“Tea?” said Esther brightly. “Or something stronger?”
“Tea, please.” Esther rang, and a maid brought in a tea tray, heels loud on the marble floor, bare for summer. An old-fashioned silver kettle swung from brackets above a flattened column of blue flame. The ample teapot was gay with the dark blue and red, white, and gold of old Worcester. But Esther was not pleased. “No toast?”
“Sure, an’ there’s mice in the bread-box again, ma’am.” The maid’s answer came in a West Irish brogue pungent as peat smoke. “If only you had let me keep the sweet little kitten that wandered in there yesterday.”
“That will do, Bridget. You know I don’t like cats.” Esther turned to Amy: “My first husband bred Persians and I had a surfeit of them then... Cream?”
“No, thank you. Just lemon.”
When Bridget had gone Amy said, “Esther, there’s one thing I must make clear to you: I really did overhear that conversation, every word about as I repeated it. But, as Curtis pointed out this morning, I cannot swear the woman’s voice was yours. So it’s only fair for me to give you the benefit of the doubt.” She paused to underline her next words: “As long as nothing else happens.”
Esther frowned. “What else could happen?”
“All sorts of things.” Amy looked at the fire. “Curtis really loves you, Esther. It would he horrible if he were disillusioned. Or if he were to — die.”
The frown had gone. Esther dropped her lids. Eyeless, her face was a mask chiseled from stone — pale and hard.
“I’ve made her angry. She doesn’t trust herself to speak,” Amy thought.
On a stand near the hall door a telephone pealed stridently. “Excuse me.” Esther walked down the room rapidly as if she were glad of the pretext to get away. “Hello?” She added, “It’s all right, Bridget,” to the maid who appeared in the doorway. Then, to the telephone: “I’ll call you back in a few minutes. Good-bye.”
From the hall door Esther looked back at Amy with guarded eyes. “I must get some information for the Horse Show Committee, but do wait. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Amy lit a cigarette. “If she hasn’t come back by the time I’ve finished this, I’ll go.”
“Miss Corbett!”
She started, and dropped her cigarette. Matthew Payne was standing in the music-room doorway. He offered her another cigarette from his own case.
“No, thank you.”
He lit one for himself. “You don’t like me, do you?”
“No.”
“That’s better than indifference.”
Amy began to draw on her gloves.
“Don’t go. Why do you dislike me so much?”
“You were in the next room listening deliberately just now. You’re the kind who does listen.”
“So do you — on telephones. And you don’t speak the truth.”
Anger flashed through Amy. “What do you mean?”
“You disliked me before you knew that I had been listening to your little talk with Esther just now. Why not admit the truth? You think I was the man you overheard on an open telephone line talking to Esther.”
“Weren’t you?” Amy looked at him directly and found his intent gaze disturbing.
But he was not disturbed. “Does my voice sound like it?” His tone was casual, almost impudent.
“Of course not. If it did I should have accused you last night. But that’s the only reason for thinking you’re not the man — your voice. If I could find some explanation for that, everything else would fit you. The only other men who have been with Esther frequently this summer are Allan and my brother Peter. I don’t believe my brother capable of violence. I’ve know Allan all my life. He hasn’t a romantic temperament like the man I overheard. Besides, I don’t think voices I’ve known so long could be distorted enough to fool me. That leaves you, a stranger. The telephone may have an especially distorting effect on your voice. I don’t know anything about your temperament, but you look like a romantic daredevil, quite capable of violence. You came here as Esther’s friend, somebody out of her past. You may have been her lover for years, before she married Curtis.”
“Then why did she marry Curtis?”
“Perhaps he could offer her some things you couldn’t.” Amy’s glance took in the dark luxury of the oak-paneled room, at its handsomest by firelight. “Now she’s got all this, she wants to keep it and have you, too. The only way is to get rid of Curtis. Even if he loves her enough to make divorce easy for her, he couldn’t give her every penny he has, so he would have to be eliminated some other way.”
“If you really believed all that you would be a fool to tell me so. I might get ideas about eliminating you. Look.” He went on hurriedly, “You’ve got the whole thing dead wrong. I wasn’t a friend of Esther’s. I was a friend of Charley Maitland, her first husband.”
“Isn’t that the same thing? You knew them both, I suppose.”
“Yes. But I liked Charley. I don’t like Esther. I’ve always suspected she killed him for his insurance.”
The silence seemed to sing in Amy’s ears. “You said your job was selling insurance,” Amy said finally.
“No, I said my job was insurance, not selling. Actually, I’m an insurance investigator. I investigated Charley Maitland’s death before the company paid his policy to his widow.”
“If they paid there can’t have been any evidence of murder!”
“No real evidence — just my hunch, and one discrepancy in Esther’s story. He was a cripple. He was killed by a fall downstairs when the brake of his wheel chair failed to work. Esther said he and she were alone in the house all that evening. But I happened to telephone about half an hour before the time Charley died and a stranger’s voice answered the telephone, a man’s voice that wasn’t Charley. That man was never traced. Esther denied, of course, that a man had been there. Since I came here I’ve been trying to decide whether he was Allan or Peter. Weren’t they both on the West Coast during the war?”
Amy nodded, speechless.
“Wasn’t Allan a poor man just out of medical school when he went into the Army? Isn’t Peter entirely dependent on his mother?”
Again Amy nodded.
“So, either one might have been a lover who could not offer Esther all the things that Curtis Gregory has given her.” Payne smiled wryly. “That shocks you, doesn’t it? You thought you had fitted us all so neatly into our little slots! Allan and Peter must be innocent — men you’ve always known and liked. But a stranger — he might do anything.”
“Not Peter!”
“That leaves Allan. Funny, I thought you liked him.”
“I do.”
“But your first cry was, ‘Not Peter.’ When a girl likes a man less than her broth—”
“Allan. I don’t believe it! If you dislike Esther why did you come here at all?”
“Because another insurance man told me that Curtis has just applied for $50,000 worth of life insurance, with Esther as beneficiary. Some criminals are psychopathic enough to repeat the pattern of a crime once it has succeeded. I wrote Esther from the West Coast and proposed myself as a guest. She couldn’t refuse an old friend of her first husband’s who had to come East anyway, and now you come up with this story of yours about a conversation heard over an open telephone line. Murchison gave me the gist of it when he came here this morning asking for confirmation of Esther’s alibi, but he didn’t go into details. Can you repeat the actual words?”
“I can try.”
Payne listened, his gaze on the fire. “There’s one odd thing. The sex of the potential victim is never mentioned. There isn’t a single ‘he’ or ‘she’.”