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

“See that thing?” Pierre asked, tapping a small .25 Webley & Scott automatic with his finger. Rand looked at it; it had been fitted with an English-made silencer. “That thing,” Pierre said, “is the one illustrated in Pollard’s book. The identical pistol; it used to be in the Pollard collection.”

“Lane had a lot of stuff from some famous collections,” Gresham said. “Pollard collection, Sawyer collection, Fred Hines collection, Meeks collection, even the old Mark Field collection, that was sold at Libbie Galleries in 1911. His own could rank with any of them. Think you can get any of this stuff back?”

“I hope so. By the way, where does this fellow Umholtz, the fabricator of spurious Whitneyville Walker Colts, hang out? I believe he ought to be looked into.”

“Say, that’s an idea!” Pierre ejaculated. “He might have bought the pistols, instead of Rivers. Why, he has a gunshop at Kingsville, on Route 22, about fifteen miles west of here, just this side of the village. He had a big sign along the road, and his shop’s in the barn, behind the house.”

“I’ll have to check up on him. But first, I want to see if any of this stuff’s at Rivers’s shop. I won’t ask you to come along,” he told Gresham. “No use you sticking your head into the lion’s mouth. I’ve talked the State Police temporarily off your trail, but I still have Farnsworth to worry about.”

“He’d like to prosecute a big corporation lawyer, if he thought he had any chance of getting a conviction,” Pierre said. “Make a nice impression on the proletarian vote in the south end of the county.”

“You’re a member of the Mohawk Club in New Belfast, aren’t you?” Rand asked Gresham. “Well, go there and stay there for a couple of days, till the heat’s off. Pierre, you can come with me to Rivers’s; I’ll run you home in my car when we’re through.”

Gresham let himself out the front door; Pierre and Rand went out through the garage and got into Rand’s car.

“You have any idea, so far, about who could have killed Rivers?” the ex-Marine asked, as they coasted down the drive to the highway.

“I haven’t even the start of an idea,” Rand said. He ran briefly over what he knew, or at least those items which were likely to become public knowledge soon. “From what I’ve observed at the shop, and from what I know of Rivers’s character, I’d think that he’d been in some kind of a crooked deal with somebody, and got double-crossed, or else the other man caught Rivers double-crossing him. Or else, Rivers and somebody else had some secret in common, and the other man wanted a monopoly on it and killed Rivers as a security measure.”

“Think it might be the Fleming pistols?”

“That depends. I’ll have to see whether any of the Fleming pistols turn up anywhere in Rivers’s former possession. Personally, I’ve about decided that the man who was drinking with Rivers killed him. There aren’t any indications that anybody else was in the shop afterward. If that’s the case, I doubt if the killer was Walters. You know what a snobbish guy Rivers was. And from what I know of him, he seems to have had a thoroughly Aristotelian outlook; he identified individuals with class-labels. Walters, of course, would be identified with the label ‘butler,’ and I can’t imagine Rivers sitting down and drinking with a ‘butler.’ He would only drink with people whom he thought of as his equals, that is, people whom he identified with class-labels of equal social importance to his own labels of ‘antiquarian’ and ‘businessman.’ ”

“That sounds like Korzybski,” Pierre said, as they turned onto Route 19 in the village and headed east. “You’ve read Science and Sanity?”

Rand nodded. “Yes. I first read it in the 1933 edition, back about 1936; I’ve been rereading it every couple of years since. The principles of General Semantics come in very handy in my business, especially in criminal-investigation work, like this. A consciousness of abstracting, a realization that we can only know something about a thin film of events on the surface of any given situation, and a habit of thinking structurally and of individual things, instead of verbally and of categories, saves a lot of blind-alley chasing. And they suggest a great many more avenues of investigation than would be evident to one whose thinking is limited by intensional, verbal, categories.”

“Yes. I find General Semantics helpful in my work, too,” Pierre said. “I can use it in plotting a story.⁠ ⁠… Oh-oh!”

“The Gentlemen of the Press,” Rand said, looking ahead as the car approached the Rivers house and shop. “There hasn’t been a good, sensational, murder story for some time; this is a gift from the gods.”

A swarm of cars were parked in front and beside the redbrick house. Among them, Rand spotted a gold-lettered green sedan of the New Belfast Dispatch and Evening Express, a black coupé bearing the blazonry of the New Belfast Mercury, cars from a couple of papers at Louisburg, the state capital, and cars from papers as far distant as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cincinnati. In front of the shop, a motley assemblage of journalists was interviewing and photographing an undersized runt in a tan Chesterfield topcoat and a gray Homburg hat, whom they were addressing as Mr. Farnsworth. The District Attorney of Scott County had a mustache which failed miserably to make him look like Tom Dewey; he impressed Rand as the sort of offensive little squirt who compensates for his general insignificance by bad manners and loud-mouthed self-assertion. Corporal Kavaalen, standing in the doorway of the shop, caught sight of Rand and his companion as they got out of the car and came to meet them, hustling them around the crowd and into the shop before anybody could notice and recognize them.

“That was a good tip, about the telephone,” he said softly. “Mick checked at the Rosemont exchange. Rivers got a long-distance call from Topeka last night;