Murder in the Gunroom by H. Beam Piper (most read books of all time .txt) 📖

"That's only because I'm crazy enough to want to marry one," the girl dealer replied. "Of all the miserly, unscrupulous, grasping characters ..." She expressed a doubt that the average gun-collector would pay more than ten cents to see his Lord and Savior riding to hounds on a Bren-carrier. "They don't give a hoot whose grandfather owned what, and if anything's battered up a little, they don't think it looks quaint, they think it looks lousy. And they've never heard of inflation; they think arms ought still to sell for the sort of prices they brought at the old Mark Field sale, back in 1911."

"What were you looking at?" Dot asked Rand, then glanced at the musket in Pierre's hands. "Oh, Priscilla."

Karen laughed. "Dot not only knows everything in the collection; she knows it by name. Dot, show Colonel Rand Hester Prynne."

"Hester coming up," Gresham's daughter said, catching another musket out of the same rack from which Pierre had gotten the matchlock and passing it over to Rand. He grasped the heavy piece, approving of the easy, instinctive way in which the girl had handled it. "Look on the barrel," she told him. "On top, right at the breech."

The gun was a flintlock, or rather, a dog-lock; sure enough, stamped on the breech was the big "A" of the Company of Workmen Armorers of London, the seventeenth-century gunmakers' guild.

"That's right," he nodded. "That's Hester Prynne, all right; the first American girl to make her letter."

There were footsteps in the hall outside, and male voices.

"Adam and Colin," Pierre recognized them before they entered.

Both men were past fifty. Colin MacBride was a six-foot black Highlander; black eyes, black hair, and a black weeping-willow mustache, from under which a stubby pipe jutted. Except when he emptied it of ashes and refilled it, it was a permanent fixture of his weather-beaten face. Trehearne was somewhat shorter, and fair; his sandy mustache, beginning to turn gray at the edges, was clipped to micrometric exactness.

They shook hands with Rand, who set Hester back in her place. Trehearne took the matchlock out of Pierre's hands and looked at it wistfully.

"Some chaps have all the luck," he commented. "What do you think of it, Mr. Rand?" Pierre, who had made the introductions, had respected the detective's present civilian status. "Or don't you collect long-arms?"

"I don't collect them, but I'm interested in anything that'll shoot. That's a good one. Those things are scarce, too."

"Yes. You'll find a hundred wheel locks for every matchlock, and yet there must have been a hundred matchlocks made for every wheel lock."

"Matchlocks were cheap, and wheel locks were expensive," MacBride suggested. He spoke with the faintest trace of Highland accent. "Naturally, they got better care."

"It would take a Scot to think of that," Karen said. "Now, you take a Scot who collects guns, and you have something!"

"That's only part of it," Rand said. "I believe that by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, most of the matchlocks that were lying around had been scrapped, and the barrels used in making flintlocks. Hester Prynne, over there, could easily have started her career as a matchlock. And then, a great many matchlocks went into the West African slave and ivory trade, and were promptly ruined by the natives."

"Yes, and I seem to recall having seen Spanish and French miguelet muskets that looked as though they had been altered directly from matchlock, retaining the original stock and even the original lock-plate," Trehearne added.

"So have I, come to think of it." Rand stole a glance at his wrist-watch. It was nine five; he was wishing Stephen Gresham would put in an appearance.

MacBride and Trehearne joined Pierre and the girls in showing him Gresham's collection; evidently they all knew it almost as well as their own. After a while, Irene Gresham ushered in Philip Cabot. He, too, was past middle age, with prematurely white hair and a thin, scholarly face. According to Hollywood type-casting, he might have been a professor, or a judge, or a Boston Brahmin, but never a stockbroker.

Irene Gresham wanted to know what everybody wanted to drink. Rand wanted Bourbon and plain water; MacBride voted for Jamaica rum; Trehearne and Cabot favored brandy and soda, and Pierre and the girls wanted Bacardi and Coca-Cola.

"And Stephen'll want rye and soda, when he gets here," Irene said. "Come on, girls; let's rustle up the drinks."

Before they returned, Stephen Gresham came in, lighting a cigar. It was just nine twenty-two.

"Well, I see everybody's here," he said. "No; where's Karen?"

Pierre told him. A few minutes later the women returned, carrying bottles and glasses; when the flurry of drink-mixing had subsided, they all sat down.

"Let's get the business over first," Gresham suggested. "I suppose you've gone over the collection already, Jeff?"

"Yes, and first of all, I want to know something. When was the last that any of you saw it?"

Gresham and Pierre had been in Fleming's gunroom just two days before the fatal "accident."

"And can you tell me if the big Whitneyville Colt was still there, then?" Rand asked. "Or the Rappahannock Forge, or the Collier flintlock, or the Hall?"

"Why, of course ... My God, aren't they there now?" Gresham demanded.

Rand shook his head. "And if Fleming still had them two days before he was killed, then somebody's been weeding out the collection since. Doing it very cleverly, too," he added. "You know how that stuff's arranged, and how conspicuous a missing pistol would be. Well, when I was going over the collection, I found about two dozen pieces of the most utter trash, things Lane Fleming wouldn't have allowed in the house, all hanging where some really good item ought to have been." He took a paper from his pocket and read off a list of the dubious items, interpolating comments on the condition, and a list of the real rarities which Gresham had mentioned the day before, which were now missing.

"All that good stuff was there the last time I saw the collection," Gresham said. "What do you say, Pierre?"

"I had the Hall pistol in my hands," Pierre said. "And I remember looking at the Rappahannock Forge."

Trehearne broke in to ask how many English dog-locks there were, and if the snaphaunce Highlander and the big all-steel wheel lock were still there. At the same time, Cabot was inquiring about the Springfield 1818 and the Virginia Manufactory pistols.

"I'll have a complete, itemized list in a few days," Rand said. "In the meantime, I'd like a couple of you to look at the collection and help me decide what's missing. I'm going to try to catch the thief, and then get at the fence through him."

"Think Rivers might have gotten the pistols?" Gresham asked. "He's the crookedest dealer I know of."

"He's the crookedest dealer anybody knows of," Rand amended. "The only thing, he's a little too anxious to buy the collection, for somebody who's just skimmed off the cream."

"Ten thousand dollars isn't much in the way of anxiety," Cabot said. "I'd call that a nominal bid, to avoid suspicion."

"The dope's changed a little on that." Rand brought him up to date. "Rivers's offer is now twenty-five thousand."

There was a stunned hush, followed by a gust of exclamations.

"Guid Lorrd!" The Scots accent fairly curdled on Colin MacBride's tongue. "We canna go over that!"

"I'm afraid not; twenty would be about our limit," Gresham agreed. "And with the best items gone ..." He shrugged.

Pierre and Karen were looking at each other in blank misery; their dream of establishing themselves in the arms business had blown up in their faces.

"Oh, he's talking through his hat!" Cabot declared. "He just hopes we'll lose interest, and then he'll buy what's left of the collection for a song."

"Maybe he knows the collection's been robbed," Trehearne suggested. "That would let him out, later. He'd accuse you or the Fleming estate of holding out the best pieces, and then offer to take what's left for about five thousand."

"Well, that would be presuming that he knows the collection has been robbed," Cabot pointed out. "And the only way he'd know that would be if he, himself, had bought the stolen pistols."

"Well, does anybody need a chaser to swallow that?" Trehearne countered. "I'm bloody sure I don't."

Karen Lawrence shook her head. "No, he'd pay twenty-five thousand for the collection, just as it stands, to keep Pierre and me out of the arms business. This end of the state couldn't support another arms-dealer, and with the reputation he's made for himself, he'd be the one to go under." She stubbed out her cigarette and finished her drink. "If you don't mind, Pierre, I think I'll go home."

"I'm not feeling very festive, myself, right now." The ex-Marine rose and held out his hand to Rand. "Don't get the idea, Jeff, that anybody here holds this against you. You have your clients' interests to look out for."

"Well, if this be treason make the most of it," Rand said, "but I hope Rivers doesn't go through with it. I'd like to see you people get the collection, and I'd hate to see a lot of nice pistols like that get into the hands of a damned swindler like Rivers.... Maybe I can catch him with the hot-goods on him, and send him up for about three-to-five."

"Oh, he's too smart for that," Karen despaired. "He can get away with faking, but the dumbest jury in the world would know what receiving stolen goods was, and he knows it."

Dorothy and Irene Gresham accompanied Pierre and Karen downstairs. After they had gone, Gresham tried, not very successfully, to inject more life into the party with another round of drinks. For a while they discussed the personal and commercial iniquities of Arnold Rivers. Trehearne and MacBride, who had come together in the latter's car, left shortly, and half an hour later, Philip Cabot rose and announced that he, too, was leaving.

"You haven't seen my collection since before the war, Jeff," he said. "If you're not sleepy, why don't you stop at my place and see what's new? You're staying at the Flemings'; my house is along your way, about a mile on the other side of the railroad."

They went out and got into their cars. Rand kept Cabot's taillight in sight until the broker swung into his drive and put his car in the garage. Rand parked beside the road, took the Leech & Rigdon out of the glove-box, and got out, slipping the Confederate revolver under his trouser-band. He was pulling down his vest to cover the butt as he went up the walk and joined his friend at the front door.

Cabot's combination library and gunroom was on the first floor. Like Rand's own, his collection was hung on racks over low bookcases on either side of the room. It was strictly a collector's collection, intensely specialized. There were all but a few of the U.S. regulation single-shot pistols, a fair representation of secondary types, most of the revolvers of the Civil War, and all the later revolvers and automatics. In addition, there were British pistols of the Revolution and 1812, Confederate revolvers, a couple of Spanish revolvers of 1898, the Lugers and Mausers and Steyers of the first World War, and the pistols of all our allies, beginning with the French weapons of the Revolution.

"I'm having the devil's own time filling in for this last war," Cabot said. "I have a want-ad running in the Rifleman, and I've gotten a few: that Nambu, and that Japanese Model-14, and the Polish Radom, and the Italian Glisenti, and that Tokarev, and, of course, the P-'38 and the Canadian Browning; but it's going to take the devil's own time. I hope nobody starts another war, for a few years, till I can get caught up on the last one."

Rand was looking at the Confederate revolvers. Griswold & Grier, Haiman Brothers, Tucker & Sherrod, Dance Brothers & Park, Spiller & Burr—there it was: Leech & Rigdon. He tapped it on the cylinder with a finger.

"Wasn't it one of those things