"That's a good report, mister," the corporal approved. "You stick around;
we'll be right along. You haven't touched anything, have you?"
"Not around the body. How long will it take you to get here?"
"About ten minutes. I'll tell Sergeant McKenna right away."
Rand hung up and glanced at his watch. Ten twenty-two; he gave himself
seven minutes and went around the room rapidly, looking only at pistols.
He saw nothing that might have come from the Fleming collection. Finally,
he opened the front door, just as a white State Police car was pulling up
at the end of the walk.
Sergeant Ignatius Loyola McKenna--customarily known and addressed as
Mick--piled out almost before it had stopped. The driver, a stocky,
blue-eyed Finn with a corporal's chevrons, followed him, and two privates
got out from behind, dragging after them a box about the size and shape
of an Army footlocker. McKenna was halfway up the drive before he
recognized Rand. Then he stopped short.
"Well, Jaysus-me-beads!" He turned suddenly to the corporal. "My God,
Aarvo; you said his name was Grant!"
"That's what I thought he said." Rand recognized the singsong accent he
had heard on the phone. "You know him?"
"Know him?" McKenna stepped aside quickly, to avoid being overrun by the
two privates with the equipment-box. He sighed resignedly. "Aarvo, this
is the notorious Jefferson Davis Rand. Tri-State Agency, in New Belfast."
He gestured toward the Finn. "Corporal Aarvo Kavaalen," he introduced.
"And Privates Skinner and Jameson.... Well, where is it?"
"Right inside." Rand stepped backward, gesturing them in. "Careful; it's
just inside the doorway."
McKenna and the corporal entered; the two privates set down their box
outside and followed. They all drew up in a semicircle around the late
Arnold Rivers and looked at him critically.
"Jesus!" Kavaalen pronounced the _J_-sound as though it were _Zh_; he
gave all his syllables an equally-accented intonation. "Say, somebody
gave him a good job!"
"Somebody's been seeing too many war-movies." McKenna got a cigarette out
of his tunic pocket and lit it in Rand's pipe-bowl. "Want to confess now,
or do you insist on a third degree with all the trimmings?"
Kavaalen looked wide-eyed at Rand, then at McKenna, and then back at
Rand. Rand laughed.
"Now, Mick!" he reproved. "You know I never kill anybody unless I have
a clear case of self-defense, and a flock of witnesses to back it up."
McKenna nodded and reassured his corporal. "That's right, Aarvo; when
Jeff Rand kills anybody, it's always self-defense. And he doesn't
generally make messes like this." He gave the body a brief scrutiny, then
turned to Rand. "You looked around, of course; what do you make of it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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