The Case of the Queenly Contestant

“This expert in the field of public relations knew what to do all right,” she said. “The next day I received an envelope by special messenger. There was no return address on the envelope. I opened it, and there were ten hundred-dollar bills in it. The next day I read in the paper that my boyfriend had left that afternoon on an extensive European trip. I never saw him again.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

Mason toyed with the stem of his cocktail glass. “I think you do,” he said.

“Well,” she admitted after a few moments, “I know this much: about a year after he returned from Europe he married a young woman whom he had met on the trip. The marriage was not particularly happy from all I can learn, but they stayed together.”

“What happened to her?” Mason asked.

“She died about a year and a half ago.”

“Any children?”

“No.”

“What about the boy’s father?”

“His father died ten years ago, and the son inherited the company.”

Mason said, “Has it occurred to you that this letter to The Cloverville Gazette suggesting that you would make a very fine subject for a story in ‘Cloverville’s Yesterdays’ was not just accidental but was part of a well-laid plan to locate you?”

“Has it occurred to you?” she countered.

“In the light of subsequent developments I think it is a logical explanation,” Mason said.

“All right,” she admitted, “it occurred to me. It occurred to me as soon as I saw the column. It occurred to me when I had a blind panic. It occurred to me when I went to your office to enlist your aid.”

“Any idea who it might be?” Mason asked.

The shake of her head was too emphatic and too instantaneous.

Mason smiled. “You are a little too emphatic in your denial, Ellen. How about the man who is the father of your child?”

“I haven’t said anything about a child.”

“You have very carefully avoided saying anything about a child,” Mason said. “But you admit you went in a blind panic. You were opposed to abortion. A logical explanation is that you had a child, that that child must be nineteen years old at the moment.

“You have made your mistakes; you have lived them down; you have established yourself in a new position of responsibility; you have a career.

“Times have changed. The fact that you may have had an illegitimate child nineteen years ago means little today. It would, of course, cause a few uplifted eyebrows, but nothing to get panicky about.

“Therefore,” Mason said, “I conclude that your panic is because of something concerning this child.”

“You are too... too damned logical,” she said.

“And correct?”

She hesitated a moment, then met his eyes. “And correct. I am going to protect him... my child.”

“It was a boy, then,” Mason said.

“Very well; it’s a son, and I am going to protect him.”

“From what?”

“From his father.”

“A boy is entitled to a father,” Mason said.

“During the formative years he’s entitled to a father whom he can look up to and respect — not a heel who runs off to Europe and leaves a pregnant sweetheart behind to face the music by herself.”

“And more than that?” Mason asked.

“I can’t tell him,” she said. “I have to protect him.”

“From the knowledge that he is illegitimate?”

“Partially that.”

“I think,” Mason said, “you’d better tell me the truth.”

The waitress brought the second round of cocktails and the menus. They ordered three steaks. The waitress withdrew.

Ellen Adair picked up her cocktail glass, drained a good half of it. “Don’t try to corner me,” she said.

“I’m simply trying to get the information I’m going to need so that I can help you,” Mason told her.

“All right,” she said; “I’ll tell you this much: I was a young, foolish, unsophisticated, good-looking girl. I was pregnant. I had a thousand dollars. That was every cent I had to my name. I know now what the public-relations man or troubleshooter or whatever you want to call him had in mind. He thought that I would use some of the money to go away from home and then use the rest of it for an abortion, then return to my parents with some story about having been emotionally disturbed and...”

“But you didn’t do that,” Mason said.

“I didn’t do that,” she said. “I came out here and got a job.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Doing housework.”

“And what happened?”

“It wasn’t long before the woman I was working for, who was very shrewd and rather suspicious, found out I was pregnant.

“She and her husband were childless. They had been trying to adopt a baby. They couldn’t adopt one because of personal reasons that had nothing to do with their competency as parents.

“The woman suggested that we move to San Francisco, that when it came time for the baby to arrive I go to the hospital and take her name, that the birth certificate would show the child as hers. They promised to treat him as their own child. They were nice people.”

“That was done?” Mason asked.

“That was done.”

“The boy thinks those people are his parents?”

“Yes.”

“Does he know you?”