The Judge Is Reversed Read online

  “Right,” Bill said. “You cover the ground. Where were you yesterday afternoon, Mr. Latham?”

  “In town. You know that. Called up to—I suppose to tell me to come here. Had lunch with a friend at the Harvard Club. Can’t say much for the food, but there you are, eh? Business friend. Partly on business.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “At four o’clock yesterday afternoon. Say three thirty to—say four thirty. Still with the friend?”

  Latham’s eyes narrowed somewhat, presumably in thought.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” Bill said.

  “The old song and dance,” Latham said. “Eh? Right to counsel and the rest of it. Nearly as I can remember, I was having a drink at the Commodore bar. Could be, two drinks. I drink scotch. I wasn’t with anybody. I didn’t see anybody I knew. About five o’clock, I got the car out of the Hippodrome parking garage and started home. I went downtown and took the tunnel. Didn’t kill anybody on the way, captain. Must be slipping, eh? Whole—”

  “Right,” Bill said. “You’ve made your point. So, you won’t mind dictating a statement? Covering—let’s say covering everything, shall we? Starting with Saturday night. When, I gather, the cat named Amantha sat on your lap. Including when you brushed—”

  The telephone rang. Bill picked it up and said, “Weigand” and then, after a moment, “All right. He’s here,” and held the telephone out to Graham Latham and said, “Your wife, Mr. Latham.” Latham said, “Yes, dear,” and listened and said, “Read it again, will you?” It appeared that she read it again; it appeared to be brief. Latham said he’d be damned and that there wasn’t much they could do, was there? Weigand could hear the rustle of the transmitted voice. “Oh,” Latham said, “some silly notion they’ve got. Nothing to worry about,” and then, after a momentary pause, “No, I don’t think it will,” and “Goodbye, then,” and replaced the receiver. Bill waited.

  “Wire from Hilda,” Latham said, without being prompted. “Sent from Kansas City. Says she’s on her way to California to marry Doug Mears and not to worry and that they barely made the plane. Apparently that’s to explain why she didn’t call before she—” He shrugged again, and the twitch of his face again made it clear he wished he had not. “So,” he said.

  “You don’t,” Bill said, “seem particularly surprised.”

  Latham said he was not, except by the timing. Both he and his wife had seen it coming—seen marriage coming. “Not this fast, I’ll admit,” Latham said. “But, kids move fast now, don’t they? Figure they haven’t too much time, eh? Could be right, you know. No sense in wasting—”

  He stopped, suddenly, as if he had tripped over something. He looked across the desk at Bill and his eyes narrowed. He looked away quickly, but not quickly enough. Bill guessed.

  “It’s true,” Bill said, “that husbands and wives can’t be compelled to testify against each other. Can’t be called by the state unless they want to be.”

  “Now what?” Latham said.

  “I thought that that had—crossed your mind,” Bill said.

  “Mears is an all right kid,” Latham said. “A little apt to fly off—” He stopped himself.

  “Right,” Bill said. “I gathered that. And, of course, he’ll have a rich wife. Unless—”

  “You’re crazy,” Latham said. “First me. Now—”

  “Unless,” Bill said, “he killed to make her rich.”

  “You mean—if he killed him—and I’m sure as hell he didn’t because—anyway, you mean if he killed Blanchard she doesn’t get the money?”

  He went to the point Bill had thought he might. Bill Weigand’s voice nevertheless held surprise, simulated, when he said that he hadn’t really meant that. If Hilda Latham—perhaps by now Hilda Mears—was not a party to the murder, her inheritance would not be stopped.

  “All I meant,” Bill said, “was that their married life might be—call it shortened, shall we? Of course, if she was in it—”

  Graham Latham stood up at that; stood up too quickly and for a moment held on to the chair, steadying himself, pain in his face. A sprained back can hurt like hell, Bill thought. However one sprains it. But it was not pain that made Latham flush red under his tan.

  “If you try to lay it on my kid—” Latham said, and his voice was suddenly hoarse. “If you—”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Take it easy. You’ll what?”

  He waited, and Latham looked down at him, glare in his eyes. But the glare faded slowly.

  “See that you don’t get away with it,” Latham said.

  “How?”

  “In any way necessary,” Latham said. “You want that statement you were talking about?”

  For answer, Bill picked up the telephone, said that Mr. Latham wished to dictate a formal statement, suggested a room and a stenographer be found, waited briefly, said, “Right,” and put the receiver back. “Sergeant Mullins will fix you up,” he said.

  “After I’ve finished?”

  “I’ll decide that,” Bill said, “after I’ve had a look at the statement. Right?”

  Mullins opened the door, and Latham went with him. Latham walked stiffly, with elaborate care.

  He might, Bill thought, go a good way to clear his daughter—if he decided she needed clearing. On one hand, he might lie for her. On the other, of course—on the other he might tell the truth for her. It would be interesting to read the statement, Bill thought. More interesting than to continue through the papers taken from Blanchard’s file cabinet—an unlocked cabinet, as it had turned out. One does not expect too much from unlocked file cabinets. Still—

  Odds and ends. Surprisingly little to do with anything of any apparent importance. If there were documents which would shed light where light still was needed, they were not, it began to appear, in the files in Blanchard’s apartment. Bill shuffled papers. It was difficult to understand on what basis the men at the apartment had made their selection. Presumably, on the assumption that the most perilous sin is that of omission—that it is safer to pile high than to overlook; best to buck decision to superiors.

  Why, for example, had they thought the brief letter Bill now held in his hand had conceivable bearing? A letterhead—stark, a name merely. “Paul M. Flagler.” A date—the previous Friday. A letter, to John Blanchard.

  “Dear Mr. Blanchard: You are quite right in your suspicion and proof should offer no difficulty. Actually, there are more discrepancies than resemblances, and I will so testify if necessary.”

  It was signed in a swirl in which, it was to be assumed, Mr. Flagler’s name was somewhere hidden.

  He would have saved himself time, Bill thought, if he had kept Nate Shapiro on at the apartment. Nate, with his customary gloominess, his unlimited capacity for self-doubt, nevertheless had the courage to decide. Nate would not have sent along this meaningless letter merely—well, presumably, merely because it was meaningless and so—

  And Bill Weigand felt his mind caught as if in a noose, a choke collar. Paul M. Flagler. Flagler. Of course! The handwriting man. The consultant on disputed documents. The expert witness in courts of law.

  Bill read again the brief letter from Flagler, who had obviously been consulted, to John Blanchard, who had asked a question. And, presumably, submitted a questioned document—and got his answer. The letter told him no more on second reading than on first. Bill put it down, and looked at the wall opposite and drummed on desk top with quick fingers.

  It came to him slowly; he checked it slowly. There was not a great deal to go on, certainly; not much to build with. In the nature of things, there wouldn’t be. The nature of things arranged. He went quickly through the papers, seeking something he did not expect to find—making sure he had not overlooked. He made sure.

  He picked up the telephone, then. He dictated a message, urgent, to the police department of the City of Los Angeles.

  When he had finished with that, he got an outside line and dialed a familiar number. He waited some time—some time after he had r
ealized that a telephone was ringing in an empty apartment.

  There was no reason, Bill Weigand told himself firmly, why he should find that fact disquieting. No reason at all.

  He looked at his watch. The time was ten thirty-five.

  15

  At breakfast, Jerry had said that it was out of the question—entirely out of the question. What with one thing and another, including time out to find a man hanging, he had, on the day before, got practically nothing done. He said that there was a great deal to do—people to see, letters to write; if possible, even manuscripts to read. He said that Simpson was, again, making noises about his contract, as he always did when an option ran out, and had even spoken dourly about Doubleday.

  “Is he good?” Pam asked, diverted. “Because it’s never seemed to me—”

  “He sells,” Jerry said. “Ours not to reason why. And it isn’t as if you needed me. I have complete confidence in your judgment.”

  “Buck passer,” Pam said, fondly.

  “Anyway,” Jerry said, “when they’re little ones, what’s there to go by? The way they look and—well, the way they look. It’s later that you find out who they are. And who they are is partly who you are, anyway.”

  “Sometimes,” Pam said, “you’re not as clear as you might be.”

  “Association,” Jerry said, and finished his coffee. “But you know what I meant.”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “All right. It’s left to me, then. I may decide no, and get me to a cattery. And, of course, the cat store may really be closed for good.”

  “Ummm-m,” Jerry said, muffled by the closet into which he spoke while reaching for a topcoat.

  “Don’t try to drink Simpson into a contract,” Pam said.

  “Ummm-m,” Jerry said, and kissed the top of her head, which was the most convenient, in passing. And went. That had been at only a few minutes after nine.

  Pam had another cup of coffee and another cigarette and what remained of The New York Times. What remained was the second section. A three-column cut of two lion cubs, wrestling at the Bronx zoo, dominated the split page—a very gay and amusing picture, Pam thought. They must remember to go to the Bronx zoo some day. The day, probably, otherwise devoted to the Statue of Liberty.

  On the same page, below the fold, the passing of Floyd Ackerman, the well-known crusader against vivisection, was noted briefly—noted as a suicide by hanging. The police had, obviously, suggested no alternative. There was no connection made between the deaths of John Blanchard—Blanchard’s death still commanded a corner of page one—and Floyd Ackerman. The Times had slipped there, Pam thought, and that was unusual for the Times. Presumably, the city desk did not read the letter column.

  Pam went inside the second section. Danzig had a piece about Blanchard—a piece reviewing his services to amateur tennis, which were clearly many. Amateur tennis had suffered a loss.

  Pam did not doubt it. She slipped from the sports pages deeper into the Times. The Times’s man Stanley—no, Stanley was somebody else’s man. The Times’s man Shanley had looked at Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset on TV and found it “stilted language in drab surroundings.” Well! A very young man, Mr. Shanley must needs be; a young man with a tin ear. Pam sternly reminded herself that it takes all kinds, and cleared the breakfast table. She rinsed what needed rinsing and stowed in the dishwasher. (Pamela North likes to have things neat for Martha, who arrives at noon or thereabouts—arrives to make things neat. Jerry has spent no little time on this, and spent it fruitlessly. “Martha’s so nice,” Pam says, “and I don’t want her to think we’re sloppy.”)

  Dressed—in the new fall suit, the need for which had been somewhat indirectly brought to her mind—Pam looked through her purse for the card of the breeders’ nook. She did not, of course, find it—not in the first purse or in the second. She turned to the Manhattan telephone directory, and found the number she wanted and dialed the number. The ringing signal was prolonged; finally the telephone was answered. “Breeders’ nook,” the voice said, and Pam reset the words in italic type. Pam said, “Miss Somers? This is Pamela North.”

  “Oh,” Madeline Somers said. “Yes?”

  She did not, Pam faintly felt, sound this morning like a very up-and-coming saleswoman. But Pam, having been married long to Jerry, makes allowances for morning moods. Pam, herself, feels fine of mornings.

  “I’m so glad you haven’t closed,” Pam said. “When my husband and I stopped by yesterday there was a sign—”

  “Oh,” Miss Somers said. “That. I had to go out to deliver a cat. Nothing would do but I take it that very afternoon. You know how people are.”

  “Well—” Pam said.

  “And I’ve nobody to leave,” Miss Somers said. “The young man I had got another offer and—for the little time I’ll keep the shop going—”

  “Not Winkle!” Pam said and to this Madeline Somers quite simply, if understandably, said “Huh?” Pam explained—explained that, for some reason, she thought of the little Siamese queen as “Winkle.”

  “I don’t know why,” Pam said, to avoid going again into that.

  “Heavens no,” Miss Somers said. “An all-white Manx. A much more expensive cat. Otherwise—You and Mr. North have decided you want her?”

  “I’m not really sure,” Pam said. “But—probably. Anyway, I’d like to look at her again and—” Pam almost said, “Talk to her,” which was more or less what she meant. It is important to talk to cats, and especially to Siamese cats. But Madeline Somers, in spite of her trade, might be one of those who do not know this. “Examine her a little more carefully,” Pam said, keeping it simple, as she always tries to do.

  “Of course,” Madeline Somers said. “You want to be sure. You’ll both come around, then?”

  Only she, Pam explained, and did not go into the matter of Mr. Simpson. They had talked it over, and her husband was perfectly willing for her to decide for both of them. “Although,” Pam said, “we’re both very fond of them.” Miss Somers might—although for some reason Pam a little doubted it—want to be sure that her cats found congenial homes.

  “I would like to know today,” Miss Somers said. “If it’s at all possible. There’s someone else who’s quite interested, I think.”

  “This morning,” Pam promised.

  There were, then, certain small delays—Dorian Weigand telephoned to suggest a dropping by for cocktails, and they found several other things to talk about; Pam remembered she had forgotten to make an appointment at Antoine’s and this, which should have been quickly accomplished, took rather a long time, owing to switchboard difficulties. (Pam was connected with the fur department and after that with junior misses. Saks’ switchboard was having a bad day.) So it was ten thirty and a few minutes more when Pam closed the apartment door behind her and walked the few steps down the corridor which took her to the elevator. She was waiting for the elevator to rise to the occasion when she heard the telephone ringing in her apartment.

  Pam cannot ignore telephones. One never knows. She hurried back the few steps and fished in her bag for her key container, while beyond the door the bell harshly, repetitiously, summoned. Pam fished with growing anxiety. It would be at the bottom; it would be under everything. It would—She found it. She opened the door. And the telephone rang its last.

  Pam knew it had; she had been almost certain that it would, being familiar with the habits of telephones. She took the receiver up and listened. It buzzed at her—buzzed its triumph. “Fooled you again,” the buzz said. Pam put the receiver back in its cradle—put it back jarringly. Serve it right to be jarred.

  Ten thirty-seven it was then, as Pam stepped into the elevator and pushed the proper button. She hoped Miss Somers would really put a “hold” on Winkle.

  At eleven thirty, Captain William Weigand shuffled papers, initialing where required, taking from “In” basket and depositing in “Out” basket. Some of the papers had to do with the Blanchard case; most did not. There is seldom one murder at a time on
the west side of Manhattan—since Blanchard had died, a young woman had been knifed to death (probably by her estranged husband), Big Nose Brancenti (so distinguished from his cousin, Little Nose Brancenti) had been filled with bullets at the wheel of his parked Cadillac. The gangsters were coming back.

  “Here we are,” Mullins said, coming into the office, and holding papers out. He gave the papers—three sheets, two and a half of them used by the typist; the first two initialed “G.L.” at the bottom, the last signed “Graham Latham”—signed very legibly, very neatly.

  Bill read Latham’s formal statement. It did not vary from Latham’s oral answers; boiled them down, kept them in sequence. Concise and clear—that was Graham Latham. There was no confession of murder. Bill had not really expected one—one either false or true, in either case to exonerate a girl. So, Latham was not that scared—if for a few seconds that scared, had simmered down. Bill nodded, and Mullins left. Almost at once he returned with Latham, who walked stiffly; who, when directed, sat carefully; whose eyes were shrewd, speculative, in a tanned face.

  “Very clear,” Bill said. “They told you it might, if needed, be used in evidence?”

  Latham merely nodded.

  “You read it over,” Bill said. “Found nothing you wanted to change in any way?”

  “Nothing,” Latham said. “Nothing I can think of.” He paused. “Now,” he said.

  Which was, Bill Weigand thought, a way of saying that circumstances might alter purposes. But all he said was, “Right, Mr. Latham.”

  “So?”

  “We won’t take any more of your time,” Bill said. Then he paused; smiled faintly. “Now,” he said. “You won’t get lost, I’m sure.”

  “Couldn’t if I wanted to, eh?”

  Bill shrugged slightly.

  “And,” he said, “you’ll let us know what you hear from your daughter?”

  “Well—”