Indianapolis Times, Volume 42, Number 210, Indianapolis, Marion County, 10 January 1931 — Page 11

JAN. 10, 1031

Murder At Brictde

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX DUNDEE laughed, the parrot which had saved his life echoing his mirth raucously, as his eyes hit upon the following lines of fine Print halfway down the third column of page' 410 of “Who’s Who in America’’: BURNS. William John, detective; b Baltimore, Oct, 19, 1861— “A taunt and a joke which turned *our, my dear Watson!’’ he exulted to the parrot. "A Joke I was not intended to live to laugh over!’’ He closed the book and replaced it in the bookcase, careless of fingerprints, for he was sure the murderer had been too clever to leave any behind him in that room—or npon the gun and silencer either, for that matter. Interestedly, Dundee surveyed the scene of his attempted murder. If he had gone up unsuspectingly to the high shelf to reach for the book he would have stood so close to the register that there would have been powder bums on his shirt front—tust as there had been on Dexter Sprague's. And htj would have been shot so near an open window—no chance for fingerprints there, either, since he had not closed the windows on his departure for New York, not wishing to return to a stuffy apartment —that the have been justified in thinkihg he had been shot from outside. It was an old-fashioned house in more ways than in the manner of 1 its heating. Outside of one of his i two unscreened windows there was an iron grating—the topmost landing of a fire escape. Dundee could imagine Captain Strawn’s positiveness in placing the murder there—crouching in wait for his victim. . . . Yes, damned ingenious, this attempted murder. Undoubtedly Strawn would have dismissed the note as the work of a crank, not hitting upon the fact that it had been written in that very room, on Dundee’s own typewriter and stationery. Strawn even might have got a mournful sort of amusement out of the fact that Dundee had been advised to call upon a greater detective than himself for assistance! ... . Yes, ingenious indeed! And so amazingly simple— Suddenly the young detective snatched for his hat. If the murderer were so ingenious in this case, might he not have been equally clever in planning and executing the murder of Nita Leigh Selim? n ts n TWENTY minutes later he parked his car in the rutty road before the Selim house in Primrose Meadows, and honked his horn loudly to attract the attention of toe plainclothesman Captain Strawn had detailed immediately after the murder. to guard the premises during the day. Therp was no answer. And a violent ringing of the doorbell also brought no response. The guard had been withdrawn, probably to loin the small army of plainclothesmen and patrolmen who had been searching foolishly and futilely for the New York gunman—the keystone of Captain Strawn’s exploded theory. With an oath, Dundee used his skeleton key to release the front door lock. Straight down the main hall and into the little foyer between the hall and Nita's bedroom. He snatched up the telephone. To his relief, it was not dead. He gave the number of Captain Strawn’s home, and had the pleasure of learning that he had interrupted his former chief at a late Sunday breakfast. “When did you withdraw the guard from the Selim house?” he asked abruptly, cutting short Strawn’s cordial welcome home. “Late Thursday afternoon,” the chief of the homicide squad answered belligerently. “I needed all my men. and the Selim house had been gone over with a fine tooth comb half a dozen times. . . . Why?” *'Oh, nothing!” Dundee retorted wearily, and hung up the receiver after assuring his old friend that he would call on him later in the day. No use to explain now to Strawn that he had given the murderer every chance to remove any betraying traces of his crime. Besides, his first excited hunch after his own attempted murder might very well be a wild, groundless one. In his case the impossi-

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bility of the murder being delayed or arranged so that the detective might be slain when the whole “crowd” was assembled was obvious. The murderer had read in a late Saturday afternoon extra—a copy of which was now In Dundee’s pocket—District Attorney Sanderson’s boast to the press that his office had been working on an entirely different theory than that which connected the two murders with “Swallow-tail Sammy,” that Special Investigator Dundee, expected back in Hamilton early Sunday Morning, had been investigating Nita Leigh’s past life In New York. And he had hinted sensational revelations connected with the twelve-year-old royal blue velvet dress which Nita had chosen to be her shroud. And in his desire to reassure the public through the press, Sanderson vaguely had promised even more specific revelations than Dundee had actually brought home with him. Prodded by reporters, Sanderson had admitted that he did not know himself the nature of those revelations. The exasperated young detective could picture the murderer reading those sensational hints and promises, could imagine his panic, the need for immediate action, so that Special Investigator Dundee should not live to tell the tale of his New York discoveries to the district attorney or any one else. u * u BUT whether he was right or wrong, Dundee determined to give his hunch a chance. He went into the over-ornate bedroom in which Nita Leigh Selim had been murdered —shot through the back as she sat at her dressing table powdering her face. If her murder had been accomplished by mechanical means, how had it been done? There was no hot-air register here. TYom the dressing table Dundee walked to the window, upon the pale-green frame of which there still was the tiny pencil mark which Dr. Price had drawn, to indicate the erjd of the path along which the bullet had traveled, provided it had traveled so far. Nothing here to aid in a mechanical murder — But in a flash Dundee changed his mind. For just slightly above the pencil mark there was a small dent in the soft painted pine of the window frame. And before Iris mind could frame words and sentences he thought he saw how Nita Leigh had been murdered. Nothing here? . . . Not now, because he had taken the lamp to the courthouse for safekeeping. He saw it clearly in imagination —that bronze floor lamp which Lydia Carr had given to Nita Leigh, its big round bowl studded with great jewels of colored glass. And in recalling eve# detail of the lamp he saw what he had dismissed as of no importance at the time and in the excitement of finding that the lamp’s bulb had been shattered by the “bang or bump” which Flora Miles had described. One of the big glass jewels had been missing, leaving an unsightly hole. No wonder there had been a "bang or bump” hard enough to dent the frame of the window! Fa the gun, wedged into the big bowl and slightly protruding from the jewel-hole, had “kicked,” just as it had kicked an hour before, when it had dislodged itself from the hole in the hot-air register and clattered down the big pipe to the heat reservoir of the furnace. That the big lamp, when he, following Strawn. first had examined the scene of Nita’s murder, had not stood in front of the window frame did not dampen Dundee’s excitement in the least. After Kartn Marshall’s scream, that room had been filled with excited people, who had rushed about, looking out of the window for the murder and doing all sorts of things which terror-stricken people do in such a crisis. No, the murderer—or murderess —had found no difficulty in shifting the big lamp one foot nearer the chaise longue, to the place it always had occupied before. But—how had the gun been fired from the lamp? Electrically, of course. Another picture flashed into Dundee’s mind. He saw himself stooping, on Monday afternoon, to see if the plug of the lamp's cord had been pulled from the socket, saw it again as it was then—nearly out. so that no

current could pass from the baseboard outlet under the bookcase Into the bronze lamp. How far from the truth his conclusion that Monday had been! a a a BUT what was the real truth? Suddenly Dundee flung back the rug which almost covered the bedroom floor and revealed the bell which Dexter Sprague pad rigged up so that Nita might summon Lydia from her basement room, in case of dire need —a precaution with which the murderer was familiar, since Lois Dunlap innocently had spread the news of Its existence. There was a half-inch hole In the hardwood floor, and out of it issued a length of green electric wire, connected with two small, flat metal plates, one upon the other, so that when stepped upon a bell would ring in Lydia’s basement room. But there was something odd about the wire. Although it was obviously new, a section of it near the two metal plates was wrapped with black adhesive tape. Another memory knocked for attention upon Dundee’s mind. The long cord of the bronze lamp had been mended with exactly the same sort of tape—about a foot from where it ended in the contact plug. Within another two minutes Dundee, with a flashlight he had found in the kitchen, was exploring the dark, earthy portion of the basement which lay directly to the east of Lydia Carr’s basement room. And he found what he was looking for—adhesive tape wrapped about the wire which had been dropped through the floor of Nita’s room before it had been carried, by means of a bored hole, into Lydia’s room. He was too late thanks to Capt.iin Strawn. The bell which Sprague had rigged up was in working order again. But as he was passing out of the basement he glanced at the ceiling of the large room devoted to furnace, hot-water heater and laundry tubs. And in the ceiling he saw a hole. . . . The murderer had left a trace he could not obliterate! At 3 o’clock that Sunday afternoon Bonnie Dundee, fatigued after a strenuous day and suffering, to his own somewhat disgusted amusement, from reaction—even a detective feels some shock at having narrowly escaped death—permitted himself the luxury of a call upon Penny Crain. He found the girl and her mother playing anagrams. After greeting him, Mrs. Crain rose, to surrender her place to the visitor. “You play with this girl of mine, Mr. Dundee. She’s too clever for me! She’s beaten me every game so far, and when I plead for twohanded bridge as a chance to get even, she shudders at the very word!” “Why did you drag poor Ralph away from his dinner here today?” Penny demanded, scrambling the little wooden blocks until they made a wierd pattern of letters. “Because I wanted to find out exactly how Nita Selim wfe killed—and I did,” Dundee answered. “I wish I knew as well who murdered her!” Mute before Penny’s excited questions, the detective idly selected letters from the mass of face-up blocks on the table, and spelled out in a low row, the names of all the guests at Nita’s fatal bridge party. ■ (To Be Continued) STICKS ft j 1 9 4 ' ■ - - SMS SMC tea ftn 77 ffi r-7 8 f ... A set of nine books was numbered from 1 to 9. When set on shelves, at shown above,’ the top numbers, when multiplied, equal the center number, 192. The lower numbers, however, do not multiply to 192. Can you rearrange the numbers so that both top and lower shelves will multiply to equal the number on the center shelf?

Answer for Yesterday

j, ARMY s A fFOLD* I Lund Jcain 4 |aie S (VAN 3 AIL* rfaONE ?[ade s |oe ' \ The 11 words, when assembled as J shown above, contain the needed letters to spell: 1, MARYLAND; 2, NEVADA; 3, CALIFORNIA; 4, FLORIDA, sad 5, OREGON *

TARZAN AND THE LOST EMPIRE

‘I am Gazat,” growled one of the apes. “I kill!” “I am Zutho,” bellowed another. “I kill!” ‘‘Kill the Tarmangani!” barked Goyad, as the six lumbered forward, sometimes erect upon their hind feet, sometimes swinging with gnarled knuckles to the ground.

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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The crowd hooted and groaned. “Down with Caesar!” “Death to Sublatus!” rose, above the tumult. To a man they were on their feet, but 4he glittering pikes of the soldiers held them in awe, except for two who rushed to the attack and ended upon the pikes of the guards. '

—By Ahern

Sublatus turned and whispered to a guest in the imperial loge. “This should be a lesson to all who dare affront Caesar,” he said. “Quite right,” said thcricourtier. “Caesar is all-power-ful.” But the ffilow’s lips were blue from terror as he saw the size of the menacing crowd. - ' P

OUT OUR WAY

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—By Edgar Rice Burroughs

As the apes approached, Zutho was in the lead. “I am Zutho,” he said, “I kill!” “Look well, Zutho, before you kill ycur friend,” replied the ape-man. “I am Tarzan of the Apes.” Zutho stopped bewildered at being addressed in the ape language. The other apes crowded around him.

PAGE 11

—By Williama

—By Blosser

—By Crane

—By Small

—By Martin