Straight down the main hall he went
and into the little foyer between the hall and Nita's bedroom. He
snatched up the telephone and 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 the murderer had been given 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--Dundee's case--the impossibility of the
murder's 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.
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