r skirt. But as she spoke, her brown eyes, enormous in her white face,
were upon Dundee, who had stepped silently from behind the portieres.

"Yes. I'll marry you, Ralph!... You may come in now, Mr. Dundee!"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was nearly nine o'clock Monday morning, and Special Investigator
Dundee sat alone in the district attorney's office, impatiently awaiting
Sanderson's arrival. Coroner Price, with the approval of Captain Strawn
of the Homicide Squad, had set the inquest into the murder of Juanita
Leigh Selim for ten o'clock, and there was much that Dundee wished to
say to the district attorney before that hour arrived.

When the thoroughly tired and dispirited young detective had returned to
his apartment late Sunday afternoon, after having seen Ralph Hammond
completely exonerated of any possible complicity in the murder of Nita
Selim, he had found a telegram from the district attorney, filed in
Chicago:

"CALLED CHICAGO SERIOUS ILLNESS OF MOTHER STOP RETURNING HAMILTON
EIGHT TEN MONDAY MORNING STOP SEE BY PAPERS YOU ARE ON SELIM JOB
STOP GOOD BUT WATCH YOUR STEP--SANDERSON"

Well--and Dundee grinned ruefully--he had been on the job all right, but
would Sanderson consider that he had "watched his step"? At any rate, he
had been thorough, he congratulated himself, as he weighed the big
manilla envelope containing his own transcription of the copious
shorthand notes he had taken during the first hours of the
investigation. A smaller envelope held Nita's tell-tale checkbook, her
amazing last will and testament, and the still more startling note she
had written to Lydia Carr. The last two Dundee had retrieved from
Carraway only this morning, after having submitted them to the
fingerprint expert on Sunday.

Carraway's report had rather dashed him at first, for it proved that no
other hands than Nita's--and his own, of course--had touched either
envelope or contents. But he was content now to believe that Nita
herself had unsealed the envelope she had inscribed, "To Be Opened in
Case of My Death".... Why?... Had she been moved by an impulse to give a
clue to the identity of the person of whom she stood in fear, but had
stifled the impulse?

Strawn had said, too, that the little rosewood desk had been in a fairly
orderly condition, before his big, official hands had clawed through it
in search of a clue or the gun itself.... Well, Strawn had been properly
chagrined when Dundee had produ