“Okay,” Paddy said. “Let’s talk about what you suspect. Stop me if I wander too far from the path. You think this Skidmore got in touch with the author of the magazine article and told him what had happened to the Brownings. Then, either the professor or Skidmore himself got the word out to the wrong party. That party is now collecting the guns by whatever means necessary. We can assume it isn’t anyone official, since Skidmore wanted to give the Austrians his gun. So they wouldn’t have had to kidnap him to get it.”
I said, “Whoever snatched Skidmore got more than his gun. He got Wilson and Reid’s names and addresses.”
“And my address,” Wilfong said. “I know that for a certainty.”
Paddy sat up. “You’ve been visited by a man with a German accent?”
“Almost. A kraut came by my place yesterday. I’ve been staying away from home for ... business reasons, so I missed him. But a neighbor passed the word. Now I’ve got the willies like I haven’t had them since I handed in my uniform.”
I pointed in the general direction of the pocket that held the gun. “So leave that out on your front step tonight with the empty milk bottles. When Herr X gets his mitts on it, he’ll leave you alone.”
“Maybe,” Wilfong said, “if he isn’t punishing us for stealing them in the first place. But it isn’t as simple as that.”
“It never is when money’s involved,” Paddy observed.
I hadn’t heard much talk of money, so I thought the great man was straying from that path he’d just spoken of. Turned out, I was lagging behind.
“You guessed it,” Wilfong said. “I’m hard up right now and no prospects on the horizon. Worse than that, I owe some serious money to an unpleasant guy.”
“Name of?” Paddy asked.
“Tip Fasano.”
“We know the gentleman, don’t we, Scotty.”
Did we ever. Fasano was middle management in the local gambling syndicate and an all-around tough egg.
I said, “Fasano’s the business that’s keeping you away from home?”
“Yes. He’s got somebody watching my place. If there’s any money to be made from this gun, I’ve got to make it and quick. Otherwise, it’ll be a tossup who punches my ticket, the mystery man or Fasano. If I can set up a deal, I want Elliott here to tag along when I make the exchange. He can carry my gun and two or three of his own.”
“You spoke of percentages earlier,” Paddy said. “What’s ours?”
“Ten percent of my take.”
Paddy haggled it up to twelve, and they shook on it.
---3---
Wilfong vetoed Paddy’s suggestion that we hold on to the Browning for him—and did it emphatically.
“Hell no. If this collector guy gets the drop on me, I want the dingus where I can hand it over before he asks twice. If it’s a choice between my neck and paying off Fasano, I’ll take my neck. Besides, the thing still shoots. That’s an argument that works with mystery men and bookies.”
He also turned down—less emphatically—my offer to watch his back until he worked out his deal.
“No offense, Elliott, but you were in the field artillery. You’re fine for a showdown, but not for moving quiet and quick, which is what I have to do now.”
I could have pointed out that Skidmore, Wilson, and Reid had all been infantrymen, for all the good that had done them. But I didn’t. Our new client looked wrung-out already.
Paddy asked, “How do you intend to make contact?”
“I dunno yet. Maybe I’ll stick a note in one of my empty milk bottles.” He stood up.
Paddy said, “While you’re giving my wife a number where you can be reached, I’ll have a word with Scotty. Then he’ll see you to your car.”
As soon as Wilfong cleared the office, Paddy went back to what he’d been doing when Peggy ushered us in, which was cleaning a spot on his necktie. His taste in ties was flamboyant, to put it politely. Today’s, which featured a peacock feather design in orange and blue, was slightly gaudier than the Alcoa fir tree in the lobby.
“What did you think of Wally’s story?” he asked as he worked.
“It held my interest.”
“But then, you’re a sucker for the movies. Still, it could be a nice Christmas bonus for us. Which makes me wonder how we can improve our chances of collecting, short of following Wally around. I think we need to get a line on this Austrian gun collector, whoever he is. Invisible men give me the heebie-jeebies. Any thoughts on that?”
“Pat Skidmore of Frankfort, Kentucky, would be the guy to ask, if he hadn’t gotten so invisible himself. That leaves the author of the magazine article about the guns, I guess. Like you told Wally, this professor might have tipped the wrong party. Or he could have helped Skidmore do it himself.”
Paddy checked his tie under the desk lamp and grunted contentedly. “Sounds like you should ask the professor. If you can tear yourself away from the tinsel.”
Wilfong’s car was a 1950 Mercury Monterey with 1949 whitewalls. Maybe ’48s. When we reached it, I asked him which magazine had run the article on the Brownings.
“I dunno,” he said, his head on a swivel now that we were out in the open. “The only magazines I read are the ones my dentist carries. If I know Pat, it was Field and Stream. Wish me luck, buddy.”
I did. Then I went inside and used Peggy’s phone to call my screenwriter wife, Ella. At one time, she’d worked publicity for Warner Brothers. I asked her if she still had any contacts in their research department.
“One, Scotty, but I use her for my script work. I thought you detectives had your own sources. Doesn’t Paddy pay off any librarians?”
“Only to forget his late fees.” I gave her a one-reel version of Wilfong’s tale. She was impressed.
“He could probably make more selling the movie rights than the gun. You want the magazine that published the article? I’ll see what I can do.”
That gave me some time to kill. I unparked my car, a copper brown ’53 Packard Clipper whose dour grillwork was heavy in the lower lip, which is to say, bumper. The Clipper and I moseyed over to the main library building. I didn’t bother with their indexes of periodical literature, since they weren’t fresh enough to contain a reference to an article that must have appeared in the last month or so. I did flip through the magazines they had out, which was a small boatload. None contained any mention of the Brownings.
After that, I moved on to a little job we were doing for the character actress Marjorie Main. That occupied me until I knocked off at dinnertime, an early dinnertime. Ella and I had two kids shy of school age, a boy for her and a girl for me, as the song lyric says, and I was anxious to see them. The run-up to Christmas had been a lot of fun so far.
Plus, I had homework to do, though I didn’t know that until I got there. Then Ella, a petite, seasonal blonde who was leaning more toward brunette as the days got shorter, handed me a copy of The Gentlemen’s Quarterly with a September publication date.
“Warner Brothers came through for you,” she said and kissed me.
“They owed me,” I replied. “I had a lousy seat for Mildred Pierce.”
After we were all fed and the kids were in bed, Ella settled in with a novel she’d been asked to adapt, a racy one with some major-league décolletage on its cover. I opened The Gentlemen’s Quarterly.
Wally Wilfong had joked about the magazines he read in his dentist’s office. The Gentlemen’s Quarterly was more like something you’d find in a machine shop. There was a redhead in shorts fly-fishing on the cover and, beneath her, a teaser for the article I was after: “Four Guns That Changed the World.”
That title was a little deceptive, I learned as I read, since on July 28, 1914, the day the archduke and his wife were killed, only one of the Brownings had actually gone off. The article contained a lot of background on Franz Ferdinand, one unpopular heir to the throne, and a recap of the slipshod investigation conducted afterward. I’d already guessed that it had been a rush job since they hadn’t bothered
to tag the actual murder weapon.
Wilfong or his source, the missing Skidmore, had gotten one detail wrong and omitted another. The serial numbers of the four handguns weren’t consecutive, only very nearly so. And the article noted in passing that there were other theories about the guns’ disappearance, though its author, Paul Carey, who was identified as a professor at Steed College in Johnson City, Tennessee, didn’t say what they were. It was easy to understand why Wilfong hadn’t mentioned competing theories. He knew firsthand, after all, that the light-fingered G.I. explanation was correct.
I sat for a while, smoking a Lucky Strike and wondering how Professor Carey had felt when Pat Skidmore called about the Brownings. Then I wondered whether Carey might have an Austrian accent. Then I turned on the television and watched an old chestnut, Christmas in Connecticut, until Ella tired of only reading about sex.
---4---
I arrived at the offices of Hollywood Security around ten the next morning, having stopped on my way in to wrap up the Great Marjorie Main Caper of 1954. Inside, Peggy was seated at her desk, giving the fisheye to a large citizen who was lounging behind a racing form.
“Paddy just asked for you,” she said to me.
The big racing fan lowered his paper and focused his tiny eyes on the intercom next to Peggy’s elbow, a puzzled expression on his face. I guessed from that that Paddy hadn’t requested my presence via the little black box. I was less puzzled than our guest, being used to the Maguires’ telepathy act. Still, I verified the order.
“He wants me right now?”
“Five minutes ago,” Peggy said.
The linebacker made a move as though to block me. Then my “I beg your pardon” flummoxed him all over again. I stepped around him and opened Paddy’s double doors.
I got flummoxed then myself. My boss, in shirtsleeves, was standing next to his desk facing two goons bigger than the one I now had behind me. They’d both glanced my way, though neither was giving me his full attention.
“Scotty!” Paddy boomed. “The very man I wanted to see. Show these gentlemen the trick you do with the gun.”
Just showing them a gun would have been a trick right then, as I wasn’t carrying one. But I did my best to oblige.
“Nothing up my sleeve,” I said, raising my left arm and tugging on my suit coat to display more shirt cuff.
That got them interested. When they were good and turned my way, Paddy grabbed them by their collars and knocked their heads together. He held on to one with his left hand and tossed the other at me.
He tossed him so hard that the guy was still dancing like Ray Bolger when he arrived at my end of the room. I could have tagged him while he was off balance, only his friend with the racing form grabbed me from behind. Paddy’s special delivery hit me square in the chest, and the three of us tumbled out through the office door, landing in a heap in front of Peggy’s desk.
The next thing I saw was Peggy coming over that desk—all eighty pounds of her—yelling, “Hey, Rube!”
That was a universal distress call among the lower strata of show business, and it brought two Hollywood Security operatives charging out of our back room: Lange, our resident lion tamer, and our current rookie, whose name was Mahoney. Or maybe they were drawn by the sound of my playmates and me rolling into the Christmas tree.
After that, as battlefield reports sometimes put it, the fighting became general. When it was over, our side held the field. It was very nearly a Pyrrhic victory, there being sufficient bloody noses, split lips, and budding black eyes to go around. And our aluminum tree wasn’t even up to cleaning drains now.
Only Paddy seemed to have come through unscathed. He emerged from his office smoking a new cigar and adjusting his coat and hat. I thought he might have talked his way through the late unpleasantness until I went to collect our third guest and found him slumped against Paddy’s desk, asking what round it was.
When he and I rejoined the others, Paddy left off examining Peggy’s bleeding lip. He told her to avoid mistletoe and turned to Lange and me.
“We’re taking these gentlemen back to their employer, Tip Fasano. Dress for the occasion. I’d suggest forty-five caliber.”
“Call the police,” Peggy told him.
“There’s no police can get us out of this one,” Paddy said, and his sober tone quieted her. “There is a call you can make for me, though,” he added. “Try that emergency number Wally Wilfong left. Set up a meeting.”
That reminded me of a little telephone business of my own. While Peggy daubed at a cut above my eyebrow with a handkerchief, I told her all I knew about Professor Carey and asked her to set up a call with him for later that day.
---5---
Once upon a time, Tip Fasano had operated out of a barbershop on Figueroa, where he’d played at cutting hair himself. Nowadays, he played at being a business executive, using a swanky office in the Valley, near Universal Studios. We caravanned out there, Paddy, Lange, and the three wise men riding in style in our new pals’ black Cadillac Fleetwood, and me tagging along behind in my Packard.
Fasano’s office was the headquarters of his legitimate business, which sold supplies to barbershops and beauty salons, so we didn’t have to shoot our way in. Or even state our business. The girl receptionist took one look at our parade of walking wounded and waved us right through.
The gambler’s office dwarfed Paddy’s to about the same degree that the Fleetwood had shaded my Clipper. The carpet was royal blue, and the walls it ran between were the same color in a lighter shade. All around were pedestals holding bits of broken statuary that looked like they’d just been dug up in Pompeii. The owner of the hardware sat behind a big block of mahogany that had brushed chrome inlays running around it like the straps on a steamer trunk.
Fasano wasn’t what you’d call handsome—his nose had been stepped on at some point in his career—but in the seven or eight years I’d known him, he hadn’t aged a bit. His hair was still dark and wavy, the skin well tanned, the whites of his eyes as clear as a baby’s. Those whites were visible briefly as we trooped in. Then Fasano went back to his trademark slit-eyed stare, which had chilled the blood of many a brave man, mine included.
Paddy seemed unaffected. “Salutations of the season, Tip,” he said. “Your elves got lost this morning and ended up in my office. I thought I’d bring them back before they got rolled by a crippled newsie.”
“Thanks,” Fasano said. “Talk to them any first?”
“As a matter of fact. They had some crazy notion that we’d taken over Wally Wilfong’s debts. I had to disabuse them.”
“They look disabused,” Fasano observed.
I found I was feeling sorry for the three torpedoes, even the one who’d poked me in the eye. The next page of dialogue cured me of that.
“Word on the street is you’re holding something valuable for Wilfong,” Fasano said. “Word also is that Wilfong is among the missing. So I think it would be better if I hold the pearl or painting or whatever the hell you’ve got, as security for Wilfong’s marker.”
Paddy said, “The only thing Wilfong left was a bad taste in my mouth. He had an old gun he claimed he could sell for a pile, but he didn’t trust us with it.”
“A gun worth real money? What, the one that plugged Lincoln?”
“Close,” Paddy said. “Wilfong also has an interested buyer. We’re to provide a bodyguard for the transfer. That’s the limit of our involvement.”
“Guess it’s my turn to do the disabusing, Maguire. You’re involved right up to your top chin. You might have roughed up my boys. You might even have the drop on me now. But the winning hand you don’t have. My organization’s a lot bigger than yours. And we know where to find you, day or night.”
He singled me out for an especially knife-edged stare. “Still married, Hollywood? Any kiddies yet?”
Paddy stepped between me and the desk, and Fasano chuckled.
“That’s right. Don’t dig a deeper hole for yourselves. I’m willing to
overlook this morning’s carrying-on because you guys did me a favor once. But I’m not writing off what Wilfong owes me. That’s business. If I let myself be taken by a small-timer like that, the big fish will be spitting hooks all over town.
“So here’s the deal. You hand over this golden gun or you hand over the ten grand I’m owed or you hand over Wilfong. I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Now catch a breeze.”
Instead of leaving, Paddy stepped up to the desk, leaning over it. It didn’t look so big then. “Just so you know, Tip,” he said, “if all our chips are on the table, yours are, too. I’d play this hand real careful if I were you.”
“Good advice any time,” Fasano said. “Here’s a Christmas present in return. Wilfong doesn’t have to be breathing when you hand him over.”
---6---
Fasano’s receptionist stopped us on our way out. She had Peggy holding on the line for Paddy. During the call, he did more listening than talking and seemed more concerned with straightening the bow on the pot that held the receptionist’s poinsettia than with anything his wife was saying. We were almost to the Clipper before he let the other shoe drop.
“That number Wilfong left belonged to the girlfriend he’s been staying with. Seems they were visited last night by a guy with a German accent. Wilfong left with the caller and hasn’t come back. Drive us over to Sunset and Western, Scotty, and let’s hear the story firsthand.”
The girlfriend’s name was Dolly Palmer, and the front parlor of her third-floor walk-up had just enough room for her, the three of us, and a flocked tree. Palmer had hair bleached like motel sheets and a figure that was one bonbon away from overripe. Her face was kind, though, and might have been pretty if she hadn’t been crying.
“I knew something was wrong with Wally,” she told us. “He hasn’t been himself for a couple of weeks. Can I get you some coffee? An eggnog?”
“Maybe later,” Paddy said.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 3
