And she does it perfectly!
I think we've all known women who were in real life exactly how Eve Belter is here. I've know many. Which was why I could almost predict what was happening in this episode, this crazy woman was trying to cover all of her escape routes, in doing so, traps herself into a corner. But worse yet, she abuses Perry's trust.
This is one of the Erle Stalney Gardner ones.
You can always tell when an episode has his stamp on it, because it is generally about 50 times crazier than a regular Perry Mason episode.
It's not that Perry is a simmering, boiling pressure cooker that will eventually explode, it's that when he does explode, he knows exactly how to do it.
But the difference between a TV ESG Episode and the original book is this: The book would have used phrases and linguistics not allowed by the overly religious TV censors of the time. But this particular episode manages to bypass these restrictions with great direction and writing and, of course, script supervision probably by Cosmo Genevese (who was also the script supervisor for Star Trek: The Next Generation 29 years later, and then even 8 years after that, he worked for Voyager and even had a character "Cosimo" named after him on that show).
I'm not even done with this episode but this woman's performance was so great I had to write this all down while it was fresh. This episode fools you, you think Perry has reached a solution and that all that is left is the denouement, but in fact there is a nice surprise twist at the ending, and it's just one of those Erle Stanley Gardner things that explains everything.
Wesley Lau has pretty much taken over for Ray Collins at this point, don't know if Ray is in any more episodes this season.
These episodes also serve as a time capsule of the year and month when they were broadcast, Perry is driving a wonderful Lincoln Continental with the rear doors that swing opposite of the front doors.