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

by Anne Austin

  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,” th
at 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.

  He found the girl and her mother playing anagrams. After greeting him, Mrs. Crain rose, to surrender her place to the visitor.

  “You play with this girl of mine, Mr. Dundee. She’s too clever for me! She’s beaten me every game so far, and when I plead for two-handed bridge as a chance to get even, she shudders at the very word.”

  “Why did you drag poor Ralph away from his dinner here today?” Penny demanded, scrambling the little wooden blocks until they made a weird pattern of letters.

  “Because I wanted to find out exactly how Nita Selim was killed—and I did,” Dundee answered. “I wish I knew as well who murdered her!”

  Mute before Penny’s excited questions, the detective idly selected letters from the mass of face-up blocks on the table, and spelled out, in a long row, the names of all the guests at Nita’s fatal bridge party. Suddenly, and with a cry that startled Penny, Dundee made a new name with the little wooden letters….

  Now he knew the answers to both “How?” and “Who?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I fail to see any necessity for all this secrecy and hocus-pocus,” District Attorney Sanderson protested irritably. “Why the devil don’t you come clean and give us the low-down—if you have it!—on this miserable business, instead, of high-handedly summoning Captain Strawn to my office, so that you can give orders to us both?”

  Before Dundee could answer, Captain Strawn came to his assistance.

  “I worked with this boy for pretty near a year, Bill, and never yet did he fail to make good when he said he had a pot on to boil. If he says it will boil over this evening, provided we help him, boil over it will, or I don’t know Bonnie Dundee!”

  Sanderson scowled but capitulated. “All right! What do you want?”

  “Thanks, chief! And thanks, Captain!” Dundee cried, with heartfelt gratitude. “First, I want to be excused from attending the adjourned inquests into the two murders, scheduled for three o’clock today.”

  “O.K.” Sanderson agreed shortly.

  “Second, after about an hour of routine stuff, I wish you’d ask for another adjournment until tomorrow, on the plea that important developments are expected today.”

  “O.K. again!”

  “Third, I’d like you personally to request the appearance of every person connected in any way with each of the murders, in your office this afternoon at four o’clock—so the whole bunch will be kept together and have no chance to go to their homes or anywhere else until I am ready for
them. You can say that, owing to the illness of your mother during the investigations, you want to question everyone personally.”

  “Do you want all the servants brought here, too?” Sanderson asked.

  “None but Lydia Carr,” Dundee answered. “After about an hour’s innocuous questioning, please invite them to accompany you to the Selim house. For that—” and he grinned, “—is where the pot is scheduled to boil over. I’d like everybody to be there by 5.15.”

  “Where do I come in?” Captain Strawn demanded, almost jealously.

  “Now that you are no longer looking for a New York gunman, I suppose you have plenty of plainclothesmen at your disposal?” Dundee asked, and was instantly sorry he had reminded his former chief of the collapse of his cherished and satisfying theory.

  “Plenty,” Strawn answered gruffly. “How many will you need?”

  “Enough to keep every person on Mr. Sanderson’s invitation list under strictest observation until—the pot boils over,” Dundee replied.

  “When do you want them to get on the job?”

  “As soon as they can do so, after you get back to your office.”

  “Are they to follow the whole gang clear out to the Selim house?”

  “Most decidedly! After the unwilling guests are safely within the house, your boys must guard the premises so that no one leaves without permission.”

  “That’s all as good as done,” Strawn assured him. “Now—about them inquiries you asked me to make yesterday of the secretary of the American Legion.” He drew a scrap of paper from his breast pocket. “I find that John Drake, Peter Dunlap and Clive Hammond were all in service, in the —th Division, which was held up late in January, 1918, for nearly two weeks, in Hoboken, before the War Department could get transports to send ’em to France. Miles, who enlisted the day war was declared, was wounded and shipped home late in 1917. He was discharged as unfit for further service—spinal operation—from a New Jersey base hospital on January 12, 1918. Furthermore, Judge Marshall was in New York the whole winter of 1917-’18, attached to the Red Cross in some legal capacity. He donated his services and—”