The execution of justice

When Zurich multimillionaire and local politician Isaak Kohler shoots a professor to death in broad daylight for no apparent reason, he cheerfully accepts his 20-year prison sentence. Yet, despite the fact that there were witnesses aplenty, he enlists Spat, a down-and-out lawyer, to investigate the crime, ordering him to pretend that someone else, now at large, committed it. Through luck and happenstance, the greenhorn attorney pulls off the impossible: an acquittal. In the process, Spat falls in love with Kohler's daughter Helene, whom he suspects is an accomplice. He also meets a femme fatale whose auto racer boyfriend beats her, a dwarfish heiress surrounded by muscled bald bodyguards and sundry small-time crooks. Did Kohler shoot the professor as an abstract, fiendish mental game, or was Swiss pistol expert Benno the real culprit, as the newspapers rashly proclaim?