"Yes. Some time during the night, after Flora was asleep with a sedative, which she badly needed because of the quarrel—a genuine one—which she and Tracey had had over Sprague—Miles slipped down to the trophy room and removed the gun and vise. But he could not remove the holes the screws had made, although he did cover the bottom of the usually empty drawer with old pamphlets on the care and feeding of dogs.... By the way, the chambermaid told me that her master spent about half an hour before dinner that Thursday night in the trophy room, 'going over his fishing tackle'.... His next concern was to make the murder jibe completely with Captain Strawn's theory of a gunman who had trailed his quarry to the Miles home and shot him through the window. The window was already open, but the screen had to be raised, too, and Sprague's fingerprints had to be on the nickel catches by which the screen curtain is raised or lowered. Of course Sprague had not touched the screen——"
"Do you mean to say he lugged the corpse to the window and lifted it up so that he could press the stiff fingers upon the nickel catches?" Sanderson asked with a shudder. "What a fiend——"
"No," Dundee assured him. "That was unnecessary. He simply removed the curtain screen, which is so designed that it can be taken down and put up as easily as a window shade. He carried the screen—his own hands protected by gloves, I suppose—to where Sprague's right hand lay palm upward, on the floor, and pressed the thumb and forefinger against the catches, making fingerprints all right, but they were reversed—as I discovered when it occurred to me to examine the photographs of Sprague's fingerprints in Carraway's office today. Miles could not turn the stiff hand over without bruising the dead flesh; consequently the print of the forefinger was on the catch where the thumb would normally have left its mark—and vice versa.... Before I forget it, I should also tell you that I found a master key hanging on the keyboard in the butler's pantry. Big houses, with their many locks, are usually provided with a master key, and Miles undoubtedly used that one to gain entrance into my room after midnight Saturday morning."
"Where did you find the vise?" Strawn asked.
"In the tool chest right here, where he had also placed the reamer he had bought. The vise probably belonged to Miles originally, but he was taking no chances on anything's being found in his possession, provided we tumbled to how the two crimes were committed.... The reamer he must have brought out here after he used it to enlarge the hole in my hot-air register after midnight Sunday morning. It is possible he did his cleaning up job here at the same time. It was safe enough to have lights on, since the house is so isolated and there had been no guard here since Thursday."
"Well—" Sanderson drew a deep breath. "He was a far cleverer man than any of us suspected. The mechanical arrangements were absurdly easy to rig up, in all three cases, but the thinking of them——. It is a pity Nita did not fear him as she feared Sprague's vengeance——"
"You're right," Dundee answered. "Nita did not fear Miles, not even when she was making him pay and pay.... No woman could look at Miles and believe him capable of murder. But a conviction of sexual inferiority leads to strange things, as psychologists can tell you.... I believe Miles married the only two women who ever fell in love with him, and there can be no doubt that Nita really loved him, for she kept her wedding dress for more than twelve years and chose it to be her shroud. It is possible she was still fond of him, although she was infatuated with Sprague when she came down here and was later sincerely in love with Ralph Hammond. Another reason she did not fear Miles when she made her will was that she counted on being able to tell him Saturday night at the latest that she would never ask him for money again, if he would trade silence for silence. How she hoped to secure Sprague's silence we can only guess at. Probably she meant to buy it with the remainder of the $10,000 she had already got from Miles—provided Sprague did not kill her for ditching him as a lover. We know she foresaw that possibility, since she willed the money to Lydia. Of course if Sprague had proved tractable, Nita as Ralph's wife would have been able to compensate Lydia handsomely for the injury she had done her."
"Poor Nita—and poor Flora!" Sanderson sighed, as he led the way up the basement stairs. "Hello! Someone's calling you, Bonnie——"
Dundee ran through the kitchen and dining room and into the living room, for he had recognized Penny Crain's sweet, husky contralto.
"What are you doing back here, young woman?" he demanded. "You were told to go home and forget all this ugly business——"