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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
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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 for-ward 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 flash-light. 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.
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"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 accusing-ly. "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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]