"I wish you would call me Penny so I'd feel more like a person than a witness," Penny retorted thornily. "Where was I?... Oh, yes! Nita cooled right off when Lois reminded her that Polly was always abrupt like that--" and here Penny paused to grin apologetically at the girl with the masculine-looking haircut, "and then we all went into the private dining room, where Nita had ordered a perfectly gorgeous lunch, with a heavenly centerpiece of green-striped yellow orchids--Well, I don't suppose you're interested in what we ate and things like that--" she hesitated.

"Was there anything unusual in the conversation--anything like a quarrel?" Dundee prompted.

"Oh, no!" Penny protested. "Nothing happened out of the ordinary at all--No, wait! Nita received a letter by messenger--or rather a note, when we were about half through luncheon--"

There was a low, strangled-in-the-throat cry from someone. Who had uttered it Dundee could not be sure, since his eyes had been on his notebook. But what had really interrupted Penny Crain was a crash.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Pardon! Awfully sorry," Clive Hammond muttered, as he bent to pick up the fragments of a colored pottery ashtray which he and his fiancee, Polly Beale, had been sharing.

"Don't worry--about picking it up," Polly commanded in her brusque voice, but Dundee, listening acutely, was sure of a very slight pause between the two parts of her sentence.

He glanced at the couple--the tall, masculine-looking girl, lounging deep in an armchair, Clive Hammond, rather unusually good-looking with his dark-red hair, brown eyes, and a face and body as compactly and symmetrically designed as one of the buildings which had been pointed out to Dundee as the product of the young architect's genius, now resuming his seat upon the arm of the chair. His chief concern seemed to be for another ashtray, which Sergeant Turner, with a grin, produced from one of the many little tables with which the room was provided.... Rather strange that those two should be engaged, Dundee mused....

"Go on, Miss Crain," the detective urged, as if he were impatient of the delay. "About that note or letter--"

"It was in a blue-grey envelope, with printing or engraving in the upper left-hand corner," Penny went on, half closing her eyes to recapture the scene in its entirety. "Like business firms use," she amended. "I couldn't help seeing, since I sat so near Nita. She seemed startled--or, well maybe I'd better say surprised and a little sore, but she tore it open and read it at a glance almost, which is why I say it must have been only a note. But while she was reading it she frowned, then smiled, as if something had amused or--or--"

"She smiled like any woman reading a love letter," Carolyn Drake interrupted positively. "I myself was sure that one of her _many_ admirers had broken an engagement, but had signed himself, 'With all my love, darling--your own So-and-so!'"

Dundee wondered if even Carolyn Drake's husband, the carefully groomed and dignified John C. Drake, bank vice-president, had ever sent _her_ such a note, but he did not let his pencil slow down, for Penny was talking again:

"I think you are a.s.suming a little too much, Carolyn.... But let that pa.s.s. At any rate, Nita didn't say a word about the contents of the note and naturally no one asked a question. She simply tucked it into the pocket of her silk summer coat, which was draped over the back of her chair, and the luncheon went on. Then we all drove over here, and found Polly waiting in her own coupe, in the road in front of the house. She told Nita she had rung the bell, but the maid, Lydia, didn't answer, so she had just waited.

"Nita didn't seem surprised; said she had a key, if Lydia hadn't come back yet.... You see," she interrupted herself to explain to Dundee, "Nita had already told us at luncheon that 'poor, darling Lydia,' as she called her, had had to go in to town to get an abscessed tooth extracted, and was to wait in the dentist's office until she felt equal to driving herself home again in Nita's coupe.... Yes, Nita had taken her in herself," she answered the beginning of a question from Dundee.

"At what time?" Dundee queried.

"I don't know exactly, but Nita said she'd had to dash away at an unG.o.dly hour, so that Lydia could make her ten o'clock dentist's appointment, and so that she herself could get a manicure and a shampoo and have her hair dressed, so I imagine she must have left not later than fifteen or twenty minutes to ten."

"How did Mrs. Selim get out to Breakaway Inn, if she left her own car with the maid?"

"You saw her arrive with Lois," Penny reminded him.

"Nita had told us all about Lydia's dentist's appointment when she was at my house for dinner Wednesday night," Lois Dunlap contributed. "I offered to call for her anywhere she said, and take her out to Breakaway Inn in my car today. I met her, at her suggestion, in the French hat salon of the shop where she got her shampoo and manicure--Redmond's department store."

"A large dinner party, Mrs. Dunlap?" Dundee asked.

"Not large at all.... Just twelve of us--the crowd here except for Mr.

Sprague, Penny and Janet."

"Who was Mrs. Selim's dinner partner?" Dundee asked.

"That's right! He _isn't_ here!" Lois Dunlap corrected herself. "Ralph Hammond brought her and was her dinner partner."

"Thank you.... Now, Penny. You were saying the maid had not returned."

"Oh, but she had!" Penny answered impatiently. "If I'm going to be interrupted so much--. Well, Nita rang the bell and Lydia came, tying on her ap.r.o.n. Nita kissed her on the cheek that wasn't swollen, and asked her why she hadn't let Polly in. And Lydia said she hadn't heard the bell, because she had dropped asleep in her room in the bas.e.m.e.nt--dopey from the local anesthetic, you know," she explained to Dundee.

"I--see," Dundee acknowledged, and underlined heavily another note in his scrawled shorthand.

"So Lydia took our hats and summer coats and put them in the hall closet, and then followed Nita, who was calling to her, on into Nita's bedroom. We thought she either wanted to give directions about the makings for the c.o.c.ktails and the sandwiches, or to console poor Lydia for the awful pain she had had at the dentist's, so we didn't intrude.

We made a dive for the bridge tables, found our places, and were ready to play when Nita joined us. Nita and Karen--"

"Just a minute, Penny.... Did any of you, then or later, until Mrs.

Marshall discovered the tragedy, go into Mrs. Selim's bedroom?"

"There was no need for us to," Penny told him. "There's a lavatory with a dressing-table right behind the staircase. I, for one, didn't go into Nita's room until after Karen screamed."

There was a chorus of similar denials on the part of every woman present. At Dundee's significant pressing of the same question upon the men, he was met with either laconic negatives or sharply indignant ones.

"All right, Penny. Go ahead, please."

"I was going to tell you how we were seated for bridge, if that interests you," Penny said, rather tartly.

"It interests me intensely," Dundee a.s.sured her, smiling.

"Then it was this way," began Penny, thawing instantly. "Karen and Nita, Carolyn and I were at this table," and she pointed to the table nearer the hall. "Flora, Polly, Janet and Lois were at the other. We played at those tables all afternoon. We simply pivoted at our own table after the end of each rubber. When Nita became dummy--"

"Forgive me," Dundee begged, as he interrupted her again. "I'd like to ask a question ... Mrs. Dunlap, since you were at the other table, perhaps you will tell me what your partner and opponents were doing just before Mrs. Selim became dummy."

Lois Dunlap pressed her fingertips into her temples, as if in an effort to remember clearly.

"It's--rather hard to think of bridge now, Mr. Dundee," she said at last. "But--yes, of course I remember! We had finished a rubber and had decided there would be no time for another, since it was so near 5:30--"

"That last rubber, please, Mrs. Dunlap," Dundee suggested. "Who were partners, and just when was it finished?"

"Flora--" Lois turned toward Mrs. Miles, who had sat with her hands tightly locked and her great haggard dark eyes roving tensely from one to another--"you and I were partners, weren't we?... Of course! Remember you were dummy and I played the hand? You went out to telephone, didn't you?... That's right! I remember clearly now! Flora said she had to telephone the house to ask how her two babies--six and four years old, they are, Mr. Dundee, and the rosiest dumplings--. Well, anyway, Flora went to telephone--"

"In the little foyer between the main hall and Mrs. Selim's room?"

"Yes, of course," Lois Dunlap answered, but Dundee's eyes were upon Flora Miles, and he saw her naturally sallow face go yellow under its too-thick rouge. "I played the hand and made my bid, although Flora and I had gone down 400 on the hand before," Lois continued, with a rueful twinkle of her pleasant grey eyes. "When the score was totted up, I found I'd won a bit after all. Our winnings go to the Forsyte Alumnae Scholarship Fund," she explained.

"Yes, I know," Dundee nodded. "And then--?"

"Polly asked the other table how they stood, and Nita said, 'One game to go on this rubber, provided we make it....' Karen was dealing the cards then, and Nita was looking very happy--she'd been winning pretty steadily, I think--"

"Pardon, Mrs. Dunlap.... How did the players at your table dispose of themselves then--that is, immediately after you had finished playing the last hand, and Mrs. Marshall was dealing at the other table?"

Lois screwed up her forehead. "Let me think--I know what _I_ did. I went over to watch the game at the other table, and stayed there till Tracey--Mr. Miles--came in for c.o.c.ktails. I can't tell you exactly what the other three did."

There was a strained silence. Dundee saw Polly Scale's hand tighten convulsively on Clive Hammond's, saw Janet Raymond flush scarlet, watched a muscle jerk in Flora Miles' otherwise rigid face.

Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "I am going to make what will seem an absurd request," he said tensely. "I am going to ask you all--the women, I mean--to take your places at the bridge tables. And then--" he paused for an instant, his blue eyes hard: "I want to see the death hand played exactly as it was played while Nita Selim was being murdered!"