Murder in the Gunroom quotes

It was hard to judge Jeff Rand’s age from his appearance; he was certainly over thirty and considerably under fifty.

He looked hard and fit, like a man who could be a serviceable friend or a particularly unpleasant enemy.

Women instinctively suspected that he would make a most satisfying lover.

… for a successful lawyer (he had studied law, years ago), or a military officer in mufti (he still had a Reserve colonelcy, and used the title occasionally, to impress people who he thought needed impressing), or a prosperous businessman, as he usually thought of himself.

Most of all, he looked like King Charles II of England anachronistically clad in a Brooks Brothers suit.

At the moment, he was looking rather like King Charles II being bothered by one of his mistresses who wanted a peerage for her husband.

Her color-scheme was blue and gold; blue eyes, and a blue tailored outfit that would have looked severe on a less curvate figure, and a charmingly absurd little blue hat perched on a mass of golden hair.

If Rand had been Charles II, she could have walked out of there with a duchess’s coronet, and Nell Gwyn would have been back selling oranges.

“Why isn’t it?” she countered. “Your door’s marked Tri-State Detective Agency, Jefferson Davis Rand, Investigation and Protection. Well, I want to know how much the collection’s worth, and who’ll pay the closest to it. That’s investigation, isn’t it? And I want protection from being swindled.

That, he thought, would settle that.

He was expecting an indignant outcry, and hardened his heart, like Pharaoh.

Instead, Gladys Fleming nodded equably.

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 bookkeeper 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 in something better than a state of suspended animation while Rand had been in the Army.

annually, they compared books to see who owed whom how much. Tipton was about five years Rand’s junior, and had been in the Navy during the war. He was frequently described as New Belfast’s leading younger attorney and most eligible bachelor.

His dark, conservatively cut clothes fitted him as though they had been sprayed on, he wore gold-rimmed glasses, and he was so freshly barbered, manicured, valeted and scrubbed as to give the impression that he had been born in cellophane and just unwrapped.

He leaned back in his chair and waved his visitor to a seat.

“Did my secretary tell you I was making an investigation?” Rand demanded incredulously. “She doesn’t usually make mistakes of that sort.”

The wrinkles moved up Goode’s brow like a battalion advancing in platoon front.

He looked even more narrowly at Rand, his suspicion compounded with bewilderment.

Fleming—but I would be obligated to represent her only as far as her interests did not improperly conflict with those of the other heirs, and that’s what I want made clear.”

Goode favored the detective with a saurian smile.

“You’re not a lawyer, too, Mr. Rand?” he asked.

There was a post office, uniform with the rest of the buildings; an excessive quantity of aluminum trimming dated it somewhere in the middle Andrew W. Mellon period.

There were four gas stations, a movie theater, and a Woolworth store with a red front that made it look like some painted hussy who had wandered into a Quaker Meeting.

Over the door of one of the smaller stores, Rand saw a black-lettered white sign: Antiques. There was a smoke-gray Plymouth coupé parked in front of it.

He pulled to the side of the road and got out, turning up the collar of his trench coat. The air was raw and damp, doubly unpleasant after the recent unseasonable warmth.

An apathetically persistent rain sogged the seedling-dotted old fields on either side, and the pinewoods beyond, and a high ceiling of unbroken dirty gray gave no promise of clearing.

The mournful hoot of a distant locomotive whistle was the only sound to pierce the silence.

The telephone rang, Cecil Gillis answered it, listened for a moment, and then said: “For you, Mr. Rivers; long distance from Milwaukee.”

Rivers’s face lit with the beatific smile of a cat at a promising mouse-hole.

“Ah, excuse me, Mr. Rand.” He crossed to the desk, picked up the phone and spoke into it. “This is Arnold Rivers,” he said, much as Edward Murrow used to say, This—is London! The telephone sputtered for a moment. “Ah, yes indeed, Mr. Verral.

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.

“Oh, forget it.” Rand dismissed Geraldine with a shrug. “I know she was talking through a highball glass. As far as selling the collection is concerned, you just let Rivers sell you a bill of something you hadn’t gotten a good look at.

He’s a smart operator, and he’s crooked as a wagon-load of blacksnakes.

Maybe you never realized just how much money Fleming put into this collection; naturally you wouldn’t realize how much could be gotten out of it again.

Rand remembered Irene Gresham, too; an overage dizzy blonde who was still living in the Flaming Youth era of the twenties. She was an extremely good egg; he liked her very much.

After all, insisting upon remaining an F. Scott Fitzgerald character was a harmless and amusing foible, and it was no more than right that somebody should try to keep the bright banner of Jazz Age innocence flying in a grim and sullen world.

He accepted a cigarette, shared the flame of his lighter with mother and daughter, and submitted to being gushed over.

“Who buys history, anyhow?” Rand wanted to know. “The fact that it came from the Sawyer collection adds more value to it than this Mayflower business. Past ownership by a recognized authority like Sawyer is a real guarantee of quality and authenticity.

But history, documented or otherwise⁠—hell, only yesterday I saw a pair of pistols with a wonderful three-hundred-and-fifty-year documented history. Only not a word of it was true; the pistols were made about twenty years ago.

”

“Oh, none of us are really interested in the individual history of collection weapons,” Rand said. “

You show me a collection that’s full of known-history arms, and I’ll show you a collection that’s either full of junk or else cost three times what it’s worth.

And you show me a collector who blows money on history, and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a collector who doesn’t know guns. I saw one such collection, once;

that Nambu, and that Japanese Model-14, and the Polish Radom, and the Italian Glisenti, and that Tokarev, and, of course, the P-’38 and the Canadian Browning; but it’s going to take the devil’s own time.

I hope nobody starts another war, for a few years, till I can get caught up on the last one.

”

“Now, Mick!” he reproved. “

You know I never kill anybody unless I have a clear case of self-defense, and a flock of witnesses to back it up.

”

“That’s the way it looks to me,” Rand agreed. “

Just because I can’t think of any other possibility, though, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any others.

”

“It does,” Rand admitted. “

I feel like an undertaker watching a man being swallowed by a shark.

”

And Rivers was away a lot, on buying trips and so on, and when he was, nobody ever saw Cecil leave the Rivers place in the evenings. At least, that’s the story; personally, I wouldn’t know.

Of course, where there’s smoke, there may be nothing more than somebody with a stogie, but, then, there may be a regular conflagration.

”

“He was shoved out,” Rand corrected. “On the sharp end of a Mauser bayonet, sometime last night. I found the body this morning, when I went to see him, and notified the State Police.

They call it murder, but of course, they’re just prejudiced. I’d call it a nuisance-abatement project.

”

“I don’t work by the day, Stephen. I take a lump-sum fee, and, of course, it’s to my interest to get a case cleared up as soon as I can. But I can’t set any time limit on a job like this.

This Rivers killing has more angles than Nude Descending a Staircase; I don’t know how much work I’ll have to do, or even what kind.

”

“Pay no attention,” McKenna advised. “

He doesn’t know what the score is; hell, he doesn’t even know what teams are playing.

”

That’s where I first met Jeff, and he saved me from making a jackass out of myself. And what happened to this guy who’d hired Jeff was something that oughtn’t to happen even to Molotov, and it happened because Jeff fixed it to happen.

If anybody hires Jeff Rand, he’s one of two things. He’s either innocent, or else he’s out of luck.

… I don’t know why the hell I bother telling you this.”

Gladys laughed. “Is that rearing its ugly head in public, now?” she asked. “

Well, there’s nothing like a good murder to shake the skeletons out of the closets.

Not that this particular skeleton was ever exactly hidden. The stories are numerous, and somewhat repetitious; Cecil and Mrs.

“

Why don’t you have the house haunted?

The Tri-State Agency has an excellent house-haunting department. Anything you want; poltergeists; apparitions; cold, clammy hands in the dark; footsteps in the attic; clanking chains and eldritch screams; banshees. Any three for the price of two.”

Varcek looked at the pistols on the desk as though they were so many rattlesnakes. “I have always feared an accident, with so many in the house. When I saw him lying dead, with a revolver in his hand, that was my first thought.

First thoughts are so often illogical, emotional.

”

to do that, I must first learn who killed Lane Fleming. However, I was not retained to investigate the Fleming murder, and as far as I know from anything she has told me, Gladys Fleming is quite satisfied that her husband shot himself accidentally.”

In a universe of ordered abstractions and multiordinal meanings, the literal truth, on one order of abstraction, was often a black lie on another.

“Does that answer your question?” he asked, with open-faced innocence.

“Oh, come!” Rand reproved. “

That’s like talking about starting a hurricane with a palm-leaf fan.

”