... "Lovely Nita," as the society editor of _The Morning News_ had
called her, was--_dead_! How, why, he did not know. He had asked no
details of Penny Crain.... Funny, thorny little Penny! Loyal little
Penny!
"Judge Marshall has telephoned Police Headquarters," she had told him
breathlessly over the telephone, "but I made him let me call you as soon
as he had hung up. I wanted _our_ office to be in on this right from the
first."
Beautiful, seductive Nita Selim, almost cuddling under his arm within
three minutes of meeting him--_dead_! A vision of her black-pansy eyes,
so wide and luminous and wistful as they had looked sideways and upward
to his, pleading for him to join her after-bridge cocktail party, nearly
made him crash into a lumbering furniture van. Those eyes were luminous
no longer, could never again snap the padlocks of slave chains upon any
man--as Penny had expressed it.... Dead! And she had been so warmly
alive, even as she had retreated from him at his mention of the fact
that he was attached to the office of the district attorney as a special
investigator. What had she feared then? Was her death a payment for some
recent or long-standing crime? Or had she simply been withdrawing from
contamination with a "flat-foot"?.
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