“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 red-headed 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!”