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Murder at Bridge

by Anne Austin · English · Gutenberg #19403 · 521,332 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Murder at Bridge

Author: Anne Austin


        
Release date: September 28, 2006 [eBook #19403]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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MURDER AT BRIDGE

A Mystery Novel

by

ANNE AUSTIN

Author of "Murder Backstairs"







Grosset & Dunlap Publishers New York
Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1931. Reprinted March,
April, 1931; February, 1932.
Printed in the United States of America




For ARLINE AND F. HUGH HERBERT




[Illustration: Ground-floor plan of Nita Selim's house in Primrose
Meadows, showing the bedroom in which the murder was committed.]




CHAPTER ONE


Bonnie Dundee stretched out a long and rather fine pair of legs,
regarding the pattern of his dark-blue socks with distinct satisfaction;
then he rested his black head against the rich upholstery of an armchair
not at all intended for his use.

His cheerful blue eyes turned at last--but not too long a last--to the
small, upright figure seated at a typewriter desk in the corner of the
office.

"Good morning, Penny," he called out lazily, and good-humoredly waited
for the storm to break.

"Miss Crain--to _you_!" The flying fingers did not stop an instant, but
Dundee noticed with glee that the slim back stiffened even more rigidly
and that there was a decided toss of the brown bobbed head.

"But Penny is so much more like you," Dundee protested, unruffled. "And
why should I be forced always to think of you as a long-legged bird,
when even our mutual boss, District Attorney William S. Sanderson, has
the privilege of calling you what you are--a bright and shining new
penny?"

"I've known Bill Sanderson since I was born," the unseen lips informed
him truculently, even as the unseen fingers continued their fiercely
staccato typing.

"Ah! That explains a lot!" Dundee conceded handsomely. "I just wondered,
amidst all this bonhommie of 'Bill' and 'Penny,' why I--"

"I only call Mr. Sanderson 'Bill' when I forget!" the small creature
defended herself sharply. "Goodness knows I _try_ to be an efficient
private secretary! And I could be a lot more efficient if lazy strangers
didn't plump themselves down in our best visitors' chair, and try to
flirt with me. I don't flirt! Do you hear?--_I don't flirt with
anybody!_"

"Flirt with you, you funny little Penny?" Dundee's voice was a little
sad, the voice of a man who finds himself grievously misunderstood. "I
only want you to like me, if you can, and be a little nice to me, for
after all I--"

"Oh, I know!" Penny Crain jerked the finished letter from her typewriter
and spun about on her narrow-backed swivel chair to face him. "I know
you are 'Mr. James F. Dundee, Special Investigator attached to the
office of the District Attorney,' and that you have a right to drive me
crazy if you want to."

"_Crazy?_" Dundee was genuinely amazed, contrite. "I beg your pardon
most humbly, Miss Crain. I'll go back to my cell--"

"Your office is almost as big and nice as this one," Penny retorted, but
her sharp, bright brown eyes--really almost the color of a new
penny--softened until they took on a velvety depth.

Dundee did not fail to notice the softening, nor did the little
heart-shaped face, with its low widow's-peak, its straight, short nose,
and its pointed little chin, made almost childish by the deep cleft
which cut through its obvious effort to look mature and determined, fail
to please him any more acutely than on the other days of the one short
week he had been privileged at intervals to gaze upon it.

"But the files, and--other things--are in this office," he told her, his
blue eyes twinkling happily once more.

"Don't you _dare_ touch my files again!" Penny cried, springing to her
feet and running toward the wall which was completely concealed by
drawers, cabinets and shelves, filled with the records of which she was
the proud custodian. "That's why I said just now that you were driving
me crazy. Thursday you took a whole folder of correspondence out of the
letter files and put it back under the wrong initial. I had to hunt for
it for two hours, with Bill--I mean, Mr. Sanderson--gnawing his nails
with impatience. He thought I had filed it wrong, and you might have
made me lose my job."

Unconsciously her slightly husky contralto voice had sunk lower and
trembled audibly.

"I'm awfully sorry. I shan't touch your files again, Miss Crain."

"Oh--go on and call me Penny," she conceded impatiently. "What do you
want now?... And you can get anything you need out of the files if
you'll just put the folder in the bottom drawer of my desk, so that I
can file it myself--correctly!"

"Thank you, Penny," Bonnie Dundee said gravely. "I'd like awfully to
have the complete transcript of 'The State versus Maginty.' Mr.
Sanderson is determined to get a conviction where our former district
attorney most ingloriously failed. The new trial comes up in two weeks,
and he wants me to try to uncover a missing link of evidence."

"I know," she nodded, and stretched her short, slender body to pull down
the two heavy volumes he required.

Without a by-your-leave, Special Investigator Dundee resumed his
comfortable seat, and laid the first of the volumes open upon his knees.
But he did not seem to take a great deal of interest in the impanelling
of jurors in the case of one Rufus Maginty, who had won the temporary
triumph of a "hung jury" under the handling of the state's case by
District Attorney Sherwood, deposed in November's election.

Rather, his eyes followed the small, brisk figure of Miss Penelope
Crain, as it moved about the room, and his ears listened to the somehow
charming though emphatic tapping of her French heels.... French heels!
Hadn't she been wearing sensible, Cuban-heeled Oxfords all other days of
this first week of his "attachment" to the district attorney's
office?... Cunning little thing, for all her thorniness and her
sharpness with him, which he now saw that he had deserved.... Pretty,
too.... Damned pretty!... What color was that dress of hers?... Ummm,
let's see ... Chartreuse, didn't they call it? Chartreuse with big brown
dots in it. Bet it was sleeveless under that short little jacket of
golden-brown chiffon velvet.... By Jove--and Dundee lapsed into one of
the Englishisms he had picked up during his six months' work in England
as a tyro in the records department of Scotland Yard, before he had come
to Hamilton to make a humble beginning as a cub detective on the
Homicide Squad--yes, by Jove, she was all dressed up, for some reason or
other.

"Of course! Because it's Saturday and you have the afternoon off!"
Dundee finished his reverie aloud, to the astonishment of the small
person trying to reach a file drawer just a little too high for her. "I
mean," he hastened to explain, "that I've just noticed how beautiful
your costume is, and found a reason for it."

There was sudden color in the creamy face. The French heels tapped an
angry progress across the big office, and Penny sat down abruptly in her
swivel chair, reached across the immaculate desk, snatched up a morning
paper and tossed it, without a glance, in the general direction of her
tormentor.

"Page three, column two, first item," she informed him ungraciously, and
then began to search with a funny sort of desperation for more work to
consume her extraordinary energy.

Bonnie Dundee grinned indulgently as he opened _The Hamilton Morning
News_ and turned to the specified page and column.

"Ah! My old friend, the 'society editress,' in her very best style," he
commented as he began to read aloud:

"'Mrs. Juanita Selim, new and charming member, is entertaining the
Forsyte Alumnae Bridge Club this afternoon, luncheon to be served at the
exclusive new Breakaway Inn on Sheridan Road--'"

"I've read it--and I'm busy, so shut up!" Penny commanded, as she
gathered up pencils to sharpen.

Quite meekly, Bonnie Dundee subsided into silent perusal of an item he
was sure could have no possible interest for himself, in either a
personal or professional capacity, unless Penny's name was in it
somewhere:

"--after which the jolly party of young matrons and maids will adjourn
to Mrs. Selim's delightful home in the Primrose Meadows Addition." He
chuckled, and dared to interrupt the high importance of pointing-up
pencils. "I say, that's funny, isn't it?... 'Primrose Meadows
Addition'!"

"I don't think it's funny," Penny retorted coldly. "It so happens that
my mother named it, that my father went into bankruptcy trying to make a
go of it, and that 'Mrs. Selim's delightful home' was built to be our
home, and in which we were fortunate enough to live only two months
before the crash came."

"Oh!" Dundee groaned. "Penny, Penny! I'm dreadfully sorry."

"Shut up!" she ordered, but her voice was huskier than ever with tears.

Dundee's now thoroughly interested eyes raced down the absurdly written
paragraphs:

"Although not an alumna of that famous and select school for girls,
Forsyte-on-the-Hudson, graduation from which places any Hamilton girl in
the very inner circle of Hamilton society, Mrs. Selim has been closely
identified with the school, having for the past two years directed and
staged Forsyte's annual play which ushers in the Easter vacation.

"Indeed it was Mrs. Selim's remarkable success with this year's play
which caused Mrs. Peter Dunlap, long interested in a Little Theater for
Hamilton, to induce the beautiful and charming young directress to come
to Hamilton with her. Plans for the Little Theater are growing apace,
and it is safe to conjecture that not all the conversation flying thick
and fast about 'Nita's' bridge tables this afternoon will be concerned
with contract 'conventions,' scores, and finesses which failed.

"Lovely 'Nita' was elected to membership a fortnight ago, when a vacancy
occurred, due to the resignation of Miss Alice Humphrey, who has gone
abroad for a year's study in the Sorbonne. The two-table club now
includes: Mesdames Hugo Marshall, Tracey A. Miles, Peter Dunlap, John C.
Drake, Juanita Selim, and Misses Polly Beale, Janet Raymond, and
Penelope Crain."

Dundee lowered the paper and stared at the profile of District Attorney
Sanderson's private secretary. So she was a "society girl," a "Forsyte"
girl! Was that the reason, perhaps, why she had been so thorny with him,
a mere "dick"? Well, he wasn't just a dick any longer. He was a Special
Investigator ... A society girl, playing at work....

But there was more, and he read on: "As is well known, the 'girls' have
their 'hen-fight' bridge-luncheon every Saturday afternoon from the
first of October to the first of June, and a bridge-dinner, in which
mere men are graciously included, every other Wednesday evening during
the season. Mr. and Mrs. Tracey A. Miles are scheduled as next
Wednesday's host and hostess."

"I take off my hat to your 'society editress'," Dundee commented with
false cheerfulness, when he had laid the paper back upon Penny's desk.
"She makes half a column of this one item in what must be a meager
Saturday bunch of 'Society Notes,' then writes it all over again, in the
past tense, for an equally meager Monday column.... Like bridge, Miss
Crain?"

Penny snatched up the paper and crushed it into her wastebasket. "I do!
And I like my old friends, even if I am not able, financially, to keep
up with them.... If that's why you've suddenly decided to stop
being--comrades--"

"Please forgive me again, Penny," he begged gently.

"I was born into that crowd, and I still belong to it, because all of
them are my real friends, but get this into your thick Scotch-Irish
head, Mr. Dundee--I'm working because I have to, and--and because I love
it, too, and because I want to earn enough before I'm many years older
to give Mother some of the things she's missing so dreadfully
since--since my father failed and--and ran away."

"Ran away?" Dundee echoed incredulously. How could any man desert a
daughter like this!

"Yes! Ran away!" she repeated fiercely. "I might as well tell you
myself. Plenty of others will be willing to, as soon as they know you
are--my friend.... As I told you, my father"--her voice broke--"my
father went bankrupt, but before the courts knew it he had sent some
securities to a--to a _woman_ in New York, and when he--left us, he went
to her, because he left Mother a note saying so. His defrauded creditors
here have tried to--to catch him, but they haven't--yet--"

Very gently Bonnie Dundee took the small hand that was distractedly
rumpling the brown waves which swept back from the widow's-peak. It lay
fluttering in his bigger palm for a moment, then snatched itself away.

"I won't have you feeling sorry for me!" she cried angrily.

"Who owns your--the Primrose Meadows house now?--Mrs. Selim?" he asked.

"The 'lovely Nita'?" Her voice was scornful. "No. She rents it from
Judge Hugo Marshall--or is supposed to pay him rent," she added with a
trace of malice. "Hugo is an old darling, but he is fearfully weak where
pretty women are concerned. Nita Selim had known Hugo in New
York--somehow--and as soon as Lois--Mrs. Dunlap, I mean--had got Nita
off the train, the stranger in our midst hied herself to Hugo's office
and he's been tagging after her ever since.... Though most of the men in
our crowd are as bad as or worse than poor old Hugo. How Karen keeps on
looking so blissfully happy--"

"Karen?" Dundee interrupted.

"Mrs. Hugo Marshall," she explained impatiently. "Karen Plummer made her
debut a year ago this last winter--a darling of a girl. Judge
Marshall--retired judge, you know--had been proposing to the prettiest
girl in each season's crop of debs for the last twenty years, and Hugo
must have been the most nonplussed 'perennial bachelor' who ever led a
grand march when Karen snapped him up.... Loved him--actually! And it
seems to have worked out marvelously.... A baby boy three months old,"
she concluded in her laconic style. Then, ashamed; "I don't know why I'm
gossiping like this!"

"Because you can't find another blessed scrap of work to do, you little
efficiency fiend," Dundee laughed, "Come on! Gossip some more. My
Maginty case will wait till afternoon, to be mulled over while you're
losing your hard-earned salary at bridge with rich women."

"We don't play for high stakes," she corrected him. "Just a twentieth of
a cent a point, though contract can run into money even at that. The
winnings all go to the Forsyte Scholarship Fund. On Wednesday evenings
the crowd plays for higher stakes--a tenth--and winners keepers.
Therefore I can't afford to go, unless I sink so low as to let my escort
pay my losses--which I sometimes do," she confessed, her brown head low
for a moment.

"Is this Mrs. Peter Dunlap a deep-bosomed club woman, who starts
Movements?" he asked, more to bring her out of her depression than
anything else. "Bigger and Better Babies Movements, and Homes for Fallen
Girls, and Little Theater Movements?"

The brown head flung itself up sharply, and the brown eyes hardened into
bright pennies again. "Lois Dunlap is the sweetest, finest, most
_comfortable_ woman in Hamilton, and I adore her--as does everyone else,
Peter Dunlap hardly more than the rest of us. She _is_ interested in a
Little Theater for Hamilton, but she won't manage it. That's why she got
hold of Nita Selim. Lois will simply put up barrels of money, without
missing them, and give a grand job to a little Broadway gold-digger.
Funny thing is, she really delights in Nita. Thinks she's sweet and has
never had a real chance."

"And what do you think?" Dundee asked softly.

"Oh--I suppose I'm a cat, but I can see through her so clearly. Not that
she's bad; she's simply an opportunist. She's awfully sweet and
deferential and 'frank' with women, but with men--well, she simply tucks
her head so that her shoulder-length black curls fall forward
enchantingly, gives them one wistful smile out of her big eyes that are
like black pansies and--the clink of slave chains!... Now go on and
think I'm catty, which I suppose I am!"

Bonnie Dundee grinned at her reassuringly. Not for him to explain that
practically all women and many men found themselves "gossiping" when he
led them on adroitly, for reasons of his own. Which of course helped
make him the excellent detective he was.

"So all the men in your crowd have fallen for Nita Selim, have they?"

"Practically all, in varying degrees, except Peter Dunlap, who has never
looked at another woman since he was lucky enough to get Lois, and Clive
Hammond, who's engaged to Polly Beale," Penny answered reluctantly, her
color high.

"Including _your_ young man?"

"I haven't a 'young man,' in the sense of being engaged," Penny
retorted, then added honestly: "I _have_ been letting Ralph
Hammond--that's Clive's brother, you know--take me about a good
deal.... Ralph and Clive have plenty of money," she defended herself
hastily. "They are architects, Clive being the head of the firm and
Ralph, who hasn't been out of college so very long, a junior partner.
It was the Hammond firm that drew up the plans for Dad's--I mean, my
father's--Primrose Meadows Addition houses. He had our house built as a
sort of show-place, you know, so that prospective builders out there
could see how artistic a home could be put up for a moderate sum of
money. But he didn't quite finish even that--left half the gabled top
story unfinished, and Nita has been teasing Hugo to finish it up for
her. It looks," she added with a shrug, "as if Nita will get what she
wants--as usual."

"And Ralph has acquired a set of slave chains?" Dundee suggested, with
just the slightest note of sympathy.

"_And how!_" Penny assured him, grimly. "A simile as out-of-date as my
clothes are going to be if I don't get some new ones soon. Not that the
crowd minds what I wear," she added loyally. "I could dress up in a
window drape--"

"And be just as charming as you are in that grand new party dress you
have on now," Dundee finished for her gallantly.

"_New!_" Penny snorted and turned back to her desk in a futile effort to
find something left undone.

Dundee ignored the rebuff. "How many suckers--I mean, how many gentlemen
with moderate incomes actually built in Primrose Meadows?"

"You are inquisitive, aren't you?... None! Our house, or rather the one
Nita Selim is living in now, is the only house on what used to be a big
farm.... Why?"

"I was just wondering," Dundee said softly, almost absent-mindedly,
"why the 'lovely Nita' chose so isolated a place in which to live,
when Hamilton has rather a large number of 'For Rent' signs out just
now.... By the way, know what time it is now?... Twenty to one! Get your
hat on, young woman. I'm going to drive you out to Breakaway Inn."

"You're not! I'm going to take a bus. One runs from the Square right
past the Inn," she told him firmly.

And just as firmly Dundee escorted her out of the almost deserted,
rather dirty old courthouse to where his brand-new sports
roadster--bought "on time"--was awaiting them in the parking space
devoted to the motors of those who officially served Hamilton County.

"I know why you want to drive me out to the Inn," Penny told him
suddenly, as the proud owner maneuvered his car through Saturday noon
traffic. "You want to see Nita Selim. Clank! Clank! I can hear the
padlocks snapping on the slave chains right now."

"Meow!" Dundee retorted, then grinned down at her with as much comradely
affection as if they had been friends for years instead of for a couple
of hours. "Is Nita very small?" he added.

"Little enough to tuck herself under the arm of a man a lot shorter than
you," Penny assured him with curious vehemence. "And if Penelope Crain
is no mean prophet, that's exactly what she'll do within five minutes
after she meets you--just as she is wistfully inviting you to join the
other men for the cocktail party which is scheduled to break up the
bridge game at 5:30. Then, of course, you'll be urged to join us all at
the dinner-dance at the Country Club tonight."

"Will she?" Dundee pretended to be vastly intrigued, which caused the
remainder of the drive to be a rather silent one, due to Penny's
unresponsiveness.

Breakaway Inn was intensely Spanish in architecture and transplanted
shrubbery, but its stucco walls were of a rather more violent raspberry
color than is considered quite esthetic in Spain or Mexico.

"There's Lois Dunlap's car just driving up," Penny cried, her face
softening with the adoration she had freely professed for her friend.
But it clouded again almost instantly. "And Nita Selim. I suppose Nita
was a little ashamed to drive up in her own Ford coupe."

As Dundee helped his new friend to alight his eyes were upon the two
women being assisted by a uniformed chauffeur from Lois Dunlap's
limousine.

In a moment the four were a laughing, exclamatory group.

"Oh, what a tall, grand man you've got yourself, Penny darling!" the
tiny, beautiful creature who could only be Mrs. Selim cried out happily.
"_May_ I meet him?"

"I shouldn't let you," Penny answered frankly, "but I will.... Mrs.
Selim, Mr. Dundee.... And Mrs. Dunlap, Mr. Dundee.... How are you, Lois?
And Peter and the brats?"

"All well, Penny. Petey's off on a week-end fishing trip, and not one of
the brats has measles, scarlet fever or hay fever, thank God," Dundee
heard Mrs. Dunlap say in the comfortable, affectionate voice that went
with her comfortable, pleasant face and body.... Nice woman!

But his eyes were of necessity upon Nita Selim, for that miniature Venus
was, as Penny had predicted, almost tucked under his arm by this time,
her black-pansy eyes wide and wistful, her soft black curls falling
forward as she coaxed:

"You'll come to the cocktail party at my house at 5:30, won't you, Mr.
Dundee?"

"Afraid I can't make it," Dundee smiled down at her. "I'm a busy man,
Mrs. Selim.... You see, I'm Special Investigator attached to the
District Attorney's office," he explained very deliberately.

"O-o-oh!" Nita Selim breathed. Than, step by step, she withdrew, so that
he was no longer submitted to the temptation to put his arm about her
too intriguing little body. And as she retreated, Dundee's keen eyes
noted a hardening of the black-pansy eyes, the sudden throbbing of a
pulse in her very white neck....

"No, don't mind about calling for me," Penny protested a moment later.
"Ralph has already volunteered.... Thanks awfully!"

As Dundee backed out of the driveway his last glance was for a very
small figure in a brown silk summer coat and palest yellow chiffon
frock, slowly rejoining Penelope Crain and Lois Dunlap. What the devil
had frightened her so? For she had been almost terrified.... Of course
she might be one of those silly women who shudder at the sight of a
detective, because they've smuggled in a diamond from Paris or a bottle
of Bacardi from Havana....

But long before his car made the distance back to the city Dundee had
shrugged off the riddle and was concentrating on all the facts he knew
regarding the Maginty case. It was his first real assignment from
Sanderson, and he was determined to make good.

Four hours later he was interrupted in his careful reading of the trial
of Rufus Maginty by the ringing of the telephone bell. That made four
times he had had to snap out the fact that District Attorney Sanderson
was playing some well-earned golf on the Country Club links, Dundee
reflected angrily, as he picked up the receiver.

But the call was for Dundee himself, and the voice on the other end of
the wire was Penny Crain's, although almost unrecognizable.

"Speak more slowly, Penny!" Dundee urged. "What's that again.... Good
Lord! You say that Nita Selim...."

After a minute of listening, and a promise of instant obedience, Dundee
hung up the receiver.

"My God!" he said slowly, blankly. "Of all things--_murder at bridge_!"




CHAPTER TWO


As Special Investigator Dundee drove through the city of Hamilton at a
speed of sixty miles an hour, his way being cleared by traffic policemen
warned by the shrill official siren which served him as a horn, he had
little time to think connectedly of the fact that Nita Selim had been
murdered during a bridge game in her rented home in Primrose Meadows.

Even after the broad sleekness of Sheridan Road stretched before him he
could do little more than try to realize the shock which had numbed
him.... "Lovely Nita," as the society editor of _The Morning News_ had
called her, was--_dead_! How, why, he did not know. He had asked no
details of Penny Crain.... Funny, thorny little Penny! Loyal little
Penny!

"Judge Marshall has telephoned Police Headquarters," she had told him
breathlessly over the telephone, "but I made him let me call you as soon
as he had hung up. I wanted _our_ office to be in on this right from the
first."

Beautiful, seductive Nita Selim, almost cuddling under his arm within
three minutes of meeting him--_dead_! A vision of her black-pansy eyes,
so wide and luminous and wistful as they had looked sideways and upward
to his, pleading for him to join her after-bridge cocktail party, nearly
made him crash into a lumbering furniture van. Those eyes were luminous
no longer, could never again snap the padlocks of slave chains upon any
man--as Penny had expressed it.... Dead! And she had been so warmly
alive, even as she had retreated from him at his mention of the fact
that he was attached to the office of the district attorney as a special
investigator. What had she feared then? Was her death a payment for some
recent or long-standing crime? Or had she simply been withdrawing from
contamination with a "flat-foot"?... No! She had been _afraid_--horribly
afraid of some ulterior purpose behind his innocent courtesy in driving
Penelope Crain to Breakaway Inn.

Well, speculation now was idle, he told himself, as he noted that his
speedometer had dropped from sixty to thirty in his preoccupation. He
speeded again, but was soon forced to stop and ask his way into Primrose
Meadows. The vague directions of a farmer's son lost him nearly eight
precious minutes, during which his friend, Captain Strawn of the
Homicide Squad, might be bungling things rather badly. But at last he
found the ornate pair of pillars spanned by the painted legend,
"Primrose Meadows," and drove through them into what soon became a
rutted lane. Almost a quarter of a mile from the entrance he found the
isolated house, unmistakable because of the line-up of private cars
parked before the short stretch of paved sidewalk, and the added
presence of police cars and motorcycles.

Dundee turned his own car into the driveway leading from the street
along the right side of the house toward the two-car garage in the rear.
Ahead of his roadster were two other cars, and a glance toward the open
garage showed that a Ford coupe was housed there.

As he was descending Captain Strawn's voice hailed him from an open
window of the room nearest the garage.

"Hello, Bonnie! Been expecting you.... Damnedest business you ever
saw.... There's a door from this room onto the porch. Hop up and come on
in."

Dundee obeyed. Driving in he had noted that a wide porch, upheld by
round white pillars, stretched across the front of the gabled brick
house and extended halfway along its right side, past a room which was
obviously a solarium, with its continuous windows, gay awnings,
and--visible through the glittering panes--orange-and-black wicker
furniture.

It was easy to swing himself up to the floor of the porch. Strawn flung
open the door which led into the back room, remarking with a grin:

"Don't be afraid I'm gumming up any fingerprints. Carraway has already
been over the room.... The Selim woman's bedroom," he explained. "The
room she was killed in."

"You _have_ been on the job," Dundee complimented his former chief.

"Sure!" Strawn acknowledged proudly. "Can't be too quick on our stumps
when it's one of these 'high sassiety' murders. Dr. Price will be here
any minute now, and my men have been all over the premises, basement to
attic. Of course it was an outside job--plain as the nose on your
face--and we haven't found a trace of the murderer."

Although Mrs. Selim had taken the house furnished, it was obvious that
this big bedroom of hers was not exactly as the Crain family had left
it. A little too pretty, a little too aggressively feminine, with its
chaise longue heaped with silk and lace pillows, its superfluity of big
and little lamps, its bed draped with golden-yellow taffeta, its
dressing table--

But he could not let critical eyes linger on the triple-mirrored vanity
dresser. For on the bench before it sat a tiny figure, the head bowed so
low that some of the black curls had fallen into a large open bowl of
powder. She was no longer wearing the brown silk summer coat whose open
front had given him a glimpse of pale yellow chiffon.

He saw the dress now, a low-cut, sleeveless, fluffy affair, but he
really had eyes only for the brownish-red hole on the left side of the
back of the bodice, about halfway between shoulder and waist--a waist so
small he could have spanned it with his two hands, including its band of
fuchsia velvet ribbon. There also had been a bow of fuchsia velvet
ribbon on the lace and straw hat she had swung so charmingly less than
five hours ago.

"Shot through the heart, I guess," Strawn commented. "Took a good
marksman to find her heart, shooting her through the back.... Funny
thing, too. Nobody heard the shot--leastways none of that crowd penned
up in the living room will admit they did. They'll all hang together,
and lie like sixty to keep us from finding out anything that might point
to one of _their_ precious bunch! But if a gun with a Maxim silencer
_was_ used, as it must have been if that whole crew ain't lying, the
gunman musta been _good_, because you can't sight with a Maxim screwed
onto a rod, you know."

"Have your men found the gun?" Dundee asked.

"Of course not, or I'd know whether it had a Maxim on it or not," Strawn
retorted. "My theory is," he added impressively, "that somebody with a
grudge against this dame hired a gunman to hang around till he got her
dead to rights, then--plop!" and he imitated the soft, thudding sound
made by the discharge of a bullet from a gun equipped with a silencer.

"Doesn't it seem rather strange that a professional gunman should have
chosen such a time--with men arriving in cars, and the house full of
women who might wander into this room at any minute--to bump off his
victim?" Dundee asked.

"Well, there ain't no other explanation," Captain Strawn contended.
"Outside of the fact that my men have gone over the whole house and
grounds without finding the gun, I've got other evidence it was an
outside job.... Look!"

Dundee followed the Chief of the Homicide Squad to one of the two
windows that looked out upon the driveway. Both were open, since the May
day was exceptionally warm, even for the Middle West. The unscreened
window from which he obediently leaned was almost directly in line with
the vanity dressing-table across the room.

"Look! See how them vines have been torn," Strawn directed, pointing to
a rambler rose which hugged the outside frame of the window. "And look
hard enough at the flower bed down below and you'll see his
footprints.... Of course we've measured them and Cain, as you see, is
guarding them till my man comes to make plaster casts of them.... Yes,
sir, he hoisted himself up to the window ledge, aimed as best he could,
then slipped down and beat it across the meadow."

"Then," Dundee began slowly, "I wonder why Mrs. Selim didn't see that
figure crouched in the window, since she must have been powdering her
face and looking into the middle of the three mirrors--the one which
reflects this very window?"

"How do you know she was powdering her face, not looking for something
in a drawer?" Strawn demanded truculently.

"For three reasons," Dundee answered almost apologetically. "First: her
powder puff, as I'm sure you noticed, is still clutched in her right
hand; second: there is no drawer open, and no drawer _was_ open, unless
someone has closed it since the murder, whereas on the other hand her
powder box _is_ open; third: the left side of her face is unevenly
coated with powder, while the other is heavily but _evenly_ powdered.
Therefore I can't see why she didn't scream, or turn around when she
heard your gunman clambering up to her window, or even when he had
crouched in it. I don't see how she could _help_ seeing him!"

"Well--what do _you_ think?" Strawn asked sourly, after he had tested
the visibility of the window from the dressing-table mirror.

"I'm afraid, Captain Strawn, that there are only two explanations
possible. The first, of course, is that Nita Selim was quite deaf or
very nearsighted. I happen to know from having met her today--"

"_You_ met her today?" Strawn interrupted incredulously.

Dundee explained briefly, then went on: "As I was saying I have good
reason to know she was not deaf, but I can't say as to her being
nearsighted, except that it is my observation that people who are
extremely nearsighted do not have very wide eyes and no creases between
the brows. I am fairly sure she did not wear glasses at all, because
glasses worn even a few hours a day leave a mark across the nose or show
pinched red spots on each side of the bridge of the nose."

"You must have had a good hard look at her," Strawn gibed, his grey eyes
twinkling, and his harsh, thin-lipped mouth pulling down at one corner
in what he thought was a genial smile.

"I did," Dundee retorted. "Well, conceding that she was neither deaf nor
half-blind, she would necessarily have heard and seen her assailant
before he shot her."

"What's the other explanation?" Strawn was becoming impatient.

"That the person who killed her was so well known to her, and his--or
her--presence in this room so natural a thing that she paid no attention
to his or her movements and was concentrating on the job of powdering
her very pretty face."

"You mean--one of that gang of society folks in there?" and Strawn
jerked a thumb toward the left side of the house.

"Very probably," Dundee agreed.

"But where's the gun?" Strawn argued. "I tell you my men--"

"This was a premeditated murder, of course," Dundee interrupted. "The
Maxim silencer--unless they are all lying about not hearing a
shot--proves that. Silencers are damned hard to get hold of, but people
with plenty of money can manage most things. And since the murder was
premeditated, it is better to count on the fact that the murderer--or
murderess--had planned a pretty safe hiding place for the gun and the
silencer.... Oh, not necessarily in the house or even near the house,"
he hastened to assure Strawn, who was trying to break in.... "By the
way, how long after Mrs. Selim was killed was her death discovered? Or
do you know?"

"I haven't been able to get much out of that bunch in there--not even
out of Penelope Crain, who ought to be willing to help, seeing as how
she works for the district attorney. But I guess she's waiting to spill
it all to you, if she knows anything, so you and Sanderson will get all
the credit."

"Now, look here, chief," Dundee protested, laying a hand on Strawn's
shoulder as he reverted to the name by which he had addressed the head
of the Homicide Squad for nearly a year, "we're going to be friends,
aren't we? Same as always? We know pretty well how to work together,
don't we? No use to begin pulling against each other."

"Guess so," Strawn growled, but he was obviously pleased and relieved.
"Maybe you'd better have a crack at that crowd yourself. I hear Doc
Price's car--always has a bum spark plug. I'll stick around with him
until he gets going good on his job; then, if you'll excuse me for
butting in, I'll join your party in the living room.... And good luck to
you, Bonnie!"

Dundee took the door he knew must lead into the central hall, but found
himself in an enclosed section of it--a small foyer between the main
hall and Nita Selim's bedroom. There was room for a telephone table and
its chair, as well as for a small sofa, large enough for two to sit upon
comfortably. He paused to open the door across from the telephone table
and found that it opened into a closet, whose hangers and hat forms now
held the outdoor clothing belonging to Nita's guests. Nice clothes--the
smart but unostentatious hats and coats of moneyed people of good taste,
he observed a little enviously, before he opened the door which led into
the main hall which bisected the main floor of the house until it
reached Nita's room.

Another door in the section behind the staircase leading to the gabled
second story next claimed his attention. Opening it, he discovered a
beautifully fitted guests' lavatory. There was even a fully appointed
dressing-table for women's use, so that none of her guests had had the
slightest excuse to invade the privacy of Mrs. Selim's bedroom and bath,
unless specifically invited to do so. Rather a well planned house, this,
Dundee concluded, as he closed the door upon the green porcelain
fixtures, and walked slowly toward the wide archway that led from the
hall into a large living room.

He had a curious reluctance to intrude upon that assembled and guarded
company of Hamilton's "real society." They were all Penny's friends, and
Penny was _his_ friend....

But his first swift, all-seeing glance about the room reassured him. No
hysterics here. These people brought race and breeding even into the
presence of death. Whatever emotions had torn them when Nita Selim's
body was discovered were almost unguessable now. A stout, short woman of
about thirty was tapping a foot nervously, as she talked to the man who
was bending over her chair. John C. Drake, that was. Dundee had met him,
knew him to be a vice president of the Hamilton National Bank, in charge
of the trust department. Penelope Crain was occupying half of a
"love-seat" with Lois Dunlap, the hands of the girl and of the woman
clinging together for mutual comfort. That tall, thin, oldish man, with
the waxed grey mustache, must be Judge Hugo Marshall, and the pretty
girl leaning trustingly against his shoulder must be his wife--Karen
Marshall, who had jumped at her first proposal during her first season.

"Yes, well-bred people," he concluded, as his eyes swept on, and then
stopped, a little bewildered. Who was _that_ man? He didn't belong
somehow, and his hands trembled visibly as he tried to light a
cigarette. Leaning--not nonchalantly, but actually for support--against
the brocaded coral silk drapes of a pair of wide, long windows set in
the east wall. Suddenly Dundee had it.... Broadway! This was no
Hamiltonian, no comfortably rich and socially secure Middle-westerner.
Broadway in every line of his too-well-tailored clothes, in the polished
smoothness of his dark hair....

"Why, it's Mr. Dundee at last!" Penny cried, turning in the S-shaped
seat before he had time to finish his mental inventory of the room's
occupants.

She jumped to her feet and threaded a swift way over Oriental rugs and
between the two bridge tables, still occupying the center of the big
room, still cluttered with score pads, tally cards, and playing cards.

"I've been wondering if you had stopped to have dinner first," she
taunted him. Then, laying a hand on his arm, she faced the living room
eagerly. "This is Mr. Dundee, folks--special investigator attached to
the district attorney's office, and a grand detective. He solved the
Hogarth murder case, you know, and the Hillcrest murder. And he's _my_
friend, so I want you all to trust him--and tell him things without
being afraid of him."

Then, rather ceremoniously but swiftly, she presented her friends--Judge
and Mrs. Hugo Marshall, Mr. and Mrs. Tracey Miles, Mr. and Mrs. John C.
Drake, Mrs. Dunlap, Janet Raymond, Polly Beale, Clive Hammond, and--

At that point Penny hesitated, then rather stiffly included the
"Broadway" man, as "Mr. Dexter Sprague--of New York."

"Thank you, Miss Crain," Dundee said. "Now will you please tell me, if
you know, whether all those invited to both the bridge party and the
cocktail party are here?"

Penny's face flamed. "Ralph Hammond, Clive's brother, hasn't come
yet.... I--I rather imagine I've been 'stood up,'" she confessed, with a
faint attempt at gayety.

And Ralph Hammond was the man who had once belonged rather exclusively
to Penny, and who, according to her own confession, had succumbed most
completely to Nita Selim's charms!--Dundee noted, filing the reflection
for further reference.

"Please, Mr. Dundee, won't you detain us as short a time as possible?"
Lois Dunlap asked, as she advanced toward him. "Mr. Dunlap is away on a
fishing trip, and I don't like to leave my three youngsters too long.
They are really too much of a handful for the governess, over a period
of hours."

"I shall detain all of you no longer than is absolutely necessary,"
Dundee told her gently, "but I am afraid I must warn you that I can't
let you go home very soon--unless one or more of you has something of
vital importance to tell--something which will clear up or materially
help to clear up this bad business."

He paused a long half-minute, then asked curtly: "I am to conclude that
no one has anything at all to volunteer?"

There was no answer, other than a barely perceptible drawing together in
self-defence of the minds and hearts of those who had been friends for
so long.

"Very well," Dundee conceded abruptly. "Then I must put all of you
through a routine examination, since every one of you is, of course, a
possible suspect."




CHAPTER THREE


"Good-by, dinner!" groaned the plump, blond little man who had been
introduced as Tracey Miles, as he sorrowfully patted his rather
prominent stomach.

"Don't worry, darling," begged the dark, neurotic-looking woman who was
Flora Miles, his wife. "I'm sure Mr. Dundee will ask Lydia--poor Nita's
maid, you know--" she explained in an aside to Dundee, "--to prepare a
light supper for us if he really needs to detain us long--which I am
sure he won't."

"How can you think of food now?" Polly Beale, the tall, sturdy girl with
an almost masculine bob and a quite masculine tweed suit, demanded
brusquely. Her voice had an unfeminine lack of modulation, but when
Dundee saw her glance toward Clive Hammond he realized that she was
wholly feminine where he was concerned, at least.

"Of course, we are all _dreadfully_ cut up over poor Nita's--death,"
gasped a rather pretty girl, whose most distinguishing feature was her
crop of crinkly, light-red hair.

"I assume that to be true, Miss Raymond," Dundee answered. "But we must
lose no more time getting at the facts. Just when was Mrs. Selim
murdered?"

At the brutal use of the word a shudder rippled over the small crowd.
Dexter Sprague, "of New York," dropped his lighted cigarette where it
would have burned a hole in a fine Persian rug, if Sergeant Turner, on
guard over the room for Captain Strawn, had not slouched from his corner
to plant a big foot upon it.

"We don't know exactly when it happened," Penny volunteered. "We were
playing bridge, the last hand of the last rubber, because the men were
arriving for cocktails, when Nita became dummy and went to her bedroom
to--"

"To make herself 'pretty-pretty' for the men," Mrs. Drake mimicked;
then, realizing the possible effect of her cattiness on Dundee, she
defended herself volubly: "Of course I _liked_ Nita, but she _did_ think
so terribly much about her effect on men--and all that, and was always
fixing her make-up, and besides--you _can't_ suspect me, because I was
playing against Karen and Nita--"

"Thank you, Mrs. Drake," Dundee cut in. "Does anyone know the exact time
Mrs. Selim left the room, when she became dummy?"

"I can tell you, because I had just arrived--the first of the men to get
here," Tracey Miles volunteered, obviously glad of the chance to talk--a
characteristic of the man, Dundee decided. "I looked at my watch just
after I stepped out of my car, because I like to be on time to the dot,
and Nita--Mrs. Selim--had said 5:30.... Well, it was exactly 5:25, so I
had five minutes to spare."

"Yes?" Dundee speeded him up impatiently.

"Well, I came right into the hall, and hung my hat in the closet out
there, and then came in here. It must have been about 5:27 by that
time," he explained, with the meticulousness of a man on the witness
stand. "I shouted, 'Hello, everybody! How's tricks?...' That's a joke,
you know. 'How's tricks?'--meaning tricks in bridge--"

"Yes, yes," Dundee admitted, frowning, but the rest of the company
exchanged indulgent smiles, and Flora Miles patted her husband's hand
fondly.

"Well, Nita jumped up from the bridge table--that one right there,"
Miles pointed to the table nearer the arched doorway, "and she said,
'Good heavens! Is it half past five already? I've got to run and make
myself 'pretty-pretty' for just such great big men as you, Tracey--"

"'Tracey, darling'!" Judge Marshall corrected, with a chuckle that
sounded odd in the tensely silent room.

Tracey Miles flushed a salmon pink, and his wife's fingers clutched at
his hand warningly. "Oh, Nita called everybody 'darling,' and didn't
mean anything by it, I guess," he explained uneasily. "Just one of her
cute little ways--. Well, anyway, she came up to me and straightened
my necktie--another one of her funny little ways--and said, 'Tracey,
my _own_ lamb, won't you shake up the cocktails for poor little
Nita?...' You know, a sort of way she had of coaxing people--"

"Yes, I know," Dundee agreed, with a trace of a grin. "Go on as rapidly
as you can, please."

"I thought you wanted to know everything!" Miles was a little peevish;
he had evidently been enjoying himself. "Of course I said I'd make the
cocktails--she said everything was ready on the sideboard. That's the
dining room right behind this room," he explained unnecessarily, since
the French doors were open. "Well, Nita blew me a kiss from her
fingertips, and ran out of the room.... Now, let's see," he ruminated,
creasing his sunburned forehead beneath his carefully combed blond hair,
"that must have been at exactly 5:30 that she left the room. I went on
into the dining room, and Lois--I mean, Mrs. Dunlap came with me,
because she said she was simply dying for a caviar sandwich and a nip
of--of--"

"Of Scotch, Tracey," Lois Dunlap cut in, grinning. "I'm sure Mr. Dundee
won't think I'm a confirmed tippler, so you might as well tell the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.... Poor Tracey has a
deadly fear that we are all going to lose the last shred of our
reputations in this deplorable affair, Mr. Dundee," she added in a
rather shaky version of the comfortable, rich voice he had heard earlier
in the day.

"I'm not going to pry into cellars," Dundee assured her in the same
spirit. "What else, Mr. Miles?"

"Nothing much," Tracey Miles confessed, with apparent regret. "I was
still mixing--no, I'd begun to shake the cocktails--when I heard a
scream--"

"Whose scream?" Dundee demanded, looking about the room, and dismissing
Miles thankfully.

"It was--I," Judge Marshall's fair-haired, blue-eyed little bride
volunteered in a voice that threatened to rise to hysteria.

"Tell me all about it," Dundee urged gently.

"Yes, sir," she quavered, while her husband's arm encircled her
shoulders in courtly fashion. "As Tracey told you, Nita was dummy, and I
was declarer--that is, I got the bid, and played the hand. It--it was
quite an exciting end for me to the afternoon of bridge, for I'm not
usually awfully lucky, so when Penny had figured up the score, because
I'm not good at arithmetic, and I knew Nita and I had rolled up an
awfully big score, I jumped up and ran into her room to tell her the
good news, because she hadn't come back. And--and--there she was--all
bowed over her dressing-table, and she--she was--was--"

"She was dead when you reached her?" Dundee assisted her.

"Yes," Karen Marshall answered faintly, and turned to hide her face
against her elderly husband's breast.

Dundee's swift eyes took in the varying degrees of whiteness and sick
horror that claimed every face in the room as surely as if all present
had not already heard Karen tell her story to Captain Strawn. Tracey
Miles looked as if he would have no immediate craving for his dinner,
and Judge Marshall's fine, thin face no longer looked so
"well-preserved" as he prided himself that it did. As for Dexter
Sprague, he almost folded up against the coral brocade draperies. It was
the women, oddly enough, who kept the better control over their
emotions.

"Of course you all rushed in when Mrs. Marshall screamed?" he asked
casually.

Twelve heads nodded mutely.

"Did any or all of you touch the body, or things in the room?"

"Mr. Sprague touched her hair, and--and lifted one of her hands," Penny
contributed quietly. "But you know how it must have been! We can't any
of us tell _exactly_ every move we made, but there was some rushing
about. The men, mostly, looking for--for whoever did it--"

"Mrs. Marshall, did you see anyone--_anyone at all_--in or near that
room when you entered it?"

The white-faced young wife lifted her head, and looked at him dazedly
with drowned blue eyes. "There wasn't anyone in--in that room, I know,"
she faltered. "It felt horrible--being in there with--with _her_--all
alone--"

"But near the room? In the main hall or in the little foyer where the
telephone is?" Dundee persisted.

"I--don't think so ... I can't--remember--seeing _anyone_.... Oh, Hugo!"
and again she crouched against her husband, who soothed her with
trembling hands that looked incongruously old against her childish fair
hair and face.

"Where were the rest of you--_exactly_ where, I mean?" Dundee demanded,
conscious that Captain Strawn had entered the room and was standing
slightly behind him.

There was such a babel of answers, given and then hastily corrected,
that Dundee broke in suddenly:

"I want a connected story of 'the events leading up to the tragedy.' And
I want someone to tell it who hasn't lost his--or her--head at all." He
looked about the company, as if speculatively, but his mind was already
made up. "Miss Crain, will you tell the story, beginning with the moment
I left you and Mrs. Dunlap and Mrs. Selim today?"

Penny nodded miserably and was about to begin.

"Just a minute, before you begin, Miss Crain," Dundee requested. "I'd
like to make notes on your story," and he drew from a coat pocket a
shorthand book, hastily filched from Penny's own tidy desk. "Yes," he
answered the girl's frank stare of amazement, "I can write shorthand--of
a sort, and pretty fast, at that, though no other human being, I am
afraid, could read it but myself.... As for you folks," he addressed the
uneasy, silent group of men and women in dead Nita's living room, "I
shall ask you not to interrupt Miss Crain unless you are very sure that
her memory is at fault."

Penelope Crain was about to begin for the second time, when again Dundee
interrupted. "Another half second, please."

On the first sheet of the new shorthand notebook Dundee scribbled:
"Suggest you try to locate Ralph Hammond immediately. Very much in love
with Mrs. Selim. Invited to cocktail party; did not show up." Tearing
the sheet from the notebook, he passed it to Captain Strawn, who read
it, frowning, and then nodded.

"Doc Price has done all he can here," Strawn whispered huskily. "Wants
to know if you'd like to speak to him before he takes the body to the
morgue."

"Certainly," Dundee answered as he grinned apologetically to the girl
who was waiting, white-faced but patiently, to tell the story of the
afternoon.

Quickly suppressed shudders and low exclamations of horror followed him
and the chief of the Homicide Squad from the room.

"Well, Bonnie boy, we meet again, for the usual reason," old Dr. Price
greeted the district attorney's new special investigator. "Another
shocking affair--that.... A nice clean wound, one of the neatest jobs I
ever saw. Shot entered the back, and penetrated the heart.... _Very_
nicely calculated. If the bullet had struck a quarter of an inch higher,
it would have been deflected by the--"

"But the _path_ of the bullet, doctor!" Dundee broke in. "Have you made
any calculations as to the place and distance at which the shot was
fired?"

"Roughly speaking--yes," the coroner answered. "The gun was fired at a
distance, probably, of ten or fifteen feet--perhaps closer, but I don't
think so," he amended meticulously. "As for the path of the bullet, I
have fixed it, judging from the position of the body, which I am assured
had not been moved before my arrival, as coming from a point somewhere
along a straight line drawn from the wound, with the body upright, of
course, to--here!"

Dundee and Strawn followed the brisk little white-haired old doctor
across the bedroom to a window opening upon the drive--the one nearest
the door leading out upon the porch.

"I've marked the end of the line here," Dr. Price went on, pointing to a
faint pencil mark made upon the window frame--the pale-green strip of
woodwork near the chaise longue, which was set between the two windows.

"I told you she was shot from the window!" Strawn reminded Dundee
triumphantly. "You see, doc, it's my theory that the murderer climbed up
to the sill of this window, which was open as it is now, crouched in it,
and shot her while she sat there powdering her face."

"Not necessarily, Captain, not necessarily," Dr. Price deprecated. "I
merely say that this pencil mark indicated the _end_ of the line showing
the path of the bullet. Certainly she was not shot _through_ the frame
of the window, but she might have been shot by anyone stationed just in
front of it, or anywhere along the line, up to, say, within ten feet of
the woman.... Now, if that's all, Captain, I'll be getting this corpse
into the morgue for an autopsy. And I'll send you both a copy of my
findings."

"Just a minute, Dr. Price," Dundee detained him. "How old would you say
Mrs. Selim was?"

The little doctor pursed his wrinkled lips and considered for a moment,
eyeing the body stretched upon the chaise longue speculatively.

"We-ell, between thirty and thirty-four years old," he answered finally.
"Of course, you understand that that estimate is unofficial, and must
remain so, until I have completed the autopsy--"

Dundee stared down at the upturned face of the dead woman with startled
incredulity. Between thirty and thirty-four years old! That tiny,
lovely--But she was not quite so lovely in death, in spite of the
serenity it had brought to those once-vivacious features. Peering more
closely, he could see--without those luminous, wide eyes to center his
attention--numerous fine lines on the waxen face, the slackness of a
little pouch of soft flesh beneath her round chin, an occasional white
hair among the shoulder-length dark curls.... Dundee sighed. How easy it
was for a beautiful woman to deceive men with a pair of wide, velvety
black eyes! But he'd bet the women had not been quite so thoroughly
taken in by her cuddly childishness, her odd mixture of demureness and
youthful impudence!

Back in the living room, whose occupants stopped whispering and grew
taut with suspense, Dundee seated himself at a little red-lacquer table,
notebook spread, while Strawn settled himself heavily in the nearest
overstuffed armchair.

"Now, Miss Crain, I am quite ready, if you will forgive me for having
kept you waiting."

In a very quiet voice--slightly husky, as always--Penny began her story:

"I think it lacked two or three minutes of one o'clock when you drove
away. Nita, Lois--do you mind if I use the names I am most accustomed
to?... Thank you!--and I went immediately into the lounge of Breakaway
Inn, where we found Carolyn Drake and Flora Miles waiting for us. Nita
soon left us to see about the arrangement of the table, and while she
was away the rest of the girls arrived."

"Except--" a woman's voice broke in.

"I was going to say all eight of us were ready for lunch except Polly
Beale. She hadn't come," Penny went on, her husky voice a little sharp
with annoyance. "When Nita came to ask us into the private dining room,
one of the Inn's employees came and told her there was a call for her
and showed her to the private booth in the lounge. In a minute Nita
returned and told us that Polly wasn't coming to the luncheon, but would
join us later for bridge here."

"Why don't you tell him how funny Nita acted?" Janet Raymond prompted.

Penny flushed, but she accepted the prompting. "I think any of us might
have been a little--annoyed," she said steadily, as if striving to be
utterly truthful. "Nita told us--" she turned to Dundee, whose pencil
was flying, "that Polly had made no excuse at all; in fact, she quoted
Polly exactly: 'Sorry, Nita. Can't make it for lunch. I'll show up at
your place at 2:30 for bridge.'"

"Nita couldn't bear the least hint of being slighted," Janet Raymond
explained, with a malicious gleam in her pale blue eyes. "If it hadn't
been for Lois and Hugo--Judge Marshall, I mean--Nita Selim would never
have been included in any of our affairs--and she _knew_ it! The Dunlaps
can do anything they please, because they're--"

"Please, Janet!" Lois Dunlap cut in, her usually placid voice becoming
quite sharp. "You must know by this time that I make friends wherever I
please, and that I liked--yes, I was _extremely_ fond of poor little
Nita. In fact, I am forced to believe that, of all the women she met in
this town, I was her only real friend."

There was a flush of anger on her lovably plain face as her grey eyes
challenged first one and then another of the "Forsyte girls." One or two
looked a little ashamed, but there was not a single voice to contradict
Lois Dunlap's flat assertion.

"Will you please go on, Pen--Miss Crain?" Dundee urged, but he had
missed nothing of the little by-play.

"I wish you would call me Penny so I'd feel more like a person than a
witness," Penny retorted thornily. "Where was I?... Oh, yes! Nita cooled
right off when Lois reminded her that Polly was always abrupt like
that--" and here Penny paused to grin apologetically at the girl with
the masculine-looking haircut, "and then we all went into the private
dining room, where Nita had ordered a perfectly gorgeous lunch, with a
heavenly centerpiece of green-striped yellow orchids--Well, I don't
suppose you're interested in what we ate and things like that--" she
hesitated.

"Was there anything unusual in the conversation--anything like a
quarrel?" Dundee prompted.

"Oh, no!" Penny protested. "Nothing happened out of the ordinary at
all--No, wait! Nita received a letter by messenger--or rather a note,
when we were about half through luncheon--"

There was a low, strangled-in-the-throat cry from someone. Who had
uttered it Dundee could not be sure, since his eyes had been on his
notebook. But what had really interrupted Penny Crain was a crash.




CHAPTER FOUR


"Pardon! Awfully sorry," Clive Hammond muttered, as he bent to pick up
the fragments of a colored pottery ashtray which he and his fiancée,
Polly Beale, had been sharing.

"Don't worry--about picking it up," Polly commanded in her brusque
voice, but Dundee, listening acutely, was sure of a very slight pause
between the two parts of her sentence.

He glanced at the couple--the tall, masculine-looking girl, lounging
deep in an armchair, Clive Hammond, rather unusually good-looking with
his dark-red hair, brown eyes, and a face and body as compactly and
symmetrically designed as one of the buildings which had been pointed
out to Dundee as the product of the young architect's genius, now
resuming his seat upon the arm of the chair. His chief concern seemed
to be for another ashtray, which Sergeant Turner, with a grin,
produced from one of the many little tables with which the room was
provided.... Rather strange that those two should be engaged, Dundee
mused....

"Go on, Miss Crain," the detective urged, as if he were impatient of the
delay. "About that note or letter--"

"It was in a blue-grey envelope, with printing or engraving in the upper
left-hand corner," Penny went on, half closing her eyes to recapture the
scene in its entirety. "Like business firms use," she amended. "I
couldn't help seeing, since I sat so near Nita. She seemed startled--or,
well maybe I'd better say surprised and a little sore, but she tore it
open and read it at a glance almost, which is why I say it must have
been only a note. But while she was reading it she frowned, then smiled,
as if something had amused or--or--"

"She smiled like any woman reading a love letter," Carolyn Drake
interrupted positively. "I myself was sure that one of her _many_
admirers had broken an engagement, but had signed himself, 'With all my
love, darling--your own So-and-so!'"

Dundee wondered if even Carolyn Drake's husband, the carefully groomed
and dignified John C. Drake, bank vice-president, had ever sent _her_
such a note, but he did not let his pencil slow down, for Penny was
talking again:

"I think you are assuming a little too much, Carolyn.... But let that
pass. At any rate, Nita didn't say a word about the contents of the note
and naturally no one asked a question. She simply tucked it into the
pocket of her silk summer coat, which was draped over the back of her
chair, and the luncheon went on. Then we all drove over here, and found
Polly waiting in her own coupe, in the road in front of the house. She
told Nita she had rung the bell, but the maid, Lydia, didn't answer, so
she had just waited.

"Nita didn't seem surprised; said she had a key, if Lydia hadn't come
back yet.... You see," she interrupted herself to explain to Dundee,
"Nita had already told us at luncheon that 'poor, darling Lydia,' as she
called her, had had to go in to town to get an abscessed tooth
extracted, and was to wait in the dentist's office until she felt equal
to driving herself home again in Nita's coupe.... Yes, Nita had taken
her in herself," she answered the beginning of a question from Dundee.

"At what time?" Dundee queried.

"I don't know exactly, but Nita said she'd had to dash away at an
ungodly hour, so that Lydia could make her ten o'clock dentist's
appointment, and so that she herself could get a manicure and a shampoo
and have her hair dressed, so I imagine she must have left not later
than fifteen or twenty minutes to ten."

"How did Mrs. Selim get out to Breakaway Inn, if she left her own car
with the maid?"

"You saw her arrive with Lois," Penny reminded him.

"Nita had told us all about Lydia's dentist's appointment when she was
at my house for dinner Wednesday night," Lois Dunlap contributed. "I
offered to call for her anywhere she said, and take her out to Breakaway
Inn in my car today. I met her, at her suggestion, in the French hat
salon of the shop where she got her shampoo and manicure--Redmond's
department store."

"A large dinner party, Mrs. Dunlap?" Dundee asked.

"Not large at all.... Just twelve of us--the crowd here except for Mr.
Sprague, Penny and Janet."

"Who was Mrs. Selim's dinner partner?" Dundee asked.

"That's right! He _isn't_ here!" Lois Dunlap corrected herself. "Ralph
Hammond brought her and was her dinner partner."

"Thank you.... Now, Penny. You were saying the maid had not returned."

"Oh, but she had!" Penny answered impatiently. "If I'm going to be
interrupted so much--. Well, Nita rang the bell and Lydia came, tying on
her apron. Nita kissed her on the cheek that wasn't swollen, and asked
her why she hadn't let Polly in. And Lydia said she hadn't heard the
bell, because she had dropped asleep in her room in the basement--dopey
from the local anesthetic, you know," she explained to Dundee.

"I--see," Dundee acknowledged, and underlined heavily another note in
his scrawled shorthand.

"So Lydia took our hats and summer coats and put them in the hall
closet, and then followed Nita, who was calling to her, on into Nita's
bedroom. We thought she either wanted to give directions about the
makings for the cocktails and the sandwiches, or to console poor Lydia
for the awful pain she had had at the dentist's, so we didn't intrude.
We made a dive for the bridge tables, found our places, and were ready
to play when Nita joined us. Nita and Karen--"

"Just a minute, Penny.... Did any of you, then or later, until Mrs.
Marshall discovered the tragedy, go into Mrs. Selim's bedroom?"

"There was no need for us to," Penny told him. "There's a lavatory with
a dressing-table right behind the staircase. I, for one, didn't go into
Nita's room until after Karen screamed."

There was a chorus of similar denials on the part of every woman
present. At Dundee's significant pressing of the same question upon the
men, he was met with either laconic negatives or sharply indignant ones.

"All right, Penny. Go ahead, please."

"I was going to tell you how we were seated for bridge, if that
interests you," Penny said, rather tartly.

"It interests me intensely," Dundee assured her, smiling.

"Then it was this way," began Penny, thawing instantly. "Karen and Nita,
Carolyn and I were at this table," and she pointed to the table nearer
the hall. "Flora, Polly, Janet and Lois were at the other. We played at
those tables all afternoon. We simply pivoted at our own table after the
end of each rubber. When Nita became dummy--"

"Forgive me," Dundee begged, as he interrupted her again. "I'd like to
ask a question ... Mrs. Dunlap, since you were at the other table,
perhaps you will tell me what your partner and opponents were doing just
before Mrs. Selim became dummy."

Lois Dunlap pressed her fingertips into her temples, as if in an effort
to remember clearly.

"It's--rather hard to think of bridge now, Mr. Dundee," she said at
last. "But--yes, of course I remember! We had finished a rubber and had
decided there would be no time for another, since it was so near 5:30--"

"That last rubber, please, Mrs. Dunlap," Dundee suggested. "Who were
partners, and just when was it finished?"

"Flora--" Lois turned toward Mrs. Miles, who had sat with her hands
tightly locked and her great haggard dark eyes roving tensely from one
to another--"you and I were partners, weren't we?... Of course! Remember
you were dummy and I played the hand? You went out to telephone, didn't
you?... That's right! I remember clearly now! Flora said she had to
telephone the house to ask how her two babies--six and four years old,
they are, Mr. Dundee, and the rosiest dumplings--. Well, anyway, Flora
went to telephone--"

"In the little foyer between the main hall and Mrs. Selim's room?"

"Yes, of course," Lois Dunlap answered, but Dundee's eyes were upon
Flora Miles, and he saw her naturally sallow face go yellow under its
too-thick rouge. "I played the hand and made my bid, although Flora and
I had gone down 400 on the hand before," Lois continued, with a rueful
twinkle of her pleasant grey eyes. "When the score was totted up, I
found I'd won a bit after all. Our winnings go to the Forsyte Alumnae
Scholarship Fund," she explained.

"Yes, I know," Dundee nodded. "And then--?"

"Polly asked the other table how they stood, and Nita said, 'One game to
go on this rubber, provided we make it....' Karen was dealing the cards
then, and Nita was looking very happy--she'd been winning pretty
steadily, I think--"

"Pardon, Mrs. Dunlap.... How did the players at your table dispose of
themselves then--that is, immediately after you had finished playing the
last hand, and Mrs. Marshall was dealing at the other table?"

Lois screwed up her forehead. "Let me think--I know what _I_ did. I went
over to watch the game at the other table, and stayed there till
Tracey--Mr. Miles--came in for cocktails. I can't tell you exactly what
the other three did."

There was a strained silence. Dundee saw Polly Scale's hand tighten
convulsively on Clive Hammond's, saw Janet Raymond flush scarlet,
watched a muscle jerk in Flora Miles' otherwise rigid face.

Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "I am going to make what will seem an
absurd request," he said tensely. "I am going to ask you all--the women,
I mean--to take your places at the bridge tables. And then--" he paused
for an instant, his blue eyes hard: "I want to see the death hand played
exactly as it was played while Nita Selim was being murdered!"




CHAPTER FIVE


"Shame on you, Bonnie Dundee!" cried Penny Crain, her small fists
clenched belligerently. "'Death hand', indeed! You talk like a New York
tabloid! And if you don't realize that all of us have stood pretty
nearly as much as we can without having to play the hand at bridge--the
_very_ hand we played while Nita Selim was being murdered!--then you
haven't the decency and human feelings I've credited you with!"

A murmur of indignant approval accompanied her tirade and buzzed on for
a moment after she had finished, but it ceased abruptly as Dundee spoke:

"Who's conducting this investigation, Penny Crain--you or I? You will
kindly let me do it in my own fashion, and try to be content when I tell
you that, in my humble opinion, what I propose is absolutely necessary
to the solution of this case!"

Bickering--Dundee grinned to himself--exactly as if they had known each
other always, had quarreled and made up with fierce intensity for years.

"Really, Mr. Dundee," Judge Hugo Marshall began pompously, embracing his
young wife protectingly, "I must say that I agree with Miss Crain. This
is an outrage, sir--an outrage to all of us, and particularly to this
frail little wife of mine, already half-hysterical over the ordeal she
has endured."

"Take your places!" Dundee ordered curtly. After all, there was a limit
to the careful courtesy one must show to Hamilton's "inmost circle of
society."

Penny led the way to the bridge tables, the very waves of her brown bob
seeming to bristle with futile anger. But she obeyed, Dundee exulted.
The way to tame this blessed little shrew had been solved by old Bill
Shakespeare centuries ago....

As the women took their places at the two tables, arguing a bit among
themselves, with semi-hysterical edges to their voices, Dundee watched
the men, but all of them, with the exception of Dexter Sprague--that
typical son of Broadway, so out of place in this company--had managed at
least a fine surface control, their lips tight, their eyes hard,
narrowed and watchful. Sprague slumped into a vacated chair and closed
his eyes, revealing finely-wrinkled, yellowish lids.

"Where shall we begin?" Polly Beale demanded brusquely. "Remember this
table had finished playing when Karen began to deal what you call the
'death hand,'" she reminded him scornfully. "And Flora wasn't here at
all--she had been dummy for our last hand--"

"And had gone out to telephone," Dundee interrupted. "Mrs. Miles, will
you please leave the room, and return exactly when you did return--or as
nearly so as you can remember?"

Dundee was sure that Mrs. Miles' sallow face took on a greyish tinge as
she staggered to her feet and wound an uncertain way toward the hall.
Tracey Miles sprang to his wife's assistance, but Sergeant Turner took
it upon himself to lay a detaining hand on the too-anxious husband's
arm. With no more than the lifting of an eyebrow, Dundee made Captain
Strawn understand that Flora Miles' movements were to be kept under
strict observation, and the chief of the Homicide Squad as unobtrusively
conveyed the order to a plainclothesman loitering interestedly in the
wide doorway.

"Now," he was answering Polly Beale's question, "I should like the
remaining three of you to behave exactly as you did when your last hand
was finished. Did you keep individual score, as is customary in
contract?--or were you playing auction?"

"Contract," Polly Beale answered curtly. "And when we're playing among
ourselves like this, one at each table is usually elected to keep score.
Janet was score-keeper for us this afternoon, but we all waited, after
our last hand was played, for Janet to give us the result for our tally
cards."

Dundee drew near the table, picked up the three tally cards--ornamental
little affairs, and rather expensive--glanced over the points recorded,
then asked abruptly:

"Where is Mrs. Miles' tally? I don't see it here."

There was no answer to be had, so he let the matter drop, temporarily,
though his shorthand notebook received another deeply underlined series
of pothooks.

"Go on, please, at both tables," Dundee commanded. "Your table--" he
nodded toward Penny, who was already over her flare of temper, "will
please select the cards each held at the conclusion of Mrs. Marshall's
deal."

"Oooh, I'd never remember _all_ my cards in the world," Carolyn Drake
wailed. "I know I had five Clubs--Ace, King, Queen--"

"You had the Jack, not the Queen, for I held it myself," Penny
contradicted her crisply.

"Until this matter of who held which cards after Mrs. Marshall's deal is
settled, I shall have to ask you all to remain as you are now," Dundee
said to the players seated at the other table.

At last it was threshed out, largely between Penny Crain and Karen
Marshall, the latter proving to have a better memory than Dundee had
expected. At last even Carolyn Drake's querulous fussiness was
satisfied, or trampled down.

Both Judge Marshall and John Drake started forward to inspect the cards,
which none of the players was trying to conceal, but Dundee waved them
back.

"Please--I want you men--all of you, to take your places outside, and
return to this room in the order of your arrival this afternoon. Try to
imagine that it is now--if I can trust Mr. Miles' apparently excellent
memory--exactly 5:25--"

"Pretty hard to do, considering it's now a quarter past seven and
there's still no dinner in sight," Tracey Miles grumbled, then
brightened: "I can come right back in then--at 5:27, can't I?"

That point settled, and the men sent away, to be watched by several
pairs of apparently indolent police eyes, Dundee turned to the bridge
table, Nita's leaving of which had provided her murderer with his
opportunity.

"The cards are 'dealt'," Penny reminded him.

"Now I want you other three to scatter exactly as you did before,"
Dundee commanded, hurry and excitement in his voice.

Lois Dunlap rose, laid down her tally card, and strolled over to the
remaining table. After a moment's hesitation, Polly Beale strode
mannishly out of the room, straight into the hall. Dundee, watching as
the bridge players earlier that afternoon certainly had not, was amazed
to see Clive Hammond beckoning to her from the open door of the
solarium.

So Clive Hammond had arrived ahead of Tracey Miles! Had somehow entered
the solarium unnoticed, and had managed to beckon his fiancée to join
him there! Prearranged?... And why had Clive Hammond failed to enter and
greet his hostess first? Moreover, _how_ had he entered the solarium?

But things were happening in the living room. Janet Raymond, flushing so
that her sunburned face outdid her red hair for vividness, was slowly
leaving the room also. Through a window opening upon the wide front
porch Dundee saw the girl take her position against a pillar, then--a
thing she had not done before very probably--press her handkerchief to
her trembling lips.

But the bidding was going on, Karen Marshall piping in her childish
treble: "Three spades!"

Dundee took his place behind her chair, then silently beckoned to Penny
to shift from her own chair opposite Carolyn Drake to the chair Nita
Selim had left to go to her death. She nodded understandingly.

"Double!" quavered Carolyn Drake, next on the left to the dealer, and
managed to raise her eyebrows meaningly to Penny, her partner, who had
not yet changed places.

Penny, throwing herself into the spirit of the thing, scowled warningly.
No exchanging of illicit signals for Penny Crain! But the instant she
slipped into Nita Selim's chair her whole face and body took on a
different manner, underwent almost a physical change. She _was_ Nita
Selim now! She tucked her head, considered her cards, laughed a little
breathless note, then cried triumphantly:

"And I say--_five spades_! What do you think of _that_, partner?"

Then the girl who was giving an amazing imitation of Nita Selim changed
as suddenly into her own character as she changed chairs.

"Nita, I don't think it's quite Hoyle to be so jubilant about the
strength of your hand," she commented tartly. "I pass."

Karen Marshall pretended to study her hand for a frowning instant, then,
under Penny's spell, announced with a pretty air of bravado:

"Six spades!... Your raise to five makes a little slam obligatory,
doesn't it, Nita?"

Carolyn Drake flushed and looked uneasily toward Penny, a bit of by-play
which Dundee could see had not figured in the original game. But she
bridled and shifted her plump body in her chair, as she must have done
before.

"I double a little slam!" she declared. Then, still acting the role she
had played in earnest that afternoon, she explained importantly: "I
always double a little slam on principle!"

Penny, in the role of Nita, redoubled with an exultant laugh, then, as
herself, said, "Pass!" with a murderous glance at Mrs. Drake.

"Let's see your hand, partner," Karen quavered, addressing a woman who
had been dead nearly two hours; then she shuddered: "Oh, this is too
horrible!" as Penny Crain again slipped into Nita Selim's chair and
prepared to lay down the dummy hand.

And it _was_ horrible--even if vitally necessary--for these three to
have to go through the farce of playing a bridge hand while one of the
original players was lying on a marble slab at the morgue, her cold
flesh insensible to the coroner's expert knife.

But Dundee said nothing, for Tracey Miles was already hovering in the
doorway, ready for his cue to enter.

Penny, or rather "Nita," was saying:

"How's _this_, Karen darling?" as she laid down the Ace and deuce of
Spades, Karen's trumps.

"I hope you remember _you_ are vulnerable, as well as we," Carolyn
remarked in a sorry imitation of her original cocksureness, as she
opened the play by leading the Ace of Clubs.

"And how's _this_, partner?... A singleton in Clubs!" Nita's imitator
demanded triumphantly, as she continued to lay down her dummy hand,
slapping the lone nine of Clubs down beside trumps; "and this little
collection of Hearts!" as she displayed and arranged the King, Jack,
eight and four of Hearts; "_and_ this!" as a length of Diamonds--Ace,
Jack, ten, eight, seven and six slithered down the glossy linen cover of
the bridge table toward Karen Marshall. "Now if you don't make your
little slam, infant, don't dare say I shouldn't have jumped you to
five!... I figured you for a blank or a singleton in Diamonds, and at
least the Ace of Hearts, or you--cautious as you are--wouldn't have made
an original three Spade bid without the Ace.... Hop to it, darling!"

"This is where I enter," Tracey Miles whispered to Dundee, and, at a nod
from the young detective, the pudgy little blond man strode jauntily
into the living room, proud of himself in the role of actor.

"Hello, everybody! How's tricks?" he called genially, but there was a
quiver of horror in his voice under its blitheness.

Penny was quite pale when she sprang from her chair, but her voice
seemed to be Nita's very own, as she sang out:

"It _can't_ be 5:30 already!... Thank heaven I'm dummy, and can run away
and make myself pretty-pretty for you and all the other great big men,
Tracey darling!"

Dundee's keen memory registered the slight difference in the wording of
the greeting as reported by this pseudo-Nita and the man she was running
to meet. But Penny, as Nita, was already straightening Tracey Miles'
necktie with possessive, coquettish fingers, was coaxing, with head
tucked alluringly:

"Tracey, my ownest lamb, won't you shake up the cocktails for Nita? The
makings are all on the sideboard, or I don't know my precious old
Lydia--even if her poor jaw does ache most horribly."

Then Penny, as Nita, was on her way, pausing in the doorway to blow a
kiss from her fingertips to the fatuously grinning but now quite pale
Tracey Miles. She was out of sight for only an instant, then reappeared
and very quietly retraced her steps to the bridge table.

Unobtrusively, Dundee drew his watch from his pocket, palmed it as he
noted the exact minute, then commanded curtly: "On with the game!"

As Tracey Miles passed the first bridge table Lois Dunlap linked her arm
in his, saying in a voice she tried to make gay and natural:

"I'm trailing along, Tracey. Simply dying for a nip of Scotch! Nita's is
the real stuff--which is more than my fussy old Pete can get half the
time!--and you know I loathe cocktails."

The two passed on into the dining room, the players scarcely raising
their eyes from their cards, which they held as if the game were real.

Dundee, his watch still in his hand, advanced to the bridge table.
Strolling from player to player he made mental photographs of each hand,
then took his stand behind Penny's chair to observe the horribly
farcical playing of it. Poor little Penny! he reflected. She hadn't had
a chance against that dumb-bell across the table from her. Fancy
anyone's doubling a little slam bid on a hand like Carolyn Drake's--or
even calling an informatory double in the first place! Why hadn't she
bid four Clubs after Karen's original three Spade bid, if she simply
wanted to give her partner information?... Not that she really had a
bid--

Karen's hand trembled as she drew the lone nine of Clubs from the dummy,
to place beside Carolyn's Ace, but Penny's fingers were quite steady as
she followed with the deuce of Clubs, to which Karen added, with a trace
of characteristic uncertainty, the eight.

"There's our book!" Carolyn Drake exulted obediently, but she cast an
apologetic glance toward Penny. "If we take one more trick we set them."

"Fat chance!" Penny obligingly responded, and Dundee, relieved, knew
that the farcical game would now be played almost exactly, and with the
same comments, as it had been played while Nita Selim was being
murdered. Thanks to Penny Crain!

With a shamefaced glance upward at Dundee, Carolyn Drake then led the
deuce of Diamonds, committing the gross tactical error of leading from
the Queen. Karen added the Jack from the dummy, and Penny shruggingly
contributed her King, to find the trick, as she had suspected in the
original game, trumped by the five of Spades, since Karen had no
Diamonds.

"So _that_ settles _us_, Carolyn!" Penny commented acidly.

Her partner rose to the role she was playing. "Well, as I said, I always
double a little slam on principle. Besides, how could I know they would
have a chance for cross-ruffing in _both_ Clubs and Diamonds? I thought
you would at least hold the Ace of Diamonds and that Karen would
certainly have one, as I only had four--"

Penny shrugged. "Oh, well! Let's play bridge!" for Karen was staring at
her cards helplessly. "Sorry, Karen! I realize a post mortem is usually
held after the playing of a hand--not before."

"I--I guess I'd better get my trumps out," Karen--now almost a genuine
actress, too--breathed tremulously. "I _do_ wish Nita were playing this
hand. I know I'll muff it somehow--"

"Good kid!" Dundee commented silently, and allowed himself the liberty
of patting Karen on her slim shoulder.

The girl threw an upward glance of gratitude through misty eyes, then
led the six of Spades, Mrs. Drake contributing the four, dummy taking
the trick with the Ace, and Penny relinquishing the three.

"Let's see--that makes five of 'em in, since I trumped one trick," Karen
said, as she reached across the table to lead from dummy.

As if the words were a cue--which they probably were--Judge Marshall
entered the room at that moment, making a great effort to be as jaunty,
debonair, and "young for his age" as he must have thought he looked when
he made his entrance when the real game was being played.

At his step Karen lifted her head and greeted her elderly husband with a
curious mixture of childlike joy and womanly tenderness:

"Hullo, darling!... I'm trying to make a little slam I may have been
foolish to bid, but Nita jumped me from three to five Spades--"

"Let's have a look, sweetheart," the retired judge suggested pompously,
and Dundee gave way to make room for him behind Karen's chair.

But before Judge Marshall looked at his wife's cards he bent and kissed
her on her flushed cheek, and Karen raised a trembling hand to tweak his
grey mustache. Dundee, with uplifted eyebrow, queried Penny, who nodded
shortly, conveying the information that this was the way the scene had
really been played when there was no question of acting.

"I'm getting out my trumps, darling," Karen confided sweetly, as she
reached for the deuce of Spades--the only remaining trump in the dummy.

"What's your hurry, child?" her husband asked indulgently. "Lead this!"
and he pointed toward the six of Diamonds.

"I wish you'd got a puncture, Hugo, so you couldn't have butted in
before this hand was played," Carolyn Drake spluttered. "Remember this
is a little slam bid, doubled and redoubled--"

"I should think _you_ would like to forget that, Carolyn!" Penny
commented bitingly. "But I agree with Carolyn, Hugo, that Karen is quite
capable of making her little slam without your assistance."

"Please don't mind," Karen begged. "Hugo just wanted to help me, because
I'm such a dub at bridge--"

"The finest little player in town!" Judge Marshall encouraged her
gallantly, but with a jaunty wink at the belligerent Penny.

Smiling adoringly at him again, Karen took his suggestion and led the
six of Diamonds from the dummy; Penny covered it with the nine; Karen
ruffed with the seven of Spades from her own hand, and Mrs. Drake
lugubriously contributed the four of Diamonds.

"I can get my trumps out now, can't I, Hugo?" Karen asked deprecatingly,
and at her husband's smiling permission, she led the King of Spades,
Carolyn had to give up the Jack, which she must have foolishly thought
would take a trick; the dummy contributed the deuce, and Penny followed
with her own last trump--the eight.

Karen counted on her fingers, her eyes on the remaining trumps in her
hand, then smiled triumphantly up at her husband.

"Why not simply tell us, Karen, that the rest of the trumps are in your
own hand?" Penny suggested caustically.

"I--I didn't mean to do anything wrong," Karen pleaded, as she led now
with the ten of Hearts, which drew in Carolyn's Queen to cover--Carolyn
murmuring religiously: "Always cover an honor with an honor--or should I
have played second hand low, Penny?"--topped by the King in the dummy,
the trick being completed by Penny's three of Hearts.

At that point John C. Drake marched into the room, strode straight to
Dundee, and spoke with cold anger:

"Enough of this nonsense! I, for one, refuse to act like a puppet for
your amusement! If you are so vitally interested in contract bridge, I
should advise you to take lessons from an expert, not from three
terrified women who are rather poor players at best. I also advise you
to get about the business you are supposed to be here for--the finding
of a murderer!"




CHAPTER SIX


Before Drake had reached his side, his purpose plain upon his stern,
rather ascetic features, Dundee had taken a hasty glance at the watch
cupped in his palm and noted the exact minute and second of the
interruption. Time out!

"One moment, Mr. Drake," he said calmly. "I quite agree with you--from
your viewpoint. What mine is, you can't be expected to know. But believe
me when I say that I consider it of vital importance to the
investigation of the murder of Mrs. Selim that this particular bridge
hand, with all its attending remarks, the usual bickering, and its
interruptions of arriving guests for cocktails, be played out, exactly
as it was this afternoon. I thought I had made myself clear before. If
you don't wish me to believe that _you have something to conceal_ by
refusing to take part in a rather grisly game--"

"Certainly I have nothing to conceal!" John C. Drake snorted angrily.

"Then please bow as gracefully as possible to necessity," Dundee urged
without rancor. "And may I ask, before we go on, if you made your
entrance at this time, and the facts of your arrival?"

Drake considered a moment, gnawing a thin upper lip. Beads of sweat
stood on his high, narrow forehead.

"I walked over from the Country Club, after eighteen holes of golf with
your _superior_, the district attorney," Drake answered, with nasty
emphasis. "I left the clubhouse at 5:10, calculating that it would take
me about twenty minutes for the walk of--of about a mile."

Dundee made a mental note to find out exactly how far from this lonely
house in Primrose Meadows the Country Club actually was, but his next
question was along another line:

"You _walked_, Mr. Drake?--after eighteen holes of golf on a warm day?"

Drake flushed. "My wife had the car. I had driven out with Mr.
Sanderson, but he was called away by a long distance message. I lingered
at the club for a while, chatting and--er--having a cool drink or two,
then I set out afoot."

"No one offered you a lift?" Dundee inquired suavely.

"No. I presume my fellow-members thought I had my car with me, and I
asked no one for a lift, for I rather fancied the idea of a walk across
the meadows."

"I see," said Dundee thoughtfully. "Now as to your arrival here--"

"I walked in. The door had been left on the latch, as it usually is,
when a party is on," Drake explained coldly. "And I was just entering
the room when I heard my wife make the remark about covering an honor
with an honor, and then her question of Penny as to whether she should
have played second hand low."

"So you entered this time at the correct moment," said Dundee. "Now, Mr.
Drake, I am going to ask you to re-enter the room and do exactly as you
did upon your arrival at approximately 5:33. I am sure you would not
willingly hamper me--or _my superior_--in this investigation."

Drake wheeled, ungraciously, and returned to the doorway, while Dundee
again consulted his watch, mentally subtracting the minutes which had
been wasted upon this interruption, from the time he had marked upon his
memory as the moment at which Drake had interfered. But an undercurrent
of skepticism nagged at his mind. Why had Drake chosen to _walk_? And
why had it taken him from 5:10 to approximately 5:33 to walk a mile or
less? The average walker, and especially one accustomed to playing golf,
could easily have covered a mile in fifteen minutes, instead of the
twenty-three minutes Drake had admitted to.... If it _was_ a
mile!... Was it possible that the banker loved wildflowers?

With head up aggressively, Drake was undoubtedly making an effort to
throw himself into the role--or perhaps into a role chosen on the spot!

"Where's everybody?" he called from the doorway. "Am I early?"

"Don't interrupt, please, dear," Carolyn Drake answered, her voice
trembling now, where before it must have been sharp and querulous.

Silently Drake took his place behind his wife's chair, laying a hand
affectionately upon her shoulder. Dundee, watching closely, saw Penny's
eyes widen with something like shocked surprise. So Drake _was_ trying
to deceive him, counting on the oneness of this group, his closest
friends!

Karen, obviously flustered, too, reached to the dummy for the Ace of
Diamonds, to which Penny played the three, Karen herself discarding the
ten of Clubs, and Mrs. Drake the five of Diamonds.

"You asked no questions, Mr. Drake?" Dundee interpolated.

The banker flushed again. "I--yes, I believe I did. Carolyn--Mrs.
Drake--explained that Karen was playing for a little slam in Spades, and
that she had doubled--'on principle'," he added acidly--a voice which
Mrs. Drake must be very well accustomed to, Dundee surmised.

"And when I told you that Nita had redoubled and it looked as if she was
going to make it," Carolyn Drake whimpered and shifted her short, stout
body in the little bridge chair, "you said--why not tell the truth?--you
said it was just like me and I might as well take to tatting at bridge
parties."

"That was said jokingly, my dear," Drake retorted, with a coldness that
tried to be affectionate warmth.

"Play bridge!" Dundee commanded, sure that the approximate length of the
previous dispute had now been taken up, whatever retort Carolyn Drake
had made. Then he checked himself, again looking at his watch: "And just
what did you answer to your husband's little joke, Mrs. Drake?"

"I--I--" The woman looked helplessly around the table, her slate-colored
eyes reddened with tears, then she plunged recklessly, after a fearful
glance at Dundee's implacable face. "I said that if it was Nita he was
talking to, he wouldn't speak in that tone; that she could make all the
foolish mistakes of over-bidding or revoking or doubling that she wanted
to, and he wouldn't say a word except to praise her--"

"Then I may as well confess," Drake said acidly, "that I answered
substantially as follows: 'Nita is an _intelligent_ bridge player as
well as a charming woman, my dear!...' Now make the most of that little
family tiff, sir--and be damned to you!"

"Did that end the scene, Mrs. Drake?" Dundee asked gently.

"I--I said something about all the men thinking Nita was perfect," Mrs.
Drake confessed, "and I cried a little, but we went on with the hand.
And Johnny--Mr. Drake went away, walking up and down the room, waiting
for Nita to come back, I suppose!"

"Then go on with the game," Dundee ordered.

Silently now, as silently as the real game must have been played,
because of the embarrassing scene between husband and wife, the sinister
game was carried to its conclusion. Karen led the Jack of Hearts from
the dummy, Penny played her seven, Karen contributed her own deuce, and
Mrs. Drake followed suit with the five.

Again Karen led from the dummy, with the four of Hearts, followed by
Penny's nine, taking it with her own Ace, Mrs. Drake throwing off the
five of Clubs. Karen then led the six of Hearts, Carolyn Drake discarded
the six of Clubs, dummy took the trick with the eight of Hearts, and
Penny sloughed the three of Clubs.

With a faint imitation of the triumph with which she had played the hand
the first time, Karen threw down her remaining three trumps.

"I've made it--a little slam!" she tried to sound very triumphant.
"Doubled and redoubled!... How much did I--did Nita and I make, Penny?"

"Plenty!" But before putting pencil to score pad, Penny cupped her chin
in her hands and stared at Carolyn Drake. "I'd like to know, Carolyn, if
it isn't one of your most cherished secrets, _what_ possessed you to
double in the first place?"

Carolyn Drake flushed scarlet as she protested feebly: "I thought of
course I could take two Club tricks with my Ace and King.... That's why
I doubled the little slam, of course. And my first double simply meant
that I had one good suit.... I thought if you could bid at all that my
two doubletons--"

"Oh, what's the use?" Penny groaned. "But may I remind you that it is
_not_ bridge to lead from a Queen?... You led the deuce of Diamonds,
when of course the play, since you had seen the Ace in the dummy, was to
lead your Queen, forcing the Ace and leaving my King guarded to take a
trick later."

"But Karen didn't have any Diamonds at all," Carolyn defended herself.

"A secret you weren't in on when you led from your Queen," Penny
reminded her. "Oh, well! We'll pay up and shut up!" and she made a
pretense of totting up the score, while Karen, who had risen, stood over
her like a bird poised for flight.

At that instant Dexter Sprague began to advance into the room, Janet
Raymond at his side, her face flaming.

"Behave exactly as you did before!" Dundee commanded in a harsh whisper.
No time for coddling these people now!

Dexter Sprague's face took on a yellower tinge, but he obeyed.

"Greetings!" he called in the jaunty, over-cordial tones of a man who
knows himself not too welcome. "Where's Nita--and everybody? Isn't that
the cocktail shaker I hear?"

Having received no answer from anyone present, Sprague strolled through
the living room and on into the dining room, Janet following. Judge
Marshall had nodded stiffly, and John C. Drake had muttered the
semblance of a greeting.... Were they all overdoing it a bit--this
reacting of their hostility to the sole remaining outsider of their
compact little group?... Dundee stroked his chin thoughtfully.

But Penny was saying in her abrupt, husky voice: "Above the line, 1250;
below the line 720, making a total of 1970 on this hand, Karen."

"Won't Nita be glad?" Karen gasped, then began to run totteringly,
calling: "Nita! Nita!" But in the hall she collapsed, shuddering, crying
in a child's whimper: "No, no! I--can't--go in there--again!"

It was Dundee who reached her first--Dundee and not her outraged and
excited old husband.

"Mrs. Marshall--listen, please," he begged in a low voice, as he lifted
her so that her head rested against his arm. "You have been
splendid--wonderful! Please believe that I am truly sorry to distress
you so, and that very soon, I hope, you may go home and rest."

"I--can't bear any--more," Karen whimpered.

Ignoring Judge Marshall's blustering, Dundee continued softly: "You
don't want the wrong person to be accused of this terrible crime, do
you, Mrs. Marshall?... Of course not! And you _do_ want to help us all
you can to discover who really killed Mrs. Selim?"

"I--I suppose so," Karen conceded, on a sob.

"Then I'll help you. I'll go to the bedroom with you," Dundee promised
her with a sigh of relief. To the others he spoke sharply:

"Go back to the exact positions in living room and dining room and
solarium, that you occupied when Mrs. Marshall ran from the room."

"I think you're overdoing it, Bonnie," Captain Strawn protested.
"But--sure I'll see that they mind you."

With Karen Marshall clinging to his arm, Dundee walked down the hall,
beyond the staircase to an open door on his left--a door guarded by a
lounging plainclothesman. Seated at the dressing-table of the guests'
lavatory was Flora Miles, her sallow dark face so ravaged that she
looked ten years older than when he had first seen her an hour before.

"So you were in here when you heard Mrs. Marshall scream, Mrs. Miles?"
Dundee paused to ask.

"Yes--yes!" she gasped, rising. "And that horrible man has made me stay
in here--. Of course, the door was closed--before. I telephoned home to
ask about my children, and then I came in here to--to do my face over--"

"You didn't hear your husband arrive?"

"No,--I didn't hear him arrive," Flora Miles faltered, her handkerchief
dabbing at her trembling, over-rouged lips.

"I--see," Dundee said slowly.

He stepped into the little room, leaving Karen to stand weakly against
the door frame. Without a word to Mrs. Miles he looked closely at the
top of the dressing-table and into the small wastebasket that stood
beside it.

"You--you can see that I cold-creamed my face before I put on fresh
powder and--and rouged," Flora Miles pointed out, with an obvious effort
at offended dignity. "After I came back, while you were making those
poor girls play the hand over again, I went through the same
motions--because you told all of us to behave exactly as we had done
before--"

"I--see," Dundee agreed.

Pretty clever, in spite of being almost frightened to death, Dundee said
to himself. But he had been just a shade cleverer than she, for he had
been in this room ahead of her, and there had been no balls of greasy
face tissue in the wastebasket then!

He was passing out of the room, offering his arm to Karen, when one of
his underlined notes thrust itself upon his memory:

"May I see your bridge tally, please, Mrs. Miles?"

"My--bridge tally!" she echoed blankly. "Why--it must be on the table
where I was playing--"

"It is not," Dundee assured her quietly. "Perhaps it is in your
handbag?" and he glanced at the rather large raffia bag that lay on the
table.

She snatched it up, slightly averting her body as she looked hastily
through its contents.

"It--isn't here.... Oh, I don't know _where_ it is! What does it
matter?"

Without replying, Dundee escorted the trembling little discoverer of
Nita Selim's body into the large ornate bedroom, murmuring as he did so:

"Don't be frightened, Mrs. Marshall. The bod--I mean Mrs. Selim isn't
here now.... And you shan't have to scream. I'll give the signal myself.
I just want you to go through the same motions you did before." On jerky
feet the girl advanced to Nita's now deserted vanity dresser.

"I--I was calling to her all the time," she whispered. "I didn't even
wait to knock, and I--I began to tell her how much we'd made off that
hand, when I--when she didn't answer.... I didn't touch her, but I
saw--I saw--" Again she gripped her face with her hands and was about to
scream.

"I know," Dundee assured her gently. Then he shouted: "Ready!"

Herded by Strawn, the small crowd of men and women came running into the
room, Judge Marshall leading the way, Penny being second in line. Penny
_second_! Why not Flora Miles, who had been nearer to that room than any
of the others, if her story was true--Dundee asked himself. But all had
crowded into the room, including Polly Beale and Clive Hammond, before
Mrs. Miles crept in.

"Is this the order of your arrival?" Dundee asked them all.

Penny, who was standing against the wall, just inside the doorway, spoke
up, staring at Flora with frowning intentness.

"You're sort of mixed up, aren't you, Flora? I was standing right here
until the worst of it was over--I didn't even go near Nita, and I know
you didn't pass me. I remember that Tracey stepped away from the--body,
and called you, and you weren't here. And then almost the next minute I
saw you coming toward him from--from--_over there_!"

And Penny pointed toward that corner of the room which held, on one
angle, the door leading to the porch, and on its other angle the window
from which, or from near which Nita Selim had been shot.

"You're lying, Penny Crain! I did no such thing!" Flora Miles cried
hysterically. "I came running in--with--with the rest of you, and I
rushed over there just to see if I could see anybody running away across
the meadow--"

"My wife is right, sir," Tracey Miles added his word aggressively. "I
saw what she was doing--the most sensible of all of us--and I ran to
join her. We looked out of the windows, both the side windows and the
rear ones, and out onto the porch. But we didn't see anything."

Surprisingly, Dundee abandoned the point.

"And you were the only one to touch her, Sprague?"

"I--believe so," Dexter Sprague answered in a strained voice. "I--laid
my hand on her--her hair, for an instant, then I picked up her hand to
see if--if there was any pulse left."

"Yes?"

"She--she was dead."

"And her hand--did it feel cold?"

"Neither cold nor warm--just cool," Sprague answered in a voice that was
nearly strangled with emotion. "She--she always had cool hands--"

"What did you do, Judge Marshall?" Dundee asked abruptly.

"I took my poor little wife away from this room, laid her on a couch in
the living room, and then telephoned the police. Miss Crain stood at my
elbow, urging me to hurry, so that she might ring you--as she did. Your
line was busy, and she lost about five minutes before getting you."

"And the rest of you?" Dundee asked.

"Nothing spectacular, I'm afraid, Mr. Dundee," Polly Beale answered in
her brusque, deep voice, now edged with scorn.

Further questioning elicited little more, beyond the fact that Clive
Hammond had dashed out to circle the house and look over the grounds,
and that John Drake had been fully occupied with an hysterical wife.

"Better let this bunch go for the present, hadn't we, boy?" Captain
Strawn whispered uneasily. "Not a thing on any of them--"

"Not quite yet, sir, if you don't mind," Dundee answered in a low voice.
"Will you take them back into the living room and put them under
Sergeant Turner's charge for a while? Then there are one or two things
I'd like to talk over with you."

Mollified by the younger man's deference and persuasiveness, Strawn
obeyed the suggestion, to return within five minutes, his grey brows
drawn into a frown.

"I hope you'll be willing to take full credit for that fool bridge game,
Bonnie," he worried. "_I_ don't want to look a chump in the newspapers!"

"I'll take the blame," Dundee assured him, with a grin. "But that 'fool
bridge game'--and I admit it was a horrible thing to have to do--told me
a whole bunch of facts that ought to be very, very useful."

"For instance?" Strawn growled.

"For instance," Dundee answered, "it told me that it took approximately
eight minutes to play out a little slam bid, when ordinarily it would
have taken not more than two or three minutes. Not only that, but it
told me the names of everyone in _this_ party who could have killed Nita
Selim, and--. Good Lord! Of course!"

And to Captain Strawn's amazement Dundee threw open the door of Nita's
big clothes closet, jerked on the light, and stooped to the floor.




CHAPTER SEVEN


Almost immediately Special Investigator Dundee rose from his crouching
position on the floor of Nita Selim's closet, and faced the chief of the
Homicide Squad of Hamilton's police force.

"I think," he said quietly, for all the excitement that burned in his
blue eyes, "that we'd better have Mrs. Miles in for a few questions."

"What have you got there--a dance program?" Strawn asked curiously, but
as Dundee continued to stare silently at the thing he held, the older
man strode to the door and relayed the order to a plainclothes
detective.

"I sent for _Mrs._ Miles," Dundee said coldly, when husband and wife
appeared together, Flora's thin, tense shoulders encircled by Tracey's
plump arm.

"If you're going to badger my wife further, I intend to be present,
sir!" Miles retorted, thrusting out his chest.

"Very well!" Dundee conceded curtly. "Mrs. Miles, why didn't you tell me
in the first place that you were _in this room_ when Nita Selim was
shot?"

"Because I wasn't--in--in the room," Flora protested, clinging with both
thin, big-veined hands to her husband's arm.

"Sir, you have no proof of this absurd accusation, and I shall
personally take this matter up--"

"I have the best of proof," Dundee said quietly, and took his hand from
his pocket. "You recognize this, Mrs. Miles?... You admit that it is the
tally card you used while playing bridge this afternoon?"

"No, no! It isn't mine!" Flora cried hysterically, cringing against her
husband, who began to protest in a voice falsetto with rage.

Dundee ignored his splutterings. "May I point out that it is identical
with the other tally cards used at Mrs. Selim's party today, and that on
its face it bears your name, 'Flora'?" and he politely extended the card
for her inspection.

"I--yes, it _must_ be mine, but I was _not_ in this room when Nita
was--was shot!"

"But you will admit that you _were_ in her clothes closet at some time
during the twenty or more minutes that elapsed between your leaving the
bridge game, when you became dummy, and the moment when Karen Marshall
screamed?"

As Flora Miles said nothing, staring at him with great, terrified black
eyes, Dundee went on relentlessly: "Mrs. Miles, when you left the bridge
game, you did not intend to telephone your house. You came _here_--into
this room!--and you lay in wait, hiding in her closet until Nita Selim
appeared, as you knew she would, sooner or later--"

"No, no! That's a lie--a lie, I tell you!" the woman shrilled at him. "I
_did_ telephone my house, and I talked to Junior, when the maid put him
up to the phone.... You can ask her yourself, if you don't believe me!"

"But _after_ you telephoned, you stole into this room--"

"No, no! I--I made up my face all fresh, just as I told you--"

Dundee did not bother to tell her how well he knew she was lying, for
suddenly something knocked on the door of his mind. He strode to the
closet, searched for a moment among the multitude of garments hanging
there, then emerged with the brown silk summer coat which Nita Selim had
worn to Breakaway Inn that noon. Before the terrified woman's eyes he
thrust a hand first into one deep pocket and then another, finding
nothing except a handkerchief of fine embroidered linen and a pair of
brown suede gauntlet gloves.

"Will you let me have the note, please, Mrs. Miles? The note Nita
received during her luncheon party, and which she thrust, before your
eyes, into a pocket of this coat?... It is in your handbag, I am sure,
since you have had no opportunity, unobserved, to destroy it."

"What ghastly nonsense is this, Dundee?" Tracey Miles demanded
furiously.

But Dundee again ignored him. His implacable eyes held Flora Miles'
until the woman broke suddenly, piteously. She fumbled in the raffia bag
which had been hanging from her arm.

"Good God, Flora! What does it all mean?" Tracey Miles collapsed like a
pricked pink balloon. "That's _my_ stationery--one of my business
envelopes--"

Flora Miles dropped the bag which she need no longer watch and clutch
with terror, as she dug her thin fingers into her husband's shoulders
and looked down at his puzzled face, for she was a little taller than
he.

"Forgive me, darling! Oh, I knew God would punish me for being jealous!
I thought _you_ were writing love letters to--to that woman--"

Dundee did not miss the slightest significance of that scene as he
retrieved the blue-grey envelope she had dropped. It was inscribed, in a
curious handwriting: "Mrs. Selim, Private Dining Room, Breakaway Inn."

"Let's see, boy," Strawn said, with respect in his harsh voice.

Dundee withdrew the single sheet of business stationery, and obligingly
held it so that the chief of detectives could read it also.

"Nita, my sweet," the note began, without date-line, "Forgive your bad
boy for last night's row, but I _must_ warn you again to watch your
step. You've already gone too far. Of course I love you and understand,
_but_--Be good, Baby, and you won't be sorry."

The note was signed "Dexy."

Dundee tapped the note for a long minute, while Tracey Miles continued
to console his wife. A new avenue, he thought--perhaps a long, long
avenue....

"Mrs. Miles," he began abruptly, and the tear-streaked face turned
toward him. "You say you thought this letter to Mrs. Selim had been
written by your husband?"

"Yes!" She gasped. "I'm jealous-natured. I admit it, and when I saw one
of our own--I mean, one of Tracey's business envelopes--"

"You made up your mind to steal it and read it?"

"Yes, I did! A wife has a right to know what her husband's doing, if
it's anything--like that--" Her haggard black eyes again implored her
husband for forgiveness, before she went on: "I _did_ slip into Nita's
room and go into her closet to see if she had left the letter in her
coat pocket. I closed the door on myself, thinking I could find the
light cord, but it was caught in one of the dresses or something, and it
took me a long time to find it in the dark of the closet, but I did find
it at last, and was just reading the note--"

"You _read_ it, even after you saw that the handwriting on the envelope
wasn't your husband's?" Dundee queried in assumed amazement.

Flora's thin body sagged. "I--I thought maybe Tracey had disguised his
Handwriting.... So I read it, and saw it was from Dexter--"

"Mr. Miles, do you know how some of your business stationery got into
Sprague's hands?"

"He's had plenty of opportunity to filch stationery or almost anything
he wants, hanging around my offices, as he does--an idler--"

But Dundee was in a hurry. He wheeled from the garrulity of the husband
to the tense terror of the wife.

"Mrs. Miles, I want you to tell me exactly what you know, unless you
prefer to consult a lawyer first--"

"Sir, if you are insinuating that _my wife_--"

"Oh, let me tell him, Tracey," Mrs. Miles capitulated suddenly,
completely. "I _was_ in the closet when Nita was killed, I suppose, but
I didn't _know_ she was being killed! _Because I was lying in there on
the closet floor in a dead faint!_"

Dundee stared at the woman incredulously, then suppressed a groan of
almost unbearable disappointment. If Flora Miles was telling the truth,
here went a-flying his only eye-witness, probably, or rather, his only
ear-witness.

"Just when did you faint, Mrs. Miles?" he asked, struggling for
patience. "Before or after Nita came into this room?"

"I was just finishing the note, with the light on in the closet, and the
door shut, when I heard Nita come into the room. I knew it was Nita
because she was singing one of those Broadway songs she is--was--so
crazy about. I jerked off the light, and crouched way back in a corner
of the closet. A velvet evening wrap fell down over my head, and I was
nearly smothering, but I was afraid to try to dislodge it for fear a
hanger would fall to the floor and make an awful clatter. And then--and
then--" She shuddered, and clung to her husband.

"What caused you to faint, Mrs. Miles?"

"Sir, my wife has heart trouble--"

"What did you hear, Mrs. Miles?" Dundee persisted.

"I couldn't hear very well, all tangled up in the coat and 'way back in
the closet, but I did hear a kind of bang or bump--no, no, not a pistol
shot!--and because it came from so near me I thought it was Nita or
Lydia coming to get something out of the closet, and I'd be discovered,
so I--I fainted--" She drew a deep breath and went on: "When I came to I
heard Karen scream, and then people running in--. But all the time that
awful tune was going on and on--"

"Tune?" Dundee gasped. "Do you mean--Nita Selim's--_song_?"

Flora Miles seemed to be dazed by Dundee's vehement question.

"Why, yes--Nita's own tune. That's what she called it--her own tune--"

"But, Mrs. Miles," Dundee protested, ashamed that his scalp was
prickling with horror, "do you mean to tell me that Nita was not dead
_then_--when Karen Marshall screamed?"

"Dead?" Flora repeated, more bewildered. "Of course she was, or at
least, they all said so--. Oh, I know what you mean! And you don't mean
what I mean at all--"

"Steady, honey-girl!" Tracey Miles urged, putting his arm about his
wife. "I'd better tell you, Dundee.... When we all came running into the
room, there was Nita's powder box playing its tune over and over--"

"Oh!" Dundee wiped his forehead. "You mean it's a musical box?"

"Yes, and plays when the lid is off," Tracey answered, obviously
delighted to have the limelight again. "Well, of course, since Nita
couldn't put the lid back on, it was still playing.... What was the
tune, honey?" he asked his wife tenderly. "I haven't much ear for music
at best, but at a time like that--"

"It was playing _Juanita_," Flora answered wearily. "Over and
over--_'Nita, Jua-a-n-ita, be my own fair bride_'," she quavered
obligingly. "Only not the words, of course, just the tune. That's why
Nita bought the box, I suppose, because it played her namesake song--"

"Maybe one of her beaus gave it to her," Tracey suggested lightly,
patting his wife's trembling shoulder. "Anyway, Dundee, the thing ran on
and on, until it ran down, I suppose. I confess I wanted to put the lid
back on, to stop the damned thing, but Hugo said we mustn't touch
anything--"

"And quite right!" Dundee cut in. "Now, Mrs. Miles, about that noise you
heard.... Did you hear anyone enter the room?... No?... Well, then, did
you hear Nita speak to anyone? You said you thought it might be Lydia,
coming to get something out of the closet."

"I didn't hear Nita speak a word to anybody, though she might have and I
wouldn't have heard, all muffled up in that velvet evening wrap and so
far back in the closet--"

"Did you hear the door onto the porch--it's _quite_ near the closet--"

"The door was open when we came in, Dundee," Tracey interposed. "It must
have been open all the time."

"I didn't hear it open," Mrs. Miles confirmed him wearily. "I tell you I
didn't hear _anything_, except Nita's coming in singing, then the powder
box playing its tune, and that bang or bump I told you about."

"And just where was that?" Dundee persisted.

"_I don't know!_" she shrilled, hysteria rising in her voice again. "I
told you it sounded fairly near the closet, as if--as if somebody bumped
into something. That's what it was like! That's exactly what it was
like. And I was so frightened of being found in the closet that I
fainted, and didn't come to until Karen screamed--"

She was babbling on, but Dundee was thinking hard. A very convenient
faint--that! For the murderer, at least! But--why not for Mrs. Miles
herself? Odd that she should _faint_! Why hadn't she trumped up some
excuse immediately and left the closet as Nita was entering the room?
Was it, possibly, because she could think of nothing but the great
relief of finding that it was Sprague, not her husband, who had been
writing love letters to Nita Selim?... A jealous woman--

"Miles," he began abruptly, "I think you'd better tell me how your wife
became so jealous of you and Nita Selim that she could get herself into
such a false position."

Tracey Miles reddened, but a gesture of one of his sunburned hands
restrained his wife's passionate defense of him. "It's the truth that
Flora is jealous-natured. And I suppose--" he faltered a moment, and his
eyes did not meet his wife's, "--that I liked seeing her a little bit
jealous of her old man. Sort of makes a man feel--well, big, you know.
And pretty important to somebody!"

"So you were just having a bit of fun with your wife, so far as Mrs.
Selim was concerned?" Dundee asked coldly.

The blood flowed through the thinning blond hair. "We-el, not exactly,"
he admitted frankly. "You see, I _did_ take a shine to Nita, and if I do
say so myself, she liked me a lot.... Oh, nothing serious! Just a little
flirtation, like most of our crowd have with each other--"

"Mrs. Miles," Dundee interrupted with sudden harshness, "are you _sure_
you did not know that that letter was from Dexter Sprague before you
looked for it?"

"Sir, if you are insinuating that _my wife_ carried on a flirtation
or--an--an _affair_ with that Sprague insect--" Tracey began to bluster.

But Dundee's eyes were on Flora Miles, and he saw that her sallow skin
had tightened like greyish silk over her thin cheek bones, and that her
eyes looked suddenly dead and glassy.

"You _fainted_, you say, Mrs. Miles," Dundee went on inexorably. "Was it
because, by any chance, this note--" and he tapped the sheet which had
caused so much trouble--"revealed the fact that Nita Selim and Dexter
Sprague were sweethearts or--lovers?"

It was a battle between those two now. Both ignored Tracey's red-faced
rage.

Flora licked her dry lips. "No--no," she whispered. "_No!_ It was
because I was jealous of Tracey and Nita--"

"Yes, and I'd given her cause to be jealous, too!" Tracey forced himself
into the conversation. "One night, at the Country Club, Flora saw me and
Nita stroll off the porch and down onto the grounds, and she had a right
to be sore at me when I got back, because I'd cut a dance with her--my
own wife!... And it was only this very morning that I made a point of
driving--out of my way too--by this house to see Nita. Not that I meant
any harm, but I was being a little silly about her--and she was about
me, too! Not that I'd leave my wife and babies for any Broadway beauty
under the sun--"

"Oh, Tracey! And you weren't going to tell me--" Was there _real_
jealousy now, or just pretense on Flora's part?

"You understand, don't you, Dundee?" Tracey demanded, man to man. "I was
just having a little fun on the side--nothing serious, mind you! But of
course I didn't tell Flora every little thing--. No man does! There've
been other girls--other women--"

"Tracey isn't worse than the other men!" Flora flamed up. "He's such a
darling that all the girls pet him, and spoil him--"

Dundee could stand no more of Miles' complacent acceptance of his own
rakishness. And certainly a girl like Nita Selim would have been able to
bear precious little of it.... Conceited ass! But Flora Miles was
another matter--and so was Dexter Sprague!

"You can join me in the living room, if you like," Dundee said shortly,
as he wheeled and strode toward the door. Was that quick, passionate
kiss between husband and wife being staged for his benefit?

"Pretty near through, boy?" Strawn, who had been silent and bewildered
for a long time, asked anxiously, as the two detectives passed into the
hall.

"Not quite. I've got to know several things yet," Dundee answered
absently.

But in the living room his mind was wholly upon the business in hand.

"I'll keep you all no longer than is absolutely necessary," he began,
and again the close-knit group--in which only Dexter Sprague was an
alien--grew taut with suspense. "From the playing out of the 'death
hand' at bridge," he went on, using the objectionable phrase again very
deliberately, "I found that no two of you men arrived together.... Mr.
Hammond, you were the first to arrive, I believe?"

"It seems that I was!" Clive Hammond answered curtly.

"And yet you did not enter the living room to greet your hostess?"

"I wanted a private word with Polly--Miss Beale--my fiancée," Hammond
explained briefly.

"How and when did you arrive?"

"I don't know the exact time. Never thought of looking at my watch,"
Hammond offered. "I came out in my own roadster--that tan Stutz you may
have noticed in the driveway. As for how I entered the house, I leaped
upon the porch and opened a door of the solarium. I walked across the
solarium, saw Polly just finishing with bridge for the afternoon, and
beckoned to her. She joined me in the solarium, and we stayed there
until Karen screamed.... That's all."

"Have you been engaged long, Mr. Hammond--you and Miss Beale?" Dundee
asked, as if quite casually.

"Nearly a year,--if it's any of your business, Dundee!"

"And just when had you seen Miss Beale last, before late this
afternoon?" Dundee asked.

"I refuse to answer!" Hammond flared. "That at least is none of your
damned business!"

"I believe I can answer my own question, Mr. Hammond," Dundee said very
softly.




CHAPTER EIGHT


"Then why ask me?" Hammond shrugged, but his eyes flickered toward Polly
Beale.

"I thought perhaps you could give me a little additional information,"
Dundee soothed him. "You see, it happens that I saw you, Miss Beale and
another young man come into the Stuart House dining room about half past
one today, just when I was thinking of lunch for myself."

"The mysterious 'other young man' was Clive's brother, Ralph Hammond,"
Polly Beale cut in brusquely.

"Your decision to lunch with your fiancé and his brother was quite a
sudden one?" Dundee asked courteously. "Just when did you change your
mind about Mrs. Selim's luncheon party at Breakaway Inn, Miss Beale?"

The tall girl threw up her mannishly cropped, chestnut head. "There is
nothing at all sinister or even queer about it, Mr. Dundee! I was on my
way to the luncheon, when I decided to drive past Nita's house, on the
chance that she might like me to drive her over."

"Then you didn't know that Mrs. Dunlap had already arranged to meet Mrs.
Selim downtown this morning and to take her to the Inn?" Dundee asked.

"No! I didn't hear of the arrangement," Polly answered decidedly.

"You were a close friend of Mrs. Selim's perhaps?" Dundee prodded.

"Not at all! But that would not keep me from doing my hostess a
courtesy.... She hated her Ford and liked expensive cars," Polly added
unemotionally. "It was about a quarter to one when I got here, I should
say. Nita wasn't here, nor was her maid, but I saw Ralph's car parked in
front of the house--"

"_Ralph Hammond's car?_" a woman squealed, but Dundee let Polly
continue.

"I rang and he answered the door. Said he was alone in the house, going
over the premises at Judge Marshall's request," Polly said evenly.

"That's right--that's right!" Judge Marshall agreed hastily. "Nita--Mrs.
Selim--wanted the unfinished half of the gabled top story finished up.
Wanted a maid's room and bath, and a guest room and bath added to the
living quarters already completed. I gave the commission, for an
estimate, at least, to the Hammond firm, since they had built the house
originally for Crain--Penny's father."

"I see," Dundee agreed. "And you sent your brother, Mr. Hammond?"

"He was the natural one to send," Clive Hammond retorted. "Small job.
All he had to do was to get together an estimate on additional furnace
lines and radiators, electric wiring, plumbing, plastering, etc."

"Go on, Miss Beale," Dundee directed.

"Thanks!" There was sarcasm in her brusque voice. "But that's really
about all I have to tell. Ralph complained that he was hungry and
charged me with giving him too little of my time--the usual thing. I
picked up Nita's phone, called Clive and made the date for the three of
us. Then I called Breakaway Inn, cancelled the luncheon part of the
bridge party with Nita, and Ralph and I drove back to Hamilton."

Dundee studied her strong, clever, almost plain face for a long minute.
Certainly Polly Beale did not look like a liar--but he would have taken
his oath that she was lying now. Or rather not revealing the whole truth
behind the actual facts of her movements that day. For instance, could a
simple plea of her future brother-in-law make her do so discourteous a
thing as to break a luncheon appointment, especially when such a course
would not only disappoint her hostess and her friends but disarrange the
seating plan of a rather formal party?

Of course the explanation was obvious. She had wanted, first, to see
Nita and remonstrate privately with her for having so enslaved Ralph
Hammond, when he was tacitly known to "belong" to Penny Crain--one of
the sacred crowd. Failing that, she had found Ralph himself, and had not
expected to find him; had talked with him about Nita, and had quarreled
a bit with him, perhaps, over his love-sodden behavior. And the crisis
had become so acute that Polly had arbitrarily called upon Clive Hammond
and then had forced Ralph to accompany her.

"Do you know, Miss Beale, why Ralph Hammond did not keep _his_
engagement with Mrs. Selim this afternoon? Or rather, his promise to
appear for cocktails and to be Miss Crain's partner for the rest of the
evening--dinner and dancing at the Country Club?"

"I do not!" Polly said crisply.

"Hammond?"

"Neither do I," Hammond retorted angrily.

"Then it was not to discuss Ralph Hammond and his--affairs, that you
beckoned Miss Beale to meet you in the solarium upon your arrival?"

"It--_was not_!"

A shade too much anger and emphasis, Dundee decided. And he wished
heartily that Strawn's detectives would not delay much longer in
bringing the missing young man into this already involved examination.

"You say that you both were in the solarium from the time of your
arrival, Hammond, until Mrs. Marshall screamed," Dundee continued. "Just
what did you see and hear?"

Dundee watched their faces keenly, but again they were well-bred,
expressionless. It was Polly Beale who answered: "Naturally there was
not absolute silence, but I am afraid we were not listening. We were
rather engrossed in our conversation. We were seated--near no
windows--and I for one _saw_ nothing, as well as heard nothing that I
can recall."

"Hammond?"

"That goes for me, too--absolutely!"

Abruptly abandoning the engaged couple, Dundee returned to Miles. "You
were the second arrival, then?"

"Yes. I parked my car along the curb in front of the house," Tracey
answered readily. "And I came right on in, and Nita jumped up--"

"Yes. We've had all that twice before," Dundee interrupted cruelly.
"Now, Judge Marshall--"

"One of my friends gave me a lift from town," Judge Marshall volunteered
pompously. "Chap named Sampson. You may have heard of him--fine fellow,
splendid lawyer. We played billiards together at the Athletic Club, and
when I was about to call a taxi--my wife having the car here--he offered
to drop me here on his way to the Country Club.... N-no, I don't
remember the exact time, did not consult my watch."

"You came directly from the road into the house, Judge Marshall?"

"Certainly, sir!"

"Did you--er, see anyone?"

"You mean, sir, did anyone see _me_?" Judge Marshall demanded with
pompous indignation. "No, no one, sir! If my word is not good enough for
you, you can think what you damned please!"

"I think we are all getting a little too tired, Mr. Dundee," Penny Crain
suggested, almost humble in her weariness.

"I'm truly sorry," the young detective apologized. "But I can't leave
things like this ... Mr. Drake, you have said you walked over from the
Country Club. You must have approached the house from the driveway side,
the side of the house which contains Mrs. Selim's bedroom.... Is that
right?"

"More or less, except that I skirted the house rather widely and arrived
from the road, stepping upon the front porch, and walking directly into
the hall. I saw no one outside or near the house when I arrived," Drake
answered, with less than his usual nastiness.

"And saw no one running away across the meadows?" Dundee pressed.

"No one at all," Drake retorted. "I wish to God I could truthfully say
that I saw a gunman, with a mask and a smoking revolver, skulking
through the wildflowers, but the absolute truth is that I saw no one."

"Thank you, Mr. Drake.... Now--Mr. Sprague, 'of New York'!"

Sprague's nervously twitching face reddened darkly. "I--I took a bus. I
have no car of my own. I got off the bus on Sheridan Road, at the
entrance to Primrose Meadows."

"I see. And you walked the quarter of a mile to this house?"

Sprague's hand fumbled with his cravat. "I--of course I did!"

"I see.... Now, Miss Raymond," Dundee pounced unexpectedly, so that the
red-haired girl went very white beneath her freckles, "you observed Mr.
Sprague toiling down the rutty road, hot and weary, but romantic in the
sunset?"

Mrs. Drake let out a nervous giggle, then clapped her hand over her
mouth.

"I--I wasn't looking that way," Janet Raymond stammered. "I--I just went
out on the porch for a breath of fresh air--"

"And you were _completely_ surprised when Mr. Sprague came walking up
the flagstone path?" Dundee persisted, for he knew she was lying, knew
that she had stationed herself there to watch for Sprague.

"I--yes, I was! He stopped and talked for a while, before we came in and
joined Tracey and Lois in the dining room, where Tracey was mixing
cocktails.... But," she flared suddenly, "I don't see why you have to
badger all of us, when it _must_ have been Lydia, the maid, who killed
Nita, because--"

"Oh, Janet! Shame on you!" Penny cried furiously.

"Where is the maid now, Captain Strawn?" Dundee asked. "I haven't seen
her yet--"

"Because she's in her room in the basement, Bonnie," Strawn answered.
"Sort of forgot about her, didn't you?" and he chuckled at the younger
man's discomfiture. "But _I_ got her story out of her, you bet! Nothing
to it, though. One of my boys--Collins, it was--found her in that short,
dark hall that runs between the Selim woman's bedroom and the kitchen.
Sicker'n a pup she was; it was a mess. Said she'd--"

"I'd better have her up and question her, if she's well enough," Dundee
interrupted, as tactfully as possible. "It seems that she had an
abscessed tooth out today, with gas and a local anesthetic.... Now, Miss
Raymond, will you tell me exactly what you meant by saying it must have
been Lydia who killed her mistress?"

"I certainly will!" the red-haired girl cried defiantly. "What I can't
see is why Tracey and Lois and Dex--Mr. Sprague--didn't think of it,
too. It's as plain as--"

"Yes, as the nose on my face," Dundee cut in grimly, but with a glance
at Strawn. "Just stick to the facts, however, Miss Raymond, and maybe we
can all agree with you."

"Well, when Mr. Sprague and I went into the dining room, there were Lois
and Tracey cutting up like a couple of children," Janet began,
determined to take her time. "When they saw us, Lois said: 'Good Lord,
Tracey! Get busy! Or your job as bartender will be taken away from you,'
and Tracey began to shake cocktails at the sideboard--"

"Guess I'd better tell it, Janet, for what it's worth," Lois cut in
impatiently. "It's nothing more nor less than that I had to ring twice
for poor Lydia before she came," she explained to Dundee. "Tracey is
full of original ideas about cocktails, and wanted some sort of bitters.
He was going to shout for Lydia, but I stepped on the button under the
dining table, and the poor thing--in the basement nursing her jaw,
probably--didn't hear. Tracey and I got to kidding, as Janet says, and
had scarcely noticed how long Lydia was in coming. I rang again, and she
came.... That's all!"

"That isn't all!" Janet denied angrily. "I was there when Lydia came
in, and she was looking white as a ghost--except for her swollen jaw.
What's more, she acted so dumb Tracey had to tell her twice what he
wanted.... And then she said Nita didn't have any of those bitters
anyway."

"An open-and-shut case against poor Lydia!" Penny Crain broke in
derisively. "Go pluck daisies, Janet! You'd be of a lot more help!"

"Here's your maid, Bonnie," Captain Strawn announced lazily, as one of
his plainclothesmen appeared in the arch between dining and living room,
dragging by the hand a woman who was resisting strangely, her apron
pressed to her face.

"You are Lydia?" Dundee asked, his voice kinder than it had been for
many minutes. "Oh, it's Lydia Carr, Captain Strawn? Thank you.... Don't
be afraid. And I'm sorry about the tooth.... Come along in. I'll not
keep you long."

The woman's knees seemed about to fail her, but with a sudden effort she
released the detective's grip on her wrist. Very tall she was, very bony
in her black cotton dress. Pathetic, too, with her thin, iron-grey hair,
and that apron concealing the left half of her face. It was odd, Dundee
thought, that it was not the swollen jaw she chose to cover.

Mrs. Dunlap sprang to her feet and hurried across the room.

"Don't mind, Lydia, please. You must not be so sensitive," she said
gently, and even more gently pulled down the concealing apron....

"Good God!" Dundee breathed, and Strawn nodded his understanding of the
younger man's horror.

For the left half of Lydia Carr's face was drawn and puckered and ridged
almost out of human semblance. Even the eye was ruined--a milky ball
which the puckered, hairless eyelid could never cover again.

"Poor Lydia is ashamed of her scarred face," Lois Dunlap explained, her
arm still about the maid's shoulder. "She isn't quite used to it yet,
but none of _us_ mind--"

"You were burned recently, Lydia?" Dundee asked pityingly.

"That's my business!" the woman astounded him by retorting harshly.

"How did it happen, Lydia?" Dundee persisted, puzzled.

"I had an accident. It was my own fault."

Lois Dunlap's kind grey eyes caught and held Dundee's firmly. "I think,
if Nita could speak to you now, Mr. Dundee, that she would beg you not
to try to force Lydia's confidence on this subject. Nita was devoted to
Lydia--we can all testify to that!--and one of the sweetest things about
her was her constant effort to protect Lydia from questions and curious
glances. I, for one, know that Nita often begged Lydia to submit to a
skin-grafting operation, regardless of expense--"

When that kind voice choked on tears, Dundee abruptly abandoned his
intention to press the matter further.

"Lydia, your mistress had been married, or was still married, wasn't
she?"

The woman's single, slate-grey eye stared into his expressionlessly.
"She had 'Mrs.' in front of her name, to use when she felt like it.
That's all I know. I never saw her husband--if she had one. I only
worked for her about five years."

"You say she used her married name 'when she felt like it....' What do
you mean by that, Lydia?"

"I mean she was an actress, and used her stage name--Juanita
Leigh--pronounced like it was spelled plain 'Lee'; but she was mostly
called 'Nita Leigh'."

"An actress, you say?" Dundee repeated thoughtfully. "I had heard of her
only as director of the Forsyte School plays.... What shows was she in?"

"She was what they call a specialty dancer in musical comedy," Lydia
answered. "Sometimes she had a real part and sometimes she only danced.
She was a good hoofer and a good trouper," she added, the Broadway terms
falling strangely from those austere lips. "And when she wasn't in a
show she sometimes got a job in the pictures. She never had a real
chance in the movies, though, because they mostly wanted her to double
for the star in long shots, where dancing comes into the picture, or in
close-ups where they just show the legs, you know."

"I see," Dundee agreed gravely. "Where were you during the fifteen
minutes or so before your mistress was shot, Lydia?"

"I was down in my room in the basement," the woman answered. "Nita--I
mean Miss Nita was going to get Judge Marshall to build me a room on the
top floor. She hated for me to have to sleep in the basement, but I
didn't mind."

"You were not required to be on duty for the party?"

"No," she answered in her harsh, flat voice. "I'd fixed the sandwiches
and put out the liquors for the cocktails--set them all out on the
dining table and sideboard, and Miss Nita had told me to go and lie down
as soon as I was through. So I did. I had an abscessed tooth pulled this
morning, and I was feeling sick."

"Did you hear the kitchen bell at all?" Dundee went on.

"I dropped off to sleep--that fool dentist had shot me full of dope--but
I did hear the bell and I come up to answer it. Mrs. Dunlap said she'd
rung twice, and I said I was sorry--"

"Lydia, did you go into your mistress' bedroom before or after you
answered that bell?" Dundee asked with sudden sharpness.

"I did not! I didn't even know she was in her bedroom, until I saw her
sitting at her dressing-table--dead." The harsh voice hesitated over the
last word, but it did not break.

"And just when did you first see her--after she was dead?"

"I went into the kitchen, thinking something else might be needed. Then
I heard a scream. It sounded like it come from Nita's--Miss Nita's
bedroom, and I run along the back hall that leads from the kitchen to
her bedroom. I heard a lot of people running and yelling. Nobody paid
any attention to me."

"You came into the room?"

"No, sir, I did not. I stopped in the doorway. I heard Mr. Sprague say
she was dead. I was sick and dizzy anyway, and I couldn't move for a
minute. I sort of slipped down to the floor, and I guess I must have
passed out. And then I was sick to my stomach, and--I didn't seem to
care if I never moved again."

"Why, Lydia?" Dundee asked gently.

"Because she was the only friend I had in the world, and I couldn't have
loved her better if she'd been my own child," Lydia answered. And the
stern voice had broken at last. "I was still there in the back hall when
a cop come and asked me a lot of questions, and then that man--" she
pointed to Captain Strawn, "--said I could go and lay down. He helped me
down the basement stairs."

Dundee tapped his teeth with the long pencil he had kept so busy that
evening--tapped them long and thoughtfully. Then:

"Lydia, did you see anyone--_anyone at all!_--from your basement room
window before you answered Mrs. Dunlap's ring?"




CHAPTER NINE


For the first time during the difficult interview Dundee was sure that
Lydia Carr was lying. For a fraction of a second her single eye wavered,
the lid flickered, then came her harsh, flat denial:

"I didn't see nobody."

"I presume your basement room has a window looking out upon the back
garden?" Dundee persisted.

"Yes, it has, but I didn't waste no time looking out of it," Lydia
answered grimly. "I was laying down, with an ice cap against my jaw."

She _had_ seen someone, Dundee told himself. But the truth would be
harder to extract from that stern, scar-twisted mouth, than the
abscessed tooth had been.

Finally, when her lone eye did not again waver under his steady gaze, he
dismissed her, or rather, returned her to Captain Strawn's custody.

"Well, Janet, I hope you're satisfied!" Penny Crain said bitingly, as
she dashed unashamed tears from her brown eyes. "If ever a maid was
absolutely crazy about her mistress--"

"I'm _not_ satisfied!" Janet Raymond retorted furiously. "She's just the
sort that would harbor a grudge for _years_, and then, all hopped up
with dope--"

"Stop it, Janet!" Lois Dunlap commanded with a curtness that set oddly
upon her kind, pleasant face.

"Listen here, Dundee," Tracey Miles broke in, almost humbly. "My wife is
getting pretty anxious about the kiddies. The nurse quit on us
yesterday, and--"

"And _my_ little wife is worrying herself sick over our boy--just three
months old," Judge Marshall joined the protest. "I'm all for assisting
justice, sir, having served on the bench myself, as you doubtless know,
but--"

"I'm all right, really, Hugo," Karen Marshall faltered.

"Please be patient a little longer," Dundee urged apologetically. After
all, only one of these people could be guilty of Nita Selim's murder,
and it _was_ beastly to have to hold them like this.... _But one was
guilty!_

"You knew Mrs. Selim in New York, Sprague?" he asked, whirling suddenly
upon the man with the Broadway stamp.

"I met Nita Leigh, as I always heard her called, when I was assistant
director in the Altamont Studios, out on Long Island," Sprague answered,
his black eyes trying to meet Dundee's with an air of complete
frankness. "Wonderful little girl, and a great dancer ... Screened
damned well, too. I had hoped to give her a break some day, at something
better than doubling for stars who can't dance. But it happened that
Nita, who never forgot even a casual friend, had a chance to give me a
leg up herself--a chance to show what I can really do with a camera."

"I knew I'd seen your name somewhere!" Dundee exclaimed. "So you're the
man the Chamber of Commerce is dickering with.... Going to make a movie
of the founding, growth and beauties of the city of Hamilton, aren't
you?"

"If I get the contract--yes," Sprague answered with palpably assumed
modesty. "My plans, naturally, call for a great deal of research work, a
large expenditure of money, a very careful selection of 'stars'--"

"I see," Dundee interrupted. Then his tone changed, became slow and
menacing in its terrible emphasis: "_And you really couldn't let even a
good friend like Nita Selim upset those fine plans of yours, could you,
Sprague?_"

Even as he put the sinister question, the detective was exulting to
himself: "Light at last! Now I know why this Broadway bounder was
received into an exclusive crowd like this! Every last female in the
bunch hoped to be the star of Sprague's motion picture!"

"I don't know what you're driving at, Dundee!" Sprague was on his feet,
his black eyes blazing out of a chalky face. "If you're accusing me
of--of--"

"Of killing Nita Selim?" Dundee asked lazily. "Oh, no! Not--yet,
Sprague! I was just remembering a rather puzzling note of yours I
happened to read this afternoon.... That note you sent by special
messenger to Breakaway Inn this noon, you know."

He had little interest for the sudden crumpling of Dexter Sprague into
the chair from which he had risen. Instead, as Dundee drew the note from
his coat pocket, his eyes swept around the room, noted the undisguised
relief on every face, the almost ghoulish satisfaction with which that
close-knit group of friends seized upon an outsider as the probable
murderer of that other outsider whom they had rashly taken into their
sacred circle. Even Penny Crain, thorny little stickler for fair play
that she was, relaxed with a tremulous sigh.

"You admit that this note, signed by what I take to be your 'pet name,'
was written by your hand, Sprague?" Dundee asked matter-of-factly, as he
extended the sheet of bluish notepaper.

"I--no--yes, I wrote it," Sprague faltered. "But it doesn't mean a
thing--not a damned thing! Just a little private matter between Nita and
myself--"

"Rather queer wording for an unimportant message, Sprague," Dundee
interrupted. "Let me refresh your memory: 'Nita, my sweet,'" he began to
read slowly, "'Forgive your bad boy for last night's row, but I _must_
warn you again to watch your step. You've already gone too far. Of
course I love you and understand, _but_--Be good, Baby, _and you won't
be sorry_!--Dexy....' Well, Sprague?"

Sprague wiped his perspiring hands on his handkerchief. "I know it
sounds--odd, under the circumstances," he admitted desperately, "but
listen, Dundee, and I'll try to make that damned note as clear as
possible to a man who doesn't know his Broadway.... Why, man, it isn't
even a love letter! Everybody on Broadway talks and writes to each other
like that, without meaning a thing!... As I told you, Nita Leigh, or
Mrs. Selim, remembered some little kindnesses I had done her on the
Altamont lot, when they got her to take up that Little Theater work Mrs.
Dunlap is interested in, and found that the Chamber of Commerce was
interested in putting Hamilton into the movies, in a big booster
campaign. She wired me and I thought it looked good enough to drop
everything and come.... Of course Nita and I got to be closer friends,
but I swear to God we were just friends--"

"And what was the 'friendly' row about last night, Sprague?"

"There wasn't a row, really," Sprague protested with desperate
earnestness. "It was merely that Nita insisted on my casting her for the
heroine of the movie--a thing I knew would alienate the whole crowd
that's been so kind to us--"

"Why--since she was a professional actress?" Dundee demanded.

"Because she isn't a Hamilton girl, of course, and the Chamber of
Commerce wants the cast to be all local talent," Sprague answered,
lapsing unconsciously into the present tense.

"And just what were you warning her against?"

"I'd told her before to watch her step," Sprague went on more easily.
"You see, Dundee, Nita Leigh is--was--a first-class little vamp, and I
could see she was playing her cards with the men here--" he indicated
four of Hamilton's most prominent Chamber of Commerce members with a
wave of his hand--"to get them all so crazy about her that they'd vote
for her as the star of the picture. I could see her point, all right. It
would have been a big chance for her to show how she could act.... Well,
I could see it was dangerous business, and that the girls--" and he
smiled jerkily at the tense women in the living room, "--were getting
pretty wrought up over the way Nita was behaving.... All except Mrs.
Dunlap," he added. "_She_ didn't want to act in the picture, and Nita
didn't make any headway at all with Peter Dunlap."

"Thanks, Mr. Sprague," Lois Dunlap drawled, with an amused quirk of her
broad mouth.

"Get along with the row, Sprague!" Dundee commanded impatiently.

"As I said, it wasn't really a row. I just pleaded with Nita last night
to smooth down the girls' rumpled feathers, and to make it clear to them
that she didn't want the star part in the picture any more than she
wanted any other woman's husband or sweetheart.... Just a friendly
warning--" Sprague drew a deep breath. "And that's all the note
meant--absolutely!"

"I see," Dundee said quietly, then quoted: _"'Be good, Baby, and you
won't be sorry!'"_

"That meant, of course," Sprague took him up eagerly, "that I'd see she
got a real part in a regular movie, after I'd made my hit with the
Hamilton picture."

Very plausible, very plausible indeed, Dundee reflected. And yet--

Finally he lifted his head and let his eyes dart from face to face.

"All of you have stated, separately and collectively, that you heard no
shot fired in Nita Selim's bedroom this afternoon," he said sharply. "Is
that true?"

He was answered by weary nods or sullen affirmations.

"Then," he continued, "I must conclude that you are all lying or that
Nita Selim was killed with a gun equipped with a Maxim silencer."

Never was a detective more unprepared for the effect of his words upon a
group of possible suspects than was Special Investigator Dundee....




CHAPTER TEN


As Dexter Sprague had glibly and plausibly explained away every sinister
aspect of the note he had written to Nita Selim that day, Special
Investigator Dundee was recalling with verbatim vividness his argument
with Captain Strawn of the Homicide Squad immediately after his arrival
into the house of violent death.

He had said then: "The person who killed Nita Selim, was so well known
to her, and his--or her--presence in this room so natural a thing that
she paid no attention to his or her movements and was concentrating on
the job of powdering her very pretty face."

And he had said further, in face of the disappearance of the gun and in
explanation of the fact that all twelve of these people had immediately
protested to Strawn that they had heard no shot:

"This was a premeditated murder, of course. The Maxim silencer--unless
they are all lying about not hearing a shot--proves that. Silencers are
damned hard to get hold of, but people with plenty of money can manage
most things."

And as Dexter Sprague had talked on, more and more glibly, Dundee had
suddenly found an explanation which fitted his own argument with such
perfection that he wondered, naïvely, if he were perhaps gifted with
clairvoyance.

Of all these twelve people, whom he had questioned so relentlessly, only
Dexter Sprague could easily have come into possession of a Maxim
silencer. He had dilated proudly upon the fact that he had been an
assistant director at the Altamont Studios on Long Island. And the
Altamont company had recently finished making a series of "underworld"
motion pictures--crook dramas featuring gunmen with "rods" made eerily
noiseless by Maxim silencers.

A bit of information he had picked up in a motion picture magazine had
hurtled into the logical chain of Dundee's reasoning: assistant
directors were in charge of "props"; it was their business to see that
no article needed for the production of a picture was lost or missing
when the director needed it. Dexter Sprague had said that he had
"dropped everything" to come when Nita Selim wired him of the Chamber of
Commerce project to make a "booster" movie of Hamilton.

Perhaps he _had_ dropped everything. But--_had he hesitated long enough
to pick up a Maxim silencer and a blunt-nosed automatic_? And was the
"row" which Sprague had been so glibly explaining away an ancient one--a
row so deadly that, when Nita Selim had refused to heed his written
warning, her murder had become necessary?

It was with all this in mind that Bonnie Dundee flung his challenge: "I
must conclude that you are all lying or that Nita Selim was killed with
a gun equipped with a Maxim silencer."

And his eyes, terrible with their command that the weakling should break
and confess, were upon Dexter Sprague. But Sprague did not break. He
stared back blankly....

If his eyes and his attention had included the whole group it is
possible that what happened would not have taken Dundee so completely by
surprise. He had paid little attention to a sort of concerted gasp, a
slight movement among the group farthest from him.

But not even his intense concentration upon Sprague could prevent his
hearing Karen Marshall's childish voice, tremulous with fear:

"No, no, Hugo! Don't--don't!"

He whirled from Sprague in time to see Judge Marshall disengaging his
arm from his young wife's clinging fingers, to note, with profound
astonishment, that Drake was stepping hastily aside, so that not even
his coat sleeve might be brushed by the advancing figure of the elderly,
retired judge. And before Judge Marshall had time to speak, Dundee saw
that a blight had touched, at last, the solid friendship of the women;
that they did not look at each other with that air of standing together
whatever happened, but that their eyes, not meeting at all, became
secret, calculating, afraid....

"Sir!" Judge Marshall began pompously, when he had planted himself
squarely before the young detective, "It shall never be said of me that
I have tried, even in the slightest way, to hamper the course of
justice."

"I am sure of that, Judge Marshall," Dundee replied courteously, but his
pulses were hammering. What, in God's name, did this long-winded old
fool have to tell him?... "You have some information you believe may be
valuable, Judge?"

"I do not believe it will be at all valuable, sir. On the contrary!" the
old man retorted indignantly. "But to suppress the fact at this juncture
might lead to grave misunderstandings later, when it inevitably comes to
light. So, sir, it is my duty to inform you that I myself own a Colt's
.32, as well as a Maxim silencer."

"What!" Dundee exclaimed incredulously. He was conscious that, behind
him, Captain Strawn was getting to his feet.

"There is no need to get out your handcuffs, Captain Strawn!" Judge
Marshall warned him majestically. "I assure you that I have not violated
the law. Every judge, active and retired, is entitled to a permit to
carry a weapon, and I long ago availed myself of the privilege. Nor am I
about to make a confession of murder!"

"There ain't no permit, so far as I know, Judge," Strawn growled, "for
any man, whoever he may be--God A'mighty himself not excepted--to tote a
gun with a silencer on it."

Karen Marshall was crying now, with the abandoned grief of a petted
child.

"Granted, Captain!" Judge Marshall snapped. "But it happens that I do
not 'tote' my gun with the silencer on it. If it interests you, I may as
well explain that I came by the silencer several years ago, when I was
on the bench. A notorious Chicago gunman, on trial for murder here, and
acquitted by a feeble-minded jury, made me a present of the very
silencer he had used in killing his victim--an ironic gesture, a gesture
of supreme insolence, but an entirely safe gesture, since he well knew
that a man once acquitted of a crime cannot again be placed in jeopardy
for the same offence."

"So you kept the silencer as a curiosity, Judge Marshall?" Dundee
interrupted the pompous flow of rhetoric.

"For years--yes," the ex-judge answered, then his face went yellow
and very old. "As I told you just now, I will withhold no fact that
may be of any relevance whatever.... About two months ago--in March,
I believe--our little group here took up target-shooting as a fad.
Several of us became quite expert with revolver and rifle. Mr.
Drake--" and he nodded toward the banker, who instantly averted his eyes,
"--conceived the idea of practising the draw-from-the-hip sort of
revolver-shooting--the kind one sees in Wild West movies, you know--"

"I think you might add, Hugo," Drake cut in angrily, "that I had in mind
the hope of being able to protect the bank in case of a holdup!"

"And the silencer, Judge Marshall?" Captain Strawn prodded.

Judge Marshall flushed, and fingered the end of a waxed mustache. "The
silencer, sir, was my wife's idea. You see, sir, we are fortunate enough
to be the parents of an infant son. He was just a month old when I
painted a bull's eye upon the brick wall of our back garden and invited
our friends to indulge their fad as our guests. The shooting awakened
the baby so frequently that Karen--Mrs. Marshall--dug up the silencer,
which I had shown her as a memento of my career on the bench. Thereafter
we confined our practice almost exclusively to drawing from the hip and
shooting without sighting. It is impossible to sight with a gun equipped
with a silencer, you know, since the silencer covers the sighter on the
barrel."

"It sure does," Strawn drawled. "So every last one of you folks had a
good deal of this sort of practice, I take it?"

Judge Marshall glanced about the room, as if he could not recall the
face of everyone present.

"Yes, all of us--except Mr. Sprague and--Penny, my dear, did you join us
at all?"

The girl who had once been in on every sport that this crowd of
Hamilton's socially elect indulged in, flushed a painful red.

"No, Hugo. I--I have to stay with Mother on Sunday mornings, you know."

"Your target practice was a Sunday morning diversion, then, Judge
Marshall?" Dundee asked.

"Yes. We usually have an hour of the sport--between eleven and noon, on
Sundays. We've been having a sort of tournament--quite sharply
competitive--"

"When did you and your friends practise last?" Dundee asked.

"Last Sunday. Tomorrow was to mark the end of the 'tournament'," the
Judge answered.

"And when did you last see your gun and silencer?" Dundee persisted.

"Last Sunday, of course.... Why, Good Lord!" Marshall ejaculated. _"It
was Nita herself who put the gun away!_"

There was a collective gasp of relief. Eyes could meet eyes--now. But it
was Flora Miles who voiced the thought or hope that seemed apparent on
every face.

"That's why I didn't hear anyone talking when I was in the closet!" she
cried, her voice almost hysterical in its vehemence. "_There wasn't
anybody but Nita in the room!_ She committed suicide! She stole poor
Hugo's gun and the silencer and committed suicide!"

"At a distance of from ten to fifteen feet?" Dundee asked with
ill-concealed sarcasm. "And when she was powdering her face? And just
after entering the room, blithely singing a Broadway hit?"

"Maybe the lady is right, boy," Captain Strawn interposed mildly. "I've
heard of people rigging up contrivances--"

"Which make the gun and the silencer disappear by magic?" Dundee
demanded. "No, folks, I'm afraid the suicide theory is no good.... Now,
Judge Marshall," and he turned again to the creator of the biggest
sensation since the investigation into Nita Selim's death had got under
way, "you say that Mrs. Selim herself put the gun away.... Will you
explain the circumstances?"

The elderly man's face had gone yellowish again. "Certainly! Nita Selim
and I were the last to leave the back garden. She was particularly poor
at the sport--never made a bull's eye during the four or five Sunday
mornings after Lois--Mrs. Dunlap--drew her into our set. She begged for
a few more shots, and I stayed with her, after the others had gone into
the house for--er--refreshment. She fired the last bullet in the chamber
of the Colt's, and together we walked to the house, entering the little
room at the rear where all sorts of sports equipment are kept--fishing
rods and tackle, golf clubs, bows and arrows, skis, etc. She was
carrying the gun, unscrewing the silencer as we walked. It is my habit
to keep the pistol and the silencer in a drawer in a little corner
cupboard--"

"Locked, up?" Dundee asked sharply.

"Usually locked, but not always, I am afraid," Judge Marshall answered
reluctantly.

"And you saw Mrs. Selim place the gun and the silencer in the drawer?"

"I--thought I did, but I was really not watching closely. As a matter of
fact, I stopped to look over a fishing rod, with a view to trying it out
the first good fishing weather--"

"Was Mrs. Selim wearing a coat or cloak?" Dundee cut in impatiently.

"Why, I don't know--"

"Yes, she was, Hugo!" Karen cried out eagerly. "It was quite chilly last
Sunday morning. Remember? We all had on coats or sweaters. Nita wore a
dark-green leather jacket with big pockets--"

"And she left in a great hurry, without even waiting for a drink," Flora
Miles contributed triumphantly. "I tell you, she took them away in her
pockets."

"Your guess may be correct, Mrs. Miles," Dundee agreed, "but I think we
had better not come to any definite conclusion until we know that Judge
Marshall's automatic and silencer are really missing.... Is there anyone
at your house now, Judge, whom you can ask to look for it?"

"Certainly. The butler.... Shall I telephone him?"

Accompanied by Captain Strawn, the ex-judge went to the telephone in the
little foyer between Nita Selim's bedroom and the main hall. And within
five minutes he was back, nodding his head gravely.

"Hinson tells me that the Colt's and the silencer are both missing,
sir.... May I express my profound regret that my possession of--"

"Some other time, Judge Marshall!" Dundee interrupted curtly, and
hurried from the room, followed by Strawn, who nodded to Sergeant
Turner, still lounging wearily in a far corner of the living room, to
stand guard vigilantly.

"Well, Bonnie, here's the devil to pay," Strawn gloomed, but Dundee made
for the telephone without answering.

He called a number, then curtly demanded: "Dr. Price, please!... Yes, I
know he's busy on an autopsy. Just tell him that Dundee, of the district
attorney's office, wants to speak to him."

There was a long pause, then: "Hello, Dr. Price!... Dundee.... What are
the caliber and type of bullet that killed Nita Selim?... Thanks much,
doctor.... Anything new?... Fine! Thanks again!"

He hung up the receiver and faced Strawn. "Bullet from a Colt's .32," he
said grimly. "I suggest you send one of your men around to the Marshall
home to pick up a bullet that was shot in their damned target practice.
If you send the two bullets tonight, registered mail, to Wright, the
ballistics expert in Chicago, he can probably wire you tomorrow morning
as to whether the same gun was used to fire both."

"Sure, Bonnie," Strawn agreed lugubriously. "I was going to do just
that.... Say, this town is getting to be worse than Chicago!"

When he re-entered the living room Dundee began upon the judge again,
regardless of the fact that the elderly husband was murmuring
consolatory endearments to his young wife.

"Judge Marshall, how many keys are there to the cupboard drawer in which
your gun and silencer were kept?"

"Just one. I have it with me," the old man answered wearily.

"Then when Hinson, your butler, looked for them, he found the drawer
unlocked?"

"He did. I confess to almost criminal negligence--"

"Then so far as you know, the gun and silencer could have been removed
at any time by any guest of yours between noon last Sunday and--today?"
Dundee went on relentlessly.

"I--suppose so. But these people have been my close friends for years,"
the judge answered. "Not one of them, sir--"

"After Mrs. Selim's departure last Sunday, did your other guests remain
for any length of time?"

"For an hour or more, I think. Lois and Peter Dunlap remained for our
two o'clock Sunday dinner, but the others drifted away to various
engagements."

"Did any of you return to the room where the gun was kept?"

"I can speak only for myself and Peter--Mr. Dunlap," Judge Marshall
answered, flushing with indignation. "The two of us went down just
before dinner was served. I wanted to show him some new flies for trout
casting."

"Your home is a popular rendezvous for your intimates, is it not?"

"I pride myself that it is, sir!"

"And guests run in and out, having the freedom of the place?"

"Certainly, sir!... And since I am not so stupid as you imagine, I can
tell you now that I understand the drift of your questions, and can
forestall them: Yes, all of these people--_my friends_!--have had
opportunity to take the gun and the silencer from the cupboard since it
was placed there last Sunday, if it _was_ placed there by Mrs. Selim.
But may I remind you, sir, that opportunity alone is not sufficient;
that _motive_--"

"Since Mrs. Selim is dead, murdered by the weapon which was stolen, we
can assume, Judge Marshall, that someone had motive," Dundee reminded
him implacably, for in his mind there was no doubt that the ballistics
expert would bear him out.

There was a heavy, throbbing silence. The group that, with the exception
of Dexter Sprague, had been so united, so cemented with long-sustained
friendship, again dissolved visibly before Dundee's eyes into eleven
individuals, each shrinking into himself, mentally drawing away from any
possible contamination with a murderer....

"You have said, Judge Marshall," Dundee went on at last, "that Miss
Crain and Mr. Sprague were not at your home for target practice Sunday.
Has either of them been in your home during this past week?"

"Penny--Miss Crain--spent an evening with my wife when I was--er--away
from home on business. That was last Tuesday, I believe--"

"Yes, it was Tuesday, Hugo," Penny Crain interrupted firmly. "And Karen
can vouch for the fact that I did not go into the gun room."

"Don't be silly, Penny!" Carolyn Drake scolded, as if she had long been
bursting to speak. "Giving an alibi! As if _any_ of us who were playing
bridge while that woman was being shot _needs_ any alibi!... But I'll
tell you what _I_ think, Mr. Detective! I think Nita herself stole the
gun and the silencer, to kill Dexter Sprague with, and that _he_ stole
it from her and murdered _her_! Nobody else has the slightest scrap of a
motive, and that note he wrote her ought to be enough to hang him on!"

Dexter Sprague had struggled to his feet during the woman's hysterical
attack, his face like chalk, his eyes blazing. But Dundee waved him
aside peremptorily.

"One more question, Judge Marshall," he said suavely, as if he had not
heard a word that Carolyn Drake had said. "You knew Mrs. Selim before
her arrival in Hamilton with Mrs. Dunlap, I believe.... Just when and
where did you meet her?"




CHAPTER ELEVEN


"You are damned impertinent, sir!" Judge Marshall shouted, the ends of
his waxed grey mustache trembling with anger.

"Then I take it that you do not wish to divulge the circumstances of
your friendship with Mrs. Selim?" Dundee asked.

"Friendship!" the old man snorted. "Your implications, sir, are
dastardly! I met Mrs. Selim, or rather, Nita Leigh, as she was
introduced to me, only once, several years ago when I was in New York.
Naturally--"

"Just a moment, Judge. You say she was introduced to you as Nita Leigh.
Then you knew her as an actress, I presume?"

"I refuse to submit to such a cowardly attack, sir!"

"_Attack_, Judge?" Dundee repeated with assumed astonishment. "I merely
thought you might be able to shed a little light on the past of the
woman who has been murdered here today, with a weapon you admit to
having owned.... However--"

The elderly ex-judge stared at his tormentor for a moment as if murder
was in his heart. He gasped twice, then suddenly his whole manner
changed.

"I apologize, Dundee. You must realize how--But that is beside the
point. I met Nita Leigh at--er--at a social gathering, arranged by some
New York friends of mine. She was young, attractive, more refined
than--er--than the average young woman in musical comedy. Naturally I
told her if she was ever in Hamilton to look me up. And she did."

"And because she was 'more refined than the average young woman in
musical comedy'--than the average chorus girl, to put it simply," Dundee
took him up, "you co-operated with Mrs. Dunlap to introduce her to your
most intimate friends--including your wife?"

"Oh, Hugo! Why didn't you tell me?" Karen Marshall wailed.

"You see, sir, what you are doing!" Judge Marshall stormed.

"I am truly sorry if I have distressed you, Mrs. Marshall," Dundee
protested sincerely. "But--" He shrugged and turned again to the
husband. "I understand you were Mrs. Selim's landlord.... May I ask how
much rent she paid?"

"The house rents for one hundred dollars a month--furnished."

"And did Mrs. Selim pay her rent promptly?" Dundee persisted.

"Since this is the 24th of May, sir, Mrs. Selim's rent for June was not
yet due."

Not before poor little Karen could Dundee force himself to ask what,
inevitably, would have been his next question--one which could not have
been evaded, as the ex-judge had evaded the other two questions: "_Is it
not true, Judge Marshal, that Nita Leigh Selim paid you no rent at
all?_" But there were other ways to find out....

"Look here, Dundee!" a brusque voice challenged, and the detective
whirled to face Polly Beale. It was like her, he thought with a slight
grin, to address him as one man to another....

"Yes, Miss Beale?"

"I'm no fool, and I don't think any of my friends here are
either--though two or three of them have acted like it today," the
masculine-looking girl stated flatly. "You've made it very plain that
any one of us here, except the Sprague man, could have stolen Hugo's gun
and silencer.... Has the gun been found?"

"It has not, Miss Beale."

"O. K.!" The queer girl snapped her fingers. "I move that you or
Captain Strawn search the men for the weapon, and that I search the
Women.... Wait!" she harshly stopped a flurry of feminine protests. "I'll
ask you, Dundee, to search me first yourself. I believe the technical
term is 'frisking,' isn't it?... Then 'frisk' me.... Here is my handbag.
I wore no coat, except this--" and she pointed to the jacket of her tweed
suit.

As she strode toward the detective Clive Hammond sprang after her with
an oath and a sharp command.

"Shut up, Clive! I'm not married to you yet!" she retorted, but her eyes
were gentler than her voice.

His face burning with embarrassment, Dundee went through the traditional
gestures of police "frisking"--running his hands rapidly down the girl's
tall, sturdy body, slapping her pockets. And his fingers fumbled sadly
as he opened her tooled leather handbag.

"Satisfied?" Polly Beale demanded, and at Dundee's miserable nod, the
girl faced her friends: "Well, come along, girls!"

"Lord! What a girl!" Dundee muttered to Strawn, as the young Amazon
herded Flora Miles, Penny Crain, Karen Marshall, Carolyn Drake, Lois
Dunlap and Janet Raymond into the dining room.

Silently, and almost meekly, as if shamed into submission by Polly
Beale's example, John Drake, Tracey Miles, Clive Hammond, Judge
Marshall, and Dexter Sprague permitted Captain Strawn and Sergeant
Turner to search them.

"How about the guest closet and the cars?" Dundee asked of Strawn in a
low voice, when the fruitless, unpleasant task was finished.

"Gone over with a fine tooth comb long ago," Strawn assured him
gloomily. "And not a hiding place in or outside the house that the boys
haven't poked into--including the meadow as far as anyone could throw
from the bedroom window."

The women were filing back into the room, some pale, some flushed, but
all able to look each other in the eye again.

With surprising jauntiness Polly Beale saluted Dundee. "Nothing more
deadly on any of us than Flora's triple-deck compact."

"I thank you with all my heart, Miss Beale," Dundee said sincerely. "And
now I think you may all go to your homes.... Of course you understand,"
he interrupted a chorus of relieved ejaculations, "that all of you will
be wanted for the inquest, which will probably be held Monday."

"And what's more," Captain Strawn cut in, to show his authority, "I want
all of you to hold yourselves ready for further questioning at any
time."

There was a stampede for coats and hats, a rush for cars as if the house
were on fire, or--Dundee reflected wryly--as if those he had tortured
were afraid he would change his mind. Rushing away with hatred of him in
their hearts....

Only Penny Crain held back, maneuvering for a chance to speak with him.

"I don't have to go with the rest, do I?" she begged in a husky whisper.

"And why not?" Dundee grinned at her, but he was glad there was no
hatred in _her_ eyes.

"I'm 'attached' to the district attorney's office, too, aren't I?"

"Right! And you've been a brick this evening. I don't know what I should
have done without you--"

"Well, I can't see that you've done much _with_ me," she gibed. "But I'd
like to stick around, if you're going to do some real Sherlocking--"

"Can't be done, Penny. I want to stay here alone for a while and mull
things over. But I'd like to have a long talk with you tomorrow."

"Come to Sunday dinner. Mother loves murder mysteries," she suggested.
Then realization swept over her. Her brown eyes widened, filled with
terror. "Stop thinking one of us did it! _Stop_, I tell you!"

"Can _you_ stop, Penny?" he asked gently.

But she fled from him, sobbing wildly for the first time that long,
horrible evening. Dundee, watching from the doorway of the lighted hall,
saw the chauffeur open the rear door of the Dunlap limousine, saw Penny
catapult herself into Lois Dunlap's outstretched arms....

"When did the Dunlap chauffeur call for his mistress?" he asked Strawn,
who stood beside him.

"About ten minutes after you arrived," Strawn answered wearily. "Said
he'd dropped Mrs. Dunlap and the Selim woman at about 2:30 and had been
ordered to return around 6:30.... Knows nothing, of course." The chief
of the Homicide Squad drew a deep breath. "Well, Bonnie, he has nothing
on me. In spite of all the palaver I don't know nothing either."

"You need some dinner, chief," Dundee suggested. "And the boys must be
getting hungry, too."

"Somebody's got to guard the house, I suppose," Strawn gloomed. "Not
that it will do any good.... And what about that maid--that Carr woman?
Shall I lock her up on general principles?"

"No. I want to have another talk with her, and if she bucks at spending
the night here, I'll take her to the Rhodes House, and turn her over to
my old friend, Mother Rhodes. We haven't anything on her, you know."

"No, nor on anybody else, except that old fool, Marshall, and we can't
clap him into jail--yet," Strawn agreed, his grey eyes twinkling.

"Take your crew on in, chief," Dundee urged. "I'll stick till midnight
or longer, if you don't mind. You can arrange to have a couple of the
boys to relieve me about twelve.... And by the way, will you telephone
me the minute you get hold of Ralph Hammond?"

"Well, maybe not so quick as all that," Strawn drawled. "I'll take the
first crack at _that_ baby, my lad!... Not so dumb, am I, Bonnie-boy?
Not so dumb! I can put two and two together as well as the next
one--pretty near as well as the district attorney's new 'special
investigator!'"

           *       *       *       *       *

Although Bonnie Dundee had taken Captain Strawn's none-too-gentle
parting gibe with good grace, it was a very thoughtful young detective
who set about locking himself into the house in which Nita Selim had
been murdered.

Captain Strawn had beaten him to the job that evening by at least twenty
minutes. Had the old detective stumbled upon something which Dundee, for
all his spectacular thoroughness, had overlooked or had been unable to
turn up because Strawn had suppressed it?

What if Strawn's parting boast was not an idle one, and he really had
"the goods" on Ralph Hammond? Had the old chief been laughing up his
sleeve during the farce of playing out the "death hand at bridge," and
during the merciless quizzing of old Judge Marshall?

But Dundee's native common sense quickly routed his gloom. Captain
Strawn was too direct in his methods, too afraid of antagonizing the
rich and influential, to have permitted even a "special investigator"
from the district attorney's office to torment those twelve people
needlessly. Probably Strawn, feeling a little hurt at having played
second fiddle all evening, had simply wanted to get him fussed, was even
now chuckling over the effect of his parting boast....

Much cheered, Dundee lingered in the dining room whose windows he had
made fast against any intrusion, so that his task of guarding the house
alone might be minimized. As he glanced at the table, with its silver
plates heaped with tiny sandwiches of caviar and anchovy paste, its
little silver boats of olives and sweet pickles, he discovered that he
was very hungry indeed....

As he munched the drying sandwiches and sipped charged water--the
various liquors for cocktails on the sideboard offered a temptation
which he sternly resisted--Dundee's thought boiled and churned, throwing
up picture after picture of Nita Selim, alive and then dead; of Penny
Crain--bless her!--helping him at the expense of her loyalty to
life-long friends; of Flora Miles, lying desperately and then confessing
to a shameful theft; of Karen Marshall gallantly playing out the "death
hand"; of Karen's stricken, childish face when she learned that her
elderly husband had met and at least flirted with Nita Selim at a chorus
girls' party....

At that last picture Dundee flushed so that his skin prickled. Had he
made a fool of himself, or was he right in his suspicion that Hugo
Marshall had given Nita Selim this cottage rent free? That point should
be easily settled, at any rate....

Ruefully reflecting that appetizers do not make a satisfactory meal he
betook himself to the dead woman's bedroom.... Yes, his memory had
served him well. Here was her desk--a small feminine affair of rosewood,
set in the corner of the room nearest the porch door.

The desk was not locked. As Dundee let down the slanting lid, whose
polish was marred with many fingerprints, he saw that its contents were
in a hopeless jumble. So Strawn had beaten him to this, too! Had he
found an all-important clue in one of the many little pigeon-holes and
drawers, stuffing it into his pocket just before a bumptious young
"special investigator" had arrived?

But Dundee's returning gloom was instantly dispelled. Here was Nita's
checkbook, a flutter of filled-in stubs attached to only one remaining
blank check. So Nita had banked with the Hamilton National Bank, of
which John C. Drake--who apparently hated his fattish, fussy wife--was a
vice president! Another tiny fact to be tucked away.... She had opened
her account, apparently, on April 21, the day of her arrival in
Hamilton--the guest and employe of Mrs. Peter Dunlap. Probably Lois
Dunlap had advanced her the two hundred dollars as first payment for her
prospective work in organizing a Little Theater movement in Hamilton.

Turning rapidly through stubs, Dundee stopped twice, whistling softly
with amazement each time. For on April 28th, and again on May 5th, Nita
Selim had deposited $5,000! Where had she got the money? Were the sums
transfers from accounts in New York banks? But it was hardly likely that
a little Broadway hanger-on had had so much hard cash on deposit. Then
where had she got it--$5,000 at a time, here in Hamilton?

_Blackmail!_

Hastily but thoroughly Dundee ran through the remaining check
stubs.... _No record at all of a check for rent made out to Judge Hugo
Marshall!_

But there was a stub that interested him. Check No. 17--Nita had spent
her money lavishly--was filled in as follows, in Nita's pretty backhand:

     No. 17  $9,000
     _May 9, 1930_
     To _Trust Dept._
     For _Investment_

Had John C. Drake, who as vice president in charge of trusts and
investments had doubtless handled the check, wondered at all where the
$9,000 had come from?

One other revelation came out of the twenty-three filled-in stubs. On
every Monday Nita Selim had drawn a check for $40 to her maid, Lydia
Carr.

Again Dundee whistled. Forty dollars a week was, he wagered to himself,
more money than any other maid in Hamilton was lucky enough to receive!
Nita in a new light--an over-generous Nita! Or--_was Nita herself paying
blackmail on a small scale_?

He reached into a pigeon-hole whose contents--a thick packet of unused
envelopes--had not been disturbed by Strawn, and was about to remove an
envelope in which to place the all-important checkbook, when he noticed
something slightly peculiar. An envelope in the middle of the packet
looked rather thicker than an empty case should....

_But it was not empty._ And across the face of the expensive,
cream-colored linen paper was written, in that same pretty, very legible
backhand:

     TO BE OPENED IN CASE OF MY DEATH
     --JAUNITA LEIGH SELIM

His heart hammering painfully, and his fingers trembling, Dundee drew
out the two close-written sheets of creamy notepaper. After all, who had
better right than he to open it? Was he not the representative of the
district attorney?... And he hadn't damaged the envelope. It had opened
very easily indeed--its flap had yielded instantly to his thumb-nail....

Wait! It had been _too easy_! Before unfolding the letter or whatever it
was, Dundee examined the flap of the envelope.... Yes! He was not the
first to open it since its original sealing. God grant he hadn't
destroyed any tell-tale fingerprints in his criminal haste to learn any
secret that Nita Selim had recorded here!... Perhaps Nita herself had
unsealed the letter to make an addition or a correction?

Well, whatever damage had been done was done now, and he might as well
read....

Five minutes later Bonnie Dundee was racing through the dining room,
pushing open the swinging door that led into the butler's pantry. Where
the devil were the steps that led down into the basement? A precious
minute was lost before he discovered that a door in the dark back hall
opened upon the steep stairs....

An unshaded light, dangling from the ceiling, revealed the furnace in
one corner of the big basement, laundry equipment in another. He plunged
on.... That must be the maid's room, behind that closed door.... God!
What if she had escaped, while he had been munching caviar and anchovy
sandwiches? A fine guard he'd been!... And it wasn't as if he hadn't had
a dim suspicion of the truth....

The knob turned easily. He flung open the door. And then his knees
nearly gave way, so tremendous was his relief. For there, on the thin
mattress of a white-enameled iron bed, lay the woman he so ardently
desired to see.

She had apparently been asleep, and the noise he had made had startled
her into panicky wakefulness. Instinctively her hand flew to the ruined
left side of her face--that hideous expanse of livid flesh, scarred and
ridged so that it did not look human....

"What--? Who--?" Lydia Carr gasped, struggling to a sitting position,
only to fall back as nausea swept over her.

"You remember me?" Dundee panted. "Dundee of the district attorney's
office. I questioned you this afternoon--"

The woman closed the single eye that had escaped the accident which had
marred her face so hideously. "I--remember.... I'm sick.... I told you
all I know--"

"Lydia, why didn't you tell me that it was your mistress, Mrs. Selim who
did--that?" Dundee demanded sternly, pointing to the woman's sightless
left eye and ruined cheek.




CHAPTER TWELVE


Lydia Carr, still clothed in the black cotton dress and white apron of
her maid's uniform, struggled to a sitting position on the edge of her
basement room bed.

"No, no! That's a lie! It was an accident, I tell you--my own
fault!... Who dared to say Nita--Miss Nita--did it?"

"Better lie down, Lydia," Dundee suggested gently. "I won't want you
fainting. You've had a hard day with the abscessed tooth, the dope the
dentist gave you, and--other things. I don't wonder that you lost your
head, went a little crazy, perhaps--"

The detective's sinister implication seemed to make no impression at all
upon the woman with the scarred face.

"I asked you--" she gasped, her single eye glaring at him, "who dared
say Nita burned me?"

"It was Nita herself who told me," Dundee answered softly. "Just a few
minutes ago."

"Holy Mother!" the maid gasped, and crossed herself dazedly.

Let her think the dead woman had appeared to him in a vision, Dundee
told himself. Perhaps her confession would come the quicker--

The maid began to rock her gaunt body, her arms crossed over her flat
chest. "My poor little girl! Even in death she thinks of me, she's
sorry--. She sent me a message, didn't she? Tell me! She was always
trying to comfort me, sir! The poor little thing couldn't believe I'd
forgiven her as soon as she done it--. Tell me!"

"Yes," Dundee agreed, his eyes watching her keenly. "She sent you a
message--of a sort.... But I can't give it to you until you have told me
all about the--accident in which you were burned."

"I'll tell," Lydia promised eagerly. Gone were the harshness and
secretiveness with which she had met his earlier questioning.... "You
see, sir, I loved Miss Nita--I called her Nita, if you don't mind, sir.
I loved her like she was my own child. And she was fond of me, too,
fonder of me than of anybody in the world, she used to tell me, when
some man had hurt her bad.... And there was always some man or other,
she was so sweet and so pretty.... Well, I found her in the bathroom one
day, just ready to drink carbolic acid, to kill her poor little self--"

"When was that, Lydia?" Dundee interrupted.

"It was in February--Sunday, the ninth of February," Lydia went on,
still rocking in an agony of grief. "I tried to take the glass out of
her hands. She'd poured a lot of the stuff out of the bottle.... You
see, she was already in a fit of hysterics, or she'd never have tried to
kill herself.... It was my own fault, trying to take the glass away from
her, like I did--"

"She flung the acid into your face?" Dundee asked, shuddering.

"She didn't know what she was doing!" the woman cried, glaring at him.
"Nearly went out of her mind, they told me at the hospital, because
she'd hurt me.... A private room in the best hospital in New York she
got for me, trained nurses night and day, and so many doctors fussing
around me I wanted to fire the whole outfit and save some of my poor
girl's money--which I don't know till this day how she got hold of--"

Dundee let her sob and rock her arms for a while unmolested. In February
Nita Selim had had to borrow money to pay doctor and hospital bills. Had
borrowed it or "gold-dug" it.... And in May she had been rich enough to
have $9,000 to invest!

"Lydia, you never forgave Nita Selim for ruining your life as well as
your face!" Dundee charged her suddenly.

"You're a liar!" she cried passionately. "I know what I felt. It's _my_
face and _my_ life, ain't it? I tell you I didn't even bear a grudge
against her--the poor little thing! Eating her heart out with sorrow for
what she'd done--till the very day of her death! Always trying to make
it up to me--paying me too much money for the handful of work I had to
do, what with her eating out nearly all the time and throwing away
stockings the minute they got a run in 'em--. Forgive her? I'd have
crawled from here to New York on my hands and knees for Nita Leigh!"

Dundee studied her horribly scarred face, made more horrible now by what
looked like genuine grief.

"Lydia, who was the man over whom your mistress wanted to commit
suicide?"

The single, tear-reddened eye glared at him suspiciously, then became
wary. "I don't know."

"Was it Dexter Sprague, Lydia?"

"Sprague?" She spat the name out contemptuously. "No! She didn't know
him then, except to speak to at the moving picture studio."

"When did he become her--lover, Lydia?" Dundee asked casually.

The woman stiffened, became menacingly hostile. "Who says he was her
lover? You can't trick me, Mr. Detective! I'd cut my tongue out before
I'd let you make me say one word against my poor girl!"

Dundee shrugged. He knew a stone wall when he ran up against one.

"Lydia," he began again, after a thoughtful pause, "I have proof that
Nita Selim was sure you had never forgiven her for the injury she did
you." His fingers touched the letter in his pocket--that incredible
"Last Will and Testament" which Nita had written the day before she was
murdered....

"And that's another lie!" the woman cried, shaking with anger. She
struggled to her feet, stood swaying dizzily a moment. "Come upstairs
with me to her room, and I'll show _you_ some proof that I had forgiven
her!... Come along, I tell you!... Trying to make me say _I_ killed my
poor girl, when I'd have died for her--Come on, I tell you!"

And Dundee, wondering, beginning to doubt his own conviction a
little--that conviction which had sprung full-grown out of Nita's
strange, informal will, and which had seemed to explain
everything--followed Lydia Carr from her basement room to the bedroom in
which Nita had been murdered....

"See this!" and Lydia Carr snatched up the powder box from the
dressing-table. Her long, bony fingers busied themselves with frantic
haste, and suddenly, into the silence of the room came the tinkle of
music. "_I_ bought her this--for a present, out of my own money, soon as
I got out of the hospital!" the maid's voice shrilled, over the slow,
sweet, tinkly notes. "It's playing her name song--_Juanita_. It was
playing that song when she died. I stood there in the doorway and heard
it--" and she pointed toward the door leading from Nita's room into the
back hall. "She loved it and used it all the time, because I gave it to
her.... And _this_!"

She set the musical powder box upon the dressing-table and rushed across
the room to one of the several lamps that Dundee had noticed on his
first survey of the room. It was the largest and gaudiest of the
collection--a huge bowl of filigreed bronze, set with innumerable
stones, as large as marbles, or larger. Red, yellow and green stones
that must have cast a strange radiance over the pretty head that had
been wont to lie just beneath it, on the heaped lace pillows of the
chaise lounge, Dundee reflected.

As if Lydia had read his thoughts, she jerked at the little chain which
hung from the bottom of the big bronze bowl against the heavy metal
standard.

"I gave her this--saved up for it out of my own money!" she was assuring
him with savage triumph in proving her point. "And she loved it so she
brought it with us when we came from New York--It won't light! It was
working all right last night, because my poor little girl was lying
there, looking so pretty under the colored lights--"

With strong twists of her big hands Lydia began to unscrew the filigreed
bronze bowl. As she lifted it off she exclaimed blankly:

"Why, look! The light bulb's--_broke_!"

But Dundee had already seen--not only the broken light bulb but the
explanation of the queer noise that Flora Miles had described
hysterically over and over, as "a bang or a bump." The chaise lounge
stood between the two windows that opened upon the drive. And at the
head of it stood the big lamp, just a few inches from the wall and only
a foot from the window frame upon which Dr. Price had pencilled the
point to indicate the end of the imaginary line along which the shot
which killed Nita Leigh Selim had traveled.

The "bang or bump" which Flora Miles had heard had been made by the
knocking of the big lamp against the wall. Undoubtedly the one who had
bumped into the lamp was Nita's murderer--or murderess--in frantic haste
to make an escape.

_And that meant that the murderer had fled toward the back hall, not
through the window in front of which he had stood, not through the door
leading onto the front porch...._ A little progress, at least!

But Lydia was not through proving that she had forgiven her mistress.
She was snatching things from Nita's clothes closet--

"See these mules with ostrich feathers?--I give 'em to my girl!... And
this bed jacket? I embroidered the flowers on it with my own hands--"

Through her flood of proof Dundee heard the whir of a car's engine, then
the loud banging of a car's door.... Running footsteps on the flagstone
path.... Dundee reached the front door just as the bell pealed shrilly.

"Hello, Dundee! Awfully glad I caught you before you left.... Is poor
Lydia still here?"

"Come in, Mr. Miles," Dundee invited, searching with a puzzled frown the
round, blond face of Tracey Miles. "Yes, Lydia is still here.... Why?"

"Then I'm in luck, and I think Lydia is, too--poor old girl!... You see,
Dundee," Miles began to explain, as he took off his new straw hat to mop
his perspiring forehead, "the crowd all ganged up when our various cars
reached Sheridan Road, and by unanimous vote we elected to drive over to
the Country Club for a meal in one of the small private dining rooms--to
escape the questions of the morbidly curious, you know--"

"Yes.... What about it?" Dundee interrupted impatiently.

"Well, I admit we were all pretty hungry, in spite of--well, of course
we were all fond of Nita, but--"

"What about Lydia?" Dundee cut him short.

"I'm getting to it, old boy," Miles protested, with the injured air of
an unappreciated small boy. "While we were waiting for our food,
somebody said, 'Poor Lydia! What's going to become of _her_?' And
somebody else said that it was harder on her--Nita's death, I mean--than
on anybody else, because Nita was all she had in the world, and then
Lois--Lois is always practical, you know--ran to telephone Police
Headquarters, to see what had been done with Lydia, and to see if it
would be all right for Flora and me to take her home with us--"

"Just a minute, Miles! Whom did Mrs. Dunlap talk to at Headquarters?"

"Why, Captain Strawn, of course," Miles answered. "He told Lois that you
were still out here, questioning Lydia again, and that it was all right
with him, whatever you decided. So as soon as I had finished eating, I
drove over--"

"Is Mrs. Miles with you?" Dundee interrupted again.

"Well, no," Miles admitted uncomfortably. "You see, the girls felt a
little squeamish about coming back, even on an errand of mercy--"

Dundee grinned. He had no doubt that Flora Miles had emphatically
refused the possibility of another gruelling interview.

"Why do you and Mrs. Miles want to take Lydia home with you?" he asked.

"To give her a home and a job," Miles answered promptly. "She knows us,
we're used to her poor old scarred face, and the youngsters, Tam and
Betty, are not a bit afraid of her. In fact, Betty pats that scarred
cheek and says, over and over, 'Poo Lyddy! Poo Lyddy! Betty 'oves
Lyddy!' and Tam--he's T. A. Miles, junior, you know, and we call him
Tam, from the initials, because he hates being called Junior and two
Tracey's are a nuisance--"

"I gather that you want to hire Lydia as a nurse for the children,"
Dundee interrupted the fond father's verbose explanations.

"Right, old man! You see, our nurse left us yesterday--"

"Wait here, Miles. I'll speak to Lydia. She's in Mrs. Selim's
bedroom.... By the way, Miles, since you and your wife are kind enough
to want to take Lydia in and give her a home and a job, I think it only
fair to tell you that it is highly improbable that Lydia Carr will take
any job at all."

"You mean--?" Miles gasped, his ruddy face turning pale. "I say, Dundee,
it's absurd to think for a minute that good old faithful Lydia had a
thing to do with Nita's murder--"

"I rather think you're right about that, Miles," Dundee interrupted.
"Now will you excuse me?"

He found Lydia where he had left her--in her dead mistress' bedroom. The
tall, gaunt woman was crouching beside the chaise longue, her arms
outstretched to encircle a little pile of the gifts she claimed to have
given Nita Selim to prove that she bore no grudge for the terrible
injury her mistress had done her. At Dundee's entrance she flung up her
head, and the detective saw that tears were streaming from both the
sightless eye and the unharmed one.

Taking his seat on the chaise longue, Dundee explained gently but
briefly the offer which Tracey Miles had just made.

"They want--_me_?" she gasped brokenly, incredulously, and her fingers
faltered to her horrible cheek. "I didn't think anybody but my poor girl
would have me around--"

"It is true they want you," Dundee assured her. "But you don't have to
take a job now unless you wish, Lydia."

"What do you mean?" the maid demanded harshly, her good eye hardening
with suspicion.

"Lydia," the young detective began slowly, and almost praying that he
was doing the right thing, "when I woke you up tonight to question you,
I said that Nita herself had just told me that it was she who had burned
your face.... And you asked me if she had also given you a message--"

"Yes, sir!" the maid interrupted with pitiful eagerness. "And you'll
tell me now? You don't still think _I_ killed her, do you?"

"No, I don't think you killed your mistress, Lydia, but I think, if you
would, you could help me find out who did," Dundee assured her gravely.
"No, wait!" and he drew from his pocket the envelope inscribed: "To Be
Opened In Case of My Death--Juanita Leigh Selim."

"Do you recognize this handwriting, Lydia?"

"It was wrote by her own hand," the maid answered, her voice husky with
tears. "Is that the message, sir?"

"You never saw it before?" Dundee asked sharply.

"No, no! I didn't know my poor girl was thinking about death," Lydia
moaned. "I thought she was happy here. She was tickled to pieces over
being taken up by all them society people, and on the go day and
night----"

"Lydia, this is Mrs. Selim's last will and testament," Dundee
interrupted, withdrawing the sheets slowly and unfolding them. "It was
written yesterday, and it begins:

"'Knowing that any of us may die any time, and that I, Juanita Leigh
Selim, have good cause to fear that my own life hangs by a thread that
may break any minute--'"

"What did my poor girl mean?" Lydia Carr cried out vehemently. "She
wasn't sick, ever--"

"I think, Lydia, that she feared exactly what happened today--murder!
And I want you to tell me who it was she feared. _For I believe you
know!_"

The woman shrank from him, until she was sitting on her lean haunches,
her hands flattening against her cheeks. For a long minute she did not
attempt to answer. Her right eye widened enormously, then slowly grew as
expressionless as the milky left ball.

"I--don't--know," she said dully. Then, with vehement emphasis: "_I
don't know!_ If I did, I'd kill him with my own hands!"

Dundee had no choice but to take her word.

"You said there was a message for me," Lydia reminded him.

"I'll read you her will first," Dundee said quietly, lifting the sheets
again: "I am herewith setting down my last will and testament, in my own
handwriting. I do here and now solemnly will and bequeath to my faithful
and beloved maid, Lydia Carr, all property, including all moneys, stocks
and personal belongings of which I die possessed--"

"To--_me_?" Lydia whispered. "To me?"

"To you, Lydia," Dundee assured her gravely.

"Then I can have all her pretty clothes to keep always?"

"And her money, to do as you like with, if the court accepts this will
for probate--as I think it will, regardless of the fact that it is very
informal and was not witnessed."

"But--she didn't have any money," Lydia protested. "Nothing but what
Mrs. Dunlap paid her in advance for the work she was going to do--"

"Lydia, your mistress died possessed of nearly ten thousand dollars!"
Dundee fixed her bewildered grey eye with his blue ones. "_Ten thousand
dollars!_ All of which she got right here in Hamilton! And I want you to
tell me how she got it!"

"But--I don't know! I don't believe she had it!"

Dundee shrugged. Either this woman would perjure her soul to protect her
mistress' name from scandal, or she really knew nothing.

"That is all of the will itself, Lydia," he went on finally, "except her
command that her body be cremated without funeral services of any kind,
and that nobody be allowed to accompany the remains to the crematory
except yourself and Mrs. Peter Dunlap, in case her death takes pl

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