And smaller headlines informed the sensation-loving public:
"SWALLOW-TAIL SAMMY" SAVELLI'S DEATH AVENGED BY BROTHER WHO
SURRENDERS TO POLICE; "SLICK" THOMPSON, ALLEGED MEMBER OF SAMMY'S
GANG, SHOT TO DEATH ON SIXTH AVENUE.
Still smaller head-type acknowledged that Joe Savelli, after giving
himself up, with a revolver in his hand, had disclaimed any knowledge of
or connection with the murders of Juanita Leigh Selim and Dexter
Sprague.
Two hours later, Dundee received a long telegram from District Attorney
Sanderson:
"INFORMED BY EVENING SUN SAVELLI ANGLE COMPLETE WASHOUT STOP HAVE
YOU MADE ANY PROGRESS ALONG OTHER LINES STOP HAVE INFORMED
REPORTERS YOU WORKING INDEPENDENTLY WITH STRONG CHANCE OF SOLVING
BOTH CASES STOP WOULD LIKE YOU HERE FOR ADJOURNED INQUESTS ON BOTH
MURDERS MONDAY STOP MOTHER IMPROVED AM ON JOB AGAIN"
Since Dundee felt that there was little chance of following through
either on the scandals which Gladys Earle had hinted at, or on Nita's
strangely secret marriage of twelve years before, he immediately
dispatched a wire to Sanderson, assuring him that vital progress had
been made and that he would leave New York on the four o'clock train
west, arriving in Hamilton Sunday morning at 8:50. The concluding
sentence of the wire was:
"SUGGEST YOU PACIFY PRESS WITH ONLY VAGUEST OF HINTS."
Sanderson's wire, with its confession of an interview on Dundee's trip
to New York, had upset him and left him with a cold, sick feeling of
fear that, stumbling half in darkness, the district attorney had
unwittingly warned the murderer of Nita Selim and Dexter Sprague that
his special investigator was on the right track. But he consoled himself
with the hope that the final sentence of his answering telegram would
prevent any further damage.
But he was wrong. An hour before he reached his destination on Sunday
morning he went into the dining car and found a copy of _The Hamilton
Morning News_ beside his plate. And on the front page was a photograph
of dead Nita, her black hair in a French roll, her slim, recumbent body
clad in the royal blue velvet dress. Beneath the picture was the
caption:
"What part does the outmoded royal blue velvet dress which Nita Selim
chose as a shroud play in the solution of her murder?... That is the
question which Special Investigator Dundee, attached to the district
attorney's office, who is due home this morning from fruitful detective
work in New York, is undoubtedly prepared to answer."
Dundee was still seething with futile rage when he climbed the stairs to
his apartment. On the floor just inside his living room door he found an
envelope--unstamped and bearing his name in typing.
The note inside, on paper as plain as the envelope, was typed and
unsigned.
"If Detective Dundee will consult page 410 of the latest WHO'S WHO IN
AMERICA, he will find a tip which should aid him materially in solving
the two murder cases which seem to be proving too difficult for his
inexperience."
A wry grin at his anonymous correspondent's unfriendly gibe was just
twisting his lips when a double knock sounded on the living room door,
which he had not completely closed.
"Come in, Belle!"
A morose, slack-mouthed mulatto girl in ancient felt slippers sidled
into the room.
"Howdy, Mistah Dundee," Belle greeted him listlessly. "You got back, lak
de papers said you would, didn' yuh? An' I ain't sayin' I ain't glad!
Dat parrot o' yoahs sho is Gawd's own nuisance--nippin' at mah fingahs
an' screechin' his fool head off.... 'Cose I ain't sayin' it's
_his_ fault--keepin' dat young gemman on de secon' flo' awake las'
night.... But lak I say to Mistah Wilson, when he lights into me dis
mawnin', runnin' off at de mouf 'cause I fo'got to put Cap'n's covah on
his cage las' night, I ain't de onliest one what fo'gits in dis hyar
house.... Comin' home Gawd knows when, leavin' de front do' unlocked de
res' o' de night, so's bugglers and murderers and Gawd knows who could
walk right in hyar----"
Dundee, itching to consult his own copy of "Who's Who", flung a glance
at the parrot's cage, intending to pacify the mournful mulatto by
scolding his "Watson" roundly. But he changed his mind and consoled the
chambermaid instead:
"Just tell Mr. Wilson that for once he's wrong. You did _not_ forget to
cover Cap'n's cage, Belle. Look!"
The girl's dull eyes bulged as they took in the cage, completely swathed
in a square of black silk.
"Gawd's sake, Mistah Dundee!" she ejaculated. "_I_ didn't put dat covah
on dat bird's cage! An' neithah did Mis' Bowen, 'cause she been laid up
with rheumatiz eveh since you lef, an' eveh las' endurin' thing in dis
ol' house has been lef fo' me to do!"
"Then I suppose the indignant Mr. Wilson came up and covered Cap'n
himself," Dundee suggested, crossing the room to the bookcase which
stood within reaching distance of his big leather-covered armchair.
"Him?" Belle snorted. "How he gonna get in hyer widout no key? 'Sides,
he'd a-tol' me if'n----"
"Belle, how many times must I ask you not to misplace my things?" Dundee
cut in irritably, for he was tired of the discussion, and angry that his
copy of "Who's Who" was missing from its customary place in the
bookcase.
"Me?... I ain't teched none o' yoah things, 'cep'n to dus' 'em and lay
'em down whar I foun' 'em," Belle retorted, mournfulness submerged in
anger.
Dundee looked about the room, then his eyes alighted upon the missing
book, lying upon a shelf that extended across the top of an
old-fashioned hot-air register, set high in the wall between the two
windows. The thick red volume lay close against the wall, its
gold-lettered "rib" facing the room.
"Belle, tell me the truth, and I shall not be angry: did you put that
red book on that shelf?" Dundee asked, his voice steady and kindly in
spite of his excitement.
"Nossuh! I ain't teched it!"
"And you did not put the cover over my parrot's cage, although I had
tipped you well to feed Cap'n and cover him at night," Dundee said
severely.
"I gotta heap o' wuk to do----"
"And you say that Mr. Wilson, one of the two young men on the second
floor, left the front door unlocked when he came in last night?" Dundee
asked. "Does he admit it?"
"Yassuh," Belle told him sulkily. "He say he was tiahed when he got home
'long 'bout midnight, an' he clean fo'got to turn de key in de do' an'
shoot de bolt."
"Thanks, Belle. That will be all now," and Dundee did a great deal to
dispel the chambermaid's gloom by presenting her with a dollar bill.
When she had gone, the detective read the note again, then looked
at it and its envelope more closely. They had a strangely familiar
look.... Suddenly he jerked open a drawer of his desk, on which his new
noiseless typewriter stood, selected a sheet of plain white bond, and
rolled it into the machine. Quickly he tapped out a copy of the strange,
taunting message.
Yes! The left-hand margin was identical, the typing and its degree of
blackness were identical, and the paper on which he had made the copy
was exactly the same as that on which the original had been written.
The truth flashed into his mind. It was no coincidence that he had a
copy of the very book to which his unknown correspondent referred him.
For the note had been written in this very room, on stationery
conveniently at hand, on the noiseless typewriter which had been far
more considerate about not betraying the intruder than had the parrot
whose slumbers had been disturbed.
"But why did my unknown friend risk arrest as a burglar if he wanted to
give me an honest tip?" Dundee remarked aloud to the parrot, who croaked
an irrelevant answer:
"Bad Penny! Bad Penny!"
"I'm afraid, 'my dear Watson,' that those words will not be so helpful
in this case as they were when your mistress was murdered," Dundee
assured his parrot absently, for he was studying the peculiar situation
from every angle. "Another question, Cap'n--why did the unknown bother
to take my 'Who's Who' out of the bookcase, where I should normally have
looked for it, and put it on that particular shelf?"
Warily, for his scalp was prickling with a premonition of danger, Dundee
crossed the room to the shelf, but his hand did not reach out for the
red book, which might have been expected to solve one problem, at least.
"_Why the shelf?_" he asked himself again. Why not the desk top, or the
mantelpiece, or the smoking table beside the big armchair?
The shelf, with its drapery of rather fine old silk tapestry, offered no
answer in itself, for it held nothing except the red book, a Chinese
bowl, and a humidor of tobacco. And beneath the shelf was nothing but
the old-fashioned register, the opening covered with a screwed-on metal
screen which was a mass of big holes to permit the escape of hot air
when the furnace was going in the winter....
Suddenly Dundee stooped and stared with eyes that were widened with
excitement and a certain amount of horror. Then he rose, and, standing
far to one side, picked up the fat volume which lay on the shelf. As he
had expected, a bullet whizzed noiselessly across the room and buried
itself in the plaster of the wall opposite--a bullet which would have
ploughed through his own heart if he had obeyed his first impulse and
gone directly to the shelf to obey the instructions in the note.
But more had happened than the whizzing flight of a bullet through one
of the holes of the hot-air register. The "Who's Who" had been jerked
almost out of Dundee's hand before he had lifted the heavy volume many
inches from the shelf. Coincidental with the disappearance of a bit of
white string which had been pinned to a thin page of the book was a
metallic clatter, followed swiftly by the faint sound of a bump far
below.
Dropping "Who's Who" to the floor, Dundee flung open his living room
door and raced down three flights of stairs. He brought up, panting, at
the door of the basement. It was not locked and in another minute he was
standing before the big hot-air furnace. Above the fire box was a big
metal compartment--the reservoir for the heated air. And set into the
reservoir, to conduct the heat to the regions above, were three huge
pipes.
With strength augmented by excitement, Dundee tugged and tore at one of
the pipes until he had dislodged it. Then thrusting his hand into the
heat reservoir, he groped until he had found what he had known must be
there--_Judge Marshall's automatic, with the Maxim silencer screwed upon
the end of its short nose_.
At last he held in his hands the weapon with which Nita Leigh Selim and
Dexter Sprague had been murdered.
The ingeniousness of his own attempted murder moved him to such profound
admiration that he could scarcely feel resentment. If, in the excitement
of hunting for a promised clue, he had gone directly to the shelf,
standing in front of the hole in the register into which the end of the
silencer had been jammed, so that it showed scarcely at all, even to
eyes looking for it, he would now have been dead. And the gun and
silencer, after hurtling down the big hot-air pipe behind the register,
could have lain hidden for months, even years, in the heat reservoir of
the furnace.
With the weapon carefully wrapped in his handkerchief, Dundee went up
the stairs almost as swiftly as he had gone down them, meeting no one on
the way to his rooms on the top floor.
"My most heartfelt thanks to you, Cap'n!" he greeted his parrot. "If you
had not squawked last night and so frightened the murderer that he made
the vital error of covering your cage, I should never have annoyed you
again with my Sherlock ruminations on cases which do not interest you in
the slightest."
The parrot cackled hoarsely, but Dundee paid him scant attention. He
picked up the now harmless "Who's Who" and turned to page 410, a corner
of which had disappeared with the string that was still fastened to the
hair-trigger hammer of the Colt's .32. Very clever and very simple! The
murderer of two people and the would-be murderer of a third had had only
to unscrew the metal covering of the register, wedge the end of the
silencer into one of the many holes, replace the screws, and paste the
end of the string, drawn through another hole hidden by the tapestry, to
a page of the book he had selected as the one most likely to appeal to a
detective as a clue source....
No, wait! He had had to do more! Dundee bent and examined the metal
cover of the register. The circumference of the hole the murderer had
chosen as the one which would be directly in front of Dundee's heart
gleamed brightly. It had been necessary to enlarge it considerably. _The
murderer had left a trace after all!_
But the book was open in Dundee's hands and his eyes rapidly scanned
page 410. And he found what the murderer had not expected him to live to
read, but which he had counted on as an explanation of the note which
the police would have puzzled over, if all had gone well with his
scheme....