The Judge Is Reversed

by Frances Lockridge

  It was eleven forty-five then, and Pam telephoned first to Bill’s office, with a call to his apartment in reserve. The second call proved unnecessary.

  Bill said, “Weigand,” and Pam said, “Pam,” which made a nice start. She told him then, and now was succinct as she can be when the mood is on her, about the presence together at Mario’s of Doug Mears and Hilda Latham and of the outer semblances—the hand held, the intentness in the man’s face—of some tie between the two which they had not revealed earlier when they met at the Norths’ apartment.

  It did not, Pam pointed out, have to mean anything. They had merely thought he ought to know, since the decision as to what things meant was his.

  “Right,” Bill said. He hesitated, feeling that the presence of Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley hovered over him. (A very red-faced presence; Inspector O’Malley has strong feeling about the Norths; it amounts to Northophobia.) “As a matter of fact,” Bill said, “Mears has just been brought in to—explain a thing or two.”

  “Bill!”

  “Not now,” Bill said. “In time, Pamela. As always. Good night, Pamela.”

  Bill Weigand, having hung up, considered the telephone. It fitted in—was a piece in a picture which was forming. A young man and a young woman with more to talk about than they had seemed to have; a bequest which was certainly what people called “substantial”; fingerprints where no fingerprints should—

  “All right,” Bill said, to Mullins. “Have him brought in. And a stenographer.”

  “Formal like?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “I think so, sergeant.”

  They brought Doug Mears in. He moved, for all his length, in spite of what was almost angularity in his long body, with lithe grace. His face was set, angry. He said, “Now what?” in a hard voice and stood in front of Bill Weigand’s desk.

  “Sit down, Mr. Mears,” Bill said, and Mears didn’t, and Bill seemed not to notice this. “There are a few more questions we’d like to ask you. In connection with Mr. Blanchard’s death.”

  “I don’t,” Mears said, “know a damn thing more than I’ve told you.”

  “Then,” Bill said, “we’ll just go over that again. It may take some little time. You may as well sit down.”

  This time Mears sat down. He leaned forward. There was truculence in the shape of his body.

  “Am I charged with anything?” he said. “Let’s get that straight.”

  “No. You’re not charged with anything. At the moment.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to answer questions? You try to beat answers out of me?”

  Bill sighed. He made the sigh audible.

  “No,” he said. “We don’t beat anything out of you. You don’t have to say anything, answer anything. We can charge you—say as a material witness. That’s a very handy charge. You can get a lawyer to represent you when you’re arraigned tomorrow before a magistrate. Then you’ll find out why you were asked to come here.”

  “Asked,” Mears said, with bitterness.

  “Very well,” Bill said. “Why you were brought here. You’re wasting everybody’s time, Mr. Mears.” Mears glared at him. “Right,” Bill said. “Sergeant, take Mr. Mears down to the desk. Book him as a material witness in the homicidal death of John Blanchard. Let him make the telephone call he’s entitled to make. Then—”

  “O.K.,” Mears said. “I’ve got nothing to tell you. But, O.K. Shoot.”

  “Mr. Mears,” Bill said, “you say that when you went to Mr. Blanchard’s apartment this afternoon—went to get a drink he’d offered you—that that was the first time you’d been there today?”

  “You’re damned right I do.”

  “When you went there you found the police in charge,” Bill said. “You were asked to go downtown to the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. North. You—”

  “Asked hell,” Mears said.

  Bill sighed again; again made the patient sigh audible.

  “You weren’t in the Blanchard apartment alone, were you?” Bill said. “Let wander around it alone?”

  “I didn’t get beyond the foyer. You ought to know that.”

  “Oh,” Bill said. “I do, Mr. Mears. You had no chance, then, to go to a hall closet off the foyer and get anything out of it. Touch anything. Right?”

  Mears didn’t bother to answer, which was enough answer.

  “Then,” Bill said, “suppose you tell me how your fingerprints got on the handle grip of a tennis racket Mr. Blanchard kept in the hall closet? Got there very recently. Almost certainly in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “What the—”

  “Wait. A racket in a press. Which may have been used as the weapon by whoever killed Mr. Blanchard.”

  “You’re trying to pull something. Running a bluff.”

  The words were firm enough. They had come after a considerable pause. They had come after a change in the expression on Mears’s young face. You can’t take a change of expression into court. However—

  “No,” Bill said. “They were there, Mears. Right where they would be if you had held the racket to—hit a tennis ball. Or—to hit something else. Well?”

  Mears said nothing. He continued to lean forward. But the truculence had gone.

  “When did they get there? When you used the racket as a club? To kill Blanchard?”

  There was another longish pause.

  “I didn’t kill Blanchard,” Mears said then, and spaced the words out slowly. He paused again. “O.K.,” he said, “I’ve been holding out. Because it didn’t mean anything and—wouldn’t look good. I—I didn’t think about prints on the grip. All right, I was there—”

  “Wait,” Bill said. “If you are going to change what you told us before, what you say now will be taken down by a stenographer. It will be written up in the form of a statement and you’ll be asked to sign it. Such a statement can be introduced into evidence in court. You realize that?”

  “O.K.,” Mears said, and sounded very weary. “O.K. I heard you. So—I did go there in the morning. I did handle the racket. I didn’t hit him with it, or hit anything with it. It was this way—”

  What he said about meeting John Blanchard the previous evening at Forest Hills was true. He had apologized; he had asked whether, at some time that was convenient, Blanchard would show him what was wrong about the way he served. “They keep on changing the damn foot-fault rule,” Mears said, aggrieved. Blanchard had suggested the following evening, if Mears happened then to be in town.

  That morning, Mears had waked up early, and in a broody mood. He was out of the men’s singles, which was what mattered. He had admitted earlier, when he first talked to Weigand, that it mattered. But—he still had a semi-finals in the mixed doubles; something that might be salvaged. “I didn’t know then Nellie’d been on the—” he said, and suddenly flushed and said, perhaps to some distant Nellie, “Sorry.”

  If an explanation of his foot-faulting was to do him any good at Forest Hills, even the little good of getting somewhere in the mixed doubles, he would have to get it before the match. Not in the evening, after it. So, he had telephoned John Blanchard. At about eight thirty.

  “Eight thirty? On a Sunday morning?”

  Blanchard had a match to umpire—a semi-finals in the men’s senior division. Because rain had postponed some matches earlier in the week, there had been a jam-up in schedules. The match Blanchard had agreed to umpire was set for ten in the morning. So if Blanchard wasn’t up in his apartment on Riverside Drive by eight thirty, he’d damn well better be.

  He had been. He had hesitated; he had said O.K., if Mears would be quick about it. With almost no traffic, Mears had been able to be quick. He had rung the doorbell of the apartment at about nine o’clock. Blanchard had been fully dressed; had warned that he didn’t have much time.

  “He showed me,” Mears said. “You want the details? It’s easier to show than to explain. That’s why—”

  “Never mind that now,” Bill said. “So?”

  “The way
he saw it,” Mears said, “when I went across the line I touched down with the free foot before I hit—”

  “Never mind,” Bill said. “I’m not a tennis player.”

  “Could have been,” Mears said, looking at Bill Weigand across the desk. “Even now, if you—”

  Bill smiled for the first time. It was not a prolonged smile. Bill shook his head. He said, “Get on with it, Mr. Mears.”

  Blanchard had demonstrated, using the edge of a carpet as a base line. Mears had gone through motions; he hadn’t, he said now, seemed quite to get it. It was Blanchard who suggested that it might be easier if he actually swung a racket, who had said there was one in the hall closet, if he wanted to try it; had said, again, that they’d have to hurry.

  Mears said he had got the racket; had not wasted time removing the press or cover; had simulated a few service swings.

  Bill looked at the long young man, mentally added the length of a racket to an arm.

  “Just could,” Mears said. “Damned high ceilings in that old place.”

  There were. Bill remembered that.

  Mears thought he had it. Blanchard had promised that, if he got a chance, he would watch Mears play during the afternoon. If Mears wanted to, he could drop by in the evening—around six—and learn what Blanchard had seen. Meanwhile—Blanchard, Mears told them, had looked at his watch and Mears had taken the hint and left. He had offered to drive the older man to Forest Hills, and been thanked, and told that Blanchard wanted his own car along.

  Mears was not sure, but he thought he had put the racket back in the closet. He had left Blanchard in the apartment. “He was all right then.” It had been, then, only about nine fifteen.

  Had Mears got, in any way, an impression that Blanchard was expecting anybody else? Had another appointment?

  For a moment, Bill Weigand thought, the young tennis player looked hopeful. Looked as if he saw an opening?

  “No,” Mears said, “I can’t say I did—or come to that, didn’t. He didn’t say anything about one.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “That’s a very interesting explanation, Mr. Mears. Clears up that point.”

  “Does it?”

  “Say it does,” Bill said. “Now—how well do you know Miss Latham, Mr. Mears? Perhaps better than you—either of you—let on this afternoon?”

  For a moment it appeared that Mears was going to get up from the chair he sat in—get up with violence. He did not. But his voice was hard again as he said, “Now, what the hell?”

  Bill Weigand merely waited.

  “I don’t get it,” Mears said, and the puzzlement in his voice was obvious—possibly too obvious. “She’s a nice girl. I meet a lot of nice girls on the circuit. How well do I know her? Like I know a lot of nice girls.”

  “Mr. Mears,” Bill said, “when you and she left the Norths this evening it seemed to me that you more or less ordered her to come with you. As if you had a right to order—a right based on—let’s call it on a relationship. And you and she went to dinner together.”

  “What’s so damn—” Mears began, and then his face flushed. “You had us followed?” he said. “What the hell gives you the right?”

  “Never mind,” Bill said. “You went to a place called Mario’s. Your attitude there—yours and hers—was not as casual as if—say as if she were any nice girl you’d happened to come across on what you call the circuit. It appeared you had a good deal in common.”

  “Slipped up, didn’t you?” Mears said. “No hidden mike? No lip-readers stationed at suitable places? My, my, captain?”

  He overdid it. Even as he spoke, there was something in his face which suggested his own realization that he was overdoing it.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it’s none of your damn business.”

  “Anything that has to do—”

  “This doesn’t. Blanchard was an old friend of her family. She’d known him since she was a kid. She—”

  “She told me that,” Bill said. “Also, that you were just one of the tennis players she knew—the tennis-playing kids, she said.”

  “So? Just what I—”

  “Mears,” Weigand said, “suppose you listen a minute. We like to do things the quick way—get facts from people who haven’t anything to hide. Anything important to hide. But we can do things the slow way. And we can hold you as a material witness while we do. We can talk to people who know you and Miss Latham. People who have seen you together. People to whom you may have talked when there wasn’t any reason to be cagey. Other men and women you’ve—oh, had dinner with, gone dancing with. We’ll find people who were observant, assuming there was anything to observe. All that will slow things up. Take days instead of minutes. You and Miss Latham are merely casual acquaintances?”

  “That’s what I—” Mears said, and stopped.

  Weigand waited again, watched the considering face of the lanky young man. It was not a poker face. It occurred to Bill Weigand that Hilda Latham had been right when she had said that, whatever his age, Mears was a “kid.” Now he was an uncertain kid, carrying on a debate in his own mind, the wavering between courses reflected in his face.

  “All right,” Mears said. “I want to marry her. Has that anything to do with you?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “Has it, Mr. Mears? How does she feel about it?”

  Mears hesitated. He said, “All right, I guess.” He stopped again. “O.K.,” he said, “she feels fine about it. Only—”

  Weigand waited.

  “Only,” Mears said, “I’m a tennis bum. A pretty good one, in spite of losing to Ted Wilson. Ought to have taken him. Maybe have taken Farthing. So. I’ve missed it this year. Could be I’ll miss it next year and the year after. Could be I’ll never get it. You don’t have a hell of a lot of years, unless you’re a Gar Mulloy. And then—then what? Unless you’ve made a stake as a pro, then what?” He looked at Weigand as if he expected an answer. Bill had no answer. “My people,” Doug Mears said, “haven’t got any money. Just get along.”

  “If you feel that way—” Bill said.

  “Because I like to play tennis—like it more than anything else. Because maybe one of these days—maybe next year—I’ll be tops. Because—why does anybody do anything? Except clerk in a store?”

  He was earnest, then. It occurred to Bill Weigand, oddly, unexpectedly, that Doug Mears was as much in earnest as a young poet might be, asked why he wrote poetry. Or a painter—It also occurred to Bill Weigand that he was himself a policeman because he wanted to be.

  “Mr. Mears,” Bill said, “do you know that Miss Latham inherits a very substantial sum from Mr. Blanchard? It’s—” Bill paused for a moment and considered. He saw no reason why not. “The sum is half a million dollars,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  Mears said “No.” He said it quickly.

  “Did she?”

  “She’s never said so.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “So it’s going to be a pleasant surprise?”

  For all Mears knew. But it did not seem to Bill that, to Mears, it came as a surprise of magnitude—a surprise appropriate to the size of the inheritance, which was certainly of magnitude. Unless, of course—

  “Is Miss Latham’s father a rich man?”

  “Now what the hell—”

  “Wait,” Bill said. “Let’s not get off on this what-the-hell business again. You and Hilda Latham are planning to get married—thinking about it, anyway. You talk about yourselves. A lot about yourselves. About all the things that concern yourselves.”

  “No,” Mears said. “They’ve got this big place, and I guess they did have money. But—now I guess not.”

  He looked, quickly, at the stenographer, who was making quicker movements with pencil, on notebook.

  “No,” Bill said. “This isn’t part of the statement. You’ve given us an account of your actions at pertinent times. We’ll ask you to sign that. Not this.”

  “This,” Mears said, “is just fishing. In the hope you can get so
mething on—” It seemed to reach him, then. He stood up, very tall, face red under tan. “Damn you to hell,” he said. He spoke loudly.

  Mullins moved toward him.

  Bill Weigand seemed to pay no attention to these movements.

  “Mr. Mears,” Weigand said, “Mr. Blanchard was an old man from where you stand. I suppose he was. He was in his late fifties. But he was a vigorous man, from all accounts. And from the appearance of his body. He might have lived a good many years. Twenty—perhaps even thirty.”

  Mears glared down at him.

  “A half million dollars is a lot to leave to a young woman who is—” Bill hesitated. “Who is merely the daughter of an old friend. Don’t you think so?”

  Mears did not change position; he did not stop glaring. But the hot color under his tan lessened—lessened markedly. His lips became very tight.

  “Well?” Bill said.

  Mears shook his head. In denial? Or, in stupefaction that a man could be so wrong, so obtuse?

  “A vigorous man,” Bill said. “A man in his fifties, Mears, isn’t limited to the role of—say the role of an uncle. You must know—”

  “You—” Mears said. “You lying—”

  Bill Weigand has been called all the usual names, and some unusual ones. All occupations have their hazards.

  “Sit down, Mears,” Mullins said. “Sit down and shut your mouth.”

  Mears turned on Mullins. Mullins was as tall as Mears, and considerably heavier. Mullins said, “Now!” Mears sat down. He continued to look, intently, at Bill Weigand. Finally, he said, “I suppose you’ve got to be like this?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “I’ve got to be like this. Well?”

  “Damn it all,” Mears said. “She was fond of him. Everything else aside—the kind of person she is—the—Aside from all that, she was fond of him. Had been since she was a child.”

  If a job makes a man, at times, a terrier, he has to learn to shake like one.

  “It is possible,” Bill Weigand said, “to work up considerable affection for half a million dollars. If Blanchard had lived out his life, Miss Latham might have had to wait a long time for the money, mightn’t she? Conceivably, until she, too, was in her fifties. A long time for a girl whose family has a big house and not the kind of money that ought to go with it. A girl, say, who was brought up in the environment of those who do have a lot of money. A girl—”