Murder at Bridge | Page 4

Dundee laughed, "Come on! Gossip some more. My Maginty case will wait till afternoon, to be mulled over while you're losing your hard-earned salary at bridge with rich women."
"We don't play for high stakes," she corrected him. "Just a twentieth of a cent a point, though contract can run into money even at that. The winnings all go to the Forsyte Scholarship Fund. On Wednesday evenings the crowd plays for higher stakes--a tenth--and winners keepers. Therefore I can't afford to go, unless I sink so low as to let my escort pay my losses--which I sometimes do," she confessed, her brown head low for a moment.
"Is this Mrs. Peter Dunlap a deep-bosomed club woman, who starts Movements?" he asked, more to bring her out of her depression than anything else. "Bigger and Better Babies Movements, and Homes for Fallen Girls, and Little Theater Movements?"
The brown head flung itself up sharply, and the brown eyes hardened into bright pennies again. "Lois Dunlap is the sweetest, finest, most comfortable woman in Hamilton, and I adore her--as does everyone else, Peter Dunlap hardly more than the rest of us. She is interested in a Little Theater for Hamilton, but she won't manage it. That's why she got hold of Nita Selim. Lois will simply put up barrels of money, without missing them, and give a grand job to a little Broadway gold-digger. Funny thing is, she really delights in Nita. Thinks she's sweet and has never had a real chance."
"And what do you think?" Dundee asked softly.
"Oh--I suppose I'm a cat, but I can see through her so clearly. Not that she's bad; she's simply an opportunist. She's awfully sweet and deferential and 'frank' with women, but with men--well, she simply tucks her head so that her shoulder-length black curls fall forward enchantingly, gives them one wistful smile out of her big eyes that are like black pansies and--the clink of slave chains!... Now go on and think I'm catty, which I suppose I am!"
Bonnie Dundee grinned at her reassuringly. Not for him to explain that practically all women and many men found themselves "gossiping" when he led them on adroitly, for reasons of his own. Which of course helped make him the excellent detective he was.
"So all the men in your crowd have fallen for Nita Selim, have they?"
"Practically all, in varying degrees, except Peter Dunlap, who has never looked at another woman since he was lucky enough to get Lois, and Clive Hammond, who's engaged to Polly Beale," Penny answered reluctantly, her color high.
"Including your young man?"
"I haven't a 'young man,' in the sense of being engaged," Penny retorted, then added honestly: "I have been letting Ralph Hammond--that's Clive's brother, you know--take me about a good deal.... Ralph and Clive have plenty of money," she defended herself hastily. "They are architects, Clive being the head of the firm and Ralph, who hasn't been out of college so very long, a junior partner. It was the Hammond firm that drew up the plans for Dad's--I mean, my father's--Primrose Meadows Addition houses. He had our house built as a sort of show-place, you know, so that prospective builders out there could see how artistic a home could be put up for a moderate sum of money. But he didn't quite finish even that--left half the gabled top story unfinished, and Nita has been teasing Hugo to finish it up for her. It looks," she added with a shrug, "as if Nita will get what she wants--as usual."
"And Ralph has acquired a set of slave chains?" Dundee suggested, with just the slightest note of sympathy.
"And how!" Penny assured him, grimly. "A simile as out-of-date as my clothes are going to be if I don't get some new ones soon. Not that the crowd minds what I wear," she added loyally. "I could dress up in a window drape--"
"And be just as charming as you are in that grand new party dress you have on now," Dundee finished for her gallantly.
"New!" Penny snorted and turned back to her desk in a futile effort to find something left undone.
Dundee ignored the rebuff. "How many suckers--I mean, how many gentlemen with moderate incomes actually built in Primrose Meadows?"
"You are inquisitive, aren't you?... None! Our house, or rather the one Nita Selim is living in now, is the only house on what used to be a big farm.... Why?"
"I was just wondering," Dundee said softly, almost absent-mindedly, "why the 'lovely Nita' chose so isolated a place in which to live, when Hamilton has rather a large number of 'For Rent' signs out just now.... By the way, know what time it is now?... Twenty to one! Get your hat on, young woman. I'm going to drive you out to Breakaway Inn."
"You're not! I'm going to take a bus.