There Was an Old Woman

by Ellery Queen

  PART ONE

  1 ... Who Lived in a Shoe

  The pearl-gray planet of the supreme court building, which lies in Foley Square, is round in shape; whereby you may know that in New York County Justice is one with universal laws, following the conscience of Man like the earth the sun. Or so Ellery Queen reflected as he sat on the southern extremity of his spine in Trial Term Part VI, Mr. Justice Greevey not yet presiding, between Sergeant Thomas Velie of Homicide and Inspector Queen, waiting to testify in a case which is another story.

  "How long, O Lord?" yawned Ellery.

  "If you're referring to that Gilbert and Sullivan pipsqueak, Greevey," snapped his father, "Greevey's probably just scratching his navel and crawling out of his ermine bed. Velie, go see what's holding up the works."

  Sergeant Velie opened one aggrieved eye, nodded ponderously, and lumbered off in quest of enlightenment. When he lumbered back, the Sergeant looked black. "The Clerk says," growled Sergeant Velie, "that Mr. Justice Greevey he called up and says he's got an earache, so he'll be delayed two hours gettin' down here while he gets—the Clerk says 'irritated,' which I am, but it don't make sense to me."

  "Irritation," frowned Mr. Queen, "or to call it by its purer name 'irrigation'—irrigation, Sergeant, is the process by which one reclaims a dry, dusty, and dead terrain .., a description, I understand, which fits Mr. Justice Greevey like a decalcomania."

  The Sergeant looked puzzled, but Inspector Queen muttered through his ragged mustache: "Two hours! I'd like to irrigate him. Let's go out in the hall for a smoke." And the old gentleman marched out of Room 331, followed by Sergeant Velie and—meekly—Ellery Queen; and so barged into the fantastic hull of the Potts case.

  For a little way down the corridor, before the door of Room 335, Trial Term Part Vu, they came upon Charley Paxton, pacing. Mr. Queen like the governor of Messina's niece, had a good eye and could see a church by daylight; so he noted this and that about the tall young man, mechanically, and concluded [a] he was an attorney (brief case); [b] his name was Charles Hunter Paxton (stern gilt lettering on same); [c] Counselor Paxton was waiting for a client and the client was late (frequent glances at wrist watch); [d] he was unhappy (general droop). And the great man, having run over Charles Hunter Paxton with the vacuum cleaner of his glance, made to pass on, satisfied.

  But his father halted, twinkling.

  Inspector: Again, Charley? What is it this time?

  Mr. Paxton: Lèse-majesté, Inspector.

  Inspector: Where'd it happen?

  Mr. Paxton: Club Bongo.

  Sergeant Velie (shaking the marble halls with his laugh-, ter): Imagine Thurlow in that clip joint!

  Mr. Paxton: And he got clipped—make no mistake about that, my friends. Clipped on the buttonola.

  Inspector: Assault and battery, huh?

  Mr. Paxton (bitterly): Not at all, Inspector. We mustn't break our record! No, the same old suit for slander. Young Conklin Cliffstatter—of the East Shore Cliffstatters. Jute and shoddy.

  Sergeant: Stinking, I bet

  Mr. Paxton: Well, Sergeant, just potted enough to tell Thurlow a few homely truths about the name of Potts. (Hollow laugh.) There I go myself—"potted," "Potts." I swear that's all Conk Cliffstatter did—make a pun on the name of Potts. Called 'em "crack-Potts."

  Ellery Queen (his silver eyes gleaming with hunger): Dad?

  So Inspector Queen and Charley-Paxton-my-son-Ellery-Queen, and the two young men shook hands, and that was how Ellery became embroiled—it was more than an involvement—in the wonderful case of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.

  A court officer plunged his bald head into the cool of the corridor from the swelter of Room 335, Trial Term Part VII.

  "Hey, Counselor, Mr. Justice Cornfield says Potts or no Potts he ain't waitin' much longer for your era—your client. What gives, in God's good name?"

  "Can't he wait another five minutes, for goodness' sake?" Charley Paxton cried, exasperated. "They must have been held up—Here they are! Officer, tell Cornfield we'll be right in!" And Counselor Paxton raced toward the elevators, which had just discharged an astonishing cargo.

  "There she is," said the Inspector to his son, as one who points out a clash of planets. "Take a good look, Ellery. The Old Woman doesn't make many public appearances."

  "With the getup," chortled Sergeant Velie, "she could snag a job in the movies like that."

  Some women grow old with grace, others with bitterness, and still others simply grow old; but neither the concept of growth nor the devolution of old age seemed relevant to Cornelia Potts. She was a small creature with a plump stomach and tiny fine-boned feet which whisked her about. Her face, like a tangerine, was almost entirely lacking in detail; one was surprised to find embedded in it two eyes, which were as black and hard as coal chips. Those eyes, by some perverse chemistry of her ego, were unwinkingly malevolent. If they were capable of changing expression at all, it was into malicious rage.

  If not for the eyes, seeing Cornelia Potts in the black taffeta skirts she affected, the boned black lace choker, the prim black bonnet, one would have thought of her as a "Sweet old character," a sort of sexless little kobold who vaguely resembled the Jubilee pictures of Queen Victoria. But the eyes quite forbade such sentimentalization; they were dangerous and evil eyes, and they made imaginative people—like Ellery—think of poltergeists, and elementáis, and suchlike creatures of the unmentionable worlds.

  Mrs. Cornelia Potts did not step sedately, as befitted a dame of seventy years, from the elevator—she darted from it, like a midge from a hot stream, followed by a widening wake of assorted characters, most of whom were delighted ladies and gentlemen of the press, and at least one of whom—palpably not a journalist—was almost as extraordinary as she.

  "And who," demanded the astonished Mr. Queen, "is that?"

  "Thurlow," grinned Inspector Queen. "The little guy Charley Paxton was talking about. Cornelia's eldest son."

  "Cornelia's eldest wack," Sergeant Velie, the purist, said.

  "He resents," winked the Inspector.

  "Everything," said the Sergeant, waving a flipper.

  "Always taking—what do you educated birds call it?— umbrage," said the Inspector.

  "Resents? Umbrage?" Ellery frowned.

  "Aw, read the right papers," guffawed the Sergeant "Ain't he cute?"

  With a thrill of surprise Ellery saw that, if you were so ill-advised as to strip the black taffeta from old Mrs. Potts and reclothe her in weary gray tweeds, you would have Thurlow, her son.... No, there was a difference. Thurlow radiated an inferior grade of energy. In a race with his mother, he would always lose. And, in fact, he was losing the present race; for he toddled hurriedly along in the Old Woman's wake, clutching his derby to his little belly, and trying without success to overtake her. He was panting, perspiring, and in a pet.

  A lean glum man in a morning coat, carrying a medical satchel, stumbled after mother and son with a sick smile which seemed to say: "I am not trotting, I am walking. This is not reality, it is a bad dream. Gentlemen of the press, be merciful. One has to make a living."

  "I know him," growled Ellery. "Dr. Waggoner Innis, the Pasteur of Park Avenue."

  "She treats Innis like some people treat dogs," said Sergeant Velie, smacking his lips.

  "The way he's trotting after her, he looks like one," said the Inspector.

  "But why a doctor?" protested Ellery. "She looks as healthy as a troll."

  "I always understood it was her heart."

  "What heart?" sneered the Sergeant. "She ain't got no heart."

  The cortege swept by and through the door of Room 335. Young Paxton, who had tried to intercept Mrs. Potts and received a blasting "Traffic!" for his pains, lingered
only long enough to mutter: "If you want to see the show, gentlemen, you're welcome"; then he dashed after his clients.

  So the Queens and Sergeant Velie, blessing Mr. Justice Greevey's earache, went in to see the show.

  Mr. Justice Cornfield, a large jurist with the eyes of an apprehensive doe, took one look from the eminence of his bench at the tardy Old Woman, damp Thurlow Potts, blushing Dr. Waggoner Innis, and their exulting press and immediately exhibited a ferocious vindictiveness. He screamed at the Clerk, and there were whisperings and scurryings, and lo! the calendar was readjusted, and the case of Potts v. Cliffstatter found itself removed one degree in Time, so that Giacomo v. Jive Jottings, Inc., which had been scheduled to follow it, now found itself with priority.

  Ellery beckoned Charley Paxton, who was hovering about Mrs. Cornelia Potts; and the lawyer scooted over thankfully.

  "Come on outside. This'll take hours."

  They shouldered their way out into the corridor again.

  "Your client," began Mr. Queen, "fascinates me."

  "The Old Woman?" Charley made a face. "Have a cigaret? It's Thurlow, not Mrs. Potts, who's the plaintiff in this action."

  "Oh. From the way he was tumbling after his mother, I gathered—"

  "Thurlow's been tumbling after Mama for forty-seven years."

  "Why the elegant Dr. Waggoner Innis7"

  "Cornelia has a bad heart condition."

  "Nonsense. From the way she skitters about—"

  "That's just it. Nobody can tell the old hellion anything. It keeps Dr. Innis in a constant state of jitters. So he always accompanies the Old Woman when she leaves the Shoe."

  "Beg pardon?"

  Charley regarded him with suspicion. "Do you mean to say, Queen, you don't know about the Shoe?"

  "I'm a very ignorant man." said Ellery abjectly. "Should I?"

  "But I thought everybody in America knew! Cornelia Potts' fortune was made in the shoe business. The Potts Shoe."

  Ellery started "Potts Shoes Are America's Shoes— $3.99 Everywhere?"

  "That's the Potts."

  "No!" Ellery turned to stare at the closed door of Room 335. The Potts Shoe was not an enterprise, or even an institution; it was a whole civilization. There were Potts Shoe Stores in every cranny of the land. Little children wore Potts Shoes; and their mothers, and their fathers, and their sisters and their brothers and their uncles and their aunts; and what was more depressing, their grandparents had worn Potts Shoes before them. To don a Potts Shoe was to display the honor badge of lower-income America; and since this class was the largest class, the Potts fortune was not merely terrestrial—it was galactic.

  "But your curious reference," said the great man eagerly, turning back to the lawyer, "to 'when she leaves the Shoe.' Has a cult grown up about the Pottses, with its own esoteric terminology?"

  Charley grinned. "It all started when some cartoonist on a pro-Labor paper was told by his editor to squirt some India ink in the general direction of Cornelia. Don't you remember that strike in the Potts' plant?" Ellery nodded; it was beginning to come back to him. "Well, this genius of the drawing board drew a big mansion—supposed to represent the Potts Palace on Riverside Drive—only he shaped it like an old-fashioned high-top shoe; and he drew Cornelia Potts like the old harridan in the Mother Goose illustration, with her six children tumbling out of the 'shoe', and he captioned it: 'There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, She Had So Many Children She Couldn't Pay Her Workers a Living Wage,' or something like that. Anyway, the name's stuck; she's been 'the Old Woman' ever since."

  "And you're this female foot potentate's attorney?"

  "Yes, but most of my activity is devoted to Thurlow, bless his sensitive little heart. You saw Thurlow? That tubby little troglodyte with the narrow shoulders?"

  Ellery nodded. "Built incredibly like a baby kangaroo."

  "Well, Thurlow Potts is the world's most insultable man."

  "And the money to do something about it," mourned Mr. Queen. "Very sad. Does he ever win one of these suits?"

  "Win!" Paxton swabbed his face angrily. "It's driven me to sobriety. This is the thirty-seventh suit for libel or slander he's made me bring into court! And every darned one of the first thirty-six has been thrown out."

  "How about this one—the Club Bongo inbroglio?"

  "Cornfield'll throw it out without a hearing. Mark my words."

  "Why does Mrs. Potts put up with this childishness?"

  "Because in her own way the Old Woman's got an even crazier pride in the family name than Thurlow."

  "But if the suits are all silly, why do you permit them to come to court, Charley?"

  Charley flushed. "Thurlow insists, and the Old Woman backs him up.... I know I've been accused of milking them, Queen." His jaw shot forward. "I've earned every damn cent I've ever collected being their attorney, and don't you think I haven't!"

  "I'm sure you have—"

  "I've had nightmares about them! In my dreams they have long noses and fat little bottoms and they spit at me all night! But if / didn't do it, they'd find a thousand lawyers who'd break their necks to get the business. And wouldn't be so blamed scrupulous, either! Beg your pardon. My nerves—"

  Sergeant Velie stuck his head out of Room 335. "Charley! The judge settled that hot-trumpet case, and the Old Woman's bellowin' for you."

  "May she crack a cylinder," muttered Counselor Paxton; and he marched back into Trial Term Part VII with the posture of one who looks forward only to the kiss of Madame Guillotine.

  "Tell me, Dad," said Ellery when he had fought his way back with Sergeant Velie to the Inspector's side. "How did Charley Paxton, who seems otherwise normal, get mixed up with the Pottses?"

  "Charley sort of inherited *em,*' chuckled Inspector Queen. "His pappy was Sidney Paxton, the tax and estate lawyer—fine fella, Sid—many a bottle of beer we cracked together." Sergeant Velie nodded nostalgically. "Sid sent Charley to law school, and Charley got out of Harvard Law with honors. Began to practice criminal law— everybody said he had a flair for it—but his old man died, and Charley had to chuck a brilliant career and step in and take over Sid's civil practice. By that time the Potts account was so big Sid had had to drop all his other clients. Now Charley spends his life trying to keep out of the nut house."

  Thurlow Potts could scarcely contain himself at the front of the room. He squirmed in his seat like a fat boy at the circus, the two gray tufts behind his ears standing up nervously. He exuded a moist and giggly fierceness, as if he were enjoying to the full his indignation.

  "That little man," thought Ellery, "is fitten fodder for a psychiatrist." And he watched even more intently.

  Ensued a brilliant but confusing battle of bitternesses. It was evident from the Opening sortie that Mr. Justice Cornfield meant to see justice done—to Mr. Conklin Cliffstatter, who sat bored among his attorneys and seemed not to care a tittle whether justice were done or not. In fact, Ellery suspected Mr. Cliffstatter suckled only one ambition—to go home and sleep it off.

  "But Your Honor—" protested Charley Paxton.

  "Don't Your Honor me, Counselor!" thundered Mr. Justice Cornfield. "I'm not saying it's your fault—heaven knows lawyers have to live—but you ought to know better than to pull this stunt in my court for—how many times does this make?"

  "Your Honor, my client has been grossly slandered—"

  "My Honor my eye! Your client is a public nuisance who clutters up the calendars of our courts! I don't mind his wasting his money—or rather his mother's—but 1 do mind his wasting the taxpayers'!"

  "Your Honor has heard the testimony of the witness—" said Counselor Paxton desperately.

  "And I'm satisfied there was no slander. Case dismissed!" snapped Mr. Justice Cornfield. He grinned evilly at the Old Woman.

  To Charley Paxton's visible horror, Thurlow Potts bounced to his feet. "Your Honor!" Thurlow squeaked imperiously.

  "Sit down, Thurlow," gasped Charley. "Or rather let's get out of here—"

 
"Just—one—moment, Counselor," said Mr. Justice Cornfield softly. "Mr. Potts, you wish to address the Court?"

  "I certainly do!"

  "Then by all means address it."

  "I came to this court for justice!" cried Thurlow, brandishing his arms as if they were broadswords. "And what do I get? Insults. Where are the rights of Man? What's happened to our Constitution? Don't we live in the last refuge of personal liberty? Surely a responsible citizen has the right of protection by law against the slanders of drunken, irresponsible persons?"

  "Yes?" said Mr. Justice Cornfield. "You were saying—"

  "But what do I find in this court?" screeched Thurlow. "Protection? No! Are my rights defended by this court? No! Is my name cleared of the crude insinuations of this defendant? No! It is a valuable name, Your Honor, an honorable name, and this person's slander has reduced its value by considerable sums—!"

  "I'll reduce it still more, Mr. Potts," said the judge with enjoyment, "if you don't stop this outrageous exhibition."

  "Your Honor," Charley Paxton jumped forward. "May I apologize for the hasty and ill-considered remarks of my client—"

  "Stop!" And the Old Woman arose, terrible in wrath.

  Even the judge quailed momentarily.

  "Your Dishonor," said Cornelia Potts, "—I can't address you as Your Honor, because you haven't any—Your Dishonor, I've sat in many courtrooms and I've listened to many judges, but never in my long life have I had the misfortune to witness such monkey's antics, in such a court of Baal, presided over by such a wicked old goat. My son came here to seek the protection of the court in defense of our good name-—instead he is insulted and ridiculed and our good name further held up to public scorn. . . ."

  "Are you quite finished, Madam?" choked Mr. Justice Cornfield.

  "No! How much do I owe you for contempt?" "Case dismissed! Case dismissed!" bellowed the judge; and he leaped from his leather chair, girding his robe about him like a young girl discovered en déshabille, and fled to chambers.

  "This is surely a bad dream," said Ellery Queen exultantly. "What happens next?"

  The Queens and Sergeant Velie joined the departing Potts parade. Bravely it swept into the corridor, Queen Victoria in the van flourishing her bulky bumbershoot like a cudgel at the assorted bondsmen, newspaper folks, divorce litigants, attorneys, attendants, rubbernecks, and tagtails who had joined the courtroom exodus. The Old Woman, and then steaming little Thurlow, and red-faced Dr. Innis, and Charles Hunter Paxton, and Sergeant Velie, and the Queens père et fils. Bravely it swept onto the balcony under the rotunda, and into the elevators, and downstairs to the lobby.