Murder at Bridge Part 25

"Listen, Penny!" Dundee urged rapidly. "You must realize that I've got to see and hear, but I don't want Ralph Hammond to see _me_ until after he's had a talk with you. Will you let me eavesdrop behind these portieres?... I know it's a beastly thing to do, but--"

Penny agreed at last, and within ten minutes after that amazing telephone call Dundee, from behind the portieres that separated the dining and living room, heard Penny greeting her visitor in the little foyer. She had played fair; had not gone out into the hall to whisper a warning--if any warning was needed.

He had seen Ralph Hammond enter the dining room of the Stuart House the day before, in company with Clive Hammond and Polly Beale, when the three had been strangers to him; but Dundee told himself now that he would hardly have recognized the young man whom Penny was preceding into her living room. The Ralph Hammond of Sat.u.r.day had had a white, drawn face and sick eyes. But this boy....

Like his older brother, Clive, Ralph Hammond had dark-red, curling hair.

But unlike his brother's, his eyes were a wide, candid hazel--the green iris thickly flecked with brown. A little shorter than Clive, a trifle more slender. But that which held the detective's eyes was something less tangible but at once more evident than superlative masculine good looks. It was a sort of shy joyousness and buoyance, which flushed the tan of his cheeks, sang in his voice, made his eyes almost unbearably bright....

Before Penny Crain, very pale and quiet, could sink into the chair she was groping toward, Ralph Hammond was at her side, one arm going out to encircle her shoulders.

"Don't look like that, Penny!" Dundee heard him plead, his voice suddenly humble. "You've every right to be sore at me, honey, but please don't be. I know I've been an awful cad these last few weeks, but I'm myself again. I'm cured now, Penny--"

"Wait, Ralph!" Penny protested faintly, holding back as he would have hugged her hard against his breast. "What about--Nita?"

Dundee saw the young man's face go darkly red, but heard him answer almost steadily: "I hoped you'd understand without making me put it into words, honey.... I'm cured of--Nita. I can't express it any other way except to say I was sick, and now I'm cured--"

"You mean--" Penny faltered, but with a swift, imploring glance toward Dundee, "--you don't love Nita any more? You can't deny you were terribly in love with her, Ralph. Lois told us--told _me_ last night that Nita had told her in strictest confidence that she had promised to marry you, just Thursday night--"

The boy's face was very pale as he dropped his hands from Penny's shoulders, but Dundee, from behind the portieres, was not troubling to spy for the moment. He was too indignant with Penny for having withheld from him the vital fact of Nita's engagement to Ralph Hammond....

"That's true, Penny," Ralph was saying dully. "You have a right to know, because I'm asking _you_ to marry me now.... I did propose to Nita again Thursday night, and she did accept me. I confess now I was wild with happiness--"

"Why did she refuse you before?" Penny cut in, and Dundee silently thanked her for asking the question he would have liked to ask himself.

"Was it because she wasn't sure she was in love with you?"

"You're making it awfully hard for me, honey," the boy protested, then admitted humbly, "Of course you want to know, and you should know.... No, she said all along, almost from the first that she loved me more than I could love her, but that there were--reasons.... _Two reasons_, she always said, and once I asked her jealously if they were both men, but she looked so startled and then laughed so queerly that I didn't ask again.... Then I thought it might be because I was younger than she was, though I can't believe she is more than twenty-three or so, and I'm twenty-five, you know. And once I got cold-sick because I thought she might still be married, but she said her husband was married again, and I wasn't to ask questions or worry about him--"

"But she _did_ accept you Thursday night?" Penny persisted.

"Yes," the boy admitted, his face darkly flushed again. "This is awfully hard, honey, but I'll tell you once for all and get it over with.... I took her to dinner. We drove to Burnsville because she said she was sick of Hamilton. When we were driving back she suddenly became very queer--reckless, defiant.... And she asked me if I still wanted to marry her, and I said I did. I asked her right then to say when, and she said she'd marry me June first, but she added--" and the boy, to Dundee's watching eyes, seemed to be genuinely puzzled again by what must have sounded so odd at the time--"that she'd marry me June first _if she lived to see the day_."

"Oh!" Penny gasped, then, controlling her horror, she asked with what sounded like real curiosity, "Then what--happened, Ralph? Why do you propose to _her_ on Thursday and to _me_ on--on Sunday?"

"A gorgeous actress sacrificed to the typewriter," Dundee told himself, as he waited for Ralph Hammond's reluctant reply.

"Can't we forget it, honey?... You do love me a little, don't you? Can't you take my word for it that--I'm cured now--forever?"

Penny's hands went up to cover her face, and Dundee had the grace to feel very sorry indeed for her--sorry even if she intended to give her promise to Ralph Hammond, as a sick feeling in his stomach prophesied that she was about to do....

"How can I know you're really--cured, if I don't know what cured you?"

"I suppose you're right," the boy admitted miserably. "There's no need to ask you not to tell anyone else. Although I don't want to see her again ever--. Why, Penny, I wouldn't even tell Polly and Clive yesterday, after it happened, though Polly guessed and went upstairs--.

I tried to keep her back--."

"I don't--quite understand, Ralph," Penny interrupted. "You mean something happened when you were at Nita's house yesterday morning?"

"Yes. Judge Marshall had promised Nita to have the unfinished half of the top story turned into a maid's bedroom and bath and a guest bedroom and bath. Clive let me go to make the estimates. Of course I was glad of the chance to see Nita again--I hadn't been with her since Thursday night. But she had to take Lydia in for a dentist's appointment, and they left me alone in the house. I had to go into the finished half to make some measurements, and in the bedroom I found--oh, G.o.d!" he groaned, and pressed a fist against his trembling mouth.

"You found that Dexter Sprague was staying there, was using the bedroom that used to be mine--didn't you?" Penny helped him at last, in desperation.

"How did you know?" The boy stared at the girl blankly for a moment, then seemed to crumple as if from a new blow. "I suppose it was common gossip that Nita and Sprague were lovers, and I was the only one she fooled!... My G.o.d! To think all of you would stand by and let me _marry_ her--a cheap little gold-digger from Broadway, living with a cheap four-flusher she couldn't get along without and had to send for--"

"Did you--want to kill her, Ralph?" Penny whispered, touching one of his knotted fists with a trembling hand.

"Kill her?... Good Lord, _no_!" the boy flung at her violently. "I'm not such an a.s.s as that! You girls are all alike! Polly had so little sense as to think I'd want to kill Nita and Sprague both! She couldn't see, and neither could Clive, that all I wanted was to get away from everybody and get so drunk I could forget what a fool I'd been--"

"What _did_ you do, Ralph?" Penny asked urgently.

"Why, I got drunk, of course," the boy answered, as if surprised at her persistence. "Darling, you wouldn't believe me if I told you how much rot-gut Scotch it took to put me under, but that filthy bootlegging hotel clerk would have charged me twice what he did for the stuff if he had known how much good it would do me."

"Hotel?" Penny s.n.a.t.c.hed at the vital word. "Where did you go to get drunk, Ralph?"

"I never realized before you had so much curiosity, honey," the boy grinned at her. "After I shook Clive--Polly went on to Nita's bridge party, because she couldn't throw her down at the last minute--I wandered around till I came to the Railroad Men's Hotel, down on State Street, you know, the other side of the tracks. It's a miserable dump, but I sort of hankered for a place to hide in that was as miserable and cheap as I felt--"

"Did you register under your own name?"

"Ashamed of me, Penny?... No, I registered under my first two names--Ralph Edwards. And the rat-faced, filthy little hotel clerk turned out to be a bootlegger.... Well, when I woke up about eleven this morning I give you my word I wasn't sick and headachy, though G.o.d knows I'd drunk enough to put me out for a week.... Penny, I woke up feeling--well, I can't explain it but to say I felt light and new and--and clean.... All washed-up! At first I thought my heart was empty--it felt so free of pain. But as I lay there thanking G.o.d that _that was that_, I found my heart wasn't empty at all. It was br.i.m.m.i.n.g full of love--Gosh, honey! I sound like a Laura Jean Libbey hero, don't I?... But before I rang you from the lunch room where I ate breakfast I wrote Nita a special delivery note, telling her it was all off. I had to be free actually, before I could ask you.... You _will_ marry me, won't you, Penny honey?... I knew this morning I had never really loved anyone else--"

Penelope Crain remained rigid for a moment, then very slowly she laid both her hands on his head, for he had knelt and buried his face against her skirt. But as she spoke, her brown eyes, enormous in her white face, were upon Dundee, who had stepped silently from behind the portieres.

"Yes. I'll marry you, Ralph!... You may come in now, Mr. Dundee!"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was nearly nine o'clock Monday morning, and Special Investigator Dundee sat alone in the district attorney's office, impatiently awaiting Sanderson's arrival. Coroner Price, with the approval of Captain Strawn of the Homicide Squad, had set the inquest into the murder of Juanita Leigh Selim for ten o'clock, and there was much that Dundee wished to say to the district attorney before that hour arrived.

When the thoroughly tired and dispirited young detective had returned to his apartment late Sunday afternoon, after having seen Ralph Hammond completely exonerated of any possible complicity in the murder of Nita Selim, he had found a telegram from the district attorney, filed in Chicago:

"CALLED CHICAGO SERIOUS ILLNESS OF MOTHER STOP RETURNING HAMILTON EIGHT TEN MONDAY MORNING STOP SEE BY PAPERS YOU ARE ON SELIM JOB STOP GOOD BUT WATCH YOUR STEP--SANDERSON"

Well--and Dundee grinned ruefully--he had been on the job all right, but would Sanderson consider that he had "watched his step"? At any rate, he had been thorough, he congratulated himself, as he weighed the big manilla envelope containing his own transcription of the copious shorthand notes he had taken during the first hours of the investigation. A smaller envelope held Nita's tell-tale checkbook, her amazing last will and testament, and the still more startling note she had written to Lydia Carr. The last two Dundee had retrieved from Carraway only this morning, after having submitted them to the fingerprint expert on Sunday.

Carraway's report had rather dashed him at first, for it proved that no other hands than Nita's--and his own, of course--had touched either envelope or contents. But he was content now to believe that Nita herself had unsealed the envelope she had inscribed, "To Be Opened in Case of My Death".... Why?... Had she been moved by an impulse to give a clue to the ident.i.ty of the person of whom she stood in fear, but had stifled the impulse?

Strawn had said, too, that the little rosewood desk had been in a fairly orderly condition, before his big, official hands had clawed through it in search of a clue or the gun itself.... Well, Strawn had been properly chagrined when Dundee had produced the will and note....

"Why did she stick it away in a pack of new envelopes, if she wanted it to be found?" Strawn had demanded irritably, and had not been appeased by Dundee's suggestion: "Because she did not want Lydia, in dusting the desk, to see it and be alarmed."

Yes, he had been busy enough, but what, actually, had he to show for his industry? He had worked up three good cases--the first against Lydia Carr, the second against Dexter Sprague, and the third against Ralph Hammond--only to have them knocked to pieces almost as fast as he had conceived them.... Of course Lydia Carr might be lying to give Sprague an alibi, but Dundee was convinced that she was telling the truth and that she hated Sprague too much to fake an alibi for him.... Of course there was always Judge Marshall, but--

Through the closed door came sounds which Dundee presently identified as connected with Penny Crain's arrival--the emphatic click of her heels; the quick opening and shutting of desk drawers....

The down-hearted young detective debated the question of taking his perplexities out to her, but decided against it. She probably wanted to hear no more of his theories, was undoubtedly burning with righteous indignation against him because of Ralph Hammond.... Did she still consider herself engaged to Ralph, in spite of the fact that young Hammond had gallantly insisted upon releasing her from her promise as soon as he suspected that it had been given merely to prove her faith in his innocence?