Murder in the Gunroom by H. Beam Piper (100 books to read in a lifetime TXT) 📕

Rand hung up and glanced at his watch. Ten twenty-two; he gave himself seven minutes and went around the room rapidly, looking only at pistols. He saw nothing that might have come from the Fleming collection. Finally, he opened the front door, just as a white State Police car was pulling up at the end of the walk.

Sergeant Ignatius Loyola McKenna⁠—customarily known and addressed as Mick⁠—piled out almost before it had stopped. The driver, a stocky, blue-eyed Finn with a corporal’s chevrons, followed him, and two privates got out from behind, dragging after them a box about the size and shape of an Army footlocker. McKenna was halfway up the drive before he recognized Rand. Then he stopped short.

“Well, Jaysus-me-beads!” He turned suddenly to the corporal. “My God, Aarvo; you said his name was Grant!”

“That’s what I thought he said.” Rand recognized the singsong accent he had heard on the phone. “You know him?”

“Know him?” McKenna stepped aside quickly, to avoid being overrun by the two privates with the equipment-box. He sighed resignedly. “Aarvo, this is the notorious Jefferson Davis Rand. Tri-State Agency, in New Belfast.” He gestured toward the Finn. “Corporal Aarvo Kavaalen,” he introduced. “And Privates Skinner and Jameson.⁠ ⁠… Well, where is it?”

“Right inside.” Rand stepped backward, gesturing them in. “Careful; it’s just inside the doorway.”

McKenna and the corporal entered; the two privates set down their box outside and followed. They all drew up in a semicircle around the late Arnold Rivers and looked at him critically.

“Jesus!” Kavaalen pronounced the J-sound as though it were Zh; he gave all his syllables an equally-accented intonation. “Say, somebody gave him a good job!”

“Somebody’s been seeing too many war-movies.” McKenna got a cigarette out of his tunic pocket and lit it in Rand’s pipe-bowl. “Want to confess now, or do you insist on a third degree with all the trimmings?”

Kavaalen looked wide-eyed at Rand, then at McKenna, and then back at Rand. Rand laughed.

“Now, Mick!” he reproved. “You know I never kill anybody unless I have a clear case of self-defense, and a flock of witnesses to back it up.”

McKenna nodded and reassured his corporal. “That’s right, Aarvo; when Jeff Rand kills anybody, it’s always self-defense. And he doesn’t generally make messes like this.” He gave the body a brief scrutiny, then turned to Rand. “You looked around, of course; what do you make of it?”

“Last night, sometime,” Rand reconstructed, “Rivers had a visitor. A man, who smoked cigars. He and Rivers were on friendly, or at least sociable, terms. They sat back there by the fire for some time, smoking and drinking. The shades were all drawn. I don’t know whether that was standard procedure, or because this conference was something clandestine. Finally, Rivers’s visitor got up to leave.

“Now, of course, he could have left, and somebody else could have come here later, been admitted, and killed Rivers. That’s a possibility,” Rand said, “but it’s also an assumption without anything to support it. I rather like the idea that the man who sat back there drinking and smoking with Rivers was the killer. If so, Rivers must have gone with him to the door and was about to open it when this fellow picked up that rifle, probably from that rack, over there, and clipped him on the jaw with the butt. Then he gave him the point three times, the second and third probably while Rivers was down. Then he swung it up and slammed down with it, and left it sticking through Rivers and in the floor.”

McKenna nodded. “Lights on when you got here?” he asked.

“No; I put them on when I came in. The killer must have turned them off when he left, but the deadlatch on the door wasn’t set, and he doesn’t seem to have bothered checking on that.”

“Think he left right after he killed Rivers?”

Rand shook his head. “No, that was just the first part of it. After he’d finished Rivers, he went back to that desk and got all the cards Rivers used to record his transactions on⁠—an individual card for every item. He destroyed the lot of them, or at least most of them, in the fireplace. Now, I’m only guessing, here, but I think he took out a card or cards in which he had some interest, and then dumped the rest in the fire to prevent anybody from being able to determine which ones he was interested in. I am further guessing that the cards which the killer wanted to suppress were in the ‘sold’ file. But I am not guessing about the destruction of the record-file; I found the fireplace full of ashes, found one card that had escaped unburned⁠—you can be sure that one wasn’t important⁠—and found the drawer where the record-system was kept empty.”

“Think he might have stolen something, and covered up by burning the cards?” McKenna asked.

Rand shook his head again. “I was here yesterday; bought a pistol from Rivers. That’s how I noticed this card-index system. Of course, I didn’t look at everything, while I was here, but I can’t see where any quantity of arms have been removed, and Rivers didn’t have any single item that was worth a murder. Fact is, no old firearm is. There are only a very few old arms that are worth over a thousand dollars, and most of them are well-known, unique specimens that would be unsaleable because every collector would know where it came from.”

“We can check possible thefts with Rivers’s clerk, when he gets here,” McKenna said. “Now, suppose you show me these things you found, back at the rear⁠ ⁠… Aarvo, you and the boys start taking pictures,” he told the corporal, then he followed Rand back through the shop.

He tested the temperature of the water in the ice-bowl with his finger. He looked at the ashtray, and bent over and sniffed at each of the two glasses.

“I see one of them’s been emptied out,” he commented. “Want to