Susan Morrow and Gertrude Michael

            On Sunday I worked a bit on my essay on William Wordsworth’s representation of children in his poem “We Are Seven”. I’m definitely within the required word count now but I still need to dig a thesis out of the text and shape what I’ve written into a supporting argument.

            I edited a digital copy of Wordsworth’s Prelude but it wasn’t the 1805 Prelude, which is the one we are studying, and so found a PDF of that and downloaded it.

            I sautéed some chopped green onions that I’d frozen and added a package of frozen vegetable rice primavera containing broccoli, zucchini, carrots, onions and peppers. I sprinkled some basil and sage into the mix with the intention of turning the whole concoction into stuffing for a chicken but there was too much liquid and so I needed to add something to thicken it. I got the crazy idea to add the remainder of a bag of blue-corn tortilla chips. It wasn’t a disaster but the flavour of the chips overwhelmed the other spices.

            I didn’t eat any of the chicken this day because I made it for Thanksgiving and I wanted to roast the chicken before the best before date.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. This story begins with a woman sunbathing near the trailer that she has parked in the country. While she is dozing, a man sneaks up, hitches a truck to her trailer and hauls it away. Clothed only in a towel she walks to a golf course and calls Perry Mason. He arranges through Della to have clothes delivered to her and she hires Mason to locate her trailer, promising him $1500. Arlene is the daughter of a man who is in prison for the theft of $400,000 from the Mercantile Security Bank and she has been gathering information in a diary to prove her father’s innocence. The diary was in the trailer when it was stolen. Mason locates the trailer simply by placing an ad for it in the paper. Arlene pays Mason and then dismisses him, promising to send him the $1500 that afternoon. Later that day Mason receives by courier an envelope containing one $1000 bill and one $500 bill. Looking at the money, Mason decides that, despite the fact that Arlene has fired him, he wants to investigate the bank robbery. Mason locates Bill Emory, the now blacklisted driver who'd driven the armoured truck. He learns from him that only two people had keys to the back of the truck: Arlene’s father and George Ballard. Mason finds out that another $1500 has been sent to him, this time with a letter signed by Arlene. Mason receives a summons to appear before the grand jury with all moneys he’s collected from Arlene. Mason goes to see George Ballard, who tells him that on the day of the robbery things had been different from routine because he had bet on a horse and had gone to another room to check the results while Arlene’s father loaded the money but he knows his partner didn’t steal the money. George says that whoever has a $1000 bill with serial number 00581 is the thief. George goes to get Mason a drink and while he’s out of the room he checks the serial number on the $1000 bill that was sent to him and finds it matches. Mason needs to hide the bill and so he rolls it up in George’s window shade. Later two detectives are watching George’s house. The see someone lowering the shade and they think it’s a signal to someone. They also see Arlene entering the house. They see a man leave and they agree that it looks like Perry Mason. They go in the house and find George dead. Mason goes back to George’s house but the $1000 bill is gone. Mason finds out that the man who’d stolen Arlene’s trailer, Tom Sacket, was also the courier who’d delivered the first $1500. Arlene is wanted for the murder of George Ballard and is hiding out. Her boyfriend, Dr. Ralph Chandler meets her and advises her to talk to Mason. Mason finds out that all of the employees of the bank were patients of Dr Chandler. Arlene calls Mason and he picks her up. The police pull him over and arrest Arlene. In court Mason declares that the one who killed George Ballard was also largely responsible for the Mercantile Security robbery. He says that since the employees of the bank were all patients of Dr. Chandler, during complete physicals, after they had disrobed, keys were removed from their pockets and impressions were made to make copies. The keys were taken by Dr. Chandler’s nurse and given to Sacket, who was also an expert forger. The copies were given to Bill Emory, who is also the one that followed Mason to George Ballard’s, killed him and took the $1000 bill. We next see Mason in a restaurant with Della as she shows him a cheque that he’s been given for $25,000 as a reward for retrieving the stolen money. He tells her to give it to Arlene’s father. Burger arrives and Mason offers to buy him lunch. He asks the waitress to bring Burger an order of crow.

            Arlene was played by Susan Morrow, who in 1953 was in “Cat-Women of the Moon” and she also played an undercover RCMP officer the same year in “Canadian Mounties VS Atomic Invaders”.

 Her younger sister was Judith Exner, who claimed to have been John F Kennedy’s lover for two years, as well as the mistress of two Mafia bosses.

            The nurse was played by Gertrude Michael, who starred in Murder at the Vanities in which she sang an ode to marijuana called “Sweet Marijuana”.