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

along with the things he would need to take to jail with him. When it was finished, they all went down the spiral stairway into the library.

Nelda was standing at the foot of it. Evidently she had been listening to what had been going on upstairs.

“You dirty sneak!” she yelled, catching sight of Walters. “After all we’ve done for you, you turn around and rob us! I hope they give you twenty years!”

Walters turned to McKenna. “Sergeant, I am willing to accept the penalty of the law for what I have done, but I don’t believe, sir, that it includes being yapped at by this vulgar bitch.”

Nelda let out an inarticulate howl of fury and sprang at him, nails raking. Corporal Kavaalen caught her wrist before she could claw the prisoner.

“That’s enough, you!” he told her. “You stop that, or you’ll spend a night in jail yourself.”

She jerked her arm loose from his grasp and flung out of the library. As she went out, Gladys entered; Rand, who had been bringing up in the rear, stepped down from the stairway.

“He confessed,” he said softly. “We had to bluff it out of him, but he came across. Sold the pistols to Carl Gwinnett. We’re going, now, to pick up Gwinnett and the pistols.”

“I’m glad you found the pistols,” she told him. “But what’re we going to do, over the weekend, for a butler.⁠ ⁠…”

Rand snapped his fingers. “Dammit, I never thought of that!” He allowed his brow to furrow with thought. “I won’t promise anything, but I may be able to dig up somebody for you, for a day or so. Some of my friends are visiting their son, in a Naval hospital on the West Coast, and their butler may be glad for a chance to pick up a little extra money. Shall I call him and find out?”

“Oh, Colonel Rand, would you? I’d be eternally grateful!”

It was just as easy as that.

XVIII

Dave Ritter, driving his small coupé, kept his eye on the white State Police car ahead. Rand, who had come away from the Fleming home in the white car, had called Ritter from the office of the Justice of the Peace while waiting for Walters to put up bail, after his hearing. Now, en route to Gwinnett’s, he was briefing his assistant on what had happened.

“So everything’s set,” he concluded. “Mrs. Fleming jumped at it; she knows you’re coming in your own car, which you may keep in the garage there. You’ve left New Belfast about now; if you show up around three, you’ll be safe on the driving time. Your name is Davies; I decided on that in case I suffer a lapsus linguæ and call you Dave in front of somebody.”

“Yeah. I’ll have to watch and not call you Jeff, Colonel Rand, sir.” He nodded toward the glove-box. “That Leech & Rigdon’s in there; you’d better get it out before I go to the Flemings’. The guy at the drive-in made a positive identification; it’s the one he sold Fleming. I saw the rest of the pistols he has there; don’t waste time looking him up about them. They stink. And I saw Tip this morning. He got young Jarrett sprung on a writ.” He thought for a moment. “What does this do to the Rivers and Fleming murders?”

“We can look for one man for both jobs, now,” Rand said. “Probably the motive for Fleming was that merger he was so violently opposed to, and the Rivers killing must have been a security measure of some sort. There; that must be Gwinnett’s, now.”

The State Police car had pulled up in front of a large three-story frame house with faded and discolored paint and jigsaw scrollwork around the cornices, standing among a clump of trees beside the road. McKenna and Kavaalen got out, with Walters between them, and started up the path to the front steps. Ritter stopped behind the white sedan, and he and Rand got out. By that time, Walters and the two policemen were on the front porch.

Suddenly Ritter turned and sprinted around the right side of the house. Rand stood looking after him for a moment, then started to follow more slowly; as he did, a shot slammed in the rear. Jerking out the changeling .38-special, he whirled and ran around the left side of the house, arriving at the rear in time to see Gwinnett standing on a boardwalk between the house and the stable-garage behind, with his hands raised. There was a fresh bullet-scar on the boardwalk at his feet. Ritter was covering him from the corner of the house with the .380 Beretta.

Rand strolled over to Gwinnett, frisked him, and told him to put his hands down.

“Nice, Dave,” he complimented. “I thought of that, too, about a minute too late. As soon as he saw Walters coming up the walk with the police, he knew what had happened. Come on, Gwinnett; we’ll go through the house and let them in.”

Gwinnett’s eyes darted from side to side, like the eyes of a trapped animal. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, stiff-lipped. “What is this, a stickup?”

Nobody bothered to tell him to stop kidding. They marched him through the kitchen, where a Negro girl, her arms white with flour, was dithering in fright, and into the front hall. A woman in a faded housedress had just admitted the two officers and the former Fleming butler.

“You goddam rat!” Gwinnett yelled at Walters, as soon as he saw him.

“For God’s sake, Carl,” the woman begged. “Don’t make things any worse than they are. Keep quiet!”

“All right, Gwinnett,” McKenna said. “We’re arresting you: receiving stolen goods, and accessory to larceny. We have a search warrant. Want to see it?”

“So you have a search warrant,” Gwinnett said. “So go ahead and search; if you don’t find anything, you’ll plant something. I want to call my lawyer.”

“That’s your right,” McKenna told him. “Aarvo, take him to a phone; let him call