“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 a round 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 that 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 redheaded 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
