Karen Steele

            When the alarm rang I was singing in a dream. It was some kind of African American influenced song with the word “Sweet” in it. In my head I sang the last two notes in the same key as the digital rooster crow of my alarm. The crow is just two notes with the second note extended and really the second note is just the same as the first note but one octave higher.

            I worked a bit on my essay.
            I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner". What a weird story! Sam was into the opium.

            I ate the wings from my roasted chicken for dinner and the day before I ate the legs. It’s not going anywhere now.

            I watched Perry Mason. In this story a young woman named Claire is hitchhiking to LA because her purse containing her bus tickets and her money had been stolen at the bus station. A man named Greeley picks her up and it is right away evident that he’s drunk. He immediately tries to get fresh. He tries to pull her towards him as he’s driving, but as she struggles with him her face touches his shirt. He becomes angry that she's gotten lipstick on his shirt and is distracted and veers in front of a tractor-trailer. Claire wakes up in the hospital. It looks like Claire had been knocked unconscious by an accident that killed the truck driver. Greeley had put her behind the wheel and left on foot. It turns out that it wasn’t even his car but that of movie producer, Jerry Heywood and since Heywood does not match the description of the man she says picked her up and she doesn’t know his name, Claire is charged with manslaughter and car theft. A young woman named Doris comes to Mason and asks her to defend Claire. She says that Claire had been on her way to LA to stay with her. Mason takes the case and goes to see Heywood, who says he was home the night of the accident. After Mason leaves though, his butler, Tanner suggests that he should be getting paid more since he can confirm that Heywood wasn’t home that day. Heywood fires Tanner. Mason advises Claire to leave the hospital and move into a hotel with Doris. Mason begins to worry that the Mr X who had been behind the wheel might come after Claire. He calls the hotel room but finds no answer and so he goes there to find a dead body identified as Greeley but Claire is not there. Mason goes to see Greeley’s wife, Marcia and asks her if she’s found a shirt with lipstick. She says she hasn’t. Doris tells Mason that Claire had left the hotel to get aspirin to ease the pain in her injured arm but when she came back she’d found Greeley dead in her room. She panicked and went to Doris’s place but Tragg comes and arrests her there. Mason receives a call telling him that Heywood has a lodge outside of Fresno. Mason says the man had a cockney accent and Paul tells him it had to be Tanner. He tells Mason that Tanner has a sharp eye for girls and so Mason asks if he has any of his female detectives available but they are all out of town. Doris volunteers, and Mason is reluctant but finally agrees. Paul tells her Tanner hangs out at the bar in the Adirondack Hotel where he lives. She gets dolled up and sits at the bar. Tanner comes in and is drawn to Doris immediately. He says, “My friends call me Ernie. What do they call you?” She answers, “I don’t think your friends call me anything.” Doris calls Mason with the first bit of information she got from Tanner. Heywood's car had its 5000-mile check on Monday but after the accident on Tuesday the reading was over 5700. Doris goes back to Tanner at their table and he is about to tell her something about Greeley when he looks around and says it's too noisy. He invites her up to his place. Mason gets a call from Marcia telling him that she’s found something among her husband’s things that she wants to bring to him. He says he’ll wait for her. He and Della figure it must be Greeley’s shirt she’s bringing him but he doesn’t need it anymore because after Greeley’s body was found, since he met Claire’s description, they dropped the car theft charges and switched it to murder. He figures though that it would be better for him to have the shirt than Tragg. Doris goes to Tanner’s place but he is so drunk that he feels sick and so Doris leaves to get him a coffee. When she returns she finds Tanner dead. She calls Mason. He comes. He takes the coffee that she’d bought and they both leave. They walk up two floors, take the elevator down and call the police. When Mason gets back to his office Marcia is there with the shirt. He tells her he doesn’t need it but he’ll take it if it’s a burden to her. Tragg suddenly walks in and says he’ll take it. Tragg says he knows that Mason has been to Tanner’s murder scene because there had been pillow feathers all over the floor there and he sees a feather on Mason’s office floor that he’d obviously picked up with wet feet from the rain. Tragg says he could toss Mason in jail as a material witness but he wants the DA to have a crack at him in court the next day. In court, with Heywood on the stand, Mason points out that 600 miles had been added to his car in a period of time that would have been impossible between the nine hours between when he reported it stolen and the accident. Mason points out that the distance between LA and Fresno is 300 miles. Since the DA found out that the shirt he got from Marcia was not Greeley’s shirt, he’d decided not to introduce it in evidence. Mason asks to introduce it as evidence himself. He asks the clerk to read the laundry mark on Heywood’s collar and compare it to the shirt that Marcia had brought. The laundry marks are a match. Heywood admits that the shirt is his. Mason reveals that Heywood’s butler Tanner had also been employed by Greeley to spy on him. Mason suggests that on Monday Heywood and Marcia had driven to his lodge in Fresno together and Tanner had notified Greeley. Greeley flew to Fresno and stole Heywood’s car in order to leave Heywood marooned with his wife. Greeley wasn’t jealous. He just wanted evidence for blackmail. Mason accuses Heywood of murdering Greeley but suddenly Marcia stands up and admits to killing her husband and Tanner. Mason knew that Marcia had been at the Adirondack Hotel and had probably killed Tanner because it was she that had tracked the feather into Mason’s office.

            Claire was played by Patricia Hardy, who starred in “Girls in the Night”, “Don’t Knock the Rock” and she co-starred with James Dean in an episode of Schlitz Playhouse.

            Doris was played by Karen Steele, who was one of Mudd’s women in the classic Star Trek episode.

            Marcia was played by Helen Westcott who was a child performer at the age of two with her mother on Vaudeville. She worked throughout her childhood in theatre and film and as an adult she turned to television.