“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 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 practise. So I went after her.”