What happens
Ray Milan plays Ralph Clark, a San Francisco lawyer who storms out of his house after quarrelling with his wife Mary over a nickel. In the small town of Lansing, California, he is taken to the police station on suspicion when he cannot pay for a phone call. He is locked in a cell beside Phillips, a notorious bank robber awaiting transfer to a hangman's end. Ralph's efforts to make a collect call home keep failing, and the other prisoners press him for money. The episode is part of the Suspense series, a radio anthology of thrillers, and this guide covers only its opening stretch.
Lansing, California, and the county jail there, on a Sunday, in the late 1940s
Characters: Ralph Clark, Mary, Phillips, Sergeant Ross, Jim, Officer Brady, Jerry Nichols
Listen for: The bitter bargaining over a single nickel, and Ralph's increasingly desperate attempts to reach his wife by phone from the jail.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.