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

by Anne Austin

  “No, no! It isn’t mine!” Flora cried hysterically, cringing against her husband, who began to protest in a voice falsetto with rage.

  Dundee ignored his splutterings. “May I point out that it is identical with the other tally cards used at Mrs. Selim’s party today, and that on its face it bears your name, ‘Flora’?” and he politely extended the card for her inspection.

  “I—yes, it must be mine, but I was not in this room when Nita was—was shot!”

  “But you will admit that you were in her clothes closet at some time during the twenty or more minutes that elapsed between your leaving the bridge game, when you became dummy, and the moment when Karen Marshall screamed?”

  As Flora Miles said nothing, staring at him with great, terrified black eyes, Dundee went on relentlessly: “Mrs. Miles, when you left the bridge game, you did not intend to telephone your house. You came here—into this room!—and you lay in wait, hiding in her closet until Nita Selim appeared, as you knew she would, sooner or later—”

  “No, no! That’s a lie—a lie, I tell you!” the woman shrilled at him. “I did telephone my house, and I talked to Junior, when the maid put him up to the phone…. You can ask her yourself, if you don’t believe me!”

  “But after you telephoned, you stole into this room—”

  “No, no! I—I made up my face all fresh, just as I told you—”

  Dundee did not bother to tell her how well he knew she was lying, for suddenly something knocked on the door of his mind. He strode to the closet, searched for a moment among the multitude of garments hanging there, then emerged with the brown silk summer coat which Nita Selim had worn to Breakaway Inn that noon. Before the terrified woman’s eyes he thrust a hand first into one deep pocket and then another, finding nothing except a handkerchief of fine embroidered linen and a pair of brown suede gauntlet gloves.

  “Will you let me have the note, please, Mrs. Miles? The note Nita received during her luncheon party, and which she thrust, before your eyes, into a pocket of this coat? … It is in your handbag, I am sure, since you have had no opportunity, unobserved, to destroy it.”

  “What ghastly nonsense is this, Dundee?” Tracey Miles demanded furiously.

  But Dundee again ignored him. His implacable eyes held Flora Miles’ until the woman broke suddenly, piteously. She fumbled in the raffia bag which had been hanging from her arm.

  “Good God, Flora! What does it all mean?” Tracey Miles collapsed like a pricked pink balloon. “That’s my stationery—one of my business envelopes—”

  Flora Miles dropped the bag which she need no longer watch and clutch with terror, as she dug her thin fingers into her husband’s shoulders and looked down at his puzzled face, for she was a little taller than he.

  “Forgive me, darling! Oh, I knew God would punish me for being jealous! I thought you were writing love letters to—to that woman—”

  Dundee did not miss the slightest significance of that scene as he retrieved the blue-grey envelope she had dropped. It was inscribed, in a curious handwriting: “Mrs. Selim, Private Dining Room, Breakaway Inn.”

  “Let’s see, boy,” Strawn said, with respect in his harsh voice.

  Dundee withdrew the single sheet of business stationery, and obligingly held it so that the chief of detectives could read it also.

  “Nita, my sweet,” the note began, without date-line, “Forgive your bad boy for last night’s row, but I must warn you again to watch your step. You’ve already gone too far. Of course I love you and understand, but—Be good, Baby, and you won’t be sorry.”

  The note was signed “Dexy.”

  Dundee tapped the note for a long minute, while Tracey Miles continued to console his wife. A new avenue, he thought—perhaps a long, long avenue….

  “Mrs. Miles,” he began abruptly, and the tear-streaked face turned toward him. “You say you thought this letter to Mrs. Selim had been written by your husband?”

  “Yes!” She gasped. “I’m jealous-natured. I admit it, and when I saw one of our own—I mean, one of Tracey’s business envelopes—”

  “You made up your mind to steal it and read it?”

  “Yes, I did! A wife has a right to know what her husband’s doing, if it’s anything—like that—” Her haggard black eyes again implored her husband for forgiveness, before she went on: “I did slip into Nita’s room and go into her closet to see if she had left the letter in her coat pocket. I closed the door on myself, thinking I could find the light cord, but it was caught in one of the dresses or something, and it took me a long time to find it in the dark of the closet, but I did find it at last, and was just reading the note—”

  “You read it, even after you saw that the handwriting on the envelope wasn’t your husband’s?” Dundee queried in assumed amazement.

  Flora’s thin body sagged. “I—I thought maybe Tracey had disguised his handwriting…. So I read it, and saw it was from Dexter—”

  “Mr. Miles, do you know how some of your business stationery got into Sprague’s hands?”

  “He’s had plenty of opportunity to filch stationery or almost anything he wants, hanging around my offices, as he does—an idler—”

  But Dundee was in a hurry. He wheeled from the garrulity of the husband to the tense terror of the wife.

  “Mrs. Miles, I want you to tell me exactly what you know, unless you prefer to consult a lawyer first—”

  “Sir, if you are insinuating that my wife—”

  “Oh, let me tell him, Tracey,” Mrs. Miles capitulated suddenly, completely. “I was in the closet when Nita was killed, I suppose, but I didn’t know she was being killed! Because I was lying in there on the closet floor in a dead faint!”

  Dundee stared at the woman incredulously, then suppressed a groan of almost unbearable disappointment. If Flora Miles was telling the truth, here went a-flying his only eye-witness, probably, or rather, his only ear-witness.

  “Just when did you faint, Mrs. Miles?” he asked, struggling for patience. “Before or after Nita came into this room?”

  “I was just finishing the note, with the light on in the closet, and the door shut, when I heard Nita come into the room. I knew it was Nita because she was singing one of those Broadway songs she is—was—so crazy about. I jerked off the light, and crouched way back in a corner of the closet. A velvet evening wrap fell down over my head, and I was nearly smothering, but I was afraid to try to dislodge it for fear a hanger would fall to the floor and make an awful clatter. And then—and then—” She shuddered, and clung to her husband.

  “What caused you to faint, Mrs. Miles?”

  “Sir, my wife has heart trouble—”

  “What did you hear, Mrs. Miles?” Dundee persisted.

  “I couldn’t hear very well, all tangled up in the coat and ’way back in the closet, but I did hear a kind of bang or bump—no, no, not a pistol shot!—and because it came from so near me I thought it was Nita or Lydia coming to get something out of the closet, and I’d be discovered, so I—I fainted—” She drew a deep breath and went on: “When I came to I heard Karen scream, and then people running in—. But all the time that awful tune was going on and on—”

  “Tune?” Dundee gasped. “Do you mean—Nita Selim’s—song?”

  Flora Miles seemed to be dazed by Dundee’s vehement question.

  “Why, yes—Nita’s own tune. That’s what she called it—her own tune—”

  “But, Mrs. Miles,” Dundee protested, ashamed that his scalp was prickling with horror, “do you mean to tell me that Nita was not dead then—when Karen Marshall screamed?”

  “Dead?” Flora repeated, more bewildered. “Of course she was, or at least, they all said so—. Oh, I know what you mean! And you don’t mean what I mean at all—”

  “Steady, honey-girl!” Tracey Miles urged, putting his arm about his wife. “I’d better tell you, Dundee…. When we all came running into the room, there was Nita’s powder box playing its tune over and over—”

  “Oh!” Du
ndee wiped his forehead. “You mean it’s a musical box?”

  “Yes, and plays when the lid is off,” Tracey answered, obviously delighted to have the limelight again. “Well, of course, since Nita couldn’t put the lid back on, it was still playing…. What was the tune, honey?” he asked his wife tenderly. “I haven’t much ear for music at best, but at a time like that—”

  “It was playing Juanita,” Flora answered wearily. “Over and over—‘Nita, Jua-a-n-ita, be my own fair bride’,” she quavered obligingly. “Only not the words, of course, just the tune. That’s why Nita bought the box, I suppose, because it played her namesake song—”

  “Maybe one of her beaus gave it to her,” Tracey suggested lightly, patting his wife’s trembling shoulder. “Anyway, Dundee, the thing ran on and on, until it ran down, I suppose. I confess I wanted to put the lid back on, to stop the damned thing, but Hugo said we mustn’t touch anything—”

  “And quite right!” Dundee cut in. “Now, Mrs. Miles, about that noise you heard…. Did you hear anyone enter the room? … No? … Well, then, did you hear Nita speak to anyone? You said you thought it might be Lydia, coming to get something out of the closet.”

  “I didn’t hear Nita speak a word to anybody, though she might have and I wouldn’t have heard, all muffled up in that velvet evening wrap and so far back in the closet—”

  “Did you hear the door onto the porch—it’s quite near the closet—”

  “The door was open when we came in, Dundee,” Tracey interposed. “It must have been open all the time.”

  “I didn’t hear it open,” Mrs. Miles confirmed him wearily. “I tell you I didn’t hear anything, except Nita’s coming in singing, then the powder box playing its tune, and that bang or bump I told you about.”

  “And just where was that?” Dundee persisted.

  “I don’t know!” she shrilled, hysteria rising in her voice again. “I told you it sounded fairly near the closet, as if—as if somebody bumped into something. That’s what it was like! That’s exactly what it was like. And I was so frightened of being found in the closet that I fainted, and didn’t come to until Karen screamed—”

  She was babbling on, but Dundee was thinking hard. A very convenient faint—that! For the murderer, at least! But—why not for Mrs. Miles herself? Odd that she should faint! Why hadn’t she trumped up some excuse immediately and left the closet as Nita was entering the room? Was it, possibly, because she could think of nothing but the great relief of finding that it was Sprague, not her husband, who had been writing love letters to Nita Selim? … A jealous woman—

  “Miles,” he began abruptly, “I think you’d better tell me how your wife became so jealous of you and Nita Selim that she could get herself into such a false position.”

  Tracey Miles reddened, but a gesture of one of his sunburned hands restrained his wife’s passionate defense of him. “It’s the truth that Flora is jealous-natured. And I suppose—” he faltered a moment, and his eyes did not meet his wife’s, “—that I liked seeing her a little bit jealous of her old man. Sort of makes a man feel—well, big, you know. And pretty important to somebody!”

  “So you were just having a bit of fun with your wife, so far as Mrs. Selim was concerned?” Dundee asked coldly.

  The blood flowed through the thinning blond hair. “We-el, not exactly,” he admitted frankly. “You see, I did take a shine to Nita, and if I do say so myself, she liked me a lot…. Oh, nothing serious! Just a little flirtation, like most of our crowd have with each other—”

  “Mrs. Miles,” Dundee interrupted with sudden harshness, “are you sure you did not know that that letter was from Dexter Sprague before you looked for it?”

  “Sir, if you are insinuating that my wife carried on a flirtation or—an—an affair with that Sprague insect—” Tracey began to bluster.

  But Dundee’s eyes were on Flora Miles, and he saw that her sallow skin had tightened like greyish silk over her thin cheek bones, and that her eyes looked suddenly dead and glassy.

  “You fainted, you say, Mrs. Miles,” Dundee went on inexorably. “Was it because, by any chance, this note—” and he tapped the sheet which had caused so much trouble—“revealed the fact that Nita Selim and Dexter Sprague were sweethearts or—lovers?”

  It was a battle between those two now. Both ignored Tracey’s red-faced rage.

  Flora licked her dry lips. “No—no,” she whispered. “No! It was because I was jealous of Tracey and Nita—”

  “Yes, and I’d given her cause to be jealous, too!” Tracey forced himself into the conversation. “One night, at the Country Club, Flora saw me and Nita stroll off the porch and down onto the grounds, and she had a right to be sore at me when I got back, because I’d cut a dance with her—my own wife! … And it was only this very morning that I made a point of driving—out of my way too—by this house to see Nita. Not that I meant any harm, but I was being a little silly about her—and she was about me, too! Not that I’d leave my wife and babies for any Broadway beauty under the sun—”

  “Oh, Tracey! And you weren’t going to tell me—” Was there real jealousy now, or just pretense on Flora’s part?

  “You understand, don’t you, Dundee?” Tracey demanded, man to man. “I was just having a little fun on the side—nothing serious, mind you! But of course I didn’t tell Flora every little thing—. No man does! There’ve been other girls—other women—”

  “Tracey isn’t worse than the other men!” Flora flamed up. “He’s such a darling that all the girls pet him, and spoil him—”

  Dundee could stand no more of Miles’ complacent acceptance of his own rakishness. And certainly a girl like Nita Selim would have been able to bear precious little of it…. Conceited ass! But Flora Miles was another matter—and so was Dexter Sprague!

  “You can join me in the living room, if you like,” Dundee said shortly, as he wheeled and strode toward the door. Was that quick, passionate kiss between husband and wife being staged for his benefit?

  “Pretty near through, boy?” Strawn, who had been silent and bewildered for a long time, asked anxiously, as the two detectives passed into the hall.

  “Not quite. I’ve got to know several things yet,” Dundee answered absently.

  But in the living room his mind was wholly upon the business in hand.

  “I’ll keep you all no longer than is absolutely necessary,” he began, and again the close-knit group—in which only Dexter Sprague was an alien—grew taut with suspense. “From the playing out of the ‘death hand’ at bridge,” he went on, using the objectionable phrase again very deliberately, “I found that no two of you men arrived together…. Mr. Hammond, you were the first to arrive, I believe?”

  “It seems that I was!” Clive Hammond answered curtly.

  “And yet you did not enter the living room to greet your hostess?”

  “I wanted a private word with Polly—Miss Beale—my fiancйe,” Hammond explained briefly.

  “How and when did you arrive?”

  “I don’t know the exact time. Never thought of looking at my watch,” Hammond offered. “I came out in my own roadster—that tan Stutz you may have noticed in the driveway. As for how I entered the house, I leaped upon the porch and opened a door of the solarium. I walked across the solarium, saw Polly just finishing with bridge for the afternoon, and beckoned to her. She joined me in the solarium, and we stayed there until Karen screamed…. That’s all.”

  “Have you been engaged long, Mr. Hammond—you and Miss Beale?” Dundee asked, as if quite casually.

  “Nearly a year,—if it’s any of your business, Dundee!”

  “And just when had you seen Miss Beale last, before late this afternoon?” Dundee asked.

  “I refuse to answer!” Hammond flared. “That at least is none of your damned business!”

  “I believe I can answer my own question, Mr. Hammond,” Dundee said very softly.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Then why ask me?” Hammond shrugged, but
his eyes flickered toward Polly Beale.

  “I thought perhaps you could give me a little additional information,” Dundee soothed him. “You see, it happens that I saw you, Miss Beale and another young man come into the Stuart House dining room about half past one today, just when I was thinking of lunch for myself.”

  “The mysterious ‘other young man’ was Clive’s brother, Ralph Hammond,” Polly Beale cut in brusquely.

  “Your decision to lunch with your fiance and his brother was quite a sudden one?” Dundee asked courteously. “Just when did you change your mind about Mrs. Selim’s luncheon party at Breakaway Inn, Miss Beale?”

  The tall girl threw up her mannishly cropped, chestnut head. “There is nothing at all sinister or even queer about it, Mr. Dundee! I was on my way to the luncheon, when I decided to drive past Nita’s house, on the chance that she might like me to drive her over.”

  “Then you didn’t know that Mrs. Dunlap had already arranged to meet Mrs. Selim downtown this morning and to take her to the Inn?” Dundee asked.

  “No! I didn’t hear of the arrangement,” Polly answered decidedly.

  “You were a close friend of Mrs. Selim’s perhaps?” Dundee prodded.

  “Not at all! But that would not keep me from doing my hostess a courtesy…. She hated her Ford and liked expensive cars,” Polly added unemotionally. “It was about a quarter to one when I got here, I should say. Nita wasn’t here, nor was her maid, but I saw Ralph’s car parked in front of the house—”

  “Ralph Hammond’s car?” a woman squealed, but Dundee let Polly continue.

  “I rang and he answered the door. Said he was alone in the house, going over the premises at Judge Marshall’s request,” Polly said evenly.

  “That’s right—that’s right!” Judge Marshall agreed hastily. “Nita—Mrs. Selim—wanted the unfinished half of the gabled top story finished up. Wanted a maid’s room and bath, and a guest room and bath added to the living quarters already completed. I gave the commission, for an estimate, at least, to the Hammond firm, since they had built the house originally for Crain—Penny’s father.”