CHAPTER 21
In the month which followed, events transpired through a thickeningmiasma of rumors, official communiques, journalistic conjectures,and outright fabrications, fitfully lit by the glare of newsmen'sphoto-bulbs, bulking with strange shapes, and emitting stranger noises.There were the portentous rumblings of prepared statements, and thehollow thumps of denials. There were soft murmurs of, "Now, this isstrictly off the record ..." followed by sibilant whispers. The unseenscrews of political pressure creaked, and whitewash brushes slurpedsuavely. And there was an insistent yammering of bewildered andunanswered questions. Fred Dunmore really had killed Arnold Rivers,hadn't he? Or had he? Arnold Rivers had been double-crossingDunmore ... or had Dunmore been double-crossing Rivers? Somebodyhad stolen ten--or was it twenty-five--thousand dollars' worthof old pistols? Or was it just twenty-five thousand dollars? Orwhat, if anything, had been stolen? Was somebody being framed forsomething ... or was somebody covering up for somebody ... or what?And wasn't there something funny about the way Lane Fleming got killed,last December?
The surviving members of the Fleming family issued a few noncommittalstatements through their attorney, Humphrey Goode, and then the IronCurtain slammed down. Mick McKenna gave an outraged squawk or so, thensubsided. There was a series of pronunciamentos from the office ofDistrict Attorney Charles P. Farnsworth, all full of high-orderabstractions and empty of meaning. The reporters, converging on theFleming house, found it occupied by the State Police, who kept them atbay. Harry Bentz, of the New Belfast _Evening Mercury_, using a 30-powerspotting-'scope from the road, observed Dave Ritter, whom he recognized,wearing a suit of butler's livery and standing in the doorway of thegarage, talking to Sergeant McKenna, Carter Tipton and Farnsworth; the_Mercury_ exploited this scoop for all it was worth.
On the whole, the Rosemont Bayonet Murder was, from a journalisticstandpoint, an almost complete bust. There had been no arrest, nohearing, no protracted trial, no sensational revelations. Only onemonolithic fact, officially attested and indisputable, loomed out ofthe murk: "... and the said Frederick Parker Dunmore, deceased, didreceive the aforesaid gunshot-wounds, hereinbefore enumerated, at thehands of the said Jefferson Davis Rand and at the hands of the saidDavid Abercrombie Ritter ..." and "... the said Jefferson Davis Randand the said David Abercrombie Ritter, being in mortal fear for theirseveral lives, did so act in defense of their several persons..." and,finally, "... the said Frederick Parker Dunmore did die."
The _Evening Mercury_, which sheet the said Jefferson Davis Rand hadonce cost the loss of an expensive libel-suit and exposed in certainjournalistic malpractices verging upon blackmail, promptly burst intoprint with an indignant editorial entitled _Trial by Pistol_. Theterms: "legalized slaughter," and "flagrant whitewash," were used, andmention was made of "the well known preference of a certain notoriousprivate detective for the procedure of _habeas_ cadaver." The principalresult of this outcry was to persuade an important New Belfastmanufacturer, who had hitherto resisted Rand's sales pressure, tocontract with the Tri-State Agency for the protection of his payrolldeliveries.
Then, at the other end of the state, the professor of Moral Science at asmall theological seminary caught his wife in _flagrante delicto_ withone of the fourth-year students and opened fire upon them, at a range often feet, with a 12-gauge pump-gun. The Rosemont Bayonet Murder, alreadypretty well withered on the vine, passed quietly into limbo.
* * * * *
Summer, almost a month before its official opening, was already a _faitaccompli_. The trees were in full leaf and invaded by nesting birds, theair was fragrant with flower scents, and the mercury column of thethermometer was stretching itself up toward the ninety mark.
They were all outside, where the long shadow of the Fleming housefell across the lawn and driveway, gathered about the five parked cars.The new Fleming butler, a short and somewhat globular Negro with agingerbread-crust complexion and an air of affable dignity, was helpingPierre Jarrett and Karen Lawrence put a couple of cartons and a tallpeach-basket into Pierre's Plymouth. Colin MacBride, a streamer ofpipe-smoke floating back over his shoulder, was peering into hisluggage-compartment to check the stowage of his own cargo, while histwelve-year-old son, Malcolm, another black Highlander like hisfather, was helping Philip Cabot carry a big laundry hamper full ofnewspaper-wrapped pistols to his Cadillac. Pierre's mother, and thestylish-stout Mrs. Trehearne, and Gladys Fleming, obviously detached fromthe bustle of pre-departure preparations, were standing to one side,talking. And Rand had finished helping Adam Trehearne pack the lastcontainer of his share of the Fleming collection into his car.
"I see Colin's about ready to leave, and I'm in his way," Trehearne said.He extended his hand to Rand. "No need hashing over how we all feel aboutthis. If it hadn't been for you, that offer of Kendall's would have hadus stopped as dead as Rivers's had. Five hundred dollars deader, infact."
Stephen Gresham, carrying a package-filled orange crate, joined him,setting down his burden. His wife and daughter, with another cratebetween them, halted beside him.
"Haven't you got your stuff packed yet, Jeff?" Gresham asked.
"Jeff's been helping everybody else," Irene Gresham burst out. "Come on,everybody; let's go help Jeff pack! You're going to have dinner with us,aren't you, Jeff?"
"Oh, sorry. I have some more details to clear up; I'm having dinner here,with Mrs. Fleming," Rand regretted. "I'll pack my stuff later."
Mrs. Jarrett, Mrs. Trehearne, and Gladys came over; one by one the restof the group converged upon them. Then, when the good-by's had been said,and the promises to meet again had been given, they parted. One by onethe cars moved slowly down the driveway to the road. Only Gladys andRand, standing at the foot of the front steps, and the gingerbread-brownbutler were left.
"My, my; that was some party!" the Negro chuckled, gathering up threeempty pasteboard cartons and telescoping them together. "Dinner'll beready in about half an hour, Mrs. Fleming. Shall I go mix the cocktailsnow?"
"Yes; do that, Reuben. In the drawing-room." She watched the servantcarry the discarded containers around the house, then turned to Rand."You know, not the least of your capabilities is your knack of findingservant-replacements on short notice," she told him.
"My general factotum, Buck Pendexter, is a prominent personage in NewBelfast colored lodge circles," Rand said. "When your cook and maid quiton you, the day of the blow-up, all I had to do was phone him, and he didthe rest." He got out his cigarettes, offered them, and snapped hislighter. "I notice you're having cocktails in the drawing-room now."
"Yes. I suppose, in time, I'll stop imagining I see Fred Dunmore's bloodon the library floor. I got used to what had happened in the gunroom lastDecember. Shall we go in?" she asked, taking Rand's arm.
The cocktails were waiting when they entered the drawing-room, off thedining-room. The butler poured for them and put the glasses and theshaker on a low table by a lounge.
"I'm afraid dinner's going to be a little later than I said, Mrs.Fleming," he apologized. "Things were kind of stirred up, today, with allthose people here."
"That's all right; we can wait," she replied. "We won't need anythingmore, Reuben."
Motioning Rand down on the lounge beside her, she handed him a glass andlifted her own.
"Now," she began. "Just what sort of skulduggery has been going on? As ofFriday, the top offer for the collection was twenty-five thousand fivehundred, from some dealer up in Massachusetts. And then, on Saturday, youcame bounding in with Stephen Gresham's certified check for twenty-sixthousand. And I seem to recall that the late unlamented Rivers's offer oftwenty-five thousand straight had them stopped. Not that I'm inclinedto look askance at an extra five hundred--I can buy a new hat with myshare of that, even after taxes--but I would like to know what happened.And I might add, that's only one of many things I'd like to know."
"The client is entitled to a full report," Rand said, tasting hiscocktail. It was a vodka Martini, and very good. "You know, no
ne of thatcrowd are millionaires. Adam Trehearne, who's the plutocrat of the bunch,isn't so filthy rich he doesn't know what to do with all his money--whatthe tax-collectors leave of it--and the rest of them have to figurepretty closely. The most they could possibly scratch together wastwenty-two thousand. So I put four thousand into the pot, myself,bringing the total to five hundred over the Kendall offer, and hastilydeclared the collection sold. Of course, my getting into it meant thatmuch less for everybody else, but five-sixths of a collection is betterthan no pistols at all. I imagine Colin MacBride is honing up his_sgian-dhu_ for me because I got that big Whitneyville Walker Colt, butwhat the hell; he got the cased pair of Paterson .34's, and the Texas .40with the ramming-lever."
"Why, I think the division was fair enough," Gladys said. "They'd agreedto take your valuation, hadn't they? And all that slide-rule andcomptometer business.... But Jeff--four thousand dollars?" she queried."You only got five from me, and you can't run a detective agency on oldpistols."
Rand grinned as he set down his empty glass. Gladys refilled it from theshaker.
"My dear lady, that five thousand I unblushingly accepted from you wasonly part of it," he confessed.
"There was also a fee of three thousand from Stephen Gresham, for pullingthe bloodhounds of the D.A.'s office off his back in the matter of ArnoldRivers, and there was five thousand from Humphrey Goode, which I supposehe'll get the Premix Company to repay him, for engineering thesuppression of a lot of facts he wanted suppressed. And, finally, myconnection with this business brought that merger to my attention, and Ipicked up a hundred shares of Premix at 73-1/4, and now I have twohundred shares of Mill-Pack, worth about twenty-nine thousand, which Ican report for my income tax as capital gains. I'd say I could afford totreat myself to a few old pistols for my collection."
"Well!" She raised both eyebrows over that. "Don't anybody tell me crimedoesn't pay."
"Yes. In my ghoulish way, I generally manage to bear myself in mind, onan operation like this. I make no secret of my affection for money." Helifted his glass and sipped slowly. "Look here, Gladys; are you satisfiedwith the way this was handled?"
She shrugged. "I should be. When I started out as Lane's blood-avenger,I suppose I expected things to end somewhere out of sight, in a nice,antiseptic death-chamber at the state penitentiary. You must admit thatthat business in the library was really bringing it home. There's noquestion that you got the man who killed Lane, and if you hadn't, I'dnever have been at peace with myself. And I suppose all that chicaneryafterward was necessary, too."
"It was, if you wanted that merger to go through, and unless you wantedto see the bottom drop out of your Premix stock," Rand assured her. "Ifthe true facts of Mr. Fleming's death had gotten out, there'd have beena simply hideous stink. The Mill-Pack people would have backed out ofthat merger like a bear out of an active bee-tree.... You know what thesituation really was, don't you?"
She shook her head. "I know Mill-Pack wanted to get control of the PremixCompany, and Lane refused to go in with them. I don't fully understandhis reasons, though."
"They weren't important; they were mainly verbal, and unrelated toactuality," Rand said. "The important thing is that he did refuse, andMill-Pack wanted that merger so badly that it could be tasted in everyounce of food they sold. They got Stephen Gresham to negotiate it forthem, and he was just on the point of reporting it to be an impossibilitywhen Fred Dunmore came to him with a proposition. Dunmore said he thoughthe could persuade or force Mr. Fleming to consent, and he wanted acontract guaranteeing him a vice-presidency with Mill-Pack, at fortythousand a year, if and when the merger was accomplished. The contractwas duly signed about the first of last November."
"Well, good Lord!" Gladys Fleming's eyes widened. "When did you hearabout that?"
"I got that out of Gresham, a couple of days after the blow-up, when itwas too late to be of any use to me," Rand said. "If I'd known it fromthe beginning, it might have saved me some work. Not much, though.Gresham was just as badly scared about the facts coming out as Goode was.I can't prove collusion between him and Goode, but Gresham was helpingspread the suicide story, too."
"Nice friends Lane had! But didn't anybody think there was something oddabout that accident, immediately after that contract was signed?"
"Of course they did, but try and get them to admit it, even tothemselves. Nobody likes to think that the new vice president of thecompany murdered his way into the position. So everybody assumed theattitudes of the three Japanese monkeys, and made respectable noisesabout what a great loss Mr. Fleming was to the business world, and howlucky Dunmore was that he had that contract."
She looked at him inquiringly for a moment. "Jeff, I want you to tell meexactly how everything happened," she said. "I think I have a right toknow."
"Yes, you have," he agreed. "I'll tell you the whole thing, what Iactually know, and what I was forced to guess at:
"When this merger idea first took shape, last summer, Dunmore saw howunalterably opposed to it Mr. Fleming was, and he began wishing him outof the way. Some time later, he decided to do something about it. Isuppose Anton Varcek gave him the idea, in the first place, with hisjabber about the danger of a firearms accident. Dunmore decided he'd fixone up for Mr. Fleming. First of all, he'd need a firearm, collector'stype and in good working order. It couldn't be one of the guns in thecollection. He'd have to keep it loaded all the time, waiting for anopportunity to use it; he couldn't take a weapon out of the collection,because it would be missed, and he couldn't load one and hang it upagain, because that would be discovered. So he had to get one of his own,and he got it from Arnold Rivers."
"You know that? I mean, that's not just a guess?"
"I know it. The gun he got from Rivers was a .36 Colt, 1860 Navy-model,serial number 2444," Rand told her. "Rivers had that gun last summer. Hehad it refinished by a gunsmith named Umholtz. After Umholtz refinishedit, the gun was in Rivers's shop until November of last year, when it wassold by Rivers personally. And that was the revolver that was found inLane Fleming's hand, and the one I got from the coroner, with a lettervouching for the fact that it had been so found."
He finished his cocktail. Gladys picked up the shaker mechanically andrefilled his glass.
"Now we have Dunmore with this .36 Colt, loaded with powder, caps andbullets from the ammunition supply in the gunroom, waiting for a chanceto use it. And also, he has this Mill-Pack contract in his safe depositbox at the bank. That takes care of the weapon and the motive; only theopportunity is needed, and that came on the 22nd of December, when Mr.Fleming brought home that Confederate Leech & Rigdon .36 he had justbought. It was just a piece of luck that both revolvers were alike incaliber and general type, but it wouldn't have made a lot of difference.Nobody was paying much attention to details, and Dunmore was on the sceneto misdirect any attention anybody would pay to anything.
"Now, we come to the mechanics of the thing; the _modus operandi_, or,as it is professionally known, the M.O. You remember what happened thatevening. Nelda had gone out. You and Geraldine were listening to theradio in the parlor, over there. Varcek had gone up to his lab. Mr.Fleming was alone in the gunroom, working on his new revolver. And FredDunmore said he was going to take a bath. What he did, of course, was todraw a tub full of water, undress, put on his bathrobe and slippers, hidethe .36 Colt under the bathrobe, and then go across the hall to thegunroom, where he found Mr. Fleming sitting on that cobbler's bench,putting the finishing touches on the Leech & Rigdon. So he fired at closerange, wiped the prints off the Colt with an oily rag, put it in LaneFleming's right hand, put the rag in his left, grabbed up the Leech &Rigdon, and scuttled back to his bathroom, deadlatching and shutting thegunroom door as he went out. This last, of course, was a delaying tactic,to give him time to establish his bathtub alibi."
He lifted the cocktail glass to his lips. These vodka Martinis werestrong, and three of them before dinner was leaning way over backwardmaintaining the tradition of the hard-drinking private eye, but Gladyswas work
ing on her third, and no client was going to drink him under.
"So, in the privacy of his bathroom, he kicked out of his slippers, threwoff his robe, hid the Leech & Rigdon, probably in a space between the tuband the wall that I found while we were searching the house, the nightbefore the shooting of Dunmore, and jumped into the tub, there to awaitdevelopments. As soon as he heard Varcek's uproar in the hall, he couldemerge, dripping bathwater and innocence, to find out what the fuss wasall about.... Do you know anything about something called GeneralSemantics?" he asked suddenly.
"Yes. Before I married Lane, I went around with a radio ad-writer," shetold him. "He was a nice boy, but he'd get drunker than a boiled owlabout once a month, and weep about his crimes against sanity and meaning.He'd recite long excerpts from his professional creations, and show howhe had been deliberately objectifying words and identifying them with thethings for which they stood, and confusing orders of abstraction, andjuggling multiordinal meanings. He was going to lend me his Koran, a bookcalled _Science and Sanity_, and then he took a job with an ad agency inChicago, and I got married, and--"
Rand nodded. "Then you realize that the word is not the thing spoken of,and that the inference is not the description, and that we cannot know'all' about anything. Etcetera," he added hastily, like a Papist signinghimself with the Cross. "Well, some considerable disregard of theseprinciples seems to have existed in this case. Dunmore is seen in abathrobe, his feet bare and making wet tracks on the floor, his hair wet,etcetera. Straightaway, one and all appear to have assumed that he was inthe tub, splashing soapsuds around, while Lane Fleming was being shot.And Anton Varcek, who can be taken as an example of what S. I. Hayakawawas talking about when he spoke of people behaving like scientistsinside but not outside their laboratories, saw Lane Fleming dead, withan object labeled 'revolver' in his hand, and, because of his verbalidentifications and semantic reactions, immediately included theinference of an accident in his description of what he had seen. That wasjust an extra dividend of luck for Dunmore; it got the whole crowd ofyou thinking in terms of accidental shooting.
"Well, from there out, everything would have been a wonderful success forDunmore, except for one thing. Arnold Rivers must have heard, somehow,that Lane Fleming had been shot with a Confederate .36 that he'd boughtsomewhere that day, and that the revolver was in the hands of thiscoroner of yours. So Arnold, with his big chisel well ground, went to seeif he could manage to get it out of the coroner for a few dollars. Andwhen he saw it, lo! it was the .36 Colt that he'd sold to Dunmore abouta month before."
Gladys set down her glass. "So!" she said. "Things begin to explainthemselves!"
"You may say so, indeed," Rand told her. "And what do you suppose Riversdid with this little item of information? Why, as nearly as I canreconstruct it, he did a very foolish thing. He tried to blackmail a manwho had committed a murder. He told Fred Dunmore he'd keep his mouth shutabout the .36 Colt, if Dunmore would get him the Fleming collection. Hewanted that instead of cash, because he could get more out of it, in afew years, than Dunmore could ever scrape, and in the meantime, theprestige of handling that collection would go a long way toward repairinghis rather dilapidated reputation. Fred should have bumped him off, rightthen; it would have been the cheapest and easiest way out, and he'dprobably be alive and uncaught today if he had. But he was willing to payten thousand dollars to save himself the trouble, and that's what he toldyou Rivers had offered for the collection. The ten thousand Dunmore toldyou Rivers was willing to pay was really the ten thousand he was willingto pay, himself, to keep Rivers quiet.
"Then I was introduced into the picture, and, as you know, one of myfirst acts was to go to Rivers's shop and sneer scornfully at Rivers'ssupposed offer of ten thousand. And, right away, Rivers upped it totwenty-five thousand. You'll recall, no doubt, that Mr. Fleming had alife-insurance policy, one of these partnership mutual policies, whichgave both Dunmore and Varcek exactly twenty-five thousand apiece. Iassume that Rivers had found out about that.
"I thought, at the time, that it was peculiar that Rivers would jump hisown offer up, without knowing what anybody else was offering for thecollection. I see, now, that it wasn't his own money he was being sogenerous with. And there was another incident, while I was at Rivers'sshop, that piqued my curiosity. Rivers had in his shop a .36 Leech &Rigdon revolver, and I had been informed that it was a revolver of thattype that Mr. Fleming had brought home the evening he was killed. Ithought at the time that it was curious that two Confederate arms of thesame type and make should show up this far north, but my main idea inbuying it was the possibility that I might use it, in some way ascircumstances would permit, to throw a scare into somebody. Rivers wasquite willing to let me have it until he found out that I would bestaying at this house, and then he tried to back out of the sale andoffered me seventy-five dollars' credit on anything else in the shop, ifI'd return it to him. Well, I'd known that Mr. Fleming had been about tostart suit against Rivers over a crooked deal Rivers had put over on him,and I knew that if Mr. Fleming's death had been murder, there had been asubstitution of revolvers. So I showed the gun I'd bought from Rivers toPhilip Cabot, who had seen the revolver Mr. Fleming had bought, and herecognized it. It hasn't been established just how Rivers got the Leech& Rigdon, and never will be; the only people who knew were Rivers andDunmore, and both are in the proverbial class of non-talebearers. Iassume that Dunmore gave it to Rivers as a sort of down payment onRivers's silence, and to get rid of it.
"Well, you remember Dunmore's angry incredulity when I told him thatRivers was offering twenty-five thousand instead of ten thousand. Onewould have thought, on the face of it, that he would have been glad;as Nelda's husband, he would share in the higher price being paid for thecollection. But when you realize that Rivers was buying the collectionout of Dunmore's pocket, his reaction becomes quite understandable. Idaresay I signed Arnold Rivers's death-warrant, right there."
"I'll bet your conscience bothers you about that," Gladys remarked.
"Oh, sure; it's been gnawing hell out of me, ever since," Rand told hercheerfully. "But, right away, Dunmore decided to kill Rivers. He calledhim on the phone as soon as he left the table--here I'm speaking by thebook; I walked in on him, in the gunroom, as he was completing the call,though I didn't know it at the time--and arranged to see him thatevening. Probably to devise ways and means of dealing with the Jeff Randmenace, for an ostensible reason.
"So that night, Dunmore killed Rivers, with a bayonet. And here we havesome more Aristotelian confusion of orders of abstraction. The bayonetis defined, verbally, as a 'soldier's weapon,' so Farnsworth and MickMcKenna and the rest of them bemused themselves with suspects likeStephen Gresham and Pierre Jarrett, and ignored Dunmore, who'd never hadan hour's military training in his life. I'd like to check up on whatpicture-shows Dunmore had been seeing in the week or so before thekilling. I'll bet anything he'd been to one of these South-Pacificbanzai-operas. And speaking of confusing orders of abstraction, MickMcKenna and his merry men pulled a classic in that line. They sawDunmore's automobile, verbally defined as a 'gray Plymouth coupe' inRivers's drive at the estimated time of the murder. Pierre Jarrett hasa car of that sort, so they included the inferential idea of PierreJarrett's ownership of the car so described.
"Well, that's about all there is to it. Of course, I showed Fred Dunmorethe Leech & Rigdon, and told him it was the gun I'd gotten from thecoroner. That was all he needed to tell him that I was onto the murder,and probably onto him as the murderer. But he had evidently assumed thatalready; that was after he'd assembled my .38 and that .25 automatic, andwas planning to double-kill me and Anton Varcek. At that, he'd haveprobably killed me, if I hadn't been wearing that bulletproof vest ofMcKenna's. I owe Mick for my life; I'll have to buy him a drink,sometime, to square that."
"Well, how about Walters, and the pistols he stole?" Gladys asked."Didn't that have anything to do with it?"
"No. It was a result of Mr. Fleming's death, of course. I understand thatthe situation he
re had deteriorated rather abruptly after Mr. Fleming'sdeath. Walters was about fed up on the way things were here, and he wasgoing to hand in his notice. Then he decided that he ought to have astake to tide him over till he could get another buttling job, so hestarted higrading the collection."
Gladys nodded. "I suppose he decided, after Lane's death, that he didn'towe anybody here anything. Too bad he didn't wait, though. The situationhas remedied itself, and that's something else I owe you."
"Yes? I noticed that there was nobody here but you," Rand mentioned.
"Oh, Anton's gone to New York. The Rockefeller Foundation is financingthe major part of his research work, and he's well enough off to financethe rest himself. Geraldine went with him. Nelda is still recuperatingfrom the shock of her sudden bereavement at a high-priced sanatorium--Iunderstand there's a very good-looking young doctor there. And she'sbeen talking about going to New York herself, in order, as she puts it,to lead her own life. I don't know whether she was afraid I'd be arestraining influence, or a dangerous competitor, but she feels that herown life could be best led away from here." She set down her glass andleaned back comfortably. "Peace, it's wonderful!"
Reuben, the gingerbread butler, appeared in the dining-room doorway."Dinner's served now, Mrs. Fleming," he announced.
Rand rose, and Gladys took his arm; together, they went into thedining-room.
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