Enredo

Joey, a young man who helped Mannix out on a previous case, shows up in the detective's apartment, injured from a beating. Mannix hides Joey and gets a call out to the police just before the apartment is overrun by hoods. Mannix is beaten and when he wakes up, Joey is gone. As the detective follows the trail, an organized front tries to buy Mannix off with a trip to Hong Kong on a supposed case. It turns out that the target of all this is a judge, whose daughter is in love with Joey. The syndicate wants to pressure the judge to move the site of a trial for an organized crime figure who is beginning to talk.—Bill Koenig

In the middle of the night in his darkened apartment, Mannix finds a young man he once worked with on a case in Cleveland, Joey Curtis, injured in having been beaten. At the time Mannix worked with him, Joey, a person on the fringes, seemed to want to make a name for himself with the powerful, criminal or not, but Mannix admits Joey was difficult not to like. Mannix discovers the reason Joey wanted Mannix not to turn on the lights is because he wanted to remain hidden as thugs enter the office looking for Joey, but not before Mannix is able to hide Joey. But after Mannix awakens in having been beaten unconscious by the thugs himself, he discovers Joey and the thugs gone. The only thing Mannix has to go on to discover what happened to Joey are three words he was able to get out to Mannix in Joey's injured state: "kelly", "green", and "frame". In Peggy using information from Mannix's past much to his chagrin - Intertect's computer - Mannix believes the first two terms refer to a person, Kelly Green, the young adult daughter of Judge Francis M. Green. While he gets no information out of either Kelly or the judge beyond they feigning not to know Joey, Mannix knows he's on the right track from some other evidence, both in the form of someone he sees with Kelly, and by a potential lucrative new client. With Kelly and the judge being uncooperative, Mannix has to discover how they fit into the term "frame", the most obvious being a legal sense in a case associated to the judge.—Huggo