Take a no-holds-barred proxy war for a rich Texas oil company, with Jerry Conway, its young president, fighting for survival. Add a beautiful woman in a mudpack and not much else who gives up a freshly fired .38 to Conway before she shows him the door. Top it off with the body of another young woman with a bullet in her chest fired by the same gun, and you have the recipe for the perfect murder -- and the perfect frame-up.
Perry Mason has two problems. His client, Jerry Conway, is the prime suspect. And Perry himself is the accused accessory....

Jerry Conway is a businessman with a big problem: he's trying to prevent a hostile takeover of his business. In a few weeks, the stockholders will be voting and Gifford Farrell has done everything in his power to ruin Conway's chances of holding onto his company. The novel opens with Conway receiving a series of phone calls from a mystery woman who offers him a proxy list,; she identifies herself as Rosalind, but both know that's a false name. (Both being Conway and his confidential secretary.) His secretary urges him not to go to the ultra-secret, mostly suspicious meeting they've agreed upon. She smells a TRAP. But he wants to know what she knows that might help him keep control of the California and Texas Global Development and Exploration Company. but at the hotel a beauty, clad in underwear and a face mud pack, frames Jerry with a freshly fired gun. On the hotel bed, lawyer Perry Mason and PI Paul Drake find a woman shot dead by the same gun. Who does Giff's ex-wife cheer for?
This is the one where Perry tells Paul Drake that he has been properly chastened and intends to follow all the traffic laws when he's driving from now on and Myrtle Lamar, the young punk of an elevator girl who reads trashy paperbacks and observes more than you might expect from watching people's shoes.