The Shady Lane Matter - Ep 3

From Hollywood, it's time now for... Johnny Dollar. Oh, hi, Constable. Rick and I got the wrong nothing. Now you've got it. I'm sitting right here at the counter. If we'll, but where's Millie, Miss Dollar?

She's busy crying at the moment. I'm waiting for her to get through and hoping she'll confess to murder. Now you hadn't already gone and meet her cry that way. Millie is a fine girl. That's a trouble with this whole case, according to you.

Everybody in this township is fine people, all of them. Ellen Bates was a fine woman too. Now she's dead. And one of these fine people killed her. I'm going to find out which one, Mr. Bramler.

And I'm going to tag him for it. With your help or without it. Tonight and every weekday night, Bob Bailey in the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account, America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator, yours truly, Johnny Dollar.

From special investigator Johnny Dollar, location Shady Lane Vermont, to the home office star mutual insurance company, Hartford, Connecticut. Assignment? The Shady Lane Matter. Expense account continues. Item seven, $1.40, one pot roast special at the Shady Lane Cafe, while waitress Millie Wells dried her tears and repaired her face.

I thought of what she'd said, what I'd taken for a confession, and tried to fit it in with the other facts in the case, what few facts there were. A young farmwife, a semi-invalent named Ellen Bates, had been shot to death while sitting at the front window of her house.

The weapon was an old-fashioned squirrel rifle, a type of gun owned by half the people in the township. Ellen Bates had no known enemies. Her husband, beneficiary of a $10,000 insurance policy on his wife's life, had been accused by a spiteful neighbor of carrying on with pretty waitress Millie Wells.