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Perry's friend Beth Sandover is in a strained marriage so she asks Perry for help. When the woman who took her job is murdered, she is charged as her husband tries to preserve the $201,000 he embezzled from the company where they worked.

"Sandy" Sandover is in many ways an ideal employee. A company accountant, he is fastidious in keeping his expenses low, always taking the train instead of flying to meetings and staying at the YMCA instead of a hotel. He's described as being probably the only senior employee who has never taken a personal trip at company expense. What no one realizes is that he has been embezzling money from the company so expertly that no one has ever noticed the missing $201,000, and the company books have passed all audits. He's hoping to run off with secretary Lita Krail, leaving behind his wife Beth, who happens to be a close personal friend of Perry Mason. When his embezzlement is nearly exposed by Krail trying to blame him for not depositing $45,000, he becomes irate. When Krail is found dead, Sandy admits to beating her with a large ashtray, but the autopsy suggests she was probably already dead when he did it as she was shot. When Beth Sandover fingerprints are found on the gun, she is charged with murder so Perry defends her.—garykmcd

The scene is the offices of Devro and Banks, on the 5th floor of L.A.'s historic Bradbury Building. In his office, company president Steven Banks (Paul Tripp) is dictating a rather vague business letter, knowing that office manager Lita Krail (Kathleen Hughes) can fill in the appropriate details. She tells him that Sandy will be taking the estimates to Phoenix, then has to explain that "Sandy" is veteran accountant Clem P. Sandover (Stuart Erwin), whose wife Beth (Virginia Christine) was Lita's predecessor. Meanwhile, Sandy is in his office, taking inventory of office supplies. His superior, Frank Sellers (Karl Weber), enters, wanting to go over the details of the trip to Phoenix, but Sandy already has everything set. After Frank leaves, Sandy takes packets of bills hidden in the office and puts them in his briefcase. Sandy goes to Lita's office, and mentions that he expects her to join him in Phoenix. They're interrupted by secretary Sally Adams (Joan Staley - incorrectly credited as Sally O'Hara) who says Beth has arrived with the sweater Sandy forgot to bring. Sandy doesn't care until Sally mentions she sent Beth to his office, where his luggage for the trip is waiting. That sends the accountant rushing back, where he takes the briefcase from her, being quite rude to his wife in the process. After she leaves, Lita enters the office and says that she's coming to Phoenix after all.

In a private compartment on a Santa Fe train, Sandy finishes counting the money in the briefcase and notes in his tape-recorded memoir that it comes to $201,000 - "the perfect embezzlement". As he continues to brag into the recorder, a couple minor bumps cause some money to come floating down. It's not coming from the briefcase but Sandy's travel bag. It's an additional $45,000 that he can't account for. From a station, he calls Sally and asks if there was any additional money in the office that day. She says there was just the $45,000 for a loan deposit that he signed for.

Sandy returns home and finds Beth with her old friend Perry, who was giving her some advice. She tells Sandy that his office-mate Enos Watterton (Jack Betts) called, checking that Sandy had left. Sandy goes to Enos's apartment, looks in the window, and sees him dancing with Lita. Sandy next calls Frank, who tells him that he's learned of the $45,000 cash, supposedly sitting in the office safe, leaving the company liable if it's stolen. He's about to go to the office and meet guards from an armored car company who will take possession. Sandy rushes to the office and barely manages to put the $45,000 in the safe and hide before Frank arrives. He overhears Frank call Lita and thank her for telling him to make the double-check that let him discover the problem. It's clear to Sandy that she tried to frame him for stealing the money.

Past midnight, we see the shadow of a man, wielding what turns out to be an ash tray, leaving a woman apparently dead. The next morning, Paul Drake arrives outside Lita's house. First, he has a chat with Cyril Potkin (Richard Reeves), who's working to fix his delivery truck. He complains that he first had to sit in the truck for hours, waiting for it to be light enough for him to work on it. Paul hears loud music, finds the back entrance to Lita's house open, and enters to find her dead, with the ash tray and a man's necktie next to the body. Perry goes to Beth and warns her of impending trouble, since she and Lita disliked each other and there were accusations that someone in the office was a blackmailer. That's why Perry had sent Paul to talk with Lita. Perry brings up the fact that Beth had been close to her boss, previous company president Devro, but had left at Sandy's insistence. He resented his wife having a more important job than his. Perry adds that Beth's friends were surprised when she married Sandy, not someone else. In tears, Beth says she needs to handle the consequences of her mistakes herself, and asks him to leave. Sandy has been eavesdropping from Beth's dressing room, where he stashes packages of bills.

Perry visits Banks and asks him about Lita's involvement in shady dealings, but Banks says that Beth was the office snoop. At that moment, Frank enters and says that it was Sandy who was putting his nose in others' business. Paul has learned that the tie at the murder scene belonged to Enos, so he and Perry pay a visit. Enos admits to spending the evening with Lita, but took her home before 11 and didn't go inside. His call to Beth checking on Sandy's departure was at Lita's request. Lita also had a phone conversation with Frank, after which she told Enos that she'd fix Sandy's wagon. On hearing a description of the tie Paul found, Enos identifies as one he kept at the office, and had lent to Sandy, who had spilled soup on his own. Perry visits Beth and Sandy at home, where the accountant admits he was so angry over Lita's betrayal that he went to her early that morning and immediately started hitting her on the head with the ash tray. Lts. Tragg and Anderson enter and say that by the time Sandy did this, Lita had been dead from a bullet to the heart for at least half an hour. They arrest Beth.

In jail, Beth admits that she went to confront Lita over the accusations of blackmail. Lita told her that Sandy was getting into trouble over money, but she could make the problem go away if they both got out of town. This convinced Beth that Lita was the blackmailer, and she told Lita so. Lita got angry and pulled a gun. Beth, who'd grown up around guns, called it a silly little thing, which she grabbed from Lita and threw on the desk before leaving. Perry pointed out that this "little thing" was the murder weapon. Perry next makes excuses for various examples of Sandy's bad behavior, which gets her to admit that's what she's been doing all along. She admits that she needs her old friends back.

In court, Sally testifies to bad blood between Beth and Lita, then tells of Sandy's call to her about the money. She says that after the call, she phoned Lita and heard Beth's voice in the background telling her to hang up, then she was disconnected. Perry writes a note to Della, who gets up and begins to leave the courtroom, bumping into Sally on her way down from the witness stand. In the corridor, she tells Paul that this gave her a chance to confirm that Sally was wearing a real mink. Paul says he'll step up the investigation on her. Sandy comes out of the courtroom and tells Della that if more money is needed for the defense, he has a little saved up.

On the stand, Banks testifies that when Lita took over from Beth, she told him that there was evidence of irregularities and shadowy dealings by her predecessor, which stopped just short of criminality. However, yearly audits always showed that the company books were in perfect order. Frank testifies that Lita claimed that Sandy had hinted he was coming into some money. On cross-examination, he testifies that Lita gave him the hint about the $45,000, but if she meant to frame him, she'd have needed to move the money. It was found in the safe exactly where it should be. Lt. Tragg testifies that the police just found $201,000 in Beth's dressing room.

At a bar, Banks enters, walks up whom he thinks is Sally, and asks why she summoned him there, given the danger of discovery. However, it's Della in a wig - she also made the fake call. Caught, Banks admits he's being blackmailed over his relationship with Sally, but he doesn't know by whom. He called a private investigation agency to identify the blackmailer, and Lita might have overheard this call. In any case, he'd only paid $6000 in blackmail so far.

Back on the stand, Frank is sure that Beth couldn't have stolen any money. He knows her well, and wished he could have married her, but he couldn't leave his wife, who had been an invalid for the last fifteen years. He's also sure Sandy couldn't have taken the money, as the accountant is rather stupid, obsessed with minutiae, and completely lacking the imagination required for an effective embezzlement. From the gallery, Sandy shouts that this is a lie. From the stand, he claims that his efforts kept the firm going and that the $201,000 was his, because he embezzled it. He continues the self-praise until Perry brings up his anger at Lita's betrayal. He repeats his story of hitting her with the ash tray, but Perry says this was the second time he murdered her. He went to her, ended up shooting her with her own gun, then discovered that he was trapped by Potkin, who would have seen him driving off. So he slipped out, went to a nearby bar to establish an alibi, then returned. There, he hit the dead Lita and drove off. He expected to be discovered as murdering a dead woman, the diverting suspicion from his as the actual murderer. Sandy waves all this off as unimportant - what matters is that everyone appreciate the brilliance of his undetectable embezzlement of $201,000.

Afterwards, Perry says he realized that all the circumstantial evidence used against Beth could equally apply to Sandy. After the trial, Sandy admitted that Devro nearly caught him, and this led to Devro's stroke and death. Despite his nefarious actions, Beth still feels a little sorry for Sandy, but Paul and Perry tell her not to be. He's happy now, as jail gives him plenty of time to work on his book about the perfect embezzlement.