The Case of the Queenly Contestant

“Certainly the prosecution doesn’t intend to disclose its entire case at this point — only enough to have an order binding the defendant over for trial in the Supreme Court. You may go ahead, Mr. Prosecutor. Question this witness. What is her name?”

“Maxine Edfield.”

“Very well,” Judge Elwell ruled, “go ahead with your examination.”

Maxine Edfield seemed bursting with a desire to tell her story and, from the first question asked by the prosecutor, launched into a long dissertation.

“Do you,” the prosecutor asked, “know Ellen Adair, the defendant, and, if so, how long have you known her?”

“I know the defendant,” Maxine said. “She is now going by the name of Ellen Adair. When I knew her she was Ellen Calvert, and that is her real name. At that time I was very friendly with her, and she was keeping company with a man by the name of Harmon Haslett, who was the son of Ezekiel Haslett, who was the founder and owner of the Cloverville Spring and Suspension Company.

“At that time she was being intimate with young Haslett, and when he began to cool off she decided to pretend to be pregnant and—”

“Now, just a minute, just a minute!” Judge Elwell interrupted. “I think we’d better go ahead by question and answer and give opposing counsel a chance to object.”

“Let her go, as far as we’re concerned,” Perry Mason said. “I think I can clarify the situation with a few questions on cross-examination, but, as far as her story is concerned, she has told it before and I have heard it. If it will expedite matters to have her tell it now, the defense is perfectly willing.”

“Very well,” Judge Elwell ruled; “there’s a lot of hearsay here.”

“It isn’t hearsay at all,” Maxine Edfield snapped. “I know what I know right from her own lips. She wanted to force Harmon Haslett into marriage, and she talked it over with me in advance.”

“Talked what over with you?” Dillon asked.

“Talked over the fact that she was going to pretend to be pregnant, use the old racket to try and force Harmon to run away with her and get married.”

“She told you this herself?”

“She told me that herself.”

“But it didn’t work, she didn’t get married?” Dillon asked.

“It did not. Harmon Haslett might have fallen for it, but the company had a troubleshooter, a man named Garland — who’s sitting right there in the courtroom — and Mr. Garland put a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in an envelope and sent it—”

“Now wait a minute,” Dillon interrupted. “You don’t know what Garland did of your own knowledge.”

“Well, I know that she got the thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and right at that tune young Harmon Haslett took a quick trip to Europe; and there Ellen Calvert was, left with a broken romance, a series of disappointments in her personal career, and a thousand dollars in cash. So she moved west and started over again.”

“Did you hear from her after she left?” Dillon asked.

“I never heard a word from her.”

“How did you happen to get in touch with her again?”

“Through Mr. Lovett, the lawyer.”

“That is Mr. Lovett, sitting here in court?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what happened?”

“He started trying to trace Ellen Calvert and started looking back into her record to find the people she had known. He found that she had been very friendly with me at one time and came to me and asked me about her.”

“And he told you where she was?”

“Yes; he had found her by using detectives, I believe.”

“In any event, he brought you here to Los Angeles?”

“Yes.”

“You may inquire,” Dillon said.

“When did you first see the defendant after you arrived in Los Angeles?” Mason asked.

“Oh, all right,” she said. “I know what you’re trying to get at. I made a wrong identification. After all, I hadn’t seen Ellen for twenty years and you had a ringer, a woman who was almost the spitting image of Ellen. You planted her on me so I made a wrong identification. But that was all that was wrong about my testimony. I just made a mistake about that woman. I thought she was Ellen Calvert, or Ellen Adair, as she calls herself now. But the minute I saw the real Ellen I was absolutely certain. I simply couldn’t have been mistaken with her — but the way I was brainwashed on that identification, I did make a mistake with the first person I saw. But that was a deliberate plant and, anyway, all that was wrong was the identification. That didn’t affect in any way the things that had happened twenty years ago or the things that Ellen had told me.”

Judge Elwell said, “Even making allowances for the fact that this is a preliminary examination and that there is no objection on the part of counsel for either side, it seems to me that this witness is unduly garrulous and that it might be better to restrict the examination to question and answer.”