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

the Rivers murder, or my armored-car service, or any other business of the Tri-State Agency, no.”

“Well, you made use of my authorization to get that revolver from Kirchner⁠—” Goode began.

“Aah!” Rand cried. “So that concerns the Rivers murder, does it? Well! When did you find that out, now? When Kirchner called you, you had no objection to his giving me that revolver. What changed your mind for you? Didn’t you know that Rivers was dead, then?” Rand watched Goode trying to assimilate that. “Or didn’t you think I knew?”

Goode cleared his throat noisily, twisting his mouth. The others were looking back and forth from him to Rand, in obvious bewilderment; they realized that Rand had pulled some kind of a rabbit out of a hat, but they couldn’t understand how he’d done it.

“What I mean is that since then you have allowed yourself to become involved in this murder case. You have let it be publicly known that you are a private detective, working for the Fleming family,” Goode orated. “How long, then, will it be before it will be said, by all sorts of irresponsible persons, that you are also investigating the death of Lane Fleming?”

“Well?” Rand asked patiently. “Are you afraid people will start calling that a murder, too?”

Gladys was looking at him apprehensively, as though she were watching him juggle four live hand grenades.

“Is anybody saying that now?” Varcek asked sharply.

“Not that I know of,” Rand lied. “But if Goode keeps on denying it, they will.”

“You know perfectly well,” Goode exploded, “that I am alluding to these unfounded and mischievous rumors of suicide, which are doing the Premix Company so much harm. My God, Mr. Rand, can’t you realize⁠—”

“Oh, come off it, Goode,” Varcek broke in amusedly. “We all⁠—Colonel Rand included⁠—know that you started those rumors yourself. Very clever⁠—to start a rumor by denying it. But scarcely original. Doctor Goebbels was doing it almost twenty years ago.”

“My God, is that true?” Nelda demanded. “You mean, he’s been going around starting all these stories about Father committing suicide?” She turned on Goode like an enraged panther. “Why, you lying old son of a bitch!” she screamed at him.

“Of course. He wants to start a selling run on Premix,” Varcek explained to her. “He’s buying every share he can get his hands on. We all are.” He turned to Rand. “I’d advise you to buy some, if you can find any, Colonel Rand. In a month or so, it’s going to be a really good thing.”

“I know about the merger. I am buying,” Rand told him. “But are you sure of what Goode’s been doing?”

“Of course,” Gladys put in contemptuously. “I always wondered about this suicide talk; I couldn’t see why Humphrey was so perturbed about it. Anything that lowered the market price of Premix, at this time, would be to his advantage.” She looked at Goode as though he had six legs and a hard shell. “You know, Humphrey, I can’t say I exactly thank you for this.”

“Did you know about it?” Nelda demanded of her husband. “You did! My God, Fred, you are a filthy specimen!”

“Oh, you know; anything to turn a dishonest dollar,” Geraldine piped up. “Like the late Arnold Rivers’s ten-thousand offer. Say! I wonder if that mightn’t be what Rivers died of? Raising the price and leaving Fred out in the cold!”

Dunmore simply stared at her, making a noise like a chicken choking on a piece of string.

“Well, all this isn’t my pidgin,” Rand said to Gladys. “I only work here, Deo gratias, and I still have some work to do.”

With that, he walked past Goode and Dunmore and ascended the spiral stairway to the gunroom. Even at the desk, in the far corner of the room, he could hear them going at it, hammer-and-tongs, in the library. Sometimes it would be Nelda’s strident shrieks that would dominate the bedlam below; sometimes it would be Fred Dunmore, roaring like a bull. Now and then, Humphrey Goode would rumble something, and, once in a while, he could hear Gladys’s trained and modulated voice. Usually, any remark she made would be followed by outraged shouts from Goode and Dunmore, like the crash of falling masonry after the whip-crack of a tank-gun.

At first Rand eavesdropped shamelessly, but there was nothing of more than comic interest; it was just a routine parade and guard-mount of the older and more dependable family skeletons, with special emphasis on Humphrey Goode’s business and professional ethics. When he was satisfied that he would hear nothing having any bearing on the death of Lane Fleming, Rand went back to his work.

After a while, the tumult gradually died out. Rand was still typing when Gladys came up the spiral and perched on the corner of the desk, picking up a long brass-barreled English flintlock and hefting it.

“You know, I sometimes wonder why we don’t all come up here, break out the ammunition, pick our weapons, and settle things,” she said. “It never was like this when Lane was around. Oh, Nelda and Geraldine would bare their teeth at each other, once in a while, but now this place has turned into a miniature Iwo Jima. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to take it. I’m developing combat fatigue.”

“It’s snowing,” Rand mentioned. “Let’s throw them out into the storm.”

“I can’t. I have to give Nelda and Geraldine a home, as long as they live,” she replied. “Terms of the will. Oh, well, Geraldine’ll drink herself to death in a few years, and Nelda will elope with a prizefighter, sometime.”

“Why don’t you have the house haunted? The Tri-State Agency has an excellent house-haunting department. Anything you want; poltergeists; apparitions; cold, clammy hands in the dark; footsteps in the attic; clanking chains and eldritch screams; banshees. Any three for the price of two.”

“It wouldn’t work. Geraldine is so used to polka-dotted dinosaurs and Little Green Men from Mars that she wouldn’t mind an ordinary ghost, and Nelda’d probably try to drag it into