Murder in the Gunroom | Page 4

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