by Anne Austin
No. 17 $9,000
May 9, 1930
To Trust Dept.
For Investment
Had John C. Drake, who as vice president in charge of trusts and investments had doubtless handled the check, wondered at all where the $9,000 had come from?
One other revelation came out of the twenty-three filled-in stubs. On every Monday Nita Selim had drawn a check for $40 to her maid, Lydia Carr.
Again Dundee whistled. Forty dollars a week was, he wagered to himself, more money than any other maid in Hamilton was lucky enough to receive! Nita in a new light—an over-generous Nita! Or—was Nita herself paying blackmail on a small scale?
He reached into a pigeon-hole whose contents—a thick packet of unused envelopes—had not been disturbed by Strawn, and was about to remove an envelope in which to place the all-important checkbook, when he noticed something slightly peculiar. An envelope in the middle of the packet looked rather thicker than an empty case should….
But it was not empty. And across the face of the expensive, cream-colored linen paper was written, in that same pretty, very legible backhand:
TO BE OPENED IN CASE OF MY DEATH
—Juanita Leigh Selim
His heart hammering painfully, and his fingers trembling, Dundee drew out the two close-written sheets of creamy notepaper. After all, who had better right than he to open it? Was he not the representative of the district attorney? … And he hadn’t damaged the envelope. It had opened very easily indeed—its flap had yielded instantly to his thumb-nail….
Wait! It had been too easy! Before unfolding the letter or whatever it was, Dundee examined the flap of the envelope…. Yes! He was not the first to open it since its original sealing. God grant he hadn’t destroyed any tell-tale fingerprints in his criminal haste to learn any secret that Nita Selim had recorded here! … Perhaps Nita herself had unsealed the letter to make an addition or a correction?
Well, whatever damage had been done was done now, and he might as well read….
Five minutes later Bonnie Dundee was racing through the dining room, pushing open the swinging door that led into the butler’s pantry. Where the devil were the steps that led down into the basement? A precious minute was lost before he discovered that a door in the dark back hall opened upon the steep stairs….
An unshaded light, dangling from the ceiling, revealed the furnace in one corner of the big basement, laundry equipment in another. He plunged on…. That must be the maid’s room, behind that closed door…. God! What if she had escaped, while he had been munching caviar and anchovy sandwiches? A fine guard he’d been! … And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had a dim suspicion of the truth….
The knob turned easily. He flung open the door. And then his knees nearly gave way, so tremendous was his relief. For there, on the thin mattress of a white-enameled iron bed, lay the woman he so ardently desired to see.
She had apparently been asleep, and the noise he had made had startled her into panicky wakefulness. Instinctively her hand flew to the ruined left side of her face—that hideous expanse of livid flesh, scarred and ridged so that it did not look human….
“What—? Who—?” Lydia Carr gasped, struggling to a sitting position, only to fall back as nausea swept over her.
“You remember me?” Dundee panted. “Dundee of the district attorney’s office. I questioned you this afternoon—”
The woman closed the single eye that had escaped the accident which had marred her face so hideously. “I—remember…. I’m sick…. I told you all I know—”
“Lydia, why didn’t you tell me that it was your mistress, Mrs. Selim who did—that?” Dundee demanded sternly, pointing to the woman’s sightless left eye and ruined cheek.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lydia Carr, still clothed in the black cotton dress and white apron of her maid’s uniform, struggled to a sitting position on the edge of her basement room bed.
“No, no! That’s a lie! It was an accident, I tell you—my own fault! … Who dared to say Nita—Miss Nita—did it?”
“Better lie down, Lydia,” Dundee suggested gently. “I won’t want you fainting. You’ve had a hard day with the abscessed tooth, the dope the dentist gave you, and—other things. I don’t wonder that you lost your head, went a little crazy, perhaps—”
The detective’s sinister implication seemed to make no impression at all upon the woman with the scarred face.
“I asked you—” she gasped, her single eye glaring at him, “who dared say Nita burned me?”
“It was Nita herself who told me,” Dundee answered softly. “Just a few minutes ago.”
“Holy Mother!” the maid gasped, and crossed herself dazedly.
Let her think the dead woman had appeared to him in a vision, Dundee told himself. Perhaps her confession would come the quicker—
The maid began to rock her gaunt body, her arms crossed over her flat chest. “My poor little girl! Even in death she thinks of me, she’s sorry—. She sent me a message, didn’t she? Tell me! She was always trying to comfort me, sir! The poor little thing couldn’t believe I’d forgiven her as soon as she done it—. Tell me!”
“Yes,” Dundee agreed, his eyes watching her keenly. “She sent you a message—of a sort…. But I can’t give it to you until you have told me all about the—accident in which you were burned.”
“I’ll tell,” Lydia promised eagerly. Gone were the harshness and secretiveness with which she had met his earlier questioning…. “You see, sir, I loved Miss Nita—I called her Nita, if you don’t mind, sir. I loved her like she was my own child. And she was fond of me, too, fonder of me than of anybody in the world, she used to tell me, when some man had hurt her bad…. And there was always some man or other, she was so sweet and so pretty…. Well, I found her in the bathroom one day, just ready to drink carbolic acid, to kill her poor little self—”
“When was that, Lydia?” Dundee interrupted.
“It was in February—Sunday, the ninth of February,” Lydia went on, still rocking in an agony of grief. “I tried to take the glass out of her hands. She’d poured a lot of the stuff out of the bottle…. You see, she was already in a fit of hysterics, or she’d never have tried to kill herself…. It was my own fault, trying to take the glass away from her, like I did—”
“She flung the acid into your face?” Dundee asked, shuddering.
“She didn’t know what she was doing!” the woman cried, glaring at him. “Nearly went out of her mind, they told me at the hospital, because she’d hurt me…. A private room in the best hospital in New York she got for me, trained nurses night and day, and so many doctors fussing around me I wanted to fire the whole outfit and save some of my poor girl’s money—which I don’t know till this day how she got hold of—”
Dundee let her sob and rock her arms for a while unmolested. In February Nita Selim had had to borrow money to pay doctor and hospital bills. Had borrowed it or “gold-dug” it…. And in May she had been rich enough to have $9,000 to invest!
“Lydia, you never forgave Nita Selim for ruining your life as well as your face!” Dundee charged her suddenly.
“You’re a liar!” she cried passionately. “I know what I felt. It’s my face and my life, ain’t it? I tell you I didn’t even bear a grudge against her—the poor little thing! Eating her heart out with sorrow for what she’d done—till the very day of her death! Always trying to make it up to me—paying me too much money for the handful of work I had to do, what with her eating out nearly all the time and throwing away stockings the minute they got a run in ’em—. Forgive her? I’d have crawled from here to New York on my hands and knees for Nita Leigh!”
Dundee studied her horribly scarred face, made more horrible now by what looked like genuine grief.
“Lydia, who was the man over whom your mistress wanted to commit suicide?”
The single, tear-reddened eye glared at him suspiciously, then became wary. “I don’t know.”
“Was it Dexter Sprague, Lyd
ia?”
“Sprague?” She spat the name out contemptuously. “No! She didn’t know him then, except to speak to at the moving picture studio.”
“When did he become her—lover, Lydia?” Dundee asked casually.
The woman stiffened, became menacingly hostile. “Who says he was her lover? You can’t trick me, Mr. Detective! I’d cut my tongue out before I’d let you make me say one word against my poor girl!”
Dundee shrugged. He knew a stone wall when he ran up against one.
“Lydia,” he began again, after a thoughtful pause, “I have proof that Nita Selim was sure you had never forgiven her for the injury she did you.” His fingers touched the letter in his pocket—that incredible “Last Will and Testament” which Nita had written the day before she was murdered….
“And that’s another lie!” the woman cried, shaking with anger. She struggled to her feet, stood swaying dizzily a moment. “Come upstairs with me to her room, and I’ll show you some proof that I had forgiven her! … Come along, I tell you! … Trying to make me say I killed my poor girl, when I’d have died for her—Come on, I tell you!”
And Dundee, wondering, beginning to doubt his own conviction a little—that conviction which had sprung full-grown out of Nita’s strange, informal will, and which had seemed to explain everything—followed Lydia Carr from her basement room to the bedroom in which Nita had been murdered….
“See this!” and Lydia Carr snatched up the powder box from the dressing-table. Her long, bony fingers busied themselves with frantic haste, and suddenly, into the silence of the room came the tinkle of music. “I bought her this—for a present, out of my own money, soon as I got out of the hospital!” the maid’s voice shrilled, over the slow, sweet, tinkly notes. “It’s playing her name song—Juanita. It was playing that song when she died. I stood there in the doorway and heard it—” and she pointed toward the door leading from Nita’s room into the back hall. “She loved it and used it all the time, because I gave it to her…. And this!”
She set the musical powder box upon the dressing-table and rushed across the room to one of the several lamps that Dundee had noticed on his first survey of the room. It was the largest and gaudiest of the collection—a huge bowl of filigreed bronze, set with innumerable stones, as large as marbles, or larger. Red, yellow and green stones that must have cast a strange radiance over the pretty head that had been wont to lie just beneath it, on the heaped lace pillows of the chaise lounge, Dundee reflected.
As if Lydia had read his thoughts, she jerked at the little chain which hung from the bottom of the big bronze bowl against the heavy metal standard.
“I gave her this—saved up for it out of my own money!” she was assuring him with savage triumph in proving her point. “And she loved it so she brought it with us when we came from New York—It won’t light! It was working all right last night, because my poor little girl was lying there, looking so pretty under the colored lights—”
With strong twists of her big hands Lydia began to unscrew the filigreed bronze bowl. As she lifted it off she exclaimed blankly:
“Why, look! The light bulb’s—broke!”
But Dundee had already seen—not only the broken light bulb but the explanation of the queer noise that Flora Miles had described hysterically over and over, as “a bang or a bump.” The chaise lounge stood between the two windows that opened upon the drive. And at the head of it stood the big lamp, just a few inches from the wall and only a foot from the window frame upon which Dr. Price had pencilled the point to indicate the end of the imaginary line along which the shot which killed Nita Leigh Selim had traveled.
The “bang or bump” which Flora Miles had heard had been made by the knocking of the big lamp against the wall. Undoubtedly the one who had bumped into the lamp was Nita’s murderer—or murderess—in frantic haste to make an escape.
And that meant that the murderer had fled toward the back hall, not through the window in front of which he had stood, not through the door leading onto the front porch…. A little progress, at least!
But Lydia was not through proving that she had forgiven her mistress. She was snatching things from Nita’s clothes closet—
“See these mules with ostrich feathers?—I give ’em to my girl! … And this bed jacket? I embroidered the flowers on it with my own hands—”
Through her flood of proof Dundee heard the whir of a car’s engine, then the loud banging of a car’s door…. Running footsteps on the flagstone path…. Dundee reached the front door just as the bell pealed shrilly.
“Hello, Dundee! Awfully glad I caught you before you left…. Is poor Lydia still here?”
“Come in, Mr. Miles,” Dundee invited, searching with a puzzled frown the round, blond face of Tracey Miles. “Yes, Lydia is still here…. Why?”
“Then I’m in luck, and I think Lydia is, too—poor old girl! … You see, Dundee,” Miles began to explain, as he took off his new straw hat to mop his perspiring forehead, “the crowd all ganged up when our various cars reached Sheridan Road, and by unanimous vote we elected to drive over to the Country Club for a meal in one of the small private dining rooms—to escape the questions of the morbidly curious, you know—”
“Yes…. What about it?” Dundee interrupted impatiently.
“Well, I admit we were all pretty hungry, in spite of—well, of course we were all fond of Nita, but—”
“What about Lydia?” Dundee cut him short.
“I’m getting to it, old boy,” Miles protested, with the injured air of an unappreciated small boy. “While we were waiting for our food, somebody said, ‘Poor Lydia! What’s going to become of her?’ And somebody else said that it was harder on her—Nita’s death, I mean—than on anybody else, because Nita was all she had in the world, and then Lois—Lois is always practical, you know—ran to telephone Police Headquarters, to see what had been done with Lydia, and to see if it would be all right for Flora and me to take her home with us—”
“Just a minute, Miles! Whom did Mrs. Dunlap talk to at Headquarters?”
“Why, Captain Strawn, of course,” Miles answered. “He told Lois that you were still out here, questioning Lydia again, and that it was all right with him, whatever you decided. So as soon as I had finished eating, I drove over—”
“Is Mrs. Miles with you?” Dundee interrupted again.
“Well, no,” Miles admitted uncomfortably. “You see, the girls felt a little squeamish about coming back, even on an errand of mercy—”
Dundee grinned. He had no doubt that Flora Miles had emphatically refused the possibility of another gruelling interview.
“Why do you and Mrs. Miles want to take Lydia home with you?” he asked.
“To give her a home and a job,” Miles answered promptly. “She knows us, we’re used to her poor old scarred face, and the youngsters, Tam and Betty, are not a bit afraid of her. In fact, Betty pats that scarred cheek and says, over and over, ‘Poo Lyddy! Poo Lyddy! Betty ’oves Lyddy!’ and Tam—he’s T. A. Miles, junior, you know, and we call him Tam, from the initials, because he hates being called Junior and two Tracey’s are a nuisance—”
“I gather that you want to hire Lydia as a nurse for the children,” Dundee interrupted the fond father’s verbose explanations.
“Right, old man! You see, our nurse left us yesterday—”
“Wait here, Miles. I’ll speak to Lydia. She’s in Mrs. Selim’s bedroom…. By the way, Miles, since you and your wife are kind enough to want to take Lydia in and give her a home and a job, I think it only fair to tell you that it is highly improbable that Lydia Carr will take any job at all.”
“You mean—?” Miles gasped, his ruddy face turning pale. “I say, Dundee, it’s absurd to think for a minute that good old faithful Lydia had a thing to do with Nita’s murder—”
“I rather think you’re right about that, Miles,” Dundee interrupted. “Now will you excuse me?”
He found Lydia where he had left her—in her dead mistress’ bedro
om. The tall, gaunt woman was crouching beside the chaise longue, her arms outstretched to encircle a little pile of the gifts she claimed to have given Nita Selim to prove that she bore no grudge for the terrible injury her mistress had done her. At Dundee’s entrance she flung up her head, and the detective saw that tears were streaming from both the sightless eye and the unharmed one.
Taking his seat on the chaise longue, Dundee explained gently but briefly the offer which Tracey Miles had just made.
“They want—me?” she gasped brokenly, incredulously, and her fingers faltered to her horrible cheek. “I didn’t think anybody but my poor girl would have me around—”
“It is true they want you,” Dundee assured her. “But you don’t have to take a job now unless you wish, Lydia.”
“What do you mean?” the maid demanded harshly, her good eye hardening with suspicion.
“Lydia,” the young detective began slowly, and almost praying that he was doing the right thing, “when I woke you up tonight to question you, I said that Nita herself had just told me that it was she who had burned your face…. And you asked me if she had also given you a message—”
“Yes, sir!” the maid interrupted with pitiful eagerness. “And you’ll tell me now? You don’t still think I killed her, do you?”
“No, I don’t think you killed your mistress, Lydia, but I think, if you would, you could help me find out who did,” Dundee assured her gravely. “No, wait!” and he drew from his pocket the envelope inscribed: “To Be Opened In Case of My Death—Juanita Leigh Selim.”
“Do you recognize this handwriting, Lydia?”
“It was wrote by her own hand,” the maid answered, her voice husky with tears. “Is that the message, sir?”
“You never saw it before?” Dundee asked sharply.
“No, no! I didn’t know my poor girl was thinking about death,” Lydia moaned. “I thought she was happy here. She was tickled to pieces over being taken up by all them society people, and on the go day and night—”