A wildcat trucker flees into the desert after he accidentally sideswipes and kills a motorcycle policeman.
A crippled woman’s reluctance to admit that she witnessed a murder from her apartment window leads Anderson to suspect her husband committed the crime to avoid a blackmail payment.
Caught stealing drugs from a military base, PFC George Valdez becomes the chief suspect in a murder — but race prejudice may be influencing the outcome of his court-martial.
Egan defends Anderson after the detective guns down an affluent young man who was also the leader of a murderous street gang.
A suicidal engineer accidentally kills a co-worker while attempting a leap from a high-rise construction site, and he opts to offer no defense for the crime in the hope of being sent to the gas chamber.
Anderson forms a bond with a young boy who may have accidentally shot and killed his mother, but the child’s blustery father resents the detective’s interference.
A master tool and die craftsman, unbalanced by the loss of his physical dexterity, kills the verbally abusive co-worker who is about to take over his job.
A schoolteacher’s conscience bothers her when the wrong man is arrested for murder — but since she was with a married man when she witnessed the crime, she cannot come forward without ruining her reputation.
After a little girl is run down by a reckess motorcyclist, a discredited doctor performs emergency surgery — only to find himself on trial for practicing without a license after the girl dies.
When a young retarded man accidentally smothers a little girl to death while robbing a house, two sets of parents — the victim’s and the killer’s — must deal with their grief.
Anderson discovers that a hoodlum who has murdered a night watchman during a robbery is also blackmailing a prominent judge — who turns out to be the young killer’s father.
A down-and-out dock worker, who fancies himself a writer, buries a longshoreman’s hook in the back of the pawnbroker who holds the note on his typewriter. Confident that he’s gotten away with the perfect crime, the killer cannot resist playing cat-and-mouse with Lt. Anderson.
Anderson realizes that the daughter of a well-known playwright may have murdered her stepfather.
“Antsy” Jackson, a charming, elderly con man, finds himself a suspect in the homicidal hold-up of a church bazaar.
Anderson traces a drug-related murder back to Hoagy Blair, a nightclub comedian with a pretty young society wife and a self-destructive heroin habit.
An adulterer goes on trial for poisoning his invalid wife, but Egan suspects that his client’s daughter may be involved in the crime.
A sleazy corporate yes-man inherits the unpleasant task of corpse disposal after his boss murders his mistress.
Anderson has a hard time accepting that his old friend, a private detective who was thrown off the police force because of his alcoholism, has been driven to murder.
A priest’s faith in the innocence of the woman arrested for killing his sister convinces Egan to take the case.
Two criminals blast their way out of a courthouse.
Egan is too busy to handle the defense of a young Mexican wrongly accused of murder, so he hands the case off to his aging mentor — but the latter’s senility may obstruct the defendant’s chance at a fair trial.
An ambitious young hustler, falling victim to his gambling addiction, embezzles a large sum from his employer and goes on a spree in Las Vegas.
A rehabilitated ex-con has a hard time staying out of trouble, largely because his former employer — a small-time gangster responsible for sending him to prison in the first place — has designs on his wife.
Alex and Helen want to marry despite their feuding Hungarian-born families’ objections, but when shy Alex accidentally kills a man their love becomes as star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet’s.
Lois Janeway insists that her parolee husband has gone straight, but Anderson has a hard time believing that another criminal has adopted Janeway’s highly unusual method of robbery — the use of a vicious trained dog to frighten witnesses during the holdup..
A hit man decides to retire when he falls in love, but the machinations of his ambitious young accomplice force him to pick up his gun again.
Anderson advises a truck driver to be practical and pay the “protection” money that a racketeer is extorting from him, but the man’s pride compels him to respond with violence instead.
Egan investigates the ex-wife of an unstable man arrested for kidnapping his own son and holding the police at bay with a gun.
Two of law professor Marcus Cain’s students hire a man to murder their teacher, but Cain turns the tables and kills the killer — only he can’t confess and claim self-defense, because he was leaving his mistress’ apartment at the time.
A society girl helps to swindle a mob-connected Texas businessman on a shady land deal, but when Anderson arrests her she refuses to lead him to the sleazy gigolo who put her up to the con.