"I have--nothing--to say!" the murderer gasped thickly, then fell
heavily to the floor.
* * * * *
It was three-quarters of an hour later. District Attorney Sanderson,
Captain Strawn and Dundee were alone in the house where Nita "Selim" had
been murdered and where her husband had confessed his crimes by
committing suicide. The morgue ambulance had come and gone....
"I should have known," Dundee admitted ruefully, as the three men
entered Nita's bedroom, "that so ingenious a criminal as Tracey Miles
would not have failed to provide against the possibility of discovery.
He must have seized an opportunity to spill cyanide of potassium into
the decanter when my eyes were off him for a moment--and upon Lois
Dunlap."
"I'm glad he did," Sanderson said curtly. "But it was ghastly that poor
Lois had to know that it was she, in all innocence, who fired the shot
that killed her friend."
"It was," Dundee sighed. "But I believed that the only way I could make
Miles confess was to frighten him into thinking Flora would be killed in
the same manner.... Well, it worked!"
"Captain Strawn and I are still in the dark as to exactly how Miles
managed his wife's murder," Sanderson reminded him. "This morning you
chose to tell us nothing more than that a Hamilton man had married Nita
Leigh in New York in January, 1918, and that eight years ago, when he
saw her picture in _The Hamilton Evening Sun_, along with the story that
'Anita Lee' had committed suicide, he felt free to marry again.
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