But whether he was right or wrong, Dundee determined to give his hunch a chance. He went into the over-ornate bedroom in which Nita Leigh Selim had been murdered—shot through the back as she sat at her dressing-table powdering her face. If her murder had been accomplished by mechanical means, how had it been done? There was no hot-air register here....
From the dressing-table Dundee walked to the window, upon whose pale-green frame there was still the tiny pencil mark which Dr. Price had drawn, to indicate the end of the path along which the bullet had traveled, provided it had traveled so far. Nothing here to aid in a mechanical murder—
But in a flash Dundee changed his mind. For just slightly above the pencil mark there was a small dent in the soft painted pine of the window frame.
And before his mind could frame words and sentences he thought he saw how Nita Leigh had been murdered.
Nothing here?... Not now, because he himself had taken the lamp to the courthouse for safe-keeping.
He saw it clearly in imagination—that bronze floor-lamp which Lydia Carr had given to Nita Leigh, its big round bowl studded with great jewels of colored glass. And in recalling every detail of the lamp he saw what he had dismissed as of no importance at the time, in the excitement of finding that the lamp's bulb had been shattered by the "bang or bump" which Flora Miles had described. One of the big glass jewels had been missing, leaving an unsightly hole.
No wonder there had been a "bang or bump" hard enough to dent the frame of the window! For if his hunch was correct, the gun, wedged into the big bowl, with the silencer slightly protruding from the jewel-hole, had "kicked," just as it had kicked an hour before, when it had dislodged itself from the hole in the hot-air register and clattered down the big pipe to the heat reservoir of the furnace.
That the big lamp, when he, following Strawn, had first examined the scene of Nita's murder, had not stood in front of the window frame, did not dampen Dundee's excitement in the least. After Karen Marshall's scream that room had been filled with excited people, who had rushed about, looking out of the window for the murderer and doing all the other things which terror-stricken people do in such a crisis. No, the murderer—or murderess—had found no difficulty in shifting the big lamp one foot nearer the chaise longue, to the place it had always occupied before.
But—how had the gun been fired from the lamp? Electrically? Another picture flashed into Dundee's mind. He saw himself stooping, on Monday afternoon, to see if the plug of the lamp's cord had been pulled from the socket, saw it again as it was then—nearly out, so that no current could pass from the baseboard outlet under the bookcase into the bronze lamp. How far from the truth his conclusion that Monday had been!
But what was the real truth?