Murder at Bridge Part 9

It was Dundee who reached her first--Dundee and not her outraged and excited old husband.

"Mrs. Marshall--listen, please," he begged in a low voice, as he lifted her so that her head rested against his arm. "You have been splendid--wonderful! Please believe that I am truly sorry to distress you so, and that very soon, I hope, you may go home and rest."

"I--can't bear any--more," Karen whimpered.

Ignoring Judge Marshall's bl.u.s.tering, Dundee continued softly: "You don't want the wrong person to be accused of this terrible crime, do you, Mrs. Marshall?... Of course not! And you _do_ want to help us all you can to discover who really killed Mrs. Selim?"

"I--I suppose so," Karen conceded, on a sob.

"Then I'll help you. I'll go to the bedroom with you," Dundee promised her with a sigh of relief. To the others he spoke sharply:

"Go back to the exact positions in living room and dining room and solarium, that you occupied when Mrs. Marshall ran from the room."

"I think you're overdoing it, Bonnie," Captain Strawn protested.

"But--sure I'll see that they mind you."

With Karen Marshall clinging to his arm, Dundee walked down the hall, beyond the staircase to an open door on his left--a door guarded by a lounging plainclothesman. Seated at the dressing-table of the guests'

lavatory was Flora Miles, her sallow dark face so ravaged that she looked ten years older than when he had first seen her an hour before.

"So you were in here when you heard Mrs. Marshall scream, Mrs. Miles?"

Dundee paused to ask.

"Yes--yes!" she gasped, rising. "And that horrible man has made me stay in here--. Of course, the door was closed--before. I telephoned home to ask about my children, and then I came in here to--to do my face over--"

"You didn't hear your husband arrive?"

"No,--I didn't hear him arrive," Flora Miles faltered, her handkerchief dabbing at her trembling, over-rouged lips.

"I--see," Dundee said slowly.

He stepped into the little room, leaving Karen to stand weakly against the door frame. Without a word to Mrs. Miles he looked closely at the top of the dressing-table and into the small wastebasket that stood beside it.

"You--you can see that I cold-creamed my face before I put on fresh powder and--and rouged," Flora Miles pointed out, with an obvious effort at offended dignity. "After I came back, while you were making those poor girls play the hand over again, I went through the same motions--because you told all of us to behave exactly as we had done before--"

"I--see," Dundee agreed.

Pretty clever, in spite of being almost frightened to death, Dundee said to himself. But he had been just a shade cleverer than she, for he had been in this room ahead of her, and there had been no b.a.l.l.s of greasy face tissue in the wastebasket then!

He was pa.s.sing out of the room, offering his arm to Karen, when one of his underlined notes thrust itself upon his memory:

"May I see your bridge tally, please, Mrs. Miles?"

"My--bridge tally!" she echoed blankly. "Why--it must be on the table where I was playing--"

"It is not," Dundee a.s.sured her quietly. "Perhaps it is in your handbag?" and he glanced at the rather large raffia bag that lay on the table.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed it up, slightly averting her body as she looked hastily through its contents.

"It--isn't here.... Oh, I don't know _where_ it is! What does it matter?"

Without replying, Dundee escorted the trembling little discoverer of Nita Selim's body into the large ornate bedroom, murmuring as he did so:

"Don't be frightened, Mrs. Marshall. The bod--I mean Mrs. Selim isn't here now.... And you shan't have to scream. I'll give the signal myself.

I just want you to go through the same motions you did before." On jerky feet the girl advanced to Nita's now deserted vanity dresser.

"I--I was calling to her all the time," she whispered. "I didn't even wait to knock, and I--I began to tell her how much we'd made off that hand, when I--when she didn't answer.... I didn't touch her, but I saw--I saw--" Again she gripped her face with her hands and was about to scream.

"I know," Dundee a.s.sured her gently. Then he shouted: "Ready!"

Herded by Strawn, the small crowd of men and women came running into the room, Judge Marshall leading the way, Penny being second in line. Penny _second_! Why not Flora Miles, who had been nearer to that room than any of the others, if her story was true--Dundee asked himself. But all had crowded into the room, including Polly Beale and Clive Hammond, before Mrs. Miles crept in.

"Is this the order of your arrival?" Dundee asked them all.

Penny, who was standing against the wall, just inside the doorway, spoke up, staring at Flora with frowning intentness.

"You're sort of mixed up, aren't you, Flora? I was standing right here until the worst of it was over--I didn't even go near Nita, and I know you didn't pa.s.s me. I remember that Tracey stepped away from the--body, and called you, and you weren't here. And then almost the next minute I saw you coming toward him from--from--_over there_!"

And Penny pointed toward that corner of the room which held, on one angle, the door leading to the porch, and on its other angle the window from which, or from near which Nita Selim had been shot.

"You're lying, Penny Crain! I did no such thing!" Flora Miles cried hysterically. "I came running in--with--with the rest of you, and I rushed over there just to see if I could see anybody running away across the meadow--"

"My wife is right, sir," Tracey Miles added his word aggressively. "I saw what she was doing--the most sensible of all of us--and I ran to join her. We looked out of the windows, both the side windows and the rear ones, and out onto the porch. But we didn't see anything."

Surprisingly, Dundee abandoned the point.

"And you were the only one to touch her, Sprague?"

"I--believe so," Dexter Sprague answered in a strained voice. "I--laid my hand on her--her hair, for an instant, then I picked up her hand to see if--if there was any pulse left."

"Yes?"

"She--she was dead."

"And her hand--did it feel cold?"

"Neither cold nor warm--just cool," Sprague answered in a voice that was nearly strangled with emotion. "She--she always had cool hands--"

"What did you do, Judge Marshall?" Dundee asked abruptly.

"I took my poor little wife away from this room, laid her on a couch in the living room, and then telephoned the police. Miss Crain stood at my elbow, urging me to hurry, so that she might ring you--as she did. Your line was busy, and she lost about five minutes before getting you."

"And the rest of you?" Dundee asked.

"Nothing spectacular, I'm afraid, Mr. Dundee," Polly Beale answered in her brusque, deep voice, now edged with scorn.

Further questioning elicited little more, beyond the fact that Clive Hammond had dashed out to circle the house and look over the grounds, and that John Drake had been fully occupied with an hysterical wife.

"Better let this bunch go for the present, hadn't we, boy?" Captain Strawn whispered uneasily. "Not a thing on any of them--"