The Collection (101 page)

He said, "Put yourself in the place of one of these
roadhouse proprietors, sheriff, and try to imagine you don't give a hang about
the law. Now, if the situation were what it was, would you figure it would be
best to try to
scare
Remmel with notes like these, or would you figure
it safer in the long run just to eliminate him quietly, without threats?"

"Hm-m-m,' I said. "I see your point." Well,
I did see it, even if I couldn't see where it would get us. "If I
really
intended to go so far as killing him, I don't think I'd send notes first
that would give away my motive and make me one of a limited number of
suspects."

"Fine," Mac said, "but you wouldn't send the
notes, either, unless you thought there was a chance of them working. Would
you?"

I downed the last of my super-sugared coffee while I
thought that one over. "Guess I wouldn't," I said. "But they
might work, at that. Remmel doesn't show it, but I think he's really scared.
Oh, he says he's going ahead with his campaign with redoubled energy, but I
think he's weakening. He'd like some sort of an excuse, I think, to back out
without looking like he was yellow."

"And since you'd rather not commit murder unless you
had to, for purely selfish reasons, if no others, how would you go about giving
him that excuse to back out?"

"Darned if I know," I admitted, after I'd
scratched where my hair used to be. "How would you?"

"I don't know either, sheriff. I'd like to meet one of
these road-house owners of yours, though, just for a sample."

"Under your right name?" I asked him. "Or
undercoverlike, with me introducing you as a textile man from Texas, or
something?"

He smiled. "Since I'm being introduced by the law, I
may as well go under my true colors. I'll be freer to ask questions without
making excuses."

"O.K., Mac," I told him. I turned around and
yelled, "Hey, Sam." Sam Frey came waddling over to us again, and I
said, "Sam, meet Mr. McGuire.
The
McGuire, the guy you've read
about."

Sam said, "Glad to meet you." I told Mac:
"Sam, here, owns a roadhouse, besides this tavern. It's out on the Kerry
pike, near where we're going. He works there nights and here days and evenings,
like now. He never sleeps."

Sam grinned. "Oh, I catch a few hours now and then.
Few more years and I'll retire, and then I'll sleep twenty hours a day for a
while and catch up. I'll be able to afford it then."

"Unless this new law goes through," said McGuire.

Sam's face sobered. "Yeah," he said.

I looked at the clock on the wall over the bar. "It's
eight o'clock, Sam. Want to turn your place here over to Johnny for the rest of
the evening and go over to Remmel's with us?"

I caught the surprised look on McGuire's face. "Sam's
a deputy of mine," I explained. "He knows all about the notes. And
he's a good guy to have along."

"Here I thought you were introducing me to a suspect,"
protested McGuire. "Or are all the suspects deputies of yours?"

Sam chuckled. "Nope," he answered for me.
"I'm the only one fits both ways. Sure it ain't too early to go there, sheriff?
This is his evening for Dave Peters to be there. And you've told me how Remmel
won't let anything at all interrupt those doo-ets of his."

"Remmel's expecting us," I told him. "Said
he'd have Dave come early tonight so they'd be through by the time we got
there. Go get your coat, Sam, if you're coming."

Sam went to the back, and McGuire wanted to know, "Why
are you taking him? Not that I mind, but I'm curious."

"Two reasons. First, Sam knows every roadhouse proprietor
who'll be affected by that law. After you've talked to Remmel, Sam can give you
enough leads to keep us going all night. Second, Sam's been wanting to get a
chance to see Remmel, to have a talk with him about that law. He says he thinks
maybe he can make him see how unfair it is."

"Oh," said McGuire. Suddenly I saw what he was
thinking. He'd just asked me how the sender of the notes could go about giving
the banker a chance to back down without looking yellow.

"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.