Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

“Just picked this up,” he said. “Isn’t it a beauty?”

After examining it, Barney clicked the slide shut. “Sure is.”

“Mind dropping by police headquarters and registering it for me tomorrow?” Drennan asked. “Have my permit switched over from my thirty-eight to this too.”

The combine was careful not to lay its members open to possible concealed weapons charges. With its political influence, it didn’t have to risk such minor infractions of the law. Every member of the combine who was authorized by Drennan and Nash to carry a gun had it registered and had a gun permit.

“Sure,” Barney said, dropping the gun in his pocket.

The phone rang and Drennan went into the front room to answer it.

At that moment the plan Barney had been seeking for took shape in all its details.

His tentative idea had been to gun Drennan and let Johnny Nash take the blame. But now he realized that the jealousy motive would fit just as well if Drennan was framed for Nash’s murder. And he had just been handed the means to frame the kill that way.

In the front room he could hear Drennan talking on the phone. Quickly rounding to behind the bar, he placed a fresh glass on it, took out his handkerchief to avoid leaving fingerprints and poured Drennan’s drink from the old glass into the new. Three steps took him to the French doors. Easing one side open, he slipped outside and set the glass containing Drennan’s fingerprints on the grass to one side of the doorway.

He was back inside again, leaning against the bar, when Drennan returned.

“Johnny Nash, giving me mild hell for goofing off today,” Drennan said with a grin.

When Barney finished his second drink, he said, “I’d better run along, Mark. I’ve hardly seen Phyllis yet since I got back. Thanks for the drinks.”

Outside he slipped around the side of the house, carefully staying close to the building so that he couldn’t be seen through the French doors, and retrieved the highball glass, again using his hand kerchief.

At home he concealed the glass in the same place as the one containing Nash’s fingerprints. He was pleased to note that the glasses were identical in size and shape.

The following morning Barney dropped by police headquarters, handed over the Luger so that the record clerk could copy off the serial number and had the gun registered in Mark Drennan’s name. He also had the carrying permit changed to the new gun.

When he left headquarters he drove to a sporting goods store and bought a Borchardt-Luger exactly like the one he had just registered. When he got to the Drennan-Nash Realty Company, he delivered the second Luger to Mark Drennan. The one which was registered was locked in the glove compartment of his car.

He had to wait two more weeks before the precise set of circumstances necessary to carrying out his plan developed. Two factors were necessary: Johnny Nash had to be home alone and Mark Drennan must have no alibi.

Both circumstances developed on a Friday. Johnny Nash announced that his wife’s mother in Chicago had died, and that Nina had flown to Chicago that morning. She planned to be gone a week, Johnny said. Hardly fifteen minutes later Mark Drennan told Barney he intended to spend the weekend at his cabin on Mud Lake.

“Alone?” Barney asked.

“Sure. I always fish alone. Every once in a while I need the solitude. You have the phone number up there in case you have to get in touch with me, haven’t you?”

Barney nodded. “Yeah, I have it. When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

Things worked out even better than Barney could reasonably have expected. Saturday afternoon Phyllis announced that her mother was again ill and that she was spending the night with her. Barney didn’t figure he would need an alibi, but it was convenient not to have a witness who could testify that he was away from home at the time of the killing.

He said, “Okay, hon. I’m kind of bushed anyway. I’ll hit the sack early and get a decent night’s sleep for a change.”

The Nashes employed two servants, but neither lived in. To make sure they would be gone for the evening, he waited until ten p.m. before phoning the Nash home. Johnny Nash answered.

“You going to be home for a while?” Barney asked.

“I was planning to go to bed. Why?”

“A little business. I’ll stop over in about a half hour.”

“Okay,” Nash said. “I’ll wait up for you.”

Barney hung up and dialed station-to-station to Drennan’s Mud Lake cabin.

When Drennan’s voice said, “Hello,” Barney said, “I get you out of bed?”

“Oh, hello, Barney. Yeah, but I wasn’t asleep yet.”

“Anybody listening?”

“No. I’m all alone.” Barney’s sole motive in phoning was to make sure Drennan had no alibi witness, but he had to give some excuse for the call. He said, “Hank Brassard, who runs the book at Fourth and State has been holding out, I just found out. I planned to run over and lean on him a little, but I thought I’d better check first.”

“Couldn’t you have checked with Johnny?”

“He seems to be out.”

“Oh. Well, use your own judgment. You’re a big boy. You don’t have to check stuff like that with me.”

“Okay,” Barney said. “Hope you catch a fish.”

Carrying a briefcase, he arrived at the west-side mansion where Johnny Nash lived at ten thirty. Nash, wearing a robe and slippers, admitted him and led him into the huge front room.

“Drink?” he asked.

“No thanks,” Barney said. “Anybody here?”

When Nash shook his head, Barney opened the briefcase and took out the Luger, now equipped with a silencer. Johnny Nash’s eyes were just beginning to widen when the bullet crashed into his heart.

Without haste Barney detached the silencer, replaced it in the briefcase and wiped the gun clean. Dropping it on the floor, he lifted Nash’s body to a seated position on the sofa. Positioning a chair on the opposite side of a low cocktail table from the sofa, he wrapped his handkerchief around his hand and removed two highball glasses from the briefcase one at a time, setting them side-by-side on the cocktail table.

Going behind the bar, he carried a bottle of whisky and a seltzer siphon over to the cocktail table. After dribbling a little whisky into each glass, he squirted an ounce of seltzer on top of it. He carefully wiped off the bottles before replacing them where he had found them.

The glasses behind the bar were not the same type as the ones he had brought, he noted. It was a good thing he had come equipped with two, as different sized glasses might have struck the police as odd. He felt a touch of uneasiness that no other glasses on the backbar matched the ones on the cocktail table, then decided that probably no one would notice, since the two on the table matched.

He left the front-room lights on and opened the front window drapes before letting himself out. He drove directly home and phoned the police.

“I was just driving by a house when I heard a shot from inside it,” he said. “It’s at twelve twenty-four Urban Drive in the Chensworth district.”

“Who are you?”

“A neighbor from up the street.”

The murder occurred too late to make the Sunday morning papers, but it was on the air. The announcer said that as the result of an anonymous phone call reporting gunfire at Nash’s home, police had visited the place. When there was no answer to their ring, an officer had peered through a window into the lighted front room, had spotted Nash’s body and the police had then broken in.

Beyond these bare details, the police had as yet issued no statement, but the news commentator surmised that inasmuch as Johnny Nash had been a known racketeer, it had been a gang killing.