Murder in the Gunroom, H. Beam Piper [ebook reader 8 inch .TXT] 📗

ladies left the dining-room," Varcek said, "Fred Dunmore turned to me and apologized for harboring unjust suspicions of me in the matter of Lane Fleming's death. He said that he had been unable to understand who else could have murdered Lane, until you had pointed out to him that the house could have been entered from the garage, and the gunroom from the library. Then, he said, he had had a conversation with some unnamed gentleman at the party last evening, and had learned that Lane had discovered that Humphrey Goode was deceiving him, and had been about to have him dismissed from his position with the company, and to sever his personal connections with him."

"The devil, now!" Rand gave a good imitation of surprise. "What sort of jiggery-pokery was Goode up to?"

"Fred said that his informant told him that Lane had proof that Goode had accepted a bribe from Arnold Rivers, to misconduct the suit which Lane was bringing against Rivers about a pair of pistols he had bought from Rivers. It seems that Goode was Rivers's attorney, also, and had been involved with him in a number of dishonest transactions, although the connection had been kept secret."

"That's a new angle, now," Rand said. "I suppose that he killed Rivers in order to prevent the latter from incriminating him. Why didn't Fred come to me with this?" he asked.

"Eh?" Evidently Varcek hadn't thought of that. "Why, I suppose he was concerned about the possibility of repercussions in the business world. After all, Goode is our board chairman, and maybe he thought that people might begin thinking that the murder had some connection with the affairs of the company."

"That's possible, of course," Rand agreed. "And what's your own attitude?"

"Colonel Rand, I cannot allow these facts to be suppressed," the Czech said. "My own position is too vulnerable; you've showed me that. Except for the fact that somebody could have entered the house through the garage, the burden of suspicion would lie on me and Fred Dunmore."

"Well, do you want me to help you with it?" Rand asked.

"Yes, if you will. It would be helping yourself, also, I believe," Varcek replied. "Fred is downstairs, now, in the library; I suggest that you and I go down and have a talk with him. Maybe you could show him the folly of trying to suppress any facts concerning Lane's death."

"Yes, that would be both foolish and dangerous." Rand got to his feet, keeping his hand on the .38 Colt. "Let's go down and talk to him now."

They walked side by side toward the spiral, Rand keeping on the right and lagging behind a little, lifting the stubby revolver clear of his pocket. Yet, in spite of his vigilance, it happened before he could prevent it.

A lance of yellow fire jumped out of the shadows of the stairway, and there was a soft cough of a silenced pistol, almost lost in the click-click of the breech-action. Rand felt something sledge-hammer him in the chest, almost knocking him down. He staggered, then swung up the Colt he had drawn from his pocket and blazed two shots into the stairway. There was a clatter, and the sound of feet descending into the library. He rushed forward, revolver poised, and then a shot boomed from below, followed by three more in quick succession.

"Okay, Jeff!" Ritter's voice called out. "War's over!"

He managed, somehow, to get down the steep spiral. The little .25 Webley & Scott was lying on the bottom step; he pushed it aside with his foot, and cautioned Varcek, who was following, to avoid it. Ritter, still looking like the Perfect Butler in spite of the .380 Beretta in his hand, was standing in the hall doorway. On the floor, midway between the stairway and the door, lay Fred Dunmore. His tan coat and vest were turning dark in several places, and Rand's own Detective Special was lying a few inches from his left hand.

"He came in here and shut the door," Ritter reported. "I couldn't follow him in, so I took a plant in the hall. When I heard you blasting upstairs, I came in, just in time to see him coming down. You winged him in the right shoulder; he'd dropped the .25, and he had your gat in his left hand. When he saw mine, he threw one at me and missed; I gave him three back for it. See result on floor."

"Uh-uh; he'd have gotten away, if you hadn't been on the job," he told Ritter. Then he picked up his own revolver and holstered it. After a glance which assured him that Fred Dunmore was beyond any further action of any sort, he laid the square-butt Detective Special on the floor beside him. "You did all right, Dave," he said. "Now, nobody's going to have a chance to bamboozle a jury into acquitting him." He thought of his recent conversation with Humphrey Goode. "You did just all right," he repeated.

"So it was Fred, then," he heard Varcek, behind him, say. "Then he was lying about this evidence against Goode." The Czech came over and stood beside Rand, looking down at the body of his late brother-in-law. "But why did he tell me that story, and why did he shoot at us when we were together?"

"Both for the same general reason." Rand explained about the two pistols and the planned double-killing. "With both of us dead, you'd be the murderer, and I'd be a martyr to law-and-order, and he'd be in the clear."

Varcek regarded the dead man with more distaste than surprise. Evidently his experiences in Hitler's Europe had left him with few illusions about the sanctity of human life or the extent of human perfidy. Ritter holstered the Beretta and got out a cigarette.

"I hope you didn't leave your lighter upstairs," he told Rand.

Rand produced and snapped it, holding the flame out to his assistant. "Dave," he lectured, "the Perfect Butler always has a lighter in good working order; lighting up the mawster is part of his duties. Remember that, the next time you have a buttling job."

Ritter leaned forward for the light. "Dunmore was a better shot with his right hand than he was with his left," he commented. "He didn't come within a yard of me, and he scored a twelve-o'clock center on you. Right through the necktie."

Rand glanced down. Then he burst into a roar of obscene blasphemy.

"Seven dollars and fifty cents I paid for that tie, not three weeks ago," he concluded. "Does your grandmother make patchwork quilts? If she does, she can have it."

"My God!" Varcek stared at Rand unbelievingly. "Why, he hit you! You're wounded!"

"Only in the necktie," Rand reassured him. "I have a hole in my shirt, too." He reached under the latter garment and rummaged, as though to evict a small trespasser. When he brought out his hand, he was holding a battered .25-caliber bullet. He held it out to show to Varcek and Ritter.

"Sure," Ritter grinned at Varcek. "Didn't you know? Superman."

"I'm wearing a bulletproof vest; Mick McKenna loaned it to me yesterday," Rand enlightened Varcek. "I never wore one of the damn things before, and if I can help it, I'll never wear one again. I'm damn near stewed alive in it."

"Think how hot you'd be, right now, if you hadn't been wearing it," Ritter reminded him.

"Then you knew, since yesterday, that he would do this?" Varcek asked.

"I knew one or the other of you would," Rand replied. "I had quite a few reasons for thinking it might be Dunmore, and one good one for not suspecting you."

"You mean my dislike for firearms?"

"That could have been feigned, or it could have been overcome," Rand replied. "I mean your knowledge of biology and biochemistry. If you'd killed Lane Fleming, there'd have been no clumsy business of fake accidents; not as long as both of you ate at the same table. He'd have just died, an unimpeachably natural death." He turned to Ritter. "Dave, I'm going upstairs; I want to get out of this damned coat of mail I'm wearing. While I'm doing it, I want you to call Carter Tipton, at the Jarrett place, and Humphrey Goode, and Mick McKenna, in that order. Tell Goode to get over here as fast as he can, and come up to my room; tell him we have to consider ways and means of implementing my suggestion to him."

CHAPTER 21

In the month which followed, events transpired through a thickening miasma of rumors, official communiques, journalistic conjectures, and outright fabrications, fitfully lit by the glare of newsmen's photo-bulbs, bulking with strange shapes, and emitting stranger noises. There were the portentous rumblings of prepared statements, and the hollow thumps of denials. There were soft murmurs of, "Now, this is strictly off the record ..." followed by sibilant whispers. The unseen screws of political pressure creaked, and whitewash brushes slurped suavely. And there was an insistent yammering of bewildered and unanswered questions. Fred Dunmore really had killed Arnold Rivers, hadn't he? Or had he? Arnold Rivers had been double-crossing Dunmore ... or had Dunmore been double-crossing Rivers? Somebody had stolen ten—or was it twenty-five—thousand dollars' worth of old pistols? Or was it just twenty-five thousand dollars? Or what, if anything, had been stolen? Was somebody being framed for something ... or was somebody covering up for somebody ... or what? And wasn't there something funny about the way Lane Fleming got killed, last December?

The surviving members of the Fleming family issued a few noncommittal statements through their attorney, Humphrey Goode, and then the Iron Curtain slammed down. Mick McKenna gave an outraged squawk or so, then subsided. There was a series of pronunciamentos from the office of District Attorney Charles P. Farnsworth, all full of high-order abstractions and empty of meaning. The reporters, converging on the Fleming house, found it occupied by the State Police, who kept them at bay. Harry Bentz, of the New Belfast Evening Mercury, using a 30-power spotting-'scope from the road, observed Dave Ritter, whom he recognized, wearing a suit of butler's livery and standing in the doorway of the garage, talking to Sergeant McKenna, Carter Tipton and Farnsworth; the Mercury exploited this scoop for all it was worth.

On the whole, the Rosemont Bayonet Murder was, from a journalistic standpoint, an almost complete bust. There had been no arrest, no hearing, no protracted trial, no sensational revelations. Only one monolithic fact, officially attested and indisputable, loomed out of the murk: "... and the said Frederick Parker Dunmore, deceased, did receive the aforesaid gunshot-wounds, hereinbefore enumerated, at the hands of the said Jefferson Davis Rand and at the hands of the said David Abercrombie Ritter ..." and "... the said Jefferson Davis Rand and the said David Abercrombie Ritter, being in mortal fear for their several lives, did so act in defense of their several persons..." and, finally, "... the said Frederick Parker Dunmore did die."

The Evening Mercury, which sheet the said Jefferson Davis Rand had once cost the loss of an expensive libel-suit and exposed in certain journalistic malpractices verging upon blackmail, promptly burst into print with an indignant editorial entitled Trial by Pistol. The terms: "legalized slaughter," and "flagrant whitewash," were used, and mention was made of "the well known preference of a certain notorious private detective for the procedure of habeas cadaver." The principal result of this outcry was to persuade an important New Belfast manufacturer, who had hitherto resisted Rand's sales pressure, to contract with the Tri-State Agency for the protection of his payroll deliveries.

Then, at the other end of the state, the professor of Moral Science at a small theological seminary caught his wife in flagrante delicto with one of the fourth-year students and opened fire upon them, at a range of ten feet, with a 12-gauge pump-gun. The Rosemont Bayonet Murder, already pretty well withered on the vine, passed quietly into limbo.

Summer, almost a month before its official opening, was already a fait accompli. The trees