Indianapolis Times, Volume 42, Number 209, Indianapolis, Marion County, 9 January 1931 — Page 10

PAGE 10

Murder At Bride 0 xA,. ANNE At'STIN Auttoyol'lHt BL a.Ck PiGE ON* ■) V -TM^W^S^;^^ DEg BAC^TA I c# ’ A/

f CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE And on the front page was a phonograph of dead Nita, her black hair In a French roll, her slim, recumbent body clad In the royal blue velvet dress. Beneath the picture j Tvas the caption. “What part docs the outmoded royal blue velvet frock which Nita Selim chose as a shroud play in the solution of her murder? “That is the question which Special Investigator Dundee, attached to the district attorney’s office, and due home this morning from fruitful detective work in New York, undoubtedly is prepared to answer:, Dundee still was seething with: futile rage when he climbed the stairs to his apartment. On the living room floor, touching the door, he found an envelope—unstamped and bearing his name written on a typewriter. a a a Bonnie Dundee set his travel-1 ing bag upon a chair and Picked up the sealed envelope which ; bore no other inscription than his ; name. The note it contained was on paper as plain as the envelope, ■wps typed and unsigned: “If Special Investigator Dundee will consult Page 410 of the latest WHO'S WHO TN AMERICA, he will find a tip which should aid him materially in solving the two murder cases which seem to be proving too difficult for his inexperience." A WTy grin at the unfriendly gibe of his anonymous correspondent just was twisting his lips when a double knock, with which he had become very familiar, sounded on the livingroom door, which he had not closed ; completely. “Come in, Belle’’ A morose, slack-mouthed mulatto j girl in ancient felt slippers sidled j into the room. ‘Howdy, Mistah Dundee," Belle ! greeted him listlessly. “You got back, like the paper said you would, didn't yuh? And I ain’t sayin’ I ain’t glad! Dat parrot o’ yoahs sho is a Gawd's own nuisance— i nippin’ at mah fingahs, an’ screechin his fool head off. “ ‘Course I ain’t sayin’ it’s his fault, keepin’ dat young gen’man on de secon’ flo’ awake las’ night. . . . But lak I say to Mistah Wilson, when he lights into me dis mawnin’, runnin’ off at de mouf ’cause I fo’got to put Cap’n’s covah on his cage las’ night, I ain't de onliest one what forgets in dis house. Cornin’ home Gawd knows when an’ leavin’ de front do’ unlocked de rest o' de night, co’s bugglers and murderers and Gaw'd kncws w r ho could walk right in hyer—” Dundee, itching to consult his own copy of “Who’s Who,’’ flung a glance at the parrot’s sage, intending to pacify the mournful girl by scolding his “Watson" roundly. But he changed his mind and consoled the chambermaid instead: “Just tell Mr. Wilson that for once he’s wrong You did not forget to cover Cap’n’s cage, Belle. Look!” The girl’s full black eyes bulged as they took in the cage, completely swatiled in a square of dark silk. tt it a AIVD’S sake, Mistah Dundee!” VJ she ejaculated. “I didn’t put dat covah on dat bird’s cage! An’ neithah did Mis’ Bowen, ’cause she been laid up with rheumatiz eveh since you lef, an’ eveh las’ endurin’ thing In dis ol’ house has been lef’ fo’me to do!” “Then I suppose the indignant Mr. Wilson came up and covered Cap’n’ himself,” Dundee suggested, crossing the room to the bookcase W'hich stood within reaching distance of his big leather-covered ami-chair. “Him?” Belle snorted. “How he gonna get in hyer widout no key? ’Sides, he’d a-tol’ me if’n ” "Belle, how many times must I ask you not. to misplace my things?” Dundee cut in irritably, for he was tired of the discussion, and angry that his copy of “Who’s Who” was missing from its customary' place in the bookcase. “Me? ... I ain’t teched none o’ yoah things, ’cep’n to dus’ ’em and lay cm down whar I foun’ dm,” Belle retorted. Dundee looked about the room, then his eyes alighted upon the missing book, lying upon a tapestry draped shelf that extended across the top of an old-fashioned hot air register, set high in the wall between the two windows. The thick red volume lay close against the wall, its gold-lettered “rib” facing the room. “Belle, tell me the truth, and I shall not be angry; did you put that red book on that shelf?” Dundee

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asked, his voice steady and kindly j in spite of his excitement. “Nossuh! I ain’t teched it!” “And you did not put the cover over my parrot's cage, although I had tipped you well to feed Cap'n and cover him at night,” Dundee said severely. “I gotta heap o’ wuk to do—” “And you say that Mr. Wilson, one of the two young men on the second floor, left the front door unlocked when he came in last I night?" Dundee asked. “Does he admit it?” “Yasuh,” Belle told him sulk- j ily. “He say he was tiahed when he got home ’long 'bout midnight, an’ he clean fo’got to turn de key in j de do’ an’ shoot de bolt.” “Thanks, Belle. That will be all now.” and Dundee did a great dealj to dispel the chambermaid’s gloom by presenting her with a dollar bill. When she had gone, the detective read the note again, then looked at it and its envelope more closely. They had a strangely familiar look. Suddenly he jerked open a drawer ; of his desk, on which his new' noise- , less portable typewriter stood, se- j lected a sheet of plain white bond, anl rolled It Into the machine. Noiselessly he tapped out a copy of the strange, taunting message. Yes! The left-hand margin was Identical, the typing and its degree of hlackness were identical, and the paper on which he had made the copy was exactly the same as that on w'hich the original had been written. n n n 'T'HE truth flashed into his mind. It was no coincidence that he had a copy of the very book to which his unknown correspondent referred him For the note had been written in this very room, on stationery conveniently at hand, on the noiseless typewriter which had been far more considerate about not betraying the intruder than had the parrot whose slumbers had been disturbed. “But why did my unknown friend risk arrest as a burglar if he wanted to give me an honest tip?” Dundee remarked aloud to' the parrot, who croaked an irrelevant answer: “Bad Penny! Bad Penny!" “I’m afraid, my dear Watson, that those words will not be so helpful in this case as they were when your mistress was murdered,” Dundee assured his parrot absently, for he was studying the peculiar situation from every angle. “Another question, Cap’n—why did the unknown bother to take my ‘Who’s Who’ out of the bookcase, where I normally should have looked for it, and put it on that particular shelf?” Warily, for his scalp was prickling with a premonition of danger, Dundee crossed the room to the shelf, but his hand did not reach out for the red book, which might have been expected to solve one problem, at least. “Why the shelf?” he asked himself again. Why not the desk top, or the mantelpiece, or the smoking table beside the big armchair? The shelf, with its drapery of rather fine old silk tapestry, offered no answer in itself, for it held nothing except the red book, a Chinese bowl, arid a humidor of tobacco. And beneath the shelf w r as nothing but the old-fashioned register, the opening covered with a screwed-on metal screen which was a mass of big holes to permit the escape of hot air when the furnace was going in the winter. . . . Suddenly Dundee stooped and stared with eyes that were widened with excitement and a certain amount of horror. Then he rose, and, standing far to one side, picked up the fat volume which lay on the shelf. As he had expected, a bullet wliizzed noiselessly across the room and buried itself in the plaster of the wall opposite—a bullet which would have plowed through his own heart if he had obeyed his first impulse and gone directly to the shelf to obey the instructions in the note. But more had happened than the whizzing flight of a bullet through one of the holes of the hot-air register. The “Who’s Who” had been jerked almost out of Dundee’s hand before he had lifted the heavy volume many inches from the shelf. Coincidental with the disappearance of a bit of white string which had been pinned to a thin page of the book w r as a metallic clatter, followed swiftly by the faint sound of a bump far below.

Dropping “wiho’s who" to the floor, Dundee flung open his living room door and raced down three flights of stairs. He brought up, panting, at the door of the basement. , It was not locked and In another minute he was standing before the big hot-air furnace. Above the fire box was a big metai compartment —the reservoir for the heated air. And set into the reservoir, to conduct the heat to the region above, were three huge pipes. With strength augmented by excitement, Dundee tugged and tore at one of the pipes until he had dislodged it. Then, thrusting his hand into the heat reservoir, he groped until he had found what he had known must be there —Judge Marshall’s automatic, with the Maxim silencer screwed upon the end of its short nose. At last he held in his ltands the weapon with which Nita Leigh Selim and Dexter Sprague had been murdered. The ingeniousness of his own attempted murder moved him to such profound admiration that he scarcely could feel resentment. If, in the excitement of hunting for a promised clue, he had gone directly to the shelf, standing in front of the hole in the register into which the end of the silencer had been jammed, so that it showed scarcely at all, even to eyes looking for it, he now would have been dead. And the gun and silencer, after hurtling down the big hot-air pipe behind the register, could have lain hidden for months, even years, in the heat reservoir of the furnace. With the weapon carefully wrapped in his handkerchief, Dundee went up the stairs almost as swiftly as he had gone down them, meeting no one on the w r ay to his rooms on the top floor. “My most heartfelt thanks to you, Cap’n!” he greeted his parrot. “If you had not squawked last night and so frightened the murderer that he made % the vital error of covering your cage, I never should have annoyed you again with my Sherlock ruminations on cases which do not interest you in the slightest.” The parrot cackled hoarsely, but Dundee paid him scant attention. He picked up the now harmless “Who’s Who” and turned to page 410, a comer of which had disappeared with the string which still was fastened to the hair-trigger hammer of the Colt’s .32. Very clever and very simple! The murderer of two people and the would-be murderer of a third had had only to unscrew the metal covering of the register, wedge the end of the silencer into one of the many holes, replace the screws, and paste the end of the string to a page of the book he had selected as the one most likely to appeal to a detective as a clue source . . . No, w r ait! He had had to do more! Dundee bent and examined the metal cover of the register. The murderer had chosen as the one wrhlch would be directly in front of Dundee’s heart gleamed brightly. It had been necessary to enlarge it considerably. The murderer had left a trace after all! But the book was open in Dundee's hands and his eyes rapidly scanned Page 410. And he found what the murderer had not expected him to live to read, but w'hich he had counted on as an explanation of the note which the police would have puzzled over, if all had gone well with his scheme . . . (To Be Continued)

STICKEfti @§§m Four sets of two words each and one ' 'net of three words, from the above 11 words, can be reassembled so that they will spell the names of five states. For example ARMY and LAND contain the necessary lefierS'to spefl MARYLAND. On you discover the four remaining states? a

Answer for Yesterday

fAcEtIOUs' j AbstEmlOUs; The vowel* a e, i, 0 ahd u appear in alphabetical order in the two words shown above. -

ARZAN AND THE LOST EMPIRE

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Tarzan, in the arena at Castra feanguinarius, had been chehted of the laurels and the freedom that were to be his reward as victor in the games His miraculous conquest of the lion made him more than ever. And now, when the emperor proposed anew test, the crowd broke out in wrath. A man shouted, “Murderer I” 7

THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES

OUR BOARDING HOUSE

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FRECKLES AND HIS FRIENDS

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WASHINGTON TUBBS II

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SALESMAN SAM

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BOOTS AND HER BUDDIES

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Hatred of the emperor had long been seething in the city-state. The mob was in a mood for revolt. Menacing cries and threats were shouted from the galleries, and only the glittering pikes and sharp Spanish swords of the legionaries and the lack of a leader kept Sublatus safe from direct attack.

—B- t Ahefn

l OOfJT CARS HOW (tAPORTAMT (Ts‘ )oH, 010 1 WWAODR Vft fAe. UP s' OISTUR.& ~ T.II r ''.. O' ..1.-,.

In the arena the slaves worked rapidly. Fallen Numa had been dragged away, the sands swept and the last slave had disappeared, leaving Tarzan once alone within the inclosure. Then those menacing gates at the far end of the arena swung open once more. The crowd waited breathless for the new terror.

OUT OUR WAY

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—By Edgar Rice Burroughs

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As Tarzan looked at the open gateway, he saw six bull apes being herded through. They had heard the victory cry of the apes roll thunderously ifom the arena a few minutes before and they came now from their cages filled with excitement and ferocity, in front of them they saw that hated man-thing . . , t Tarmang^ai

JAN. 9, 1931

—By Williams

—By Blosser

—By Crane

—By Small

—By Martin