The Bellamy Trial (American Mystery Classics)

by Frances Noyes Hart

“How long would it take to get from your house to the cottage at Orchards?”

  “On foot?”

  “On foot, yes.”

  “Oh, ten-fifteen minutes, perhaps. There’s a short cut across the fields behind the house that comes out close to there.”

  “The one that Miss Page used to take the children to the playhouse?”

  “That’s the one, yes.”

  “She knew of this path?”

  “Well, obviously.” The grim smile flashed for a moment to open mockery.

  “And you knew of it?”

  “And I knew of it.”

  “How?”

  “My mother had told me that Miss Page was taking the children there, and I’d requested her not to do so as I knew Sue’s feeling about the place.”

  “Mr. Ives, were your relations with your wife happy?”

  For a moment Patrick Ives sat perfectly still, fighting back the surge of crimson that flooded his pale mockery. When he spoke, his voice, for all its clearness, sounded as though it had travelled back from a great distance.

  “Yes,” he said, “they were happy.”

  “In so far as you know, she was unaware that you had ceased to care for her?”

  “She could hardly have been aware of it,” said Patrick Ives. “From the moment that I first saw her I have loved her passionately—and devotedly—and entirely.”

  After a long, astounded silence, Lambert’s voice asked heavily, “You expect us to believe, in the face of the evidence that has been presented to us here, that you have been faithful to Mrs. Ives?”

  “It’s a matter of supreme indifference to me what you believe,” said Patrick Ives. “I don’t regard fidelity to Sue as particularly creditable. The fool of the world would have enough sense for that.”

  “You are saying that you never ceased to love her?”

  “I am saying that since I met her I’ve never given another woman two thoughts except to wish to God that she was somewhere else.”

  “That was why you went to meet Madeleine Bellamy at the gardener’s cottage?”

  “That,” said Mr. Ives imperturbably, “is precisely why I went to meet Madeleine Bellamy at the gardener’s cottage.”

  Before the cool indifference of his eye the ugly sneer on Lambert’s countenance wavered for a moment, deepened. “You deny that you wrote these letters?”

  Pat Ives bent on the small packet flourished beneath his eye a careless glance. “Not for a moment.”

  “Were they or were they not written after rendezvous had taken place between you and Mrs. Bellamy?”

  “Two of them were written after what you are pleased to describe as rendezvous had taken place—one before.”

  “And where, Mr. Ives, was your wife at the time of these meetings—on June eighth, June ninth and May twenty-second?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She was in New York, wasn’t she?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. I’d never met her, you see.”

  Lambert goggled at him above his sagging jaw. “You’d never met her?”

  The courtroom throng blinked, shivered, stared wildly into one another’s eyes. No, no, that wasn’t what he had said—that couldn’t be what he had said. Or perhaps he was going mad before their eyes, sitting there with those reckless eyes dark in his white face. . . .

  “No; those letters were written in 1916. I didn’t meet Sue until the spring of 1919.”

  “Ha!” exhaled Lambert in a great breath of contemptuous relief. “Written in 1916, eh? And may I ask why Mrs. Bellamy was carrying them around in her bag in 1926?”

  “You may ask,” Pat Ives assured him, “and what’s more, I’ll tell you. She was selling them to me.”

  “Selling them to you? What for?”

  “For a hundred thousand dollars,” said Patrick Ives.

  Over the stupefied silence of the courtroom soared Lambert’s incredulous voice: “You expect us to believe that?”

  “I wish to the Lord you’d stop asking me that,” said his witness with undisguised irritation. “It’s not my business to decide what you’ll believe or what you won’t believe. What I’m telling you is the truth.”

  “It is your contention that these letters of yours, which you now claim were written in 1916, were being used for purposes of blackmail by Mrs. Bellamy?”

  “You choose your own words,” said Pat Ives. “Personally, I’d chose prettier ones. Mimi undoubtedly considered that I would be getting value received in the letters. She was right. She also may have considered that I owed her something. She was right again.”

  “You owed her something?”

  “I owed her a great deal for not having married me,” said Pat Ives. “As she didn’t, I owe her more happiness than most men even dream of.”

  Lambert made a sound that strongly suggested a snort. “Very pretty—very pretty indeed. What it comes down to, however, is that you accuse this dead girl, who is not here to defend herself, of deliberately stooping to blackmailing the man she loved for a colossal sum of money—that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Well, hardly. She didn’t love me, of course—she never loved anyone in her life but Steve. She told me that she wanted the money because she thought that he was sick; that he was working himself to death and getting nothing out of it. She was going to persuade him that an aunt in Cheyenne had left her the money, and that she wasn’t happy here, and that they ought to start out again in a place that she’d heard of in California. She had it all worked out very nicely.”

  “One moment, Mr. Ives.” Judge Carver lifted an arresting hand. “As it is after twelve, the Court will at this time take its customary recess for luncheon. We will reconvene at one-fifteen.”

  The reporter viewed the recessional through the doors behind the witness box with an expression of unfeigned diversion. “Watch Uncle Dudley,” he adjured the red-headed girl. “He’s not going to have any luncheon; he’s going to stay right here where nobody can get at him to give him any unwelcome instructions before he gets through with Mr. Patrick Ives. There, what did I tell you?”

  Mr. Lambert, who had followed somewhat perfunctorily in the wake of his clients, now wheeled about briskly and returned to his well-laden desk, where he proceeded to plunge into a large stack of papers before him with virtuous abandon. He apparently found them of the most absorbing interest, although from time to time he permitted himself a slightly apprehensive glance at the closed door.

  Finally it opened, and one of the amiable and harassed-looking young men who shared the desk with him entered purposefully. An animated though inaudible colloquy ensued, punctuated by much emphatic head wagging by Lambert. Finally the young man departed more precipitately than he had come, Mr. Lambert returned to his studies, and the reporter and the red-headed girl emerged from the fascinated hush in which they had been contemplating this silent drama.

  “Ten to one she doesn’t get in a syllable to him before he gets through with Ives,” said the reporter.

  “Who doesn’t?” The red-headed girl’s tone was a trifle abstracted. She was wondering if her nose was still pink, and if the young man beside her was one of the young men who consider face powder more immoral than tooth powder.

  “Sue Ives, goose! What were you screaming about?”

  “I was screaming,” said the red-headed girl, memory lighting a reminiscent glitter in her eye, “because they wouldn’t let me in, and I thought that if I made enough noise they might.”

  “Why wouldn’t they let you in?”

  “Because a fat fiend made a snatch at my ticket and tore it in two and I had only half a one to show them.” She relinquished the powder box regretfully and exhibited a blue scrap about two inches square. “Next time,” she remarked with grim pride, “they’ll know whom this ticket belongs to. Two policemen snatched at me, and I told them if they laid one finger on me, I’d have them up for assault and battery. So they didn’t lay a finger on me.”

  “It will probably be a life work—and an
uphill job, at that—to eliminate a marked lack of emotional control that is your distinguishing characteristic,” said the reporter meditatively. “However, did you enjoy the picnic?”

  “I adored it!” said the emotionally uncontrolled young woman beside him.

  “It was a fair picnic,” conceded the reporter. “And for a person whose height should be measured in inches rather than feet, you’re a very fair hiker. Too bad there’s only one Sunday to a trial. You have rather a knack with bacon sandwiches too. How are you with scrambled eggs?”

  “Marvellous!” said the red-headed girl frankly.

  “Though, if things keep up the way they’ve been going this morning, we’re liable to have another trial started before this one is over. The people versus Patrick Ives! I can see it coming.”

  “You don’t think he did it, do you?” inquired the red-headed girl anxiously.

  “Oh, when it comes to murder trials, I don’t think. But I’ll tell you this: If Steve Bellamy didn’t do it, he thinks that Pat Ives did. And if Pat didn’t he thinks that Sue did. And I don’t envy any of them their thoughts these days. . . . Ah, here we are again!”

  “Mr. Ives, do I understand that you were perfectly willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for two or three letters that you protest are perfectly innocent?”

  “I don’t protest anything of the kind. I think they’re damned incriminating letters—just exactly the kind of stuff that a sickening, infatuated, fatuous young fool would write. And you’re flattering me when you say that I was perfectly willing. It took me about two months to get even moderately resigned to the situation, and at that, I didn’t regard it with marked favor.”

  “Still, you were willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to keep the letters out of your wife’s hands?”

  “Five hundred thousand dollars, if I could put my hands on it, to keep pain and sorrow and ugliness out of her way.”

  “You were not convinced, then, that she would accept your story as to when the letters were written?”

  “I didn’t want her to know that they had ever been written. I’d never told her of the degree of—intimacy that had existed between Mimi and myself.”

  “Exactly. Now Miss Cordier had told us that the notes from Mrs. Bellamy had been increasing in frequency at the time of the murder. Is that true?”

  “Yes; I’d have about three in ten days.”

  “Her demands were becoming more insistent?”

  “Considerably.” Again that small grim smile, curiously unsuggestive of mirth.

  “So that it had become essential for you to do something at once if you were to prevent these letters from reaching your wife?”

  “It was necessary for me to produce the money at once, if that is what you mean.”

  “Don’t trouble to analyze my meanings, if you please. Just answer my question.”

  Patrick Ives’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Your question was ambiguous,” he commented without emphasis.

  “I asked you if it was not imperative for you to act promptly in order to prevent these letters from reaching your wife?”

  “It’s still ambiguous. As I said before, however, it was necessary to pay for the letters pretty promptly, and I brought out the money on the night of the nineteenth with that end in view.”

  “Oh!” said Lambert, in a heavily disconcerted voice. “You brought it out, did you? In what form?”

  “I got it out of my safety box at noon—eighty-five thousand in Liberty Bonds and fifteen in municipal bonds.”

  “Did anyone know that you were doing this?”

  “Naturally not.”

  “Where did you place this sum on your return, Mr. Ives?”

  “Well, I put it first in the back of the desk drawer in my study just before dinner. I intended to put it upstairs in a wall safe behind a panel in my dressing room, but while I was looking through it in the study to make sure that it was all there, Sue called to me from the hall that our guests were going, and I went out on the porch to say good-bye to them. We didn’t go upstairs before dinner, so that I didn’t get a chance to transfer them until later in the evening.”

  “No one knew they were in the house?”

  “Not so far as I know?”

  “What did you do with them subsequently?”

  “I returned them to my safety-deposit box on Monday at noon.”

  “Anyone know of that transaction?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “So you are the only person able to attest that you ever had any intention of paying that money to Mrs. Bellamy?”

  “Well, whom do you want better?” inquired Pat Ives agreeably.

  Mr. Lambert bestowed on him an enigmatic smile that was far from agreeable. “Did this sum represent a substantial portion of your capital?”

  “It certainly would be no exaggeration to say that it made a large dent in it.”

  “You say that it had taken you a long time to decide to pay it?”

  “A moderately long time—two months.”

  “Why didn’t you take it to Mrs. Bellamy that evening, Mr. Ives?”

  “I had no appointment with her. She was to let me know if she was able to get away, and at what time.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to look in the book to see whether there was a note?”

  “It most assuredly did occur to me. I went in for that specific purpose at the time that Sue called me from the hall.”

  “So that you didn’t look?”

  “Oh, yes, I did look when I came back five minutes later. There was no note.”

  “Aha!” said Mr. Lambert, and the red-headed girl, watching with horrified eyes the reckless progress of young Mr. Ives across the spread nets, made a mechanical note that never except in a book had she heard a human being say “Aha” before. “So you looked in the book, did you? And there was no note, was there?”

  “Right both times,” said Mr. Ives.

  “Now that’s very interesting,” beamed Mr. Lambert—“very interesting, indeed. But if there had been a note in that book, you’d have found it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, not being a blithering idiot, that’s a fairly safe proposition.”

  “And if you had found it, you would have gone to the rendezvous, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d certainly have made every effort to.”

  “Cancelling your poker engagement?”

  “Presumably.”

  “Taking the short cut across the fields?”

  “I don’t know how I’d have gone. It’s slightly academic, isn’t it?”

  “And in that gardener’s cottage you would have found waiting for you the unfortunate girl with those letters that it was so vitally necessary for you to obtain?”

  “Why don’t you ask him whether he would still have had the knife in his pocket?” inquired Mr. Farr gently. “And why don’t you ask him what he would have done with it? You don’t want to leave anything like that out.”

  Lambert, thus rudely checked in his exultant career, turned bulging eyes and a howl of outraged protest in the direction of Judge Carver’s unresponsive countenance.

  “Your Honor, in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, I have yet to encounter as flagrant a breach____”

  Judge Carver cut sharply across these strident objurgations: “And in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, Mr. Lambert, this Court has yet to encounter as extraordinary a conduct of an examination as you have permitted yourself, and as the Court, in the absence of protests from either the witness or the prosecution, has permitted you. Mr. Farr’s objection was not put in a proper form, but is otherwise quite legitimate. The questions that you are putting to the witness involve a purely supposititious case, and as such, the witness is entirely at liberty to refuse to answer them. You may proceed.”

  “I’ll answer it,” said Pat Ives. “If I’d found the note, I’d have gone to the cottage, given Mimi the money, got the letters, and none of us would have spent these last weeks thinking what a nice pleasant place
hell would be for a change. I wish to God I’d found it. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  It was very far indeed from what Mr. Lambert wanted to know. However, he turned a wary eye on the jury, who were contemplating soberly and not too sympathetically the bitter, insolent face of the young gentleman in the witness box. Flippancy was obviously an evil stench in their nostrils. Mr. Lambert rattled the letters still clenched in his hand reminiscently.

  “There are two or three things in these letters that I’d like to have you reconcile with the statement that they were written in 1916. First, what does it mean, Mr. Ives, when you say: ‘I keep telling myself that we’re mad—that there’s black trouble ahead of us—that I haven’t any right in the world to let you do this’—do what, Mr. Ives?”

  “Carry on the highly indiscreet affair that we were indulging in,” said Pat Ives, his white face a shade whiter. “We’d both completely lost our heads. She wasn’t willing to marry me because she was afraid that I hadn’t it in me to make good. There was a lot of ugly gossip going on, and it had upset her.”

  “Quite so,” smiled Mr. Lambert dreadfully; “oh, quite so. Now in the one that begins: ‘Mimi darling, darling, darling, it’s after four o’clock and’____”

  “Are you going through those letters again?” inquired Patrick Ives, his hands clenched on the edge of the box.

  “Just one or two little things that I’d like cleared up, and I’m sure that these gentlemen would too. It goes on: ‘Dawn— I always thought that was the worst word in the English language and here I am on my knees waiting for it, and ranting like____’ ”

  “You needn’t go on,” said Patrick Ives, “if what you’re really after is when they were written. The sun that rose at 4:30 that morning in June in 1916 would have kept me waiting exactly one hour and six minutes longer in 1926. You and Mimi and I had forgotten just one thing, Mr. Lambert—we’d forgotten that in 1916 there was no such thing as daylight saving.”

  And through the staggered silence that invaded some three hundred-odd people who had forgotten precisely the same thing, there rose a little laugh—a gay, excited, triumphant little laugh, as though somewhere a small girl had suddenly received a beautiful and unexpected present. It came from just behind Mr. Lambert’s sagging shoulders—it came from____ The startled eyes of those in the courtroom jerked in that direction, staring unbelievingly at the quiet figure, so quiet, so cool, so gravely aloof. But the red-headed girl felt idiotic tears sting swiftly beneath her lids. Under the lowered barrier of Sue Ives’s lashes there still danced the echo of that joyous truant, shameless and unafraid. It was she who had laughed, after all.