- Elston Carr is searching for the heir to the Hocksley fortune, with Alan Neil conducting the preliminary interviews. Miriam Hocksley may be the heiress. Another woman, Doris Hocksley, also has reliable credentials but Carr is found dead.
- Doris Hocksley with John Lowell reads an ad in San Francisco in the paper looking for the heiress to the Hocksley fortune worth $2,000,000. Lowell pushes Doris to reply to the ad which she does. She has an interview with Alan Neil who is conducting all the preliminary interviews for Elston Carr to weed out obvious impostors. Doris has limited but accurate documentation but is missing a couple of key components Carr is seeking. Although he denies her application, Neil makes a veiled offer that if Doris cooperated she might get the money if she shared half of it with him but she doesn't accept the offer. Doris retains Perry to help with her claim. Perry visits Carr learning that Carr is giving the money to the heir himself. He and his two partners made a fortune in China until the Korean war when one of the partners betrayed the other two. Perry visits Miriam Hocksley who may also have a claim to the fortune. That night Perry receives a call from Neil's secretary saying she heard a shot after seeing Carr's body and has trapped the killer in the library. Doris is found with the body and she has fired the gun.—Anonymous
- "Wanted: Information concerning the daughter of a man named Hocksley who was a partner in certain adventures in China during the years 1937 through 1956. Daughter is approximately thirty years old. To claim estate in excess of two million two hundred thousand dollars. Proof of identity and evidence of paternity required. Contact Elston Carr, 123 North Renuda Drive, Los Angeles California. WARNING Impostors will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law." In his camera shop in San Francisco, Mr. Lowell (Otto Waldis) and Doris Hocksley Jackson (Toni Gerry), who lives in the apartment building next door, read this personal ad from a local paper. Lowell says there can't be that many Hocksleys around, and they should try for it.
At the home of Elston Carr (Anthony Jochim), his nephew Alan Neil (Warren Stevens) checks his messages with secretary Rebecca Gentrie (Olive Deering). Several women have called, but Alan tells Rebecca that he loves only her. Doris is waiting for him in Carr's study to state her claim. She says her father was Adam Hocksley and produces her birth certificate, evidence of where she's lived, etc., but Alan is interested in things like photographs and letters. She says the only thing she has like that was a book she received from Peiping (the pre-1949 name for Beijing), along with a photograph with a note on the back. The note was gloomy, talking about a partner turning Judas, and Doris asks if her father died in Peiping. Alan says that Adam Hocksley died there. Then he asks who supplied her with the material she presented, accusing her of being a fraud. She wants to see Carr himself, but Alan says he'd just turn her over to the D.A. because she's missing two critical pieces of evidence. Even Alan doesn't know exactly what they are, and the answer to that is locked up in the nearby safe. Alan says he'll help Doris for half the fortune.
Doris goes to Perry, wanting him to represent her, but he's undecided. He makes an appointment to see Carr, and when he arrives the old man is wheelchair-bound and helped by Gow Loong (Benson Fong). Carr is dictatorial and cynical, pointing out that the $2.2 million is legally his own money to give away or not, as he pleases. He, Hocksley, and John Lowell were partners in gun-running and related activities in China, where they made a fortune, kept in U.S. banks. Lowell was the Judas, turning his partners over to the Communists. Hocksley was killed and Carr was wounded, lucky to escape with the help of Gow Loong, who hates Lowell and is still trying to track him down. Carr thinks Perry could do a better job of the search for Hocksley's daughter and offers him a $10,000 retainer, but Perry refuses since he may represent a Miss Hocksley. Carr asks if he means Miriam Hocksley (Mary Shipp), another claimant whom Adam apparently favors. Perry explains he means Doris Hocksley and gets the address where Miriam is staying in L.A. so he can visit her. Miriam tells Perry that she has no certain knowledge of being the rightful claimant, but if she is, she wants the money. She knows the vital evidence has something to do with books and photographs, so she's having some sent from her home in Palm Beach.
That night, Perry is at home when he gets a call from Della, asking if she can give Rebecca his home number, as she wants to call him directly. Perry permits it, and soon gets a frantic call. She came home, heard a shot from the study, looked in, and saw Carr's body sprawled on the floor with a gun nearby. She heard the noise of someone still in the study, so she locked the door, trapping the person inside. She asks what to do, so Perry tells her to call Lt. Tragg. When the police arrive, they go in guns drawn and find Carr as Rebecca described him, and Doris nearby, holding a book and wearing a blank expression. Carr's pocket watch has written on the inside "17L-42R-13L-4R". The dial of Carr's safe is set to 13, and turning it right to 4 unlocks it. To Tragg, this means someone was interrupted opening the safe, presumably by Carr, so the intruder shot him. The only thing inside the safe is an empty tin container. Tragg asks Doris about the bible and photograph of three men that she's holding, but she's in shock. Tragg orders her taken away, first for medical examination, then for booking. Rebecca explains that Alan and Gow Loong had left earlier in the evening, leaving her alone with Carr, who told her to go ahead and see a show to which she had a ticket. When she returned, events transpired as she'd told Perry. Tragg questions why she locked the door when Carr might still have been alive, but she said she was certain at first glance that he was dead. Perry demonstrates that the bible, which has rounded corners, fits perfectly in the empty tin. The photo has square, unbent corners, so was never kept in the tin.
The next day, Paul is back from San Francisco and reports that Doris is a widow and has a six-year-old daughter with polio. Care for the girl is costing her $100 per month although she only nets $48 per week. He heard about, but did not meet, the helpful neighbor. When Perry hears the man's name is Lowell, he recalls the John Lowell who was "Judas" to Hocksley and Carr. Perry visits Doris in her hospital room, which has iron bars on the window, and they review what she already told Tragg. Carr had called and invited her over. When she arrived, no one let her in, but the door was open. In the study, she found the dead Carr and the gun, which she picked up, accidentally firing it. Perry asks about Lowell, and Doris says she's known him about four months, ever since he opened the photo shop next door to where she lived. He provided the photo she brought, but has no idea how he could have a copy of the photo that came with the bible. Doris had kept the bible but tossed out the photo years ago.
At trial, Dr. Morton (Bert Holland) of the coroner's office testifies that Carr was shot twice from six to nine feet away. One bullet entered his heart and was instantly fatal, the other was lodged in the spine. Rebecca relates what she previously told Perry and Tragg. On cross-examination, she confirms that the house was unlocked when she returned, and that she only heard one shot. Tragg testifies that tests show the gun that fired the bullets is the one found at the scene, and it has Doris' fingerprints on it. He also identifies the bible, photo, and tin. On cross, he says that three bullets had been fired from the gun, including one that was found in the floor. He calls it a miss, but has to admit that Doris' explanation of accidental firing is a possibility.
Alan and Miriam address each other as "darling" as she prepares for testifying that afternoon. Alan warns her not to volunteer anything about what happened the night of Harry Foster's party. She agrees it might give people the wrong idea. On the stand, she testifies about her conversation with Perry, who apparently knew from Doris that the key to the vital evidence was in Carr's safe. (Perry objects to hearsay, but Burger successfully argues the exception to the hearsay rule involving the establishment of the defendant's knowledge facts.) On cross, she says that she did not have a bible with rounded corners or a photo like Doris' as part of her evidence supporting her claim. Perry reads a note that Paul brings him, then asks Miriam where she was on the night of the murder. (Burger objects, as this is utterly unrelated to direct examination, but Perry successfully uses the cross-examiner's catchall of attempting to show bias of the witness.) Miriam answers that she was at a party in Beverly Hills, hosted by people named Foster.
On Burger's direct examination, Alan recounts the innocent part of his encounter with Doris. On cross, he denies the part about offering to help Doris for half the money. However, he admits to also being at the Foster party, that he and Miriam were away from the party from about 11 to 1, and that he and Miriam used that time to wed, having obtained a marriage license a week earlier. Perry now declares that the key to everything is the empty tin, so he rips it open. Inside a hidden panel is another copy of the photo of three men, this one trimmed to fit. The bible that also fit and the photo that matched were the objects that were to identify Adam Hocksley's daughter, so it really is Doris.
Late that night, Perry is home when he gets a phone call: "It's Miriam. I killed Alan because he was no good. He killed his uncle. Now Doris can go free. I'm going to kill myself." There's the sound of a gunshot. Perry calls the police and rushes to Miriam's apartment. Medics are carrying her away and Tragg says she has a 40/60 chance of pulling through, but Alan is dead. Perry says that Miriam was completely honest through the whole case. She didn't care all that much about the money, but loved Alan and didn't kill him. This surprises Tragg, in view of her confession, but Perry says the detective is jumping to conclusions. He points to a bullet in the wall, which couldn't have been from a shot fired from where someone shooting at Alan would stand. Perry, Tragg, and Burger go to Carr's house and announce Alan's death to Rebecca and Gow Loong. Rebecca acts shocked, but Perry says she made two mistakes. One is that Miriam is alive, which Burger confirms. Now Rebecca is really frantic. She'd loved Alan, who said he loved her too, but was lying, so she killed him. As Tragg takes her away, Perry and Burger agree that they both need a drink.
Later, Perry says that Rebecca's big blunder was calling him at home. None of the other people connected with the case, including Miriam, had his home phone number, so Perry knew the call was a fake. The bullet hole in the wall was made by Rebecca to produce the required gunshot sound. Rebecca had also been the one caught opening the safe, out of her misplaced love for Alan, when she was found by Carr and shot him. She was in the process of arranging a cover-up when Doris blundered on the scene and made it easy. From all this, Paul draws the moral "What some women will do for a man is just plain murder." Della and Perry are quite unimpressed.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content