She liked them awfully—that lanky, middle-aged man with the shrewd, sensitive face, jabbering away with the opulent-looking young creature in the sealskin cap and cloak; that Louisville reporter with her thin pretty face and little one-sided smile; that stocky youngster with the white teeth and the enormous vocabulary and the plaid necklace; that really beautiful girl who looked like an Italian opera singer and swore like a pirate, and arrived every day exactly an hour late in a flame-coloured blouse up to her chin and a little black helmet down to her eyebrows.
“Here’s your sandwich,” said the reporter—“two of ’em, just to show my heart’s in the right place. The poisonous-looking pink one is currant jelly and the healthy-looking green one is lettuce. That’s what I call a balanced ration! Fall to!”
The redheaded 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 redheaded girl sedately, keeping her eyes on the girl in the flame-coloured 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 redheaded girl meditated, while both her colour 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 racetrack touts and ham actors and men about town are made. The redheaded 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 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 practise 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
