death.

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.

A bit of information he had picked up in a motion picture magazine had
hurtled into the logical chain of Dundee's reasoning: assistant
directors were in charge of "props"; it was their business to see that
no article needed for the production of a picture was lost or missing
when the director needed it. Dexter Sprague had said that he had
"dropped everything" to come when Nita Selim wired him of the Chamber of
Commerce project to make a "booster" movie of Hamilton.

Perhaps he _had_ dropped everything. But--_had he hesitated long enough
to pick up a Maxim silencer and a blunt-nosed automatic_? And was the
"row" which Sprague had been so glibly explaining away an ancient one--a
row so deadly that, when Nita Selim had refused to heed his written
warning, her murder had become necessary?

It was with all this in mind that Bonnie Dundee flung his challenge: "I
must conclude that you are all lying or that Nita Selim was killed with
a gun equipped with a Maxim silencer."

And his eyes, terrible with their command that the weakling should break
and confess, were upon Dexter Sprague.