"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 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.
"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.