by Anne Austin
“’Scuse me! Gotta dish up!” Penny flung over her shoulder as she ran away and left him alone with her mother.
Dundee liked Mrs. Crain for making no excuses about a maid they could not afford, liked the way she settled into a lovely, ancient rocking-chair and set herself to entertain him while her daughter made ready the dinner.
Not a word was said about the horrible tragedy which had occurred the day before in the house which had once been her home. They talked of Penny’s work, and the little gentlewoman listened eagerly, with only the faintest of sighs, as Dundee humorously described Penny’s fierce efficiency and District Attorney Sanderson’s keen delight in her work.
“Bill Sanderson is a nice boy,” the woman of perhaps 48 said of Hamilton’s 35-year-old district attorney. “It is nice for Penny to work with an old friend of the family, or was—until—”
And that was the nearest she came to mentioning the murder before Penny summoned them to the little dining room.
Because Penny was watching him and was obviously proud of her skill as a cook—skill recently acquired, he was sure—Dundee ate as heartily as his carefully concealed depression would permit. There was a beautifully browned two-rib roast of beef, pan-browned potatoes, new peas, escalloped tomatoes, and, for dessert, a gelatine pudding which Penny proudly announced was “Spanish cream,” the secret of which she had mastered only that morning.
“I was up almost at dawn to make it, so that it would ‘set’ in time,” she told him, and by the quiver of her lip Dundee knew that it was not Spanish cream which had got her up….
“I’m going to help wash dishes,” he announced firmly, and Penny, with a quick intake of breath, agreed.
“Hadn’t you better take a nap, Mother?” she added a minute later, as Mrs. Crain, with a slight flush on her faded cheeks, began to stack the dessert dishes. “You mustn’t lay a hand on these dishes, or Bonnie and I will have our dishwashing picnic spoiled…. Run along now. You need sleep, dear.”
“Not any more than you do, poor baby!” Mrs. Crain quavered, and then hurried out of the room, since gentlewomen do not weep before strangers.
“I called you ‘Bonnie’ so Mother would know we are really friends,” Penny explained, her cheeks red, as she preceded him through the swinging door into the miniature kitchen.
“You’ll stick to that—being friends, I mean, no matter what happens, won’t you, Penny?” Dundee said in a low voice, setting the fragile crystal dishes he carried upon the porcelain drainboard of the sink.
“I knew you had something bad to tell me…. It’s about—Ralph, I suppose?” Her husky voice was scarcely audible above the rush of hot water into the dishpan. “You’d better tell me straight off, Bonnie. I’m not a very patient person…. Are they going to arrest Ralph when they find him? There wasn’t a word in the paper about him this morning—”
“I’m afraid they are, Penny,” Dundee told her miserably. “Captain Strawn has a warrant ready, but of course—”
“Oh, you don’t have to tell me you hope Ralph isn’t guilty!” she cut in with sudden passionate vehemence. “Don’t I know he couldn’t have done it? They always arrest the wrong person first, the blundering idiots—”
It was the thorny Penny again, the Penny with glittering eyes which matched her nickname. But Dundee felt better able to cope with this Penny….
“I’m afraid I’m the chief idiot, but you must believe that I’m sorry it should be a friend of yours,” he told her, and reached for the plate she had rinsed of its suds under the hot water tap.
“Shoot the works!” she commanded, with hard flippancy. “Of course I might have known that Captain Strawn’s theory about a gunman was just dust in our eyes, and that only a miracle could keep you from fastening on poor Ralph, since he and the gun are both missing…. Naturally it wouldn’t occur to you that it might be an outsider, someone who had followed Nita and her lover, Sprague, from New York, to kill her for having left him for Sprague…. Oh, no! Certainly not!” she gibed, to keep from bursting into tears.
“An outsider would hardly have had access to Judge Marshall’s pistol and Maxim silencer,” he reminded her. “And Captain Strawn received a wire from a ballistics expert in Chicago this morning, confirming our conviction that the same gun which fired the bullets against Judge Marshall’s target fired the bullet which killed Nita Selim…. You’ve washed that plate long enough. Let me dry it now…. And there are other things, Penny—”
“Such as—” she challenged in her angry, husky contralto.
“Sprague admitted to me this morning, after I had confronted him with proofs, that he sometimes slept in the upstairs bedroom—”
“I told you they were lovers!” Penny interrupted.
“—and that he slept there Friday night, after he and Nita had quarreled. He still contends that the row was over that movie-of-Hamilton business,” Dundee went on, as if she had not spoken. “He admitted also that Nita had told him to take his things away when he left Saturday morning, but he says it was only because she didn’t want Ralph Hammond to find a man’s belongings there if he had occasion to go into the upstairs rooms in making his estimates for the finishing-up of the other side. But he contends, and Lydia Carr, whom I also saw again this morning, supports him in it, that he stayed in the house occasionally when Nita was particularly nervous about being alone, and that they were not lovers.”
“Pooh! … Don’t wipe the flowers off that plate. Here’s another.”
“I’m inclined to say ‘Pooh!’, too, Penny,” Dundee assured her, “but Tracey Miles told me last night when he came to get Lydia that Nita really seemed to be in love with Ralph—part of the time, at least.”
“Nita thought enough of Dexter Sprague to send for him to come down here, and to root her head off for him to get the job of making the movie,” Penny reminded him fiercely, making a great splashing in the dishpan.
“Then—you don’t think she was in love with Ralph?” Dundee asked.
“Oh, I don’t know!” the girl cried. “I thought so sometimes—had the grace to hope so, anyway, since Ralph was so crazy about her.”
“That’s the point, Penny,” Dundee told her gently. “Everyone I’ve talked to this morning, including Sprague, seems sure that Ralph Hammond was mad about Nita Selim.”
“So of course he would kill her!” Penny scoffed bitterly.
“Yes, Penny—when he discovered Sprague’s easily-recognized cravats draped over the mirror frame in a bedroom in Nita’s house…. For they were there to be seen when Ralph went into that bedroom yesterday morning.”
“How do you know he saw them?”
“Because he left this behind him,” Dundee admitted reluctantly, and wiped his hands before drawing an initialed silver pencil from his breast pocket. “I found it under the edge of the bed. The initials are R. H.”
“Yes, I recognize it,” Penny admitted, turning sharply away. “I gave it to him myself, for a Christmas present. I thought I could afford to give silver pencils away then. Dad hadn’t bolted yet—” She crooked an elbow and leaned her face against it for a moment. Then she flung up her brown bobbed head defiantly. “Well?”
“Ralph must have been—well, in a pretty bad way, since he loved Nita and wanted to—marry her,” Dundee persisted painfully. “Remember that Polly Beale found him still there when she stopped to offer Nita a lift to Breakaway Inn. It is not hard to imagine what took place. We know that Polly curtly cancelled her luncheon engagement with Nita and the rest of you, and went into town with Ralph, after making sure that Clive would join them. I saw young Hammond myself for an instant, without knowing who he was, and I remember now thinking that he looked far too ill to eat. I was lunching at the Stuart House myself when they came into the dining room, you know.”
“Plenty to hang him on, I see!” Penny cried furiously.
“There’s a little more, Penny,” Dundee went on. “Polly Beale and Clive Hammond were mortally afraid that Ralph would come to the cocktail party!
I’m sure Clive made Ralph promise to stay away, and that both Clive and Polly did not trust him to keep his promise. That is why, I am sure, Clive beckoned Polly to join him in the solarium, without entering the living room to speak to Nita. You remember they said they stayed there all during the playing of—”
“If you call it the ‘death hand’ again, I’ll scream!”
“All right…. They stayed there until Karen discovered the murder. I am sure they chose that place because of its many windows—they could watch for Ralph’s car, dash out and head him off. Take him away by force, if necessary, to keep him from making a scene. I believe they knew he had murder in his heart, and that he would find a way to get a gun—”
“Have you also found out that he stole Hugo’s gun yesterday?”
“I have found that it was possible for him to do so,” Dundee said slowly. “The butler was off for the afternoon until six o’clock. There was no one in the house but the nursemaid and the-three-months-old baby.”
“Well? And I suppose you think Clive and Polly didn’t have a chance to head Ralph off, as you say, but that they did see him running away after he killed her?” Her voice was still brittle with anger, but there were indecision and fear in it, too.
“No,” Dundee replied. “I don’t think they saw him. I feel pretty sure he came into the house by the back way, and through the back hall into Nita’s room. He must have known Clive and Polly would be on the lookout for him…. At any rate, I have proof that whoever shot Nita from in front of that window near the porch door fled toward the back hall.”
And he told her of the big bronze lamp, whose bulb had been broken, reminding her of its place at the head of the chaise longue which was set between the two west windows.
“That was the ‘bang or bump’ Flora Miles heard while she was hiding in the closet,” he explained. “I suppose Flora has told all of you about it? … I thought so. Muffled as she was in the closet, it is unlikely that she could have heard Nita’s frantic whisperings to Ralph…. I doubt if he spoke at all. Nita must have been sure he was about to leave by the porch door—”
Dimly there came the ring of the telephone. With a curt word, Penny excused herself to answer it. Dundee went on polishing glasses with a fresh towel….
“Bonnie!” Penny was coming back, walking like a somnambulist, her brown eyes wide and fixed. “That was—Ralph! … And he doesn’t even know Nita is dead!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Of course I recognized his voice instantly when he said, ‘That you, Penny?’ and it’s a wonder I didn’t scream,” said Penny Crain, fighting her way up through dazed bewilderment to explain in detail, in answer to Dundee’s pelting questions. “I said, ‘Of course, Ralph…. Where have you been? …’ And he said, in that coaxing, teasing voice of his that I know so well: ‘Peeved, Penny? … I don’t blame you, honey. You really ought not to let me come over and explain why I stood you up last night, but you will, won’t you? … Ni-i-ze Penny! …’ That’s exactly how he talked, Bonnie Dundee! Exactly! Oh, don’t you see he couldn’t know that Nita is dead?”
“Did you ask him where he was?” Dundee asked finally.
“No. I just told him to come on over, and he said I could depend on it that he wouldn’t waste any time…. Oh, Bonnie! What shall we do?”
“Listen, Penny!” Dundee urged rapidly. “You must realize that I’ve got to see and hear, but I don’t want Ralph Hammond to see me until after he’s had a talk with you. Will you let me eavesdrop behind these portieres? … I know it’s a beastly thing to do, but—”
Penny agreed at last, and within ten minutes after that amazing telephone call Dundee, from behind the portieres that separated the dining and living room, heard Penny greeting her visitor in the little foyer. She had played fair; had not gone out into the hall to whisper a warning—if any warning was needed.
He had seen Ralph Hammond enter the dining room of the Stuart House the day before, in company with Clive Hammond and Polly Beale, when the three had been strangers to him; but Dundee told himself now that he would hardly have recognized the young man whom Penny was preceding into her living room. The Ralph Hammond of Saturday had had a white, drawn face and sick eyes. But this boy….
Like his older brother, Clive, Ralph Hammond had dark-red, curling hair. But unlike his brother’s, his eyes were a wide, candid hazel—the green iris thickly flecked with brown. A little shorter than Clive, a trifle more slender. But that which held the detective’s eyes was something less tangible but at once more evident than superlative masculine good looks. It was a sort of shy joyousness and buoyance, which flushed the tan of his cheeks, sang in his voice, made his eyes almost unbearably bright….
Before Penny Crain, very pale and quiet, could sink into the chair she was groping toward, Ralph Hammond was at her side, one arm going out to encircle her shoulders.
“Don’t look like that, Penny!” Dundee heard him plead, his voice suddenly humble. “You’ve every right to be sore at me, honey, but please don’t be. I know I’ve been an awful cad these last few weeks, but I’m myself again. I’m cured now, Penny—”
“Wait, Ralph!” Penny protested faintly, holding back as he would have hugged her hard against his breast. “What about—Nita?”
Dundee saw the young man’s face go darkly red, but heard him answer almost steadily: “I hoped you’d understand without making me put it into words, honey…. I’m cured of—Nita. I can’t express it any other way except to say I was sick, and now I’m cured—”
“You mean—” Penny faltered, but with a swift, imploring glance toward Dundee, “—you don’t love Nita any more? You can’t deny you were terribly in love with her, Ralph. Lois told us—told me last night that Nita had told her in strictest confidence that she had promised to marry you, just Thursday night—”
The boy’s face was very pale as he dropped his hands from Penny’s shoulders, but Dundee, from behind the portieres, was not troubling to spy for the moment. He was too indignant with Penny for having withheld from him the vital fact of Nita’s engagement to Ralph Hammond….
“That’s true, Penny,” Ralph was saying dully. “You have a right to know, because I’m asking you to marry me now…. I did propose to Nita again Thursday night, and she did accept me. I confess now I was wild with happiness—”
“Why did she refuse you before?” Penny cut in, and Dundee silently thanked her for asking the question he would have liked to ask himself. “Was it because she wasn’t sure she was in love with you?”
“You’re making it awfully hard for me, honey,” the boy protested, then admitted humbly, “Of course you want to know, and you should know…. No, she said all along, almost from the first that she loved me more than I could love her, but that there were—reasons…. Two reasons, she always said, and once I asked her jealously if they were both men, but she looked so startled and then laughed so queerly that I didn’t ask again…. Then I thought it might be because I was younger than she was, though I can’t believe she is more than twenty-three or so, and I’m twenty-five, you know. And once I got cold-sick because I thought she might still be married, but she said her husband was married again, and I wasn’t to ask questions or worry about him—”
“But she did accept you Thursday night?” Penny persisted.
“Yes,” the boy admitted, his face darkly flushed again. “This is awfully hard, honey, but I’ll tell you once for all and get it over with…. I took her to dinner. We drove to Burnsville because she said she was sick of Hamilton. When we were driving back she suddenly became very queer—reckless, defiant…. And she asked me if I still wanted to marry her, and I said I did. I asked her right then to say when, and she said she’d marry me June first, but she added—” and the boy, to Dundee’s watching eyes, seemed to be genuinely puzzled again by what must have sounded so odd at the time—“that she’d marry me June first if she lived to see the day.”
“Oh!” Penny gasped, then, controlling her horror, she asked with what sounded lik
e real curiosity, “Then what—happened, Ralph? Why do you propose to her on Thursday and to me on—on Sunday?”
“A gorgeous actress sacrificed to the typewriter,” Dundee told himself, as he waited for Ralph Hammond’s reluctant reply.
“Can’t we forget it, honey? … You do love me a little, don’t you? Can’t you take my word for it that—I’m cured now—forever?”
Penny’s hands went up to cover her face, and Dundee had the grace to feel very sorry indeed for her—sorry even if she intended to give her promise to Ralph Hammond, as a sick feeling in his stomach prophesied that she was about to do….
“How can I know you’re really—cured, if I don’t know what cured you?”
“I suppose you’re right,” the boy admitted miserably. “There’s no need to ask you not to tell anyone else. Although I don’t want to see her again ever—. Why, Penny, I wouldn’t even tell Polly and Clive yesterday, after it happened, though Polly guessed and went upstairs—. I tried to keep her back—.”
“I don’t—quite understand, Ralph,” Penny interrupted. “You mean something happened when you were at Nita’s house yesterday morning?”
“Yes. Judge Marshall had promised Nita to have the unfinished half of the top story turned into a maid’s bedroom and bath and a guest bedroom and bath. Clive let me go to make the estimates. Of course I was glad of the chance to see Nita again—I hadn’t been with her since Thursday night. But she had to take Lydia in for a dentist’s appointment, and they left me alone in the house. I had to go into the finished half to make some measurements, and in the bedroom I found—oh, God!” he groaned, and pressed a fist against his trembling mouth.
“You found that Dexter Sprague was staying there, was using the bedroom that used to be mine—didn’t you?” Penny helped him at last, in desperation.
“How did you know?” The boy stared at the girl blankly for a moment, then seemed to crumple as if from a new blow. “I suppose it was common gossip that Nita and Sprague were lovers, and I was the only one she fooled! … My God! To think all of you would stand by and let me marry her—a cheap little gold-digger from Broadway, living with a cheap four-flusher she couldn’t get along without and had to send for—”
