Free Nipped in the Bud by Stuart Palmer

Junior in court, and what do you think she said? She said she wished her friend Mr. Gault the very best of luck, but that unfortunately she was about to start out for a trip abroad and so she wouldn’t be able to make it!”
    “That does sound rather heartless, doesn’t it? But—”
    “They’re all alike,” said Sam Bordin with deep bitterness. “They have no flesh and blood in them—only straw. Just lens lice for the society photographers.”
    “Obviously she thought him guilty,” the schoolteacher observed. “Then nobody really believes in Gault’s innocence!”
    “Nobody but me,” Sam Bordin countered, almost too quickly.
    “ I ,” Miss Withers corrected. They parted with expressions of mutual esteem, and promises on the lawyer’s part to get in touch with her.
    Perhaps he would, but the schoolteacher was glad she didn’t have to hang by her thumbs until Mr. Bordin kept that promise. It had not been a wholly happy interview for her, what with one thing and another. She had preferred Sascha as a nine-year-old. When she came out into the other office, Gracie was smiling up at her from the desk. “I promised you he’d see you, didn’t I?” she said brightly, one woman to another. “His bark is worse than his bite.”
    Miss Withers sniffed indignantly. “Sascha Bordin knows better than to bite or bark at me, or I’d take a ruler to him as I have had to do once or twice in the past. He used to be one of my prize pupils, you know. And now he’s a famous criminal lawyer….”
    “ Trial lawyer, we say,” Gracie corrected. “The best.”
    “He’s never lost a client, I understand?”
    “Never a death penalty yet.”
    “It must be nice,” observed the schoolteacher, “to have so many innocent clients.” She peered down at the old-fashioned gold watch pinned to her old-fashioned bosom. “My, it’s after twelve! Is there a good place to have lunch around here?”
    Gracie said there was a nice cozy little tearoom in the next block. Somehow she wound up showing Miss Withers to the place, and facing her across a little booth in the rear of the restaurant. “The pot pie special,” said Gracie. And, “So you were Mr. Bordin’s teacher once! Imagine that!”
    “Yes. But now I think he could teach me things. About getting people out of trouble with the law, for instance. Tell me, my dear, would it be much of a blow to his prestige if he really did have a client go to the chair?”
    “Jeepers, yes!” Gracie had had a double dry Manhattan, for medicinal purposes, before lunch. “We really need a break right now. Twice in the past year Mr. Bordin had bad luck with his cases. One client got ninety-nine years, and one twenty to life. We just got to get this Junior Gault off, believe me!”
    Miss Withers expressed a mild interest in the case, implying that Sam Bordin had discussed it with her casually in passing. “Too bad that Miss Trempleau proved such a broken reed.”
    “Oh, he told you?” Gracie sighed. “But you can take that with a grain of salt. I saw Dallas and heard her sing at a charity thing once—very natural and pretty and ladylike; everybody liked her.”
    “But Mr. Bordin intimated …”
    “Oh, him! If she didn’t want to appear in court on Junior’s side she had some good reason. My boss is sour on that one subject—he has a grouch against everybody on the society page. He’s an idealist, see? And a couple years ago, after he was so brilliant in the Whitfield case, he got taken up by some of the Barberry-Morocco-Stork crowd. Invitations to dinner every night, white tie and tails, Newport and Aiken and so on. Only he had to go and get serious about one of those gilt-edged gals who turned out to have been playing winter rules. Sam Bordin didn’t enjoy the idea that he’d been kept around for laughs.”
    “He wouldn’t,” nodded the schoolteacher.
    “So he threw away the fancy clothes and settled down to work again. My boss is really an awfully good lawyer when he