“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 redheaded 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 redheaded 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 favour.”
“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 goodbye 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 redheaded 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
