“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 Innis?”
“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 I 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—”