He had said then: "The person who killed Nita Selim, was so well known
to her, and his--or her--presence in this room so natural a thing that
she paid no attention to his or her movements and was concentrating on
the job of powdering her very pretty face."
And he had said further, in face of the disappearance of the gun and in
explanation of the fact that all twelve of these people had immediately
protested to Strawn that they had heard no shot:
"This was a premeditated murder, of course. The Maxim silencer--unless
they are all lying about not hearing a shot--proves that. Silencers are
damned hard to get hold of, but people with plenty of money can manage
most things."
And as Dexter Sprague had talked on, more and more glibly, Dundee had
suddenly found an explanation which fitted his own argument with such
perfection that he wondered, naively, if he were perhaps gifted with
clairvoyance.
Of all these twelve people, whom he had questioned so relentlessly, only
Dexter Sprague could easily have come into possession of a Maxim
silencer. He had dilated proudly upon the fact that he had been an
assistant director at the Altamont Studios on Long Island. And the
Altamont company had recently finished making a series of "underworld"
motion pictures--crook dramas featuring gunmen with "rods" made eerily
noiseless by Maxim silencers.
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