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

death had been murder, there had been a substitution of revolvers. So I showed the gun I’d bought from Rivers to Philip Cabot, who had seen the revolver Mr. Fleming had bought, and he recognized it. It hasn’t been established just how Rivers got the Leech & Rigdon, and never will be; the only people who knew were Rivers and Dunmore, and both are in the proverbial class of non-talebearers. I assume that Dunmore gave it to Rivers as a sort of down payment on Rivers’s silence, and to get rid of it.

“Well, you remember Dunmore’s angry incredulity when I told him that Rivers was offering twenty-five thousand instead of ten thousand. One would have thought, on the face of it, that he would have been glad; as Nelda’s husband, he would share in the higher price being paid for the collection. But when you realize that Rivers was buying the collection out of Dunmore’s pocket, his reaction becomes quite understandable. I daresay I signed Arnold Rivers’s death-warrant, right there.”

“I’ll bet your conscience bothers you about that,” Gladys remarked.

“Oh, sure; it’s been gnawing hell out of me, ever since,” Rand told her cheerfully. “But, right away, Dunmore decided to kill Rivers. He called him on the phone as soon as he left the table⁠—here I’m speaking by the book; I walked in on him, in the gunroom, as he was completing the call, though I didn’t know it at the time⁠—and arranged to see him that evening. Probably to devise ways and means of dealing with the Jeff Rand menace, for an ostensible reason.

“So that night, Dunmore killed Rivers, with a bayonet. And here we have some more Aristotelian confusion of orders of abstraction. The bayonet is defined, verbally, as a ‘soldier’s weapon,’ so Farnsworth and Mick McKenna and the rest of them bemused themselves with suspects like Stephen Gresham and Pierre Jarrett, and ignored Dunmore, who’d never had an hour’s military training in his life. I’d like to check up on what picture-shows Dunmore had been seeing in the week or so before the killing. I’ll bet anything he’d been to one of these South-Pacific banzai-operas. And speaking of confusing orders of abstraction, Mick McKenna and his merry men pulled a classic in that line. They saw Dunmore’s automobile, verbally defined as a ‘gray Plymouth coupé’ in Rivers’s drive at the estimated time of the murder. Pierre Jarrett has a car of that sort, so they included the inferential idea of Pierre Jarrett’s ownership of the car so described.

“Well, that’s about all there is to it. Of course, I showed Fred Dunmore the Leech & Rigdon, and told him it was the gun I’d gotten from the coroner. That was all he needed to tell him that I was onto the murder, and probably onto him as the murderer. But he had evidently assumed that already; that was after he’d assembled my .38 and that .25 automatic, and was planning to double-kill me and Anton Varcek. At that, he’d have probably killed me, if I hadn’t been wearing that bulletproof vest of McKenna’s. I owe Mick for my life; I’ll have to buy him a drink, sometime, to square that.”

“Well, how about Walters, and the pistols he stole?” Gladys asked. “Didn’t that have anything to do with it?”

“No. It was a result of Mr. Fleming’s death, of course. I understand that the situation here had deteriorated rather abruptly after Mr. Fleming’s death. Walters was about fed up on the way things were here, and he was going to hand in his notice. Then he decided that he ought to have a stake to tide him over till he could get another buttling job, so he started higrading the collection.”

Gladys nodded. “I suppose he decided, after Lane’s death, that he didn’t owe anybody here anything. Too bad he didn’t wait, though. The situation has remedied itself, and that’s something else I owe you.”

“Yes? I noticed that there was nobody here but you,” Rand mentioned.

“Oh, Anton’s gone to New York. The Rockefeller Foundation is financing the major part of his research work, and he’s well enough off to finance the rest himself. Geraldine went with him. Nelda is still recuperating from the shock of her sudden bereavement at a high-priced sanatorium⁠—I understand there’s a very good-looking young doctor there. And she’s been talking about going to New York herself, in order, as she puts it, to lead her own life. I don’t know whether she was afraid I’d be a restraining influence, or a dangerous competitor, but she feels that her own life could be best led away from here.” She set down her glass and leaned back comfortably. “Peace, it’s wonderful!”

Reuben, the gingerbread butler, appeared in the dining-room doorway. “Dinner’s served now, Mrs. Fleming,” he announced.

Rand rose, and Gladys took his arm; together, they went into the dining-room.

Colophon

Murder in the Gunroom
was published in 1953 by
H. Beam Piper.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Bob Kenyon,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2006 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.

The cover page is adapted from
Portrait de Jeune Homme,
a painting completed before 1929 by
Frank Edwin Scott.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.

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