Give the Girl a Gun

by Deming, Richard

  “Wait a minute,” Amhurst interrupted. “What are you talking about?”

  “About you,” I said. “You’ve been trading off percentage interest in the Huntsafe right and left without owning a nickel’s worth of what you were trading. The whole thing belongs to Madeline Strong.”

  Madeline looked from Barney to me with a wondering expression on her face. “What do you mean, Mr. Moon?”

  I said, “Let’s start at the beginning, back with your brother’s death. I’ve had three versions of that shooting. From Amhurst, Tom Henry and Bubbles. But I haven’t heard yours. Want to tell it?”

  She looked puzzled. “What has Lloyd’s death got to do with Walter’s?”

  “A lot, if my theory is correct. Tell me, after you discovered Lloyd was dead, what happened?”

  “We walked into town and reported it. The state police went after the body.”

  “All three of you walked into town?”

  “No. Just Tom and I. Barney stayed with Lloyd’s body.”

  “I thought it would have been that way,” I said. “That gave him plenty of time to remove something from it.”

  When Amhurst opened his mouth to demand what I meant by that, I cut him off by saying, “Amhurst claims he thought he heard another rifle crack at the same time you fired, Madeline. Do you recall any such thing?”

  The girl shook her head slowly. “There wasn’t any other sound. I distinctly remember everything that happened. I” don’t think I’ll ever forget. It was so quiet when I fired, I even recall I could hear Barney’s watch ticking.”

  I felt a little thrill run along my spine. “His watch?” I asked. “You’re sure it was his watch?”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “The Huntsafe,” I said. “You heard the ticking of the Huntsafe receiver strapped to Barney’s wrist.”

  The girl looked at me incredulously. Amhurst emitted a derisive snort.

  “But the Huntsafe wasn’t finished until a month ago,” Madeline said.

  “It was finished back at the time of your hunting trip,” I corrected her. “Amhurst just announced its perfection a month ago. He and your brother were giving it a field test under actual hunting conditions when Lloyd was killed. That’s why Lloyd was in the line of fire. He deliberately got himself where he wasn’t supposed to be in order to demonstrate how the Huntsafe could prevent accidental shootings. Only Barney, instead of avoiding shooting in that direction, deliberately used the gadget in order to locate Lloyd in the underbrush and kill him. With the needle pointing straight at Lloyd, Amhurst undoubtedly could spot where he was lurking and get an accurate bead on him.”

  Barney Amhurst said, “This is the worst nonsense I ever heard. Why, in heaven’s name, would I want to kill my own partner?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “BECAUSE HE wasn’t your partner,” I said. “He was your employer. Only nobody knew that but you and Lloyd. You killed him because it was the only way you could get control of the Huntsafe patent.”

  Madeline was staring at Amhurst as though he were some kind of monster. “I don’t understand any of this,” she almost whispered.

  “Then I’ll explain it,” I told her. “I got on the track when I got to thinking over the various facts I had gleaned about your brother’s character. He was very closemouthed about his affairs, for instance. Until after he was dead, no one but Barney Amhurst even knew he was working on the Huntsafe. Also he was a sharp businessman. I recall your remarking he always had an ironclad contract for everything, and it was always in his favor. Ostensibly Lloyd and Barney were partners, but it occurred to me Lloyd had a lot of inherited money, while Barney didn’t. Lloyd could afford to experiment along even for years without income, but I wondered how Amhurst could. That got me to wondering if perhaps they weren’t partners at all, but Lloyd had been paying Barney a salary as an assistant. Today in going through Lloyd’s files, I learned he had been. His last two years’ tax records showed he had been paying three thousand seven hundred and seventy dollars in salary a year. That works out to seventy-two dollars and fifty cents a week.”

  Madeline said, “He was paying that to Barney, and I didn’t even know it?”

  “You told me yourself he never discussed his business matters. Knowing Lloyd’s character, I guessed that if he was paying Barney a salary, he would have an unbreakable contract with Barney giving himself full rights to anything developed through their joint efforts. I think it was that contract that got Ford killed. I think he found it when he was helping you sort over Lloyd’s papers, realized it meant Amhurst had no legal right to the Huntsafe at all, and used it to blackmail a ten-per-cent interest from Amhurst.”

  “Where is this so-called contract then?” Amhurst demanded.

  His voice was condescending, but I noticed sweat beaded his upper lip.

  I shrugged. “Destroyed, probably. That’s what you searched Daniel Cumberland’s apartment for after you killed him. You must have gone there straight from taking Madeline home in a taxi that night. How you knew the contract was at Cumberland’s instead of at Ford’s place, I don’t know, but it‘s a relatively unimportant point. Why’d you have to kill them both? Had they raised the ante beyond a ten-per-cent interest and made you realize they would bleed you white for the rest of your life?”

  Warren Day broke in. “Listen, Moon, are you accusing Amhurst himself of killing Ford and Cumberland? Or only of hiring young Thomaso to do it?”

  “He only used Thomaso for odd chores,” I said. “Amhurst did the actual killing.”

  “How? By black magic? I’ll swallow Cumberland, but how about Ford? He didn’t have time to get the gun over to Henry’s flat.”

  “He didn’t have to, Inspector. The whole thing was an optical illusion. Only an inventor would devise such an elaborate Rube Goldberg way to kill anyone. It would have been much simpler to have pushed Ford under a bus at some crowded intersection. Of course this way he could frame Thomas Henry for the killing. And he wanted to do that because he’s nuts about Madeline.”

  “How did he do it?” Day shouted at me.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “I’m getting to it. The gun in Henry’s workshop was planted before the crime. You’ll recall it was identified as the murder weapon not by ballistic examination of the bullet, but by microscopic examination of the ejected casing. Apparently Amhurst knew a soft-nosed bullet almost certainly would be too battered to make comparison tests possible. So before he started out that evening, he must have laid the scene. I guess that this is what happened. He fired the gun initialed ‘T.H.’ somewhere. Maybe at some isolated spot along the river. He saved the ejected casing to drop on the lawn outside his workroom window so that it would look as though the gun had been fired there. Then he let himself into Henry’s flat by means of a skeleton key, planted the gun and swiped one of Henry’s pipes to drop near the shell.”

  “How about the broken window?” Amhurst asked in a controlled voice. “How did I fake that?”

  “I’d guess it was broken in advance,” I told him. “And the pieces carefully collected in an otherwise empty waste can. When you had us all gathered in here as witnesses, you took Ford into your workroom and left the door only an inch ajar so we could hear you but couldn’t see you. Then, pretending to give Ford instructions, you started to say something in a loud voice about his taking one of the Huntsafes and coming back out here. At the same time you picked up the waste can, dumped the glass on the floor beneath the window so that it would sound as though it had just been broken from outside, then turned and shot Ford.”

  “What did I do with the gun?” Amhurst asked in the same controlled voice. “I was searched, remember, and so was the workroom.”

  “During the thirty seconds or so while I was getting up nerve enough to push open the door, you put it in the empty case of the Huntsafe transmitter you had in your hand.”

  “It wasn’t empty. I showed it to the inspector later.”

  “That stumped me for a long time,” I
admitted. “But I think I‘ve figured out how you did it. You had the works of the transmitter concealed in the bathroom. When you tore in there, supposedly to be sick, you simply took the gun out of the transmitter case and put the works back in. The murder gun was hidden in the bathroom all the time, but no one thought to search it.”

  “When you said this was a Rube Goldberg plot, you hit it,” Amhurst said derisively. “But the plot’s all in your head.”

  Even Warren Day was looking a little dubious about my theory. I brought forth some more arguments to clinch it.

  “There isn’t a single factor that doesn’t point straight at Amhurst, Inspector. For instance, when I made my first progress report over the phone to Miss Strong, Amhurst was at her apartment. As a matter of fact, he answered the phone. No one else knew I was making any progress, but that evening I found young Thomaso waiting at my apartment when I got home. Amhurst was also present when I reported to Madeline that I had learned it wasn’t Walter Ford who had that gun initialed T.H. That threw him into a blind panic, for that same evening he had Thomaso kidnap Fausta. Even the fact that Thomas Henry’s phone was used to make those checkup calls points to Amhurst. We know the killer must have had a skeleton key to get into Henry’s flat in order to plant the gun, and all Amhurst had to do was walk across two intervening lawns. I’ll admit it’s an incredible murder plot, but Amhurst here is a rather incredible guy. All through this thing he’s shown a mixture of brilliant planning and impracticality. Both fit his character exactly. Especially the impracticality. He committed three murders to get his hands on an invention, then bargained away all but thirty-per-cent interest in it because he hasn’t an ounce of business sense. What more do you want?”

  “Maybe he wants some proof,” Amhurst said.

  Despite his controlled voice, now not only Amhurst’s upper lip, but his forehead and even his cheeks were covered with sweat. He began mopping at his face with a handkerchief.

  Hannegan picked that moment to arrive with Mrs. Jennifer Ford. Mrs. Ford apparently had been at the gin again, for she was noticeably uncertain in her movements.

  The moment she walked in, Eddie Johnson took one look at her and announced in a positive voice, “That’s the lady who hired me to run those errands, Inspector.”

  Mrs. Ford turned pale. She stared at Eddie as though he were the ghost of her dead husband. Then she said in a rapid but alcoholically thick voice, “All I did was steal two of Walter’s guns, have one of them initialed and give them both to Barney. I didn’t have anything to do with Walter’s death.”

  “Why’d you steal the guns for him?” Warren Day barked at her.

  “Barney said … Well, Walter wasn’t paying me my alimony, and Barney said …"

  When her voice trailed off to nothing, I finished for her. “Barney said you could inherit a ten-per-cent interest in the Huntsafe if you helped him, didn’t he?”

  She looked at me wide-eyed, and Barney Amhurst said in a low voice, “You stupid alcoholic! If you’d kept your mouth shut, they couldn’t have proved a thing. Now you’ve talked us both into the gas chamber!”

  His face was now drenched with sweat, but he made no attempt to mop it dry.

  The woman began to whimper.

  THE END

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  The Gallows in My Garden

  I

  THE REASON SO MANY PEOPLE catch me in bed is not that I spend more time there than anyone else, but only that between jobs, which is most of the time, my slumber hours are odd, being roughly contingent on the closing-hours of taverns. In addition it was a Saturday in the middle of July, and the brick courtyard next to my bedroom gathered all the heat it could absorb from a bright sun and shoved it through my window.

  I was therefore sleeping naked without covers when the most beautiful woman I ever met dropped in at high noon.

  It takes me longer to get from bed to the door than most people, because I first have to strap on an intricate contrivance of cork, aluminum, and leather which substitutes for the lower part of a right leg I contributed to the war effort. As a result I was still nude when a soprano voice from the front room called, “Anybody home?”

  “Stay where you arel” I yelled, then added in a lower tone, “Unless you’ve had children and are over seventy.”

  A girlish giggle indicated my caller was somewhat less than seventy, so I advised her to wait ten minutes while I made myself presentable. It was closer to fifteen before I accomplished this chore, including a rapid shave. I always shave before investigating female callers who get me out of bed, because a bent nose and one drooping eyelid is enough handicap for a face, without adding whiskers.

  When I finally emerged from the bedroom, I found her standing before the mantel in my front room. It is hard to describe the first impact of her beauty, and useless to try to catalogue its details, for no one of her attributes would have been outstanding in a crowd of any hundred college-age girls. She was about nineteen or twenty, of average height, average slimness, average blondness of hair and blueness of eye.

  Yet some wondrous alchemy combined her various average features into an effect which was shattering. Perhaps it was partly her appearance of crisp coolness in an oppressive heat which had already begun to wilt my fresh collar, or perhaps it was simply personality bubbling within her, for the difference between prettiness and beauty is mainly a thing of poise and manner. Whatever it was, it caught me between the horns like a club, although from the advanced senility of my thirty-two years I rarely glance twice at women under voting age.

  When I finally got my mouth closed, I realized she had said something.

  “I didn’t catch that,” I said.

  “My name is Grace Lawson,” she repeated. “You’re Mr. Moon?”

  “I think so,” I said, still off center. “Sit down so you won’t break.”

  I led her to my favorite chair and released her hand only after she sat down.

  “Have a drink?” I asked, fumbling with the rye decanter, then changing my mind. “No, you’re too young. Smoke?” I lifted the lid from my cigar humidor and dropped it on the floor.

  “No, thanks,” she said, smiling. Apparently she was used to men stumbling over their own feet when they first met her.

  I said, “Pardon me,” poured breakfast into a shot glass, tossed it off, lit a cigar, and regained my equilibrium. When I took a seat on the sofa across from her, I found I could regard her without shooting any embolisms.

  “You’ve come on business,” I said. “That’s a deduction.”

  She smiled again. She had a smile that made you want to do something about her. Nothing drastic, for she was not the bedroom-eyed type. You didn’t want to take her in your arms; you wanted to pat her on the head.

  She asked, “How did you deduce that?”

  “Elementary. Pretty girls never call on me socially.”

  “You’re probably being modest,” she said, “but I did come on business. Do you charge much?”

  “More than I’m worth. Tell me what you want before we discuss rates.”

  “I couldn’t pay very much,” she said. “I don’t get my money until I’m twenty-one, and all I have is five hundred a month allowance.”

  I blinked. “You’re virtually a pauper. How old did you say you are?”

  “Going on twenty.”

  “In school somewhere?”

  “The state university summer session. I had to make up two courses I dropped. I’m a junior.” “Where’d you hear of me?”

  “The woman who owns El Patio recommended you. The night club, you know.” “Fausta Moreni?” I asked.

  “Yes, Fausta. Arnold and I have dinner at El Patio now and then. We were telling Fausta about the attempts on my life, and she recommended I see you.” Her lip corners lifted in a light grin. “She said if I made eyes at you, she’d cut my heart out, but she was only fooling.”

  “You don’t know Fausta,” I told her. “Let’s start at the beginning. Some
body’s trying to kill you?”

  “I think so. Once the saddle girth on my riding-horse was cut, presumably so I’d fall, and once my milk was poisoned, and once a flowerpot fell from an upper window when I was coming in late at night, and it broke right next to me.”

  I sat up straight. “You think so! You’re lucky you’re alive. How’d you escape all that?”

  “Just luck, really,” she said. “The saddle girth was cut so far it snapped soon as my weight hit the stirrup. And the milk was poisoned with something that smelled strong, so I didn’t even taste it. Uncle Doug had it analyzed—he’s a doctor, you know—but I’ve forgotten what the poison was. Of course maybe the flowerpot was just an accident. It missed me several feet.”

  “You report all this to the police?”

  “Oh, no. You see it almost has to be someone in the house, so we wouldn’t want the papers to get it. Uncle Doug has been sort of investigating, but since Don ran away last week, Arnold and I have been wondering if that’s enough. We think maybe someone tried to kill Don, too, and he ran away because he was scared.”

  “Who is Don?” I asked, somewhat numbed by the barrage of names she had just thrown at me, and deciding to sort them out one at a time.

  “My brother.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Your name is Grace Lawson? The kid who disappeared last week is your brother?”

  “My older brother, though not much older. Don was born just eleven months before I was. Last Sunday he left a note and ran off without even taking a suitcase.”

  I asked, “Aren’t you and your brother scheduled to inherit Fort Knox or something at twenty-one? I didn’t read the news item on it very carefully.”

  “We each get some money at twenty-one,” she admitted. “Unless whoever is after us succeeds in killing us. Then it goes to Ann.”