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Show ! F1r GERALDg BROWN s Duke Mct'ale, private detective. Is ' n minie the wedding presents at the j Dlgelow mansion. While he Is talking with wealthy old Miss Adelaide Bigelow, they hear a shut. A moment later. Curt Vallalncourt, the bridegroom-to-be, dies In the front hallway. Mct'ale slips away before the police arrive, and hurries to Vallalnrourt's apartment to search It for i clues. There he meets Sharl Lynn, a j singer, and former wife of Vallalncourt. ! She apparently knows of the shooting, and betrays herself under MrCale's clever questioning. He notes that she wears a green dress as did the woman he saw running away from the scene. Sharl admits that she was nearby when Vallalncourt was shot. CHAPTER IX "He was a long way ahead of I me. There was another dame com- Ing up over the Hill road that meets the path he was on at the gate by j the Bigelow house." "You're sure of that, Miss Lynn? j Remember, you may be making a dangerous accusation." Rage flared up in her. She , jumped up. "Dangerous accusation," she screamed "I should say It was. She killed him that little blue-blood. blue-blood. Killed him. I tell you I saw j her. He's dead. Dead!" He crossed to her quickly, shak- levy in a manner that insured the detective of every detail. "You think then," the lieutenant queried when at last McCale was silent, "that there was an old affair af-fair between them? Something in your telling it makes me feel you are convinced that it was not too recent something flaring up again after a long time." McCale nodded. He closed his eyes a moment, then opened one, as if the other still shuttered an inner thought. "I'm sure of it." he said. "I'm sure you'll find that they may even have been man and wife at one time that they have never been out of touch with each other for long." Donlevy digested this. "Then?" "Oh sure. Lynn was back there after any letters of hers that Val-laincourt Val-laincourt may have kept. I don't think there were any there, however. how-ever. There wasn't even a stray phone number chalked on the bathroom bath-room wall, if you get what I mean." "Quite. It was exactly as if the place had been cleaned of everything every-thing by the boy himself. Kind of disappointing, what? Because from everything we know, it doesn't seem as though that kind of gent would ever destroy a compromising missive of any kind whatever." laincourt was her own chee-ild to hear her rave." "To get on with it. the Garboish Karen is quite another ticket. As masklike and cold as the Snow Queen. Concerned, but unruffled, if you know what I mean. She turned a shade whiter, if that's possible, but I got the distinct impression she'd only walk around the corpse and go on her way. A bit too controlled. con-trolled. "Victoria was next. She 'blew in with a book under her arm. H;id been browsing around the Public Library walked home." McCale pursed his lips. "I imagine imag-ine she screamed once, made an inappropriate remark and had a long hooker of whisky on it." "You are very adroit." "I've an unusual mind, I guess," said McCale facetiously. "What crack did she make?" "She looked down at the corpse in a kind of mixture of fright and sheer excitement and said, 'Then someone did have the nerve'." McCale whistled. Donlevy turned a page. "Christopher "Chris-topher Storm the guy that didn't get the girl or almost didn't, what? He probably will now. He j swears that he was walking back and forth along the lower Common path, hoping to intercept Veronica on her way home if she should come that way. She didn't show, so he came on up to the house. There's a funny thing, Duke, them all breaking up in onesies after the wedding rehearsal. Oh. well. We come now to Veronica, the bride. "Veronica drove up in a cab the last to arrive. She was strangely excited, I thought. She'd been doing some last minute shopping, saw it was getting, late and got a cab at the corner of Boylston and Tre-mont." Tre-mont." He hesitated. ". . . she said." He let his last two words hang in the air. A devastating conversational abyss yawned, for McCale made no reply. Minutes ticked away. When he did speak, it was quietly. "She is the obvious suspect, of course, Bart. The accusation of Shari Lynn; the fact that both Miss Bigelow and I saw a girl in green running away from the scene directly di-rectly after the murder. Too bad she should have picked the corner of Boylston and Tremont street to get her cab. There are very few shops there and, as you have noted, the path running from the gate opposite oppo-site the Bigelow house, over the hill by the cannon, ends at that precise point. "Hardly coincidence." McCale shrugged. "What about the weapon?" "She must have thrown it away." "Then the area in which to search for it is small. A woman cannot throw too far." "I know that." A thwarted look came over Donlevy's craggy face. "We've had a special squad hunting hunt-ing it for three hours. So far, not a sign of it. We've actually used floodlights and turned up every fallen fall-en leaf, emptied every ash barrel in the park, with no luck." Where Is the Murder Gun? "That, then, for the moment, is that." Funny, but McCale's mind seemed relieved. Thp I'aSP Wan flmtntA mnman i ing her by the shoulders. I "Take it easy. "You're in a spot 1 yourself. Whoever it was that met ; Vallnincourt at that gate had on green suit or dress." Angrily she brushed his hands from her arms, faced him. j "I know that. She had on a green i suit. I saw it. But I was a long : way off, I tell you. You're not getting get-ting me for this just because I'm wearing this green thing. I wouldn't have killed Curt. God, I loved him. I loved him." Her body sagged aWay from him. Her voice was low and harsh, was a cry of despair, as though her throat were all burned out. McCale left Sharl Lynn slumped on the couch. He knew it was useless use-less to talk to her any more. She wouldn't be of any help. He went quickly through an ornate or-nate bedroom which had a fabulous connecting bath of chromium and glass. There were two closets of expensive linen and haberdashery. He had never seen so many shirts, ties, shoes, socks, and collars outside out-side a department store. And he went through everything. But there wasn't a single thing to give him a lead, to use as evidencesnot evi-dencesnot a letter, a receipt, a bill not even a stray address. The murdered man had played it pretty smart and close to the ground. Disgruntled, he went back Into the living room and out the front door. It was nine-fifteen when the buzzer buzz-er in McCale's outer office announced an-nounced a late caller. McCale laughed, "How are you, Bart?" Donlevy Trades Some Knowledge "Ready to take you over the hurdles for sneaking out on me this afternoon." Donlevy's smile belied be-lied his growl. McCale smiled back at him steadily. He liked the man. He had the look of careful grooming not often associated with the police. You would place him at about forty; for-ty; a large man, bulking powerful and tall against the heavy door. He was of the new school of officers so "Take it easy. You're in a spot yourself." "True. There is the possibility of a safe deposit box at some bank." "That's been checked. He had a small balance at a downtown bank, but no box of any kind." McCale hunched himself over his glass for a minute, musing. "It becomes very confusing, then. For he must have got rid of everything every-thing last night or today. Before" he stared unwinkingly at the rim of his glass "just before he went to his death." A long minute went by, while the fire crackled merrily in the grate while each one of the three thought his own thoughts about this conjecture. conjec-ture. It was Donlevy who finally shrugged it away with a sour look. Duke McCale paused in front of the big man, Donlevy. The gray-haired gray-haired police inspector looked up at him and said, "I suppose in return re-turn for your information you want to be brought up to date. "That's only fair," McCale smiled. Donlevy had never once let him down in a matter of this kind, though he covered it always with an air of assumed ill grace. Suspicion Settles On Veronica "Here it is, then, for what it's worth," he said. "There was, in the Bigelow house at the time of the murder, besides Aldelaide Bigelow Bige-low and yourself, the cook, an upstairs up-stairs maid, and the butler. King. The cook was preparing dinner. The maid, Kitty Shane, was hanging hang-ing around the kitchen. They're out, obviously. No motive, no opportunity. op-portunity. King was fixing a tray of hors d'oeuvres for the usual cocktail hour. He's out for th same reason. None of them saw or heard a thing until the prolonged ringing of the bell." "About Ave minutes after the cruising car got there, I arrived. It was then about twenty minutes since Vallalncourt had been shot. Shortly after that, the family began be-gan to wander in and I questioned them in the order of their appearance. appear-ance. Sybil and Stephen, her son, came in together. She said she had walked from the church across the Gardens, stopping at Shackley's drugstore for cigarettes. She had chatted a few minutes with the clerk, whom she knew. She met Stephen as she came out of the store. He had been wandering along Charles street, just killing time, he said Likes to walk in the rain-that rain-that sort of thing." "There's a jangled lad for you, " McCale waggled a finger. "Neurotic. "Neu-rotic. Worried about his wife. Was probably out hunting her up, wherever wher-ever she was." "Sybil is no calm, strong pioneer woman either. Collapsed like a balloon bal-loon at the news. You'd think Val- widely heralded but orten ridiculed college bred, scientifically trained and carefully chosen. "I'm not really sore," he began. "I only wondered why you took a : powder when you and Adelaide Bigelow were practically the only eye witnesses to this ghastly business. busi-ness. It dawned on me very soon when I found no keys on the ! corpse that you'd gone to Vallain-court's Vallain-court's apartment to steal a march ; on me. Was that nice?" He raised an eyebrow facetiously. "Not nice, but necessary from my point of view. I've got second look before after your squad has fine-toothed a place and there's never been a hairpin left for us fel-'ows." fel-'ows." "What exactly did you find from being first this time?" "Nary a clue. The place was as clean as a bone. Beyond getting a good idea of what the lad who lived there was like, there wasn't a false whisker for my trouble." "The setup he had was quite revealing, re-vealing, wasn't it? Pure Hollywood half DeMille, half Dorothy Draper Drap-er Very suggestive. Is that all you have found?" "I found a woman." McCale never felt it accomplished accom-plished anything to hold out on Don-levy. Don-levy. It only promoted misunderstanding misunder-standing and ill feeling. It was much better to get the evidence first. That was all. He watched the quick interest flash across Donlevy's eyes before he controlled it. before he said casu- , plly, "I would call that a clue, Duke." "Well?" he questioned. "Shari Lynn, the chanteuse, at present of the Latin Quarter and The Abbey." "Umm I've heard of her." McCale went on, then, to tell of his encounter with the night club singer. He told it all, what she had said, how she had looked, bringing the complete picture before Don- tarily while they talked of pleasant-er pleasant-er things. It was nearly twelve when Donlevy stood up to go. "I rather thought," he said at the door, "that you were retained by the old lady Bigelow to get at the truth. Now, I'm sure you're hired to protect the girl." He tried to put it over with a slow smile. "Nothing of the sort has been suggested to me, I can assure you." McCale returned his smile sardonically. sardoni-cally. "That's the truth." "Okay. 1 have my duty to do. you know." "I'd find the weapon first." "Oh, sure, sure. We'll find it." The echo of Barton Donlevy's footsteps had hardly died on the stairs when McCale, standing before be-fore the dying fire, spoke. "I held out on the torn bit of letter." let-ter." "So I see, chief. You don't think the girl in green was the Veronica dame, then?" "Maybe." There was a silence for a minute, min-ute, then Rocky said. "They have not found the rod." "No." McCale's eyes lighted up as he looked quizzically at his friend and employee. He smiled as though' he knew what Rocky was thinking. "Didn't you say the gal who ran away stopped a minute to look back when she got to the cannon on the hill?" "Yes." "Well, chief," he jumped up, "you've been waiting to see if I'd think of it. Of course I have. After all. I've heard you tell it three times. That gun ought to be in the belly of that cannon." They left the office in a mad rush A cab deposited them in rapid time at the Common entrance. It whs late and any police who hid been searching for the gun were gone. 4TO BE CONTINUED) I |