The Bellamy Trial (American Mystery Classics)

by Frances Noyes Hart

  The red-headed girl fell to obediently and gratefully.

  “I do like the way newspaper people look,” she said when only a few crumbs of the balanced ration remained.

  “Ten thousand thanks,” said the newspaper man. “Myself, I do like the way lady authoresses look.”

  “I mean I like them because they look so—so awfully alive,” explained the red-headed girl sedately, keeping her eyes on the girl in the flame-colored blouse lest the cocky young man beside her should read the unladylike interest that he roused in her.

  “Ah, well, in that case, not more than one thousand thanks,” said the reporter—“and those somewhat tempered. Look alive, do we? There’s a glowing tribute for you! I trust that you’ll be profoundly ashamed of yourself when I inform you that I meant nothing of the kind when I extolled the appearance of lady authoresses. Dead or alive, I like the way their hair grows over their ears, and their discreet use of dimples, and the useless length of their eyelashes. Meditate on that for a while!”

  The red-headed girl meditated, while both her color and her dimples deepened. At the end of her meditations she inquired politely, “Is it true that Mr. Bellamy’s counsel broke his leg?”

  “Couldn’t be truer. Fell down the Subway stairs at eleven-forty-five last night and is safe in the hospital this morning. Lambert’s taking over Bellamy’s defense; he and those two important, worried-looking kids who sit beside him at the desk down there reading great big enormous law books and are assistant counsel—whatever that means. . . . Ah, here’s Ben Potts! Fine fellow, Ben. . . . We’re off!”

  “Mr. Elliot Farwell!”

  A thickset, broad-shouldered individual, with hair as slick as oiled patent leather, puffy eyes, and overprominent blue jowls, moved heavily toward the witness box. An overgaudy tie that looked as though it came from the ten-cent store and had actually come from France, a waistcoat that made you think vaguely of checks, though it was quite guiltless of them; a handkerchief with an orange-and-green monogram ramping across one corner—the stuff of which con men and race-track touts and ham actors and men about town are made. The red-headed girl eyed him severely. Thus she was wont to regard his little brother and big brother at the night clubs, as they leaned conqueringly across little tables, offering heavily engraved flasks to limp chits clad in shoulder straps and chiffon handkerchiefs.

  “Mr. Farwell, where were you on the afternoon of the nineteenth of June at about five o’clock?”

  “At the Rosemont Country Club.”

  Not a pleasant voice at all, Mr. Farwell’s; a heavy, sullen voice, thickened and coarsened with some disreputable alchemy.

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was just hanging around after golf, having a couple of drinks.”

  “Did you see Mrs. Patrick Ives?”

  “Yes____”

  “Talk with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you give us the substance of your conversation?”

  Mr. Farwell shifted his bulk uneasily in his chair. “How do you mean—the substance of it?”

  “Just outline what you said to Mrs. Ives.”

  “Well, I told her____” The heavy voice lumbered to silence. “Do I have to answer that?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Farwell.” Judge Carver’s voice was edged with impatience.

  “I told her that she’d better keep an eye on her husband,’’ blurted Mr. Farwell desperately.

  “Did you give her any reason for doing that?”

  “Of course I gave her a reason.”

  “Well, just give it to us, too, will you?”

  “I told her that he was making a fool of himself with Mimi.”

  “Nothing more specific than that?”

  “Well, I told her that they were meeting each other secretly.”

  “Where?”

  “At the gardener’s cottage at Orchards.” Those who were near enough could see the little beads of sweat on Mr. Farwell’s forehead.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Orsini told me.”

  “And who is Orsini?”

  “He’s the Bellamys’ man of all work—tends to the garden and furnace and all that kind of thing.”

  “Well, just how did Orsini come to tell you about this, Mr. Farwell?”

  “Because I’d twice seen Mrs. Bellamy take the Perrytown bus, alone, and I told Orsini that I’d give him ten dollars if he found out for me where she was going. He said he didn’t need to find out—he knew.”

  “Did he tell you how he knew?”

  “Yes; he knew because it was he that loaned her the key to the cottage. She’d found out that he had the key, and she told him some cock-and-bull story about wanting to practice on the cottage piano that the gardener had there, and he used to loan it to her whenever she asked for it, and generally she’d forget to give it back to him till the next day.”

  “How did he happen to have it?”

  “The Thornes’ gardener was a friend of his, and he left it with Orsini when he went off on his vacation to Italy, because he’d left some kind of homebrew down in the cellar, and he wanted Orsini to keep an eye on it.”

  “Did you know when she had last borrowed it?”

  “Yes; she’d borrowed it round noon on the nineteenth. I went by her house a little before one to see if she would take lunch with me at the club, and Orsini was fixing up the gate in the picket fence. He told me that Mimi had left about half an hour ago in their car, asking for the key, as she said she wanted to go to the cottage to practice. So I went after her.”

  “To the gardener’s cottage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she there?”

  “No.”

  “How did you know that she wasn’t there, Mr. Farwell?”

  “Because there wasn’t any car, nor any music either.”

  There was a surly defiance in Farwell’s tone that the prosecutor blandly ignored.

  “Did you go into the cottage?”

  “No; it was locked.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “It started to rain while I was standing on the porch and I stopped and tossed up a coin as to whether to go on to the club, hoping it would clear up enough for golf, or to go back to the bungalow. It came tails, so I waited for a minute or so and went on to the club.”

  “Whom did you find there?”

  “Mrs. Bellamy, Dick Burgoyne, the Conroys, the Dallases, Sue Ives—all the crowd. It cleared up after lunch, and most of us went off to the links. Sue made up a foursome with the Conroys and Steve Bellamy, who turned up on the two o’clock train. Mimi played around with Burgoyne, and I went with George Dallas. We all got round within a few minutes of each other and sat around, getting drinks and gabbing.”

  “Was it then that you told Mrs. Ives about this affair of her husband’s?”

  “It was around that time.”

  “Was Mr. Ives there?”

  “No; he’d telephoned that he couldn’t get out till dinnertime.”

  “Just what made you tell Mrs. Ives this story, Mr. Farwell?”

  Elliot Farwell’s heavy jowls became slightly more prominent. “Well, I’d had a drink too many, I guess, and I was good and fed up with the whole thing. I thought Sue was a peach, and it made me sick to see what Ives was getting away with.”

  “What did Mrs. Ives say?”

  “She said that I was out of my head, and I told her that I’d bet her a thousand dollars to five cents that Mimi and Pat would tell some fairy stories about what they were doing that evening and meet at the cottage. And I told her that I’d waited behind the bushes at the lodge gates the week before when Sue was in New York, and seen both of them go up the drive—Mimi on foot and Ives ten minutes later in the car. That worried her; she wasn’t sure how sober I was, but she cut out telling me I was crazy.”

  He paused and the prosecutor lifted an impatient voice. “Then what, Mr. Farwell?”

  “Well, a little while after that George Dallas came over and said t
hat if Sue wanted him to, he’d stop on the way home and show her how to make the new cocktail that he’d been telling her about, so that she could surprise Pat with it at dinner. And she said all right, and we all piled into our cars and headed for her place—all except Mimi and Bellamy. They’d left a few minutes before, because they had dinner early.”

  “Did you have any further conversation with Mrs. Ives on the subject?”

  “Not anything that you’d call conversation. There was a whole crew jabbering around there at her place.”

  “Well, did she mention it again?”

  “Oh, well, she came up to me just when I was going—I was looking around for my hat in the hall—and she said, ‘Elliot, don’t tell anyone else that you’ve told me about this, will you?’ And I said, ‘All right.’ And she said, ‘Promise. I don’t want it to get back to Pat that I know until I decide what to do.’ And so I said sure I’d promise. And then I cleared out.”

  In the hushed courtroom his voice sounded ugly and defiant, but he kept his face turned stubbornly away from Sue Ives’s clear attentive eyes, which never once had left it, and which widened a little now, gravely ironic, as the man who had promised not to tell sullenly broke that promise.

  “Oh,” whispered the red-headed girl fiercely—“oh, the cad! He’s trying to make it look as though she did it—as though she meant to do it even then.”

  “Oh, come on, now!” remonstrated the reporter judicially. “Give the poor devil his due! After all, he’s on oath, and the prosecutor’s digging into him with a pickax and spade. Here, look out, or we’ll miss something!”

  “And after you and Mr. Burgoyne had dined, Mr. Farwell?”

  “Well, I had a rotten headache, so I decided that I wouldn’t go over to Dallases’ for the poker game after all, but that I’d turn in and read a detective story that I’d brought out with me. I called up George to ask if he’d have enough without me, and he said yes, so I decided that I’d call it a night and went up to my bedroom.”

  “Did you see Mr. Burgoyne before he left?”

  “Yes, he stuck his head in the door just as I was putting on my bathrobe and asked if there was anything he could do, and I said nothing but tell George I was sorry.”

  “Have you any idea what time that was?”

  “It must have been round quarter to nine; the party was to start about nine, and he was walking.”

  “Did you read for long after he left?”

  “Yes, I read right along; but about half-past nine I got up for a cigarette, and I couldn’t find a match, so I started hunting through the pockets of the golf suit I’d been wearing for my lighter. It wasn’t there. I remembered that I’d used it on the way over to the cottage—I kept it in my pocket with my loose change—and all of a sudden it came back to me that I’d pulled a handkerchief out of that pocket when I was getting that coin to toss up on the porch and I’d thought I heard something drop, and looked around a little, but I didn’t pay much attention to it, because I thought probably it was just some change that had rolled off the porch. I realized then that it must have been the lighter, and I was sore as the devil.”

  “Will you tell us why, Mr. Farwell?”

  “Because I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been hanging round the cottage, and the lighter was marked on the inside.”

  “Marked with your name?”

  “Marked with an inscription—Elliot, from Mimi, Christmas, 1918.”

  The coarse voice was suddenly shaken, the coarse face suddenly pale—Elliot from Mimi, Christmas, 1918.

  “What did you do after you missed the lighter, Mr. Farwell?”

  “Well, I cursed myself good and plenty and went on a hunt for matches downstairs. There wasn’t one in the whole darned place, and I was too lazy to get into my clothes again, so I called Dick at the Dallases’ and asked him to be sure to bring some home with him.”

  “What time did you telephone?”

  “I didn’t look at the time. It was half-past nine when I started to look for the matches. Quarter to ten—ten minutes to, maybe.”

  “Did you go back to bed?”

  “Yes; but I went on reading for quite a while. I’d dozed off by the time Dick came in, though the light was still burning.”

  “What time was that?”

  “A little after half-past eleven.”

  The prosecutor stood eyeing the heavy countenance before him speculatively for a moment, and then, with a quick shake of his narrow, sleek, finely poised head, took his decision. “Mr. Farwell, when did you first tell the story that you have been telling us?”

  “On June twenty-first.”

  “Where did you tell it?”

  “In your office.”

  “At whose request?”

  “At____”

  Mr. Lambert, who had been sitting twitching in his chair, emitted a roar of protest as he bounded to his feet that effectually drowned out any information Mr. Farwell was about to impart. “I object, Your Honor! I object! What does it matter whether this witness told his story in the prosecutor’s office or the Metropolitan Opera House? The point is that he’s telling it here, and anything else is deliberately beside the mark. I____”

  “The Court is inclined to agree with you, Mr. Lambert. What is the object of establishing when, where, and why Mr. Farwell told this story, Mr. Farr?”

  “Because, Your Honor, it is entirely owing to the insistence of the state that Mr. Farwell is at present making a series of admissions that if misinterpreted by the jury might be highly prejudicial to Mr. Farwell. There is not one chance in a hundred that the defense would have brought out under cross-examination the fact that Mr. Farwell was at the gardener’s cottage on the nineteenth of June—a fact that I have deliberately elicited in my zeal to set all the available facts before the jury. But in common fairness to Mr. Farwell, I think that I should be permitted to bring out the circumstances under which I obtained this information.”

  Judge Carver paraded his fine, keen old eyes meditatively from the ruddy full moon of Mr. Lambert’s countenance to the black-and-white etching of the prosecutor’s, cold as ice, for all the fever of intensity behind it; on farther still to the bullnecked and blue-jowled occupant of the witness box. There was a faint trace of distaste in their depths as they returned to the prosecutor. Perhaps it was that distaste that swung back the pendulum. Judge Carver had the reputation of being as fair as he was hard.

  “Very well, Mr. Farr. The Court sees no impropriety in having you state those circumstances as briefly as possible.”

  “May I have an objection to that, Your Honor?” Lambert’s face had deepened to a fine claret.

  “Certainly.”

  “On the morning of the twenty-first of June,” said Mr. Farr, “I asked Mr. Farwell to come to my office. When he arrived I told him that we had information in our hands that definitely connected him with this atrocious crime, and that I sincerely advised him to make a clean breast of all his movements. He proceeded to do so promptly, and told me exactly the same story that he has told you. It came, frankly, as a surprise to me, but it in no way altered or modified the state’s case. I therefore decided to put Mr. Farwell on the stand in order to let you have all the facts.”

  “Was the information that you possessed connecting Mr. Farwell with the crime the cigarette lighter, Mr. Farr?” inquired Judge Carver gravely.

  “No, Your Honor; it was Mrs. Ives’s telephone conversation with Stephen Bellamy, asking whether Elliot had not told him anything. There was no other Elliot in Mrs. Ives’s circle of acquaintances.”

  “Is the lighter in the possession of the state at present?”

  “No, Your Honor,” remarked the prosecutor blandly. “The state’s case would be considerably simplified if it were.”

  His eye rested, fugitive but penetrating, on Mr. Lambert’s heated countenance.

  “That is all that you desire to state, Mr. Farr?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. No further questions, Mr. Farwell. Cross-examine.”

>   “What kind of a cigarette lighter was this, Mr. Farwell?” There was an ominous rumble in Lambert’s voice.

  “A little black enamel and silver thing that you could light with one hand. They brought a lot of them over from England in ’17 and ’18.”

  “Had anyone ever suggested to you that this lighter might possibly prove a dangerous weapon against you if it fell into the hands of the defense?” inquired Mr. Lambert, in what were obviously intended to be silken tones.

  “No,” replied Mr. Farwell belligerently; “no one ever told me anything of the kind.”

  Mr. Farr permitted himself a fleeting and ironic smile in the direction of his adversary before he turned a countenance lit with splendid indignation in the direction of the jury.

  “Mr. Farwell, you told the prosecutor that you had had a couple of drinks before you confided this story about her husband to Mrs. Ives. Was that accurate, or had you had more?”

  “I’d had three or four, maybe—I don’t remember.”

  “Three or four after you came off the links?”

  “Well, what of it?” Farwell’s jaw was jutting dangerously.

  “Be good enough to answer my question, Mr. Farwell.”

  “All right, three or four after I came off the links.”

  “And three or four before you started?”

  “I don’t remember how many; we all had something at lunch.”

  “You had had too many, hadn’t you, Mr. Farwell?”

  “Too many for what?”

  “Too many for Mimi Bellamy’s good, let us say.” Mr. Lambert caught a menacing movement from the chair occupied by the prosecutor and hurried on: “Would you have been quite so explicit to Mrs. Ives if you had not had those drinks?”

  “I don’t know whether I would or not.” The little beads of sweat on the low forehead were suddenly larger. “I’d been thinking for quite a while that she ought to know what was going on.”

  “I see. And just what did you think was to be gained by her knowledge?”

  “I thought she’d put a stop to it.”

  “Put a stop to it with a knife, Mr. Farwell?” inquired Mr. Lambert, ferociously genial.