Murder in the Gunroom, H. Beam Piper [ebook reader color screen .txt] 📗

I always look at serials on Confederate arms. The highest known serial number for a Leech & Rigdon is 1393; this one was 1234.”

Rand pulled the .36 revolver from his pants-leg and gave it a quick glance; the number was 1234. He handed it to Cabot.

“Is this it?” he asked.

Cabot checked the number. “Yes. And I remember this bruise on the left grip; Fleming was saying that he was glad it would be on the inside, so it wouldn’t show when he hung it on the wall.” He carried the revolver to the desk and held it under the light. “Why, this thing wasn’t fired at all!” he exclaimed. “I thought that Fleming might have loaded it, meaning to target it⁠—he had a pistol range back of his house⁠—but the chambers are clean.” He sniffed at it. “Hoppe’s Number Nine,” he said. “And I can see traces of partly dissolved rust, and no traces of fouling. What the devil, Jeff?”

“It probably hasn’t been fired since Appomattox,” Rand agreed. “Philip, do you think all this didn’t-know-it-was-loaded routine might be an elaborate suicide buildup, either before or after the fact?”

“Absolutely not!” There was a trace of impatience in Cabot’s voice. “Lane Fleming wasn’t the man to commit suicide. I knew him too well ever to believe that.”

“I heard a rumor that he was about to lose control of his company,” Rand mentioned. “You know how much Premix meant to him.”

“That’s idiotic!” Cabot’s voice was openly scornful, now, and he seemed a little angry that Rand should believe such a story, as though his confidence in his friend’s intelligence had been betrayed. “Good Lord, Jeff, where did you ever hear a yarn like that?”

“Quote, usually well-informed sources, unquote.”

“Well, they were unusually ill-informed, that time,” Cabot replied. “Take my word for it, there’s absolutely nothing in it.”

“So it wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t suicide,” Rand considered. “Philip, what is the prognosis on this merger of Premix and National Milling & Packaging, now that Lane Fleming’s opposition has been, shall we say, liquidated?”

Cabot’s head jerked up; he looked at Rand in shocked surprise.

“My God, you don’t think⁠ ⁠… ?” he began. “Jeff, are you investigating Lane Fleming’s death?”

“I was retained to sell the collection,” Rand stated. “Now, I suppose, I’ll have to find out who’s been stealing those pistols, and recover them, and jail the thief and the fence. But I was not retained to investigate the death of Lane Fleming. And I do not do work for which I am not paid,” he added, with mendacious literalness.

“I see. Well, the merger’s going through. It won’t be official until the sixteenth of May, when the Premix stockholders meet, but that’s just a formality. It’s all cut and dried and in the bag now. Better let me pick you up a little Premix; there’s still some lying around. You’ll make a little less than four-for-one on it.”

“I’d had that in mind when I asked you about the merger,” Rand said. “I have about two thousand with you, haven’t I?” He did a moment’s mental arithmetic, then got out his checkbook. “Pick me up about a hundred shares,” he told the broker. “I’ve been meaning to get in on this ever since I heard about it.”

“I don’t see how you did hear about it,” Cabot said. “For obvious reasons, it’s being kept pretty well under the hat.”

Rand grinned. “Quote, usually well-informed sources, unquote. Not the sources mentioned above.”

“Jeff, you know, this damned thing’s worrying me,” Cabot told him, writing a receipt and exchanging it for Rand’s check. “I’ve been trying to ignore it, but I simply can’t. Do you really think Lane Fleming was murdered by somebody who wanted to see this merger consummated and who knew that that was an impossibility as long as Fleming was alive?”

“Philip, I don’t know. And furthermore, I don’t give a damn,” Rand lied. “If somebody wants me to look into it, and pays me my possibly exaggerated idea of what constitutes fair compensation, I will. And I’ll probably come up with Fleming’s murderer, dead or alive. But until then, it is simply no epidermis off my scrotum. And I advise you to adopt a similar attitude.”

They changed the subject, then, to the variety of pistols developed and used by the opposing nations in World War II, and the difficulties ahead of Cabot in assembling even a fairly representative group of them. Rand promised to mail Cabot a duplicate copy of his list of the letter-code symbols used by the Nazis to indicate the factories manufacturing arms for them, as well as copies of some old wartime Intelligence dope on enemy small-arms. At a little past one, he left Cabot’s home and returned to the Fleming residence.

There were four cars in the garage. The Packard sedan had not been moved, but the station-wagon was facing in the opposite direction. The gray Plymouth was in the space from which Rand had driven earlier in the evening, and a black Chrysler Imperial had been run in on the left of the Plymouth. He put his own car in on the right of the station-wagon, made sure that the Leech & Rigdon was locked in his glove-box, and closed and locked the garage doors. Then he went up into the house, through the library, and by the spiral stairway to the gunroom.

The garage had been open, he recalled, at the time of Lane Fleming’s death. The availability of such an easy means of undetected ingress and egress threw the suspect field wide open. Anybody who knew the habits of the Fleming household could have slipped up to the gunroom, while Varcek was in his lab, Dunmore was in the bathroom, and Gladys and Geraldine were in the parlor. As he crossed the hall to his own room, Rand was thinking of how narrowly Arnold Rivers had escaped a disastrous lawsuit and criminal action by the death of Lane Fleming.

X

When Rand came down to breakfast the next morning, he found Gladys, Nelda,