"Oh, you and your theory!" Strawn growled. "But let me go on.... Nita meant she would feel safer about Sprague if he was here in Hamilton, too. But the guy they double-crossed in New York, or worked the badger game on, or something like that, got on their trail. But it took him weeks to do it, and Sprague followed Nita's advice. He got here on Sunday April 27, and on Monday the 28th Nita banked the first $5,000! Don't you see it, boy? Sprague brought with him the dough they'd got for their stunt, and thought it was safer for Nita to bank it in her name, since it wasn't the name she was known by in New York anyway. We've checked up on Sprague pretty thoroughly. He didn't have a bank book, either on his body or in his room, and every bank in town denies he had an account with them."

"If that theory is correct, it makes Nita Selim a pretty low character," Dundee mused aloud. "Not only did she kick him out as a lover, but she double-crossed him as her partner in crime, by willing the whole wad to Lydia Carr. Sprague must have received quite a shock when he heard Nita's will read at the inquest."

"Yeah," Strawn agreed. "It looks like Mrs. Dunlap picked a sweet specimen to make a friend out of.... Well, that's my theory, and I think it explains everything. Their victim in New York simply hired a gunman, or come down here himself, when he got on their tracks. Of course it was a good stunt to make it look like a local crime—figured he'd fool me just as he fooled you! So the murderer simply trailed Nita around, and saw that whole bunch of society people shooting at a target at Judge Marshall's place, with a gun equipped with a Maxim silencer. Too good an opportunity to be missed, so he bides his chance to swipe the gun and silencer. To make sure it will look like a local crime, he pops off Nita when that same bunch is at her house, but it takes a few days longer before he has the same opportunity to get Sprague. But it come last night and he grabbed it."

"A very plausible theory, and one which, in general, the whole city of Hamilton has been familiar with since the night Nita was murdered," Dundee remarked significantly.

"What do you mean?" Strawn demanded. "It's waterproof, ain't it? Doc Price says the bullet—and a .32 caliber one at that—entered Sprague's body just below the breastbone and traveled an upward course till it struck the extreme right side of the heart. The bullet entered exactly where it would have to, if the murderer was crouching under that window while Sprague was raising the screen. And we have Carraway's report that it was Sprague's fingerprints on those nickleplated things you have to press together to make the screen roll up or down. Furthermore, I haven't a doubt in the world that the ballistics expert in Chicago will report that the bullet was fired from the same gun that killed Nita Selim."

"Neither have I," Dundee agreed. "But what I meant was that you had obligingly furnished the murderer who fits my theory with a theory he—or she—would not have upset for the world!... Listen!" and he bent forward very earnestly: "I'm willing to grant that Sprague was shot from the outside, through the window, when Sprague raised the screen. But there our theories part company. I believe that the murderer was a guest in the Selim home last night, that he or she had made an appointment to meet Sprague there, on the promise of paying the hush money he had demanded, in spite of my warning to him not to carry on with the blackmail scheme. Naturally he or she—and I'll say 'he' from now on, for the sake of convenience—had no intention of being seen entering that room. The bridge game was suggested by Judge Marshall at noon. There was plenty of time for the rendezvous to be made with Sprague. As I see it, the murderer told Sprague to excuse himself from the game when he became dummy, and to go to the trophy room and wait there until the murderer had a chance to slip away and appear beneath the window. Sprague had been promised that, when he raised the screen at a tap or a whispered request, a roll of bills would be handed to him, but—he received a bullet instead."

"And which one of your six suspects have you picked on?" Strawn asked sarcastically.

"That's just the trouble. There are still six," Dundee acknowledged with a wry grin. "After Sprague's disappearance, every one of the six was absent from the porch at one time or another.... No, by George! There are seven suspects now! I was about to forget Peter Dunlap, who admits he was alone on a fishing trip when Nita was murdered and who left the porch last night to go to the library, as soon as Sprague arrived!... As for the movements of the original six after Sprague disappeared: Polly Beale took a walk about the grounds; Flora Miles went upstairs to hunt for Karen Marshall, and was gone more than ten minutes; Drake went to the dining room to get the refreshments, and no one can say exactly how long he was gone; Judge Marshall went up to get his wife, and had time to make a little trip on the side; Janet Raymond walked over from her home, and passed that very window, arriving after Sprague had disappeared; and, finally, Clive Hammond arrived alone in his car, which he parked within a few feet of that window. This morning he gets married——"

"A telegram, sir!" interrupted a plainclothesman, who had entered without knocking.

Strawn snatched at it, read it, then exulted: "Read this, boy! I guess this settles the business!"

The telegram had been filed half an hour before and was from the city editor of The New York Evening Press:

"WORKING ON YOUR THEORY OF NEW YORK GUNMAN RESPONSIBLE MURDERS OF JUANITA LEIGH SELIM AND DEXTER SPRAGUE THIS PAPER HAS DISCOVERED THAT SELIM WOMAN WAS SEEN AT NIGHT CLUBS SEVERAL TIMES DURING JANUARY FEBRUARY WITH QUOTE SWALLOW TAIL SAMMY END QUOTE UNDERWORLD NAME FOR SAM SAVELLI STOP SAVELLI TAKEN FOR RIDE TUESDAY APRIL TWENTY SECOND TWO DAYS AFTER SELIM WOMAN LEFT NEW YORK STOP POLICE HERE WORKING ON THEORY SAVELLI SLAIN BY OWN GANG AFTER THEY WERE TIPPED OFF SAVELLI WAS DOUBLE CROSSING THEM STOP IN EXCHANGE FOR THIS TIP CAN YOU GIVE US ANY SUPPRESSED INFORMATION YOUR POSSESSION STOP SAVELLI HAD BROTHER WHO IS KNOWN TO US TO HAVE PROMISED REVENGE SWALLOW TAIL SAMMYS MURDER STOP BE A SPORT CAPTAIN."

"Well, that puts the lid on it, don't it?" Strawn crowed. "I'll send Sergeant Turner to New York on the five o'clock train.... Pretty decent of that city editor to wire me this tip, I'll say!"

"And are you going to reciprocate by wiring him about the $10,000 Nita banked here?" Dundee asked.

"Sure! Why not? There's no use that I can see to keep it back any longer, now that no one can have any excuse to think as you've been doing—that it was blackmail paid by a Hamiltonian."

"Then," Dundee began very slowly, "if you really think your case is solved, I'll make one suggestion: take charge of Lydia Carr and put her in a very safe place."

"Why?" Strawn looked puzzled.

"Because, when you publish the fact that Nita and Sprague got $10,000 for tipping off Savelli's gang that he was double-crossing them, and that Nita willed the money to Lydia, the avenger's next and last job would be to 'get' Lydia, since his natural conclusion would be that Lydia had been in on the scheme from the beginning," Dundee explained.

"God, boy! You're right!" Strawn exclaimed, and his heavy old face was very pale as he reached for the telephone, and called the number of the Miles residence. "I'm going to put it up to her that it will be best for her to be locked up as a material witness, for her own protection."

Five minutes later Strawn restored the receiver to the hook with a bang. "Says she won't budge!" he explained unnecessarily. "Says she ain't afraid and the Miles kids need her.... Well, it's her own funeral! But I guess you are convinced at last?"

Dundee slowly shook his head. "Almost—but not quite, chief!"

"Lord, but you're stubborn! Here's a water-tight case——"

"A very pretty and a very satisfactory case, but not exactly water-tight," Dundee interrupted. "There's just one little thing——"

"What do you mean?" Strawn demanded irritably.

"Have you forgotten the secret shelf behind the guest closet in the Selim house?" Dundee asked.

"I can afford to forget it, since it hasn't got a thing to do with the case!" Strawn retorted angrily. "There's not a scrap of evidence——"

"Of course it does not fit into your theory," Dundee agreed, "for 'Swallow-tail Sammy's' avenging brother could not have known of its existence, but there is one thing about that secret shelf and its pivot door which I don't believe you can afford to forget, Captain!"

"Yeah?" Strawn snarled.

"Yeah!... I refer, of course, to the complete absence of fingerprints on the door and on the shelf itself! Carraway didn't even find Nita Selim's fingerprints. Since Nita would have had no earthly reason for carefully wiping off her fingerprints after she removed the papers she burned on Friday night, it's a dead sure fact that someone else who had no legitimate business to do so, touched that pivoting panel and the shelf, and carefully removed all traces that he had done so!... And—" he continued grimly, "until I find out who that someone is, I, for one, won't consider the case solved!"

Fifteen minutes later Dundee was sitting at Penny Crain's desk in her office of the district attorney's suite, replacing the receiver upon the telephone hook, after having put in a call for Sanderson, who was still in Chicago, keeping vigil at the bedside of his dying mother.

"Did you find out anything new when you questioned the crowd this morning?" Penny asked. "Besides the fact that Polly and Clive got married this morning, I mean.... I wasn't surprised when I read about the wedding in the extra. It was exactly like Polly to make up her mind suddenly, after putting Clive off for a year——"

"So it was Polly who held back," Dundee said to himself. Aloud: "No, I didn't learn much new, Penny. You're a most excellent and accurate reporter.... But there were one or two things that came out. For instance, I got Drake to admit to me, in private, that Nita did give him an explanation as to where she got the $10,000."

"Yes?" Penny prompted eagerly.

"Drake says," Dundee answered dryly, "that Nita told him it was 'back alimony' which she had succeeded in collecting from her former husband. Unfortunately, she did not say who or where the mysterious husband is."

"Pooh!" scoffed Penny. "Don't you see? She just said that to satisfy Johnny's curiosity. After all, it was the most plausible explanation of how a divorcee got hold of a lot of money."

"So plausible that Drake may have thought of it himself," Dundee reflected silently. Aloud, he continued his report to the girl who had been of so much help to him: "Among other minor things that came out this morning, and which the papers did not report, was the fact that Janet Raymond tried to commit suicide this morning by drinking shoe polish. Fortunately her father discovered what she had done almost as soon as she had swallowed the stuff, and made her take ipecac and then sent for the doctor."

"Oh, poor Janet!" Penny groaned. "She must have been terribly in love with Dexter Sprague, though what she saw in him——"

Dundee made no comment, but continued with his information: "Another minor development was that Tracey Miles admitted that he and Flora had quarreled over Sprague after all of you left, and that Flora took two sleeping tablets to make sure of a night's rest."

"She's been awfully unstrung ever since Nita's murder," Penny defended her friend. "She told us all Monday night at Peter's that the doctor had prescribed sleeping medicine.... Now, you look here, Bonnie Dundee!" she cried out sharply, answering an enigmatic smile on the detective's face, "if you think Flora Miles killed Nita Selim and Dexter Sprague, because she was in love with Dexter and learned he was Nita's lover from that silly note——"

"Whoa, Penny!" Dundee checked her. "I'm not linking exactly that. But I've just remembered something that had seemed of no importance to me before."

"And what's that, Mr. Smart Aleck?" Penny demanded furiously.

"Before I answer that question, will you let me do a little theorizing?" Dundee suggested gently. "Let us suppose that Flora Miles was not in love with Sprague, but that she was being blackmailed by Nita for some scandal Nita had heard gossiped about at the Forsyte School.... No, wait!... Let us suppose further that Nita recognized Flora's picture in the group Lois Dunlap showed her, as the portrait of the girl whose story she had heard; that she was able, somehow, to secure incriminating evidence of some sort—letters, let us say. Nita tells Sprague about it, and Sprague advises her to blackmail Flora, who, Lois has told Nita, is very rich. So Nita comes to Hamilton and bleeds Flora of $10,000. Not satisfied, Nita makes another demand, the money to be paid to her the day of the bridge luncheon——"

"Silly!" Penny scoffed furiously. "The only evidence you have against poor Flora is that she stole the note Dexter had written to Nita!"

"That's the crux of the matter, Penny darling!" Dundee assured her in a maddeningly soothing voice, at which Penny clinched her hands in impotent rage. "Flora, seeing Nita receive a letter written on her husband's business stationery, jumps to the conclusion that Nita had carried out her threat to tell Tracey, or that Nita has at least given Tracey a hint of the truth and that Tracey's special-messenger note is, let us say, a confirmation of an appointment suggested by Nita.... Very well! Flora goes to Nita's bedroom at the first opportunity, knowing that Nita will come there to make up for the men's arrival. Let's suppose Flora had brought the gun and silencer with her, intending to frighten Nita, rather than kill her. But having had proof, as she believes, that Nita means business, Flora waits in the closet until Nita comes in and sits down at her dressing-table, then steps out and shoots her. Then she recoils step by step, until her foot catches in the slack cord of the bronze lamp, causing the very 'bang or bump' which Flora herself describes later, for fear someone else has heard it. Her first concern, of course, is to hide the gun and silencer. She remembers Judge Marshall's tale of the secret shelf in the guest closet, and not only hides the gun there but seeks in vain for the incriminating evidence Nita has against her. But she also remembers the note she believes Tracey has written to Nita, and which, if found after Nita's death, may give her away. So she goes to the closet in Nita's bedroom, finds the note, and faints with horror at her perhaps needless crime when she realizes that the note was written by Sprague, and not Tracey. Of course she is too ill and panic-stricken to leave the closet until the murder is discovered——"

"But you think she was not too panic-stricken to have the presence of mind to retrieve the gun and silencer and walk out with them, under the very eyes of the police," Penny scoffed.

"No! I think she was!" Dundee amazed her by admitting. "And that is where my sudden recollection of something I had considered unimportant comes in! Let us suppose that Flora, half-suspected by Tracey, confesses to him in their car as they are going to the Country Club for their long-delayed dinner, as were the rest of you. Tracey, loyal to her, decides to help her. He tells her to suggest, at dinner, that Lydia come to them as nurse, so that he can go back to the house and get the gun and silencer from the guest-closet hiding place, if an opportunity presents itself—as it did, since I left Tracey Miles alone in the hall while I went into Nita's bedroom to talk with Lydia before I permitted her to go with Tracey."

"You're crazy!" Penny told him fiercely, when he had finished. "I suppose you are going to ask me to believe that Tracey was a big enough fool to leave the gun and silencer where Flora could get hold of it and kill Sprague last night."

"Why not let us suppose that Tracey himself killed Sprague to protect his wife, not only from scandal, but from a charge of murder?" Dundee countered. "Tell me honestly: do you think Tracey Miles loves Flora enough to do that for her?"

Suddenly, inexplicably, Penny began to laugh—not hysterically, but with genuine mirth.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

"What are you laughing at?" Dundee demanded indignantly, but the sustained ringing of the telephone bell checked Penny Crain's mirthful laughter. "My Chicago call!... Hello!... Yes, this is Dundee.... All right, but make it snappy, won't you?... Hello, Mr. Sanderson! How is your mother?... That's fine! I certainly hope—Yes, the inquest is slated for tomorrow morning, but there's no use your leaving your mother to come back for it.... Yes, sir, one important new development. Can you hear me plainly?... Then hold the line a moment, please!"

With the receiver still at his ear, Dundee fumbled in his pocket for a folded sheet of paper. "No, operator! We're not through! Please keep off the line.... Listen, chief!" he addressed the district attorney at the other end of the long distance wire. "This is a telegram Captain Strawn received this afternoon from the city editor of The New York Evening Press.... Can you hear me?... All right!" and he read slowly, repeating when necessary.

When he had finished reading the telegram, he listened for a long minute, but not with so much concentration that he could not grin at Penny's wide-eyed amazement and joy. "That's what I think, sir!" he cried jubilantly. "I'd like to take the five o'clock train for New York and work on the case from that end till we actually get our teeth into something.... Thanks a lot, and my best wishes for your mother!"

"Why didn't you tell me about this 'Swallow-tail Sammy'?" Penny demanded indignantly. "Tormenting me with your silly theory about poor Flora and Tracey, when all the time you knew the case was practically solved—"

"I'm afraid I gave the district attorney a slightly false impression," Dundee interrupted, but there was no remorse in his shining blue eyes. "But just so I get to New York—By the way, young woman, what were you laughing at so heartily? I didn't know I had made an amusing remark when I asked you if you thought Tracey Miles loved his wife well enough to commit murder for her."

Penny laughed again, white teeth and brown eyes gleaming. "I was laughing at something else. It suddenly occurred to me, while you were spinning your foolish theory, how flattered Tracey would have been if Flora had confessed to him Saturday night that she had killed Nita because she was jealous!"

"Which was not my theory, if you remember!" Dundee retorted. "But why is the idea so amusing? Deep in his heart, I suppose any man would really be a bit flattered if his wife loved him enough to be that jealous."

"You don't know Tracey Miles as well as I do," Penny assured him, her eyes still mirthful. "He's really a dear, in spite of being a dreadful bore most of the time, but the truth is, Tracey hasn't an atom of sex appeal, and he must realize it.... Of course we girls have all pampered his poor little ego by pretending to be crazy about him and terribly envious that it was Flora who got him—"

"But Flora Hackett did marry him," Dundee interrupted. "She must have been a beautiful girl, and she was certainly rich enough to get any man she wanted—"

"You would think so, wouldn't you?" Penny agreed, her tongue loosened by relief. "I was only twelve years old when Flora Hackett made her debut, but a twelve-year-old has big ears and keen eyes. It is true that Flora was beautiful and rich, but—well, there was something queer about her. She was simply crazy to get married, and if a man danced with her as many as three times in an evening she literally seized upon him and tried to drag him to the altar.... Her eagerness and her intensity repelled every man who was in the least attracted to her, and I think she was beginning to be frightened to death that she wouldn't get married at all, when she happened to meet Tracey, who had just got a job as salesman in her father's business. She began to rush him—there's no other word for it—and none of the other girls minded a bit, because, without Flora, Tracey would have been the perfect male wallflower. They became engaged almost right away, and were married six months or so later. All the girls freely prophesied that even Tracey, flattered by her passion for him as he so evidently was, would get tired of it, but he didn't, and there were three marriages in 'the crowd' that June."

"Three?" Dundee repeated absently, for his interest was waning.

"Yes.... Lois Morrow and Peter Dunlap; Johnny Drake and Carolyn Swann; and Tracey and Flora," Penny answered. "Although I was thirteen then and really too old for the role, I had the fun of being flower girl for Lois and Flora both."

"Do you think Flora was really in love with Tracey?" Dundee asked curiously.

"Oh, yes! But she'd have been in love with anyone who wanted to marry her, and the funny thing is that, with the exception of Peter and Lois, they are the happiest married couple I have ever known.... You see, Tracey has never got over being flattered that so pretty and passionate a girl as Flora Hackett wanted him!... And that's why I laughed!... Tracey, with that deep-rooted sexual inferiority complex of his, would have been so flattered if Flora had told him she killed Nita out of jealousy that he would have forgiven her on the spot. On the other hand," she went on, "if Flora had told him that Nita had documentary proofs of some frightful scandal against her, can't you see how violently Tracey would have reacted against her?... Oh, no! Tracey would not have taken the trouble to murder Sprague, when Sprague popped up for more blackmail!"

"Perhaps he might have, if the scandal dated back to before the marriage," Dundee argued. "Let's suppose Sprague did pop up, and Flora turned him over to Tracey. When Sprague appeared apparently uninvited last night, Flora must have been on pins and needles, trying to make Tracey treat him decently and hoping against hope that Tracey would simply pay the scoundrel all the blackmail he was demanding——"

"Which is exactly what Tracey would have done, instead of taking the awful risk of murdering him in his own home," Penny cut in spiritedly. "Besides, Tracey wasn't gone from the porch long enough to go outside, signal to Sprague in the trophy room, shoot him when Sprague raised the screen, and then hide the gun. I told you Tracey was gone only about a minute when he went to see if Sprague's hat and stick were gone from the closet."

"Did Tracey and Flora both step outside to see their guests into their cars?" Dundee asked suddenly.

"Tracey did," Penny answered. "Flora told us all good night in the living room, then ran upstairs to see if Betty was still asleep.... But remember we didn't leave until midnight, and Dr. Price says Sprague was killed between nine and eleven last night."

"Dr. Price would be the first to grant a leeway of an hour, one way or another," Dundee told her. "Of course, if Tracey did kill him, he let Flora believe that he had given Sprague the blackmail money he was demanding. For it is inconceivable that a woman of Flora Miles' hysterical temperament could have slept—even with two sleeping tablets—knowing that a corpse was in the house."

"Oh, I'm sick of your silly theorizing!" Penny told him with vehement scorn. "Listen here, Bonnie Dundee! You probably laugh at 'woman's intuition', but take it from me—you're on the wrong track!"

"Oh, I'm not so wedded to that particular theory!" Dundee laughed. "I can spin you exactly six more just as convincing—"

"And I shan't listen! You'd better dash home and pack your bag if you want to catch the five o'clock train for New York."

"It's already packed and in my office," Dundee assured her lazily. "Got lots of time.... Hullo! Here's the home edition of The Evening Sun," he interrupted himself, as a small boy, making his rounds of the courthouse, flung the paper into the office. He reached for it, and read the streamer headline aloud: "ITALIAN GANGSTER SOUGHT IN BRIDGE MURDERS ... I wager a good many heads will lie easier on their pillows tonight."

"Let me see!" Penny commanded, and snatched the paper unceremoniously. "Oh! Did you see this?" and she pointed to a boxed story in the middle of the front page. "'Bridge Parties Cancelled'," she read aloud. "'The society editor of The Evening Sun was kept busy at her telephone today, receiving notices of cancellations of bridge parties scheduled for the remainder of the week. Eight frantic hostesses, terrified by Hamilton's second murder at bridge——' Oh, that's simply a crime! The newspapers deliberately work up mob hysteria and then——"

"I'd rather not play bridge for a while myself!" Dundee laughed, as he rose and started for his own office. "And don't you dare leave the room when you become dummy, if you have the nerve to play again! Remember, that gun and silencer are still missing!"

"What do you mean?.... You don't think there'll be more——?"

Dundee became instantly contrite before her terror. "I didn't mean it, honey," he said gently. "I think it is more than likely that the gun is at the bottom of Mirror Lake. But do take care of yourself, and by that I mean don't work yourself to death.... Any messages for anyone in New York?"

Penny's pale face quivered. "If you—happen to run across my father, which of course you won't, tell him that—Mother would like him to come home."

At intervals during the sixteen-hour run to New York, Penny's faltering words returned to haunt the district attorney's special investigator, although he would have preferred to devote his entire attention to mapping out the program he intended to follow when he reached the city which, he fully believed, had been the scene of the first act of the tragic drama he was bent upon bringing to an equally tragic conclusion.

As soon as he had registered at a hotel near the Pennsylvania Station, and had shaved and breakfasted, he took from his bag a large envelope containing the photographs Carraway had made of Penny alive and of Nita dead, both clad in the royal blue velvet dress. In the envelope also was the white satin, gold-lettered label which the dress had so proudly borne: "Pierre Model. Copied by Simonson's. New York City."

Half an hour later he was showing the photographs and the label to a woman buyer, in the French Salon of Simonson's, one of New York's most "exclusive" department stores.

"Can you tell me when the original Pierre model was bought, and when this copy was made and sold?" he asked.

The white-haired, smartly dressed buyer accepted the sheaf of photographs Bonnie Dundee was offering. "I'll do my best, of course," she began briskly, then paled and uttered a sharp exclamation as her eyes took in the topmost picture. "This is Juanita Leigh, isn't it?... But—" she shuddered, "how odd she looks—as if—"

"Yes," Dundee agreed gravely. "She was dead when that picture was taken. Did you know Mrs. Selim?"

"No," the woman breathed, her eyes still bulging with horror. "But I've seen so many pictures of her in the papers.... To think that it was one of our dresses she chose for her shroud! But you want to know when the dress was sold to her, don't you?" she asked, brisk again. "I can find out. We keep a record of all our French originals and of the number of copies made of each.... Let me think! I've been going to Paris myself for the firm for the last fifteen years, but I can't remember buying this Pierre model.... Oh, of course! I didn't go over during 1917 and 1918, on account of the war, you know, but the big Paris designers managed to send us a limited number of very good models, and this must have been one of them. Otherwise, I'd remember buying it.... If you'll excuse me a moment——"

When she returned about ten minutes later, Miss Thomas brought him a pencilled memorandum. "This Pierre model was imported in the summer of 1917, several months in advance of the winter season, of course. Only five copies were made—in different colors and materials, naturally, since we make a point of exclusiveness. The royal blue velvet copy was sold to Juanita Leigh in January, 1918. I am sorry I cannot give you the exact day of the month, but our records show the month only. I took the liberty of showing a picture of the dress to the only saleswoman in the department who has been with us that long, but she cannot remember the sale. Twelve years is a long time, you know."

"Indeed it is," Dundee agreed regretfully. "You have been immensely helpful, however, Miss Thomas, and I thank you with all my heart."

"If you could just tell me—confidentially, of course," Miss Thomas whispered, "what sort of clue this dress is—"

"I don't know, myself!" the detective admitted. "But," he added to himself, after he had escaped the buyer's natural curiosity, "I intend to find out!"

Before he could take any further steps along that particular path, however, Dundee had an appointment to keep. Upon arriving at his hotel that morning he had made two telephone calls. He smiled now as he recalled the surprise and glee of one of his former Yale classmates, now a discouraged young bond salesman, with whom he had kept in touch.

"You want to borrow my name and my kid sister?" Jimmy Randolph had chortled. "Hop to it, old sport! But you might tell me what you want with such intimate belongings of mine."

"You may not know it," Dundee had retorted, "but young Mr. James Wadley Randolph, Jr., scion of the famous old Boston family, is going to visit that equally famous school, Forsyte-on-the-Hudson, to see whether it is the ideal finishing school for his beloved young sister, Barbara.... She's about fifteen now, isn't she, Jimmy?"

"Going on sixteen, and one of Satan's prize hellions," Jimmy Randolph had answered. "The family would be eternally grateful if you could get Forsyte to take her, but make them promise not to have any more chorus girls who plan to get murdered, as directors of their amateur theatricals. Bab would be sure to be mixed up in the mess.... I suppose that's the job you're on, you flat-footed dick, you!"

The second telephone call had secured an appointment at the Forsyte School for "Mr. James Wadley Randolph, Jr., of Boston," and Dundee, rather relishing his first need for such professional tactics, relaxed to enjoy the ten-mile drive along the Hudson.

It was a quarter to twelve when his taxi swept up the drive toward the big grey-stone, turreted building, sedately lonely in the midst of its valuable acres.

"Miss Earle says to come to the office," a colored maid told him, when he had given his borrowed name, and led him from the vast hall to a fairly large room, whose windows looked upon a tennis court, and whose walls were almost covered with group pictures of graduating classes, photographs of amateur theatrical performances, and portrait studies of alumnae.

A very thin, sharp-faced woman of about forty, with red-rimmed eyes which peered nearsightedly, rose from an old-fashioned roll-top desk and came forward to greet him.

"I am Miss Earle, Miss Pendleton's private secretary," she told him, as he shook her bony, clammy hand. "I should have told you when you telephoned this morning that both Miss Pendleton and Miss Macon sailed for Europe yesterday. We always have our commencement the last Tuesday in May, you know.... But if there is anything I can do for you——"

"I should like to know something at first hand of the history of the school, its—well, prestige, special advantages, curriculum, and so on," Dundee began deprecatingly.

"I should certainly be able to answer any question you may wish to ask, Mr. Randolph, since I have been with the school for fifteen years," Miss Earle interrupted tartly.

"Then Forsyte must take younger pupils than I had been led to believe, Miss Earle," Dundee said, with his most winning smile.

"I was never a pupil here," the secretary corrected him, but she thawed visibly. "Of course, I was a mere child when I finished business school, but I have been here fifteen years—fifteen years of watching rich society girls dawdle away four or five years, just because they've got to be somewhere before they make their debut.... But I mustn't talk like that, or I'll give you a wrong impression, Mr. Randolph. Of its kind, it is really a very fine school—very exclusive; riding masters, dancing masters, a golf 'pro' and our own golf course, native teachers for French, Italian, German and Spanish.... Oh, the school is all right, and will probably not suffer any loss of prestige on account of that dreadful murder out in the Middle West——"

"Murder?" Dundee echoed, as if he had no idea what she was talking about.

"Haven't you been reading the papers?" Miss Earle rallied him, with a coquettish smile. "But I don't suppose Boston bothers with such sordid things," she added, her thin-lipped mouth tightening. "Miss Pendleton was all cut up about it, because Mrs. Selim, or Juanita Leigh, as she was known on Broadway, had directed our Easter play the last two years, and the reporters simply hounded us the first two days after she was murdered out in Hamilton, where a number of our richest girls have come from——"

"By Jove!" Dundee exclaimed. "Was the Selim woman connected with this school, really?... I only read the headlines—never pay much attention to murders in the papers—"

"I wish," Miss Earle interrupted tartly, fresh tears reddening her eyes, "that people wouldn't persist in referring to her as 'that Selim woman'.... When I think how sweet and friendly she was, how—how kind!" and to Dundee's surprise she choked on tears before she could go on: "Of course I know it's dreadful for the school, and I ought not to talk about it, when you've come to see about putting your sister into the school, but Nita was my friend, and it simply makes me wild——"

"You admired and liked her very much?" Dundee asked, forgetting his role for the moment.

"Yes, I did! And Miss Pendleton liked her, too. And you can imagine how clever and popular she was, when a wonderful woman like Mrs. Peter Dunlap, who was Lois Morrow when she was in school here, admired her so much she took her to Hamilton with her to direct plays for a Little Theater.... Why, I never met anyone I was so congenial with!" the secretary went on passionately. "The girls here snub me and make silly jokes about me behind my back and call me nicknames, but Nita was just as sweet to me as she was to anyone—even Miss Pendleton herself!"

"Were you with her much?" Dundee dared ask.

"With her much?... I should say I was!" she asserted proudly. "I have a room here, live here the year 'round, and both years Nita shared my room, so she would not have to make the long trip back to New York every night during the last week of rehearsals. We used to talk until two or three o'clock in the morning—Say!" she broke off, in sudden terror. "You aren't a reporter, are you?"

"A reporter? Good Lord, no!" Dundee denied, in all sincerity. Then he made up his mind swiftly. This woman hated the school and all connected with it, had grown more and more sour and envy-bitten every year of the fifteen she had served here—and she liked Nita Leigh Selim better than anyone she had ever met. The opportunity for direct questioning was too miraculous to be ignored. So he changed his tone suddenly and said very earnestly: "No, I am not a reporter, Miss Earle. But I am not James Wadley Randolph, Jr. I am James F. Dundee, special investigator attached to the office of the district attorney of Hamilton, and I want you to help me solve the mystery of Mrs. Selim's murder."

It took nearly ten precious minutes for Dundee to nurse the terrified but obviously thrilled woman over the shock, and to get her into the mood to answer him freely.

"But I shan't and can't tell you anything bad about Nita!" she protested vehemently, wiping her red-rimmed eyes. "The papers are all saying now that she got $10,000 for double-crossing some awful racketeer named 'Swallow-tail Sammy', but I know she didn't get the money that way! She was too good——"

"From Nita's confidences to you, do you have any idea how she did get the money?" Dundee asked.

Miss Earle shook her head. "I don't know, but she got it honorably. I know that!... Maybe she found her husband and made him pay alimony——"

Dundee controlled his excitement with difficulty. "Did she tell you all about her marriage and divorce?"

Again Miss Earle shook her head. "The only time she ever spoke of it was last year—the first year she directed our play, you know. I asked her why she didn't get married again, and she said she couldn't—she wasn't divorced, because she didn't know where her husband was, and it was too expensive to go to Reno.... Of course she may have found him or something—and got a divorce some time this last year, and this money she got was a settlement——"

"She must have got a divorce, since she was planning to be married again to a young man in Hamilton," Dundee assured her soothingly.

"The way everybody puts the very worst interpretation on everything, when a person gets murdered!" Miss Earle stormed. "If poor Nita had belonged to a rich family, like the girls here, they would have spent a million if necessary to hush up any scandal on her!... I've seen it done!" she added, darkly and venomously.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Bonnie Dundee's heart leaped, but he forced himself to go softly. "I suppose," he said casually, "a fashionable school like this has plenty of carefully hushed-up scandals——"

"I'll say it has!" Miss Earle retorted inelegantly, and with ghoulish satisfaction. "Money can do anything! It makes my blood simply boil when I think of how those Forsyte girls in Hamilton—so smug and snobbish in their hick town 'society'—must be running poor Nita down, now that she's dead and can't defend herself!... If the truth were only known about some of them——"

Dundee could almost have embraced the homely, life-soured spinster—she was making his task so easy for him.

"I've met them all, of course, since Mrs. Selim was murdered," he said deprecatingly, "and I must say they seem to be remarkably fine women and girls——"

"Oh are they?" Miss Earle snorted. "Flora Hackett—Mrs. Tracey Miles she is now—didn't happen to tell you the nice little fuss she kicked up when she was here, did she? Oh, no! I guess not!"

"She looks," Dundee agreed, "like a girl who would have made things lively."

"I'll say so! Miss Pendleton nearly had nervous prostration!" Miss Earle plunged on, then fear blanched her face for a moment. "You know you've promised you'll never tell Miss Pendleton or Miss Macon that you talked to me!"

"You can depend on it that I will protect you," Dundee assured her. "When did Flora Hackett kick up her little fuss?"

"Let's see.... Flora graduated in June, 1920," Miss Earle obliged willingly. "So it must have been in 1919—yes, because she had one more year here. Of course they let her come back!... Money!... She took the lead in our annual Easter play in 1919, and just because Serena Hart complimented her and told her she was almost as good as a professional—"

"Serena Hart!" Dundee wonderingly repeated the name of one of America's most popular and beloved stage stars.

"Yes—Serena Hart," Miss Earle repeated proudly. "She was a Forsyte girl, too, and of course she did go into the chorus herself, after she graduated in—let's see—1917, because it was the second year after I'd come to work here—and Miss Pendleton nearly died, because she was afraid Forsyte's precious prestige would be lowered, but when Serena became a star everything was grand, of course, and Forsyte was proud to claim her.... Anyway, Serena comes to the Easter play every year she can, if she isn't in a Broadway play herself, of course, and so she saw Flora acting in the Easter play in 1919, and told her she was awfully good. She was, too, but not half the actress that little Penny Crain was, when she had the lead in the play four or five years ago."

Dundee's heart begged him to ask for more details of Penny's triumph, but his job demanded that he keep the now too-voluble Miss Earle to the business in hand.

"And Flora Hackett——?" he prompted.

"Well, the next day after the play the Easter vacation began, you know, and Flora forged a letter from her father, giving her permission to spend the ten-days' Easter holiday with one of the girls who lived in Atlanta," Miss Earle continued, with great relish. "Well, sir, right in the middle of the holidays, here came her father and mother—they were both alive then—and asked for Flora! They wired the girl in Atlanta, and Flora wasn't there, and the Hacketts were nearly crazy. But as luck would have it, Mr. Hackett ran into a friend of theirs on Broadway, and this friend began to tease Mr. Hackett about his daughter's being a chorus girl!"

"A chorus girl!" Dundee echoed, taking care not to show his disappointment.

"Of course they nabbed her right out of the show, but that wasn't the worst of it!" Miss Earle went on dramatically and mysteriously. "They tried to hush it up, of course, but the word went through the school like wildfire that Flora wasn't only in the chorus, but that she was living with an actor she'd been writing fan letters to long before the Easter play went on!"

"Did you hear his name?" Dundee asked.

"No," Miss Earle acknowledged regretfully. "But I'll bet anything it was the truth!... Why, Flora Hackett was so man-crazy she flirted scandalously with every male teacher in the school. The golf 'pro' we had then got so scared of her he quit his job!"

"I suppose," Dundee prompted craftily, "she wasn't any worse than some of the other Hamilton girls."

"We-ell," Miss Earle admitted reluctantly, "nothing ever came out on any of the others, but it looked mighty funny to me when Janet Raymond's mother took her out of school right in the middle of a term and hauled her off to Europe for a whole year!... I guess,"—she suggested, with raised eyebrows, "you know what it usually means when a girl has to spend a whole year abroad, and her mother says she's taking her away for her health—and Janet looking as healthy as any other girl in the school, except that she was crying half the time, and smuggling special delivery letters in and out by one of the maids—"

"Did you tell Nita these stories and point out the pictures of the girls?" Dundee had to risk asking.

Miss Earle froze instantly. "Naturally she was interested in the school, and once when she said it always made her mad the way chorus girls were run down, I told her that in my opinion society girls were worse than actresses, and—well, of course I gave her some examples, a lot of them worse than anything I've told you about Flora Hackett and Janet Raymond.... I hope," she added viciously, "that Nita dropped a hint or two if Flora or Janet had the nerve to high-hat her when she was in Hamilton!"

"Perhaps she did," Dundee agreed softly. "By the way, how did Nita happen to get the job here of directing the Easter plays?"

"That's what the reporters wanted to know," Miss Earle smiled. "But Miss Pendleton wouldn't tell them, for fear Serena wouldn't like it, and maybe be drawn into the scandal, when everybody knows she's as straight as a string——"

"Did Serena Hart get her the job?" Dundee was amazed.

"Yes.... Wait, I'll show you the letter of recommendation she wrote for Nita to Miss Pendleton," Miss Earle offered eagerly. "Remember, now, you're not to tell on me!"

She went to a tall walnut filing cabinet, and quickly returned with a note, which she thrust into Dundee's willing hands. He read:

"Dear Miss Pendleton: The bearer, Juanita Leigh, is rather badly in need of a job, and I have suggested that she apply to you for a chance to direct the Easter play. I have known Miss Leigh personally for ten years, and have the highest regard, both for her character and for her ability. Since you usually stage musical comedies, I think Miss Leigh, who has been a specialty dancer as well as an actress in musical comedy for about twelve years, would be admirably suited for the work. Knowing my love for Forsyte as you do, I do not have to assure you that I would suggest nothing which would be detrimental to the school's best interests.... Fondly yours, Serena Hart."

"She was wrong there, but I know it wasn't Nita's fault," Miss Earle, who had been looking over his shoulder, commented upon the last sentence of the letter.

"Is Miss Hart appearing in a play now?" Dundee asked.

"No, but she's rehearsing in one—'Temptation'—which will open at the Warburton Theater next Monday night," the secretary answered. "At commencement Tuesday night, Serena told Miss Pendleton how awfully sorry she was about Nita, and gave me tickets for the opening.... You go to see her, but don't tell her I told you anything.... I know she's rehearsing at the theater this afternoon, because she said she would be all week, and couldn't go to the boat to see Miss Pendleton and Miss Macon off for Europe."

"I will!" Dundee accepted the suggestion gratefully, as if it had not occurred to him. "But first I want you to come out to lunch with me. I'm sure you know of some nice tearoom or roadhouse in the neighborhood."

During the luncheon, which Miss Earle devoured avidly, without its interfering with her flow of reminiscences concerning the girls she hated, Dundee was able to learn nothing more to the detriment of Forsyte's Hamilton alumnae, but he did add considerably to his knowledge and pity of female human nature.

It was nearly three o'clock when he presented his card, with a message pencilled upon its back, to the aged doorkeeper who drowsed in the alley which led to the stage entrance of the Warburton Theater, just off Broadway near Times Square, and fifteen minutes later he was being received in the star's dressing-room by Serena Hart herself.

"You're working on poor Nita's murder?" she began without preamble, as she seated herself at her dressing-table and indicated a decrepit chair for the detective. "I was wondering how much longer I could keep out of it.... Of course you've been pumping that poor, foolish virgin—Gladys Earle.... Why girls who look like that are always called Gladys—God! I'm tired! We've been at it since ten this morning, but thank the Lord we're through now for the day."

Dundee studied her with keen interest, and decided that, almost plain though she was, she was even more magnetic than when seen from the footlights.... Rather carelessly dressed, long brown hair rather tousled, her face very pale and haggard without the make-up which would give it radiance on Monday night, Serena Hart was nevertheless one of the most attractive women Dundee had ever met—and one of the kindest, he felt suddenly sure....

"When did I first meet Nita Leigh?" she repeated his question. "Let me think—Oh, yes! The first year after I went on the stage—1917. We were in the chorus together in 'Teasing Tilly'—a rotten show, by the way. The other girls of the chorus were awfully snooty to me, because I was that anathema, a 'society girl', but Nita was a darling. She showed me the ropes, and we became quite intimate—around the theater only, however, since my parents kept an awfully strict eye on me. The show was a great hit—ran on into 1918, till February or March, I believe."

"Then do you know, Miss Hart, whether Nita got married during the winter?" Dundee asked.

"Why, yes, she did!" Serena Hart answered, her brow clearing after a frown of concentration. "I can't remember exactly when, but it was before the show closed—certainly a few weeks before, because the poor child was a deserted bride days before the closing notice was posted."

"Deserted!" Dundee exclaimed. "Did you meet her husband, Miss Hart?"

"No," Serena Hart replied. "As a matter of fact, she told me extraordinarily little about him, and did not discuss her marriage with the other girls of the chorus at all. I got the impression that Mr. Selim—Mat, she called him—wanted it kept secret for a while, but I don't know why.... This was early in 1918, as I've told you, though I have no way of fixing even the approximate date, and New York was full of soldiers. I remember I jumped to the conclusion that Nita had succumbed to a war romance, but I don't think she said anything to confirm my suspicion."

"When did she tell you of her marriage—that is, when—in relation to the date of the wedding itself?" Dundee asked.

"The very day she was married," Serena Hart answered. "She was late for the matinee. Our dressing-tables were side by side, and as she slipped out of her dress——"

"This dress?" Dundee asked, and handed her the photograph of dead Nita in the royal blue velvet dress she had kept for twelve years.

"Yes," and Serena Hart shuddered. "And her hair was dressed like that, too, although she had been wearing it in long curls, and had to take it down before she would go on for the opening number. She whispered to me that she had been married that day, that she was terribly happy, very much in love, and that her husband had asked her to dress her hair in the French roll, a favorite hair-dress with him. Between numbers she whispered to me again, telling me that her husband was 'so different', 'such a lamb'—totally unlike any man she had met on Broadway, poor child.... For she was a child still—only twenty, but she had been in the 'show business' since she was a motherless, fatherless little drifter of sixteen.... No, she did not tell me how old he was, where he came from, his business, or what he looked like, and I did not inquire. As the days passed—weeks, probably, she became more and more silent and reserved, though once or twice she protested she was still 'terribly happy.' Then came a day when she did not show up for the performance at all. The next night she told me—in just a few words, that her husband had left her, after a quarrel, and had not returned. It seems that she had innocently told him how she had 'vamped' Benny Steinfeld, the big revue producer, you know, into giving her a 'spot' in his summer show, and that her 'Mat' had flown into a rage, accusing her of having been untrue to him. She never mentioned his desertion to me again, but——"

"Yes?" Dundee prompted.

"Well," Serena Hart went on, uncomfortably, "I'm afraid I rather forgot poor Nita after 'Teasing Tilly' closed, for my next work was in stock in Des Moines. After a year of stock I got my chance in a legitimate show on Broadway, and one day I met her on the street. Not having much to talk with her about, I asked her if she and her husband were reconciled. She said no, that she had never seen him again. Then, in a burst of confidence, she told me that she had hired a private detective out of her meager earnings to investigate him in his home town, or rather the city he had told her he came from. The detective had reported that no such person as Mat or Matthew Selim had ever lived there, so far as he could find out. I asked her if she was going to get a divorce and she said she was not—that being already married was a protection against getting married in haste again. After that, I rather lost sight of Nita, and practically forgot her, our paths being so very divergent."

"And you never saw her again?" Dundee asked, very much disappointed.

"Oh, yes, two or three times—at openings, or on the street, but we never held any significant conversation," Serena Hart answered, reaching for her plain, rather dowdy little hat. "Wait! I was about to forget! I had quite a shock in connection with Nita. One afternoon—let's see, that was when I opened in 'Hullabaloo,' in which I made my first real success, you know—I bought The New York Evening Star, which devotes considerable space to theatrical doings, to see what sort of review the show had got, and on the first page I saw a picture of Nita, beneath a headline which said, 'Famous Model Commits Suicide'——"

"What!" Dundee exclaimed, astounded.

"Oh, it wasn't Nita Leigh," Serena Hart reassured him. "There was a correction the next day. You see, an artists' model named Anita Lee—spelled L-e-e, instead of Le-i-g-h—had committed suicide, and, as the Star explained it the next day, the similarity of both the first name and the last had caused the error in getting a photograph from the 'morgue' to accompany the story. There was a picture of Nita Leigh, with Nita's statement that 'the report of my death has been exaggerated,' and a picture of the real Anita Lee."

"When did the mistake occur?" Dundee asked, in great excitement.

"Let me think!" Serena Hart frowned. "'Hullabaloo' opened in—yes, about the first of May, 1922.... Just a little more than eight years ago."

Dundee reached for his own hat, in a fever to be gone, but to his surprise the actress stopped him, a faint color in her pale cheeks.

"Since you're from Hamilton, and are investigating the murder, you have undoubtedly met little Penelope Crain?"

"I know her very well. It happens that she is private secretary to the district attorney, under whom I work.... Why?"

"I saw her play the lead in the Easter show at Forsyte four or five years ago," Miss Hart explained, her face turned from the detective as she dusted it with powder, "and I was impressed with her talent. In fact, I advised her father, who had come from Hamilton to witness the performance, as proud parents are likely to do, to let her go on the stage."

"So you met Roger Crain?" Dundee paused to ask.

"Oh, yes.... A charming man, with even more personality than his daughter," the actress answered carelessly, so carelessly that Dundee had a sudden hunch.

"Have you seen Mr. Crain recently?... He deserted his family and fled Hamilton, under rather unsavory circumstances."

"What do you mean?" Miss Hart asked sharply.

"Oh, there was nothing actually criminal, I suppose, but he is believed to have withheld some securities which would have helped satisfy his creditors, when bankruptcy was imminent," Dundee explained. "Have you seen him since then—January it was, I believe?"

"January?" Miss Hart appeared to need time for reflection. "Oh, yes! He sent in his card on the 'first night' of my show that opened in January.... It was a flop—lasted only five weeks.... We chatted of the Forsyte girls who are now in Hamilton, most of whom I went to school with or have met at the Easter plays."

"Do you know where Mr. Crain is now?" Dundee asked. "I have a message for him from Penny—if you should happen to see him again——"

"Why should I see him again?" Miss Hart shrugged. "And I haven't the least idea where he is living or what he is doing now.... Of course, if he should come to see me backstage after 'Temptation' opens—What is the message from Penny?"

"That her mother wants him to come home," Dundee answered. "And I am very sure Penny wants him back, too.... The mother is one of the sweetest, gentlest, most tragic women I have ever met—and you have seen Penny for yourself.... The disgrace has been very hard on them. It would be splendid if Roger Crain would come back and redeem himself."

Half an hour later Bonnie Dundee, in the file room of The New York Evening Star, was in possession of the bound volume of that newspaper for the month of May, 1922. On the front page of the issue of May 3, under the caption which Serena Hart had quoted so accurately, was a picture of a young, laughing Nita Leigh, her curls bobbed short, a rose between her gleaming teeth. And in the issue of May 4 appeared two pictures side by side—exotic, straight-haired, slant-eyed Anita Lee, who had found life so insupportable that she had ended it, and the same photograph of living, vital Nita Leigh.

When he returned the files he asked the girl in charge:

"Does this copyright line beneath this picture—" and he pointed to the photograph of Nita which had appeared erroneously, "—mean that the picture was syndicated?"

The girl bent her head to see. "'Copyright by Metropolitan Picture Service'," she read aloud. "Yes, that's what it means. When The Evening Star was owned by Mr. Magnus, he formed a separate company called the Metropolitan Picture Service, which supplied papers all over the country with a daily picture service, in mat form. But the picture syndicate was discontinued about five years ago when the paper was sold to its present owners."

"Are their files available?" Dundee asked.

"If they are, I don't know anything about it," the girl told him, and turned to another seeker after bound volumes of the paper.

"It doesn't matter," Dundee assured her, and asked for a sheet of blank paper, on which he quickly composed the following telegram, addressed to Penny Crain:

"PLEASE SEARCH FILES ALL THREE HAMILTON PAPERS WEEK OF MAY FOURTH TO ELEVENTH YEAR OF NINETEEN TWENTY TWO FOR STORY AND PICTURES ON SUICIDE ANITA LEE ARTISTS MODEL STOP SAY NOTHING TO ANYONE NOT EVEN SANDERSON IF HE IS THERE STOP WIRE RESULT"

In his hotel, while impatiently awaiting an answer from Penny, Dundee passed the time by scanning all the New York papers of Thursday and Friday, on the chance of meeting with significant revelations concerning the private life of Dexter Sprague or Juanita Leigh Selim united by death—in the press, at least. There was much space devoted to the theory involving the two New Yorkers with the murder of the racketeer and gambler, "Swallow-tail Sammy" Savelli, but only two pieces of information held Dundee's interest.

The first was a reminder to the public that certain theatrical columns of Sunday, February 9, had carried the rumor of Dexter Sprague's engagement to Dolly Martin, popular "baby" star of Altamont Pictures, and that the same columns of Tuesday, February 11, had carried Sprague's own denial of the engagement—Dolly having "nothing to say."

"So that is why Nita tried to commit suicide on February 9—and her attempted suicide, with its tragic consequences for Lydia Carr, is probably the reason Sprague gave up his movie star," Dundee mused. "Did Nita let him persuade her to go into the blackmail business, in order to hold his wandering, mercenary affections?... Lord! The men some women love!"

The second bit of information which the papers supplied him was winnowed by Dundee himself, from a news summary of Nita Leigh's last year of life as chorus girl, specialty dancer, "double" in pictures, and director of the Easter play at Forsyte-on-the-Hudson.

"If Nita got a divorce or even a legal separation from her husband after her talk with Gladys Earle a year ago, she got it in New York and so secretly that no New York paper has been able to dig it up," Dundee concluded. "And yet she had promised to marry Ralph Hammond!"

A bellboy with a telegram interrupted the startling new train of thought which that conclusion had started.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

With a sharp exclamation of excitement and triumph, Dundee read Penny's telegram:

"HAMILTON EVENING SUN DATE OF MAY FIFTH NINETEEN TWENTY TWO PUBLISHED STORY OF SUICIDE ANITA LEE ARTISTS MODEL BUT PICTURE ACCOMPANYING WAS UNDOUBTEDLY NITA LEIGH SELIM'S STOP NO CORRECTION FOLLOWED STOP WHAT DOES IT MEAN"

"What does it mean?" Dundee repeated exultantly to himself. "It means, my darling little Penny, that anyone in Hamilton who had any interest in the matter believed Nita Leigh Selim was dead, and thought the spelling of her name was wrong, not the picture itself!... The question is who read that story and gazed on that picture with exquisite relief?"

Two hours before he had dismissed as impossible or highly impractical his impulse to investigate the eleven-year-old scandal on Flora Hackett, who was now Flora Miles, as told him by Gladys Earle of the Forsyte School. Even more difficult would it be to find out why Janet Raymond's mother had taken her abroad for a year. Of course—he had ruefully told himself—Nita Leigh might have been lucky—or unlucky enough to run across documentary proof of one of the scandals of which Gladys Earle had told her, or had dared to blackmail her victim by dark hints, as Miss Earle had unconsciously suggested to her.

But this new development could not be ignored. A picture of Nita Leigh as a suicide had appeared eight years ago in a Hamilton paper, and the paper had either remained unaware of the error or had thought it not worth the space for a correction.... Eight years ago!...

Eight years ago in June three weddings had occurred in Hamilton! The Dunlap, the Miles, the Drake wedding. And within the last year and a half Judge Marshall, after proposing season after season to the most popular debutante, had married lovely little Karen Plummer. Suddenly a sentence from Ralph Hammond's story of his engagement to Nita Leigh Selim popped up in Dundee's memory: "And once I got cold-sick because I thought she might still be married, but she said her husband had married again, and I wasn't to ask questions or worry about him."

If Ralph Hammond had reported Nita accurately she had not said she was divorced. She had merely said her husband was married again! Why was Ralph to ask no questions? Divorced wives were not usually so reticent....

Had Nita planned to commit the crime of bigamy? If not, when and where and how had she secured a divorce?

To Serena Hart, years before, she had denied any intention of getting a divorce, for two reasons—because she did not know where her husband was, and because, being married although husbandless, was a protection against matrimonial temptations.

To Gladys Earle, a year ago in April, she had confided that she could not marry again, because she was not divorced and because she did not know the whereabouts of her husband.

And so far as New York reporters had been able to find out, Nita Leigh had done nothing to alter her status as a married woman during the past year. Moreover, if Nita had secured either a divorce or a legal separation, her "faithful and beloved maid," Lydia Carr, would certainly have known of it. And Lydia had vehemently protested more than once to Bonnie Dundee that she knew nothing of Nita's husband, although she had worked for the musical comedy dancer for five years. Surely if Nita, loving and trusting Lydia as she did, had entered into negotiations of any kind with or concerning her husband during the last year, her maid would have been the first to know of them. And yet——

Suddenly Dundee jumped to his feet and began to pace the floor of his hotel bedroom. He was remembering the belated confidence that John C. Drake, banker, had made to him the morning before—after the discovery of Dexter Sprague's murder. He recalled Drake's reluctant statement almost word for word:

"About that $10,000 which Nita deposited with our bank, Dundee.... When she made the first deposit of $5,000 on April 28, she explained it with an embarrassed laugh as 'back alimony', an instalment of which she had succeeded in collecting from her former husband. And, naturally, when she made the second deposit on May 5, I presumed the same explanation covered that sum, too, though I confess I was puzzled by the fact that both big deposits had been made in cash."

In cash!

Had Nita, by any chance, been telling a near-truth? Had she been blackmailing her own husband—a husband who had dared marry again, believing his deserted wife to be dead—and justifying herself by calling it "back alimony?"

But—wasn't it, in reality, no matter what coercion Nita had used in getting the money, exactly that?... Back alimony! And the price of her silence before the world and the wife who was not really a wife....

In a new light, Bonnie Dundee studied the character of the woman who had been murdered—possibly to make her silence eternal.

Lois Dunlap had liked, even loved her. The other women and girls of "the crowd"—that exclusive, self-centered clique of Hamilton's most socially prominent women—must have liked her fairly well and found her congenial, in spite of their jealousy of her popularity with the men of the crowd, or they would not have tolerated her, regardless of Lois Dunlap's championship of her protegee.

Gladys Earle had found her "the sweetest, kindest, most generous person I ever met"—Gladys Earle, who envied and hated all girls who were more fortunate than she.

Serena Hart, former member of New York's Junior League and still listed in the Social Register, had found her the only congenial member of the chorus she had invaded as the first step toward stardom. And Serena Hart had the reputation of being a woman of character and judgment, a kind and wise and great woman....

Finally, Ralph Hammond had loved Nita and wanted to marry her.

Was it possible that Nita Selim's only crime, into which she had been led by her infatuation for Dexter Sprague, had been to demand, secretly, financial compensation from a husband who had married and deserted her, a husband who, believing her dead, had married again?

But who was the man whose picture—to spin a new theory—Nita had recognized as that of her husband among the male members of the cast of "The Beggar's Opera," when Lois Dunlap had proudly exhibited the "stills" of that amateur performance?

With excitement hammering at his pulses, Dundee took the bunch of photographs which Lois Dunlap had willingly given him, and studied the picture that contained the entire cast—the picture which had first attracted Nita's attention. And again despair overwhelmed him, for every one of his possible male suspects was in that group....

But he could not keep his thoughts from racing on.... Men who stepped out of their class and went on parties with chorus girls frequently did so under assumed names, he reflected. Serena Hart was authority for the information that Nita's had been a sudden marriage. Was it not entirely possible that the man who married Nita in 1918 had done so half-drunk, both on liquor and infatuation, and that he had not troubled to explain to Nita his motives for having used an assumed name or to write in his real name on the application for a marriage license? Had Nita's private detective journeyed out to Hamilton years ago in a fruitless attempt to locate "Matthew Selim?"

Bonnie Dundee lay awake for hours Friday night turning these and a hundred other questions over and over in his too-active mind, and slept at last, only to awake Saturday with a plan of procedure which he was sensible enough to realize promised small chance of success.

And he was right. Not in Manhattan, or in any of the other boroughs of New York City, did he find any record of a marriage license issued to Juanita Leigh and Matthew Selim. Not only was it entirely probable that Juanita Leigh was a stage name and that Nita had married conscientiously under her real name, but it was equally possible that the license had been secured in New Jersey or Connecticut.

When he gave up his quest at noon Saturday and returned to his hotel, Dundee bought at the newsstand a paper whose headline convinced him that Sergeant Turner was, at that moment, even more discouraged than himself. For the big type told the world:

JOE SAVELLI "GETS" BROTHER'S SLAYER

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....



CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Dundee laughed, the parrot which had saved his life echoing his mirth raucously, as his eyes hit upon the following lines of fine print halfway 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 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.