The Case of the Golden Fraud
Perry Mason

In its labyrinthine associations, the theme still works out as a certain ambience replicated in court. A tape-recorded conversation doctored from a microphone in a living room creates the motive, fragments of the original remaining on the reel give one still more plausible (an illicit love affair, the discovery of the bug).

The whole thing is a ploy to sink an executive’s rival, devised by the executive’s wife.

The investment bank has a prospective client, the rival visits her repeatedly, the desk clerk is in love with her, the doctored recording fools him.

At the crucial place in the story, he drops a golden English quarter-noble into a parking meter to snare the rival.