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Murder at Bridge

<h2>CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE</h2> "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. <hr style='width: 45%;' /> 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——" "Why didn't he make a clean breast of the whole mess to Flora, since he had not married her until he believed Nita Leigh was dead?" Sanderson interrupted. "You must remember that Flora was carrying on a violent flirtation with Sprague—'vamping' him to get the lead in the Hamilton movie, if Sprague got the job of directing it," Dundee reminded him. "Miles, victim of a deep-rooted sexual inferiority complex, must have felt sure that Flora, on discovering she was not legally married, would snatch at the chance to marry Sprague—which was of course what Sprague had planned in case Nita published the truth." "But you were wrong about the secret shelf! The gun was never there!" Strawn gloated. "No. But it was the absence of fingerprints on the pivoting panel and shelf which kept me on the right track. Miles had searched the shelf for the marriage certificate which he could not know Nita had already burned. Probably, too, he had written her a few letters during their short courtship——" "How was Sprague killed?" Sanderson interrupted impatiently. Dundee led the way across the basement to a cubbyhole next to the coal room, entered and came out with a narrow, deep drawer of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl.... "First I must tell you that Miles got the gun out of the lamp that Saturday night, parking his car at a distance and sneaking into the house while I was talking with Lydia in the basement. We can guess that he stowed gun, silencer and electro-magnet in a pocket of his car. At any rate, he came back noisily enough a little later, to offer Lydia a job as nurse in his home. Doubtless he assured himself that she knew nothing, or poor Lydia would have gone the way of her mistress and Sprague." "Was Sprague——?" Strawn began. "Despite my warning," Dundee went on, refusing to be hurried, "Sprague made a demand for blackmail money upon Miles. It is possible that Sprague, also sneaking into the house that Saturday night to get his bag, saw Miles retrieve the gun. At any rate, Sprague knew that Miles was the only person among all the company who had a real motive for killing Nita Selim, and he undoubtedly blackmailed Miles as a murderer as well as a bigamist. Perhaps Miles put him off for a day or two, but on Wednesday Judge Marshall begged for a bridge game, and Miles seized the opportunity of again having the original crowd present—a sort of wall of integrity surrounding and including him. For I don't think he really wanted to involve his best friends as suspects. I believe he merely wanted to hide among them—apparently as above suspicion as they were. And there is safety in numbers, you know.... At any rate, Miles made an appointment Wednesday afternoon with Sprague, telling him that, if he would come to his home that evening, and manage to leave the bridge game while he was dummy, he would find the money he was demanding—in a drawer of the cabinet that stood between the two windows in the trophy room!" Dundee exhibited the drawer he had taken from the basement tool room. "This drawer! I took it away from the Miles home this afternoon while everyone but a chambermaid was at the inquest. Miles did not have time to go home before going to your office, Mr. Sanderson, with the rest of the crowd you had summoned for questioning. If he had, he would have killed himself as soon as he found the incriminating drawer was missing from the cabinet." "But—how——?" Sanderson began, frowning with bewilderment. "Very simple!" Dundee answered. "When Sprague pulled open this drawer, which was set in the cabinet at just the height of his stomach, he received a bullet in his heart.... See these four little holes?... A vise was screwed into the bottom of the drawer so that it gripped the gun with its silencer, at an upward angle. A piece of string was tied to the trigger and fastened somehow to the underside of the drawer, so that when Sprague pulled the drawer open the string was drawn taut and the trigger pulled. Practically the same mechanism by which he tried to murder me.... The kick of the gun jerked the drawer shut. All Miles had to do when he was pretending to look for Sprague was to turn off the trophy room light by a button—one of a series on the outside wall of the hall closet. Probably it had been agreed between them that Sprague would not return to the bridge game, hence Sprague's telephoning for a taxi to wait for him at the foot of the hill, and his taking his hat and stick into the trophy room with him." "Then Miles had from midnight till dawn to remove the gun!" "Yes. Some time during the night, after Flora was asleep with a sedative, which she badly needed because of the quarrel—a genuine one—which she and Tracey had had over Sprague—Miles slipped down to the trophy room and removed the gun and vise. But he could not remove the holes the screws had made, although he did cover the bottom of the usually empty drawer with old pamphlets on the care and feeding of dogs.... By the way, the chambermaid told me that her master spent about half an hour before dinner that Thursday night in the trophy room, 'going over his fishing tackle'.... His next concern was to make the murder jibe completely with Captain Strawn's theory of a gunman who had trailed his quarry to the Miles home and shot him through the window. The window was already open, but the screen had to be raised, too, and Sprague's fingerprints had to be on the nickel catches by which the screen curtain is raised or lowered. Of course Sprague had not touched the screen——" "Do you mean to say he lugged the corpse to the window and lifted it up so that he could press the stiff fingers upon the nickel catches?" Sanderson asked with a shudder. "What a fiend——" "No," Dundee assured him. "That was unnecessary. He simply removed the curtain screen, which is so designed that it can be taken down and put up as easily as a window shade. He carried the screen—his own hands protected by gloves, I suppose—to where Sprague's right hand lay palm upward, on the floor, and pressed the thumb and forefinger against the catches, making fingerprints all right, but they were reversed—as I discovered when it occurred to me to examine the photographs of Sprague's fingerprints in Carraway's office today. Miles could not turn the stiff hand over without bruising the dead flesh; consequently the print of the forefinger was on the catch where the thumb would normally have left its mark—and vice versa.... Before I forget it, I should also tell you that I found a master key hanging on the keyboard in the butler's pantry. Big houses, with their many locks, are usually provided with a master key, and Miles undoubtedly used that one to gain entrance into my room after midnight Saturday morning." "Where did you find the vise?" Strawn asked. "In the tool chest right here, where he had also placed the reamer he had bought. The vise probably belonged to Miles originally, but he was taking no chances on anything's being found in his possession, provided we tumbled to how the two crimes were committed.... The reamer he must have brought out here after he used it to enlarge the hole in my hot-air register after midnight Sunday morning. It is possible he did his cleaning up job here at the same time. It was safe enough to have lights on, since the house is so isolated and there had been no guard here since Thursday." "Well—" Sanderson drew a deep breath. "He was a far cleverer man than any of us suspected. The mechanical arrangements were absurdly easy to rig up, in all three cases, but the thinking of them——. It is a pity Nita did not fear him as she feared Sprague's vengeance——" "You're right," Dundee answered. "Nita did not fear Miles, not even when she was making him pay and pay.... No woman could look at Miles and believe him capable of murder. But a conviction of sexual inferiority leads to strange things, as psychologists can tell you.... I believe Miles married the only two women who ever fell in love with him, and there can be no doubt that Nita really loved him, for she kept her wedding dress for more than twelve years and chose it to be her shroud. It is possible she was still fond of him, although she was infatuated with Sprague when she came down here and was later sincerely in love with Ralph Hammond. Another reason she did not fear Miles when she made her will was that she counted on being able to tell him Saturday night at the latest that she would never ask him for money again, if he would trade silence for silence. How she hoped to secure Sprague's silence we can only guess at. Probably she meant to buy it with the remainder of the $10,000 she had already got from Miles—provided Sprague did not kill her for ditching him as a lover. We know she foresaw that possibility, since she willed the money to Lydia. Of course if Sprague had proved tractable, Nita as Ralph's wife would have been able to compensate Lydia handsomely for the injury she had done her." "Poor Nita—and poor Flora!" Sanderson sighed, as he led the way up the basement stairs. "Hello! Someone's calling you, Bonnie——" Dundee ran through the kitchen and dining room and into the living room, for he had recognized Penny Crain's sweet, husky contralto. "What are you doing back here, young woman?" he demanded. "You were told to go home and forget all this ugly business——" "Dad wants a private word with you," Penny explained, her brown eyes luminous with happiness. "He's on the front porch.... And you ought to see Mother! She looks like a twenty-year-old bride!" When Dundee joined him on the porch, Roger Crain flushed painfully but there was happiness in his eyes, too.... "Serena asked me to thank you for giving her Penny's message to pass on to me," Crain began in a low voice. "I'm sure you've guessed a lot, but what you probably don't know is that Serena used the securities I had sent her for safe keeping, to play the market with. When she knew what I had done here, she wouldn't let me touch a penny of the money until she had turned it into enough to clear up all my debts in Hamilton.... Then," and he sighed slightly, "she sent me home.... Not that I'm sorry. I'm going to try to make Margaret and Penny happy, make them and the town forget that I disgraced them——" "Through?" Penny called from the doorway, and Bonnie Dundee forgot Tracey Miles and all his ingenious schemes.     <hr class="full" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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