bertie had swindled. At the ranch, he parked the car between the road and the house, and area that was muddy after the earlier rain. Then Lucille somehow got the trunk open, or maybe it wasn't closed all the way. She jumped out and ran toward the road, ignoring Bob. Once they leave the room, Tragg tells Perry that the police have secret information that confirms Bob's story, and even Bob doesn't know about it yet.

In court, Bob tells his story. On cross-examination, Perry merely asks Bob why Bertie was found with his personal possessions and ID. Bob says Bertie must have taken them for reasons of his own. Burger now reveals the source of the secret information. It turns out that Overbrook is an experienced tracker. Using a detailed diagram made by the police, he recounts how the morning after Bob's arrival he backtracked along the route Bob had left, leading him to where Lucille's car had been left. He found tracks of a woman's shoes, running from near where the trunk would have been to the road, and walking from another part of the road to the car. There are also tire tracks of the car being turned around and driven back on the road. There are also prints Overbrook made when he walked from this area to the farm road, from which he gathered boards he set down so investigators could walk from the farm road to the car's location without disturbing things. Lucille tells Perry that she didn't make any of the tracks.

During a recess, Perry, Della, and Paul go to the Overbrook farm. Della notices the gap between the two sets of woman's footprints. "Coming and going" says Perry. Paul's worried that there's nothing there to contradict Bob's account. Bernice couldn't have made the tracks Monday night, because her whereabouts have been confirmed. Perry has Della try running in the mud, but ultimately concludes that something Paul said is the key to the mystery.

Back in court, Perry calls Bernice. He has a record of a phone call to her from Bob on the murder night. He suggests that early Tuesday morning, by which time knowledge of all her movements was no longer certain, she could have made false prints to frame Lucille. She denies it, so Perry calls Overbrook for the purpose of proving his suggestion. He gets the tracking expert to admit that there's nothing in the prints that shows that the track from the car to the road was made first. Someone could have walked from the road to where the car had been then run back to the road. Overbrook admits it, and adds that there was a bush squashed by the car that the woman could have stepped on to avoid leaving prints in the gap between the two sets of prints. So the tracks don't confirm Bob's improbably story of Lucille escaping from the trunk after all. Perry then asks him to explain his dog Prince's footprints, which are also on the police diagram. They show that Prince made lots of prints between the car area and the farm road, but did not accompany Overbrook when he backtracked Bob from the house to the farm. So these prints were the result of separate occasions. Perry suggests that Overbrook did the backtracking while leaving Prince to guard Bob, found the car with an unconscious Bertie, a man he hated. He took the car and ran it into the canyon, then returned. Later, he realized there were prints of him going to the car but not leaving the area. Therefore, he got the boards and laid them to cover up his approach to the car area, then stepped off and walked back to the farm road. On this occasion, Prince was with him. Overbrook admits his actions, but says that Bertie was already dead when he found him. Bob shouts "That's a lie! He was all right!"

Leaving court, Perry says Paul gave him the key to the solution when he talked about the woman's prints "coming and going" - the opposite order from what everyone was assuming. (However, it was Perry himself who used those words, not Paul.) Burger thanks Perry for handing him the guilty party - it had to be Overbrook. Perry counters with some alternative assumptions that make it credible that Bob is guilty, and Burger leaves, annoyed. Perry admits to Paul and Della that Burger had it right. He just doesn't want to establish the precedent of agreeing with the D.A.