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

you go out, I’d be obliged to you for sending Walters up here. I still have this work here, and I’ll need his help.”

After Varcek had left him, Rand looked in the desk drawer, verifying his assumption that the .38 he had seen there was gone. He wondered where his own was, at the moment.

When the butler arrived, he was put to work bringing pistols to the desk, carrying them back to the racks, taking measurements, and the like. All the while, Rand kept his eye on the head of the spiral stairway.

Finally he caught a movement, and saw what looked like the top of a peak-crowned gray felt hat between the spindles of the railing. He eased the Detective Special out of its holster and got to his feet.

“All right!” he sang out. “Come on up!”

Walters looked, obviously startled, at the revolver that had materialized in Rand’s hand, and at the two men who were emerging from the spiral. He was even more startled, it seemed, when he realized that they wore the uniform of the State Police.

“What.⁠ ⁠… What’s the meaning of this, sir?” he demanded of Rand.

“You’re being arrested,” Rand told him. “Just stand still, now.”

He stepped around the desk and frisked the butler quickly, wondering if he were going to find a .25 Webley & Scott automatic or his own .38-Special. When he found neither, he holstered his temporary weapon.

“If this is your idea of a joke, sir, permit me to say that it isn’t.⁠ ⁠…”

“It’s no joke, son,” Sergeant McKenna told him. “In this country, a police-officer doesn’t have to recite any incantation before he makes an arrest, any more than he needs to read any Riot Act before he can start shooting, but it won’t hurt to warn you that anything you say can be used against you.”

“At least, I must insist upon knowing why I am being arrested,” Walters said icily.

“Oh! Don’t you know?” McKenna asked. “Why, you’re being arrested for the murder of Arnold Rivers.”

For a moment the butler retained his professional glacial disdain, and then the bottom seemed to drop suddenly out of him. Rand suppressed a smile at this minor verification of his theory. Walters had been expecting to be accused of larceny, and was prepared to treat the charge with contempt. Then he had realized, after a second or so, what the State Police sergeant had really said.

“Good God, gentlemen!” He looked from Mick McKenna to Corporal Kavaalen to Rand and back again in bewilderment. “You surely can’t mean that!”

“We can and we do,” Rand told him. “You stole about twenty-five pistols from this collection, after Mr. Fleming died, and sold them to Arnold Rivers. Then, when I came here and started checking up on the collection, you knew the game was up. So, last evening, you took out the station-wagon and went to see Rivers, and you killed him to keep him from turning state’s evidence and incriminating you. Or maybe you killed him in a quarrel over the division of the loot. I hope, for your sake, that it was the latter; if it was, you may get off with second degree murder. But if you can’t prove that there was no premeditation, you’re tagged for the electric chair.”

“But⁠ ⁠… But I didn’t kill Mr. Rivers,” Walters stammered. “I barely knew the gentleman. I saw him, once or twice, when he was here to see Mr. Fleming, but outside of that.⁠ ⁠…”

“Outside of that, you sold him about twenty-five of these pistols, and got a like number of junk pistols from him, for replacements.” He took the list Pierre Jarrett and Stephen Gresham had compiled out of his pocket and began reading: “Italian wheel lock pistol, late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century; pair Italian snaphaunce pistols, by Lazarino Cominazo.⁠ ⁠…” He finished the list and put it away. “I think we’ve missed one or two, but that’ll do, for the time.”

“But I didn’t sell those pistols to Mr. Rivers,” Walters expostulated. “I sold them to Mr. Carl Gwinnett. I can prove it!”

That Rand had not expected. “Go on!” he jeered. “I suppose you have receipts for all of them. Fences always do that, of course.”

“But I did sell them to Mr. Gwinnett. I can take you to his house, if you get a search warrant, and show you where he has them hidden in the garret. He was afraid to offer them for sale until after this collection had been broken up and sold; he still has every one of them.”

McKenna spat out an obscenity. “Aren’t we ever going to have any luck?” he demanded. “Jarrett out on a writ this morning, and now this!”

“But he ain’t in the clear,” Kavaalen argued. “Maybe he didn’t sell Rivers the pistols, but maybe he did kill him.”

“Dope!” McKenna abused his subordinate. “If he didn’t sell Rivers the pistols, why would he kill him?”

“He’s only said he sold them to Gwinnett,” Rand pointed out. Then he turned to Walters. “Look here; if we find those pistols in Gwinnett’s possession, you’re clear on this murder charge. There’s still a slight matter of larceny, but that doesn’t involve the electric chair. You take my advice and make a confession now, and then accompany these officers to Gwinnett’s place and show them the pistols. If you do that, you may expect clemency on the theft charge, too.”

“Oh, I will, sir! I’ll sign a full confession, and take these police-officers and show them every one of the pistols.⁠ ⁠…”

Rand put paper and carbon sheets in the typewriter. As Walters dictated, he typed; the butler listed every pistol which Gresham and Pierre Jarrett had found missing, and a cased presentation pair of .44 Colt 1860’s that nobody had missed. He signed the triplicate copies willingly; he didn’t seem to mind signing himself into jail, as long as he thought he was signing himself out of the electric chair.

The book in which Fleming had recorded his pistols he still had; he had removed it from the gunroom and was keeping it in his room. He said he would get it,