Free But He Was Already Dead When I Got There by Barbara Paul Page B

on the floor above.
    Barney wasn’t in his room. How vexing ! Mrs. Polk thought. Just when she needed him the most!
    She searched the house quietly, not wanting to wake Miss Gretchen. She found the manservant in the kitchen, asleep on one of the breakfast nook benches—shameful! Mrs. Polk shook his shoulder, rather roughly. “Barney! Wake up!” she hissed. “Do you hear me, Barney? Wake up!”
    Bjarne Pedersen fought his way up out of a Valium-and-alcohol stupor. He was vaguely aware of Mrs. Polk’s high voice calling him from a long distance away. He felt hands tugging at him, forcing him into an upright position.
    Then the hands and the voice went away, and Bjarne’s head drooped forward on his chest. But not for long; after what seemed only a second or two the hands and the voice were back, and with them the smell of coffee. He managed to get one eye open enough to see Mrs. Polk’s anxious face peering into his.
    â€œDrink the coffee, Barney!” Mrs. Polk urged him. “Something terrible has happened and I need you!” When he made no move to take the cup, she held it up to his lips. “Hurry, Barney! There’s not much time! Miss Gretchen will be waking up any minute now!”
    A tea-drinker by preference, Bjarne had to down two cups of the noxious stuff before Mrs. Polk would tell him what the “terrible” thing was that had happened. And when she did tell him, it was terrible indeed. Now shocked fully awake, Bjarne lurched to his feet and stumbled after the housekeeper to the library.
    There it was—the thing he’d feared the most. Mr. Vincent lay sprawled on the floor, head bloodied and ugly, as dead as they come. All Bjarne’s fears about his future came rushing to the front, and he had to squeeze back the tears. When he could speak, he said only one word. “Police?”
    â€œI haven’t called them yet,” Mrs. Polk said tightly. “There’s something I want you to do first. It’s not decent to leave him there like that—contemptuous, somehow. He should be behind his desk, where he belongs. Pick him up, Barney.”
    A phrase from a thousand television shows floated into Bjarne’s head. “Isn’t that, uh, tampering with the evidence?”
    â€œI don’t care,” Mrs. Polk said rigidly. “I don’t want anyone to see him like that. And what difference could it make anyway? He’s just as dead either place.”
    Bjarne wasn’t up to arguing with her. Besides, in a way she was right; there was something obscene about leaving Mr. Vincent sprawled out like that. Bjarne found no pleasure in seeing a once-powerful man brought low. He stooped down and wrestled the dead man back into the wheelchair.
    Mrs. Polk gasped. “Look!” She pointed to the automatic pistol on the floor. “That must be the gun that killed him! It looks like Mr. Vincent’s gun, doesn’t it?”
    It did. But the wound on Mr. Vincent’s head didn’t look like a gunshot wound to Bjarne—not that he had all that much experience with bullets and the kinds of holes they made. “Better bring it along,” he told Mrs. Polk.
    Bjarne wheeled the body to behind the desk; when he stopped the chair, Mr. Vincent slumped forward across the desk top, his right arm extending stiffly out to the side. Mrs. Polk approached, gingerly carrying the automatic by the barrel between thumb and forefinger. She placed the gun on the desk top just a few inches beyond Mr. Vincent’s outstretched right hand.
    â€œYou left your fingerprints,” Bjarne said, and wiped the barrel clean with his handkerchief.
    Mrs. Polk sighed. “Now we’re ready to call the police,” she said.

5
    A good old house , Lieutenant Frederick Toomey thought. Well maintained, not cuted up by restorers and the like. Toomey puffed his way up the front steps. He was a shortish man who grew a little rounder every year;