HomeMy WebLinkAboutZurich Herald, 1933-04-13, Page 2Murder at BrI
By ANNE AUSTIN.
e
o-o-m-a•a•
r•@•IVO .4.1110-4,
SYNOPSIS. the front door unlocked when he came
Investigating the murders of Juanita
Selina and Dexter Sprague, who he
thinks were partners in blackmail,
"i3unn.ie" Dundee learns that Juanita
Leigh was married to Matthew Selim in
1918, was soon deserted, but apparently
not divorced. From Serena Hart, stage
star, .he learn:; t'.at N..a's picture was
printed with a stor• about the suicide
of Anita Lee.
Dundee wires to Penny Crain, district
suicide story secretary,
printedein Hamiltt on.
After this s_ory appeared four of Dun-
dee's possible suspects married—Peter
then same year, and Judge11Marshall,, own n-
er of the d2..th weapon, almost seven
years later.
Nita deposited 510,000 in cash in Ham-
ilton which Dundee considers "back ali-
riedya'frogain,mhlnking her dead. husband who hDundee,
on his way home in response to a wire
from the district attorney, finds he has
made ar
wh ch have probably putrevelations tbetheemrderer
en his guard. At home he finds a note
ender his door,
in last night?" Dundee asked. "Does
he admi' it?"
"Yassuh," Belle told him sulkily.
"Thanks' Belle. That will be all
now," and Dundee did a great deal
to dispel the chambermaid's gloom by
presenting her with a dollar bill.
When she had game the detective
,read the note again, then looked at
it and its envelope more closely. They
had a strangely familiar look.. • .
Suddenly he jerked open e drawer
of his desk, on -which his portable
typewriter stood, selected a sheet of
plain white bond, and rolled it into
the machine. Noiselessly he tapped
out a copy of the strange, taunting
message.
Yes! The lefthand margin was
identical, the typing and its degre
CHAPTER XLV. of blackness were identical, and the
Dundee set his traveling paper on which he had made the copy
Bonnie as that on which
was exactly the same
the original had been written.
The truth flashed into his mind. It
eras no coincidence that he had a copy
of the very ook to which his un-
known correspondent referred him.
For the note had been written in this
very room, on stationery conveniently
at hand, on the noiseless typewriter
which had been far more considerate
about not betraying the intruder than
had the parrot whose slumbers had
been. disturbed.
"But why did my unknown friend
risk arrest as a burglar if he wanted
to give me an honest tip?" Dundee
remarked aloud to the parrot, who
croaked an irrelevant answer:
"Bad Penny! Bad Penny!"
"I'm afraid, niy dear Watson, that
these words will not be so helpful in
this case," Dundee assuted his par-
rot absently. "Another question,
Cap'n—why did the unknown bother
to take my `Who's Who' out of the
bookcase and put it on that particular
shelf?"
Warily, for his scalp was prickling
with a premonition of danger, Dundee
crossed the room to the shelf, but his
hand did not reach out for the red
book, which might have been expected
to solve one problem, at least. "Why
the shelf?" he asked himself again.
The shelf, with its drapery, offered
no answer in itself, for it held nothing
except the red book, a Chinese bowl,
and a humidor of tobacco. And be-
neath the shelf was nothing but the
old-fashioned register, the opening
covered with a screwed -on metal
screen which was a mass of big holes
to permit the escape of hot air when
the furnace was going in the winter.
Suddenly Dundee stooped and star••
ed with eyes that were widened with
excitement and a certain amount of
horror. Thn he rose, and, standing
far to one side, picked up the fat
volume which lay on the shelf. As
he had expected, a bullet whizzed
noiselessly across the room and buried
itself in the plaster of the wall oppo-
site—a bullet which would have plow-
ed through his own heart if he had
obeyed his first impulse and gone di-
rectly to the shelf to obey the instruc-
tions in the note.
But more had happened than the
,rhizzing flight of a bullet through one
of the holes of the hot-air register.
The "Who's Who" had been jerked
almost out of Dundee's hand before
he had lifted the heavy volume many
inches from the shelf. Coincidental
with the disappearance of a bit of
white string which had. been pinned
to a. thin page of the book was a
metallic clatter, followed swiftly by
the faint sound of a bump far below.
Dropping "Who's Who" to the floor,
Dundee flung open his living room
door and raced down three flights of
stairs. He brought up, panting, at
the door of the basement. It was not
locked and in another minute he was
standing before the big hot-air fur-
nace. With strength augmented by
excitement, Dundee tugged and tore
at one of the pipes until he had dis-
lodgel. it. Then, thrusting his hand
into the heat reservoir, he groped
until he found what he had known
must be there—Judge Marshall's
automatic, with the Maxine silencer
screwed upon the end of its short
nose.
At last he held in his hands the
weapon with which Nita Leigh Selim
and Dexter Sprague had been mur-
dered.
The ingeniousness of his own at-
teinpted murder inoveii him to Stich
profound admiration that he could
scarcely feel resentment. If, in the
excitement of hunting for a promised
clue, he had gone directly to the shelf,
standing in :front of the hole in the
register into which the end of the
silencer had been jammed, so that it
showed scarcely at all, even to eves
lcokin; for it, he would now have been
dead. And the gun and silencer,
after hurtling down the big hot-air
pipe behind the register, could have
lain hidden for months, even years,. in
the heat reservoir of the furnace.
With the weapon carefully wrapped
his handkerchief, Dundee went up in interrerillg with the liberty of 0.0 -
the stairs ab. sat as swiftly as he tion c,f any hind of their number,. 18
had gone doal 'cies meeting no oAt self•pratectlon,--'-3ob:n StUalit Mill, ,
bag upon a chair and picked up the
sealed envelope which bore no other
,Inscription than his name. The note
It contained was on paper as plain
as the envelope, was typed and un-
signed:
"If Special Investigator Dundee
will consult page 410 of the latest
WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA, he will
find a tip which should aid him ma-
terialitiy in solving the two murder
cases which seem to be proving too
difficult for his inexperience."
A wry grin at the unfriendly gibe
of his anonymous correspondent was
just twisting his lips when a double
knock, with which he had become very
familiar, sounded on the living room
door, which he had not completely
closed.
"Come in, Belle!"
A morose, slaek-mouthed mulatto
girl in ancient felt slippers sidled
into the room.
"Howdy, Mistah Dundee," Belle
greeted him Iistlessly. "You got back
like the paper said you would, didn't
yuh? And I ain't sayin' I ain't glad!
Dat parrot o' yoahs is a nuisance--
nippin' at mah fingahs, an' screechin'
his fool head off. Mistah Wilson lit
into me dis mawnin 'cause I forgot
to put Cap'n's covah on his cage las'
night."
"Just tell Mr. Wilson that for once
he's wrong. You did not forget to
rover Cap'e's cage, Belle. Look!"
The girl's dull black eyes bulged.
as they took in the cage, completely
swathed in a. square of dark silk.
"Mistah Dundee!" she ejaculated.
"I didn't put dat covah on dat bird's
cage! An' neithah did Miss' Bowen,
'cause she been laid up with rheumatic;
eveh since you lef', an' eveh las' en-
durin' think in. dis of house has been
let' fo' me to do!"
"Then I suppose the indignant Mr.
Wilson came up and covered Cap'n
himself," Dundee suggested, crossing
the room to the bookcase.
"Hiro?" Belle snorted. "How he
gonna get in hyer widout no key?
`Sides, he'd a-tol' me if'n—"
"Belle, how many tines must I ask
you not to misplace my things?" Dun-
dee cut in irritably, for he was tired
of the discussion and angry that his
ec.py of "Who's Who" was missing
from its customary place in the book -
ease.
"Ivte? ... I ain't teched none o'
yoah things, cep'n to dus' 'em an!
lay 'em down whar I fount 'em," Belle
retorted.
Dundee looked about the room, then
his eyes alighted upon the missing
book, lying upon a shelf that.extend-
ed across the top of an old-fashioned
het -air register.
"Belle, tell me the truth, and I shall
wet be angry: did you put that red
book on that shelf?" Dundee asked.
"Nossuh! I ain't teched it!"
"And you did not put the coven:
over my parrot's cage, although I had
tipped you well to feed Cap'n and
cover him at night," Dundee said
severely.
"1 gotta heap o' wuk to do—"
"And you say that Mr. Wilson left
A New Role
Jackie Coogan, who made a
fortune as juvenile movie star, is
now Jarom, the leper boy, in
Santa Clara university's passion
play.
on the way to hie
floor.
"My most heartfelt thanks to you,
Cap'n!" he greted his parrot. "If you
had not squawked last night and so
frightened the murderer that he made
the vital error of covering your cage,
I should never have annoyed you
again with my Sherlock ruminations
on cases which do not interest you in
the slightest"
The parrot cackled.• hoarsely, but
Dundee paid him scant attention. ile
picked up the now harmless "Who's
Who" and turned to page 410, a cor-
ner of which had disappeared with
the •string which was still fastened
to the hair-trigger hammer of the
Colt's.32—very clever and very
simple! The murderer of two people
and the .vould-Le murderer of a third
had had only to unscrew the metal
cover of the register, wedge the end
of the silencer into one of the. many
holes, replace the screws, and paste
the end of the string to a page of the
book he hacl selected as the one most
likely to appeal to a detective as a
clue source... .
No, wait! He had had to do more:
Dundee bent and examined the inetai
cover of the register.. The circtinifer-
eree of the hole the .murderer `had
chosen as the one whicrould. be di-
rectly in front of • iYtmdeb's heart
gleamed brightly. 1t1itid"-beea neces-
sary to enlarge it considerably. The
murderer had left: a trace after all!
But the book was open in Dundee's
hands and -his eyes rapidly scanned
page 410. And he found what the
murderer had not expected him to live
to read, but which he had counted on
as an explanation of the note which
the police would have puzzled over,
if all had gone well with his scheme.
rooms on the top
NEIGHBORS TALK
Long -Lost Quarry
Of Egypt Found
Army Patrol Happens Upon
the Diorite Source, Un-
known for Some 3,500
Cairo.—Quite by accident an arch-
aeological 'discovery was made early
last Summer in Zipper Egypt which
has just now, after further investiga-
tion, resulted in the identification of
a diorite quarry of the Old and Middle
Kingdoms of ancient Egypt—lost 3,500
years—the location of which had been
hitherto unknown to Egyptologists and
geologists, although diligently sought
in recent times.
It was last June that a car patrol
of the Egyptian Army, accompanied
by El-Farik Sir Charlton Spin!cs Pas-
ha, commander of the Egyptian Amry,
while passing through an unsurveyed
part of the Western Desert about forty
miles northwest of Abou Simbel, no-
ticed two cairns on a ridge. They ap-
peared to be much larger than the
usual desert landmarks of that type.
Closer investigation revealed two most
interesting inscribed stone blocks at
the foot of one of the cairns.
These were sent to the Cairo
Museum for further examination, One
bore the name of the little-known King
Dadefre of the fourth dynasty, no
monument of whom had been known
hitherto south of Sakkara. The other
block, made of almost jet black dio-
rite, and very badly weathered, was a
record of an expedtion. sent out under
King Amenemhet II of the twelfth
dynasty to bring mentat stone from
the desert. Mentat is the ancient Egy-
ptian name for the dark granite of As-
suan.
"I am employed in a theatre and it
is a problem to make ends meet, as
I help support my mother and sisters.
I like to dress well but haven't very
much to spend on clothes. To give the
wrpearanee of variety to my slender
wardrobe I change the color of a dress
or stockings as soon as the things be -
coil a faded, I always use Diamond
Dyes for the wr,r t using thein asdyes
for ;dr.esse. anti ,as tints for stockings.
I have always gotten' such perfect re-
sults that our neighbors talk about
the great number of new things 1 have.
iearned,1 baht I?lamdnd,Dyes from
.our wardrobe inistreso. She •s0s'511d
has tried, all the dyes on the market
britforte.71Ast i"spliai1 work and
0 '
are Sposy to is -•vis' iaiamoncl Mos..
I uoer tans t41ey.Are the world's most
I;opular dyes i --laid` they deserve to be."
L. P., Montreal.
ISSUE. No. 14—'33
ORANGE PE O BLEND
"Fresh from Rile Ciatrcl mars
Sir Christopher Wren
Visits Paris
Writers who have failed to realize
the importance of this visit of Wren
to Paris at the impressionable age of
thirty-three, when his faculties for ab -
,sorption were never higher—and most
of them have failed to realize it—have
host the real key to Wren's greatness.
I doubt if it has been realized to
the full, even yet, how -important this
short visit of sx months was to Wren
and how greatly it affected his after
life. As soon as he set foot on French
soil he seems. to have been caught by
the sight of a few French domes and
to have been filled with creative ideas.
There was plenty of Flamboyant
Gothic for his admiration if he chose
to lavish it; he seems to have passed
it by.
The fame of St. Peter's had begun
to affect Parisian architects and build-
ers; the church of St. Paul and St.
Louis, close to the Place des Vosges,
for example, attracted Wren's eye
probably no less than Ste. Marie cies
Feuillantnes; that he was deeply im-
pressed with the domes of the Sor-
Bonne and the Val -de -Grace is quite
certain. The facade of the Sorbonne
gave Wren something to ponder over,
and there is little doubt that he made
a mental note of the saucer -donees of
the interior, for those with which he
subsequently decorated his vaulting at
St. Paul's are very similar in appear-
ance.
I point again to Oxford. His sur-
roundings there surely should have set
up in him a desire to express himself
architectually, for no city in England
has more to offer hm. He had never
seen a dome worth calling a dome un-
til he visited France; spires he had
seen in plenty. So that his English
surroundings in the most English of
all. English cities had not captured his
spirit, He lived in a city of spires,
but he devoted his time to the study
of the heavens.
Then we find him taking a short
holiday in France, and we also find
him combining his classic thoughts
with what France had to show him of
classical nature. His imagination was
Long -Sought Diorite Quarry
After careful study, it was pointed.
out by Mr. Engelbach, director of the
Cairo Museum, that it is not very like-
ly that the ancient Egyptions would
have sent an expedition far into the
desert for something that could be ob-
tained more easily in the Nile Valley.
It is believed that the term mentat
might have been used to designate all
the dark hard rocks of the south, and
that, therefore, this might be the site
of the diorite quarry of the Old and
Middle Kingdoms which has been so
eagerly sought by Egyptologists and
geologists.
Several weeks ago Mr. Engelback
himself visited the site and almost im-
mediately became convinced that the
lost quarries had indeed been found—
outcrops of magnificent stone showing
in the afternoon light as a deep blue
against the red granite boulders.
Every variety of diorite is to be found
there, from the dark green and black
stone used for the Old Kingdon Royal
statues to the white stone, speckled
with black, so often used for bowls
and vases.
Gut Boulders in Quantity
It seems that there was no main.
quarry, but from the chips and other
indications it appears that the Egyp-
tians dug out boulders until they ob-
tained one of the required size free
from flaws. Here and there on the
desert large blocks were observed
showing traces of rough dressing, but
all appear to have been abandoned be-
cause of flaws. A ramp was also found,
made of the same stone, about ten
yards long and a yard and rehalf high
at the end, by which blocks-couldhave
been rolled up to load them on to a
sled. or wagon.
Near the cairns and here and there
among the outcrops were the remains
of the huts used by the workmen, in
which were potsherds, all of the Mid-
dle Kingdom: The only other docu-
ment discovered here was a block
bearing the name of King Isesi (Assa.)
of the fifth dynasty.
(To be continued.)
True Service
(Written in the album of a child)
Small service is true service while it
lasts;
Of friends, however humble, score not
' one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dew -drop from
the sun.
—Wordsworth, in "Yarrow Revisited."
Gems from Life's Scrap -book
Thought
".A. single grateful thought towards
heaven is the most perfect prayer."---
Lessing.
There is nothing either good or bad
but thinking makes it so."—Shake-
speare.
"Whatever guides thought spiritually
benefits mind and body."—Mary Baker
Eddy.
"Thought takes man out of servitude
into freedom."—Emerson.
"The value of a thought cannot be
told."—Bailey.
"Growing thought makes grewiug
revelation."—George Elliott.
"The happiness of your life depends
upon the quality of your thoughts,"
Marcus Antoniuus.
Welsh Bards Help
In Teaching Jobless
fired from the first hour he set foo!
in Paris. However general his thoughtf
may have been at first, the desire tc
specialize was quickly paramo'tnt
This was Renaissance architecture ilt
was admiring; there was Gothc, ton
but he had seen enough and bad neve:
wished to concern himself -with. it
Now he had seen a style of buildiw
that appealed to him as being a fore
in which. he could express himself, hie
whole outlook on art instantly undr,e,
went -a change.
- That is what I feel so `many writer.
have missed. They have not realized
that, without any preconceived ideaE
worth calling such, Christopher'Wren
suddenly found himself face to race
with something that made an architect
of him in a second of time. The sight
of a few clones not very wonderful
doilies, but domes—brought: about a
climax in his artistic career. — From
"Sir Chistepher Wren, His Life and
Times," by C. Whitaker -Wilson. (New
York: McBride).
My Star
All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue:
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red
blue.
Then it stops like a bird;
flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with
the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a
world?
Mine has opened its soul to me:
therefore I love it.
—Robert Browning, "Poems."
Holyhead, Wales. --. Welsh bards,'
who are honored for achievements in
the arts at, the annual Eisteddfodau,
al'e rallying to instruct and entertain
the jobless here. Classes and lectures
in both the Welsh and English lang-
uage are drawing numbers of eager
listeners.
Lectures include .. "The World
Crisis," "The Ideals of Edueation,"
"Poetry," "Sopie of the dements of
Humor in lTh glish Literature" and
"The History, of Civilization."
The sole eii 1 fee which mankind are
warranted, individually or collectively,
'3N
and the
like a
Air Freedom Urged
By ritish Expert
London.—A greater degree of in
ternational freedom of passage fol
commercial aircraft is essential tc
the progress of civic aviation, Mr. G,
E. Woods Humphrey, managing diree-
t0i• of Imperial Airways,• told a gath-
ering of members of the institute of
Transport here recently,
There could be only two possible
reasons for obstructing freedom of
international flight, he said — first,
fear of the misuse of civil aircraft
for military purposes, and, second,
material gain might result from hold:
ing an international line up to some •
sort of ransom.
Women In Majority
Swedish Census Shows
Stockholm. — There are now 1029
women to every 1000 men in Sweden;
according to latest figures. The pro
portion in Stockholm ,is 1240 womel
to 1000 men. That is a lack of oui
man for every fifth woman,
AFIEIS B Ei
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C8
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Do not hesitate to take
Aspirin tablets because of this
speed. Their quick action is
due to the fact they dissolve
immediately.They are p erfec tly
safe. They do not depress the
heart.
That's the .beauty of a
remedy like Aspirin. Anyone
can take it, as often as there is
any need of its comfort. In
sufficient quantity to get com-
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.Aspirin every day in the year
without ill effects.
When you want relief from
headaches, colds, neuralgia,
or neuritis, periodic pains, etc.,
stick to Aspirin. You know
what it will do, and you know
what you are taking.
The new reduced price os
bottles of 100 tablets leaves no
reason for experimenting with
any substitute for relieving
pain. Insist on Aspirin.
LIZ
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