g.... Naturally it
wouldn't occur to you that it might be an outsider, someone who had
followed Nita and her lover, Sprague, from New York, to kill her for
having left him for Sprague.... Oh, no! Certainly not!" she gibed, to
keep from bursting into tears.

"An outsider would hardly have had access to Judge Marshall's pistol and
Maxim silencer," he reminded her. "And Captain Strawn received a wire
from a ballistics expert in Chicago this morning, confirming our
conviction that the same gun which fired the bullets against Judge
Marshall's target fired the bullet which killed Nita Selim.... You've
washed that plate long enough. Let me dry it now.... And there are other
things, Penny--"

"Such as--" she challenged in her angry, husky contralto.

"Sprague admitted to me this morning, after I had confronted him with
proofs, that he sometimes slept in the upstairs bedroom--"

"I told you they were lovers!" Penny interrupted.

"--and that he slept there Friday night, after he and Nita had
quarreled. He still contends that the row was over that
movie-of-Hamilton business," Dundee went on, as if she had not spoken.
"He admitted also that Nita had told him to take his things away when he
left Saturday morning, but he says it was only because she didn't want
Ralph Hammond to find a man's belongings there if he had occasion to go
into the upstairs rooms in making his estimates for the finishing-up of
the other side. But he contends, and Lydia Carr, whom I also saw again
this morning, supports him in it, that he stayed in the house
occasionally when Nita was particularly nervous about being alone, and
that they were _not_ lovers."

"Pooh!... Don't wipe the flowers off that plate. Here's another."

"I'm inclined to say 'Pooh!', too, Penny," Dundee assured her, "but
Tracey Miles told me last night when he came to get Lydia that Nita
really seemed to be in love with Ralph--part of the time, at least."

"Nita thought enough of Dexter Sprague to send for him to come down
here, and to root her head off for him to get the job of making the
movie," Penny reminded him fiercely, making a great splashing in the
dishpan.

"Then--_you_ don't think she was in love with Ralph?" Dundee asked.

"Oh, _I don't know_!" the girl cried. "I thought so sometimes--had the
grace to hope so, anyway, since Ralph was so crazy about her."

"That's the point, Penny," Dundee told her gently. "Everyone I've talked
to this morning, including Sprague, se