***SPOILERS*** It's when aspiring actress Suzette Montcom was killed in a hit an run accident as her escort Carl Rodney got the living hell beaten out of him by a couple of muggers, who robbed him, that PI Mike Hammer gets involved in the case. Not in Rodney's mugging & beating but in tracking down this missing young woman Susan Hacket who's parents hired him to find. It turns out that Susan was the missing Montcom and sharing an apartment on the Upper West Side of Mnhattan with fellow actress Shelly Lewis, Ruta Lee. It was Shelly who as a cigarette girl at a high class night club introduced her, by being wined and dined, to big buck customers who's money, for entertaining them, help her pay the couples rent.
This had Susan get her rich escorts set up by being mugged by people working with her that in fact, when she ran from the crime scene, led to her being killed in a hit-and-run accident. As Hammer got close to the truth he himself was brutally beaten up and had his office ransacked. It's when a Mr. Ryan a student at the acting institute that both Susan & Shelly were enrolled in was about to spill the beans on the late Susan's sting operation on her boyfriends, or better yet Johns, he himself was murdered! That happened in an acting scene where the fake gun, in him playing an embezzler, that was used to shoot him was loaded with real bullets not blanks!
***SPOILERS*** Hammer who took a beating from Susan's mugger friends who worked him over earlier in the episode gets back at them by turning the tables on the two. That's when he figured out what they were up to, and who was controlling them, when they tried to set him up again this time to get murdered. It's later that the man or woman who was behind this whole scheme came out of the shadows only for Hammer, who by then dispatched his accomplices, to put him out of business as well as behind bars.
