"You remember me?" Dundee panted. "Dundee of the district attorney's office. I questioned you this afternoon--"

The woman closed the single eye that had escaped the accident which had marred her face so hideously. "I--remember.... I'm sick.... I told you all I know--"

"Lydia, why didn't you tell me that it was your mistress, Mrs. Selim who did--that?" Dundee demanded sternly, pointing to the woman's sightless left eye and ruined cheek.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lydia Carr, still clothed in the black cotton dress and white ap.r.o.n of her maid's uniform, struggled to a sitting position on the edge of her bas.e.m.e.nt room bed.

"No, no! That's a lie! It was an accident, I tell you--my own fault!... Who dared to say Nita--Miss Nita--did it?"

"Better lie down, Lydia," Dundee suggested gently. "I won't want you fainting. You've had a hard day with the abscessed tooth, the dope the dentist gave you, and--other things. I don't wonder that you lost your head, went a little crazy, perhaps--"

The detective's sinister implication seemed to make no impression at all upon the woman with the scarred face.

"I asked you--" she gasped, her single eye glaring at him, "who dared say Nita burned me?"

"It was Nita herself who told me," Dundee answered softly. "Just a few minutes ago."

"Holy Mother!" the maid gasped, and crossed herself dazedly.

Let her think the dead woman had appeared to him in a vision, Dundee told himself. Perhaps her confession would come the quicker--

The maid began to rock her gaunt body, her arms crossed over her flat chest. "My poor little girl! Even in death she thinks of me, she's sorry--. She sent me a message, didn't she? Tell me! She was always trying to comfort me, sir! The poor little thing couldn't believe I'd forgiven her as soon as she done it--. Tell me!"

"Yes," Dundee agreed, his eyes watching her keenly. "She sent you a message--of a sort.... But I can't give it to you until you have told me all about the--accident in which you were burned."

"I'll tell," Lydia promised eagerly. Gone were the harshness and secretiveness with which she had met his earlier questioning.... "You see, sir, I loved Miss Nita--I called her Nita, if you don't mind, sir.

I loved her like she was my own child. And she was fond of me, too, fonder of me than of anybody in the world, she used to tell me, when some man had hurt her bad.... And there was always some man or other, she was so sweet and so pretty.... Well, I found her in the bathroom one day, just ready to drink carbolic acid, to kill her poor little self--"

"When was that, Lydia?" Dundee interrupted.

"It was in February--Sunday, the ninth of February," Lydia went on, still rocking in an agony of grief. "I tried to take the gla.s.s out of her hands. She'd poured a lot of the stuff out of the bottle.... You see, she was already in a fit of hysterics, or she'd never have tried to kill herself.... It was my own fault, trying to take the gla.s.s away from her, like I did--"

"She flung the acid into your face?" Dundee asked, shuddering.

"She didn't know what she was doing!" the woman cried, glaring at him.

"Nearly went out of her mind, they told me at the hospital, because she'd hurt me.... A private room in the best hospital in New York she got for me, trained nurses night and day, and so many doctors fussing around me I wanted to fire the whole outfit and save some of my poor girl's money--which I don't know till this day how she got hold of--"

Dundee let her sob and rock her arms for a while unmolested. In February Nita Selim had had to borrow money to pay doctor and hospital bills. Had borrowed it or "gold-dug" it.... And in May she had been rich enough to have $9,000 to invest!

"Lydia, you never forgave Nita Selim for ruining your life as well as your face!" Dundee charged her suddenly.

"You're a liar!" she cried pa.s.sionately. "I know what I felt. It's _my_ face and _my_ life, ain't it? I tell you I didn't even bear a grudge against her--the poor little thing! Eating her heart out with sorrow for what she'd done--till the very day of her death! Always trying to make it up to me--paying me too much money for the handful of work I had to do, what with her eating out nearly all the time and throwing away stockings the minute they got a run in 'em--. Forgive her? I'd have crawled from here to New York on my hands and knees for Nita Leigh!"

Dundee studied her horribly scarred face, made more horrible now by what looked like genuine grief.

"Lydia, who was the man over whom your mistress wanted to commit suicide?"

The single, tear-reddened eye glared at him suspiciously, then became wary. "I don't know."

"Was it Dexter Sprague, Lydia?"

"Sprague?" She spat the name out contemptuously. "No! She didn't know him then, except to speak to at the moving picture studio."

"When did he become her--lover, Lydia?" Dundee asked casually.

The woman stiffened, became menacingly hostile. "Who says he was her lover? You can't trick me, Mr. Detective! I'd cut my tongue out before I'd let you make me say one word against my poor girl!"

Dundee shrugged. He knew a stone wall when he ran up against one.

"Lydia," he began again, after a thoughtful pause, "I have proof that Nita Selim was sure you had never forgiven her for the injury she did you." His fingers touched the letter in his pocket--that incredible "Last Will and Testament" which Nita had written the day before she was murdered....

"And that's another lie!" the woman cried, shaking with anger. She struggled to her feet, stood swaying dizzily a moment. "Come upstairs with me to her room, and I'll show _you_ some proof that I had forgiven her!... Come along, I tell you!... Trying to make me say _I_ killed my poor girl, when I'd have died for her--Come on, I tell you!"

And Dundee, wondering, beginning to doubt his own conviction a little--that conviction which had sprung full-grown out of Nita's strange, informal will, and which had seemed to explain everything--followed Lydia Carr from her bas.e.m.e.nt room to the bedroom in which Nita had been murdered....

"See this!" and Lydia Carr s.n.a.t.c.hed up the powder box from the dressing-table. Her long, bony fingers busied themselves with frantic haste, and suddenly, into the silence of the room came the tinkle of music. "_I_ bought her this--for a present, out of my own money, soon as I got out of the hospital!" the maid's voice shrilled, over the slow, sweet, tinkly notes. "It's playing her name song--_Juanita_. It was playing that song when she died. I stood there in the doorway and heard it--" and she pointed toward the door leading from Nita's room into the back hall. "She loved it and used it all the time, because I gave it to her.... And _this_!"

She set the musical powder box upon the dressing-table and rushed across the room to one of the several lamps that Dundee had noticed on his first survey of the room. It was the largest and gaudiest of the collection--a huge bowl of filigreed bronze, set with innumerable stones, as large as marbles, or larger. Red, yellow and green stones that must have cast a strange radiance over the pretty head that had been wont to lie just beneath it, on the heaped lace pillows of the chaise lounge, Dundee reflected.

As if Lydia had read his thoughts, she jerked at the little chain which hung from the bottom of the big bronze bowl against the heavy metal standard.

"I gave her this--saved up for it out of my own money!" she was a.s.suring him with savage triumph in proving her point. "And she loved it so she brought it with us when we came from New York--It won't light! It was working all right last night, because my poor little girl was lying there, looking so pretty under the colored lights--"

With strong twists of her big hands Lydia began to unscrew the filigreed bronze bowl. As she lifted it off she exclaimed blankly:

"Why, look! The light bulb's--_broke_!"

But Dundee had already seen--not only the broken light bulb but the explanation of the queer noise that Flora Miles had described hysterically over and over, as "a bang or a b.u.mp." The chaise lounge stood between the two windows that opened upon the drive. And at the head of it stood the big lamp, just a few inches from the wall and only a foot from the window frame upon which Dr. Price had pencilled the point to indicate the end of the imaginary line along which the shot which killed Nita Leigh Selim had traveled.

The "bang or b.u.mp" which Flora Miles had heard had been made by the knocking of the big lamp against the wall. Undoubtedly the one who had b.u.mped into the lamp was Nita's murderer--or murderess--in frantic haste to make an escape.

_And that meant that the murderer had fled toward the back hall, not through the window in front of which he had stood, not through the door leading onto the front porch...._ A little progress, at least!

But Lydia was not through proving that she had forgiven her mistress.

She was s.n.a.t.c.hing things from Nita's clothes closet--

"See these mules with ostrich feathers?--I give 'em to my girl!... And this bed jacket? I embroidered the flowers on it with my own hands--"

Through her flood of proof Dundee heard the whir of a car's engine, then the loud banging of a car's door.... Running footsteps on the flagstone path.... Dundee reached the front door just as the bell pealed shrilly.

"h.e.l.lo, Dundee! Awfully glad I caught you before you left.... Is poor Lydia still here?"

"Come in, Mr. Miles," Dundee invited, searching with a puzzled frown the round, blond face of Tracey Miles. "Yes, Lydia is still here.... Why?"