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

of the crime he hired Jeff to investigate. It was an arson case; this guy set fire to his own factory, and then got Jeff to run down a lot of fake clues he’d planted. I know about that; I was on the case, myself. That’s where I first met Jeff, and he saved me from making a jackass out of myself. And what happened to this guy who’d hired Jeff was something that oughtn’t to happen even to Molotov, and it happened because Jeff fixed it to happen. If anybody hires Jeff Rand, he’s one of two things. He’s either innocent, or else he’s out of luck.⁠ ⁠… I don’t know why the hell I bother telling you this.”

“Ten to two, you say,” Rand considered. “Look. A couple of days ago, Rivers put out a new price-list to his regular customers. A lot of them, in different parts of the country, order by telephone, and some of them live in the West, where there’s a couple of hours’ time-difference. One of them, calling at, say, eight o’clock, local time, would get his call in at ten, Eastern Standard. If you checked the long-distance calls to Rivers’s number last night, now, you might get something.”

“Yeah. And if he took a call after nine twenty-two, that would let Gresham out. Even Farnsworth could figure that out. Sure. I’ll check right away.”

“Who’s at Rivers’s now?”

“Skinner and Jameson, of our gang. And Farnsworth, and some of his outfit. And the hell’s own slew of reporters, of course,” McKenna said. “Aarvo’s going back there, in a little. We’re still trying to locate Mrs. Rivers; we haven’t been able to, yet. The maid says she went to New York day before yesterday.”

“I’ll probably be around at Rivers’s, later in the day. I want to check on that Fleming angle.”

“Uh-huh; I’ll be there, in half an hour,” Corporal Kavaalen said. “Be seeing you.”

They exchanged so-longs, and Kavaalen backed, and made a U-turn, moving off in the direction of Rosemont. Olsen’s voluble protests drifted back as the car receded. Rand returned to his own car and followed.

XIII

Rand found Gladys alone in the library. As she rose to greet him, he came close to her, gesturing for silence with finger on lips.

“There’s a perfect hell of a mess,” he whispered. “Somebody murdered Arnold Rivers last night.”

She looked at him in horror. “Murdered? Who was it? How did it⁠ ⁠… ?”

“I haven’t time to talk about that right now,” he told her. “Stephen Gresham and Pierre Jarrett are on their way here, and I’d like you to keep the servants, and particularly Walters, out of earshot of the gunroom while they’re here. It seems that a number of the best pistols have been stolen from the collection, sometime between the death of Mr. Fleming and the time I saw the collection yesterday. Stephen and Pierre are going to help me find out just what’s been taken. I have an idea they might have been sold to Rivers. That may have been why he was killed⁠—to prevent him from implicating the thief.”

“You think somebody here⁠—the servants?” she asked.

“I can’t see how it could have been an outsider. The stuff wasn’t all taken at once; it must have been moved out a piece at a time, and worthless pistols moved in and hung on the racks to replace valuable pistols taken.” He had left the library door purposely open; when the doorbell rang, he heard it. “I’ll let them in,” he said. “You go and head Walters off.”

Rand hurried to the front door and admitted Gresham and Pierre, hustling them down the hall, into the library, and up the spiral to the gunroom, while Gladys went to the foot of the front stairs. Through the open gunroom door, Rand could hear her speaking to Walters, as though sending him on some errand to the rear of the house. He closed the door and turned to the others.

“We’ll have to make it fast,” he said. “Mrs. Fleming can’t hold the butler off all day. Let’s start over here, and go around the racks.”

They began at the left, with the wheel locks. Pierre put his finger immediately on the shabby and disreputable specimen Rand had first noticed.

“Phew! Is that one a stinker!” he said. “What used to be there was a nice late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century North Italian pistol, all covered with steel filigree-work. A real beauty; much better than average.”

“Those Turkish atrocities,” Gresham pointed out. “They’re filling in for a pair of Lazarino Cominazo snaphaunces that Lane Fleming paid seven hundred for, back in the mid-thirties, and didn’t pay a cent too much for, even then. Worth an easy thousand, now. Remember the pair of Cominazo flintlocks illustrated in Pollard’s Short History of Firearms? These were even better, and snaphaunces.”

“Well, you go over the collection,” Rand told them. “Note down anything you find missing.” He handed them a pad of paper and a pencil from the desk. “I have something else to do, for a few minutes.”

With that he left them scrutinizing the pistols on the wall, and went to the workbench in the corner, drawing the .36 Colt from under his waistband. Working rapidly, he dismounted it, taking off the barrel and cylinder, and cleaned it thoroughly before putting it together again. Pierre and Gresham had just started on the Colts when he slipped the revolver out of sight and rejoined them.

It took over a half-hour to finish; when they had gotten completely around the collection, Rand had a list of twenty-six missing items, including four cased sets. At a conservative estimate, the missing pistols were worth ten to twelve thousand dollars, dealer’s list value; the stuff that had been moved in to replace them might have a value of two or three hundred, but no serious collector would buy any of it at any price. There had been no attempt to replace the cased items; the cases had been merely rearranged on the table to avoid any conspicuous