by Anne Austin
Once before—on Sunday, the day after Nita Selim’s murder, when he had come to interview Lydia Carr and had secured the alibi which had eliminated Dexter Sprague as a suspect—Dundee had driven his car up this hill between the tall yew hedges. But then he had taken the fork which led to the hooded doorway over the kitchen; had descended the kitchen stairs with Lydia, to the servants’ sitting room in the basement. Now he continued along the main driveway to the more impressive entrance, whose flanking, slim turrets frowned down upon a line of police cars and motorcycles.
His approach must have been expected and observed, for it was the master of the house who opened the great, iron-studded doors and invited the detective into the broad main hall, at the end of which, down three steps, lay the immense living room. The detective’s first glance took in stately armchairs of the Cromwell period, thick, mellow-toned rugs, and, in the living room beyond, splendid examples of Jacobean furniture.
“A horrible thing to happen in a man’s home, Dundee,” Miles was saying, his plump, rosy face blighted with horror. “I can’t realize yet that we actually slept as usual with a corpse lying down here all night! And I have only myself to blame—”
“What do you mean?” Dundee asked.
“Why, that the—the body wasn’t discovered sooner,” Miles explained. “If it had occurred to me that Whitson hadn’t closed the trophy room windows, I should have gone in to close and lock them when I made the rounds of living room, dining room and library, after our guests were gone last night.”
A pale-faced, bald-headed butler had materialized while his master was speaking. “Beg pardon, sir, but I did not close the trophy room windows because I thought you might be using the room again…. You see, sir,” and Whitson turned to Dundee, “Mr. Miles and Mr. Dunlap played ping-pong in the trophy room after dinner until the other guests began to arrive, and I did not want them to find the room stuffy—it was a warm night—if any of the guests—”
“I see,” Dundee interrupted. “Who, to your knowledge, was the last person to enter the trophy room last night, Mr. Miles?”
“I was, except Sprague, of course, and I had no idea he’d gone there. Drake wanted to play anagrams, and before the bridge game started, I went to the trophy room to get the box,” Miles explained. “I turned off the light when I left, and there was no light burning in there this morning when Celia, the parlor maid, went there to put the anagram box back in the cabinet, and found the body…. Flora—Mrs. Miles—had brought the anagrams in from the porch and left them on a table in the living room, as our guests were getting ready to leave. There was nothing else to bring in, in case of rain. The bridge tables are of iron, covered with oilcloth, and fitted with oilcloth bags for the cards, score pads, and pencils—”
“Yes, I know,” Dundee interrupted. “Miss Crain has already told me all about that, and a good many details of the party itself…. By the way, where is Mrs. Miles now?”
“In bed. The doctor is with her. She is prostrated from the shock.”
“Where is this room you call the trophy room?” Dundee asked. “No, don’t bother to come with me. Just point it out. It’s on this floor, I understand.”
Miles pointed past the great circular staircase that wound upward from the main hall. “You can’t see the door from here, but it’s behind the staircase. Celia found the door closed this morning, and no light on, as I said—”
Dundee cut him short by marching toward the door which was again closed. He entered so noiselessly that Captain Strawn, Dr. Price and the fingerprint expert, Carraway, did not hear him. For a moment he stood just inside the door and let his eyes wander about the room which Penny Crain had already described. It was not a large room—twelve by fourteen feet, possibly—but it looked even smaller, crowded as it was with the long ping-pong table, bags of golf clubs, fishing tackle, tennis racquets, skis and sleds. There were two windows in the north wall of the room, looking out upon the yew-hedged driveway, and between them stood a cabinet of numerous big and little drawers.
Not until he had taken in the general aspect of the room did Dundee look at the thing over which Captain Strawn and the coroner were bending—the body of Dexter Sprague.
The alien from New York had fallen about four feet from the window nearer the east wall of the trophy room. He lay on his side, his left cheek against the floor, the fingers of his left hand still clutching the powder-burned bosom of his soft shirt, now stiff with dried blood, a pool of which had formed and then half congealed upon the rug. The right hand, the fingers curled but not touching each other, lay palm-upward on the floor at the end of the rigid, outstretched arm. The one visible eye was half open, but on the sallow, thin face, which had been strikingly handsome in an obvious sort of way, was a peace and dignity which Dundee had never seen upon Sprague’s face when the man was alive. The left leg was drawn upward so that the knee almost touched the bullet-pierced stomach.
“How long has he been dead, doctor?” Dundee asked quietly.
“Hello, boy!” Dr. Price greeted him placidly. “Always the same question! I’ve been here only a few minutes, and I’ve already told Strawn that I shall probably be unable to fix the hour of death with any degree of accuracy.”
“Took your time, didn’t you, Bonnie?” Captain Strawn greeted his former subordinate on the Homicide Squad. “Doc says he’s been dead between ten and twelve hours. Since it’s nearly ten now, that means Sprague was killed some time between nine and eleven o’clock last night.”
“Better say between nine o’clock and midnight last night,” Dr. Price suggested. “He may have lived an hour or more—unconscious, of course. For the indications are that he did not die instantly, but staggered a few steps, clutching at the wound. But of course I shall have to perform an autopsy first—”
Dundee crossed the room, stepping over the dead man’s stick—a swank affair of dark, polished wood, with a heavy knob of carved onyx, which lay about a foot beyond the reach of the curled fingers of the stiff right hand.
“Sprague’s hat?” he asked, pointing to a brightly banded straw which lay upon the top of the cabinet.
“Yes,” Strawn answered. “And did you notice the window screen?”
He pointed to the window in front of which the body lay. The sash of leaded panes was raised as high as it would go, and beneath it was a screen of the roller-curtain type, raised about six inches from the window sill. A pair of curved, nickel-plated catches in the center of the inch-wide metal band on the bottom of the coppernet curtain showed how the screen was raised or lowered.
Dundee nodded, frowning, and Strawn began eagerly:
“You’ll have to admit I was right now, boy. You’ve sneered at my gunman theory and tried to pin Nita’s murder on one of Hamilton’s finest bunch of people, but you’ll have to admit now that every detail of this set-up bears me out.”
“Yes?”
“Sure. This is the way I figure it out: Sprague has good reason to be afraid he’s next on the program. He’s nervous. He hops a taxi at his hotel and comes here—can’t stick to his room any longer. Wants a little human companionship. This crowd here—and I have Miles’ word for it—ain’t any too glad to see him, and shows it. He phones for a taxi to go back to his hotel—about 9.15, that was, Miles says—but decides to walk down the hill to meet it. Don’t want to go back out on the porch and lie about having had a good time, when he hasn’t…. Well, he opens the front door, or what would be the front door if this was any ordinary house, but before he steps out he sees or hears something—probably a rustling in the hedge across the driveway, or maybe he even sees a face, in the light from the lanterns on each side of the door. He feels sure Nita’s murderer has trailed him and is lying in wait for him. In a panic he darts into this room, and don’t turn on the light for fear he’ll be seen from the windows, but he can see well enough to make out how the screens work, and he was familiar with the house anyway. I’ll bet you anything you like Sprague stayed in this room for an hour or two, till he thought th
e coast was clear, then eased up this screen, intending to climb out of the window and drop to the ground…. Not much of a drop at that. You can see that the tall hedge on this side of the driveway comes pretty near up to these windows…. Well, I figure he laid his hat on this cabinet, intending to reach in for it when he was outside, but that he had already made some little noise which the gunman was listening for, and that when he got the screen up this high, the gunman, crouching under the window, let go with the same gun and silencer that he used to bump off Nita…. I’ve got Miles’ word for it that neither he nor anybody else heard a shot…. Of course, nobody knew Sprague was in here, and since his hat and stick was both missing from the hall closet, they took it for granted he’d beat it…. Any objections to that theory, boy?”
“Just a few—one in particular,” Dundee said. “But I grant it’s a good one, provided Dr. Price’s autopsy bears you out as to the course of the bullet, and that Carraway finds Sprague’s fingerprints on that contrivance for raising the screen. Even then—”
But Dundee was not allowed to finish his sentence, for Strawn was summoned to the telephone, by Whitson. When he returned there was a slightly bewildered look on his heavy old face.
“That’s funny…. Collins—the lad I sent to check up on the taxi companies—says he’s located the driver that answered Sprague’s call last night. The driver says he was called about 9.15, told to come immediately, and to wait for Sprague at the foot of the hill, on the main road. He says he waited there until half past ten, then went on back to town, sore’n a boiled owl.”
“It doesn’t look exactly as if Sprague were afraid of anyone outside of this house last night, does it?” Dundee asked. “By the way, I suppose you’ve sent for everyone who was here?”
“Sure!” But again Captain Strawn looked uncomfortable. “But we haven’t been able to locate the Beale girl and Clive Hammond.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I’d give a good deal to know which of those two suggested that it would be a good idea to get married the first thing this morning,” Dundee mused aloud, as he put down the second extra which The Hamilton Morning News had had occasion to issue that Thursday.
It was two o’clock, and the district attorney’s “special investigator” sat across the desk from Captain Strawn, in his former chief’s office at Police Headquarters.
The first extra had screamed in its biggest head type: SECOND BRIDGE DUMMY MURDER! and had carried, in detail, Captain Strawn’s comforting theory that Dexter Sprague’s erstwhile friends had again been made the victims of a New York gunman’s fiendish cleverness in committing his murders under circumstances which would inevitably involve Hamilton’s most highly respected and socially prominent citizens in the police investigation.
But the second extra had a more romantic streamer headline: HAMMOND WEDDING DELAYS MURDER QUIZ.
The story beneath a series of smaller headlines began:
“At the very moment—9.05 o’clock this morning—when Celia Hunt, maid in the Tracey Miles home in the Brentwood district of Hamilton, was screaming the news of her discovery of the dead body of Dexter Sprague, New York motion picture director, in what is known as the ‘trophy room,’ Miss Polly Beale and Mr. Clive Hammond were applying for a marriage license in the Municipal Building.
“At 9.30, when Miss Beale and Mr. Hammond were exchanging their vows in the rectory of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, of which both bride and groom have been members since childhood, Captain John Strawn of the Homicide Squad was listening to Tracey Miles’ account of the strange disappearance of Dexter Sprague last night from an impromptu bridge game, after he had announced his intention of taking advantage of the fact that he was ‘dummy’ to telephone for a taxi.
“And at 10 o’clock, when the new Mrs. Hammond called her home to break the news of her marriage to her aunt, Mrs. Amelia Beale, the bride was in turn acquainted with the news of Sprague’s murder and the fact that both she and her husband were wanted at the Miles home for questioning by the police, since both had been guests of Mr. and Mrs. Miles last night, although Mr. Hammond did not arrive until about 11 o’clock.”
There followed a revision of the murder story as it had appeared in the first extra, with additional details supplied by Strawn, and with a line drawing of the scene of the crime—the trophy room itself and the forked driveway with its tall yew hedges. A dotted line illustrated Strawn’s theory of Sprague’s plan to elude the murderer who had followed him to the Miles home. Because of the curved sweep of the driveway toward the main entrance of the house, the tall hedge was less than two feet from the window with the partly opened screen.
“Captain Strawn’s theory,” read the text below the large drawing, “is that Sprague had good cause to fear he was being followed on his way to the Miles home; that he telephoned for a taxi to wait for him at the foot of the hill, and that he planned to leave the Miles house by way of the trophy room window, so that his lurking pursuer might have no knowledge of his departure. The drawing shows that his proposed flight would have been protected by hedges until he reached the wooded slope of the hill, provided his Nemesis was lurking in the opposite hedge across the driveway, where he could observe every departure from the Miles home.”
“You’ve sure got a single-track mind, boy,” Strawn chuckled. “So you think those two got married in such a hurry this morning because the law says a husband or a wife can’t be made to testify against the other?”
“Possibly.” Dundee grinned, unruffled. “But there is another possibility—which is why I should like to know who suggested this sudden wedding. I mean that we can’t overlook the possibility that these two murders made either the bride or the groom feel perfectly safe in going on with the marriage. Polly Beale and Clive Hammond had been engaged for more than a year, you know, with no apparent reason for a long engagement…. As for my having a single-track mind, Captain, what about you? I have six possible suspects, all of whose names I know, and you have only one—whose name you do not know, and whose motive you can only guess at, while I have a perfectly good motive that might fit any one of my six—blackmail!”
“Is that so?” Strawn growled. “I’m not telling the papers everything, and if they are satisfied to call these murders ‘crimes passionnels,’ it’s all right with me. But I’m not forgetting that Nita Selim banked ten thousand dollars cash after she got to Hamilton. My real theory now that Sprague has been killed is that Nita and Sprague had cooked up some sort of racket between them, and that when Nita got the chance to come to Hamilton with Mrs. Dunlap, she jumped at it, and she and Sprague sprung their racket, whatever it was, either just before or just after Nita left New York. Probably it was Nita’s tip-off and Sprague did the actual dirty work himself, which explains that telegram that Nita sent him April 24, just three days after she got to Hamilton. Let’s see again just what it says,” and Strawn reached for a copy of the night letter which Dundee himself had unearthed the day before. “See: ‘Everything Jake so far, but would feel safer you here—’”
“Yes, I remember the wording quite well,” Dundee interrupted. “But you did not take it so seriously when I showed it to you yesterday. If you had—”
“All right! Rub it in!” Strawn snapped, flushing darkly. “If I had assigned a man to ‘tail’ Sprague, as you suggested, he wouldn’t have been murdered—”
“He probably would have been murdered just the same,” Dundee comforted the older man, “but we might have been lucky enough to have had an eye-witness.”
“Oh, you and your theory!” Strawn growled. “But let me go on…. Nita meant she would feel safer about Sprague if he was here in Hamilton, too. But the guy they double-crossed in New York, or worked the badger game on, or something like that, got on their trail. But it took him weeks to do it, and Sprague followed Nita’s advice. He got here on Sunday April 27, and on Monday the 28th Nita banked the first $5,000! Don’t you see it, boy? Sprague brought with him the dough they’d got for their stunt, and thought it was safer
for Nita to bank it in her name, since it wasn’t the name she was known by in New York anyway. We’ve checked up on Sprague pretty thoroughly. He didn’t have a bank book, either on his body or in his room, and every bank in town denies he had an account with them.”
“If that theory is correct, it makes Nita Selim a pretty low character,” Dundee mused aloud. “Not only did she kick him out as a lover, but she double-crossed him as her partner in crime, by willing the whole wad to Lydia Carr. Sprague must have received quite a shock when he heard Nita’s will read at the inquest.”
“Yeah,” Strawn agreed. “It looks like Mrs. Dunlap picked a sweet specimen to make a friend out of…. Well, that’s my theory, and I think it explains everything. Their victim in New York simply hired a gunman, or come down here himself, when he got on their tracks. Of course it was a good stunt to make it look like a local crime—figured he’d fool me just as he fooled you! So the murderer simply trailed Nita around, and saw that whole bunch of society people shooting at a target at Judge Marshall’s place, with a gun equipped with a Maxim silencer. Too good an opportunity to be missed, so he bides his chance to swipe the gun and silencer. To make sure it will look like a local crime, he pops off Nita when that same bunch is at her house, but it takes a few days longer before he has the same opportunity to get Sprague. But it come last night and he grabbed it.”
“A very plausible theory, and one which, in general, the whole city of Hamilton has been familiar with since the night Nita was murdered,” Dundee remarked significantly.
“What do you mean?” Strawn demanded. “It’s waterproof, ain’t it? Doc Price says the bullet—and a .32 caliber one at that—entered Sprague’s body just below the breastbone and traveled an upward course till it struck the extreme right side of the heart. The bullet entered exactly where it would have to, if the murderer was crouching under that window while Sprague was raising the screen. And we have Carraway’s report that it was Sprague’s fingerprints on those nickleplated things you have to press together to make the screen roll up or down. Furthermore, I haven’t a doubt in the world that the ballistics expert in Chicago will report that the bullet was fired from the same gun that killed Nita Selim.”