“Otto Schultz!”
A cozy white-headed cherub trotted energetically up.
“Number 10, take your place in the box!”
“Josiah Morgan!”
“Gosh, they’ll get the whole panel in under an hour!” exulted the reporter. “Look at the fine hatchet face on Morgan, will you? I bet the fellow that tries to sell Josh a lame horse will live to rue the day.”
“Charles Stuyvesant!”
Charles Stuyvesant smiled pleasantly at the sheriff, his fine iron-gray head and trim shoulders standing out sharply against his overgroomed and undergroomed comrades in the box.
“Number 12, take your place in the box! You and each of you do solemnly swear that you will well and truly try Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives, and a true verdict give according to the law and evidence, so help you God?”
Above the grave answering murmur the red-headed girl begged nervously, “What happens now?”
“I don’t know—recess, maybe—wait, the judge is addressing the jury.”
Judge Carver’s deep voice rang out impressively in the still courtroom:
“Gentlemen of the jury, you will now be given the usual admonition—that you are not to discuss this case amongst yourselves, or allow anybody else to discuss it with you, outside your own body. You are not to form or express any opinion about the merits of the controversy. You are to refrain from speaking of it to anybody, or from allowing anybody to speak to you with respect to any aspect of this case. If this occurs you will communicate it to the Court at once. You are to keep your judgment open until the defendants have had their side of the case heard, and, lastly, you are to make up your judgment solely on the law, which is the last thing that you will hear from the Court in its charge. Until then, you will not be able to render a verdict in accordance with the law, and therefore you must suspend judgment until that time. The Court is dismissed for the noon recess. We will reconvene at one o’clock.”
The red-headed girl turned eyes round as saucers on the reporter. “Don’t they come back till one?”
“They do not.”
“What do we do until then?”
“We eat. There’s a fair place on the next corner.”
The red-headed girl waved it away. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly eat—not possibly. It’s like the first time I went to the theatre; I was only seven, but I remember it perfectly. I sat spang in the middle of the front row, just like this, and I made my governess take me three quarters of an hour too early, and I sat there getting sicker and sicker from pure excitement, wondering what kind of a new world was behind that curtain—what kind of a strange, beautiful, terrible world. I sat there feeling more frightful every second, and all of a sudden the curtain went up with a jerk and I let out a shriek that made everyone in the theatre and on the stage jump three feet in the air. I feel exactly like that now.”
“Well, get hold of yourself. Shrieking isn’t popular around here. If you sit right there like a good quiet child I may bring you back an apple. I don’t promise anything, but I may.”
She was still sitting there when he came back with the apple, crunched up in her chair, staring at the jury box with eyes rounder than ever.
“Isn’t it nearly time?” She eyed the apple ungratefully.
“It is. Come on now, eat it, and I’ll show you what I’ve got in my pocket.”
“Show?”
“The jury list—names, addresses, ages, professions and all. Two of them are under thirty, three under forty, four under fifty, two under sixty, one sixty-two. Three merchants, two clerks, two farmers, an insurance man, an accountant, a radio expert, a jeweller and a banker. Not a bad list at all, if you ask me. Charles Stuyvesant’s the only one that won’t have a good clubby time of it. He’s one of the richest bankers in New York.”
“He looked it,” said the red-headed girl. “What will they do when they come back?”
“Well, if they’re good, the prosecutor’s going to make them a nice little speech.”
“Who is the prosecutor? Is he well known?”
“Mr. Daniel Farr is a promising young lad of about forty who is extremely well known in these parts, and if you asked him his own unbiased opinion of his abilities, he would undoubtedly tell you that with a bit of luck he ought to be President of these United States in the next ten years.”
“And what do you think of him?”
“Well, I think that he may be, at that, and I add in passing that I consider that no tribute to the judgment of these United States. He’s about as shrewd as they make ’em, but I’m not convinced that he’s a very good lawyer. He goes in too much for purple patches and hitting about three inches below the belt for my simple tastes. And he works on the theory that the jury is not quite all there, which may be amply justified but is a little trying for the innocent bystander. He goes in for poetry, too—oh, not Amy Lowell or Ezra Pound, but something along the lines of ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more,’ and ‘How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood’—you know the kind of thing—deep stuff.”
“Is he successful?”
“Oh, by all manner of means. Twenty years ago he was caddie master at the Rosemont Country Club; five years before that he was a caddie there. America, my child, is the land of opportunity. He’s magnificent when he gets started on the idle rich; it’s all right to be rich if you’re not idle—or well born. If you’re one of those well born society devils, you might just as well go and jump in the lake, if you ask Mr. Farr.”
“Does he still live in Rosemont?”
“No, hasn’t lived there for nineteen years; but I don’t believe that he’s forgotten one single snub or tip that he got in the good old days. Every now and then you can see him stop and turn them over in his mind.”
“What’s Mr. Lambert like?”
“Ah, there is a horse of a different color—a cart horse of a different color, if I may go so far. Mr. Dudley Lambert is a lawyer who knows everything that there is to know about wills and trusts and estates, and not another blessed thing in the world. If he’s as good now as he was when I heard him in a case two years ago, he’s terrible. I can’t wait to hear him.”
The red-headed girl looked pale. “Oh, then, why did she get him?”
“Ah, thereby hangs a tale. Mr. Lambert was a side kick of old Curtiss Thorne—handled his estate and everything—and being a crusty old bachelor from the age of thirty on, he idolized the Thorne children. Sue was his pet. She still calls him Uncle Dudley, and when the split came between Sue and her father he stuck to Sue. So I suppose that it was fairly natural that she turned to him when this thing burst; he’s always handled all her affairs, and he’s probably told her that he’s the best lawyer this side of the Rocky Mountains. He believes it.”
“How old is he?”
“Sixty-three—plenty old enough to know better. You might take everything that I say about these guys with a handful of salt; it’s only fair to inform you that they are anything but popular with the Fourth Estate. The only person that talks less in this world than Dudley Lambert is Daniel Farr; either of them would make a closed steel trap seem like a chatterbox. Stephen Bellamy’s counsel is Lambert’s junior partner and under both his thumbs; he’d be a nice chap if he didn’t have lockjaw.”
“Don’t they tell you anything at all?” inquired the red-headed girl sympathetically.
“They tell us that there’s been a murder,” replied the reporter gloomily. “And I’m telling you that it’s the only murder that ever took place in the United States of America where the press has been treated like an orphan child by everyone that knows one earthly thing about it. Not one word of the hearing before the grand jury has leaked out to anyone; we haven’t been given the name of one witness, and whatever the state’s case against Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives may be, it’s a carefully guarded secret between Mr. Daniel Farr and Mr. Daniel Farr. The defense is just as expansive. So don’t believe all you hear from me. I’d boil the lot of ’em in
oil. Here comes Ben Potts. To be continued in our next.”
The red-headed girl wasn’t listening to him; she was watching the dark figure of the prosecutor, moving leisurely forward toward the little space where twelve men were seating themselves quietly and unostentatiously in their stiff, uncomfortable chairs. Twelve men—twelve everyday, ordinary, average men____ She drew a sharp breath and turned her face away for a minute. The curtain was going up.
“May it please Your Honor”—the prosecutor’s voice was very low, but as penetrating as though he were a hand-breadth away—“may it please Your Honor and gentlemen of the jury: On the night of the nineteenth of June, 1926, a little less than four months ago, a singularly cruel and ruthless murder took place not ten miles from the spot in which we have met to try the two who are accused of perpetrating it. On that summer night, which was made for youth and love and beauty, a girl who was young and beautiful and most desperately in love came out through the starlight to meet her lover. She had no right to meet him. She was another man’s wife, he was another woman’s husband. But love had made her reckless, and she came, with a black cloak flung over her white lace dress, and silver slippers that were made for dancing on feet that were made to dance—and that had danced for the last time. She was bound for the gardener’s cottage on one of the largest and oldest estates in the neighborhood, known as Orchards. At the time of the murder, it was not occupied, and the house was for sale. She was hurrying, because she feared that she was late and that her lover might be waiting. But it was not love that waited for her in the little sitting room of the gardener’s cottage.
“If you men who sit here in judgment of her murderers think harshly of that pretty, flushed, enchanted girl hurrying through the night to her tryst, remember that that tryst was with death, not with love, and be gentle with her, even in your thoughts. She has paid more dearly for the crime of loving not wisely but too well than many of her righteous sisters.
“Next morning, at about nine o’clock, Mr. Herbert Conroy, a real-estate agent, arrived at the gardener’s cottage with a prospective client for the estate who wished to inspect the property. As he came up on the little porch he was surprised to see that the front door was slightly ajar, and thinking that sneak thieves might have broken in, he pushed it farther open and went in.
“The first floor at the right of the narrow hall was the sitting room—what was known by the people who had formerly used it as the front parlor. Mr. Conroy stepped across its threshold, and his eyes fell on a truly appalling sight. Stretched out on the floor before him was a young woman in a white lace evening gown. A table was overturned beside her. Either there had been a struggle or the table had been upset as she fell. At her feet were the fragments of a shattered lamp chimney and china shade and a brass lamp.
“The girl’s white frock was stained with blood from throat to hem; her silk stockings were clotted with it; even her silver slippers were ruinously stained. She was known to have been wearing a string of pearls, her wedding ring, and three sapphire-and-diamond rings when she left home. These jewels were missing. The girl on the floor—the girl who had been wilfully and cruelly stabbed to death—the girl whose pretty frock had been turned into a ghastly mockery, was Madeleine Bellamy, of whose murder the two defendants before you are jointly accused.
“The man on trial is Stephen Bellamy, the husband of the murdered girl. The woman who sits beside him is Susan Ives, the wife of Patrick Ives, who was the lover of Madeleine Bellamy and to whom she was going on that ill-starred night in June.
“Murder, gentlemen, is an ugly and repellent thing; but this murder, I think that you will agree, is a peculiarly ugly and repellent one. It is repellent because it is the State’s contention that it was committed by a woman of birth, breeding, and refinement, to whose every instinct the very thought should have been abhorrent—because this lady was driven to this crime by a motive singularly sordid—because at her side stood a devoted husband, changed by jealousy to a beast to whom the death of his wife had become more precious than her life. It is peculiarly repellent because we propose to show that these two, with her blood still on their hands, were cool, collected, and deliberate enough to remove the jewels that she wore from her dead body in order to make this murder seem to involve robbery as a motive.
“In order to be able fully to grasp the significance of the evidence that we propose to present to you, it is necessary that you should know something of the background against which these actors played their tragic parts. As briefly as possible, then, I will sketch it for you.
“Bellechester County—your county, gentlemen, and thank God, my county—contains as many beautiful homes and delightful communities as any county in this state—or in any other state, for that matter—and no more delightful one exists than that of Rosemont, a small village about ten miles south of this courthouse. The village itself is a flourishing little place, but the real center of attraction is the country club, about two miles from the village limits. About this center cluster some charming homes, and in one of the most charming of them, a low, rambling, remodelled farmhouse, lived Patrick Ives and his wife. Patrick Ives is a man of about thirty-two who has made a surprising place for himself as a partner in one of the most conservative and successful investment banking houses in New York. I say surprising advisedly, for everyone was greatly surprised when about seven years ago he married Susan Thorne and settled down to serious work for the first time in his life. Up till that time, with the exception of two years at the front establishing a brilliant war record, he seems to have spent most of his time perfecting his golf game and his fox-trotting abilities and devoting the small portion of time that remained at his disposal to an anaemic real-estate business. According to all reports, he was—and is—likable, charming and immensely popular.”
“Just one moment, Mr. Farr,” Judge Carver’s deep tones cut abruptly across the prosecutor’s clear, urgent voice. “Do you propose to prove all these statements?”
“Certainly, Your Honor.”
“I do not wish in any way to hamper you, but some of this seems a little far afield.”
“I can assure Your Honor that the State proposes to connect all these facts with its case.”
“Very well, you may proceed.”
“At the time of the murder Mr. Ives’s household consisted of his wife, Susan Thorne Ives; his two children, Peter and Polly, aged five and six; his mother, Mrs. Daniel Ives, to whom he has always been an unusually devoted son; a nursery governess, Miss Kathleen Page; and some six or seven servants. The only member of the household who concerns us immediately is Susan, or, as she is known to her friends, Sue Ives.
“Mrs. Ives is a most unusual woman. The youngest child and only daughter of the immensely wealthy Curtiss Thorne, she grew up on the old Thorne estate, Orchards, the idol of her father and her two brothers. Her mother died shortly after she was born. There was no luxury, no indulgence to which she was not accustomed from her earliest childhood. She was brilliantly intellectual and excelled at every type of athletics. Society, apparently, interested her very little; but there was not a trophy that she did not promptly capture at either golf or tennis. She was not particularly attractive to men, according to local gossip, in spite of being witty, accomplished, and charming—perhaps she was too witty and too accomplished for their peace of mind. At any rate, she set the entire community by the ears about seven years ago by running off with the handsome and impecunious Patrick Ives, just back from the war.
“Old Curtiss Thorne, who detested Patrick Ives and had other plans for her, cut her off without a cent—and died two years later without a cent himself, ruined by the collapse of his business during the deflation of 1921. Just what happened to Patrick and Susan Ives during the three years after the elopement, no one knows. They disappeared into the maelstrom of New York. Mrs. Daniel Ives joined them, and somehow they must have managed to keep from starving to death. Two children were born to Susan Ives, and finally Patrick persuaded this investment house to
try him out as a bond salesman. It developed that he had a positive genius for the business, and his rise has been spectacular in the extreme. He is considered to-day one of the most promising young men in the Street.
“At the end of four years, the Iveses and their babies returned to Rosemont. They bought an old farmhouse with some seven or eight acres about a mile from the club, remodelled it, landscaped it, put in a tennis court, and became the most sought-after young couple in Rosemont. On the surface, they seemed ideally happy. Two charming children, a charming home, plenty of money, congenial enough tastes—such things should go far to create a paradise, shouldn’t they? Well, down this smooth, easy, flower-strewn, and garlanded path Patrick and Susan Ives were hurrying straight toward hell. In order to understand why this was true, you must know something of two other people and their lives.
“About a mile and a half from the Ives house was another farmhouse, on the outskirts of the village, but this one had not been remodelled. It was small, shabby, in poor repair—no tennis court, no gardens, a cheap portable garage, a meager half acre of land inadequately surrounded by a rickety fence. Everything is comparative in this world. To the dwellers in tenements and slums, that house would have been a little palace. To the dweller in the stone palaces that line the Hudson, it would be a slum. To Madeleine Bellamy, whose home it was, it was undoubtedly a constant humiliation and irritation.
“Mimi Bellamy—in all likelihood no one in Rosemont had heard her called Madeleine since the day that she was christened—Mimi Bellamy was an amazingly beautiful creature. ‘Beauty’ is a much cheapened and battered word; in murder trials it is loosely applied to either the victim or the murderess if either of them happened to be under fifty and not actually deformed. I am not referring to that type of beauty. Mimi Bellamy’s beauty was of the type that in Trojan days launched a thousand ships and in these days launches a musical comedy. Hers was beauty that is a disastrous gift—not the commonplace prettiness of a small-town belle, though such, it seems, was the rôle in which fate had cast her.
The Bellamy Trial (American Mystery Classics) Page 3