“She was in New York, wasn’t she?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. I’d never met her, you see.”
Lambert goggled at him above his sagging jaw. “You’d never met her?”
The courtroom throng blinked, shivered, stared wildly into one another’s eyes. No, no, that wasn’t what he had said—that couldn’t be what he had said. Or perhaps he was going mad before their eyes, sitting there with those reckless eyes dark in his white face. . . .
“No; those letters were written in 1916. I didn’t meet Sue until the spring of 1919.”
“Ha!” exhaled Lambert in a great breath of contemptuous relief. “Written in 1916, eh? And may I ask why Mrs. Bellamy was carrying them around in her bag in 1926?”
“You may ask,” Pat Ives assured him, “and what’s more, I’ll tell you. She was selling them to me.”
“Selling them to you? What for?”
“For a hundred thousand dollars,” said Patrick Ives.
Over the stupefied silence of the courtroom soared Lambert’s incredulous voice: “You expect us to believe that?”