Pretty clever, in spite of being almost frightened to death, Dundee said to himself. But he had been just a shade cleverer than she, for he had been in this room ahead of her, and there had been no balls of greasy face tissue in the wastebasket then!
He was passing out of the room, offering his arm to Karen, when one of his underlined notes thrust itself upon his memory:
"May I see your bridge tally, please, Mrs. Miles?"
"My—bridge tally!" she echoed blankly. "Why—it must be on the table where I was playing—"
"It is not," Dundee assured her quietly. "Perhaps it is in your handbag?" and he glanced at the rather large raffia bag that lay on the table.
She snatched it up, slightly averting her body as she looked hastily through its contents.
"It—isn't here.... Oh, I don't know where it is! What does it matter?"
Without replying, Dundee escorted the trembling little discoverer of Nita Selim's body into the large ornate bedroom, murmuring as he did so:
"Don't be frightened, Mrs. Marshall. The bod—I mean Mrs. Selim isn't here now.... And you shan't have to scream. I'll give the signal myself. I just want you to go through the same motions you did before." On jerky feet the girl advanced to Nita's now deserted vanity dresser.
"I—I was calling to her all the time," she whispered. "I didn't even wait to knock, and I—I began to tell her how much we'd made off that hand, when I—when she didn't answer.... I didn't touch her, but I saw—I saw—" Again she gripped her face with her hands and was about to scream.