It was nothing out of the ordinary, as wheel locks go; a long Flemish weapon of about 1640, the type used by the Royalist cavalry in the English Civil War. There were two others almost like it, but this one was in simply appalling condition. The metal was rough with rust, and apparently no attempt had been made to clean it in a couple of centuries. There was a piece cracked out of the fore-end, the ramrod was missing, as was the front ramrod-thimble, both the trigger-guard and the butt-cap were loose, and when Rand touched the wheel, it revolved freely if sluggishly, betraying a broken spring or chain.
The vertical row next to it seemed to be all snaphaunces, but among them Rand saw a pair of Turkish flintlocks. Not even good Turkish flintlocks; a pair of the sort of weapons hastily thrown together by native craftsmen or imported ready-made from Belgium for bazaar sale to gullible tourists. Among the fine examples of seventeenth-century Brescian gunmaking above and below it, these things looked like a pair of Dogpatchers in the Waldorf’s Starlight Room. Rand contemplated them with distaste, then shrugged. After all, they might have had some sentimental significance; say souvenirs of a pleasantly remembered trip to the Levant.
A few rows farther on, among some exceptionally fine flintlocks, all of which pre-dated 1700, he saw one of those big Belgian navy pistols, circa 1800, of the sort once advertised far and wide by a certain old-army-goods dealer for $6.95. This was a particularly repulsive specimen of its breed; grimy with hardened dust and gummed oil, maculated with yellow-surface-rust, the brasswork green with corrosion. It was impossible to shrug off a thing like that. From then on, Rand kept his eyes open for similar incongruities.
They weren’t hard to find. There was a big army pistol, of Central European origin and in abominable condition, among a row of fine multi-shot flintlocks. Multi-shot…Stephen Gresham had mentioned an Elisha Collier flintlock revolver. It wasn’t there. It should be hanging about where this post-Napoleonic German thing was.
There was no Hall breech-loader, either, but there was a dilapidated old Ketland. There were many such interlopers among the U.S. Martials: an English ounce-ball cavalry pistol, a French 1777 and a French 1773, a couple more $6.95 bargain-counter specials, a miserable altered S. North 1816. Among the Colts, there was some awful junk, including a big Spanish hinge-frame .44 and a Belgian imitation of a Webley R.I.C. Model. There weren’t as many Paterson Colts as Gresham had spoken of, and the Whitneyville Walker was absent. It went on like that; about a dozen of the best pistols which Rand remembered having seen from two years ago were gone, and he spotted at least twenty items which the late Lane Fleming wouldn’t have hung in his backyard privy, if he’d had one.
Well, that was to be expected. The way these pistols were arranged, the absence of one from its hooks would have been instantly obvious. So, as the good stuff had moved out, these disreputable changelings had moved in.
“You had rather a shocking experience here, in Mr. Fleming’s death,” Rand said, over his shoulder, to the butler.
“Oh, yes indeed, sir!” Walters seemed relieved that Rand had broken the silence. “A great loss to all of us, sir. And so unexpected.”
He didn’t seem averse to talking about it, and went on at some length. His story closely paralleled that of Gladys Fleming.
“Mr. Varcek called the doctor immediately,” he said. “Then Mr. Dunmore pointed out that the doctor would be obliged to notify either the coroner or the police, so he called Mr. Goode, the family solicitor. That was about twenty minutes after the shot. Mr. Goode arrived directly; he was here in about ten minutes. I must say, sir, I was glad to see him; to tell the truth, I had been afraid that the authorities might claim that Mr. Fleming had shot himself deliberately.”
Somebody else doesn’t like the smell of that accident, Rand thought. Aloud, he said:
“Mr. Goode lives nearby, then, I take it?”
“Oh, yes, sir. You can see his house from these windows. Over here, sir.”
Rand looked out the window. The rain-soaked lawn of the Fleming residence ended about a hundred yards to the west; beyond it, an orchard was beginning to break into leaf, and beyond the orchard and another lawn stood a half-timbered Tudor-style house, somewhat smaller than the Fleming place. A path led down from it to the orchard, and another led from the orchard to the rear of the house from which Rand looked.
“Must be comforting to know your lawyer’s so handy,” he commented. “And what do you think, Walters? Are you satisfied, in your own mind, that Mr. Fleming was killed accidentally?”
The servant looked at him seriously. “No, sir; I’m not,” he replied. “I’ve thought about it a great deal, since it happened, sir, and I just can’t believe that Mr. Fleming would have that revolver, and start working on it, without knowing that it was loaded. That just isn’t possible, if you’ll pardon me, sir. And I can’t understand how he would have shot himself while removing the charges. The fact is, when I came up here at quarter of seven, to call him for cocktails, he had the whole thing apart and spread out in front of him.” The butler thought for a moment. “I believe Mr. Dunmore had something like that in mind when he called Mr. Goode.”
“Well, what happened?” Rand asked. “Did the coroner or the doctor choke on calling it an accident?”
“Oh no, sir; there was no trouble of any sort about that. You see, Dr. Yardman called the coroner, as soon as he arrived, but Mr. Goode was here already. He’d come over by that path you saw, to the rear of the house, and in through the garage, which was open, since Mrs. Dunmore was out with the coupé. They all talked it over for a while, and the coroner decided that there would be no need for any inquest, and the doctor wrote out the certificate. That was all there was to it.”
Rand looked at the section of pistol-rack devoted to Colts.
“Which one was it?” he asked.
“Oh it’s not here, sir,” Walters replied. “The coroner took it away with him.”
“And hasn’t returned it yet? Well, he has no business keeping it. It’s part of the collection, and belongs to the estate.”
“Yes, sir. If I may say so, I thought it was a bit high-handed of him, taking it away, myself, but it wasn’t my place to say anything about it.”
“Well, I’ll make it mine. If that revolver’s what I’m told it is, it’s too valuable to let some damned county-seat politician walk off with.” A thought occurred to him. “And if I find that he’s disposed of it, this county’s going to need a new coroner, at least till the present incumbent gets out of jail.”
The buzzer of the extension phone went off like an annoyed rattlesnake. Walters scooped it up, spoke into it, listened for a moment, and handed it to Rand.
“For you, sir; Mrs. Fleming.”
“Colonel Rand, Carl Gwinnett, the commission-dealer I told you about is here,” Gladys told him. “Do you want to talk to him?”
“Why, yes. Do I understand, now, that you and the other ladies want cash, and don’t want the collection peddled off piecemeal?… All right, send him up. I’ll talk to him.”
A few minutes later, a short, compact-looking man of forty-odd entered the gunroom, shifting a brief case to his left hand and extending his right. Rand advanced to meet him and shook hands with him.
“You’re Colonel Rand? Enjoyed your articles in the Rifleman,” he said. “Mrs. Fleming tells me you’re handling the sale of the collection for the estate.”
“That’s right, Mr. Gwinnett. Mrs. Fleming tells me you’re interested.”
“Yes. Originally, I offered to sell the collection for her on a commission basis, but she didn’t seem to care for the idea, and neither do the other ladies. They all want spot cash, in a lump sum.”
“Yes. Mrs. Fleming herself might have been interested in your proposition, if she’d been sole owner. You could probably get more for the collection, even after deducting your commission, than I’ll be able to, but the collection belongs to the estate, and has to be sold before any division can be made.”
“Yes, I see that. Well, how much wo
uld the estate, or you, consider a reasonable offer?”
“Sit down, Mr. Gwinnett,” Rand invited. “What would you consider a reasonable offer, yourself? We’re not asking any specific price; we’re just taking bids, as it were.”
“Well, how much have you been offered, to date?”
“Well, we haven’t heard from everybody. In fact, we haven’t put out a list, or solicited offers, except locally, as yet. But one gentleman has expressed a willingness to pay up to twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Gwinnett’s face expressed polite skepticism. “Colonel Rand!” he protested. “You certainly don’t take an offer like that seriously?”
“I think it was made seriously,” Rand replied. “A respectable profit could be made on the collection, even at that price.”
Gwinnett’s eyes shifted over the rows of horizontal barrels on the walls. He was almost visibly wrestling with mental arithmetic, and at the same time trying to keep any hint of his notion of the collection’s real value out of his face.
“Well, I doubt if I could raise that much,” he said. “Might I ask who’s making this offer?”
“You might; I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. You wouldn’t want me to publish your own offer broadcast, would you?”
“I think I can guess. If I’m right, don’t hold your head in a tub of water till you get it,” Gwinnett advised. “Making a big offer to scare away competition is one thing, and paying off on it is another. I’ve seen that happen before, you know. Fact is, there’s one dealer, not far from here, who makes a regular habit of it. He’ll make some fantastic offer, and then, when everybody’s been bluffed out, he’ll start making objections and finding faults, and before long he’ll be down to about a quarter of his original price.”
“The practice isn’t unknown,” Rand admitted.
“I’ll bet you don’t have this twenty-five thousand dollar offer on paper, over a signature,” Gwinnett pursued. “Well, here.” He opened his brief case and extracted a sheet of paper, handing it to Rand. “You can file this; I’ll stand back of it.”
Rand looked at the typed and signed statement to the effect that Carl Gwinnett agreed to pay the sum of fifteen thousand dollars for the Lane Fleming pistol-collection, in its entirety, within thirty days of date. That was an average of six dollars a pistol. There had been a time, not too long ago, when a pistol-collection with an average value of six dollars, particularly one as large as the Fleming collection, had been something unusual. For one thing, arms values had increased sharply in the meantime. For another, Lane Fleming had kept his collection clean of the two-dollar items which dragged down so many collectors’ average values. Except for the two-dozen-odd mysterious interlopers, there wasn’t a pistol in the Fleming collection that wasn’t worth at least twenty dollars, and quite a few had values expressible in three figures.
“Well, your offer is duly received and filed, Mr. Gwinnett,” Rand told him, folding the sheet and putting it in his pocket. “This is better than an unwitnessed verbal statement that somebody is willing to pay twenty-five thousand. I’ll certainly bear you in mind.”
“You can show that to Arnold Rivers, if you want to,” Gwinnett said. “See how much he’s willing to commit himself to, over his signature.”
CHAPTER 8
Pre-dinner cocktails in the library seemed to be a sort of household rite—a self-imposed Truce of Bacchus before the resumption of hostilities in the dining-room. It lasted from six forty-five to seven; everybody sipped Manhattans and kept quiet and listened to the radio newscast. The only new face, to Rand, was Fred Dunmore’s.
It was a smooth, pinkly-shaven face, decorated with octagonal rimless glasses; an entirely unremarkable face; the face of the type that used to be labeled “Babbitt.” The corner of Rand’s mind that handled such data subconsciously filed his description: forty-five to fifty, one-eighty, five feet eight, hair brown and thinning, eyes blue. To this he added the Rotarian button on the lapel, and the small gold globule on the watch chain that testified that, when his age and weight had been considerably less, Dunmore had played on somebody’s basketball team. At that time he had probably belonged to the Y.M.C.A., and had thought that Mussolini was doing a splendid job in Italy, that H. L. Mencken ought to be deported to Russia, and that Prohibition was here to stay. At company sales meetings, he probably radiated an aura of synthetic good-fellowship.
As Rand followed Walters down the spiral from the gunroom, the radio commercial was just starting, and Geraldine was asking Dunmore where Anton was.
“Oh, you know,” Dunmore told her, impatiently. “He had to go to Louisburg, to that Medical Association meeting; he’s reading a paper about the new diabetic ration.”
He broke off as Rand approached and was introduced by Gladys, who handed both men their cocktails. Then the news commentator greeted them out of the radio, and everybody absorbed the day’s news along with their Manhattans. After the broadcast, they all crossed the hall to the dining-room, where hostilities began almost before the soup was cool enough to taste.
“I don’t see why you women had to do this,” Dunmore huffed. “Rivers has made us a fair offer. Bringing in an outsider will only give him the impression that we lack confidence in him.”
“Well, won’t that be just too, too bad!” Geraldine slashed at him. “We mustn’t ever hurt dear Mr. Rivers’s feelings like that. Let him have the collection for half what it’s worth, but never, never let him think we know what a God-damned crook he is!”
Dunmore evidently didn’t think that worth dignifying with an answer. Doubtless he expected Nelda to launch a counter-offensive, as a matter of principle. If he did, he was disappointed.
“Well?” Nelda demanded. “What did you want us to do; give the collection away?”
“You don’t understand,” Dunmore told her. “You’ve probably heard somebody say what the collection’s worth, and you never stopped to realize that it’s only worth that to a dealer, who can sell it item by item. You can’t expect…”
“We can expect a lot more than ten thousand dollars,” Nelda retorted. “In fact, we can expect more than that from Rivers. Colonel Rand was talking to Rivers, this afternoon. Colonel Rand doesn’t have any confidence in Rivers at all, and he doesn’t care who knows it.”
“You were talking to Arnold Rivers, this afternoon, about the collection?” Dunmore demanded of Rand.
“That’s right,” Rand confirmed. “I told him his ten thousand dollar offer was a joke. Stephen Gresham and his friends can top that out of one pocket. Finally, he got around to admitting that he’s willing to pay up to twenty-five thousand.”
“I don’t believe it!” Dunmore exclaimed angrily. “Rivers told me personally, that neither he nor any other dealer could hope to handle that collection profitably at more than ten thousand.”
“And you believed that?” Nelda demanded. “And you’re a business man? My God!”
“He’s probably a good one, as long as he sticks to pancake flour,” Geraldine was generous enough to concede. “But about guns, he barely knows which end the bullet comes out at. Ten thousand was probably his idea of what we’d think the pistols were worth.”
Dunmore ignored that and turned to Rand. “Did Arnold Rivers actually tell you he’d pay twenty-five thousand dollars for the collection?” he asked. “I can’t believe that he’d raise his own offer like that.”
“He didn’t raise his offer; I threw it out and told him to make one that could be taken seriously.” Rand repeated, as closely as he could, his conversation with the arms-dealer. When he had finished, Dunmore was frowning in puzzled displeasure.
“And you think he’s actually willing to pay that much?”
“Yes, I do. If he handles them right, he can double his money on the pistols inside of five years. I doubt if you realize how valuable those pistols are. You probably defined Mr. Fleming’s collection as a ‘hobby’ and therefore something not to be taken seriously. And, aside from the actual profit, the prestige of handling t
his collection would be worth a good deal to Rivers, as advertising. I haven’t the least doubt that he can raise the money, or that he’s willing to pay it.”
Dunmore was still frowning. Maybe he hated being proved wrong in front of the women of the family.
“And you think Gresham and his friends will offer enough to force him to pay the full amount?”
Rand laughed and told him to stop being naïve. “He’s done that, himself, and what’s more, he knows it. When he told me he was willing to go as high as twenty-five thousand, he fixed the price. Unless somebody offers more, which isn’t impossible.”
“But maybe he’s just bluffing.” Dunmore seemed to be following Gwinnett’s line of thought. “After he’s bluffed Gresham’s crowd out, maybe he’ll go back to his original ten thousand offer.”
“Fred, please stop talking about that ten thousand dollars!” Geraldine interrupted. “How much did Rivers actually tell you he’d pay? Twenty-five thousand, like he did Colonel Rand?”
Dunmore turned in his chair angrily. “Now, look here!” he shouted. “There’s a limit to what I’ve got to take from you.…”
He stopped short, as Nelda, beside him, moved slightly, and his words ended in something that sounded like a smothered moan. Rand suspected that she had kicked her husband painfully under the table. Then Walters came in with the meat course, and firing ceased until the butler had retired.
“By the way,” Rand tossed into the conversational vacuum that followed his exit, “does anybody know anything about a record Mr. Fleming kept of his collection?”
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