The Case of the Queenly Contestant

Mason said, “Our friend Jarmen Dayton will, from that moment, be very difficult to deal with. We’ll find that The Cloverville Gazette is very, very penny-pinching. The talk of generous compensation which we heard earlier today will fade away into the background. Our friend Mr. Dayton will wish us a very good day and leave us badly mystified.”

“And what will you do?”

“Oh, I’ll be badly mystified,” Mason said, grinning. “You never want to disappoint a private detective who has spent the night on a jet plane and who hasn’t had time even to go to a hotel and freshen up but who did have time to go to a local private detective agency and engage an operative to back up his play.”

Della sighed. “If you didn’t get such a kick out of cases of this sort, you’d get bored with it all. I suppose you’re running up a big bill with Paul Drake’s office, and so far we have no client to charge it to.”

“I’m the client in this particular transaction,” Mason said. “I’m trying to find out why a young woman who had won a beauty contest and thought she had the world at her feet would become pregnant and disappear, remain unmarried for twenty years, then hire an attorney to keep a local newspaper from publishing an item in the column entitled ‘Cloverville’s Yesterdays’.”

“And what,” Della Street asked, “became of the baby?”

“I think,” Mason told her, “that when we start asking questions about that, we’ll find our client will tell us to go fly a kite.”

“Why?” Della Street asked.

“If we knew the answer to that,” Mason said, “we’d probably know why The Cloverville Gazette sent a private detective out here and why someone is paying to have me shadowed.”

Mason, feeling in a particularly happy mood, brought out the coffee percolator and said, “I think that entitles us to a coffee break, Della.”

They had only started drinking their coffee when the telephone rang and Gertie said, “Ellen Smith is here.”

“Tell her to come in,” Mason said. “Wait a minute. Della will come out and get her.”

Della Street went to the outer office and, a few moments later, came back with a woman who was almost exactly the same height and build as Ellen Adair.

Mason looked her over approvingly.

“Credentials?” he asked.

She opened her purse and showed him her credentials as one of Drake’s operatives.

“We have to be cautious in a deal of this sort,” Mason said. “Sit down. We’ve got about ten or fifteen minutes to kill, and I take it you could perhaps use a cup of coffee.”

“I’d love it.”

“Do you mind telling me your exact age?” Mason asked.

“Thirty-two to prospective employers, thirty to prospective swains, and thirty-eight when accuracy is essential.”

Mason grinned. “I think you have what it takes.”

Della handed the woman a cup of coffee.

Then the woman said, “Would you mind telling me what this is all about?”

“Frankly,” Mason said, “we don’t know. I am going to tell you this much about which I am certain.

“Since you will take the name of Ellen Smith for the purpose of this job, we are going to call you Ellen Smith and not your true name.

“You are taking the name of Ellen Smith because people are going to mistake you for an Ellen Calvert who at one time lived in the Midwest in a rural city which has since grown considerably.

“You — as Ellen Calvert — left that city twenty years ago under mysterious circumstances, and certain people are trying to find out what those circumstances were, where you have been, and what happened to you.

“I think that there are a lot of other things which these people are trying to find out, but I’m not prepared to say what they are.

“The reason you are here is that I was approached a short time ago by a man who put me in such a position that he felt certain I would telephone my client — who, incidentally, is the real Ellen Calvert — and ask her to come in to discuss a proposition which he had made.

“I know that I have been shadowed and I have every reason to believe the office is being kept under surveillance. Because you are about the same build and age as the real Ellen Calvert, when you leave this office you will be shadowed.

“Now, as I understand it, the Drake Detective Agency has an apartment which they use from time to time.”

“That’s right. Mr. Drake keeps people there when he has some witness whom he doesn’t dare to register in a local hotel. It’s also a place where operatives can take a potential witness when they want to get a statement. The place is bugged and a tape recorder takes down things that are said.

“It’s not a particularly large or expensive apartment. It’s just a utility place.”

“I think it will do,” Mason said. “When you leave here you’re to take a taxi and go to that apartment. It has a back door?”

“Front and back, yes. There’s a service entrance in the back.”

Mason said, “Once you have been shadowed to that apartment, once you produce a key and go inside as though you owned the place, there will be a period of an hour or so when you will be free.