LITMIR.BIZ

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      Tracey Miles flushed a salmon pink, and his wife's fingers clutched at his hand warningly. "Oh, Nita called everybody 'darling,' and didn't mean anything by it, I guess," he explained uneasily. "Just one of her cute little ways—. Well, anyway, she came up to me and straightened my necktie—another one of her funny little ways—and said, 'Tracey, my own lamb, won't you shake up the cocktails for poor little Nita? … ' You know, a sort of way she had of coaxing people—"

      "Yes, I know," Dundee agreed, with a trace of a grin. "Go on as rapidly as you can, please."

      "I thought you wanted to know everything!" Miles was a little peevish; he had evidently been enjoying himself. "Of course I said I'd make the cocktails—she said everything was ready on the sideboard. That's the dining room right behind this room," he explained unnecessarily, since the French doors were open. "Well, Nita blew me a kiss from her fingertips, and ran out of the room. … Now, let's see," he ruminated, creasing his sunburned forehead beneath his carefully combed blond hair, "that must have been at exactly 5:30 that she left the room. I went on into the dining room, and Lois—I mean, Mrs. Dunlap came with me, because she said she was simply dying for a caviar sandwich and a nip of—of—"

      "Of Scotch, Tracey," Lois Dunlap cut in, grinning. "I'm sure Mr. Dundee won't think I'm a confirmed tippler, so you might as well tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. … Poor Tracey has a deadly fear that we are all going to lose the last shred of our reputations in this deplorable affair, Mr. Dundee," she added in a rather shaky version of the comfortable, rich voice he had heard earlier in the day.

      "I'm not going to pry into cellars," Dundee assured her in the same spirit. "What else, Mr. Miles?"

      "Nothing much," Tracey Miles confessed, with apparent regret. "I was still mixing—no, I'd begun to shake the cocktails—when I heard a scream—"

      "Whose scream?" Dundee demanded, looking about the room, and dismissing Miles thankfully.

      "It was—I," Judge Marshall's fair-haired, blue-eyed little bride volunteered in a voice that threatened to rise to hysteria.

      "Tell me all about it," Dundee urged gently.

      "Yes, sir," she quavered, while her husband's arm encircled her shoulders in courtly fashion. "As Tracey told you, Nita was dummy, and I was declarer—that is, I got the bid, and played the hand. It—it was quite an exciting end for me to the afternoon of bridge, for I'm not usually awfully lucky, so when Penny had figured up the score, because I'm not good at arithmetic, and I knew Nita and I had rolled up an awfully big score, I jumped up and ran into her room to tell her the good news, because she hadn't come back. And—and—there she was—all bowed over her dressing-table, and she—she was—was—"

      "She was dead when you reached her?" Dundee assisted her.

      "Yes," Karen Marshall answered faintly, and turned to hide her face against her elderly husband's breast.

      Dundee's swift eyes took in the varying degrees of whiteness and sick horror that claimed every face in the room as surely as if all present had not already heard Karen tell her story to Captain Strawn. Tracey Miles looked as if he would have no immediate craving for his dinner, and Judge Marshall's fine, thin face no longer looked so "well-preserved" as he prided himself that it did. As for Dexter Sprague, he almost folded up against the coral brocade draperies. It was the women, oddly enough, who kept the better control over their emotions.

      "Of course you all rushed in when Mrs. Marshall screamed?" he asked casually.

      Twelve heads nodded mutely.

      "Did any or all of you touch the body, or things in the room?"

      "Mr. Sprague touched her hair, and—and lifted one of her hands," Penny contributed quietly. "But you know how it must have been! We can't any of us tell exactly every move we made, but there was some rushing about. The men, mostly, looking for—for whoever did it—"

      "Mrs. Marshall, did you see anyone—anyone at all—in or near that room when you entered it?"

      The white-faced young wife lifted her head, and looked at him dazedly with drowned blue eyes. "There wasn't anyone in—in that room, I know," she faltered. "It felt horrible—being in there with—with her—all alone—"

      "But near the room? In the main hall or in the little foyer where the telephone is?" Dundee persisted.

      "I—don't think so … I can't—remember—seeing anyone. … Oh, Hugo!" and again she crouched against her husband, who soothed her with trembling hands that looked incongruously old against her childish fair hair and face.

      "Where were the rest of you—exactly where, I mean?" Dundee demanded, conscious that Captain Strawn had entered the room and was standing slightly behind him.

      There was such a babel of answers, given and then hastily corrected, that Dundee broke in suddenly:

      "I want a connected story of 'the events leading up to the tragedy.' And I want someone to tell it who hasn't lost his—or her—head at all." He looked about the company, as if speculatively, but his mind was already made up. "Miss Crain, will you tell the story, beginning with the moment I left you and Mrs. Dunlap and Mrs. Selim today?"

      Penny nodded miserably and was about to begin.

      "Just a minute, before you begin, Miss Crain," Dundee requested. "I'd like to make notes on your story," and he drew from a coat pocket a shorthand book, hastily filched from Penny's own tidy desk. "Yes," he answered the girl's frank stare of amazement, "I can write shorthand—of a sort, and pretty fast, at that, though no other human being, I am afraid, could read it but myself. … As for you folks," he addressed the uneasy, silent group of men and women in dead Nita's living room, "I shall ask you not to interrupt Miss Crain unless you are very sure that her memory is at fault."

      Penelope Crain was about to begin for the second time, when again Dundee interrupted. "Another half second, please."

      On the first sheet of the new shorthand notebook Dundee scribbled: "Suggest you try to locate Ralph Hammond immediately. Very much in love with Mrs. Selim. Invited to cocktail party; did not show up." Tearing the sheet from the notebook, he passed it to Captain Strawn, who read it, frowning, and then nodded.

      "Doc Price has done all he can here," Strawn whispered huskily. "Wants to know if you'd like to speak to him before he takes the body to the morgue."

      "Certainly," Dundee answered as he grinned apologetically to the girl who was waiting, white-faced but patiently, to tell the story of the afternoon.

      Quickly suppressed shudders and low exclamations of horror followed him and the chief of the Homicide Squad from the room.

      "Well, Bonnie boy, we meet again, for the usual reason," old Dr. Price greeted the district attorney's new special investigator. "Another shocking affair—that. … A nice clean wound, one of the neatest jobs I ever saw. Shot entered the back, and penetrated the heart. … Very nicely calculated. If the bullet had struck a quarter of an inch higher, it would have been deflected by the—"

      "But the path of the bullet, doctor!" Dundee broke in. "Have you made any calculations as to the place and distance at which the shot was fired?"

      "Roughly speaking—yes," the coroner answered. "The gun was fired at a distance, probably, of ten or fifteen feet—perhaps closer, but I don't think so," he amended meticulously. "As for the path of the bullet, I have fixed it, judging from the position of the body, which I am assured had not been moved before my arrival, as coming from a point somewhere along a straight line drawn from the wound, with the body upright, of course, to—here!"

      Dundee and Strawn followed the brisk little white-haired old doctor across the bedroom to a window opening upon the drive—the one nearest the door leading out upon the porch.

      "I've marked the end of the line here," Dr. Price went on, pointing to a faint pencil mark made upon the window frame—the pale-green strip of woodwork near the chaise longue, which was

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