by Anne Austin
“So that is why Nita tried to commit suicide on February 9—and her attempted suicide, with its tragic consequences for Lydia Carr, is probably the reason Sprague gave up his movie star,” Dundee mused. “Did Nita let him persuade her to go into the blackmail business, in order to hold his wandering, mercenary affections? … Lord! The men some women love!”
The second bit of information which the papers supplied him was winnowed by Dundee himself, from a news summary of Nita Leigh’s last year of life as chorus girl, specialty dancer, “double” in pictures, and director of the Easter play at Forsyte-on-the-Hudson.
“If Nita got a divorce or even a legal separation from her husband after her talk with Gladys Earle a year ago, she got it in New York and so secretly that no New York paper has been able to dig it up,” Dundee concluded. “And yet she had promised to marry Ralph Hammond!”
A bellboy with a telegram interrupted the startling new train of thought which that conclusion had started.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
With a sharp exclamation of excitement and triumph, Dundee read Penny’s telegram:
“HAMILTON EVENING SUN DATE OF MAY FIFTH NINETEEN TWENTY TWO PUBLISHED STORY OF SUICIDE ANITA LEE ARTISTS MODEL BUT PICTURE ACCOMPANYING WAS UNDOUBTEDLY NITA LEIGH SELIM’S STOP NO CORRECTION FOLLOWED STOP WHAT DOES IT MEAN”
“What does it mean?” Dundee repeated exultantly to himself. “It means, my darling little Penny, that anyone in Hamilton who had any interest in the matter believed Nita Leigh Selim was dead, and thought the spelling of her name was wrong, not the picture itself! … The question is who read that story and gazed on that picture with exquisite relief?”
Two hours before he had dismissed as impossible or highly impractical his impulse to investigate the eleven-year-old scandal on Flora Hackett, who was now Flora Miles, as told him by Gladys Earle of the Forsyte School. Even more difficult would it be to find out why Janet Raymond’s mother had taken her abroad for a year. Of course—he had ruefully told himself—Nita Leigh might have been lucky—or unlucky enough to run across documentary proof of one of the scandals of which Gladys Earle had told her, or had dared to blackmail her victim by dark hints, as Miss Earle had unconsciously suggested to her.
But this new development could not be ignored. A picture of Nita Leigh as a suicide had appeared eight years ago in a Hamilton paper, and the paper had either remained unaware of the error or had thought it not worth the space for a correction…. Eight years ago! …
Eight years ago in June three weddings had occurred in Hamilton! The Dunlap, the Miles, the Drake wedding. And within the last year and a half Judge Marshall, after proposing season after season to the most popular debutante, had married lovely little Karen Plummer. Suddenly a sentence from Ralph Hammond’s story of his engagement to Nita Leigh Selim popped up in Dundee’s memory: “And once I got cold-sick because I thought she might still be married, but she said her husband had married again, and I wasn’t to ask questions or worry about him.”
If Ralph Hammond had reported Nita accurately she had not said she was divorced. She had merely said her husband was married again! Why was Ralph to ask no questions? Divorced wives were not usually so reticent….
Had Nita planned to commit the crime of bigamy? If not, when and where and how had she secured a divorce?
To Serena Hart, years before, she had denied any intention of getting a divorce, for two reasons—because she did not know where her husband was, and because, being married although husbandless, was a protection against matrimonial temptations.
To Gladys Earle, a year ago in April, she had confided that she could not marry again, because she was not divorced and because she did not know the whereabouts of her husband.
And so far as New York reporters had been able to find out, Nita Leigh had done nothing to alter her status as a married woman during the past year. Moreover, if Nita had secured either a divorce or a legal separation, her “faithful and beloved maid,” Lydia Carr, would certainly have known of it. And Lydia had vehemently protested more than once to Bonnie Dundee that she knew nothing of Nita’s husband, although she had worked for the musical comedy dancer for five years. Surely if Nita, loving and trusting Lydia as she did, had entered into negotiations of any kind with or concerning her husband during the last year, her maid would have been the first to know of them. And yet—
Suddenly Dundee jumped to his feet and began to pace the floor of his hotel bedroom. He was remembering the belated confidence that John C. Drake, banker, had made to him the morning before—after the discovery of Dexter Sprague’s murder. He recalled Drake’s reluctant statement almost word for word:
“About that $10,000 which Nita deposited with our bank, Dundee…. When she made the first deposit of $5,000 on April 28, she explained it with an embarrassed laugh as ‘back alimony’, an instalment of which she had succeeded in collecting from her former husband. And, naturally, when she made the second deposit on May 5, I presumed the same explanation covered that sum, too, though I confess I was puzzled by the fact that both big deposits had been made in cash.”
In cash!
Had Nita, by any chance, been telling a near-truth? Had she been blackmailing her own husband—a husband who had dared marry again, believing his deserted wife to be dead—and justifying herself by calling it “back alimony?”
But—wasn’t it, in reality, no matter what coercion Nita had used in getting the money, exactly that? … Back alimony! And the price of her silence before the world and the wife who was not really a wife….
In a new light, Bonnie Dundee studied the character of the woman who had been murdered—possibly to make her silence eternal.
Lois Dunlap had liked, even loved her. The other women and girls of “the crowd”—that exclusive, self-centered clique of Hamilton’s most socially prominent women—must have liked her fairly well and found her congenial, in spite of their jealousy of her popularity with the men of the crowd, or they would not have tolerated her, regardless of Lois Dunlap’s championship of her protegee.
Gladys Earle had found her “the sweetest, kindest, most generous person I ever met”—Gladys Earle, who envied and hated all girls who were more fortunate than she.
Serena Hart, former member of New York’s Junior League and still listed in the Social Register, had found her the only congenial member of the chorus she had invaded as the first step toward stardom. And Serena Hart had the reputation of being a woman of character and judgment, a kind and wise and great woman….
Finally, Ralph Hammond had loved Nita and wanted to marry her.
Was it possible that Nita Selim’s only crime, into which she had been led by her infatuation for Dexter Sprague, had been to demand, secretly, financial compensation from a husband who had married and deserted her, a husband who, believing her dead, had married again?
But who was the man whose picture—to spin a new theory—Nita had recognized as that of her husband among the male members of the cast of “The Beggar’s Opera,” when Lois Dunlap had proudly exhibited the “stills” of that amateur performance?
With excitement hammering at his pulses, Dundee took the bunch of photographs which Lois Dunlap had willingly given him, and studied the picture that contained the entire cast—the picture which had first attracted Nita’s attention. And again despair overwhelmed him, for every one of his possible male suspects was in that group….
But he could not keep his thoughts from racing on…. Men who stepped out of their class and went on parties with chorus girls frequently did so under assumed names, he reflected. Serena Hart was authority for the information that Nita’s had been a sudden marriage. Was it not entirely possible that the man who married Nita in 1918 had done so half-drunk, both on liquor and infatuation, and that he had not troubled to explain to Nita his motives for having used an assumed name or to write in his real name on the application for a marriage license? Had Nita’s private detective journeyed out to Hamilton years ago in a fruitless attempt to locate “Matthew
Selim?”
Bonnie Dundee lay awake for hours Friday night turning these and a hundred other questions over and over in his too-active mind, and slept at last, only to awake Saturday with a plan of procedure which he was sensible enough to realize promised small chance of success.
And he was right. Not in Manhattan, or in any of the other boroughs of New York City, did he find any record of a marriage license issued to Juanita Leigh and Matthew Selim. Not only was it entirely probable that Juanita Leigh was a stage name and that Nita had married conscientiously under her real name, but it was equally possible that the license had been secured in New Jersey or Connecticut.
When he gave up his quest at noon Saturday and returned to his hotel, Dundee bought at the newsstand a paper whose headline convinced him that Sergeant Turner was, at that moment, even more discouraged than himself. For the big type told the world:
JOE SAVELLI “GETS” BROTHER’S SLAYER
And smaller headlines informed the sensation-loving public:
“SWALLOW-TAIL SAMMY” SAVELLI’S DEATH AVENGED BY BROTHER WHO SURRENDERS TO POLICE; “SLICK” THOMPSON, ALLEGED MEMBER OF SAMMY’S GANG, SHOT TO DEATH ON SIXTH AVENUE.
Still smaller head-type acknowledged that Joe Savelli, after giving himself up, with a revolver in his hand, had disclaimed any knowledge of or connection with the murders of Juanita Leigh Selim and Dexter Sprague.
Two hours later, Dundee received a long telegram from District Attorney Sanderson:
“INFORMED BY EVENING SUN SAVELLI ANGLE COMPLETE WASHOUT STOP HAVE YOU MADE ANY PROGRESS ALONG OTHER LINES STOP HAVE INFORMED REPORTERS YOU WORKING INDEPENDENTLY WITH STRONG CHANCE OF SOLVING BOTH CASES STOP WOULD LIKE YOU HERE FOR ADJOURNED INQUESTS ON BOTH MURDERS MONDAY STOP MOTHER IMPROVED AM ON JOB AGAIN”
Since Dundee felt that there was little chance of following through either on the scandals which Gladys Earle had hinted at, or on Nita’s strangely secret marriage of twelve years before, he immediately dispatched a wire to Sanderson, assuring him that vital progress had been made and that he would leave New York on the four o’clock train west, arriving in Hamilton Sunday morning at 8.50. The concluding sentence of the wire was:
“SUGGEST YOU PACIFY PRESS WITH ONLY VAGUEST OF HINTS.”
Sanderson’s wire, with its confession of an interview on Dundee’s trip to New York, had upset him and left him with a cold, sick feeling of fear that, stumbling half in darkness, the district attorney had unwittingly warned the murderer of Nita Selim and Dexter Sprague that his special investigator was on the right track. But he consoled himself with the hope that the final sentence of his answering telegram would prevent any further damage.
But he was wrong. An hour before he reached his destination on Sunday morning he went into the dining car and found a copy of The Hamilton Morning News beside his plate. And on the front page was a photograph of dead Nita, her black hair in a French roll, her slim, recumbent body clad in the royal blue velvet dress. Beneath the picture was the caption:
“What part does the outmoded royal blue velvet dress which Nita Selim chose as a shroud play in the solution of her murder? … That is the question which Special Investigator Dundee, attached to the district attorney’s office, who is due home this morning from fruitful detective work in New York, is undoubtedly prepared to answer.”
Dundee was still seething with futile rage when he climbed the stairs to his apartment. On the floor just inside his living room door he found an envelope—unstamped and bearing his name in typing.
The note inside, on paper as plain as the envelope, was typed and unsigned.
“If Detective Dundee will consult page 410 of the latest WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, he will find a tip which should aid him materially in solving the two murder cases which seem to be proving too difficult for his inexperience.”
A wry grin at his anonymous correspondent’s unfriendly gibe was just twisting his lips when a double knock sounded on the living room door, which he had not completely closed.
“Come in, Belle!”
A morose, slack-mouthed mulatto girl in ancient felt slippers sidled into the room.
“Howdy, Mistah Dundee,” Belle greeted him listlessly. “You got back, lak de papers said you would, didn’ yuh? An’ I ain’t sayin’ I ain’t glad! Dat parrot o’ yoahs sho is Gawd’s own nuisance—nippin’ at mah fingahs an’ screechin’ his fool head off…. ’Cose I ain’t sayin’ it’s his fault—keepin’ dat young gemman on de secon’ flo’ awake las’ night…. But lak I say to Mistah Wilson, when he lights into me dis mawnin’, runnin’ off at de mouf ’cause I fo’got to put Cap’n’s covah on his cage las’ night, I ain’t de onliest one what fo’gits in dis hyar house…. Comin’ home Gawd knows when, leavin’ de front do’ unlocked de res’ o’ de night, so’s bugglers and murderers and Gawd knows who could walk right in hyar—”
Dundee, itching to consult his own copy of “Who’s Who”, flung a glance at the parrot’s cage, intending to pacify the mournful mulatto by scolding his “Watson” roundly. But he changed his mind and consoled the chambermaid instead:
“Just tell Mr. Wilson that for once he’s wrong. You did not forget to cover Cap’n’s cage, Belle. Look!”
The girl’s dull eyes bulged as they took in the cage, completely swathed in a square of black silk.
“Gawd’s sake, Mistah Dundee!” she ejaculated. “I didn’t put dat covah on dat bird’s cage! An’ neithah did Mis’ Bowen, ’cause she been laid up with rheumatiz eveh since you lef, an’ eveh las’ endurin’ thing in dis ol’ house has been lef fo’ me to do!”
“Then I suppose the indignant Mr. Wilson came up and covered Cap’n himself,” Dundee suggested, crossing the room to the bookcase which stood within reaching distance of his big leather-covered armchair.
“Him?” Belle snorted. “How he gonna get in hyer widout no key? ’Sides, he’d a-tol’ me if’n—”
“Belle, how many times must I ask you not to misplace my things?” Dundee cut in irritably, for he was tired of the discussion, and angry that his copy of “Who’s Who” was missing from its customary place in the bookcase.
“Me? … I ain’t teched none o’ yoah things, ’cep’n to dus’ ’em and lay ’em down whar I foun’ ’em,” Belle retorted, mournfulness submerged in anger.
Dundee looked about the room, then his eyes alighted upon the missing book, lying upon a shelf that extended across the top of an old-fashioned hot-air register, set high in the wall between the two windows. The thick red volume lay close against the wall, its gold-lettered “rib” facing the room.
“Belle, tell me the truth, and I shall not be angry: did you put that red book on that shelf?” Dundee asked, his voice steady and kindly in spite of his excitement.
“Nossuh! I ain’t teched it!”
“And you did not put the cover over my parrot’s cage, although I had tipped you well to feed Cap’n and cover him at night,” Dundee said severely.
“I gotta heap o’ wuk to do—”
“And you say that Mr. Wilson, one of the two young men on the second floor, left the front door unlocked when he came in last night?” Dundee asked. “Does he admit it?”
“Yassuh,” Belle told him sulkily. “He say he was tiahed when he got home ’long ’bout midnight, an’ he clean fo’got to turn de key in de do’ an’ shoot de bolt.”
“Thanks, Belle. That will be all now,” and Dundee did a great deal to dispel the chambermaid’s gloom by presenting her with a dollar bill.
When she had gone, the detective read the note again, then looked at it and its envelope more closely. They had a strangely familiar look…. Suddenly he jerked open a drawer of his desk, on which his new noiseless typewriter stood, selected a sheet of plain white bond, and rolled it into the machine. Quickly he tapped out a copy of the strange, taunting message.
Yes! The left-hand margin was identical, the typing and its degree of blackness were identical, and the paper on which he had made the copy was exactly the same as that on which the original h
ad been written.
The truth flashed into his mind. It was no coincidence that he had a copy of the very book to which his unknown correspondent referred him. For the note had been written in this very room, on stationery conveniently at hand, on the noiseless typewriter which had been far more considerate about not betraying the intruder than had the parrot whose slumbers had been disturbed.
“But why did my unknown friend risk arrest as a burglar if he wanted to give me an honest tip?” Dundee remarked aloud to the parrot, who croaked an irrelevant answer:
“Bad Penny! Bad Penny!”
“I’m afraid, ‘my dear Watson,’ that those words will not be so helpful in this case as they were when your mistress was murdered,” Dundee assured his parrot absently, for he was studying the peculiar situation from every angle. “Another question, Cap’n—why did the unknown bother to take my ‘Who’s Who’ out of the bookcase, where I should normally have looked for it, and put it on that particular shelf?”
Warily, for his scalp was prickling with a premonition of danger, Dundee crossed the room to the shelf, but his hand did not reach out for the red book, which might have been expected to solve one problem, at least. “Why the shelf?” he asked himself again. Why not the desk top, or the mantelpiece, or the smoking table beside the big armchair?
The shelf, with its drapery of rather fine old silk tapestry, offered no answer in itself, for it held nothing except the red book, a Chinese bowl, and a humidor of tobacco. And beneath the shelf was nothing but the old-fashioned register, the opening covered with a screwed-on metal screen which was a mass of big holes to permit the escape of hot air when the furnace was going in the winter….