“Horace,” he said, “we’ve always got on pretty well at the Bar.”
“Have we, Guthrie?”
“My client has come to a rather agonizing decision.”
“You mean he’s going to answer my question?”
“It’s not that exactly. You see, Horace, we’re chucking in the sponge. Our hands are up. We surrender! Matron can have her precious will. We offer no further evidence.”
You could have knocked me down with a Chancery brief, but I tried to sound nonchalant. “Oh really, Featherstone,” I said, “that’s very satisfactory.” It was also somewhat incredible. But Guthrie, it became clear, had other matters on his mind.
“I say, Rumpole. A fellow must be certain of his fee. You’ll let me have my costs out of the estate, won’t you?”
“I suppose so.” I warned him, “I’d better just check.”
“With your client?”
“Not only with her,” I said, “with the deceased. I mean it’s his money, isn’t it?” And I left him thinking, no doubt, that old Horace Rumpole had completely lost his marbles.
When Matron came into view I put the proposition to her; I told her that the Percival Ollards would give her all the boodle, only provided that Guthrie, and their other lawyers, got their costs out of the estate. She and the dear departed must have had a convivial lunch together, agreement was reached, and the deal was on. With about as much joy and enthusiasm as King John might have shown when signing Magna Carta, Mr. Justice Venables pronounced, in the absence of further argument, for the will of the first of March, 1974, benefiting Miss Beasley, and against the earlier will which favoured the Percival Ollards. All parties were allowed their costs out of the estate.
When we came out of Court, Matron seized my hand in her muscular grasp.
“Thanks most awfully, Mr. Rumpole,” she said. “The colonel knew you’d pull it off and hit them for six.”
“Miss Beasley. May I call you ‘Matey’?”
“Please.”
“What’s the truth of it? What did the brothers say to each other over the scones and Darjeeling?”
There was a pause, and then Miss Beasley said with a small, secret smile, “How would I know, Mr. Rumpole? Only the colonel and his brother know that.”
However, I was not to be left in total ignorance of the truth of “In the Estate of Colonel Ollard, deceased.” After we had taken off our robes, Guthrie Featherstone did me the honour of inviting me to crack a bottle of claret at the Sheridan Club, and, as he had given me my first (and my last) Chancery will, I did him the honour of accepting. As we sat in a quiet room, under the portraits of old actors and even older judges, Featherstone said, “No reason why you shouldn’t know, Rumpole. Your client had been Percy’s mistress for years.”
“Miss Beasley, Matey, the old dragon of the nursing home, his mistress!” I was astonished, and I let my amazement show. “His what?”
“Girlfriend.” Featherstone made it sound even more inappropriate.
“It seems odd, somehow, calling a stout, elderly woman a ‘girlfriend.’ Are you trying to tell me, Guthrie, intimacy actually took place?”
“Regularly, apparently. On a Wednesday. Matron’s afternoon off. But when Colonel Roderick Ollard went into Sunnyside she dived into bed with him, and deserted Percy. The meeting at the tearoom was when the colonel told his brother all about it and said he meant to leave his money to Rosemary Beasley.”
I was silent. I drank claret. I began to wonder where the planchette came in.
“But why couldn’t your client have told us that?” I asked my ex-opponent.
“His wife, Rumpole! His wife Marcia! She’s a battle-axe and she was kept completely in the dark about Matey. It seems there would have been hell to pay if she’d found out. So we had to settle.”
“Well, well, Featherstone. Matron, the femme fatale. I’d never have believed it.”
What did I believe? That the colonel spoke from the grave? Or that Matron invented all the seances to tell us a truth which would have caused her deep embarrassment to communicate in any other way? As it was, she had told me nothing.
All I knew was that I didn’t fancy the idea of the “other side.” I knew I shouldn’t care for long chats with Colonel Ollard and the Emperor Napoleon even if Joseph Stalin were to be of the party. Dying, as far as I was concerned, had been postponed indefinitely.
Masquerade
by John M. O’Toole
The desk clerk sat in his little yellow alcove and grinned across the curving yellow counter at his guest, his elbow propped on a Chicago phone book that looked old enough to have Mrs. O’Leary listed. The grin kept growing on his face, and a laugh worked its way in gruff chuckles from his belly.
“It’s what?” he finally whooped.
“It’s glued to my face,” Louis said.
Pausing in the alley, the man in the brand-new custom-tailored suit set his attaché case down. Then he rummaged through a trash can, found a curled slice of pizza and hungrily devoured it.
He had lost all his money in a string of bad investments. After that his wife had left him. His credit cards had been canceled. The bank had foreclosed on his mortgage, and thirty-six hours ago a pair of sheriff s deputies had forcibly removed him from his luxury condo. He’d been lucky to escape with a few personal items — handkerchiefs, underwear, a toothbrush, and soap — hastily packed inside his attaché case.
He sat himself down on the alley’s crumbling pavement, leaned his back against the white stucco wall of a motel. He closed his eyes and longed for oblivion. The shadows in the alley soon merged with darkness, and Louis Walsh, exhausted, drifted quickly into sleep.
He awoke the next morning with his head on a pillow. He was lying on a double bed in a room with a suspended ceiling and flocked yellow wallpaper. A sharp but painless pressure framed his face. He turned his head and saw an air conditioner in a wall beneath a picture window. The air conditioner was going full blast, whooshing and humming, but for some odd reason his face couldn’t feel it.
Louis sat up slowly, swung his legs off the bed. He was still fully dressed, but not in his new suit. He was wearing bluejeans now, and a T-shirt with a big red target on the front. The clothes fit him snugly. He felt a bit dizzy and his head hurt like hell. He waited for the dizziness to pass, then rose gradually from the bed, using the headboard for support.
He staggered to the window and parted the yellow drapes. Outside was a small balcony with a wrought-iron rail. He was on the third floor of an L-shaped building, in the wing that extended at a right angle to the building’s main entrance. Between his window and the entrance was a small parking lot. The entrance had a tattered canopy and a couple of newspaper vending machines out in front. Above the entrance, three stories of white stucco and small balconies and drawn yellow drapes. On the roof, neon letters spelled, “E — Z REST MOTEL.”
On the floor beneath the window was his attaché case. He picked the case up. It felt heavier than usual. It rattled. He set it back down and it let out a ring, like a jostled telephone. He bent and tried to open it. The latches were locked. The key was in his suit, wherever that was.
He turned from the window, saw an armchair and a writing desk and a coin-operated TV. A partly open door led into a small bathroom. On the door was a full-length mirror, in the mirror his reflection.