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

you’ve showed me that. Except for the fact that somebody could have entered the house through the garage, the burden of suspicion would lie on me and Fred Dunmore.”

“Well, do you want me to help you with it?” Rand asked.

“Yes, if you will. It would be helping yourself, also, I believe,” Varcek replied. “Fred is downstairs, now, in the library; I suggest that you and I go down and have a talk with him. Maybe you could show him the folly of trying to suppress any facts concerning Lane’s death.”

“Yes, that would be both foolish and dangerous.” Rand got to his feet, keeping his hand on the .38 Colt. “Let’s go down and talk to him now.”

They walked side by side toward the spiral, Rand keeping on the right and lagging behind a little, lifting the stubby revolver clear of his pocket. Yet, in spite of his vigilance, it happened before he could prevent it.

A lance of yellow fire jumped out of the shadows of the stairway, and there was a soft cough of a silenced pistol, almost lost in the click-click of the breech-action. Rand felt something sledgehammer him in the chest, almost knocking him down. He staggered, then swung up the Colt he had drawn from his pocket and blazed two shots into the stairway. There was a clatter, and the sound of feet descending into the library. He rushed forward, revolver poised, and then a shot boomed from below, followed by three more in quick succession.

“Okay, Jeff!” Ritter’s voice called out. “War’s over!”

He managed, somehow, to get down the steep spiral. The little .25 Webley & Scott was lying on the bottom step; he pushed it aside with his foot, and cautioned Varcek, who was following, to avoid it. Ritter, still looking like the Perfect Butler in spite of the .380 Beretta in his hand, was standing in the hall doorway. On the floor, midway between the stairway and the door, lay Fred Dunmore. His tan coat and vest were turning dark in several places, and Rand’s own Detective Special was lying a few inches from his left hand.

“He came in here and shut the door,” Ritter reported. “I couldn’t follow him in, so I took a plant in the hall. When I heard you blasting upstairs, I came in, just in time to see him coming down. You winged him in the right shoulder; he’d dropped the .25, and he had your gat in his left hand. When he saw mine, he threw one at me and missed; I gave him three back for it. See result on floor.”

“Uh-uh; he’d have gotten away, if you hadn’t been on the job,” he told Ritter. Then he picked up his own revolver and holstered it. After a glance which assured him that Fred Dunmore was beyond any further action of any sort, he laid the square-butt Detective Special on the floor beside him. “You did all right, Dave,” he said. “Now, nobody’s going to have a chance to bamboozle a jury into acquitting him.” He thought of his recent conversation with Humphrey Goode. “You did just all right,” he repeated.

“So it was Fred, then,” he heard Varcek, behind him, say. “Then he was lying about this evidence against Goode.” The Czech came over and stood beside Rand, looking down at the body of his late brother-in-law. “But why did he tell me that story, and why did he shoot at us when we were together?”

“Both for the same general reason.” Rand explained about the two pistols and the planned double-killing. “With both of us dead, you’d be the murderer, and I’d be a martyr to law-and-order, and he’d be in the clear.”

Varcek regarded the dead man with more distaste than surprise. Evidently his experiences in Hitler’s Europe had left him with few illusions about the sanctity of human life or the extent of human perfidy. Ritter holstered the Beretta and got out a cigarette.

“I hope you didn’t leave your lighter upstairs,” he told Rand.

Rand produced and snapped it, holding the flame out to his assistant. “Dave,” he lectured, “the Perfect Butler always has a lighter in good working order; lighting up the mawster is part of his duties. Remember that, the next time you have a buttling job.”

Ritter leaned forward for the light. “Dunmore was a better shot with his right hand than he was with his left,” he commented. “He didn’t come within a yard of me, and he scored a twelve-o’clock center on you. Right through the necktie.”

Rand glanced down. Then he burst into a roar of obscene blasphemy.

“Seven dollars and fifty cents I paid for that tie, not three weeks ago,” he concluded. “Does your grandmother make patchwork quilts? If she does, she can have it.”

“My God!” Varcek stared at Rand unbelievingly. “Why, he hit you! You’re wounded!”

“Only in the necktie,” Rand reassured him. “I have a hole in my shirt, too.” He reached under the latter garment and rummaged, as though to evict a small trespasser. When he brought out his hand, he was holding a battered .25-caliber bullet. He held it out to show to Varcek and Ritter.

“Sure,” Ritter grinned at Varcek. “Didn’t you know? Superman.”

“I’m wearing a bulletproof vest; Mick McKenna loaned it to me yesterday,” Rand enlightened Varcek. “I never wore one of the damn things before, and if I can help it, I’ll never wear one again. I’m damn near stewed alive in it.”

“Think how hot you’d be, right now, if you hadn’t been wearing it,” Ritter reminded him.

“Then you knew, since yesterday, that he would do this?” Varcek asked.

“I knew one or the other of you would,” Rand replied. “I had quite a few reasons for thinking it might be Dunmore, and one good one for not suspecting you.”

“You mean my dislike for firearms?”

“That could have been feigned, or it could have been overcome,” Rand replied. “I mean your knowledge of biology and biochemistry. If you’d killed Lane Fleming, there’d have been no clumsy business of fake accidents; not as