"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.