Лиза Марклунд - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 1. Whole No. 833, January 2011

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.

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.”