Murder at Bridge Part 45

"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 s.h.i.+ny, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.e.xual inferiority complex, must have felt sure that Flora, on discovering she was not legally married, would s.n.a.t.c.h 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 courts.h.i.+p----"

"How was Sprague killed?" Sanderson interrupted impatiently.

Dundee led the way across the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 Sat.u.r.day night, parking his car at a distance and sneaking into the house while I was talking with Lydia in the bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 a.s.sured 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 b.u.t.ton--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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sured 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.e.xual 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 bas.e.m.e.nt stairs. "h.e.l.lo! 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 pa.s.s 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.