... You
said then you knew who the man was but you would not even tell us how
you knew--"
"Because I had very little actual proof then," Dundee answered. "As to
who he was, the salient clue had been staring me in the face the whole
time, but it was not until I was fooling with a set of anagrams last
night, idly spelling out the names of all the men who _might_ have
married her and then murdered her, that I saw it--"
"Saw _what_?" Strawn demanded irritably.
"That Selim is simply Miles spelled backwards," Dundee explained.
"Possibly because he considered it the sophisticated thing to do, Miles
used an assumed name at the party at which he met Nita Leigh--and
married her under that name shortly afterward. Even the first name,
'Mat', by which she knew him, was only his initials reversed."
"Simple--but clever," Sanderson commented.
"Just as were all of Miles' schemes after Nita, egged on by Sprague,
turned up in Hamilton to demand 'back alimony' as the price of her
silence.... But let me show you how he killed his wife."
He strode to the big bronze lamp. "It took me less than an hour today to
reconstruct the death machine so that it would be almost exactly as it
was when Miles finished his work just before 2:30 on Saturday, May
24--and as it remained until he had an opportunity to come back here and
dismantle it.
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