The Collection

by Fredric Brown

"Sam never sent those notes," I said suddenly. "Sam's an honest guy, a swell guy. He wouldn't kill a fly."

  McGuire said quietly, "I agree with you. But the sender of those notes hasn't harmed a fly yet, has he? And maybe he has no intentions of harming Remmel."

  "You mean the whole thing is just a bluff? Is that what you think?"

  He smiled. "Sheriff, are you asking me to give a considered opinion on the case before I've even seen Mr. Remmel? Lord, man, I just got here, and all I've got is an open mind. I'm discussing possibilities, not opinions."

  Well, he was right as usual, and I'd asked a silly question. But before I could try to back-track on it, Sam came with his coat and hat on and we got into my car and went to the Remmel place.

  It's a big, rambling house with three wings to it, and the minute I turned in the gateway I had a feeling that something was wrong. I get feelings like that sometimes, and every once in a while they're right, even if they mostly aren't.

  And the minute I stopped the motor of my car in the driveway, I knew I was wrong again, and breathed a sigh of relief. They were still playing.

  A flute isn't exactly loud, but it carries well, and Dave's wheezy tones were unmistakable. I grinned at McGuire as we walked along the path from the driveway to the porch, past what Remmel called his "music room." The shades were up and the curtains drawn back, and we got a glimpse of them hard at it as we walked by, Remmel at the piano bench pounding away at the keys and Dave standing behind him and to his left, tooting.

  "We got here too soon, all right," I said as I rang the doorbell. "But it isn't our fault. They were expecting us at eight, and it's a quarter after."

  The door opened and Craig, the Remmel butler, bowed and stood aside for us to come in. I said, "Hi, Bob," and clapped him on the shoulder as we went past.

  Ethelda Remmel, regal in white, was sweeping down toward us along the corridor. "Sheriff Clark," she said, holding out her fingertips and looking like she was trying to pretend to look glad to see us.

  I performed the introductions.

  "Henry is expecting you," she informed us. "If you'll step into the drawing room a moment until he and Mr. Peters are through their--" She didn't name it; just gave a deprecating little laugh that made me understand why Henry Remmel--teetotaler that he was--sought release in pounding ivory. Another man might have set up a blonde, but Henry Remmel wasn't another man.

  We went in; it was across the hall from the music room. There was a lull in the noise and then it started in again, right away. I'd recognized the music before; I didn't know the name, but it was something we had on the phonograph at home; but this one I didn't know, had never heard before. It sounded like a show-off piece for the flute, with high, short little runs and trills and octave jumps all over the place. Not bad, but not good, either.

  Then it happened, so suddenly that for an instant that seemed a lot longer none of us moved. Once you've heard that sound you never mistake it again. I've heard it, and I know Sam has, and I have no doubt that McGuire had heard it more often than we.

  I mean the staccato yammer of a sub-machine gun. One burst of about half a dozen shots, so quick together that it sounded almost like one. The flute, in the middle of a high note, seeming to give an almost humanly discordant gasp before it went silent. And at the same moment the dreadful discord that a piano makes only when a couple of dozen keys in a row are pushed down all at once and hard--like if you fall across them.

  It seemed, as I said, like a long time that we just looked at each other, but it couldn't have been long, because the strings of the piano, with the keys obviously still held down, were still vibrating audibly when we reached the hall.

  Mrs. Remmel had been nearest the door of the drawing room, and she was the first to reach that closed door across the hall. She wrenched at the knob, forgetting that her husband always turned the catch on the inside of the door to make sure no one would disturb him while he was in the one room he held sacred. Then she put up frantic fists to pound on the wooden panel, but before she could connect, the latch was turned from within and the door swung open.

  Dave Peters stood there in the doorway, his face pale and his eyes so wide they seemed ready to fall out of their sockets. Over his shoulder I could see, at the piano, just what I had expected to see there. Somehow, merely from the way he lay slumped forward across the keyboard, I was certain that Henry Remmel was dead. I knew at a glance that there wasn't any use wasting time crossing over to feel for a pulse that wouldn't be there.

  I saw Dave's flute on the floor where he had dropped it, and the curtain blowing slightly inward from an opened window on the side of the wing toward the back of the house. Dave was pointing to that open window. "Fired in there," he shouted, although there was no need for shouting. "Hurry, maybe you can--"

  Cursing myself for not having thought of it before someone told me to, I jerked around and ran for the outside door. Sam had been quicker than I, and hadn't waited for a flute-playing bank clerk to tell us what to do. He was already outside and pounding around the house to the left.

  I pounded out the door after him and started around the house the other way, yanking out my Police Positive as I ran.

  Sam had nerve, all right, because I knew he didn't have a gun. Or maybe his running out had been more reaction than courage, because when we came in sight of each other at the back of the house and he didn't recognize me in the almost darkness, he gave a yawp and started to go back.

  I called out to him and he stopped. I was beginning to think again, and I said, "Be quiet, Sam. Listen." It was too dark to see whoever might be making a getaway, but there was just a chance that they wouldn't be so far but what we could hear them.

  We stood there a moment, and there wasn't any sound but the hysterical sobbing of Ethelda Remmel in the house. None that we could hear, anyway. I said, "Sam, there's a flashlight in my car. Will you get it?"

  He said, "Sure, Les," and went after it. I stepped up toward the open window that the killer had fired through, and three feet away, too close to the window to be visible in the square of light that fell from the window onto the lawn, I stumbled over something. Something hard and heavy.

  I bent over to look, and I could make out that it was a Tommy-gun all right. I didn't touch it until Sam got back with the flashlight. Then I picked it up carefully by hooking my finger through the trigger guard so as not to smear any prints. As I raised up with it, I shot a resentful glance in the window.

  This McGuire was sure disappointing me. He was in there comforting Mrs. Remmel and trying to calm down Dave Peters so he could answer questions without shouting. That kind of stuff is what you'd expect from an ordinary private dick, but not from one with a reputation like McGuire's. Staying in there to jabber and leaving the man hunt and the dirty work to me and Sam.

  I went around in the door again, and put the Tommy-gun down in a corner of the murder room. A housekeeper had appeared on the scene from somewhere and was taking Mrs. Remmel away toward the upstairs of the house.

  "He got away," I said. "And the ground is too hard for prints. He left the typewriter, though. Maybe there'll be fingerprints on it."

  "And maybe not," said Sam. Privately, I agreed with him. The only killers nowadays who leave prints are spur-of-the-moment boys, and they don't carry Tommy-guns around on the chance that they may decide to go hunting.

  I glared at McGuire. I couldn't blame him out loud for not having gone chasing out with us, because it had turned out he was right and there hadn't been any use of trying. But I was mad at him anyway, and my tongue gave way at its loosest hinge.

  "So you thought the boys were bluffing about killing Remmel, huh?" I said. I realized, even as I said it, that I was being unfair, because he hadn't made any such statement at all, and had refused to even guess until he had all the facts. Then I thought of another angle.

  "So you thought Sam here was a suspect, huh?" I said accusingly. "That maybe he was coming here to give Remmel an out. Well, Remmel don't need an out now; he
's got one. And Sam was with us when it happened, and he couldn't have done it any more'n me or Mrs. Remmel or Dave or you yourself, or--"

  He said, "Be quiet, sheriff." He said it so softly and so calmly and authoritatively that I shut up so sudden I near sprained a tonsil, and felt my face getting red. In spite of my general resemblance to a spavined elephant, I have a blush--so I'm told--that is like a schoolgirl's.

  McGuire wasn't even looking at me, though. He was talking conversationally to Dave, just like there wasn't a stiff in the room at all. "That piece you were playing after the 'IL Trovatore' number," he said. "Is this the score for it?" He strolled to the piano and looked at the music opened on it. It was written out by hand in ink, on ruled music paper.

  Dave nodded. "My own composition," he said. "A suite for flute and piano. I brought it over tonight for us to try out."

  "Interesting," said McGuire casually. He was leaning over to study the manuscript, and he'd taken a pencil from his pocket. He pointed to a place about halfway down the second page. "This would be about the point where the machine gun made a trio of it, wouldn't it? About so."

  Lightly, with his pencil, he sketched in six slurred thirty-second notes below the staff. "About six notes right here."

  I thought he'd gone nuts. I didn't change my mind at all when he turned and went on talking. "The history of music is very interesting, Mr. Peters," he said. I gawked at him.

  A guy who'd talk about the history of music over a dead body was a new one on me. He went on: "Have you ever read about a Colonel Rebsomen who lived in France early in the last centur--"

  Then I knew he'd gone genuinely and completely insane, because he tensed suddenly and his right hand darted inside his coat and came out holding an automatic. But this time I wasn't so slow; I dived before he could aim at whoever he was going to aim at, and the bullet went wild and snipped a stem from a potted plant on my left. My right to his jaw made him drop the gun and claw the air, and I grabbed for the gun and got it. McGuire didn't go down from my punch. He kept his feet and looked at me a little sadly. "You damned fool!" he said. "I was going to shoot it out of his hand."

  I said blankly, "Shoot what out of whose hand?"

  Then I turned around and saw Dave, and saw that he was slumped back in a chair, and that his face wasn't pretty to look at. There was a little bottle in his hand. Even as I watched, his relaxing fingers let it slide to the floor.

  Sam said, "Prussic acid. It's all over; no use rushing for any antidote for that stuff."

  I didn't understand it, but I did get that I'd made a fool of myself again. This time, though, I can't say I was really sorry. I'd known Dave pretty well, and if he'd killed Hank Remmel it was better for him to have had a sudden out than to go through what a murderer goes through before he climbs the steps. A guy like Dave.

  I turned back to McGuire, and I didn't call him Mac this time. I handed him his gun respectfully, and I said, "I sure owe you an apology, Mr. McGuire. I thought--but damn it all, I still don't see how Dave could have killed him. We heard 'em, all the time."

  He slid his gun back into its holster. "Here's the score for it, sheriff," he said. "Suite for Flute and Tommy-gun. I don't like this case, sheriff, but just the same, I'd like to take along this piece of music as a souvenir of it. It's unique. May I?"

  He took it out into the hall and put it into the brief case he'd left there. I followed him. "Listen," I said, "I'm still as dumb as I was. How did Dave--"

  We were out of sight of the two dead bodies now, and he grinned. "The case is closed, sheriff," he told me, "and I can catch the ten-o'clock train out. If you can have your deputy stay here and call in the coroner and so on, why on the way back to town I'll tell you."

  I fixed it with Sam, and as I started to drive McGuire in, I said: "I figure it this far. It's easy to see how Dave could have had motive, as teller of the bank. An audit'll show it. I'd guess offhand that he must have forged Remmel's name to cover up, too, and figured that with Remmel dead the forgery would never be found out. Maybe he even had it fixed to get control of the bank himself. If he was short, and had a choice between that and jail--well, you can see the motive, all right.

  "And sending those notes was a natural to throw suspicion in another direction, and that, too, would show the murder was planned. But how on earth--Say, you mentioned a Colonel Reb-something. That was when Dave pulled out the bottle and--you know. What the hell would a colonel who lived last century have to do with it?"

  "Colonel Rebsomen," said McGuire, "was quite famous. He was a one-armed flute player. Anyone much interested in the flute would have heard of him. He had a special flute he could play anything on and play it well. When I wrote in that part for the Tommy-gun into Peters' flute score and then mentioned Colonel Rebsomen, Peters knew I saw through it."

  "A one-armed flute player! Holy cow! But . . . but that was a special flute, you say. Dave's is an ordinary one, isn't it?"

  McGuire nodded. "But on an ordinary flute there are certain notes that can be played with the left hand alone. Quite a few of them, in fact. From G to C in the first and second octaves, and most of the notes in the top octave.

  "You see, sheriff, he not only planned this murder, but he had written the music for it. Almost the whole of that suite he wrote is so pitched that it can be played with one hand.

  "We were to be his alibi. He waited until he heard us come, and then persuaded Remmel to run through that number once before he went out to join us. As soon as they started he backed to the window, still playing. He'd planted the gun on the window sill when he came, and he'd probably opened the window earlier to be ready to get at it.

  "He got the gun and, still playing, pulled the trigger. You can't do much with a Tommy-gun one-handed, but you can fire one burst that can't miss a man two yards away. Then he dropped his flute, probably wiped his prints off the gun and threw it out the window and came to unlatch the door. Perfect--except for Colonel Rebsomen's ghost."

  I'd just swung my car in to the curb at the station, and we walked in. It was well before train time and, except for us, the station was empty.

  I said, "My God, Mac, what a scheme for murder that was! Only an unbalanced mind would have planned it. I guess flute players really are a bit nuts."

  McGuire nodded absently. He put his brief case down and took the score of Dave's suite from it. I looked over his shoulder and shuddered when I saw those penciled staccato notes that showed where the Tommy-gun had joined in.

  And suddenly I realized how near Dave had come to getting away with it. He would have, for all of me or Sam. Offhand, you'd say only another flute player could have--

  "Gawd, Mac," I said, "I just remembered that you didn't answer me before when I asked if you played the flute. Do you?"

  "I was just considering," he said, "showing you how this would sound if it were well played. It's not bad music, really." He reached deeper in his brief case and came up with a black leather case that proved to be plush lining and the sections of a dismembered flute. And darned if it didn't sound not so bad at that, the way he played it.

  I've had mine a month now, and I can play "My Country 'Tis of Thee," and a few other easy ones. Only, as my wife acrimoniously points out, if another fancy murder is ever pulled off in Crogan County, it'll probably be planned by a chess player instead of a flute player, and I'll make a fool of myself again because I don't know a pawn from a bishop, except that the knights look like horses.

  But a guy can't be an expert in everything, and what's good enough for a guy like McGuire, who can solve a case practically while it's happening, is good enough for a guy like me.

  THE CAT FROM SIAM

  Chapter I

  The Locked Door

  We were in the middle of our third game of chess when it happened.

  It was late in the evening--eleven thirty-five, to be exact. Jack Sebastian and I were in the living room of my two-room bachelor apartment. We had the chess game set up on the card table in front of the fireplace, in which
the gas grate burned cheerfully.

  Jack looked cheerful too. He was wreathed in smoke from his smelliest pipe and he had me a pawn down and held a positional edge. I'd taken the first two games, but this one looked like his. It didn't look any less so when he moved his knight and said, "Check." My rook was forked along with the king. There didn't seem to be anything I could do about it except give up the rook for the knight.

  I looked up at the Siamese cat who was sleepily watching us from her place of vantage on the mantel.

  "Looks like he's got us, Beautiful," I said. "One should never play with a policeman."

  "I wish you wouldn't do that, dammit," Jack said. "You give me the willies."

  "Anything's fair in love and chess," I told him. "If it gives you the willies to have me talk to a cat, that's fine. Besides, Beautiful doesn't kibitz. If you see her give me any signals, I'll concede."

  "Go ahead and move," he said, irritably. "You've got only one move that takes you out of check, so make it. I take your rook, and then--"

  There was a noise, then, that I didn't identify for a second because it was made up of a crack and a ping and a thud. It wasn't until I turned to where part of the sound came from that I realized what it had been. There was a little round hole in the glass of the window.

  The crack had been a shot, the ping had been the bullet coming through the glass--and the thud had been the bullet going into the wall behind me!

  But by the time I had that figured out, the chessmen were spilling into my lap.

  "Down, quick!" Jack Sebastian was saying sharply.

  Whether I got there myself, or Jack pushed me there, I was on the floor. And by that time I was thinking.

  Grabbing the cord of the lamp, I jerked the plug out of the wall and we were in darkness except for the reddish-yellow glow of the gas grate in the fireplace. The handle of that was on Jack's side, and I saw him, on his knees, reach out and turn it.

  Then there was complete darkness. I looked toward where the window should be, but it was a moonless night and I couldn't see even the faintest outline of the window. I slid sideways until I bumped against the sofa. Jack Sebastian's voice came to me out of the darkness.