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

and a man whom he decided, by elimination, must be Anton Varcek, already at the table. The latter rose as Rand entered, and bowed jerkily as Gladys verified the guess with an introduction.

He was about Rand’s own age and height; he had a smooth-shaven, tight-mouthed face, adorned with bushy eyebrows, each of which was almost as heavy as Rand’s mustache. It was a face that seemed tantalizingly familiar, and Rand puzzled for a moment, then nodded mentally. Of course he had seen a face like that hundreds of times, in newsreels and news-photos, and, once in prewar Berlin, its living double. Rudolf Hess. He wondered how much deeper the resemblance went, and tried not to let it prejudice him.

Nelda greeted him with a trowelful of sweetness and a dash of bedroom-bait. Gladys waved him to a vacant seat at her right and summoned the maid who had been serving breakfast. After Rand had indicated his preference of fruit and found out what else there was to eat, he inquired where the others were.

“Oh, Fred’s still dressing; he’ll be down in a minute,” Nelda told him. “And Geraldine won’t; she never eats with her breakfast.”

Varcek winced slightly at this, and shifted the subject by inquiring if Rand were a professional antiques-expert.

“No, I’m a lily-pure amateur,” Rand told him. “Or was until I took this job. I have a collection of my own, and I’m supposed to be something of an authority. My business is operating a private detective agency.”

“But you are here only as an arms-expert?” Varcek inquired. “You are not making any sort of detective investigation?”

“That’s right,” Rand assured him. “This is practically a paid vacation, for me. First time I ever handled anything like this; it’s a real pleasure to be working at something I really enjoy, for a change.”

Varcek nodded. “Yes, I can understand that. My own work, for instance. I would continue with my research even if I were independently wealthy and any sort of work were unnecessary.”

“Tell Colonel Rand what you’re working on now,” Nelda urged.

Varcek gave a small mirthless laugh. “Oh, Colonel Rand would be no more interested than I would be in his pistols,” he objected, then turned to Rand. “It is a series of experiments having to do with the chemical nature of life,” he said. Another perfunctory chuckle. “No, I am not trying to recreate Frankenstein’s monster. The fact is, I am working with fruit flies.”

“Something about heredity?” Rand wanted to know.

Varcek laughed again, with more amusement. “So! One says: ‘Fruit flies,’ and immediately another thinks: ‘Heredity.’ It is practically a standard response. Only, in this case, I am investigating the effect of diet changes. I use fruit flies because of their extreme adaptability. If I find that I am on the right track, I shall work with mice, next.”

“Fred Dunmore mentioned a packaged diabetic ration you’d developed,” Rand mentioned.

“Oh, yes.” Varcek shrugged. “Yes. Something like an Army field-ration, for diabetics to carry when traveling, or wherever proper food may be unobtainable. That is for the company; soon we put it on the market, and make lots of money. But this other, that is my own private work.”

Dunmore had come in while Varcek was speaking and had seated himself beside his wife.

“Don’t let him kid you, Colonel,” he said. “Anton’s just as keen about that dollar as the rest of us. I don’t know what he’s cooking up, up there in the attic, but I’ll give ten-to-one we’ll be selling it in twenty-five-cent packages inside a year, and selling plenty of them.⁠ ⁠… Oh, and speaking about that dollar; how did you make out with Gresham and his friends?”

“I didn’t. They’d expected to pay about twenty thousand for the collection; Rivers’s offer has them stopped. And even if they could go over twenty-five, I think Rivers would raise them. He’s afraid to let them get the collection; Pierre Jarrett and Karen Lawrence intended using their share of it to go into the old-arms business, in competition with him.”

“Uh-huh, that’s smart,” Dunmore approved. “It’s always better to take a small loss stopping competition than to let it get too big for you. You save a damn-sight bigger loss later.”

“How soon do you think the pistols will be sold?” Gladys asked.

“Oh, in about a month, at the outside,” Rand said, continuing to explain what had to be done first.

“Well, I’m glad of that,” Varcek commented. “I never liked those things, and after what happened⁠ ⁠… The sooner they can be sold, the better.”

Breakfast finally ended, and Varcek and Dunmore left for the Premix plant. Rand debated for a moment the wisdom of speaking to Gladys about the missing pistols, then decided to wait until his suspicions were better verified. After a few minutes in the gunroom, going over Lane Fleming’s arms-books on the shelf over the workbench without finding any trace of the book in which he had catalogued his collection, he got his hat and coat, went down to the garage, and took out his car.

It had stopped raining for the time being; the dingy sky showed broken spots like bits of bluing on a badly-rusted piece of steel. As he got out of his car in front of Arnold Rivers’s redbrick house, he was wondering just how he was going to go about what he wanted to do. After all⁠ ⁠…

The door of the shop was unlocked, and opened with a slow clanging of the door-chime, but the interior was dark. All the shades had been pulled, and the lights were out. For a moment Rand stood in the doorway, adjusting his eyes to the darkness within and wondering where everybody was.

Then, in the path of light that fell inward from the open door, he saw two feet in tan shoes, toes up, at the end of tweed-trousered legs, on the floor. An instant later he stepped inside, pulled the door shut after him, and was using his penlight to find the electric switch.

For a second or so after he snapped it nothing happened, and