Murder at Bridge Page 27

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dundee laughed, the parrot which had saved his life echoing his mirthraucously, as his eyes hit upon the following lines of fine printhalfway down the third column of page 410 of "Who's Who in America":

  BURNS, William John, detective; b. Baltimore, Oct. 19, 1861--

  "A taunt and a joke which turned sour, 'my dear Watson'!" he exulted tothe parrot. "A joke I was not intended to live to laugh over!"

  He closed the book and replaced it in the bookcase, careless offingerprints, for he was sure the murderer had been too clever to leaveany behind him in that room--or upon the gun and silencer either, forthat matter.

  Interestedly, Dundee surveyed the scene of his attempted murder. If hehad unsuspectingly gone up to the high shelf to reach for the book hewould have stood so close to the register that there would have beenpowder burns on his shirt front--just as there had been on DexterSprague's. And he would have been shot so near an open window--no chancefor fingerprints there, either, since he had not closed the windows onhis departure for New York, not wishing to return to a stuffyapartment--that the police would have been justified in thinking he hadbeen shot from outside. It was an old-fashioned house in more ways thanin the manner of its heating. Outside of one of his two unscreenedwindows there was an iron grating--the topmost landing of a fire escape.Dundee could imagine Captain Strawn's positiveness in placing themurderer there--crouching in wait for his victim....

  Yes, damned ingenious, this attempted murder! Undoubtedly Strawn wouldhave dismissed the note as the work of a crank, not hitting upon thefact that it had been written in that very room, on Dundee's owntypewriter and stationery. Strawn might even have got a mournful sort ofamusement out of the fact that Dundee had been advised to call upon agreater detective than himself for assistance!... Yes, ingenious indeed!And so amazingly simple----

  Suddenly the young detective snatched for his hat. If the murderer wasso ingenious in this case, might he not have been equally clever inplanning and executing the murder of Nita Leigh Selim?

  Twenty minutes later he parked his car in the rutty road before theSelim house in Primrose Meadows, and honked his horn loudly to attractthe attention of the plainclothesmen Captain Strawn had detailedimmediately after the murder to guard the premises during the day. Therewas no answer. And a violent ringing of the doorbell also brought noresponse. The guard had been withdrawn, probably to join the small armyof plainclothesmen and patrolmen who had been foolishly and futilelysearching for the New York gunman--the keystone of Captain Strawn'sexploded theory.

  With an oath, Dundee used his skeleton key to release the Yale lock withwhich the front door was equipped. Straight down the main hall he wentand into the little foyer between the hall and Nita's bedroom. Hesnatched up the telephone and to his relief it was not dead. He gave thenumber of Captain Strawn's home, and had the pleasure of learning thathe had interrupted his former chief at a late Sunday breakfast.

  "When did you withdraw the guard from the Selim house?" he askedabruptly, cutting short Strawn's cordial welcome-home.

  "Late Thursday afternoon," the Chief of the Homicide Squad answeredbelligerently. "I needed all my men, and the Selim house had been goneover with a fine tooth comb half a dozen times.... Why?"

  "Oh, nothing!" Dundee retorted wearily, and hung up the receiver afterassuring 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 everychance to remove any betraying traces of his crime. Besides, his firstexcited hunch, after his own attempted murder, might very well be awild, groundless one. In his--Dundee's case--the impossibility of themurder's being delayed or arranged so that the detective might be slainwhen the whole "crowd" was assembled was obvious. The murderer had readin a late Saturday afternoon extra--a copy of which was now in Dundee'spocket--District Attorney Sanderson's boast to the press that his officehad been working on an entirely different theory than that whichconnected the two murders with "Swallow-tail Sammy," that SpecialInvestigator Dundee, _expected back in Hamilton early Sunday morning_,had been investigating Nita Leigh's past life in New York. And despiteDundee's telegraphed warning, he had hinted sensational revelationsconnected with the twelve-year-old royal blue velvet dress which Nitahad chosen to be her shroud. And in his desire to reassure the publicthrough the press, Sanderson had mysteriously promised even morespecific revelations than Dundee had actually brought home with him.Prodded by reporters, Sanderson had admitted that he did not himselfknow the nature of those revelations.

  The exasperated young detective could picture the murderer reading thosesensational hints and promises, could imagine his panic, the need forimmediate action, so that Special Investigator Dundee should not live totell the tale of his New York discoveries to the district attorney oranyone else.

  But whether he was right or wrong, Dundee determined to give his hunch achance. He went into the over-ornate bedroom in which Nita Leigh Selimhad been murdered--shot through the back as she sat at herdressing-table powdering her face. If her murder had been accomplishedby mechanical means, how had it been done? There was no hot-air registerhere....

  From the dressing-table Dundee walked to the window, upon whosepale-green frame there was still the tiny pencil mark which Dr. Pricehad drawn, to indicate the end of the path along which the bullet hadtraveled, provided it had traveled so far. Nothing _here_ to aid in amechanical murder--

  But in a flash Dundee changed his mind. For just slightly above thepencil mark there was a small dent in the soft painted pine of thewindow frame.

  And before his mind could frame words and sentences he thought he sawhow Nita Leigh had been murdered.

  Nothing here?... _Not now, because he himself had taken the lamp to thecourthouse for safe-keeping._

  He saw it clearly in imagination--that bronze floor-lamp which LydiaCarr had given to Nita Leigh, its big round bowl studded with greatjewels of colored glass. And in recalling every detail of the lamp hesaw what he had dismissed as of no importance at the time, in theexcitement of finding that the lamp's bulb had been shattered by the"bang or bump" which Flora Miles had described. _One of the big glassjewels had been missing, leaving an unsightly hole._

  No wonder there had been a "bang or bump" hard enough to dent the frameof the window! For if his hunch was correct, the gun, wedged into thebig bowl, with the silencer slightly protruding from the jewel-hole, had"kicked," just as it had kicked an hour before, when it had dislodgeditself from the hole in the hot-air register and clattered down the bigpipe to the heat reservoir of the furnace.

  That the big lamp, when he, following Strawn, had first examined thescene of Nita's murder, had not stood in front of the window frame, didnot dampen Dundee's excitement in the least. After Karen Marshall'sscream that room had been filled with excited people, who had rushedabout, looking out of the window for the murderer and doing all theother things which terror-stricken people do in such a crisis. No, themurderer--or murderess--had found no difficulty in shifting the big lampone foot nearer the chaise longue, to the place it had always occupiedbefore.

  But--_how_ had the gun been fired from the lamp? Electrically? Anotherpicture flashed into Dundee's mind. He saw himself stooping, on Mondayafternoon, to see if the plug of the lamp's cord had been pulled fromthe socket, saw it again as it was then--nearly out, so that no currentcould pass from the baseboard outlet under the bookcase into the bronzelamp. 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 almostentirely covered the bedroom floor and revealed the bell which DexterSprague had rigged up so that Nita might summon Lydia from her basementroom, in case of dire need--a precaution with which the murderer wasprobably familiar, since Lois Dunlap might innocently have spread thenews of its existence.

  There was a half-inch hole in the hardwood floor, and out of it issued alength of green electric cord, connected with two
small, flat metalplates, one upon the other, so that when stepped upon a bell would ringin Lydia's basement room.

  But there was something odd about the wire. Although it was obviouslynew, a section of it near the two metal plates was wrapped with blackadhesive tape. Another memory knocked for attention upon Dundee's mind._The long cord of the bronze lamp had been mended with exactly the samesort of tape--about a foot from where it ended in the contact plug._

  Within another two minutes, Dundee, with a flashlight he had found inthe kitchen, was exploring the dark, earthy portion of the basementwhich lay directly to the east of Lydia Carr's basement room. And hefound what he was looking for--adhesive tape wrapped about the wirewhich had been dropped through the floor of Nita's room before it hadbeen carried, by means of another hole, into Lydia's room.

  He was too late--thanks to Captain Strawn. The bell which Sprague hadrigged up was in working order again. But as he was passing out of thebasement 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 astrenuous day, and suffering, to his own somewhat disgusted amusement,from reaction--even a detective feels some shock at having narrowlyescaped 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-handedbridge as a chance to get even, she shudders at the very word."

  "Why did you drag poor Ralph away from his dinner here today?" Pennydemanded, scrambling the little wooden blocks until they made a weirdpattern of letters.

  "Because I wanted to find out exactly _how_ Nita Selim was killed--and Idid," Dundee answered. "I wish I knew as well _who_ murdered her!"

  Mute before Penny's excited questions, the detective idly selectedletters 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 namewith the little wooden letters....

  Now he knew the answers to both "_How?_" and "_Who?_"