by Anne Austin
“All that doesn’t matter now, Captain, but thanks just the same,” Dundee interrupted. “Now if you will both excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to do before five o’clock today!”
Dundee had not exaggerated. That Monday was one of the busiest days he had ever spent in all the twenty-seven years of his life. He began, rather strangely, by visiting half a dozen of Hamilton’s hardware stores, exhibiting a peculiar instrument and making annoying inquiries as to when and to whom it had been sold. But at his sixth port of call success so completely rewarded his efforts that he was jubilant when he bade the mystified proprietor good day, a signed statement reposing in his wallet.
Two other calls—both in office buildings—took up only an hour of his time, and a taxicab delivered him at Police Headquarters just as the factory whistles were sirening the news that it was twelve o’clock.
He was lucky enough to find the fingerprint expert, Carraway, in his cubbyhole of an office, his desk almost crowded out by immense filing cabinets.
Five minutes later Dundee sat at that desk, photographs of Dexter Sprague’s dead body, just as it had been discovered on the floor of the trophy room in the Miles home, and a labelled set of fingerprints spread out before him.
“You’re sure there can have been no mistake?” he asked. “No chance that these fingerprint photographs were reversed when the prints were made?”
“Not a chance—with my system!” Carraway retorted positively.
“Fine!” Dundee cried. “May I take these photographs? … You have copies, I presume?”
It was half past two o’clock when Dundee, after a much needed lunch, parked his car in the driveway of one of the most splendid houses overlooking Mirror Lake—a home whose master and mistress were now attending an inquest into two murders….
Half an hour later he climbed into his roadster again, his head spinning. “Did I say ingenious?” he marvelled….
He drove directly to the Selim house, for he had much to do before the arrival of Sanderson’s compulsory guests at 5.15.
His first visit there was to a small room in the basement—a dark cubbyhole next to the coal room. He had locked it carefully after exploring it the day before, for he had taken no chance on leaving unguarded—as he had found it—treasure worth more to him than its weight in gold.
And queer treasure it was that he extracted now—a coiled length of electric wire, which he and Ralph Hammond had measured the day before, with triumphant excitement; a box of thumb tacks, many of them surprisingly bent at the point; an augur with a set of bits of varying sizes, a step-ladder, and a hammer. If Dexter Sprague had not overestimated the amount of electric wire needed for the job of installing an alarm bell between Nita’s bedroom and Lydia’s…. Dundee was about to close the tool chest when his eyes fell upon a piece of hardware he had not expected ever to find, although he had known of its existence for more than an hour.
At 5.15 he was entirely ready for D. A. Sanderson, Captain Strawn and their party of indignant and unwilling guests….
“Oh, Mr. Dundee!” Carolyn Drake squealed. “You’re not going to make us play that awful ‘death hand’ again, are you?”
They were all crowding about him—the men and women who had been Nita Selim’s guests at her last bridge and cocktail party….
“Not only are the bridge tables exactly where they were at this time on the evening of May 24,” Dundee answered so significantly that all stopped chattering to listen, “but everything else in the house is precisely as it was then. Fortunately, not even the electricity has been cut off! But to make sure I have forgotten nothing, I wish you would all follow me into Mrs. Selim’s bedroom and look for yourselves.”
Like sheep, they crowded into the little foyer and on into the bedroom. There stood the big bronze lamp, set squarely in front of the window frame and in a direct line with the musical powder box on dead Nita’s dressing table.
At 5.25, Penny Crain, Karen Marshall, Carolyn Drake, and Flora Miles, who had been requisitioned by Dundee to play the part of the murdered woman, were seated at table No. 2, and behind Karen’s chair stood Lois Dunlap. Clive Hammond and his new wife were again together in the solarium. But there Dundee’s restaging of the original scene in the tragic drama ended. Everyone else, including Lydia Carr and Peter Dunlap, were huddled together in a far corner of the living room.
“Now, Mr. Miles!” Dundee called. “Your cue! Never mind the comedy about ‘How’s tricks?’ Simply go into the dining room, with Mrs. Dunlap, to mix cocktails. You’ll find all the ingredients still on the sideboard, exactly as there were when Mrs. Selim sent you to mix drinks on May 24…. And Mrs. Miles, will you, pretending that you are Nita Selim, go to powder your face at Mrs. Selim’s dressing-table?”
Her face white and drawn, Flora Miles stumbled from the room, just as her husband, dumb for once with rage, entered the dining room with Lois Dunlap.
Dundee was about to follow the latter two when an interruption occurred. Followed by a plainclothesman, a middle-aged man entered the living room. Tall, broad-shouldered, determined, he strode to the bridge table, his handsome head upflung, his brown eyes fixed upon the widened brown eyes of Penny Crain.
*****
“Dad!” the girl breathed; then, joyously: “Oh, Dad! You’ve come home!”
But Dundee halted the reconciliation with a stern word of command. “Please join the group in the corner, Mr. Crain!”
Regardless of the ensuing hubbub Dundee strode into the dining room, where Tracey Miles stood at the sideboard, pouring whiskey from an almost empty decanter into a small glass.
“May I drink the Scotch Tracey has poured for me, Mr. Dundee?” Mrs. Dunlap asked shakily, leaning against the big round table.
“Yes, but—Silence, please!” he cried, as there came the first faint, tinkling notes of Juanita, from Nita’s musical powder box, penetrating the thin wall between the bedroom and dining room.
“As I have said,” the detective spoke loudly and clearly above the tinkle of music, “everything is now exactly as it was when Nita Selim was murdered! Permit me to show you all how that murder was accomplished!”
A chair at the bridge table was overturned. Lois Dunlap almost choked on her drink of Scotch. Women screamed. In a few seconds every person in the living room, including the district attorney and Strawn, was huddled in the wide opening into the dining room, their eyes fixed in horror upon Bonnie Dundee.
He spoke again, his voice very clear, but slow and weighted with a dreadful significance:
“Mrs. Dunlap, step on the bell beneath the dining table!”
Lois Dunlap dropped the empty whiskey glass, her face suddenly wiped of all expression.
“Step on that bell, Mrs. Dunlap—just as you did before!”
As if hypnotized, Lois Dunlap began to grope with the toe of her right pump for the slight bulge under the rug which indicated the position of the bell used for summoning the maid from the kitchen.
With a strangled cry Tracey Miles lunged across the few feet which separated the woman and himself, seized her arm and whirled her violently away from the table.
“Do you want to kill my wife, too?” he panted, his usually florid face the color of putty. “You—you—!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“That would be impossible, Miles,” Dundee said deliberately. “For your wife is already dead!” Then his clear words rang out like the knell of doom:
“Tracey Arthur Miles, I arrest you for the murder of your wife, known as Juanita Leigh Selim, and for the murder of Dexter Sprague. And it is my duty to warn you that anything you say may be used against you.”
Tracey Miles lifted his ashen face and stared at the detective blankly, as though he had gone deaf and blind. “All—over—isn’t it? May I—have a—drink?” he managed to articulate at last.
“Poor devil! He needs it,” the too-soft-hearted young detective told himself, as Miles poured a drink from the almost empty whiskey decanter and raised the little glass to his
lips.
“I have—nothing—to say!” the murderer gasped thickly, then fell heavily to the floor.
****
It was three-quarters of an hour later. District Attorney Sanderson, Captain Strawn and Dundee were alone in the house where Nita “Selim” had been murdered and where her husband had confessed his crimes by committing suicide. The morgue ambulance had come and gone….
“I should have known,” Dundee admitted ruefully, as the three men entered Nita’s bedroom, “that so ingenious a criminal as Tracey Miles would not have failed to provide against the possibility of discovery. He must have seized an opportunity to spill cyanide of potassium into the decanter when my eyes were off him for a moment—and upon Lois Dunlap.”
“I’m glad he did,” Sanderson said curtly. “But it was ghastly that poor Lois had to know that it was she, in all innocence, who fired the shot that killed her friend.”
“It was,” Dundee sighed. “But I believed that the only way I could make Miles confess was to frighten him into thinking Flora would be killed in the same manner…. Well, it worked!”
“Captain Strawn and I are still in the dark as to exactly how Miles managed his wife’s murder,” Sanderson reminded him. “This morning you chose to tell us nothing more than that a Hamilton man had married Nita Leigh in New York in January, 1918, and that eight years ago, when he saw her picture in The Hamilton Evening Sun, along with the story that ‘Anita Lee’ had committed suicide, he felt free to marry again…. You said then you knew who the man was but you would not even tell us how you knew—”
“Because I had very little actual proof then,” Dundee answered. “As to who he was, the salient clue had been staring me in the face the whole time, but it was not until I was fooling with a set of anagrams last night, idly spelling out the names of all the men who might have married her and then murdered her, that I saw it—”
“Saw what?” Strawn demanded irritably.
“That Selim is simply Miles spelled backwards,” Dundee explained. “Possibly because he considered it the sophisticated thing to do, Miles used an assumed name at the party at which he met Nita Leigh—and married her under that name shortly afterward. Even the first name, ‘Mat’, by which she knew him, was only his initials reversed.”
“Simple—but clever,” Sanderson commented.
“Just as were all of Miles’ schemes after Nita, egged on by Sprague, turned up in Hamilton to demand ‘back alimony’ as the price of her silence…. But let me show you how he killed his wife.”
He strode to the big bronze lamp. “It took me less than an hour today to reconstruct the death machine so that it would be almost exactly as it was when Miles finished his work just before 2.30 on Saturday, May 24—and as it remained until he had an opportunity to come back here and dismantle it. Trust him to find out that the guard was removed from the house Thursday!”
As he spoke, he was unscrewing the big, jewel-studded bowl of the bronze lamp. Wedged, at a down-slanting angle inside the bowl, which was twelve inches in diameter, was Judge Marshall’s snub-nosed automatic, the attached Maxim silencer projecting slightly from the hole whose jewel was missing.
“Lydia told me last night over the telephone—and very much surprised she was, too, when I swore her to secrecy—that the jewel had been lost when the lamp was shipped from New York,” Dundee explained. “There’s a blank cartridge in the gun now, of course, but Miles, in his panic, took my words literally…. See the electro-magnet strapped to the gun butt? He got it from the bell Sprague had installed in Lydia’s bedroom, and he returned it when he was ‘cleaning up’, so that the bell would ring again. The magnet he connected with the electric wire in one of the two lamp sockets, as you see it now, and the long cord of the lamp was connected with the wire of the bell in the dining room—so connected that when anyone stepped on the two little metal plates under the dining room rug, the kitchen bell would ring and the gun would be fired simultaneously. But if you will examine the jewel hole,” he suggested, “you will see that Miles had to enlarge it considerably, using a reamer, which I found in the tool chest in the basement, along with all the apparatus Sprague had bought for installing Nita’s alarm bell. I could see no reason for Sprague’s having needed a reamer for his little job, however, and this morning I was lucky enough to get proof that Miles himself had purchased it at a hardware store on the Tuesday before Nita’s murder.”
“How did he connect the lamp cord with the dining room bell?” Strawn puzzled. “These modern houses don’t have exposed wiring—”
“You forget Sprague’s wiring for the alarm bell from here to Lydia’s room!” and Dundee threw back the rug, showing them the hole in the floor, out of which came a short length of electric wire, ending in two small metal plates. But attached now to the wire was the cord from the bronze lamp.
“The plug of the lamp cord is nearly out of the baseboard outlet behind the bookcase, just as Miles left it, so that there is no contact with electricity there. And the rug, which almost entirely covers the floor, hides, as you have seen, the joining of the two wires. An inexplicable wrapping of adhesive tape both on the lamp cord and on the wire of Nita’s alarm bell here gave me the clue…. In installing the alarm bell, Sprague copied the arrangement under the dining table, of course. And Miles simply had to drop a bit, fastened to the augur Sprague had bought and used for his own job, down the four inches which separate the dining room floor from the basement ceiling, boring a hole through the ceiling. It was that fresh-bored hole in the ceiling that I could not understand, and which Ralph Hammond assured me was not there Saturday morning before Nita was killed…. Miles joined a piece of electric wire to the dining room bell wires, and pushed it down through the hole he had bored into the basement ceiling. Now if you’ll come down with me—”
When the three men stood staring upward at the basement ceiling, Dundee continued:
“See this long wire running along the ceiling from the hole beneath the dining room bell? The tacks Miles used to secure it were also returned to the tool chest, but he could not get rid of either the augur hole or the tiny holes showing the course of the wire…. Let’s follow it.”
He led them across the basement to a door leading into a dank, unfinished portion of the cellar, directly east of Lydia’s bedroom and beneath Nita’s. The wire whose course they were following led under the top frame of the door, and, with a flashlight in his hand, Dundee showed how it continued along a rafter until it reached the place where it was joined, by adhesive tape, to the wire Sprague had dropped from Nita’s bedroom floor above.
“Miles simply cut the wire here where it enters another hole through Lydia’s bedroom wall, and attached the new wire,” Dundee explained. “The connection between the dining room bell and the electro-magnet in the lamp upstairs was then complete…. Sprague had bought yards too much of the wire—fortunately for Miles’ scheme.”
“But what a chance Miles took on the bullet’s not hitting her in a fatal spot!” Sanderson commented in an awed voice.
“Not much of a chance!” Dundee denied. “He would fire the gun only when he knew Nita was seated before her dressing-table. Experienced marksman that he was, he could calculate the path of the bullet to a nicety. Of course the machine had to be used that very day. As you know Nita herself gave him his chance. Miles, standing at the sideboard, which was separated from Nita’s dressing table only by a thin wall, listened until the first faint notes of Juanita told him that Nita was powdering her face. He could be almost positive that Nita was sitting down to her task…. The poor girl saw nothing to alarm her, but the gun kicked when the shot was fired by Lois’ innocent stepping upon the dining room bell, and the big lamp was rocked so that it banged against the window frame, shattering the one bulb Miles had left in it. Of course he moved the lamp a foot or so, in the resulting excitement. And if Nita had been wounded only, living to tell how the shot was fired, Miles would have committed suicide then and there.”
“What if Nita had not asked
him to mix cocktails or had not gone to powder her face?” Strawn asked.
“The whole party was going to dine and dance at the Country Club. Miles would have escorted her home, as he had done on Monday night, when Nita had probably made her last demand. He could have counted on Nita’s going into her bedroom to powder her face, even if he had had to tell her that her nose was shiny, and would himself then have gone to the dining room, on the excuse that he needed a drink before discussing ‘business’…. But I must tell you that on Saturday morning, according to the telephone operator in Miles’ office, into whom I put the fear of the Lord and the law when I interviewed her this morning, Nita rang Miles to say she must see him as soon as possible, her unexpressed intention being to tell him that she was not going to make him come across again. Miles—the telephone operator confessed to having listened-in on the Whole conversation—told her he would be right out, but Nita said she and Lydia were going into Hamilton and would not be back until 2.30—the time the bridge game was scheduled to begin. That was the opportunity Miles had been praying for, and he came on out, having previously stolen the gun and silencer and having studied this house—”
“How had he got in?” Sanderson wanted to know.
“Judge Marshall had lent him a key in February, when Miles wanted to show the house to an engaged young man in his offices, and Miles had neglected to return it…. Well, when he arrived, he found Ralph Hammond here, and had to leave, waiting at a safe distance, probably, until the coast was clear about one o’clock. Even so, he had more than an hour to do his carefully planned job…. Nita had to die! Miles could not continue to pay her large sums of money, since he was really only an employe of Flora’s. Everything he held dear in the world was threatened. He loved Flora, he adored his children, and he could not give up the luxury and social position which his bigamous marriage with Flora—”
