When Lydia and Carraway had left together, Dundee rose and addressed the district attorney:
"I'm going out to the Selim house now, to look for that secret hiding place where Roger Crain kept his securities, and which Judge Marshall evidently displayed to Nita, as one of the charms of the house when she 'rented' it."
"Why not simply telephone Judge Marshall and ask him where and what it is?" Sanderson asked reasonably.
"Do you think he'd tell?" Dundee retorted. "The old boy's no fool. Even if he didn't kill Nita himself and hide the gun there, my question would throw him into a panic of fear lest one of his best friends had done just that.... No, I'll find it myself, if it's all right with you!"
But after a solid hour of hard and fruitless work, Bonnie Dundee was forced to admit ruefully to himself that his parting words to the district attorney might have been the youthful and empty boast that Sanderson had evidently considered them.
For nowhere in the house Roger Crain had built and in which Nita Selim had been murdered could the detective find anything remotely resembling a concealed safe. The two plainclothesmen whom Strawn had detailed to guard the house and to continue the search for the missing gun and silencer looked on with unconcealed amusement as Dundee tapped walls, floors and ceilings in a house that seemed to be exceptionally free of architectural eccentricities.
Finally Dundee grew tired of their ribald comments and curtly ordered them to make a new and exhaustive search of the unused portions of the basement—those dark earth banks, with their overhead networks of water and drain pipes, heavily insulated cables of electric wires, cobwebby rafters and rough shelves holding empty fruit jars and liquor bottles—which contrasted sharply with the neatly ceiled and cement-floored space devoted to furnace, laundry and maid's room. Dundee himself had given those regions only a cursory inspection with his flashlight, for it was highly improbable that Nita Selim would have made use of a secret hiding place for her jewelry and valuable papers, if that hiding place was located in such dark, awesome surroundings.
No. The hiding place, if it really existed—and it must exist—had been within easy reach of Nita dressing and bedecking herself for a party, or Lydia Carr could not have been kept in complete ignorance of its location.
With that conviction in mind, Dundee returned to Nita's bedroom, to which he had already devoted at least half an hour. Nothing in the big clothes closet, where Flora Miles had been hiding while Nita was being murdered. No secret drawers in desk or dressing-table or bedside table. No false bottom in boudoir chair or chaise longue.... He had even taken every book out of the four-shelf bookcase which stood against the west wall near the north corner of the room, and had satisfied himself that no book was a leafless fake.
His minute inspection of the bathroom and back hall, upon which Nita's bedroom opened, had proved as fruitless, although he had removed every drawer from the big linen press which stood in the hall, and measured spaces to a fraction of an inch. As for the walls, they were, except for the doors, unbroken expanses of tinted plaster.