The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde

3

Low clouds were being borne sluggishly along by a warm southerly wind. Below those clouds, the ground, parched by a six months dry season during which there had been no rain at all, awaited the rain with hushed expectancy.

Perry Mason paused to buy a paper, noted that the time was ten a.m. on the dot. He glanced up at the heavy clouds, said to the man at the cigar counter, “Looks as though we might have rain.”

“We sure need it.”

Mason, folding the newspaper under his arm, nodded.

“Can’t get used to this country where they have six months dry season and six months wet season,” the man went on. “I’m from back east where you have green grass all summer. Here it bakes up so brown it looks like toast.”

“What do you have back east in the winter?” Mason asked.

The man grinned. “That’s why I’m here, Mr. Mason.”

The lawyer walked on to the elevator, and two minutes later, latchkeyed the door of his private office.

“Hello, Della. What’s new?”

“Jason Bartsler.”

“He’s early.”

“Seems worried.”

Mason tossed the newspaper to the desk, hung up his hat, said, “Let’s see him, Della.”

Jason Bartsler followed Della into the office. “I’m a little early,” he announced.

“So I noticed.”

“Mason, I couldn’t sleep. How the devil did you know there was some reason back of my employment of Diana Regis?”

Mason smiled. “A successful businessman calls up a radio actress he is supposed never to have seen and employs her to come to his house and read to him. Tut tut, Bartsler, and you supposed to be a skeptic!”

Bartsler grinned sheepishly. “Well, when you put it that way...”

“Go on,” Mason said as Bartsler stopped.

Bartsler shifted his position. “My present wife is my second wife. My first wife died. There was one child, a son, Robert. He died on December seventh, nineteen hundred and forty-one at the age of twenty-six — at Pearl Harbor. They never even identified his body.”

Mason’s eyes showed sympathy.

After a moment Bartsler went on. “Life is so much more complicated than we realize, that it’s only when we look back on it from the vantage point of experience we can even glimpse what it’s all about, and by that time, it’s too late. And make no mistake about it, Mr. Mason, all that we get is a glimpse.”

Bartsler was silent for several seconds, then went on. “He married about a year before his death. He married a girl I didn’t like. I didn’t approve of her background. I didn’t like her associates.”

“And you disliked her personally?” Mason asked.

Bartsler said, “Looking back on it, I’m afraid I never gave myself an opportunity to find out. I was so prejudiced against her that I don’t think I ever saw the woman as she really was. Every time I looked at her, I saw the mental image which I had created in my own mind before I had even met her.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Mason asked.

“Nothing, perhaps. She had been a circus performer. She had been raised in the circus, a trapeze acrobat.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-four. That is, she’s twenty-four now. She was about twenty when she married my son.”

“Or when he married her,” Mason amended with a slight smile.

“Well... yes.”

“Go ahead. Let’s hear the rest of it.”

“She wasn’t in the circus when my son met her. She had had a fall from a trapeze and injured her hip, the first serious fall she had ever had, and it crippled her sufficiently to put her out of the business. She had no means of livelihood other than her work on the trapeze, and almost overnight she found that door slammed in her face. Naturally Robert seemed to be an attractive possibility for her to develop.

“I resented my son’s marriage, and that resentment created a barrier between us. After my son’s death, Helen, his wife, made no effort to conceal her bitterness, and for my part, I certainly made it apparent that I considered any possible connection she might have had with the family by reason of the marriage had terminated.”

“I take it,” Mason said, “this is leading up to Diana Regis?”

“Very definitely.”

“It might be better if you told me just what the connection was.”

“Just one more bit of preliminary, Mr. Mason, so you’ll understand the entire situation. I didn’t even see Helen for — well, until about four weeks ago.”

“She looked you up?”

“No, I looked her up.”

Mason’s eyebrows elevated slightly. “Why?”

Bartsler shifted his position uneasily in the chair. “I had reason to believe that there was a posthumous grandson born in March of nineteen hundred and forty-two. And,” Bartsler went on, his voice bitter with feeling, “that she had deliberately concealed that fact from me. A grandchild, a son of Robert. I...”

Bartsler’s voice choked with emotion. It was several seconds before he could proceed.

Mason said, “That’s hardly the way a fortune hunter would have played it, Bartsler.”

“I realize that — now.”

“How did you find out about it?”

“A month ago I received an anonymous letter telling me that it might be to my interest to look over the birth records of San Francisco for March nineteen forty-two.”

“What did you do?”

“Threw the letter away. I thought it was simply the prelude to some blackmailing scheme. Then I started thinking and looked up the records and... Mr. Mason, here it is in black and white, a birth certificate. I have here a certified copy.”

Bartsler passed over a certified copy of a birth certificate to Mason. Mason read it carefully, said, “There seems to be no question about it. This is apparently the child of Robert Bartsler and Helen Bartsler, born the fifteenth day of March, nineteen hundred and forty-two, a male child. I presume you’ve talked with the attending physician?”

“Yes.”

“And what does he say?”

“It’s true.”

“So then you went to see Robert’s widow?”

“Yes. She’s living on a little chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley.”

“And where did you get with her?”

“Precisely nowhere.”

“What did she say?”

“She laughed at me, refused to either deny or confirm the birth, told me I had never been a true father to Robert, that I had treated her as the scum of the earth, that she had lived for months in the hope that someday she could strike back, that surely I wouldn’t want to acknowledge a grandson that was tainted with her blood.”

“She seems to have had a field day,” Mason said.

“She did.”

“So what did you do?”

“Hired detectives.”

“Get anywhere?”

“No — at least not directly.”

“How about indirectly?”

“A blonde young woman visited Helen. This blonde seemed to know something. One of my detectives managed a minor car accident and got her name from her driving license, the number of her car license, and all that.”

“The name?”

“Diana Regis.”

“Well?”

“But it wasn’t Diana. I didn’t find out it wasn’t she until after she came to work for me. Who was it? Probably a girl who shares an apartment with her, another blonde named Mildred Danville.”

Mason tilted back his head and frowned. “Rather an unusual legal situation,” he said. “Usually it’s the case of a mother trying to get support for a child. Here we have a mother who calmly goes about her business saying that there never was any child, at any rate, refusing to admit it.”

“But there’s that birth certificate.”

“And have you consulted the Bureau of Vital Statistics to find that there also isn’t a death certificate?”

“Of course. What bothers me, Mr. Mason, the thing that drives me crazy, is that Helen may simply have released the child somewhere for adoption. She didn’t want to be bothered with it herself, and she wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of knowing I had a grandchild. Think of it, Mr. Mason. My own flesh and blood! Robert’s son — a boy that probably has all of the charm that Robert had, all of his spontaneity, all of his magnetic personality. My God, Mr. Mason, I can’t stand it!

“And,” Bartsler went on bitterly, after an interval, “I understand from the lawyer who handles my corporation work that I have no legal redress; that where the father of a child is dead, the mother has the right to release the child for adoption, and that’s all there is to it. All of the records in connection with an abandoned child become confidential. In fact, I understand some agencies burn all of the records except the release of the mother — making certain that the chain is broken so that it’s absolutely impossible for anyone ever to trace the child.”

Mason drummed his long powerful finger on the edge of the desk. “You have,” he said, “an interesting and unusual legal problem.”

“My own lawyers advised me that there’s no way of handling it, that if the child has been released for adoption, that’s all there is to it; that Helen would be perfectly within her legal rights to refuse to answer any questions; that there simply isn’t any method by which I could determine the present whereabouts of the child.”

Mason pursed his lips. “When I find that one theory of a case is hopeless, I squirm around and try to find some other theory. After all, it makes a great deal of difference how you look at a case. It’s what the lawyers call the legal theory on which it is to be tried.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Sometimes a great deal. A lawyer needs imagination. When you come to one legal road that’s blocked, you back up and try another.”

“Well, there isn’t any other road in this case. My lawyers have thrown up their hands.”

Mason lit a cigarette, smoked thoughtfully. “There might be.”

“Might be what?”

“Another road.”

“I’m afraid not, Mason. I don’t think even your ingenuity could find a way out of this legal impasse.”

Mason said patiently, “I think perhaps I can show you what I mean by the legal theory. Technically your son is listed as missing?”

“I believe that’s the technical classification, because the body with proper identification tags wasn’t found. However, there’s no question about what happened.”

“Exactly,” Mason said. “And if you try the case on that legal theory, you’re stuck.”

“We’re stuck anyway.”

“But,” Mason went on, “suppose we take the theory that your son may be alive.”

“There’s not a chance of it.”

“Officially he’s listed as missing.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes a lot. A person has to be missing for seven years before he can be presumed dead.”

“But if he is dead actually, I don’t see what is to be gained by waiting seven years.”

“Don’t you see, under that theory of the case, your son is merely a missing person. It would be necessary to wait for seven years before his death could be presumed. During those seven years it would take the consent of both parents before his child could be released for adoption.”

Comprehension dawned in Bartsler’s face. “Good Heavens, Mr. Mason! You’ve solved it! You’ve done it!”

Bartsler was up out of his chair in his excitement. “We’ll crack the case wide open. We’ll bring that baby into court. We’ll make certain that there are no adoption proceedings. Good Lord, why didn’t some of those other lawyers think of that?”

Mason said, “I don’t know all the facts, Mr. Bartsler, I’m just giving you a legal theory. It might pay you to talk that over with your lawyers.”

“Lawyers, hell!” Bartsler exclaimed. “I haven’t time to wait for a bunch of lawyer... My God, Mason, you’re a legal wizard! Send me a bill. No, to hell with a bill! I’ll send you a check!”

Bartsler turned toward the door, streaked out of the office.

Mason looked at Della Street and grinned.

“Where’s he going in such a hurry?” she asked.

“Probably out to a chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley,” Mason said.