Henry Beam Piper - Murder in the Gunroom

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MURDER IN THE GUNROOM

By H. BEAM PIPER

NEW YORK
_Alfred A. Knopf_ 1953
FIRST EDITION

TO _Colonel Henry W. Shoemaker_ an old and valued friend, who was
promised this dedication, with an entirely different novel in mind,
twenty-two years ago.

PREFACE

_The Lane Fleming collection of early pistols and revolvers was one of
the best in the country. When Fleming was found dead on the floor of
his locked gunroom, a Confederate-made Colt-type percussion .36 revolver
in his hand, the coroner's verdict was "death by accident." But Gladys
Fleming had her doubts. Enough at any rate to engage Colonel Jefferson
Davis Rand--better known just as Jeff--private detective and a
pistol-collector himself, to catalogue, appraise, and negotiate the
sale of her late husband's collection.

There were a number of people who had wanted the collection. The
question was: had anyone wanted it badly enough to kill Fleming? And if
so, how had he done it? Here is a mystery, told against the fascinating
background of old guns and gun-collecting, which is rapid-fire without
being hysterical, exciting without losing its contact with reason, and
which introduces a personable and intelligent new private detective. It
is a story that will keep your nerves on a hair trigger even if you don't
know the difference between a cased pair of Paterson .34's and a Texas
.40 with a ramming-lever._

CHAPTER 1

It was hard to judge Jeff Rand's age from his appearance; he was
certainly over thirty and considerably under fifty. He looked hard and
fit, like a man who could be a serviceable friend or a particularly
unpleasant enemy. Women instinctively suspected that he would make a
most satisfying lover. One might have taken him for a successful lawyer
(he had studied law, years ago), or a military officer in mufti (he still
had a Reserve colonelcy, and used the title occasionally, to impress
people who he thought needed impressing), or a prosperous businessman,
as he usually thought of himself. Most of all, he looked like King
Charles II of England anachronistically clad in a Brooks Brothers suit.

At the moment, he was looking rather like King Charles II being bothered
by one of his mistresses who wanted a peerage for her husband.

"But, Mrs. Fleming," he was expostulating. "There surely must be somebody
else.... After all, you'll have to admit that this isn't the sort of work
this agency handles."

The would-be client released a series of smoke-rings and watched them
float up toward the air-outlet at the office ceiling. It spoke well for
Rand's ability to subordinate esthetic to business considerations that he
was trying to give her a courteous and humane brush-off. She made even
the Petty and Varga girls seem credible. Her color-scheme was blue and
gold; blue eyes, and a blue tailored outfit that would have looked severe
on a less curvate figure, and a charmingly absurd little blue hat perched
on a mass of golden hair. If Rand had been Charles II, she could have
walked out of there with a duchess's coronet, and Nell Gwyn would have
been back selling oranges.

"Why isn't it?" she countered. "Your door's marked _Tri-State Detective
Agency, Jefferson Davis Rand, Investigation and Protection_. Well, I want
to know how much the collection's worth, and who'll pay the closest to
it. That's investigation, isn't it? And I want protection from being
swindled. And don't tell me you can't do it. You're a pistol-collector,
yourself; you have one of the best small collections in the state. And
you're a recognized authority on early pistols; I've read some of your
articles in the _Rifleman_. If you can't handle this, I don't know who
can."

Rand's frown deepened. He wondered how much Gladys Fleming knew about the
principles of General Semantics. Even if she didn't know anything, she
was still edging him into an untenable position. He hastily shifted from
the attempt to identify his business with the label, "private detective
agency."

"Well, here, Mrs. Fleming," he explained. "My business, including
armed-guard and protected-delivery service, and general investigation
and protection work, requires some personal supervision, but none of
it demands my exclusive attention. Now, if you wanted some routine
investigation made, I could turn it over to my staff, maybe put two or
three men to work on it. But there's nothing about this business of yours
that I could delegate to anybody; I'd have to do it all myself, at the
expense of neglecting the rest of my business. Now, I could do what you
want done, but it would cost you three or four times what you'd gain by
retaining me."

"Well, let me decide that, Colonel," she replied. "How much would you
have to have?"

"Well, this collection of your late husband's consists of some
twenty-five hundred pistols and revolvers, all types and periods," Rand
said. "You want me to catalogue it, appraise each item, issue lists, and
negotiate with prospective buyers. The cataloguing and appraisal alone
would take from a week to ten days, and it would be a couple more weeks
until a satisfactory sale could be arranged. Why, say five thousand
dollars; a thousand as a retainer and the rest on completion."

That, he thought, would settle that. He was expecting an indignant
outcry, and hardened his heart, like Pharaoh. Instead, Gladys Fleming
nodded equably.

"That seems reasonable enough, Colonel Rand, considering that you'd have
to be staying with us at Rosemont, away from your office," she agreed.
"I'll give you a check for the thousand now, with a letter of
authorization."

Rand nodded in return. Being thoroughly conscious of the fact that
he could only know a thin film of the events on the surface of any
situation, he was not easily surprised.

"Very well," he said. "You've hired an arms-expert. I'll be in Rosemont
some time tomorrow afternoon. Now, who are these prospective purchasers
you mentioned, and just how prospective, in terms of United States
currency, are they?"

"Well, for one, there's Arnold Rivers; he's offering ten thousand for the
collection. I suppose you know of him; he has an antique-arms business at
Rosemont."

"I've done some business with him," Rand admitted. "Who else?"

"There's a commission-dealer named Carl Gwinnett, who wants to handle
the collection for us, for twenty per cent. I'm told that that isn't an
unusually exorbitant commission, but I'm not exactly crazy about the
idea."

"You shouldn't be, if you want your money in a hurry," Rand told her.
"He'd take at least five years to get everything sold. He wouldn't dump
the whole collection on the market at once, upset prices, and spoil his
future business. You know, two thousand five hundred pistols of the sort
Mr. Fleming had, coming on the market in a lot, could do just that. The
old-arms market isn't so large that it couldn't be easily saturated."

"That's what I'd been thinking.... And then, there are some private
collectors, mostly friends of Lane's--Mr. Fleming's--who are talking
about forming a pool to buy the collection for distribution among
themselves," she continued.

"That's more like it," Rand approved. "If they can raise enough money
among them, that is. They won't want the stuff for resale, and they may
pay something resembling a decent price. Who are they?"

"Well, Stephen Gresham appears to be the leading spirit," she said. "The
corporation lawyer, you know. Then, there is a Mr. Trehearne, and a Mr.
MacBride, and Philip Cabot, and one or two others."

"I know Gresham and Cabot," Rand said. "They're both friends of mine, and
I have an account with Cabot, Joyner & Teale, Cabot's brokerage firm.
I've corresponded with MacBride; he specializes in Colts.... You're the
sole owner, I take it?"

"Well, no." She paused, picking her words carefully. "We may just run
into a little trouble, there. You see, the collection is part of the
residue of the estate, left equally to myself and my two stepdaughters,
Nelda Dunmore and Geraldine Varcek. You understand, Mr. Fleming and I
were married in 1941; his first wife died fifteen years before."

"Well, your stepdaughters, now; would they also be my clients?"

"Good Lord, no!" That amused her considerably more than it did Rand.
"Of course," she continued, "they're just as interested in selling the
collection for the best possible price, but beyond that, there may be a
slight divergence of opinion. For instance, Nelda's husband, Fred
Dunmore, has been insisting that we let him handle the sale of the
pistols, on the grounds that he is something he calls a businessman.
Nelda supports him in this. It was Fred who got this ten-thousand-dollar
offer from Rivers. Personally, I think Rivers is playing him for a
sucker. Outside his own line, Fred is an awful innocent, and I've never
trusted this man Rivers. Lane had some trouble with him, just before ..."

"Arnold Rivers," Rand said, when it was evident that she was not going
to continue, "has the reputation, among collectors, of being the biggest
crook in the old-gun racket, a reputation he seems determined to live
up--or down--to. But here; if your stepdaughters are co-owners, what's
my status? What authority, if any, have I to do any negotiating?"

Gladys Fleming laughed musically. "That, my dear Colonel, is where you
earn your fee," she told him. "Actually, it won't be as hard as it looks.
If Nelda gives you any argument, you can count on Geraldine to take your
side as a matter of principle; if Geraldine objects first, Nelda will
help you steam-roll her into line. Fred Dunmore is accustomed to dealing
with a lot of yes-men at the plant; you shouldn't have any trouble
shouting him down. Anton Varcek won't be interested, one way or another;
he has what amounts to a pathological phobia about firearms of any sort.
And Humphrey Goode, our attorney, who's executor of the estate, will
welcome you with open arms, once he finds out what you want to do. That
collection has him talking to himself, already. Look; if you come out
to our happy home in the early afternoon, before Fred and Anton get back
from the plant, we ought to ram through some sort of agreement with
Geraldine and Nelda."

"You and whoever else sides with me will be a majority," Rand considered.
"Of course, the other one may pull a Gromyko on us, but ... I think I'll
talk to Goode, first."

"Yes. That would be smart," Gladys Fleming agreed. "After all, he's
responsible for selling the collection." She crossed to the desk and sat
down in Rand's chair while she wrote out the check and a short letter of
authorization, then she returned to her own seat.

"There's another thing," she continued, lighting a fresh cigarette.
"Because of the manner of Mr. Fleming's death, the girls have a horror of
the collection almost--but not quite--as strong as their desire to get
the best possible price for it."

"Yes. I'd heard that Mr. Fleming had been killed in a firearms accident,
last November," Rand mentioned.

"It was with one of his collection-pieces," the widow replied. "One
he'd bought just that day; a Confederate-made Colt-type percussion .36
revolver. He'd brought it home with him, simply delighted with it, and
started cleaning it at once. He could hardly wait until dinner was over
to get back to work on it.

"We'd finished dinner about seven, or a little after. At about half-past,
Nelda went out somewhere in the coupe. Anton had gone up to his
laboratory, in the attic--he's one of these fortunates whose work is also
his hobby; he's a biochemist and dietitian--and Lane was in the gunroom,
on the second floor, working on his new revolver. Fred Dunmore was having
a bath, and Geraldine and I had taken our coffee into the east parlor.
Geraldine put on the radio, and we were listening to it.

"It must have been about 7:47 or 7:48, because the program had changed
and the first commercial was just over, when we heard a loud noise from
somewhere upstairs. Neither of us thought of a shot; my own first idea
was of a door slamming. Then, about five minutes later, we heard Anton,
in the upstairs hall, pounding on a door, and shouting: 'Lane! Lane! Are
you all right?' We ran up the front stairway, and found Anton, in his
rubber lab-apron, and Fred, in a bathrobe, and barefooted, standing
outside the gunroom door. The door was locked, and that in itself was
unusual; there's a Yale lock on it, but nobody ever used it.

"For a minute or so, we just stood there. Anton was explaining that he
had heard a shot and that nobody in the gunroom answered. Geraldine told
him, rather impatiently, to go down to the library and up the spiral. You
see," she explained, "the library is directly under the gunroom, and
there's a spiral stairway connecting the two rooms. So Anton went
downstairs and we stood waiting in the hall. Fred was shivering in his
bathrobe; he said he'd just jumped out of the bathtub, and he had
nothing on under it. After a while, Anton opened the gunroom door from
the inside, and stood in the doorway, blocking it. He said: 'You'd better
not come in. There's been an accident, but it's too late to do anything.
Lane's shot himself with one of those damned pistols; I always knew
something like this would happen.'

"Well, I simply elbowed him out of the way and went in, and the others
followed me. By this time, the uproar had penetrated to the rear of the
house, and the servants--Walters, the butler, and Mrs. Horder, the
cook--had joined us. We found Lane inside, lying on the floor, shot
through the forehead. Of course, he was dead. He'd been sitting on one of
these old cobblers' benches of the sort that used to be all the thing for
cocktail-tables; he had his tools and polish and oil and rags on it. He'd
fallen off it to one side and was lying beside it. He had a revolver in
his right hand, and an oily rag in his left."

"Was it the revolver he'd brought home with him?" Rand asked.

"I don't know," she replied. "He showed me this Confederate revolver when
he came home, but it was dirty and dusty, and I didn't touch it. And I
didn't look closely at the one he had in his hand when he was ... on the
floor. It was about the same size and design; that's all I could swear
to." She continued: "We had something of an argument about what to do.
Walters, the butler, offered to call the police. He's English, and his
mind seems to run naturally to due process of law. Fred and Anton both
howled that proposal down; they wanted no part of the police. At the
same time, Geraldine was going into hysterics, and I was trying to get
her quieted down. I took her to her room and gave her a couple of
sleeping-pills, and then went back to the gunroom. While I was gone, it
seems that Anton had called our family doctor, Dr. Yardman, and then Fred
called Humphrey Goode, our lawyer. Goode lives next door to us, about two
hundred yards away, so he arrived almost at once. When the doctor came,
he called the coroner, and when he arrived, about an hour later, they all
went into a huddle and decided that it was an obvious accident and that
no inquest would be necessary. Then somebody, I'm not sure who, called an
undertaker. It was past eleven when he arrived, and for once, Nelda got
home early. She was just coming in while they were carrying Lane out in a
basket. You can imagine how horrible that was for her; it was days before
she was over the shock. So she'll be just as glad as anybody to see the
last of the pistol-collection."

Through the recital, Rand had sat silently, toying with the ivory-handled
Italian Fascist dagger-of-honor that was doing duty as a letter-opener on
his desk. Gladys Fleming wasn't, he was sure, indulging in any
masochistic self-harrowing; neither, he thought, was she talking to
relieve her mind. Once or twice there had been a small catch in her
voice, but otherwise the narration had been a piece of straight
reporting, neither callous nor emotional. Good reporting, too; carefully
detailed. There had been one or two inclusions of inferential matter in
the guise of description, but that was to be looked for and discounted.
And she had remembered, at the end, to include her ostensible reason for
telling the story.

"Yes, it must have been dreadful," he sympathized. "Odd, though, that an
old hand with guns like Mr. Fleming would have an accident like that. I
met him, once or twice, and was at your home to see his collection, a
couple of years ago. He impressed me as knowing firearms pretty
thoroughly.... Well, you can look for me tomorrow, say around two. In
the meantime, I'll see Goode, and also Gresham and Arnold Rivers."

CHAPTER 2

After ushering his client out the hall door and closing it behind her,
Rand turned and said:

"All right, Kathie, or Dave; whoever's out there. Come on in."

Then he went to his desk and reached under it, snapping off a switch.
As he straightened, the door from the reception-office opened and
his secretary, Kathie O'Grady, entered, loading a cigarette into an
eight-inch amber holder. She was a handsome woman, built on the generous
lines of a Renaissance goddess; none of the Renaissance masters, however,
had ever employed a model so strikingly Hibernian. She had blue eyes, and
a fair, highly-colored complexion; she wore green, which went well with
her flaming red hair, and a good deal of gold costume-jewelry.

Behind her came Dave Ritter. He was Rand's assistant, and also Kathie's
lover. He was five or six years older than his employer, and slightly
built. His hair, fighting a stubborn rearguard action against baldness,
was an 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 book-keeper 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
further assume that the killer wasn't particularly familiar with the
subject of firearms, antique, care and maintenance of."

"And with all the hollering and whooping and hysterics-throwing, nobody
noticed the switch," Ritter finished. "Wonder what happened to the one he
was really cleaning."

"That I may possibly find out," Rand said. "The general incompetence with
which this murder was committed gives me plenty of room to hope that it
may still be lying around somewhere."

"Well, have you thought that it might just be suicide?" Kathie asked.

"I have, very briefly; I dismissed the thought, almost at once," Rand
told her. "For two reasons. One, that if it had been suicide, Mrs.
Fleming wouldn't want it poked into; she'd be more than willing to let it
ride as an accident. And, two, I doubt if a man who prided himself on his
gun-knowledge, as Fleming did, would want his self-shooting to be taken
for an accident. I'm damn sure I wouldn't want my friends to go around
saying: 'What a dope; didn't know it was loaded!' I doubt if he'd even
expect people to believe that it had been an accident." He shook his
head. "No, the only inference I can draw is that somebody murdered
Fleming, and then faked evidence intended to indicate an accident." He
rose. "I'll be back, in a little; think it over, while I'm gone."

* * * * *

Carter Tipton had his law-office on the floor above the Tri-State
Detective Agency. He handled all Rand's not infrequent legal
involvements, and Rand did all his investigating and witness-chasing;
annually, they compared books to see who owed whom how much. Tipton was
about five years Rand's junior, and had been in the Navy during the war.
He was frequently described as New Belfast's leading younger attorney and
most eligible bachelor. His dark, conservatively cut clothes fitted him
as though they had been sprayed on, he wore gold-rimmed glasses, and he
was so freshly barbered, manicured, valeted and scrubbed as to give the
impression that he had been born in cellophane and just unwrapped. He
leaned back in his chair and waved his visitor to a seat.

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