“I wish to the Lord you’d stop asking me that,” said his witness with undisguised irritation. “It’s not my business to decide what you’ll believe or what you won’t believe. What I’m telling you is the truth.”
“It is your contention that these letters of yours, which you now claim were written in 1916, were being used for purposes of blackmail by Mrs. Bellamy?”
“You choose your own words,” said Pat Ives. “Personally, I’d chose prettier ones. Mimi undoubtedly considered that I would be getting value received in the letters. She was right. She also may have considered that I owed her something. She was right again.”
“You owed her something?”
“I owed her a great deal for not having married me,” said Pat Ives. “As she didn’t, I owe her more happiness than most men even dream of.”
Lambert made a sound that strongly suggested a snort. “Very pretty—very pretty indeed. What it comes down to, however, is that you accuse this dead girl, who is not here to defend herself, of deliberately stooping to blackmailing the man she loved for a colossal sum of money—that’s it, isn’t it?”
“Well, hardly. She didn’t love me, of course—she never loved anyone in her life but Steve. She told me that she wanted the money because she thought that he was sick; that he was working himself to death and getting nothing out of it. She was going to persuade him that an aunt in Cheyenne had left her the money, and that she wasn’t happy here, and that they ought to start out again in a place that she’d heard of in California. She had it all worked out very nicely.”
“One moment, Mr. Ives.” Judge Carver lifted an arresting hand. “As it is after twelve, the Court will at this time take its customary recess for luncheon. We will reconvene at one-fifteen.”
The reporter viewed the recessional through the doors behind the witness box with an expression of unfeigned diversion. “Watch Uncle Dudley,” he adjured the red-headed girl. “He’s not going to have any luncheon; he’s going to stay right here where nobody can get at him to give him any unwelcome instructions before he gets through with Mr. Patrick Ives. There, what did I tell you?”