Afternoon Tea Mysteries, Volume One: A Collection of Cozy Mysteries (Three thrilling novels in one volume!) Page 6

  “You mean—one of that gang of society folks in there?” and Strawn jerked a thumb toward the left side of the house.

  “Very probably,” Dundee agreed.

  “But where’s the gun?” Strawn argued. “I tell you my men—”

  “This was a premeditated murder, of course,” Dundee interrupted. “The Maxim silencer—unless they are all lying about not hearing a shot—proves that. Silencers are damned hard to get hold of, but people with plenty of money can manage most things. And since the murder was premeditated, it is better to count on the fact that the murderer—or murderess—had planned a pretty safe hiding place for the gun and the silencer…. Oh, not necessarily in the house or even near the house,” he hastened to assure Strawn, who was trying to break in…. “By the way, how long after Mrs. Selim was killed was her death discovered? Or do you know?”

  “I haven’t been able to get much out of that bunch in there—not even out of Penelope Crain, who ought to be willing to help, seeing as how she works for the district attorney. But I guess she’s waiting to spill it all to you, if she knows anything, so you and Sanderson will get all the credit.”

  “Now, look here, chief,” Dundee protested, laying a hand on Strawn’s shoulder as he reverted to the name by which he had addressed the head of the Homicide Squad for nearly a year, “we’re going to be friends, aren’t we? Same as always? We know pretty well how to work together, don’t we? No use to begin pulling against each other.”

  “Guess so,” Strawn growled, but he was obviously pleased and relieved. “Maybe you’d better have a crack at that crowd yourself. I hear Doc Price’s car—always has a bum spark plug. I’ll stick around with him until he gets going good on his job; then, if you’ll excuse me for butting in, I’ll join your party in the living room…. And good luck to you, Bonnie!”

  Dundee took the door he knew must lead into the central hall, but found himself in an enclosed section of it—a small foyer between the main hall and Nita Selim’s bedroom. There was room for a telephone table and its chair, as well as for a small sofa, large enough for two to sit upon comfortably. He paused to open the door across from the telephone table and found that it opened into a closet, whose hangers and hat forms now held the outdoor clothing belonging to Nita’s guests. Nice clothes—the smart but unostentatious hats and coats of moneyed people of good taste, he observed a little enviously, before he opened the door which led into the main hall which bisected the main floor of the house until it reached Nita’s room.

  Another door in the section behind the staircase leading to the gabled second story next claimed his attention. Opening it, he discovered a beautifully fitted guests’ lavatory. There was even a fully appointed dressing-table for women’s use, so that none of her guests had had the slightest excuse to invade the privacy of Mrs. Selim’s bedroom and bath, unless specifically invited to do so. Rather a well planned house, this, Dundee concluded, as he closed the door upon the green porcelain fixtures, and walked slowly toward the wide archway that led from the hall into a large living room.

  He had a curious reluctance to intrude upon that assembled and guarded company of Hamilton’s “real society.” They were all Penny’s friends, and Penny was his friend….

  But his first swift, all-seeing glance about the room reassured him. No hysterics here. These people brought race and breeding even into the presence of death. Whatever emotions had torn them when Nita Selim’s body was discovered were almost unguessable now. A stout, short woman of about thirty was tapping a foot nervously, as she talked to the man who was bending over her chair. John C. Drake, that was. Dundee had met him, knew him to be a vice president of the Hamilton National Bank, in charge of the trust department. Penelope Crain was occupying half of a “love-seat” with Lois Dunlap, the hands of the girl and of the woman clinging together for mutual comfort. That tall, thin, oldish man, with the waxed grey mustache, must be Judge Hugo Marshall, and the pretty girl leaning trustingly against his shoulder must be his wife—Karen Marshall, who had jumped at her first proposal during her first season.

  “Yes, well-bred people,” he concluded, as his eyes swept on, and then stopped, a little bewildered. Who was that man? He didn’t belong somehow, and his hands trembled visibly as he tried to light a cigarette. Leaning—not nonchalantly, but actually for support—against the brocaded coral silk drapes of a pair of wide, long windows set in the east wall. Suddenly Dundee had it…. Broadway! This was no Hamiltonian, no comfortably rich and socially secure Middle-westerner. Broadway in every line of his too-well-tailored clothes, in the polished smoothness of his dark hair….

  “Why, it’s Mr. Dundee at last!” Penny cried, turning in the S-shaped seat before he had time to finish his mental inventory of the room’s occupants.

  She jumped to her feet and threaded a swift way over Oriental rugs and between the two bridge tables, still occupying the center of the big room, still cluttered with score pads, tally cards, and playing cards.

  “I’ve been wondering if you had stopped to have dinner first,” she taunted him. Then, laying a hand on his arm, she faced the living room eagerly. “This is Mr. Dundee, folks—special investigator attached to the district attorney’s office, and a grand detective. He solved the Hogarth murder case, you know, and the Hillcrest murder. And he’s my friend, so I want you all to trust him—and tell him things without being afraid of him.”

  Then, rather ceremoniously but swiftly, she presented her friends—Judge and Mrs. Hugo Marshall, Mr. and Mrs. Tracey Miles, Mr. and Mrs. John C. Drake, Mrs. Dunlap, Janet Raymond, Polly Beale, Clive Hammond, and—

  At that point Penny hesitated, then rather stiffly included the “Broadway” man, as “Mr. Dexter Sprague—of New York.”

  “Thank you, Miss Crain,” Dundee said. “Now will you please tell me, if you know, whether all those invited to both the bridge party and the cocktail party are here?”

  Penny’s face flamed. “Ralph Hammond, Clive’s brother, hasn’t come yet…. I—I rather imagine I’ve been ‘stood up,’” she confessed, with a faint attempt at gayety.

  And Ralph Hammond was the man who had once belonged rather exclusively to Penny, and who, according to her own confession, had succumbed most completely to Nita Selim’s charms!—Dundee noted, filing the reflection for further reference.

  “Please, Mr. Dundee, won’t you detain us as short a time as possible?” Lois Dunlap asked, as she advanced toward him. “Mr. Dunlap is away on a fishing trip, and I don’t like to leave my three youngsters too long. They are really too much of a handful for the governess, over a period of hours.”

  “I shall detain all of you no longer than is absolutely necessary,” Dundee told her gently, “but I am afraid I must warn you that I can’t let you go home very soon—unless one or more of you has something of vital importance to tell—something which will clear up or materially help to clear up this bad business.”

  He paused a long half-minute, then asked curtly: “I am to conclude that no one has anything at all to volunteer?”

  There was no answer, other than a barely perceptible drawing together in self-defence of the minds and hearts of those who had been friends for so long.

  “Very well,” Dundee conceded abruptly. “Then I must put all of you through a routine examination, since every one of you is, of course, a possible suspect.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “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 unfem
inine 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—”