Murder in the Gunroom - H. Beam Piper (digital ebook reader .TXT) 📗

indeterminate mousy gray-brown. It was one of his professional assets that nobody ever noticed him, not even in a crowd of one; when he wanted it to, his thin face could assume the weary, baffled expression of a middle-aged bookkeeper with a wife and four children on fifty dollars a week. Actually, he drew three times that much, had no wife, admitted to no children. During the war, he and Kathie had kept the Tri-State Agency in something better than a state of suspended animation while Rand had been in the Army.

Ritter fumbled a Camel out of his shirt pocket and made a beeline for the desk, appropriating Rand’s lighter and sharing the flame with Kathie.

“You know, Jeff,” he said, “one of the reasons why this agency never made any money while you were away was that I never had the unadulterated insolence to ask the kind of fees you do. I was listening in on the extension in the file-room; I could hear Kathie damn near faint when you said five grand.”

“Yes; five thousand dollars for appraising a collection they’ve been offered ten for, and she only has a third-interest,” Kathie said, retracting herself into the chair lately vacated by Gladys Fleming. “If that makes sense, now⁠ ⁠…”

“Ah, don’t you get it, Kathleen Mavourneen?” Ritter asked. “She doesn’t care about the pistols; she wants Jeff to find out who fixed up that accident for Fleming. You heard that big, long shaggy-dog story about exactly what happened and where everybody was supposed to have been at the time. I hope you got all that recorded; it was all told for a purpose.”

Rand had picked up the outside phone and was dialing. In a moment, a girl’s voice answered.

“Carter Tipton’s law-office; good afternoon.”

“Hello, Rheba; is Tip available?”

“Oh, hello, Jeff. Just a sec; I’ll see.” She buzzed another phone. “Jeff Rand on the line,” she announced.

A clear, slightly Harvard-accented male voice took over.

“Hello, Jeff. Now what sort of malfeasance have you committed?”

“Nothing, so far⁠—cross my fingers,” Rand replied. “I just want a little information. Are you busy?⁠ ⁠… Okay, I’ll be up directly.”

He replaced the phone and turned to his disciples.

“Our client,” he said, “wants two jobs done on one fee. Getting the pistol-collection sold is one job. Exploring the whys and wherefores of that quote accident unquote is the other. She has a hunch, and probably nothing much better, that there’s something sour about the accident. She expects me to find evidence to that effect while I’m at Rosemont, going over the collection. I’m not excluding other possibilities, but I’ll work on that line until and unless I find out differently. Five thousand should cover both jobs.”

“You think that’s how it is?” Kathie asked.

“Look, Kathie. I got just as far in Arithmetic, at school, as you did, and I suspect that Mrs. Fleming got at least as far as long division, herself. For reasons I stated, I simply couldn’t have handled that collection business for anything like a reasonable fee, so I told her five thousand, thinking that would stop her. When it didn’t, I knew she had something else in mind, and when she went into all that detail about the death of her husband, she as good as told me that was what it was. Now I’m sorry I didn’t say ten thousand; I think she’d have bought it at that price just as cheerfully. She thinks Lane Fleming was murdered. Well, on the face of what she told me, so do I.”

“All right, Professor; expound,” Ritter said.

“You heard what he was supposed to have shot himself with,” Rand began. “A Colt-type percussion revolver. You know what they’re like. And I know enough about Lane Fleming to know how much experience he had with old arms. I can’t believe that he’d buy a pistol without carefully examining it, and I can’t believe that he’d bring that thing home and start working on it without seeing the caps on the nipples and the charges in the chambers, if it had been loaded. And if it had been, he would have first taken off the caps, and then taken it apart and drawn the charges. And she says he started working on it as soon as he got home⁠—presumably around five⁠—and then took time out for dinner, and then went back to work on it, and more than half an hour later, there was a shot and he was killed.” Rand blew a Bronx cheer. “If that accident had been the McCoy, it would have happened in the first five minutes after he started working on that pistol. No, in the first thirty seconds. And then, when they found him, he had the revolver in his right hand, and an oily rag in his left. I hope both of you noticed that little touch.”

“Yeah. When I clean a gat, I generally have it in my left hand, and clean with my right,” Ritter said.

“Exactly. And why do you use an oily rag?” Rand inquired.

Ritter looked at him blankly for a half-second, then grinned ruefully.

“Damn, I never thought of that,” he admitted. “Okay, he was bumped off, all right.”

“But you use oily rags on guns,” Kathie objected. “I’ve seen both of you, often enough.”

“When we’re all through, honey,” Ritter told her.

“Yes. When he brought home that revolver, it was in neglected condition,” Rand said. “Either surface-rusted, or filthy with gummed oil and dirt. Even if Mrs. Fleming hadn’t mentioned that point, the length of time he spent cleaning it would justify such an inference. He would have taken it apart, down to the smallest screw, and cleaned everything carefully, and then put it together again, and then, when he had finished, he would have gone over the surface with an oiled rag, before hanging it on the wall. He would certainly not have surface-oiled it before removing the charges, if there ever were any. I assume the revolver he was found holding, presumably the one with which he was killed, was another one. And I would