Free The Judge Is Reversed by Frances Lockridge

worried. John isn’t—I mean wasn’t—a young man.”
    â€œBut a healthy man? So far as you knew?”
    â€œCompletely. So far as I knew. As he ever said.”
    â€œYou saw a good deal of him?”
    â€œNot a good deal, really. I’d stay over at the apartment—oh, perhaps once every two weeks. Oftener in the winter. Now and then he’d spend a weekend with us. He was daddy’s friend, really. And mother’s.”
    She didn’t, she told them, know much about John Blanchard’s other friends, associates. “Of course, he was a lot older.” She knew of his interest in cats; she supposed he knew a good many people who also were interested in cats—as breeders, showers of cats. About them, she knew nothing. He was a member of the West Side Tennis Club, and still played now and then. She played there too, now and then. She wasn’t good—not really good. She’d found out “years” ago she wasn’t going to be. Her father was a member of the club. She supposed that John Blanchard had known a lot of people through his interest in tennis, his membership in the umpires’ association. A good many of the men he probably knew she knew by name; some to smile at, nod to. Of course, most of them were older. “His age.”
    A friend of the family—that was the picture. A much older man; a man like an uncle; a man who let her stay when she liked in an apartment too large for one man. She had been fond of him; very fond of him—as a pretty young woman may be fond of a man like an elderly uncle. That he should have been— killed! Who would want—?
    They were trying to find that out; that was what it was all about. She couldn’t help there? Blanchard had said nothing to her which now, in the light of what had happened, took on meaning—meaning it had not had when he said it?
    She shook her head, the red hair swaying about her pretty face.
    He had not spoken of anyone with whom he had had—call it a disagreement? Had not seemed worried when she saw him last?
    Again the head shook, the hair swayed.
    She had had her chance; had not taken it. Bill Weigand’s tone was just perceptibly different on the next question.
    â€œMiss Latham,” he said, “you haven’t mentioned the incident at Forest Hills yesterday. In the garden bar. You don’t think that was germane to what I asked?”
    Her eyes widened at that; their expression changed momentarily.
    â€œHow did—” she began, and caught herself. “Oh,” she said, “that.” Her tone dismissed “that.”
    â€œThat was nothing. Doug Mears sort of—flies off the handle, as daddy says. I’m sure he was sorry right away afterward. Probably apologized. In matches the boys—and the girls too, sometimes—get so keyed up that—” She stopped. “It didn’t mean anything,” she said. “It never occurred to me that you would think it was—what you said. Germane. Just an excited kid.”
    â€œMears is—what, Jerry?”
    â€œTwenty-four,” Jerry said. “About that. Twenty-three or twenty-four.”
    â€œJust a kid, anyway,” the girl said. “Younger than you make it sound. A tennis-playing kid.”
    â€œA friend of yours, Miss Latham?”
    â€œNot especially. I know a good many of them—the tennis-playing kids and—”
    â€œMiss Latham,” Bill said, “more or less by accident, we’ve learned quite a bit about this—incident. You spoke to Mears as if you knew him rather well. As if you were—cautioning him. And Mears said something about—” He looked at Pam North. She hesitated.
    â€œAll right,” she said. “My husband and I happened to be there, Miss Latham. Mr. Mears said something about Mr. Blanchard’s having got what he wanted and then—” Pam closed her eyes; concentrated. She opened