The Case of the Queenly Contestant

“Do you suppose Garland and Dayton are still watching the office?” Della Street asked.

“They’d hardly expect me to be so foolish as to send for my client now,” Mason said thoughtfully. “And they’d hardly expect Ellen to be so foolish as to come in, but — well, we’re in for it now, Della. Tell Gertie to have her come in.”

Della Street passed the message over the telephone to the receptionist, and a few seconds later Ellen Adair opened the door to the private office.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mason,” she said, “but I simply had to see you. I’ve changed my mind.”

“You’ve chosen a mighty poor time to change your mind,” Mason said. “Sit down.”

“Why?” she asked. “What’s so bad about the time?”

Mason said, “As I suppose you are aware, Harmon Haslett has been lost at sea in the wreck of a private yacht. Stephen Garland, the troubleshooter for the company, and Jarmen Dayton, a detective, came out here to try and locate you. They knew that you had been in my office. They assumed you would come again.

“I anticipated their moves and hired a female detective of about your age and build, gave her instructions in the mannerisms she was to assume, and staked her out in an apartment.

“We have just come from that apartment, where we had a dramatic scene. An attorney named Duncan Z. Lovett brought a witness — a Maxine Edfield — who identified the female detective as you and stated that you and she had double-dated and that you had confided in her after your love affair with Harmon Haslett, that you were worried because you thought Harmon was cooling off and you decided, after conferring with Maxine Edfield, to pretend that you were pregnant and see if you couldn’t force Haslett into marriage.

“In place of that scheme’s working, she said, Haslett left abruptly for Europe, acting on the advice of Garland, the troubleshooter. She said that Garland sent you a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and you decided to go away and begin life all over again, that you never were pregnant and the whole thing had been a scheme to try and force Harmon Haslett into matrimony.”

“Why, the lying little...”

“Take it easy,” Mason said. “It’s necessary that you have this information quickly. Then we can discuss it after you know the facts.

“Maxine Edfield identified the detective as being you. She was about your height and complexion, and I had given her instructions as to how to walk and how to comport herself.

“The result was rather ludicrous. Maxine Edfield insisted that she was telling the truth. She also insisted that the detective was the woman she had known as Ellen Calvert, the woman who had confided in her.

“Everything blew sky high after Lovett’s witness got herself in that trap.

“Now, then, you’ve walked into my office. If Garland and Dayton are still shadowing the office in the forlorn hope that you’ll show up, they’ll know from the description that they’ve hit pay dirt.”

“Let them hit pay dirt,” she said. “I’m going to come out in the open and fight.”

“Fight for what?” Mason asked.

“Two million dollars for my son.”

“Whoa, back up,” Mason said. “That’s an entirely different attitude from the one you had when you were here before.”

“A woman has a right to change her mind.”

“What brought about this change of heart on your part?” Mason asked.

She opened her purse, took from it another newspaper clipping.

“This article from The Cloverville Gazette, for one thing,” she said.

Mason glanced at the headline: MANUFACTURER’S ESTATE VALUED AT TWO MILLION DOLLARS.

Mason raised his eyes from the headline. “You hadn’t known this before?”

“No. I knew that Harmon Haslett was head of the business and virtually the sole stockholder, but I had no idea the business had grown so much in twenty years. It’s evidently a real big company now.”

“You understand what all this means?” Mason said. “If you try to claim that estate, you’re going to be accused of fraud, you’re going to be accused of perjury, your son is going to have his name dragged through the courts, and... He has no idea that you’re his real mother?”

“He does now,” she said. “I talked with him. I explained everything to him, and it was a lot easier than I had anticipated, because the woman he thought was his mother had made a couple of statements that had aroused his suspicions.”

Mason regarded her thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “you could be a very, very, very clever woman working in conspiracy with a young man of the proper age and making a very dramatic, carefully staged flimflam for the purpose of collecting a couple of million dollars.”

“And you think I am an impostor?”

Mason said thoughtfully, “The way this thing has been engineered, the dramatic way the facts have been brought to light, I just don’t know what to think. I’m only letting you know that I’m skeptical at the moment.

“Remember this: I’m not representing you any longer. Our relationship as attorney and client was terminated by you. Now you come to me with an entirely different plan of operation. I’m just telling you that I’m skeptical.”