“A woman has a right to change her mind.”
“What brought about this change of heart on your part?” Mason asked.
She opened her purse, took from it another newspaper clipping.
“This article from The Cloverville Gazette, for one thing,” she said.
Mason glanced at the headline: MANUFACTURER’S ESTATE VALUED AT TWO MILLION DOLLARS.
Mason raised his eyes from the headline. “You hadn’t known this before?”
“No. I knew that Harmon Haslett was head of the business and virtually the sole stockholder, but I had no idea the business had grown so much in twenty years. It’s evidently a real big company now.”
“You understand what all this means?” Mason said. “If you try to claim that estate, you’re going to be accused of fraud, you’re going to be accused of perjury, your son is going to have his name dragged through the courts, and... He has no idea that you’re his real mother?”
“He does now,” she said. “I talked with him. I explained everything to him, and it was a lot easier than I had anticipated, because the woman he thought was his mother had made a couple of statements that had aroused his suspicions.”
Mason regarded her thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “you could be a very, very, very clever woman working in conspiracy with a young man of the proper age and making a very dramatic, carefully staged flimflam for the purpose of collecting a couple of million dollars.”
“And you think I am an impostor?”
Mason said thoughtfully, “The way this thing has been engineered, the dramatic way the facts have been brought to light, I just don’t know what to think. I’m only letting you know that I’m skeptical at the moment.
“Remember this: I’m not representing you any longer. Our relationship as attorney and client was terminated by you. Now you come to me with an entirely different plan of operation. I’m just telling you that I’m skeptical.”
“I can’t blame you, Mr. Mason,” she said. “And I know now that I have acted like a fool. I should have taken everything into consideration.”
“All right,” Mason said, “let’s have the real story; and, mind you, I am not asking you as a client. I am only asking you to tell me what you want me to do for the purpose of seeing whether I want to represent you.
“Now how much of what you told me was the truth?”
“Everything I told you was the truth,” she said. “The only thing is I kept part of the truth from you.”
“You did have a son?”
She said, “I came here just a little over twenty years ago. I was pregnant and desperate, but I had some money. I had what was left of the thousand dollars I had received — and since I had traveled in the cheapest way possible, I had a large part of that money.
“I couldn’t take advantage of the office training I had had in the Haslett Company without giving it as a reference. Therefore, the only thing I had left was general housework and baby-sitting.
“I put an ad in the paper, and a Mrs. Baird answered the ad and asked me to call. I went out and had an interview. They were not very well fixed, but they had good credit and Mr. Baird had a steady job. The wife, Melinda Baird, was not at all well. They had no children. They looked like just an ordinary married couple.
“I went to work for them. Within a short time Mrs. Baird noticed my condition. I told her all about my trouble and told her that I would keep on working as long as I was able. Then I would go to a home for unwed mothers and have my child.
“She was very frank with me and very friendly. She asked me if I had considered the possibilities of an abortion, and I told her I had and that I wouldn’t go for it.
“She didn’t say anything more that day, but a couple of days later she talked with me and told me that she had had a long discussion with her husband — that they would like very much to adopt my baby but there were legal obstacles which made it impossible.
“So then Mrs. Baird came out with the proposition. She would tell her friends that she was pregnant. Mr. Baird would stay in Los Angeles and keep his job. But Mrs. Baird and I would go to San Francisco. When it came time for me to be confined, I would go to a San Francisco hospital under the name of Melinda Baird and have my child. The child would be registered as having been born to Melinda Baird and August Leroy Baird.
“That was all there need be to it. After a period of recuperation, we would return to Los Angeles. I could have a permanent job with them and they would bring up the child as their own. The only thing they asked was that I never let anyone — particularly the child — know the true state of affairs.”
Mason studied the woman thoughtfully. “Why did you change your mind, and why do you come to me now?” he asked.
“Because of articles in the paper,” she said, “showing that Harmon Haslett left an estate of over two million dollars. There are no heirs other than my son.”
“You’re not trying to get any for yourself?” Mason asked.
“I have no legal claim.”
“Before, when I talked with you, you were very positive that you wanted your son to make his own way in the world, that you didn’t want him to know that he had — as you expressed it, I believe — a heel for a father. Now there has been an abrupt change.”
“I’ve been giving the matter a lot of thought. A few days ago I was thing in terms of a live father and two or three hundred dollars a month as support money for my son. Now I am thinking in terms of a dead father and an estate of two million dollars for the boy.”
“All of that,” Mason said, “helps to make me skeptical.”
She said, “It just happens that I can prove my story.”
Mason sat forward in his chair. “Now that,” he said, “would be interesting. How are you going to prove it? By the people who have been posing as the parents of...?”
“No, they are both dead. They were killed in an automobile accident.”
“How, then?”
“By a nurse at the hospital in San Francisco.”
Mason said, “You mean you have a nurse who remembers what happened twenty years ago and who can testify to the circumstances surrounding one single birth out of all of the thousands which took place?”
“You’re making it sound like something utterly incredible.”
“Frankly, I think it is.”
“Well, when you understand the circumstances, you’ll realize that it’s the most logical thing on earth.”
“What are the circumstances?”
“This nurse had just started work in this hospital on the day that I was confined. Remember that I went into the hospital and took the name of Melinda Baird — and at that time, of course, I had to take the age of Melinda Baird, which I gave as twenty-nine. At the time I was only nineteen.
“Nobody noticed the discrepancy in ages except this one nurse, who happened to be checking the records and saw that my age was given as twenty-nine. Actually, Melinda Baird was thirty-one at the time, but we thought we could get by with a few years off on the official documents on the grounds that a woman always likes to make herself younger than she is.
“Anyway, this nurse thought there had been a mistake, and she came in to talk with me about it.”
“What’s her name?” Mason asked.
“Agnes Burlington.”
“All right, she came in to see you before the child was born?”
“That’s right.”
“And asked you if you hadn’t made a mistake in giving your age?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“I told her no — that I’d actually been born on the date I’d put in the records, that I was really older than I looked.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Bosh and nonsense,’ and she asked me who I thought I was fooling, and finally I told her to give me a break and to just quit worrying about it.