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

“So, in the privacy of his bathroom, he kicked out of his slippers, threw off his robe, hid the Leech & Rigdon, probably in a space between the tub and the wall that I found while we were searching the house, the night before the shooting of Dunmore, and jumped into the tub, there to await developments. As soon as he heard Varcek’s uproar in the hall, he could emerge, dripping bathwater and innocence, to find out what the fuss was all about.⁠ ⁠… Do you know anything about something called General Semantics?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes. Before I married Lane, I went around with a radio ad-writer,” she told him. “He was a nice boy, but he’d get drunker than a boiled owl about once a month, and weep about his crimes against sanity and meaning. He’d recite long excerpts from his professional creations, and show how he had been deliberately objectifying words and identifying them with the things for which they stood, and confusing orders of abstraction, and juggling multiordinal meanings. He was going to lend me his Koran, a book called Science and Sanity, and then he took a job with an ad agency in Chicago, and I got married, and⁠—”

Rand nodded. “Then you realize that the word is not the thing spoken of, and that the inference is not the description, and that we cannot know ‘all’ about anything. Etcetera,” he added hastily, like a Papist signing himself with the Cross. “Well, some considerable disregard of these principles seems to have existed in this case. Dunmore is seen in a bathrobe, his feet bare and making wet tracks on the floor, his hair wet, etcetera. Straightaway, one and all appear to have assumed that he was in the tub, splashing soapsuds around, while Lane Fleming was being shot. And Anton Varcek, who can be taken as an example of what S. I. Hayakawa was talking about when he spoke of people behaving like scientists inside but not outside their laboratories, saw Lane Fleming dead, with an object labeled ‘revolver’ in his hand, and, because of his verbal identifications and semantic reactions, immediately included the inference of an accident in his description of what he had seen. That was just an extra dividend of luck for Dunmore; it got the whole crowd of you thinking in terms of accidental shooting.

“Well, from there out, everything would have been a wonderful success for Dunmore, except for one thing. Arnold Rivers must have heard, somehow, that Lane Fleming had been shot with a Confederate .36 that he’d bought somewhere that day, and that the revolver was in the hands of this coroner of yours. So Arnold, with his big chisel well ground, went to see if he could manage to get it out of the coroner for a few dollars. And when he saw it, lo! it was the .36 Colt that he’d sold to Dunmore about a month before.”

Gladys set down her glass. “So!” she said. “Things begin to explain themselves!”

“You may say so, indeed,” Rand told her. “And what do you suppose Rivers did with this little item of information? Why, as nearly as I can reconstruct it, he did a very foolish thing. He tried to blackmail a man who had committed a murder. He told Fred Dunmore he’d keep his mouth shut about the .36 Colt, if Dunmore would get him the Fleming collection. He wanted that instead of cash, because he could get more out of it, in a few years, than Dunmore could ever scrape, and in the meantime, the prestige of handling that collection would go a long way toward repairing his rather dilapidated reputation. Fred should have bumped him off, right then; it would have been the cheapest and easiest way out, and he’d probably be alive and uncaught today if he had. But he was willing to pay ten thousand dollars to save himself the trouble, and that’s what he told you Rivers had offered for the collection. The ten thousand Dunmore told you Rivers was willing to pay was really the ten thousand he was willing to pay, himself, to keep Rivers quiet.

“Then I was introduced into the picture, and, as you know, one of my first acts was to go to Rivers’s shop and sneer scornfully at Rivers’s supposed offer of ten thousand. And, right away, Rivers upped it to twenty-five thousand. You’ll recall, no doubt, that Mr. Fleming had a life-insurance policy, one of these partnership mutual policies, which gave both Dunmore and Varcek exactly twenty-five thousand apiece. I assume that Rivers had found out about that.

“I thought, at the time, that it was peculiar that Rivers would jump his own offer up, without knowing what anybody else was offering for the collection. I see, now, that it wasn’t his own money he was being so generous with. And there was another incident, while I was at Rivers’s shop, that piqued my curiosity. Rivers had in his shop a .36 Leech & Rigdon revolver, and I had been informed that it was a revolver of that type that Mr. Fleming had brought home the evening he was killed. I thought at the time that it was curious that two Confederate arms of the same type and make should show up this far north, but my main idea in buying it was the possibility that I might use it, in some way as circumstances would permit, to throw a scare into somebody. Rivers was quite willing to let me have it until he found out that I would be staying at this house, and then he tried to back out of the sale and offered me seventy-five dollars’ credit on anything else in the shop, if I’d return it to him. Well, I’d known that Mr. Fleming had been about to start suit against Rivers over a crooked deal Rivers had put over on him, and I knew that if Mr. Fleming’s