Afternoon Tea Mysteries, Volume One: A Collection of Cozy Mysteries (Three thrilling novels in one volume!) Page 5

  “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 “A simile as out-of-date as my clothes are going to be if I don’t get some new ones soon.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.”