Finally he caught a movement, and saw what looked like the top of a peak-crowned gray felt hat between the spindles of the railing. He eased the Detective Special out of its holster and got to his feet.
“All right!” he sang out. “Come on up!”
Walters looked, obviously startled, at the revolver that had materialized in Rand’s hand, and at the two men who were emerging from the spiral. He was even more startled, it seemed, when he realized that they wore the uniform of the State Police.
“What.… What’s the meaning of this, sir?” he demanded of Rand.
“You’re being arrested,” Rand told him. “Just stand still, now.”
He stepped around the desk and frisked the butler quickly, wondering if he were going to find a .25 Webley & Scott automatic or his own .38-Special. When he found neither, he holstered his temporary weapon.
“If this is your idea of a joke, sir, permit me to say that it isn’t.…”
“It’s no joke, son,” Sergeant McKenna told him. “In this country, a police-officer doesn’t have to recite any incantation before he makes an arrest, any more than he needs to read any Riot Act before he can start shooting, but it won’t hurt to warn you that anything you say can be used against you.”
“At least, I must insist upon knowing why I am being arrested,” Walters said icily.
“Oh! Don’t you know?” McKenna asked. “Why, you’re being arrested for the murder of Arnold Rivers.”
For a moment the butler retained his professional glacial disdain, and then the bottom seemed to drop suddenly out of him. Rand suppressed a smile at this minor verification of his theory. Walters had been expecting to be accused of larceny, and was prepared to treat the charge with contempt. Then he had realized, after a second or so, what the State Police sergeant had really said.
“Good God, gentlemen!” He looked from Mick McKenna to Corporal Kavaalen to Rand and back again in bewilderment. “You surely can’t mean that!”
“We can and we do,” Rand told him. “You stole about twenty-five pistols from this collection, after Mr. Fleming died, and sold them to Arnold Rivers. Then, when I came here and started checking up on the collection, you knew the game was up. So, last evening, you took out the station-wagon and went to see Rivers, and you killed him to keep him from turning state’s evidence and incriminating you. Or maybe you killed him in a quarrel over the division of the loot. I hope, for your sake, that it was the latter; if it was, you may get off with second degree murder. But if you can’t prove that there was no premeditation, you’re tagged for the electric chair.”
“But…But I didn’t kill Mr. Rivers,” Walters stammered. “I barely knew the gentleman. I saw him, once or twice, when he was here to see Mr. Fleming, but outside of that.…”
“Outside of that, you sold him about twenty-five of these pistols, and got a like number of junk pistols from him, for replacements.” He took the list Pierre Jarrett and Stephen Gresham had compiled out of his pocket and began reading: “Italian wheel lock pistol, late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century; pair Italian snaphaunce pistols, by Lazarino Cominazo.…” He finished the list and put it away. “I think we’ve missed one or two, but that’ll do, for the time.”
“But I didn’t sell those pistols to Mr. Rivers,” Walters expostulated. “I sold them to Mr. Carl Gwinnett. I can prove it!”
That Rand had not expected. “Go on!” he jeered. “I suppose you have receipts for all of them. Fences always do that, of course.”
“But I did sell them to Mr. Gwinnett. I can take you to his house, if you get a search warrant, and show you where he has them hidden in the garret. He was afraid to offer them for sale until after this collection had been broken up and sold; he still has every one of them.”
McKenna spat out an obscenity. “Aren’t we ever going to have any luck?” he demanded. “Jarrett out on a writ this morning, and now this!”
“But he ain’t in the clear,” Kavaalen argued. “Maybe he didn’t sell Rivers the pistols, but maybe he did kill him.”
“Dope!” McKenna abused his subordinate. “If he didn’t sell Rivers the pistols, why would he kill him?”
“He’s only said he sold them to Gwinnett,” Rand pointed out. Then he turned to Walters. “Look here; if we find those pistols in Gwinnett’s possession, you’re clear on this murder charge. There’s still a slight matter of larceny, but that doesn’t involve the electric chair. You take my advice and make a confession now, and then accompany these officers to Gwinnett’s place and show them the pistols. If you do that, you may expect clemency on the theft charge, too.”
“Oh, I will, sir! I’ll sign a full confession, and take these police-officers and show them every one of the pistols.…”
Rand put paper and carbon sheets in the typewriter. As Walters dictated, he typed; the butler listed every pistol which Gresham and Pierre Jarrett had found missing, and a cased presentation pair of .44 Colt 1860’s that nobody had missed. He signed the triplicate copies willingly; he didn’t seem to mind signing himself into jail, as long as he thought he was signing himself out of the electric chair.
The book in which Fleming had recorded his pistols he still had; he had removed it from the gunroom and was keeping it in his room. He said he would get it, along with the things he would need to take to jail with him. When it was finished, they all went down the spiral stairway into the library.
Nelda was standing at the foot of it. Evidently she had been listening to what had been going on upstairs.
“You dirty sneak!” she yelled, catching sight of Walters. “After all we’ve done for you, you turn around and rob us! I hope they give you twenty years!”
Walters turned to McKenna. “Sergeant, I am willing to accept the penalty of the law for what I have done, but I don’t believe, sir, that it includes being yapped at by this vulgar bitch.”
Nelda let out an inarticulate howl of fury and sprang at him, nails raking. Corporal Kavaalen caught her wrist before she could claw the prisoner.
“That’s enough, you!” he told her. “You stop that, or you’ll spend a night in jail yourself.”
She jerked her arm loose from his grasp and flung out of the library. As she went out, Gladys entered; Rand, who had been bringing up in the rear, stepped down from the stairway.
“He confessed,” he said softly. “We had to bluff it out of him, but he came across. Sold the pistols to Carl Gwinnett. We’re going, now, to pick up Gwinnett and the pistols.”
“I’m glad you found the pistols,” she told him. “But what’re we going to do, over the week-end, for a butler.…”
Rand snapped his fingers. “Dammit, I never thought of that!” He allowed his brow to furrow with thought. “I won’t promise anything, but I may be able to dig up somebody for you, for a day or so. Some of my friends are visiting their son, in a Naval hospital on the West Coast, and their butler may be glad for a chance to pick up a little extra money. Shall I call him and find out?”
“Oh, Colonel Rand, would you? I’d be eternally grateful!”
It was just as easy as that.
CHAPTER 18
Dave Ritter, driving his small coupé, kept his eye on the white State Police car ahead. Rand, who had come away from the Fleming home in the white car, had called Ritter from the office of the Justice of the Peace while waiting for Walters to put up bail, after his hearing. Now, en route to Gwinnett’s, he was briefing his assistant on what had happened.
“So everything’s set,” he concluded. “Mrs. Fleming jumped at it; she knows you’re coming in your own car, which you may keep in the garage there. You’ve left New Belfast about now; if you show up around three, you’ll be safe on the driving time. Your name is Davies; I decided on that in case I suffer a lapsus linguæ and call you Dave in front of somebody.”
“Yeah. I’ll have to watch and not call you Jeff, Colonel Rand, sir.” He nodded toward the glove-box. “That Leech & Rigdon’s in there; you’d better get it out before I go to the Flemings’. Th
e guy at the drive-in made a positive identification; it’s the one he sold Fleming. I saw the rest of the pistols he has there; don’t waste time looking him up about them. They stink. And I saw Tip this morning. He got young Jarrett sprung on a writ.” He thought for a moment. “What does this do to the Rivers and Fleming murders?”
“We can look for one man for both jobs, now,” Rand said. “Probably the motive for Fleming was that merger he was so violently opposed to, and the Rivers killing must have been a security measure of some sort. There; that must be Gwinnett’s, now.”
The State Police car had pulled up in front of a large three-story frame house with faded and discolored paint and jigsaw scrollwork around the cornices, standing among a clump of trees beside the road. McKenna and Kavaalen got out, with Walters between them, and started up the path to the front steps. Ritter stopped behind the white sedan, and he and Rand got out. By that time, Walters and the two policemen were on the front porch.
Suddenly Ritter turned and sprinted around the right side of the house. Rand stood looking after him for a moment, then started to follow more slowly; as he did, a shot slammed in the rear. Jerking out the changeling .38-special, he whirled and ran around the left side of the house, arriving at the rear in time to see Gwinnett standing on a boardwalk between the house and the stable-garage behind, with his hands raised. There was a fresh bullet-scar on the boardwalk at his feet. Ritter was covering him from the corner of the house with the .380 Beretta.
Rand strolled over to Gwinnett, frisked him, and told him to put his hands down.
“Nice, Dave,” he complimented. “I thought of that, too, about a minute too late. As soon as he saw Walters coming up the walk with the police, he knew what had happened. Come on, Gwinnett; we’ll go through the house and let them in.”
Gwinnett’s eyes darted from side to side, like the eyes of a trapped animal. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, stiff-lipped. “What is this, a stick-up?”
Nobody bothered to tell him to stop kidding. They marched him through the kitchen, where a Negro girl, her arms white with flour, was dithering in fright, and into the front hall. A woman in a faded housedress had just admitted the two officers and the former Fleming butler.
“You goddam rat!” Gwinnett yelled at Walters, as soon as he saw him.
“For God’s sake, Carl,” the woman begged. “Don’t make things any worse than they are. Keep quiet!”
“All right, Gwinnett,” McKenna said. “We’re arresting you: receiving stolen goods, and accessory to larceny. We have a search warrant. Want to see it?”
“So you have a search warrant,” Gwinnett said. “So go ahead and search; if you don’t find anything, you’ll plant something. I want to call my lawyer.”
“That’s your right,” McKenna told him. “Aarvo, take him to a phone; let him call the White House if he wants to.” He turned to Walters. “Now, where would he have this stuff stashed?”
“In the garret, sir. I know the way.”
As Kavaalen accompanied Gwinnett to the phone, Walters started upstairs. Rand and McKenna followed, with Mrs. Gwinnett bringing up the rear. During the search of the attic, she stood to one side, watching the ex-butler dig into a pile of pistols.
“This is one, gentlemen,” Walters said, producing a Springfield 1818 Model flintlock. “And here is the Walker Colt, and the .40-caliber Colt Paterson, and the Hall.…”
Eventually, he had them all assembled, including the five cased sets. Rand found a couple of empty bushel baskets and laid the pistols in them, between layers of old newspapers. He picked up one, and McKenna took the other, while Walters piled the five flat hardwood cases into his arms like cordwood. Still saying nothing, her eyes stony with hatred, the woman followed them downstairs.
The rest of the afternoon was consumed with formalities. Gwinnett was given a hearing, at which he was represented by a lawyer straight out of a B-grade gangster picture. Rand had a heated argument with an over-zealous Justice of the Peace, who wanted to impound the pistols and jackknife-mark them for identification, but after hurling bloodthirsty threats of a damage suit for an astronomical figure, he managed to retain possession of the recovered weapons.
Ritter left at a little past three, to report for duty in the Fleming household. Rand rode with McKenna and Kavaalen to the State Police substation, where the pistols were transferred to McKenna’s personal car, in which they and Rand were to be transported back to the Fleming place.
It was five o’clock before Rand had finished telling the sergeant and the corporal everything he felt they ought to know.
“When we get to the Flemings’, I’ll give you that revolver I got from the coroner,” he finished. “One of your boys can take it to this fellow Umholtz, and get him to identify it. You might also show it to young Gillis, and see what he knows about it. Gillis might even give you a name for who got it from Rivers. I’m not building any hopes on that, and the reason I’m not is that Gillis is still alive. If he knew, I don’t think he would be.”
“Yeah. I can see that,” McKenna nodded. “Fact is, I can see everything, now, except one thing. This pistol-switch somebody gave you; what’s the idea of that?”
“Why, that’s because I’m on the spot,” Rand told him. “I’m to be killed, and somebody else is to be killed along with me. The .25 automatic will be used on me, and the .38 will be used on the other fellow, and we’ll be found dead about five feet apart, and I’ll be holding my own gun, and the other fellow will be holding the .25, and it will look as though we shot it out and scored a double knockout. That way, my mouth will be shut about what I’ve learned since I came here, and the man who’s supposed to have killed me will take the rap for Fleming and Rivers both. Nothing to stop an investigation like a couple of corpses who can’t tell their own story and can take the blame for everything.”
“Zhee-zus!” Kavaalen’s eyes widened. “That must be just it!”
“Well, you got your nerve about you, I’ll say that,” McKenna commented. “You sit there and talk about it like it was something that was going to happen to Joe Doakes and Oscar Zilch.” He looked at Rand intently. “You want us to keep an eye on you?”
Rand leaned over and spat into the brass cuspidor, a gesture of braggadocio he had picked up among the French maquis.
“Hell, no! That’s the last thing I do want!” he said. “I want him to try it. You realize, don’t you, that all this is pure assumption and theory? We don’t have a single fact, as it stands, that proves anything. We could go and pick this fellow up, and he’s one of three men, so we could grab all three of them, and even if we found the .25 Webley & Scott and my .38 in his pockets, we couldn’t charge him with anything. Fact is, right now we can’t even prove that Lane Fleming’s death was anything but the accident it’s on the books as being. But let him take a shot at me.…”
“And then you’ll have another nice, clear case of self-defense.” McKenna frowned. “Goddammit, Jeff, you’ve had to defend yourself too many times, already. This’ll be—well, how many will it be?”
“Counting Germans?” Rand grinned. “Hell, I don’t know; I can’t remember all of them.”
“One thing,” Kavaalen said solemnly, “you never hear of any lawyers springing people out of cemeteries on writs.”
“Look, Jeff,” McKenna said, at length. “If it’s the way you think, this guy won’t dare kill you instantly, will he? Seems to me, the way the script reads, this other guy shoots you, and you shoot back and kill him, and then you die. Isn’t that it?”
Rand nodded. “I’m banking on that. He’ll try to give me a fatal but not instantly fatal wound, and that means he’ll have to take time to pick his spot. The reason I’ve managed to survive these people against whom I’ve had to defend myself has been that I just don’t give a damn where I shoot a man. A lot of good police officers have gotten themselves killed because they tried to wing somebody and took a second or so longer about shooting than they should have.”
“Something in that, too,” McKenna agreed. “But what I’m getting at is this: I think I know a way to give you a little more percentage.” He rose. “Wait a minute; I’ll be right back.”
CHAPTER 19
There was less feuding at dinner that evening than at any previous meal Rand had eaten in the Fleming home. In the first place, everybody seemed a little awed in the presence of the new butler, who flitted in and out of the room like a ghost and, when spoken to, answered in a heavy B.B.C. accent. Then, the women, who carried on most of the hostilities, had re-erected their front populaire and were sharing a common pleasure in the recovery of the stolen pistols. And finally, there was a distinct possibility that the swift and dramatic justice that had overtaken Walters and Gwinnett at Rand’s hands was having a sobering effect upon somebody at that table.
Dunmore, Nelda, Varcek, Geraldine and Gladys had been intending to go to a party that evening, but at the last minute Gladys had pleaded indisposition and telephoned regrets. The meal over, Rand had gone up to the gunroom, Gladys drifted into the small drawing-room off the dining-room, and the others had gone to their rooms to dress.
Rand was taking down the junk with which Walters had infiltrated the collection and was listing and hanging up the recovered items when Fred Dunmore, wearing a dressing-gown, strolled in.
“I can’t get over the idea of Walters being a thief,” he sorrowed. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen his signed confession.… Well, it just goes to show you.…”
“He took his medicine standing up,” Rand said. “And he helped us recover the pistols. If I were you, I’d go easy with him.”
Dunmore shook his head. “I’m not a revengeful man, Colonel Rand,” he said, “but if there’s one thing I can’t forgive, it’s a disloyal employee.” His mouth closed sternly around his cigar. “He’ll have to take what’s coming to him.” He stood by the desk for a moment, looking down at the recovered items and the pile of junk on the floor. “When did you first suspect him?”
The H. Beam Piper Megapack Page 228
