The Waterbury Democrat., 1931-01-30
saw how Nita Leigh had been nur

saw how Nita Leigh had been mur- dered.
 Nothing here? Not now. be- cause he had taken the lamp to the courthouse for safekeeping.
 He saw 1t 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 and Tn the excitement of finding that the lamps bulb had been shattered by the bang or bump which Flora Miles had described. One of the big glass jewels had been missing, leay- ing an unsightly hole.
 No wonder there had been a bang or bump hard enough to dent the frame of the window! For the gun, wedged into the big bowl and slightly protruding from the 5ewel-hole. had kicked" just as it had kicked an hour before. when 1t 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, fol- lowing Strawn. had first examined the scene of Nita's murder. had not stood in front of the window frame
 did not dampen Dundee's excite ment 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 sorts of things which
 terror-stricken people do in such a crlSlS. No, the murderer-Or mur-
 deress-had found no difficulty in shifting the big lamp one foot
 nearer the chaise tongue. to the place it had always occupied be- fore.
 But--how had the gun been fired rom the lamp? Electrically, of
 course. Another picture flashed into Dundee's mind. He saw him.
 self stopping, on Monday afternoon,
 to see if the plug of the lamps cord
 had been pulled from the socke., 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 con- clusion that Monday had been But what was the real truth |? Suddenly Dundee flung back the rug
 which almost entirely covered the bedroom floor and revealed the bell
 which Dexter Sprague had rigged up so that Nita might summon Ly- dla rom her basement room, in case of dire need--a precaution which the murderer was familiar since
 Lois Dunlap had innocently spread the news of it's existence.
 There was a half-inch hole in the hardwood floor. and out of it issued length of green electric wire. con- nected with two small, flat metal plates, one upon the other. so that when stepped upon a bell would ring in Lydia's basement room. But there was something odd about the wire. Although it was obviously new, section of it near the two metal plates was wrapped with black adhesive tape. Another
 memory knocked for attention upon Dundee's mind. The long cord of the bronze lamp had been mended With exactly the same sort of tape about foot from where it ended
 in the contact plug.
 Within another two minutes, Dundee, with flashlight he had iound In the kitchen, was explor- ing the dark, earthly portion of the basement which lay directly to the | east of Lydia Carr's basement room. And he found what he was looking
 for-adhesive tape wrapped about the wire which had been dropped through the floor Of Nita's room be- lore 1t had been carried by means
 of bored hole, into Lydia's room. He was too late-thanks to Cap-
 tain Strawn. The bell which
 Sprague had rigged up was in work
 Ing order again. But as he was passing out of the basement he glanced at the ceiling of the large room devoted to furnace. hot-water heater and laundry tubs. And in
 the ceiling he saw q hole. The murderer had left a trace he could not obliterate,
 At 3 o'clock that Sunday afternoon