The Judge Is Reversed (7 page)

Briefly, he told Nate what it looked like it could be. “So maybe—” he said, and stopped.

He said, “Oh,” in a slightly diminished tone. He said, “O.K., Nate.” He put his hand over the receiver and turned to Bill Weigand. “Nate Shapiro,” he said. “Thought of it. Sent them along to the lab. Anything else—yeah, Nate?”

Again he listened. He said, “Maybe you'd better talk to the loot, Nate. I mean the captain.”

Weigand put down an empty glass, after glancing at it briefly. He crossed the room and took the telephone from Mullins and said, “Yes, Shapiro?” He listened. He said, “Ummm.” He said, “Right.” He said, “Did she? That's interesting.” He said, “Right. We'll come back—” and stopped and turned and looked, briefly, at the Norths. He said, into the telephone, “Tell you what, Nate. Have one of the boys bring her down here. Right? All informal like. And only if she doesn't mind coming. You know the pitch.” He listened again. “By all means in her own car, if she'd rather. Somebody along to help her park, don't you think?” He listened again, briefly, said “Right,” once more and put the telephone back in its cradle.

“A young woman walked into the apartment,” Bill told them. “Started to, anyway. Had a key to it. Said Mr. Blanchard had invited her to drop by for a drink. Very much upset to find out that he'd had his last.”

“So,” Jerry said, “she's being brought here. To the North station house.” He went to make drinks.

“Well,” Bill said, and sat down and waited. “There's one other point. Seems she's got red hair. Very pretty red hair, Nate Shapiro says. In that mournful way of his.”

Jerry distributed drinks. When he put Pam's down by her chair he said, “Sorry about the foot,” and was looked at, momentarily, without apparent comprehension. Then Pam said, “Oh, that. I'd forgotten.” She lifted one foot and looked at it. “Seems all right,” she said. “It was just at the moment it—” She stopped, since she was clearly not being listened to.

Gerald North said that he'd be damned and went off down the hall toward the closet from which Pam had brought the scratching post—the, sadly, no longer used scratching post. There was, again, some rattling from the closet. Then Jerry came back. Just inside the living room he paused and then held, above his head, a sheathed tennis racket. He held it as if he were about to make an overhead smash.

The racket was in a cover. It was also in a wooden press—an oblong arrangement of wood, with turnbolts at each corner, clamping the racket.

When he had full attention, Jerry brought the racket sweeping down, hard—and so that one of the wooden corners of the press, rather than the face of the racket, would strike anything that intervened.

“Pretty much like the corner of a desk, isn't it?” Jerry said, and patted the corner of the racket press with what appeared to be affection. “A good deal easier to handle than a desk, too. Good and heavy in the head a racket is, when there's a press on it.”

Bill Weigand put his drink down and held his hand out. Jerry put the racket in it, and Bill swung it slowly back and forth.

“Quite heavy,” he said, and handed it to Mullins, who stood up and swung it as if it were a club. “What d'yuh know?” Mullins asked himself.

“Blanchard used to be quite a tennis player,” Jerry said. “Probably had a few rackets still around in the apartment. Nobody throws rackets away. Always figures that sometime he'll get back to it. Never quite gives up.” He looked at the racket Mullins held as one might look at a stranger. “Probably warped by now,” he said. “Strings gone, probably.” He went back to his drink.

Weigand nodded to Mullins, who went again to the telephone, and dialed again, and again said, “Nate?” He listened briefly. He said, “O.K. I'll tell the loot-I-mean-captain. But there's another thing, Nate. See if Blanchard had any tennis rackets lying around, huh? In—” He turned and looked toward the others for enlightenment. “Presses,” Jerry said.

“Presses,” Sergeant Mullins said, to Detective Nathan Shapiro, supervising further investigations in the outsize apartment on Riverside Drive. “Wood gadgets that clamp—oh.” He listened. He said, “Yeah, Nate. That was the idea. Be seeing.” He hung up.

“Two rackets,” he said. “Both in presses.” Weigand raised eyebrows. “Yeah,” Mullins said. “Nate's sent them along to the lab. Also, the girl's on her way down.”

They sipped, seated again, the racket on the floor by Sergeant Mullins's chair.

“Only,” Pam North said, after some minutes, “it's a little hard to picture. Somebody walks in and says, ‘By the way, Mr. Blanchard, have you got a tennis racket handy? Like to brain you with it if you have.' And Blanchard says—”

She did not finish her sentence. She finished her drink, instead.

“It seems stronger than usual,” she said. “Did you put in extra vermouth, Jerry?”

6

Hilda Latham was slender, even in a green woolen suit. Her eyes were greenish-blue, and she was very pretty. And she had dark red hair. When the precinct man who had come down with her said, at the doorway, “This is Miss Latham, captain,” and, without being told, went out again and closed the door behind him, Bill Weigand looked quickly at Pam North. Quickly, just perceptibly, Pam nodded.

“Nice of you to come down, Miss Latham,” Bill said, and Pam said, for herself and Jerry, that they were the Norths and could they get Miss Latham something to drink? The girl shook her head. There was a tightness about her curving lips; there was, Pam thought, a wariness in her greenish eyes. But it's quite likely, Pam told herself, that I'm seeing what I look for.

“I want to do anything,” Hilda Latham said. Her voice was soft, yet very clear. “Anything I can. Only I don't—” She did sit down, then. “It's so hard to believe,” she said, and this time the soft clear voice trembled a little. “When the men told me—” She did not continue. She looked from one to the other.

They appreciated her coming down, Bill told her again. He didn't know, either, what she could tell them. Except that it might help them to talk to anyone who had known John Blanchard well, as he assumed—

“All my life, nearly,” Hilda Latham said, and her soft voice was steady again. “Since I was a little girl, anyway. He and father had been friends for years. And for a couple of years—no, three years—he and Aunt Susan—” She paused. She smiled faintly. The smile was without meaning. “I'm not keeping things very straight, am I?” she said. “Aunt Susan was Mrs. Blanchard. She died years ago. Not my aunt, really. Just—just a word a child uses. You know?”

“Of course he does,” Pam said. “Won't you change your mind about a drink, Miss Latham? Probably you could do with one.”

“Well—” the red-haired girl said, and again arranged a smile on curved lips—a smile for convention's sake. “Anything.”

A martini would be all right; a martini would be fine.

There was nothing, there had been nothing, to indicate that Hilda Latham remembered the Norths as among those who had watched the short, bitter scene in the garden bar at Forest Hills. There was no reason she should remember. She, not they, had been at the center, been the watched.

“Thank you,” she said, to Jerry, for the drink. “You'll wonder how I happened to have a key to John's apartment.”

“Aunt” Susan, but not “Uncle” John. But those appellations would have died with childhood. The girl was—what? In her quite early twenties, probably.

“Anything you can tell us,” Bill Weigand said. “About the key, then?”

Since her father—“Graham Latham?” She looked from one to the other, apparently for some sign that the name was recognized. She got none. Anyway—

When her father had retired, about five years before, they had given up the apartment they had in Manhattan, and now lived all year around in the Southampton house. She had started to say, now did say, that there, in Southampton, before Mrs. Blanchard died, the Blanchards had had a house “next door.” Anyway—

Her father and mother came into New York infrequently. Now and then, for a week or two in the winter, they came in and stayed at a hotel and went to the theater. But she came in much more frequently and when she did usually stayed in John Blanchard's apartment. The key was so that she could come and go when she wished, whether he was there or not.

“There's room there for half a dozen,” Hilda said. “I could just pop in, and not even bother him. Just tell Mrs. Sandys—” She broke off. “They weren't there today?” she said. “The Sandyses?”

“No,” Bill told her. “Apparently they had the weekend off.”

“Because of the tournament,” Hilda said, and nodded her head so that the deep red hair swirled around her face. “He'd be there—” Again she broke off. “Would have expected to be there,” she said, “most of the weekend. Umpiring—filling in on the lines. It's hard to find linesmen sometimes and—”

She shrugged slim shoulders, suggesting that she had wandered far from anything which would be found interesting, which would help. “Anyway,” she said, “that's why he let Mr. and Mrs. Sandys off, I expect. If they'd been there—was it somebody who broke in? A burglar?”

“Conceivably,” Bill said. “Only—the door wasn't forced. And, nothing was disturbed. There's nothing to indicate that Mr. Blanchard surprised somebody ransacking the apartment. You just happened to be in town today, Miss Latham? Or were you in last night? Stay at the apartment?”

She hesitated for a moment. Then she shook her head, and again the red hair swirled.

“No,” she said. “I came to see if John was—all right. I was home last night. Most of this morning.”

They waited.

“I was going to have lunch with him,” she said. “At the inn at Forest Hills. I drove in from Southampton to have lunch with him. He—he didn't come. I tried to get him on the telephone and then—then asked people at the club. He'd been going to umpire a mixed doubles match and hadn't showed up there, either. I tried again a couple of times on the phone and then watched the finals—the men's finals. Then—well, then I drove in to see if he was all right. I said he'd asked me to come in for a drink but that was—just something to say. The first thing that came into my mind.”

That didn't matter, Bill Weigand told her. Had she any particular reason to worry about John Blanchard?

She was quick on that. He'd invited her to lunch. He had agreed to umpire a match. He had kept neither appointment. Which was unlike him.

It was only that? Nothing more specific?

Greenish-blue eyes went very wide open. Specific? What did Captain Weigand mean, specific?

“I don't know,” Bill said. “Were you afraid he'd been taken suddenly ill? A heart attack—something like that?”

“I didn't know what to think,” she said. “Of course—I've said I was worried. That that's why I came in. When nobody answered the telephone—not John or Sandys or anybody—of course I was worried. John isn't—I mean wasn't—a young man.”

“But a healthy man? So far as you knew?”

“Completely. So far as I knew. As he ever said.”

“You saw a good deal of him?”

“Not a good deal, really. I'd stay over at the apartment—oh, perhaps once every two weeks. Oftener in the winter. Now and then he'd spend a weekend with us. He was daddy's friend, really. And mother's.”

She didn't, she told them, know much about John Blanchard's other friends, associates. “Of course, he was a lot older.” She knew of his interest in cats; she supposed he knew a good many people who also were interested in cats—as breeders, showers of cats. About them, she knew nothing. He was a member of the West Side Tennis Club, and still played now and then. She played there too, now and then. She wasn't good—not really good. She'd found out “years” ago she wasn't going to be. Her father was a member of the club. She supposed that John Blanchard had known a lot of people through his interest in tennis, his membership in the umpires' association. A good many of the men he probably knew she knew by name; some to smile at, nod to. Of course, most of them were older. “His age.”

A friend of the family—that was the picture. A much older man; a man like an uncle; a man who let her stay when she liked in an apartment too large for one man. She had been fond of him; very fond of him—as a pretty young woman may be fond of a man like an elderly uncle. That he should have been—
killed!
Who would want—?

They were trying to find that out; that was what it was all about. She couldn't help there? Blanchard had said nothing to her which now, in the light of what had happened, took on meaning—meaning it had not had when he said it?

She shook her head, the red hair swaying about her pretty face.

He had not spoken of anyone with whom he had had—call it a disagreement? Had not seemed worried when she saw him last?

Again the head shook, the hair swayed.

She had had her chance; had not taken it. Bill Weigand's tone was just perceptibly different on the next question.

“Miss Latham,” he said, “you haven't mentioned the incident at Forest Hills yesterday. In the garden bar. You don't think that was germane to what I asked?”

Her eyes widened at that; their expression changed momentarily.

“How did—” she began, and caught herself. “Oh,” she said, “that.” Her tone dismissed “that.”

“That was nothing. Doug Mears sort of—flies off the handle, as daddy says. I'm sure he was sorry right away afterward. Probably apologized. In matches the boys—and the girls too, sometimes—get so keyed up that—” She stopped. “It didn't mean anything,” she said. “It never occurred to me that you would think it was—what you said. Germane. Just an excited kid.”

“Mears is—what, Jerry?”