Rand found Gladys alone in the library. As she rose to greet him, he came
close to her, gesturing for silence with finger on lips.
"There's a perfect hell of a mess," he whispered. "Somebody murdered
Arnold Rivers last night."
She looked at him in horror. "Murdered? Who was it? How did it...?"
"I haven't time to talk about that right now," he told her. "Stephen
Gresham and Pierre Jarrett are on their way here, and I'd like you to
keep the servants, and particularly Walters, out of earshot of the
gunroom while they're here. It seems that a number of the best pistols
have been stolen from the collection, sometime between the death of Mr.
Fleming and the time I saw the collection yesterday. Stephen and Pierre
are going to help me find out just what's been taken. I have an idea they
might have been sold to Rivers. That may have been why he was killed--to
prevent him from implicating the thief."
"You think somebody here--the servants?" she asked.
"I can't see how it could have been an outsider. The stuff wasn't all
taken at once; it must have been moved out a piece at a time, and
worthless pistols moved in and hung on the racks to replace valuable
pistols taken." He had left the library door purposely open; when the
doorbell rang, he heard it. "I'll let them in," he said. "You go and head
Walters off."
Rand hurried to the front door and admitted Gresham and Pierre, hustling
them down the hall, into the library, and up the spiral to the gunroom,
while Gladys went to the foot of the front stairs. Through the open
gunroom door, Rand could hear her speaking to Walters, as though sending
him on some errand to the rear of the house. He closed the door and
turned to the others.
"We'll have to make it fast," he said. "Mrs. Fleming can't hold the
butler off all day. Let's start over here, and go around the racks."
They began at the left, with the wheel locks. Pierre put his finger
immediately on the shabby and disreputable specimen Rand had first
noticed.
"Phew! Is that one a stinker!" he said. "What used to be there was a
nice late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century North Italian pistol,
all covered with steel filigree-work. A real beauty; much better than
average."
"Those Turkish atrocities," Gresham pointed out. "They're filling in for
a pair of Lazarino Cominazo snaphaunces that Lane Fleming paid seven
hundred for, back in the mid-thirties, and didn't pay a cent too much
for, even then. Worth an easy thousand, now. Remember the pair of
Cominazo flintlocks illustrated in Pollard's _Short History of Firearms_?
These were even better, and snaphaunces."
"Well, you go over the collection," Rand told them. "Note down anything
you find missing." He handed them a pad of paper and a pencil from the
desk. "I have something else to do, for a few minutes."
With that he left them scrutinizing the pistols on the wall, and went to
the workbench in the corner, drawing the .36 Colt from under his
waistband. Working rapidly, he dismounted it, taking off the barrel and
cylinder, and cleaned it thoroughly before putting it together again.
Pierre and Gresham had just started on the Colts when he slipped the
revolver out of sight and rejoined them.
It took over a half-hour to finish; when they had gotten completely
around the collection, Rand had a list of twenty-six missing items,
including four cased sets. At a conservative estimate, the missing
pistols were worth ten to twelve thousand dollars, dealer's list value;
the stuff that had been moved in to replace them might have a value of
two or three hundred, but no serious collector would buy any of it at any
price. There had been no attempt to replace the cased items; the cases
had been merely rearranged on the table to avoid any conspicuous
vacancies.
"See that thing?" Pierre asked, tapping a small .25 Webley & Scott
automatic with his finger. Rand looked at it; it had been fitted with an
English-made silencer. "That thing," Pierre said, "is the one illustrated
in Pollard's book. The identical pistol; it used to be in the Pollard
collection."
"Lane had a lot of stuff from some famous collections," Gresham said.
"Pollard collection, Sawyer collection, Fred Hines collection, Meeks
collection, even the old Mark Field collection, that was sold at Libbie
Galleries in 1911. His own could rank with any of them. Think you can get
any of this stuff back?"
"I hope so. By the way, where does this fellow Umholtz, the fabricator of
spurious Whitneyville Walker Colts, hang out? I believe he ought to be
looked into."
"Say, that's an idea!" Pierre ejaculated. "He might have bought the
pistols, instead of Rivers. Why, he has a gunshop at Kingsville, on Route
22, about fifteen miles west of here, just this side of the village. He
had a big sign along the road, and his shop's in the barn, behind the
house."
"I'll have to check up on him. But first, I want to see if any of this
stuff's at Rivers's shop. I won't ask you to come along," he told
Gresham. "No use you sticking your head into the lion's mouth. I've
talked the State Police temporarily off your trail, but I still have
Farnsworth to worry about."
"He'd like to prosecute a big corporation lawyer, if he thought he had
any chance of getting a conviction," Pierre said. "Make a nice impression
on the proletarian vote in the south end of the county."
"You're a member of the Mohawk Club in New Belfast, aren't you?" Rand
asked Gresham. "Well, go there and stay there for a couple of days, till
the heat's off. Pierre, you can come with me to Rivers's; I'll run you
home in my car when we're through."
Gresham let himself out the front door; Pierre and Rand went out through
the garage and got into Rand's car.
"You have any idea, so far, about who could have killed Rivers?" the
ex-Marine asked, as they coasted down the drive to the highway.
"I haven't even the start of an idea," Rand said. He ran briefly over
what he knew, or at least those items which were likely to become public
knowledge soon. "From what I've observed at the shop, and from what I
know of Rivers's character, I'd think that he'd been in some kind of a
crooked deal with somebody, and got double-crossed, or else the other man
caught Rivers double-crossing him. Or else, Rivers and somebody else had
some secret in common, and the other man wanted a monopoly on it and
killed Rivers as a security measure."
"Think it might be the Fleming pistols?"
"That depends. I'll have to see whether any of the Fleming pistols turn
up anywhere in Rivers's former possession. Personally, I've about decided
that the man who was drinking with Rivers killed him. There aren't any
indications that anybody else was in the shop afterward. If that's the
case, I doubt if the killer was Walters. You know what a snobbish guy
Rivers was. And from what I know of him, he seems to have had a
thoroughly Aristotelian outlook; he identified individuals with
class-labels. Walters, of course, would be identified with the label
'butler,' and I can't imagine Rivers sitting down and drinking with a
'butler.' He would only drink with people whom he thought of as his
equals, that is, people whom he identified with class-labels of equal
social importance to his own labels of 'antiquarian' and 'businessman.'"
"That sounds like Korzybski," Pierre said, as they turned onto Route 19
in the village and headed east. "You've read _Science and Sanity_?"
Rand nodded. "Yes. I first read it in the 1933 edition, back about 1936;
I've been rereading it every couple of years since. The principles of
General Semantics come in very handy in my business, especially in
criminal-investigation work, like this. A consciousness of abstracting,
a realization that we can only know something about a thin film of events
on the surface of any given situation, and a habit of thinking
structurally and of individual things, instead of verbally and of
categories, saves a lot of blind-alley chasing. And they suggest a
great many more avenues of investigation than would be evident to one
whose thinking is limited by intensional, verbal, categories."
"Yes. I find General Semantics helpful in my work, too," Pierre said. "I
can use it in plotting a story.... Oh-oh!"
"The Gentlemen of the Press," Rand said, looking ahead as the car
approached the Rivers house and shop. "There hasn't been a good,
sensational, murder story for some time; this is a gift from the gods."
A swarm of cars were parked in front and beside the red-brick house.
Among them, Rand spotted a gold-lettered green sedan of the New Belfast
_Dispatch_ and _Evening Express_, a black coupe bearing the blazonry of
the New Belfast _Mercury_, cars from a couple of papers at Louisburg, the
state capital, and cars from papers as far distant as Pittsburgh,
Buffalo, and Cincinnati. In front of the shop, a motley assemblage of
journalists was interviewing and photographing an undersized runt in
a tan Chesterfield topcoat and a gray Homburg hat, whom they were
addressing as Mr. Farnsworth. The District Attorney of Scott County had
a mustache which failed miserably to make him look like Tom Dewey; he
impressed Rand as the sort of offensive little squirt who compensates
for his general insignificance by bad manners and loud-mouthed
self-assertion. Corporal Kavaalen, standing in the doorway of the shop,
caught sight of Rand and his companion as they got out of the car and
came to meet them, hustling them around the crowd and into the shop
before anybody could notice and recognize them.
"That was a good tip, about the telephone," he said softly. "Mick checked
at the Rosemont exchange. Rivers got a long-distance call from Topeka
last night; ten fifteen to ten seventeen. We got the night long distance
operator out of bed, and she confirmed it; Rivers took the call himself.
He gets a lot of long distance calls in the evenings; she knew his
voice." He corrected himself, shifting to the past tense and glancing, as
he did, at the chalk outline on the floor, now scuffed by many feet, and
the dried bloodstains. "You say this puts Gresham in the clear?"
"Absolutely," Rand assured him. "He was at home from nine twenty-two on."
He introduced Pierre Jarrett, and explained their mission. "You find
anything except what's here in the shop?"
"Only Rivers's own .38 Smith & Wesson, in his room, and a lot of pistols
out in the garage, that look like junk to me," Kavaalen said. "I'll show
them to you."
Rand nodded. "Pierre, you look around the shop; I'll see what this other
stuff is."
He followed Kavaalen through a door at the rear of the shop; the same one
through which Cecil Gillis had carried the Kentucky rifle the afternoon
before. Beside Rivers's car, there was a long workbench in the garage,
and piles of wood and cardboard cartons, and stacks of newspapers, and
a barrel full of excelsior, all evidently used in preparing arms for
shipment. There was also a large pile of old pistols, and a number of
long-arms.
Rand pawed among the pistols; they were, as the State Police corporal had
said, all junk. The sort of things a dealer has to buy, at times, in
order to get something really good. Many of them had been partially
dismantled for parts. When he was certain that the heap of junk-weapons
didn't conceal anything of value, he returned to the shop. Pierre was
waiting for him by Rivers's desk.
He shook his head. "Not a thing," he reported. "I found a couple of
out-and-out fakes, and about ten or fifteen that had been altered in one
way or another, and a lot of reblued stuff, but nothing from Fleming's
collection. What did you find?"
Rand laughed. "I found Rivers's scrap-heap, and some pistols that
probably contributed parts to some of the stuff you found," he said. "Of
course, all we can say is that the stuff isn't here; Rivers could have
bought it, and stored it outside somewhere. But even so, I'm not taking
the Fleming butler too seriously as a suspect for the murder."
"What's this about Fleming's butler?" a voice broke in. "Have you been
withholding information from me?"
Rand turned, to find that Farnsworth had left the press conference in
front and crepe-soled up on him from behind.
"I withheld a theory, which seems to have come to nothing," he replied.
Kavaalen told the D.A. who Rand was. "He's cooperating with us," he
added. "Sergeant McKenna instructed us to give him every consideration."
"It seems that a number of valuable pistols were stolen from the
collection of the late Lane Fleming," Rand said. "We suspected that
the butler had stolen them and sold them to Rivers; I thought it
possible that he might also have killed Rivers to silence him about the
transaction." He shrugged. "None of the stolen items have turned up here,
so there's nothing to connect the thefts with the death of Rivers."
"Good heavens, you certainly didn't suspect a prominent and respected
citizen like Mr. Rivers of receiving stolen goods?" Farnsworth demanded,
aghast.
"Who respects him?" Rand hooted. "Rivers was a notorious swindler; he
had that reputation among arms-collectors all over the country. He was
expelled from membership in the National Rifle Association for
misrepresentation and fraud. Why, he even swindled Lane Fleming on a pair
of fake pistols, a week or so before Fleming's death. And the very reason
why your man Olsen was inclined to suspect Stephen Gresham was that he
had had trouble with Rivers about a crooked deal Rivers had put over on
him. Fortunately, Mr. Gresham has since been cleared of any suspicion,
but--"
"Who says he's been cleared?" Farnsworth snapped. "He's still a suspect."
"Sergeant McKenna says so," Corporal Kavaalen declared. "He has been
cleared. I guess we just didn't get around to telling you about that."
He went on to explain about the long distance call that had furnished
Stephen Gresham's alibi.
"And Gresham was at home from nine twenty-two on," Rand added. "There are
eight witnesses to that: His wife and daughter; myself; Captain Jarrett,
here; and his fiancee, Miss Lawrence; Philip Cabot; Adam Trehearne; Colin
MacBride."
Farnsworth looked bewildered. "Why wasn't I told about that?" he demanded
sulkily.
"Sergeant McKenna's been too busy, and I didn't think of it," Kavaalen
said insolently. "I'm not supposed to report to you, anyhow. Why didn't
your man Olsen tell you; he was with us when we checked with the
telephone company."
Farnsworth tried to ignore that by questioning Pierre about the time of
Gresham's arrival home, then turned to Rand and wanted to know what the
latter's interest in the case was.
Rand told him about his work in connection with the Fleming collection,
producing Humphrey Goode's letter of authorization. Farnsworth seemed
impressed in about the same way as the coroner, Kirchner, but he was
still puzzled.
"But I understood that you had been retained by Stephen Gresham, to
investigate this murder," he said.
"So you did talk to Olsen, after I saw him," Rand pounced. "Odd he didn't
mention this telephone thing.... Why, yes; that's true. My agency handles
all sorts of business. The two operations aren't mutually exclusive; for
a while, I even thought they might be related, but now--" He shrugged.
"Well, you believe, now, that Rivers had nothing to do with the pistols
you say were stolen from the Fleming collection?" Farnsworth asked. Rand
shook his head ambiguously; Farnsworth took that for a negative answer
to his question, as he was intended to. "And you say Mr. Gresham has been
completely cleared of any suspicion of complicity in this murder?"
"Mr. Rand's helping us; we want him to stick around till the case is
closed," Corporal Kavaalen threw in, perceiving the drift of Farnsworth's
questions. "He and Sergeant McKenna have worked together before; he's
given us a lot of good tips."
"You understand," Rand took over, "Mr. Gresham didn't retain me merely
to help him clear himself. I don't accept that kind of retainers. I was
retained to find the murderer of Arnold Rivers, and I intend to continue
working on this case until I do. I hope that the same friendly spirit of
mutual cooperation will exist between your office and my agency as exists
between me and the State Police. I certainly don't want to have to work
at cross purposes with any of the regular law-enforcement agencies."
"Oh, certainly; of course." Farnsworth didn't seem to like the idea, but
there was no apparent opening for objection. He and Rand exchanged
mendacious compliments, pledged close cooperation, and did practically
everything but draw up and sign a treaty of alliance. Then Farnsworth and
Corporal Kavaalen accompanied Rand and Pierre Jarrett to the front door.
Some of the reporters who were ravening outside must have spotted Rand as
he had entered; they were all waiting for him to come out, and set up a
monstrous ululation when he appeared in the doorway. With Farnsworth
beaming approval, Rand assured the Press that he was no more than a mere
spectator, that the State Police and the efficient District Attorney of
Scott County had the situation well in hand, and that an arrest was
expected within a matter of hours. Then he and Pierre hurried to his car
and drove away.