Legendary Women Detectives

Looking black enough, he put the question formally to the Jury, who returned a verdict of “Not Guilty,” and then he discharged Willoughton.

I came out of the Court with Ruth, and we waited for Willoughton.

Presently he came out of the door and stopped and shook himself. Then he saw Ruth and came to her. They did not greet one another. She just slipped her hand through his arm; and they walked out of the New Bailey together.

We made a good deal of noise, cheering them.

DON’T MISS THE CLASSIC AMY BREWSTER MYSTERIES

By Sam Merwin, Jr.

Gallopining out of the 1940s!

A Knife in My Back

A Matter of Policy

Message from a Corpse

La Brewster as described by her autho, in Knife in My Back:

“Quit kidding!” said Weddinton. “Why did you kill her, Joe?” The already high tension in the room rose another notch with his question. None of them heard the elevator door open or footsteps in the hall outside. The deep, almost rasping voice sounded, therefore, like a sudden clap of thunder.

“Of course he didn’t do it, you quibbling corporation jacknapes!” were the first words it uttered. “If he had, he wouldn’t have had the colossal nerve to call me in for help. Where do I put this?”

This most remarkable figure, in Boston if not in the entire world, stood in the doorway, filling it from side to side. A woman of indeterminate years, of vast corpulence and even greater ugliness. She wore no hat, and wispy gray-black hair, cut in the old Dutch style of the suffragettes of 1916 hung about the full moon of her face.

Twinkling brown eyes, almost buried in balloons of fat, were set on either side of a shapeless blob of a nose. This in turn hovered over an odd round rosebud of a mouth that expressed a constant cipher of astonishment and three demi-lunar chins that might have belonged to the Michelin man of the old automobile tire advertisements.

The short, fat body beneath this remarkable head also had a Michelin look which was in no way disguised by the shapeless old stained tweed topcoat and sacklike russet jersey dress that adorned it. The “this” of which she spoke was the cellophane wrapping of a thick Havana cigar which, without further direction, she hurled accurately into the fireplace.

Following it across the room in a graceless waddle, she bit off the end of the smoke, spat it out and busied herself applying a light. Exhaling a cloud of heavy smoke, she turned slowly to look at the stunned occupants of the room.

“Amy Brewster!” said Chris in an explosive whisper. Lawyer Weddington just stared. It was Joe who grinned, walked over to the human monstrosity. Deftly removing her cigar from her lips before she could protest, he planted a kiss full on the round little mouth. Then he stuck the Havana back in place.

“You don’t have to think your Casanova technique will get you anywhere with me,” she announced, scowling at the young man fiercely.

“That,” said Joe, amiably insulting, “would be a fate worse than death. But, baby, am I glad to see you!”

That “baby” was too much for Chris. He sat there and stared, too startled even to rise out of politeness. He knew all about Amy Brewster-who didn’t? But he had never expected to see her in this house after the feud which had begun when Amy had publicly labeled his father as the type of pale carbon copy, fifth generation Yankee that had caused the current dry rot in the one-time Athens of America by retirement into complete stuffed-shirt intellectual and business sterility.

Amelia Winslow Brewster’s ancestry went all the way back to Plymouth Rock, and her people had been hell-raising and brilliant all the way down the line. They had never conformed to the pattern of their times, yet had been unassailable through their very strength of character and knack for achievement. They had long been thorns “ in the side of a society made up of less gifted and irreverent fellow citizens.

Take Amy, for instance-though no one had succeeded despite many attempts. She had been graduated from Radcliff at sixteen with a Phi Beta Kappa key, been admitted to the Massachusetts bar before she was twenty. Two years later, she had been admitted in New York.

Possessed of a great fortune and ready to try something else, she had dabbled in finance, run “Brewster’s millions” up into eight figures. Then she had given most of it away-and acquired a well-earned reputation as a radical.

She had gambled prodigiously all over the world and so shrewdly that, unless the game was fixed, she invariably won. And any gambler who tried to fleece Amy didn’t enjoy his freedom long thereafter. A confirmed advocate of redistribution of wealth, she had done her best to live up to it-but couldn’t seem to unload as fast as she made it.