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

“Huh-unh.” Rand smiled slightly. “Even the tiny tots wipe off the cookie-jar, after they’ve raided it,” he said.

A flashbulb lit the front of the shop briefly. Corporal Kavaalen said something to the others. McKenna picked up the card Rand had found by the edges and looked at it.

“What in hell’s this all about, Jeff?” he asked.

“Rivers made it out for one of his pistols. An English flintlock pocket-pistol; I can show you one almost like it, up front. He’d gotten it and three others, back in 1938, in trade for a Kentucky rifle. The numbers are reference-numbers; the letters are Rivers’s private price-code. Those three at the end are, respectively, what he absolutely had to get for it, what he thought was a reasonable price, and the most he thought the traffic would stand. He sold it in 1942 for his middle price.”

There was another flash by the door, then Kavaalen called out:

“Hey, Mick; we got two of the stiffs, now. All right if we pull out the bayonet for a closeup of his chest?”

“Sure. Better chalkline it, first; you’ll move things jerking that bayonet out.” He turned back to Rand. “You think, then, that maybe some card in that file would have gotten somebody in trouble, and he had to croak Rivers to get it, and then burned the rest of the cards for a cover-up?”

“That’s the way it looks to me,” Rand agreed. “Just because I can’t think of any other possibility, though, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any others.”

“Hey! You think he might have been selling modern arms to criminals, without reporting the sale?” McKenna asked.

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Rand considered. “There was very little that I would put past that fellow. But I wouldn’t think he’d be stupid enough to carry a record of such sales in his own file, though.”

McKenna rubbed the butt of his .38 reflectively; that seemed to be his substitute for head-scratching, as an aid to cerebration.

“You said you were here yesterday, and bought a pistol,” he began. “All right; I know about that collection of yours. But why were you back here bright and early this morning? You working on Rivers for somebody? If so, give.”

Rand told him what he was working on. “Rivers wants to buy the Fleming collection. That was the reason I saw him yesterday. But the reason I came here, this morning, is that I find that somebody has stolen about two dozen of the best pistols out of the collection since Fleming’s death, and tried to cover up by replacing them with some junk that Lane Fleming wouldn’t have allowed inside his house. For my money, it’s the butler. Now that Fleming’s dead, he’s the only one in the house who knows enough about arms to know what was worth stealing. He has constant access to the gunroom. I caught him in a lie about a book Fleming kept a record of his collection in, and now the book has vanished. And furthermore, and most important, if he’d been on the level, he would have spotted what was going on, long ago, and squawked about it.”

“That’s a damn good circumstantial case, Jeff,” McKenna nodded. “Nothing you could take to a jury, of course, but mighty good grounds for suspicion.⁠ ⁠… You think Rivers could have been the fence?”

“He could have been. Whoever was higrading the collection had to have an outlet for his stuff, and he had to have a source of supply for the junk he was infiltrating into the collection as replacements. A crooked dealer is the answer to both, and Arnold Rivers was definitely crooked.”

“You know that?” McKenna inquired. “For sure?”

Another flash lit the front of the shop. Rand nodded.

“For damn good and sure. I can show you half a dozen firearms in this shop that have been altered to increase their value. I don’t mean legitimate restorations; I mean fraudulent alterations.” He went on to tell McKenna about Rivers’s expulsion from membership in the National Rifle Association. “And I know that he sold a pair of pistols to Lane Fleming, about a week before Fleming was killed, that were outright fakes. Fleming was going to sue the ears off Rivers about that; the fact is, until this morning, I’d been wondering if that mightn’t have been why Fleming had that sour-looking accident. If he’d lived, he’d have run Rivers out of business.”

“Hell, I didn’t know that!” McKenna seemed worried. “Fleming used to target-shoot with our gang, and he knew too much about gats to pull a Russ Columbo on himself. I didn’t like that accident, at the time, but I figured he’d pulled the Dutch, and the family were making out it was an accident. We never were called in; the whole thing was handled through the coroner’s office. You really think Fleming could have been bumped?”

“Yes. I think he could have been bumped,” Rand understated. “I haven’t found any positive proof, but⁠—” He told McKenna about his purchase, from Rivers, of the revolver that had been later identified as the one brought home by Fleming on the day of his death. “I still don’t know how Rivers got hold of it,” he continued. “Until I walked in here not half an hour ago and found Rivers dead on the floor, I’d had a suspicion that Rivers might have sneaked into the Fleming house, shot Fleming with another revolver, left it in Fleming’s hand and carried away the one Fleming had been working on. The motive, of course, would have been to stop a lawsuit that would have put Rivers out of business and, not inconceivably, in jail. But now⁠ ⁠…” He looked toward the front of the shop, where another photoflash glared for an instant. “And don’t suggest that Rivers got conscience-stricken and killed himself. Aside from the technical difficulties of pinning himself to the floor after he was dead, that explanation’s out. Rivers had no conscience to be stricken with.”

“Well, let’s skip Fleming, for