Read Online The Judge Is Reversed by Frances Lockridge - Free Book Online

receiver and turned to Bill Weigand. “Nate Shapiro,” he said. “Thought of it. Sent them along to the lab. Anything else—yeah, Nate?”
    Again he listened. He said, “Maybe you’d better talk to the loot, Nate. I mean the captain.”
    Weigand put down an empty glass, after glancing at it briefly. He crossed the room and took the telephone from Mullins and said, “Yes, Shapiro?” He listened. He said, “Ummm.” He said, “Right.” He said, “Did she? That’s interesting.” He said, “Right. We’ll come back—” and stopped and turned and looked, briefly, at the Norths. He said, into the telephone, “Tell you what, Nate. Have one of the boys bring her down here. Right? All informal like. And only if she doesn’t mind coming. You know the pitch.” He listened again. “By all means in her own car, if she’d rather. Somebody along to help her park, don’t you think?” He listened again, briefly, said “Right,” once more and put the telephone back in its cradle.
    â€œA young woman walked into the apartment,” Bill told them. “Started to, anyway. Had a key to it. Said Mr. Blanchard had invited her to drop by for a drink. Very much upset to find out that he’d had his last.”
    â€œSo,” Jerry said, “she’s being brought here. To the North station house.” He went to make drinks.
    â€œWell,” Bill said, and sat down and waited. “There’s one other point. Seems she’s got red hair. Very pretty red hair, Nate Shapiro says. In that mournful way of his.”
    Jerry distributed drinks. When he put Pam’s down by her chair he said, “Sorry about the foot,” and was looked at, momentarily, without apparent comprehension. Then Pam said, “Oh, that. I’d forgotten.” She lifted one foot and looked at it. “Seems all right,” she said. “It was just at the moment it—” She stopped, since she was clearly not being listened to.
    Gerald North said that he’d be damned and went off down the hall toward the closet from which Pam had brought the scratching post—the, sadly, no longer used scratching post. There was, again, some rattling from the closet. Then Jerry came back. Just inside the living room he paused and then held, above his head, a sheathed tennis racket. He held it as if he were about to make an overhead smash.
    The racket was in a cover. It was also in a wooden press—an oblong arrangement of wood, with turnbolts at each corner, clamping the racket.
    When he had full attention, Jerry brought the racket sweeping down, hard—and so that one of the wooden corners of the press, rather than the face of the racket, would strike anything that intervened.
    â€œPretty much like the corner of a desk, isn’t it?” Jerry said, and patted the corner of the racket press with what appeared to be affection. “A good deal easier to handle than a desk, too. Good and heavy in the head a racket is, when there’s a press on it.”
    Bill Weigand put his drink down and held his hand out. Jerry put the racket in it, and Bill swung it slowly back and forth.
    â€œQuite heavy,” he said, and handed it to Mullins, who stood up and swung it as if it were a club. “What d’yuh know?” Mullins asked himself.
    â€œBlanchard used to be quite a tennis player,” Jerry said. “Probably had a few rackets still around in the apartment. Nobody throws rackets away. Always figures that sometime he’ll get back to it. Never quite gives up.” He looked at the racket Mullins held as one might look at a stranger. “Probably warped by now,” he said. “Strings gone, probably.” He went back to his drink.
    Weigand nodded to Mullins, who went again to the telephone, and dialed again, and again said, “Nate?” He listened briefly. He said, “O.K. I’ll tell the