"No. But it was the absence of fingerprints on the pivoting panel and shelf which kept me on the right track. Miles had searched the shelf for the marriage certificate which he could not know Nita had already burned. Probably, too, he had written her a few letters during their short courtship——"
"How was Sprague killed?" Sanderson interrupted impatiently.
Dundee led the way across the basement to a cubbyhole next to the coal room, entered and came out with a narrow, deep drawer of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl....
"First I must tell you that Miles got the gun out of the lamp that Saturday night, parking his car at a distance and sneaking into the house while I was talking with Lydia in the basement. We can guess that he stowed gun, silencer and electro-magnet in a pocket of his car. At any rate, he came back noisily enough a little later, to offer Lydia a job as nurse in his home. Doubtless he assured himself that she knew nothing, or poor Lydia would have gone the way of her mistress and Sprague."
"Was Sprague——?" Strawn began.
"Despite my warning," Dundee went on, refusing to be hurried, "Sprague made a demand for blackmail money upon Miles. It is possible that Sprague, also sneaking into the house that Saturday night to get his bag, saw Miles retrieve the gun. At any rate, Sprague knew that Miles was the only person among all the company who had a real motive for killing Nita Selim, and he undoubtedly blackmailed Miles as a murderer as well as a bigamist. Perhaps Miles put him off for a day or two, but on Wednesday Judge Marshall begged for a bridge game, and Miles seized the opportunity of again having the original crowd present—a sort of wall of integrity surrounding and including him. For I don't think he really wanted to involve his best friends as suspects. I believe he merely wanted to hide among them—apparently as above suspicion as they were. And there is safety in numbers, you know.... At any rate, Miles made an appointment Wednesday afternoon with Sprague, telling him that, if he would come to his home that evening, and manage to leave the bridge game while he was dummy, he would find the money he was demanding—in a drawer of the cabinet that stood between the two windows in the trophy room!"
Dundee exhibited the drawer he had taken from the basement tool room. "This drawer! I took it away from the Miles home this afternoon while everyone but a chambermaid was at the inquest. Miles did not have time to go home before going to your office, Mr. Sanderson, with the rest of the crowd you had summoned for questioning. If he had, he would have killed himself as soon as he found the incriminating drawer was missing from the cabinet."
"But—how——?" Sanderson began, frowning with bewilderment.
"Very simple!" Dundee answered. "When Sprague pulled open this drawer, which was set in the cabinet at just the height of his stomach, he received a bullet in his heart.... See these four little holes?... A vise was screwed into the bottom of the drawer so that it gripped the gun with its silencer, at an upward angle. A piece of string was tied to the trigger and fastened somehow to the underside of the drawer, so that when Sprague pulled the drawer open the string was drawn taut and the trigger pulled. Practically the same mechanism by which he tried to murder me.... The kick of the gun jerked the drawer shut. All Miles had to do when he was pretending to look for Sprague was to turn off the trophy room light by a button—one of a series on the outside wall of the hall closet. Probably it had been agreed between them that Sprague would not return to the bridge game, hence Sprague's telephoning for a taxi to wait for him at the foot of the hill, and his taking his hat and stick into the trophy room with him."
"Then Miles had from midnight till dawn to remove the gun!"