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

I’m having dinner here, with Mrs. Fleming,” Rand regretted. “I’ll pack my stuff later.”

Mrs. Jarrett, Mrs. Trehearne, and Gladys came over; one by one the rest of the group converged upon them. Then, when the goodbye’s had been said, and the promises to meet again had been given, they parted. One by one the cars moved slowly down the driveway to the road. Only Gladys and Rand, standing at the foot of the front steps, and the gingerbread-brown butler were left.

“My, my; that was some party!” the Negro chuckled, gathering up three empty pasteboard cartons and telescoping them together. “Dinner’ll be ready in about half an hour, Mrs. Fleming. Shall I go mix the cocktails now?”

“Yes; do that, Reuben. In the drawing-room.” She watched the servant carry the discarded containers around the house, then turned to Rand. “You know, not the least of your capabilities is your knack of finding servant-replacements on short notice,” she told him.

“My general factotum, Buck Pendexter, is a prominent personage in New Belfast colored lodge circles,” Rand said. “When your cook and maid quit on you, the day of the blowup, all I had to do was phone him, and he did the rest.” He got out his cigarettes, offered them, and snapped his lighter. “I notice you’re having cocktails in the drawing-room now.”

“Yes. I suppose, in time, I’ll stop imagining I see Fred Dunmore’s blood on the library floor. I got used to what had happened in the gunroom last December. Shall we go in?” she asked, taking Rand’s arm.

The cocktails were waiting when they entered the drawing-room, off the dining-room. The butler poured for them and put the glasses and the shaker on a low table by a lounge.

“I’m afraid dinner’s going to be a little later than I said, Mrs. Fleming,” he apologized. “Things were kind of stirred up, today, with all those people here.”

“That’s all right; we can wait,” she replied. “We won’t need anything more, Reuben.”

Motioning Rand down on the lounge beside her, she handed him a glass and lifted her own.

“Now,” she began. “Just what sort of skulduggery has been going on? As of Friday, the top offer for the collection was twenty-five thousand five hundred, from some dealer up in Massachusetts. And then, on Saturday, you came bounding in with Stephen Gresham’s certified check for twenty-six thousand. And I seem to recall that the late unlamented Rivers’s offer of twenty-five thousand straight had them stopped. Not that I’m inclined to look askance at an extra five hundred⁠—I can buy a new hat with my share of that, even after taxes⁠—but I would like to know what happened. And I might add, that’s only one of many things I’d like to know.”

“The client is entitled to a full report,” Rand said, tasting his cocktail. It was a vodka Martini, and very good. “You know, none of that crowd are millionaires. Adam Trehearne, who’s the plutocrat of the bunch, isn’t so filthy rich he doesn’t know what to do with all his money⁠—what the tax-collectors leave of it⁠—and the rest of them have to figure pretty closely. The most they could possibly scratch together was twenty-two thousand. So I put four thousand into the pot, myself, bringing the total to five hundred over the Kendall offer, and hastily declared the collection sold. Of course, my getting into it meant that much less for everybody else, but five-sixths of a collection is better than no pistols at all. I imagine Colin MacBride is honing up his sgian-dhu for me because I got that big Whitneyville Walker Colt, but what the hell; he got the cased pair of Paterson .34’s, and the Texas .40 with the ramming-lever.”

“Why, I think the division was fair enough,” Gladys said. “They’d agreed to take your valuation, hadn’t they? And all that slide-rule and comptometer business.⁠ ⁠… But Jeff⁠—four thousand dollars?” she queried. “You only got five from me, and you can’t run a detective agency on old pistols.”

Rand grinned as he set down his empty glass. Gladys refilled it from the shaker.

“My dear lady, that five thousand I unblushingly accepted from you was only part of it,” he confessed.

“There was also a fee of three thousand from Stephen Gresham, for pulling the bloodhounds of the D.A.’s office off his back in the matter of Arnold Rivers, and there was five thousand from Humphrey Goode, which I suppose he’ll get the Premix Company to repay him, for engineering the suppression of a lot of facts he wanted suppressed. And, finally, my connection with this business brought that merger to my attention, and I picked up a hundred shares of Premix at 73¼, and now I have two hundred shares of Mill-Pack, worth about twenty-nine thousand, which I can report for my income tax as capital gains. I’d say I could afford to treat myself to a few old pistols for my collection.”

“Well!” She raised both eyebrows over that. “Don’t anybody tell me crime doesn’t pay.”

“Yes. In my ghoulish way, I generally manage to bear myself in mind, on an operation like this. I make no secret of my affection for money.” He lifted his glass and sipped slowly. “Look here, Gladys; are you satisfied with the way this was handled?”

She shrugged. “I should be. When I started out as Lane’s blood-avenger, I suppose I expected things to end somewhere out of sight, in a nice, antiseptic death-chamber at the state penitentiary. You must admit that that business in the library was really bringing it home. There’s no question that you got the man who killed Lane, and if you hadn’t, I’d never have been at peace with myself. And I suppose all that chicanery afterward was necessary, too.”

“It was, if you wanted that merger to go through, and unless you wanted to see the bottom drop out of your Premix stock,” Rand assured her. “If the true facts of Mr. Fleming’s death had gotten out, there’d have been a simply hideous stink. The Mill-Pack people would have backed out of that