June Vincent and Betty Utey

            When I got up with my cold on Saturday morning I knew I wasn’t going to go to the food bank. I wasn’t incapacitated but I really didn’t fancy standing around in a smoky line-up in the cold for more than an hour. I figured I’d serve my health better by saving the food bank for a Saturday when I didn’t feel under the weather. Especially since I did have to do a few things to do next week, such as school, work and a poetry reading.

            Even though there was a lot of liquid sandpaper in my throat I had no problem singing during song practice.

            I went out to No Frills in the late morning to buy some grapes, raspberries, bread, mouthwash and detergent.

            I had a ham sandwich for lunch.

I finished my first readings of the William Blake and Charlotte Smith poems for my Romantic Literature course. As far as writing is concerned, Smith is as good a poet as Coleridge or Wordsworth but there’s not as much vision or creativity in her work. It’s mostly about descriptions of nature interspersed with information about nature or the location she’s writing about.

I had a chicken burger for dinner and watched Perry Mason. The story begins at a nightclub called “Danceland” where attractive women are hired to dance with customers. A drunk named Sanders, who isn’t causing any trouble, is tossed out. Archer, the landlord of the club steps out and talks to a blonde named Kim in a car. She asks if he’s arranged for the money. He says she’ll get it tomorrow. She says, “Then you’ve nothing to worry about. I can keep a secret.” Next we see Kim in her apartment and talking to her roommate, Inez. Inez is a dancer at the ballroom and Kim got her the job. Inez says if not for the fact that she gets to travel she’d quit tomorrow. Kim tells her she can’t quit because she’s part of the operation. “What operation?” Kim smiles and says, “When you find that out you’ll have invented security.” Sanders is sleeping one off in his trailer when the cops barge in and arrest him for a robbery. They found Archer’s empty wallet in a trashcan outside of Sanders’s trailer. Perry Mason comes to see Sanders in jail and tells him he’s going to be his lawyer. Sanders protests that he has no money but Mason says it’s no problem. This is the first poor person that Mason has defended in the series. Sanders drinks because eight years before he’d fallen asleep at the wheel after driving 36 hours straight to get a job and he had an accident. His wife and two children were killed. Mason’s detective, Paul Drake, finds out that Inez was fired from the club at the time of the robbery by the club owner, Martha. Martha had claimed she was in the car with Archer when he was robbed. Inez has moved to Las Vegas but Paul sends a man to talk her into coming back to testify. She comes to the courthouse and Paul leaves Inez on a bench outside the courtroom to wait to be called but when Paul leaves her alone a mean looking thug who's been sitting on another bench gets up and walks towards her. When it’s time for Inez to come in, Paul goes out to get her and she’s gone. Later some boys are playing ball and when the ball goes foul one of them goes after it behind some bushes and finds Kim’s body. Tragg comes to see Mason and informs him that Kim’s purse and jewellery were found under Sanders’s trailer. They are keeping the robbery charge against Sanders but adding murder.  Mason asks Sanders why he was always going to Danceland and he says he could listen to music there and watch happy people. Paul goes to see Inez. This is the longest scene that Paul has had without Mason so far in this series. He pleads with her that if she doesn't testify then Sanders will get the gas chamber. She takes a handful of pills. Paul sees they are sleeping pills. She locks herself in the bedroom. He busts the door but she’s already gone out the fire escape and into a waiting car. It turns out that the pills in the bottle were just sugar tablets and she'd just used them to trick Paul. Mason comes up with a clever way to legally search Inez’s Las Vegas apartment. Up until she died, Kim had been making payments on a mink coat, but after she died, Inez was seen wearing it. Mason decides to buy the contract for the mink because conditional sales contracts provide that if the property is moved to another state the seller has the right to repossess, which means that he would have the right to enter premises and reclaim the property. He obviously doesn’t care about the mink but this way he can search for evidence. The only thing he finds there though is a postcard for Kim from a modelling agency in LA called Universal. Suddenly a man with a key opens the door and pulls a gun on Mason and tells him to face the wall. This is the first time in the series that Mason has ever had a gun pulled on him. The man goes through the mail and takes the postcard. Della is out of sight and watching from another room. Back in LA, Della goes to The Universal Modelling Agency and discovers that the boss is the same man that pulled the gun on Mason. We find out later that his name is Gibbs. In court, while Martha is on the stand, Della notices that her purse is exactly the same as that of one of the other dancers she interviewed. Mason says he’s seen one like it as well. Martha admits to having given a purse like hers to Kim and that most of her hostesses have similar handbags. Back at Mason’s office, Paul brings Kim’s purse that he borrowed from a contact at police headquarters. On the inside of the flap is a mirror. Mason removes the mirror to find behind it a secret compartment containing a small amount of heroin but which could hold quite a bit more. In court the next day, with Martha again on the stand, Mason brings forward a purse like Martha’s and asks, “What if I told you that that purse belonged to Kim Lane?” Burger objects because Mason is not supposed to have possession of state’s evidence. Mason assures the judge that the purse is very relevant to the case and asks for the court’s indulgence. Mason asks Martha to remove the mirror in the purse. He asks her what the powder behind the mirror could be. She says she doesn’t know. Mason tells her that it tastes like heroin. He hands the purse to the judge and asks that the police analyze the powder and hold both Martha and Archer on charges of smuggling narcotics. Martha admits that she was not in Archer’s car on the night of the robbery but she said that she was to help him because a witness to the robbery had seen a woman in the car. She says the woman in the car was actually Kim Lane and she was already dead. Archer had found Kim’s body in an apartment he’d rented for them both to meet. Mason puts Gibbs on the stand. He admits that he was in charge of the smuggling operation. While being photographed in other countries the smack was slipped into the secret compartments of their purses. The girls didn’t know that they were drug mules. When they came back a similar switch was made to get the heroin out of their purses. Kim found out about the drugs and was blackmailing Archer. She got $5000 from him. Gibbs came and killed her for the money.

Later Mason explains to Burger that the purse that he’d showed Martha was not really Kim’s. He reminded him his exact words: “What if I told you that that purse belonged to Kim Lane?” He didn’t say it was hers. Mason had put some white flour in the compartment to scare her into talking.
            Mason got Sanders a job in a record store so he could listen to music all the time.
            Paul starts dating Inez.

Inez was played by Karen Sharpe, who was almost cast to be Larry Hagman’s fiancé on “I Dream of Jeannie” but Jerry Lewis snatched her up to play the lovesick nurse in his “Disorderly Orderly”. She married Stanley Kramer, who produced and directed “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” along with many other critically acclaimed films. She is now in charge of his estate and legacy.

Martha was played by June Vincent. After acting in fifty films in the 40s she got a lot of television work.

Kim was played by Finnish actor Betty Utey. She married Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel Without A Cause.