Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Now, however, the problem has resolved itself.”

“You mean, because Alex is dead, that there is nothing to keep me from marrying Rufe? That may be true, but I’ll have to think about it. It doesn’t seem quite fair to Alex. A kind of unfair advantage for Rufe, you know. I may be compelled by fairness to give him up also.”

Marcus slapped a knee sharply and stood up and walked around his chair and sat down again. He closed his eyes and opened them, and she was still there.

“There was a pair of target pistols in the apartment,” he said. “The superintendent told me they were bugs about target shooting. Is that so?”

“Oh, yes, and so am I. I have a pistol like the ones you saw. It all started when we were quite young. In the beginning, we used bb pistols. We lived in a small town, only a short walk into the country, and we used to go out together frequently, the three of us, and have matches. Would you like to see my pistol?”

“It would be kind of you to show it to me.”

“Not at all.”

She got up and went to a desk and returned in a minute with the pistol, which was, as she had said, apparently identical with the two he had appropriated. Clean, recently oiled. He took it and examined it and handed it back to her. She sat in her chair again, the pistol lying in her lap beneath her hands.

“Do you happen to have a photograph of Mr. Fleming?” he asked.

“Of Rufe? No. I’m sorry.”

“Not even a snapshot?”

“Not even that. It’s rather strange, isn’t it, when you come to think about it? Neither Alex nor Rufe were much for having their pictures taken.”

“Perhaps you could describe him to me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, just in case I happen to see him or something. It might save me some time and trouble.”

“Well, he’s quite tall. About six-three, I’d say. Rather thin, but quite strong. He has a long face with thick eyebrows that grow across the bridge of his nose and black hair that’s wiry and doesn’t stay brushed very well. His shoulders are somewhat stooped, and I keep telling him to pull them back, but it doesn’t do any good. I think he stoops deliberately to avoid appearing as tall as he is, especially when he’s with me. As you can see, I’m rather small.”

“Yes. I see.” Marcus stood up, holding his hat, and looked around the room. An open entrance to a small kitchen. A door closed upon what must be a bedroom. Off the bedroom, certainly, a bath. No different, basically, from the place shared by Gray and Fleming. “Tell me,” he said. “Can you think of anyone at all who might have wanted to kill Alexander Gray?”

“No. No one. Surely it must have been some kind of accident.”

“He was in no trouble that you knew of?”

“None. If Alex had any trouble, it must have been minor.”

“I see. Well, thank you very much, Miss Shore. If you see Mr. Fleming, please have him contact me at police headquarters.”

She followed him to the door and showed him out; the last thing he saw was her grave face and darkened eyes as the door closed between them. It was now well past time for lunch, and so he went on and had a steak sandwich at a small restaurant and went on from there to headquarters, where he read a brief report from the coroner as to the estimated time of Alexander Gray’s death, which estimate was, as Marcus had predicted, not much different from Marcus’s guess. The coroner thought that Gray had been killed by a .22 caliber bullet, but there had been no time as yet to recover it from the body, due to an accumulation of work, and an autopsy was promised as soon as possible.

Marcus carried the pair of matched pistols to ballistics and left them with instructions for tests, and then returned to his desk and began to clear up some paper work, including his own report of the Gray case. He tried three times without success, during the rest of the afternoon, to reach Fleming at his apartment, and he kept thinking that Fleming might call in, but he didn’t. Late in the afternoon, Fuller came in and reported on what had happened at the golf course after Marcus had left, but it didn’t amount to much.

Alone, Marcus rocked back in his chair and closed his eyes and tried to think. He thought mostly about Sandra Shore. He still had difficulty in convincing himself that she was real, and he wondered if she was truly so remarkably self-contained as she had appeared, or if she had only found it impossible to express more effectively her shock and surprise at news that was really no news at all. Had she in fact known that Alexander Gray was dead before Marcus had arrived to tell her so? Marcus wondered, but he didn’t know.

He sat there thinking for a long time, not really getting anywhere, and then he tried Fleming’s apartment again without any luck. He decided to go out and eat and go home, and that’s what he did. In his bachelor’s apartment, he read for a while and had three highballs, bourbon and branch, and listened, the last thing before going to bed, to a Toscanini recording of Beethoven’s Sixth. The next morning, which was the morning of Sunday, he got up early and drank two cups of coffee and went back to headquarters, and he was at his desk there when Fuller, reluctantly on duty, brought in a young man to see him. The young man, according to Fuller, had something to say about the Gray case, now public knowledge, that might or might not be significant. The young man’s name, said Fuller, was Herbert Richards.

“Sit down and tell me what you know,” Marcus said.

“Well,” said Herbert Richards, sitting, “I was driving out there yesterday morning on the street just east of the Golf Club where this guy was killed, and my old clunker quit running all of a sudden. I’ve been working on a construction job, and I was on my way to meet some of the crew at a place in town. We were going on together in one of the trucks, you see. Anyhow, my clunker quit, and I had to hurry terribly to make it on time, walking, and so I cut across the corner of the golf course, walking in a kind of gully that runs diagonally across the corner, and all of a sudden I heard shots.”

“Wait a minute,” Marcus said. “Did you say shots? ”

“Yes, sir. Two of them. I read about the murder in the paper last night, and it said this guy was only shot once, so I wondered if I could have been mistaken, but I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure I’m not. They came so close together that they did sound almost like one shot, but I’m sure there were two.”

“What did you do when you heard the shots?”

“Nothing. Just kept on going down the gully.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that something might be wrong?”

“Why should it? I’ve heard lots of shots in my life, or sounds like shots. This is the first time it ever turned out to be someone getting murdered.”

Marcus conceded the validity of the point. Honest folk going about their business just didn’t jump to the conclusion of murder at every unusual sight or sound, even the sound of shots.

“What time was this?” he said.

“That’s mostly what I wanted to tell you. It was just daylight. Just after dawn. I know it’s important to know the time something like this happens, and that’s why I came down here.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“You think it may help?”

“I think so. Thanks. If you don’t have anything else to tell me, you can go now.”

Herbert Richards left, visibly pleased, and Marcus closed his eyes and thought for a moment about the scene of Alexander Gray’s murder. Opening them again, he looked for Fuller, who was waiting.

“Fuller,” he said, “you remember that high bank we went down about twenty yards or so from where Gray was lying? You take a couple of men and go out there and dig around in it and see if you can find a bullet.”