ant obedience, Dundee
hung up the receiver.

"My God!" he said slowly, blankly. "Of all things--_murder at bridge_!"

CHAPTER TWO

As Special Investigator Dundee drove through the city of Hamilton at a
speed of sixty miles an hour, his way being cleared by traffic policemen
warned by the shrill official siren which served him as a horn, he had
little time to think connectedly of the fact that Nita Selim had been
murdered during a bridge game in her rented home in Primrose Meadows.

Even after the broad sleekness of Sheridan Road stretched before him he
could do little more than try to realize the shock which had numbed
him.... "Lovely Nita," as the society editor of _The Morning News_ had
called her, was--_dead_! How, why, he did not know. He had asked no
details of Penny Crain.... Funny, thorny little Penny! Loyal little
Penny!

"Judge Marshall has telephoned Police Headquarters," she had told him
breathlessly over the telephone, "but I made him let me call you as soon
as he had hung up. I wanted _our_ office to be in on this right from the
first."

Beautiful, seductive Nita Selim, almost cuddling under his arm within
three minutes of meeting him--_dead_! A vision of her black-pansy eyes,
so wide and luminous and wistful as they had looked sideways and upward
to his, pleading for him to join her after-bridge cocktail party, nearly
made him crash into a lumbering furniture van. Those eyes were luminous
no longer, could never again snap the padlocks of slave chains upon any
man--as Penny had expressed it.... Dead! And she had been so warmly
alive, even as she had retreated from him at his mention of the fact
that he was attached to the office of the district attorney as a special
investigator. What had she feared then? Was her death a payment for some
recent or long-standing crime? Or had she simply been withdrawing from
contamination with a "flat-foot"?... No! She had been _afraid_--horribly
afraid of some ulterior purpose behind his innocent courtesy in driving
Penelope Crain to Breakaway Inn.

Well, speculation now was idle, he told himself, as he noted that his
speedometer had dropped from sixty to thirty in his preoccupation. He
speeded again, but was soon forced to stop and ask his way into Primrose
Meadows. The vague directions of a farmer's son lost him nearly eight
precious minutes, during which his friend, Captain Strawn of the
Homicide Squad, might be bungling things rather badly. But at last h