"A taunt and a joke which turned sour, 'my dear Watson'!" he exulted to
the parrot. "A joke I was not intended to live to laugh over!"
He closed the book and replaced it in the bookcase, careless of
fingerprints, for he was sure the murderer had been too clever to leave
any behind him in that room--or upon the gun and silencer either, for
that matter.
Interestedly, Dundee surveyed the scene of his attempted murder. If he
had unsuspectingly gone up to the high shelf to reach for the book he
would have stood so close to the register that there would have been
powder burns on his shirt front--just as there had been on Dexter
Sprague's. And he would have been shot so near an open window--no chance
for fingerprints there, either, since he had not closed the windows on
his departure for New York, not wishing to return to a stuffy
apartment--that the police would have been justified in thinking he had
been shot from outside. It was an old-fashioned house in more ways than
in the manner of its heating. Outside of one of his two unscreened
windows there was an iron grating--the topmost landing of a fire escape.
Dundee could imagine Captain Strawn's positiveness in placing the
murderer there--crouching in wait for his victim....
Yes, damned ingenious, this attempted murder! Undoubtedly Strawn would
have dismissed the note as the work of a crank, not hitting upon the
fact that it had been written in that very room, on Dundee's own
typewriter and stationery. Strawn might even have got a mournful sort of
amusement out of the fact that Dundee had been advised to call upon a
greater detective than himself for assistance!... Yes, ingenious indeed!
And so amazingly simple----
Suddenly the young detective snatched for his hat. If the murderer was
so ingenious in this case, might he not have been equally clever in
planning and executing the murder of Nita Leigh Selim?
Twenty minutes later he parked his car in the rutty road before the
Selim house in Primrose Meadows, and honked his horn loudly to attract
the attention of the plainclothesmen Captain Strawn had detailed
immediately after the murder to guard the premises during the day. There
was no answer. And a violent ringing of the doorbell also brought no
response. The guard had been withdrawn, probably to join the small army
of plainclothesmen and patrolmen who had been foolishly and futilely
searching for the New York gunman--the keystone of Captain Strawn's
exploded theory.
With an oath, Dundee used his skeleton key to release the Yale lock with
which the front door was equipped. Straight down the main hall he went
and into the little foyer between the hall and Nita's bedroom. He
snatched up the telephone and to his relief it was not dead. He gave the
number of Captain Strawn's home, and had the pleasure of learning that
he had interrupted his former chief at a late Sunday breakfast.
"When did you withdraw the guard from the Selim house?" he asked
abruptly, cutting short Strawn's cordial welcome-home.
"Late Thursday afternoon," the Chief of the Homicide Squad answered
belligerently. "I needed all my men, and the Selim house had been gone
over with a fine tooth comb half a dozen times.... Why?"
"Oh, nothing!" Dundee retorted wearily, and hung up the receiver after
assuring his old friend that he would call on him later in the day.
No use to explain now to Strawn that the murderer had been given every
chance to remove any betraying traces of his crime. Besides, his first
excited hunch, after his own attempted murder, might very well be a
wild, groundless one. In his--Dundee's case--the impossibility of the
murder's being delayed or arranged so that the detective might be slain
when the whole "crowd" was assembled was obvious. The murderer had read
in a late Saturday afternoon extra--a copy of which was now in Dundee's
pocket--District Attorney Sanderson's boast to the press that his office
had been working on an entirely different theory than that which
connected the two murders with "Swallow-tail Sammy," that Special
Investigator Dundee, _expected back in Hamilton early Sunday morning_,
had been investigating Nita Leigh's past life in New York. And despite
Dundee's telegraphed warning, he had hinted sensational revelations
connected with the twelve-year-old royal blue velvet dress which Nita
had chosen to be her shroud. And in his desire to reassure the public
through the press, Sanderson had mysteriously promised even more
specific revelations than Dundee had actually brought home with him.
Prodded by reporters, Sanderson had admitted that he did not himself
know the nature of those revelations.
The exasperated young detective could picture the murderer reading those
sensational hints and promises, could imagine his panic, the need for
immediate action, so that Special Investigator Dundee should not live to
tell the tale of his New York discoveries to the district attorney or
anyone else.
But whether he was right or wrong, Dundee determined to give his hunch a
chance. He went into the over-ornate bedroom in which Nita Leigh Selim
had been murdered--shot through the back as she sat at her
dressing-table powdering her face. If her murder had been accomplished
by mechanical means, how had it been done? There was no hot-air register
here....
From the dressing-table Dundee walked to the window, upon whose
pale-green frame there was still the tiny pencil mark which Dr. Price
had drawn, to indicate the end of the path along which the bullet had
traveled, provided it had traveled so far. Nothing _here_ to aid in a
mechanical murder--
But in a flash Dundee changed his mind. For just slightly above the
pencil mark there was a small dent in the soft painted pine of the
window frame.
And before his mind could frame words and sentences he thought he saw
how Nita Leigh had been murdered.
Nothing here?... _Not now, because he himself had taken the lamp to the
courthouse for safe-keeping._
He saw it clearly in imagination--that bronze floor-lamp which Lydia
Carr had given to Nita Leigh, its big round bowl studded with great
jewels of colored glass. And in recalling every detail of the lamp he
saw what he had dismissed as of no importance at the time, in the
excitement of finding that the lamp's bulb had been shattered by the
"bang or bump" which Flora Miles had described. _One of the big glass
jewels had been missing, leaving an unsightly hole._
No wonder there had been a "bang or bump" hard enough to dent the frame
of the window! For if his hunch was correct, the gun, wedged into the
big bowl, with the silencer slightly protruding from the jewel-hole, had
"kicked," just as it had kicked an hour before, when it had dislodged
itself from the hole in the hot-air register and clattered down the big
pipe to the heat reservoir of the furnace.
That the big lamp, when he, following Strawn, had first examined the
scene of Nita's murder, had not stood in front of the window frame, did
not dampen Dundee's excitement in the least. After Karen Marshall's
scream that room had been filled with excited people, who had rushed
about, looking out of the window for the murderer and doing all the
other things which terror-stricken people do in such a crisis. No, the
murderer--or murderess--had found no difficulty in shifting the big lamp
one foot nearer the chaise longue, to the place it had always occupied
before.
But--_how_ had the gun been fired from the lamp? Electrically? Another
picture flashed into Dundee's mind. He saw himself stooping, on Monday
afternoon, to see if the plug of the lamp's cord had been pulled from
the socket, saw it again as it was then--nearly out, so that no current
could pass from the baseboard outlet under the bookcase into the bronze
lamp. How far from the truth his conclusion that Monday had been!
But what was the _real_ truth?
Suddenly Dundee flung back the moss-green Wilton rug which almost
entirely covered the bedroom floor and revealed the bell which Dexter
Sprague had rigged up so that Nita might summon Lydia from her basement
room, in case of dire need--a precaution with which the murderer was
probably familiar, since Lois Dunlap might innocently have spread the
news of its existence.
There was a half-inch hole in the hardwood floor, and out of it issued a
length of green electric cord, connected with two small, flat metal
plates, one upon the other, so that when stepped upon a bell would ring
in Lydia's basement room.
But there was something odd about the wire. Although it was obviously
new, a section of it near the two metal plates was wrapped with black
adhesive tape. Another memory knocked for attention upon Dundee's mind.
_The long cord of the bronze lamp had been mended with exactly the same
sort of tape--about a foot from where it ended in the contact plug._
Within another two minutes, Dundee, with a flashlight he had found in
the kitchen, was exploring the dark, earthy portion of the basement
which lay directly to the east of Lydia Carr's basement room. And he
found what he was looking for--adhesive tape wrapped about the wire
which had been dropped through the floor of Nita's room before it had
been carried, by means of another hole, into Lydia's room.
He was too late--thanks to Captain Strawn. The bell which Sprague had
rigged up was in working order again. But as he was passing out of the
basement he glanced at the ceiling of the large room devoted to furnace,
hot-water heater and laundry tubs. And in the ceiling he saw a hole....
The murderer had left a trace he could not obliterate!
* * * * *
At three o'clock that Sunday afternoon Bonnie Dundee, fatigued after a
strenuous day, and suffering, to his own somewhat disgusted amusement,
from reaction--even a detective feels some shock at having narrowly
escaped death--permitted himself the luxury of a call upon Penny Crain.
He found the girl and her mother playing anagrams. After greeting him,
Mrs. Crain rose, to surrender her place to the visitor.
"_You_ play with this girl of mine, Mr. Dundee. She's too clever for me!
She's beaten me every game so far, and when I plead for two-handed
bridge as a chance to get even, she shudders at the very word."
"Why did you drag poor Ralph away from his dinner here today?" Penny
demanded, scrambling the little wooden blocks until they made a weird
pattern of letters.
"Because I wanted to find out exactly _how_ Nita Selim was killed--and I
did," Dundee answered. "I wish I knew as well _who_ murdered her!"
Mute before Penny's excited questions, the detective idly selected
letters from the mass of face-up blocks on the table, and spelled out,
in a long row, the names of all the guests at Nita's fatal bridge party.
Suddenly, and with a cry that startled Penny, Dundee made a new name
with the little wooden letters....