by Anne Austin
“Yes, sir,” Lydia answered, and accepted without thanks the chair he offered.
“I suppose you have read The Hamilton Morning News today, Lydia?”
“I have!”
“May I have that paper, chief? … Thanks! … Now, Lydia, I want you to read again the paragraphs that are headed ‘New York, May 25—’ and tell us if the statements are correct.”
Lydia accepted the paper and her single eye scanned the following lines obediently:
New York, May 25 (UP)
Mrs. Juanita Leigh Selim, who was murdered Saturday afternoon in Hamilton, ——, was known along Broadway as Nita Leigh, chorus girl and specialty dancer. Her last known address in New York was No. — West 54th St., where she had a three-room apartment. According to the superintendent, E. J. Black, Miss Leigh, as he knew her, lived there alone except for her maid, Lydia Carr, and entertained few visitors.
Irving Wein, publicity director for Altamont Pictures, when interviewed by a reporter in his rooms at the Cadillac Hotel late today, said that Nita Leigh had been used for “bits” and as a dancing “double” for stars in a number of recent pictures, including “Night Life” and “Boy, Howdy!”, both of which have dancing sequences. Musical comedy programs for the last year carry her name only once, in the list of “Ladies of the Ensemble” of the revue, “What of it?”
Miss Eloise Pendleton, head-mistress of Forsyte-on-the-Hudson, mentioned in the dispatches from Hamilton, confirms the report that Mrs. Selim, as she was known there, twice directed the annual Easter musical comedy presented by that fashionable school for young ladies, but could add nothing of interest to the facts given above, beyond asserting that Mrs. Selim had proved to be an unusually competent and popular director of their amateur theatricals.
“Yes, that’s correct, as far as it goes,” Lydia commented, resentment strong in her harsh voice as she returned the paper to Dundee.
“Have you anything to add?” Dundee caught her up quickly.
“No, sir!” Lydia shook her head, her lips in a grim line. Then resentment burst through: “They don’t have to talk like she was a back number on Broadway, just because she was tired of the stage and going in for movies!”
District Attorney Sanderson took her in hand then, pelting her with questions about Nita’s New York “gentlemen friends,” but he made no more headway than Dundee.
“We know that Nita Selim was afraid of someone!” Sanderson began again, angrily. “Who was it—someone she’d known in New York, or somebody in Hamilton?”
“I don’t know!” Lydia told him flatly.
“But you do know she was living in fear of her life, don’t you?” Dundee interposed.
“I—well, yes, I suppose she was,” Lydia admitted reluctantly. “But I thought she was just afraid to live out there in that lonesome house away off at the end of nowhere.”
“Was she afraid of Dexter Sprague?” Sanderson shot at her.
“Would she have asked him to stay all night if she’d been afraid of him?” Lydia demanded scornfully. “And would she have asked him to rig up a bell from her bedroom to mine, if it was him she was afraid of?”
“A bell?” Dundee echoed.
“Yes, sir. It has a contraption under the rug, right beside her bed, so’s she could step on it and it would ring in my room, which was underneath hers…. Mr. Sprague bought the wire and stuff, bored a hole through her bedroom floor, and fixed it all hisself.”
“Did anyone know Nita had taken this precaution to protect herself?” Dundee asked.
“Mis’ Lois did, because one day not long ago she stepped on it accidentally, when she was in Nita’s room. The bell buzzed in my room and I come up to answer it, and Nita explained it to Mis’ Lois.”
So that was why no attempt had been made to murder Nita while she slept!—Dundee told himself triumphantly. For of course it was more than probable that Lois Dunlap had innocently spread the news of Nita’s nervousness and her ingenious method of summoning help instantly….
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in! … All finished, Carraway? … Fine! I’d like to see the prints as soon as possible, and now I’d like you to go over to the morgue with Lydia, and wait there until she has the body dressed in these clothes, and the hair done according to the instructions Mrs. Selim left…. I’ll leave the posing to you, but I want a full-length picture as well as a head portrait.”
As Lydia’s work-roughened, knuckly hands were returning the funeral clothes to the suitcase, another question occurred to Dundee:
“Lydia, did you know, before I questioned you at the Miles home yesterday, that Sprague had returned for that bag he had left in the bedroom upstairs?”
Her scarred cheek flushed livid, but the maid answered with defiant honesty: “Yes, I did! He spoke to me through my basement window just before you come running down to talk to me. He’d sneaked back, but he could tell from seeing your car outside that you was there, and he asked me to go up and get the bag and set it outside the kitchen door for him. I said I wouldn’t do it; it was too risky.”
“Then you were pretending to be asleep when I entered your room?”
“Yes, I was! But I had been asleep before Mr. Sprague called me. While you was ding-donging at me about Nita burning my face I heard Mr. Sprague open the kitchen door. He had a key Nita had give him, so’s he could slip in unnoticed if he happened to come when Nita had other company. He didn’t hardly make any noise at all, but I heard it, because I was listening for it…. You’d left the door to the basement stairs open, and my door, too, so I heard him.”
“Did you hear him come down?”
“Yes, I did! There’s a board on the backstairs that squeaks, and I heard it plain, while you was still at me, hammer and tongs,” Lydia answered. “He was in the house not more’n two minutes, all told, and when I figured he was safely out, I went upstairs with you to show you the presents I’d give Nita after she burnt me, to prove I’d forgive her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Lydia? Why did you protect Sprague? I know you don’t like him,” Dundee puzzled.
“I wasn’t thinking about him,” Lydia told him flatly. “I was thinking about Nita. I didn’t want any scandal on her, and I knew what the police and the newspapers would say if they found out Mr. Sprague had been staying all night sometimes.”
“Are you prepared to swear Sprague had time to do nothing but go up to the bedroom and get his bag?”
“I am!”
When Lydia and Carraway had left together, Dundee rose and addressed the district attorney:
“I’m going out to the Selim house now, to look for that secret hiding place where Roger Crain kept his securities, and which Judge Marshall evidently displayed to Nita, as one of the charms of the house when she ‘rented’ it.”
“Why not simply telephone Judge Marshall and ask him where and what it is?” Sanderson asked reasonably.
“Do you think he’d tell?” Dundee retorted. “The old boy’s no fool. Even if he didn’t kill Nita himself and hide the gun there, my question would throw him into a panic of fear lest one of his best friends had done just that…. No, I’ll find it myself, if it’s all right with you!”
But after a solid hour of hard and fruitless work, Bonnie Dundee was forced to admit ruefully to himself that his parting words to the district attorney might have been the youthful and empty boast that Sanderson had evidently considered them.
For nowhere in the house Roger Crain had built and in which Nita Selim had been murdered could the detective find anything remotely resembling a concealed safe. The two plainclothesmen whom Strawn had detailed to guard the house and to continue the search for the missing gun and silencer looked on with unconcealed amusement as Dundee tapped walls, floors and ceilings in a house that seemed to be exceptionally free of architectural eccentricities.
Finally Dundee grew tired of their ribald comments and curtly ordered them to make a new and exhaustive search of the unused portions of the basement—thos
e dark earth banks, with their overhead networks of water and drain pipes, heavily insulated cables of electric wires, cobwebby rafters and rough shelves holding empty fruit jars and liquor bottles—which contrasted sharply with the neatly ceiled and cement-floored space devoted to furnace, laundry and maid’s room. Dundee himself had given those regions only a cursory inspection with his flashlight, for it was highly improbable that Nita Selim would have made use of a secret hiding place for her jewelry and valuable papers, if that hiding place was located in such dark, awesome surroundings.
No. The hiding place, if it really existed—and it must exist—had been within easy reach of Nita dressing and bedecking herself for a party, or Lydia Carr could not have been kept in complete ignorance of its location.
With that conviction in mind, Dundee returned to Nita’s bedroom, to which he had already devoted at least half an hour. Nothing in the big clothes closet, where Flora Miles had been hiding while Nita was being murdered. No secret drawers in desk or dressing-table or bedside table. No false bottom in boudoir chair or chaise longue…. He had even taken every book out of the four-shelf bookcase which stood against the west wall near the north corner of the room, and had satisfied himself that no book was a leafless fake.
His minute inspection of the bathroom and back hall, upon which Nita’s bedroom opened, had proved as fruitless, although he had removed every drawer from the big linen press which stood in the hall, and measured spaces to a fraction of an inch. As for the walls, they were, except for the doors, unbroken expanses of tinted plaster.
And yet—
He stepped into the clothes closet again, hammer in hand for a fresh tapping of the cedar-board walls. Nothing here…. And then he tapped again, his ear against the end wall of the closet—the wall farthest from the side porch….
Yes! There was a faintly hollow echo of the hammer strokes!
Excitement blazing high again, he took the tape measure with which he had provided himself on his way out, and calculated the length of the closet from end to end. Six feet….
Emerging from the closet he closed his eyes in an effort to recall in exact detail the architect’s blueprint of the lower floor, which Coroner Price had submitted to his jury at the inquest that morning. Yes, that was right! The inner end wall of Nita’s clothes closet was also the back of the guest closet in the little foyer that lay between Nita’s bedroom and the main hall.
Within ten minutes, much laying-on of the tape measure had produced a startling result. Instead of having a wall in common, the guest closet and Nita’s clothes closet were separated by exactly eleven inches! Why the waste space? The blueprint, bearing the imprint of the architects, Hammond & Hammond, showed no such walled-up cubbyhole!
Exultantly, Dundee again entered Nita’s closet and went over every inch of the narrow, horizontal cedar boards, which formed the end wall. But he met with no reward. Not through this workmanlike, solidly constructed wall had an opening been made….
But in the foyer closet he read a different story. Its back wall had an amateurish look. This closet was not cedar-lined, as was Nita’s, but was painted throughout in soft ivory. But it was the back wall of the closet in which Dundee was interested. Unlike the other walls, which were of plaster, the back was constructed of six-inch-wide boards—the cheapness of the lumber not concealed by its coat of ivory paint. No self-respecting builder had put in that wall of broad, horizontal boards….
And then, directly beneath the shelf which was set regulation height, just above the pole on which swung a dozen coat hangers, Dundee found what he was looking for.
A short length of the cheap board, a queer scrap to have been used even in so shoddy a job as that wall was…. Eight inches long. And set square in the center of the wall, just below the shelf and pole. If he had not been looking for something odd, however, Dundee acknowledged to himself, he would not have noticed it. Did anyone ever notice the back walls of closets?
Sure of the result, he pressed with his finger tips upon the lower end of that short piece of board. And slowly it swung inward, the top slanting outward.
He had found the secret hiding place. And Dundee silently agreed with Judge Marshall that it was “the simplest and most ingenious arrangement you ever saw,” for it was nothing more nor less than a shelf set between the two closets, in those eleven inches of unaccounted for space!
“I take off my hat to Roger Crain!” Dundee reflected. “No burglar in the world would ever have thought of pressing upon a short piece of board in a foyer closet, in search of a safe…. But how did Judge Marshall know of its existence?”
The only answer Dundee could think of was that Crain, overseeing the building of his house, had suddenly conceived this brilliant and simple plan, and had tipped one of the carpenters to carry it out for him. Possibly, or probably, he had bragged to Clive or Ralph Hammond, his architects, of his clever invention. And the Hammond boys had passed on the information to Judge Marshall, when, after Crain’s failure and flight, the house had become the property of the ex-judge.
These thoughts rushed through his mind as his flashlight explored the shelf through the tilted opening. The gun and silencer must be here, since they could be no place else! … But the shelf was bare except for a small brass box, fastened only by a clasp. In his acute disappointment Dundee took little interest in the collection of pretty but inexpensive jewelry—Nita’s trinkets, undoubtedly—which the brass box contained…. No wedding ring among them….
In spite of his chagrin at not finding the gun, Dundee studied the simple mechanism which Roger Crain’s ingenuity had conceived. From the outside, the eight-inch length of board fitted smoothly, giving no indication whatever that it was otherwise than what it seemed—part of a cheaply built wall. But Dundee’s flashlight played upon the beveled edges of both the short board and the two neighboring planks between which it was fitted. The pivoting arrangement was of the simplest, the small nickel-plated pieces being set into the short board and the other two planks with small screws which did not pierce the painted outside surface.
His curiosity satisfied, Dundee stepped out of the closet into the tiny foyer. He was about to leave when a terrific truth crashed through his mind and froze his feet to the floor.
Of course the gun and silencer were not there!
This was the guest closet! In it had hung the hat of every person who had been Nita’s guest, either for bridge or cocktails, that fatal Saturday afternoon!
And to this closet, to retrieve hat, stick or—in the case of the women, summer coat and hat—had come every person who had been questioned and then searched by the police.
Dundee tried to recapture the picture of the stampede which had followed upon his permission for all guests to go to their homes. But it was useless. He had stayed in the living room with Strawn, had taken not the slightest interest in the scramble for hats, coats and sticks. For Strawn had previously assured him that the guest closet had been thoroughly searched.
So quickly that he felt slightly dizzy, Dundee’s thoughts raced around the new discovery. This changed everything, of course. Any one of half a dozen persons could have arrived with the gun and silencer—not screwed together, of course, because of the ungainly length—and seized the opportunity presented by Nita’s being alone in her bedroom to shoot her. What easier, then, than to hide the weapon on this secret shelf, the “door” of which yielded to the slightest pressure? And what easier than to retrieve the weapon after permission had been granted to all to return to their homes? Easy enough to manage to go alone to the closet for a hat, the extra minute of time unnoticed in the general excitement. It had been vitally necessary, too, to retrieve the weapon, since any innocent member of that party might have remembered later to mention the secret hiding place to the police—secret no longer since Judge Marshall had gossiped about it….
Then another thought boiled up and demanded attention. In the new theory, what place did the “bang or bump” have—that noise which Flora Miles, concealed in Nita�
��s closet, had dimly heard? Dundee had been positive, when Lydia had discovered the shattered electric bulb in the big bronze lamp that its position in Nita’s room indicated the progress of the flight of the murderer—flight diagonally across the room toward the back hall. But now—
A little dashed, Dundee returned to the bedroom. The big lamp was where he had first seen it—about a foot beyond the window nearest the porch, and at the head of the chaise longue which was set between the two west windows, where, according to Lydia, the lamp always stood. The too-long cord lay slackly along the floor near the west wall, and extended to the double outlet on the baseboard behind the bookcase…. A slack cord!
Down on his hands and knees Dundee went, to peer under the low bottom shelf of the bookcase…. Yes! The pronged plug of the lamp cord had been jerked almost out of the baseboard outlet! It was easy to visualize what had happened: The murderer, after firing the shot, had involuntarily taken a step or even several steps backward, until his foot had caught in the loop of electric cord, causing the big lamp to be thrown violently against the wall near which it stood…. But who?
Any one of half a dozen people! But—who?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Having ticketed the big bronze lamp, which he had brought with him from the Selim house, and locked it away in the room devoted to “exhibits for the state,” Bonnie Dundee hurried into Penny’s office, primed with the news of his discovery of the secret hiding place and eager to lay his new theory before the district attorney.
“Bill’s gone,” Penny interrupted her swift typing to inform him. “To Chicago. He had only fifteen minutes to make the three o’clock train, after he received a wire saying his mother is not expected to live. He tried to reach you at the Selim house, but one of Captain Strawn’s men said you had left.”
“I stopped on my way in to get a bite to eat,” Dundee explained mechanically. “I’d dashed off without my lunch, you know.”
