Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

I got out one of my cards, scribbled a number on the back, and gave it to him. “Call this guy in Belleville. His name’s Ben Perkins. He’s a P.I. who doubles in apartment maintenance, which as lines of work go aren’t so very different from each other. He’s a cowboy, but a good one, which is what this job screams for. But I can’t guarantee he’ll touch it.”

“I don’t know.” He was looking at the number. “Weintraub recommended you as the original clam.”

“This guy makes me look like a set of those wind-up dime store dentures.” I said so long again and let myself out, feeling cleansed. And as broke as a motel room chair.

The Iroquois Heights business had to do with a wandering wife I never found. What I did find was a deputy city prosecutor living off the town madam and a broken head courtesy of a local beat officer’s monkey stick. The assistant chief is an old acquaintance. A week after the Kendall visit I was nursing my headache with aspirin and the office fan with pliers and a paperclip when Lieutenant John Alderdyce of Detroit Homicide walked in. His black face glistened and he was breathing like a rhinoceros from the three-story climb. But his shirt and Chinese silk sport coat looked fresh. He saw what I was doing and said, “Why don’t you pop for air conditioning?”

“Every time I get a fund started I get hungry.” I laid down my tools and plugged in the fan. The blades turned, wrinkling the thick air. I lifted my eyebrows at John.

He drew a small white rectangle out of an inside pocket and laid it on my desk, lining up the edges with those of the blotter. It was one of my business cards. “These things turn up in the damnedest places,” he said. “So do you.”

“I’m paid to. The cards I raise as best I can and then send them out into the world. I can’t answer for where they wind up.”

He flipped it over with a finger. A telephone number was written on the back in a scrawl I recognized. I sighed and sat back.

“What’d he do,” I asked, “hang himself or stick his tongue in a light socket?”

He jumped on it with both feet. “What makes it suicide?”

“Blum’s wife was cheating on him, he said, and he lost his only other interest to a B-and-E. He as much as told me he’d take the back way out if that gun collection didn’t find its way home.”

“Maybe you better throw me the rest of it,” he said.

I did, starting with my introduction to Blum’s dog Hector and finishing with my exit from the house on Kendall. Alderdyce listened with his head down, stroking an unlit cigarette. We were coming up on the fifth anniversary of his first attempt to quit them.

“So you walked away from it,” he said when I was through. “I never knew you to turn your back on a job just because it got too illegal.”

I said, “We’ll pass over that on account of we’re so close. I didn’t like Blum. When he couldn’t bully me he tried wheedling and he caught me in the wrong mood. Was it suicide?”

“It plays that way. Wife came home from an overnight stay with one of her little bridge partners and found him shot through the heart with a .38 automatic. The gun was in his right hand and the paraffin test came up positive. Powder burns, the works. No note, but you can’t have music too.”

“Thirty-eight auto. You mean one of those Navy Supers?”

“Colt Sporting Pistol, Model 1902. It was discontinued in 1928. A real museum piece. The same gun was on a list we found in a desk drawer.”

“I know the list. He said everything on it had been stolen.”

“He lied. We turned your card in a wastebasket this morning. We tried to reach you.”

“I was up in the Heights getting a lesson in police work, Warner Brothers style. Check out the wife’s alibi?”

He nodded, rolling the cold cigarette along his lower lip. “A pro bowler in Harper Woods. You’d like him. Muscles on his elbows and if his I.Q. tests out at half his handicap you can have my pension. Blum started getting cold around midnight and she was at Fred Flintstone’s place from ten o’clock on. She married Blum four years ago, about the time he turned seventy-five and turned over the operation of his construction firm to his partners. We’re still digging.”

“He told me he used to be in shipping.” Alderdyce shrugged. I said, “I guess you called Perkins.”

“The number you wrote on the card. Blum didn’t score any more points with him than he did with you. I’m glad we never met. I wouldn’t want to know someone who wasn’t good enough for two P.I.’s with cardboard in their shoes.”

I lit a Winston, just to make him squirm. “What I most enjoy paying rent on this office for is to provide a forum for overdressed fuzz to run down my profession. Self-snuffings don’t usually make you this pleasant. Or is it the heat?”

“It’s the heat,” he said. “It’s also this particular self-snuffing. Maybe I’m burning out. They say one good way of telling is when you find yourself wanting to stand the stiff on its feet and ask it a question.”

“As for instance?”

“As for instance, ‘Mr. Blum, would you please tell me why before you shot yourself you decided to shoot your dog?’ ”

I said nothing. After a little while he broke his cigarette in two and flipped the pieces at my wastebasket and went out.

I finished my smoke, then broke out my Polk Administration Underwood and cranked a sheet into it and waited for my report to the husband of the runaway wife to fall into order. When I got tired of that I tore out the blank sheet and crumpled it and bonged it into the basket. My head said it was time to go home.

“Mr. Walker?”

I was busy locking the door to my private office. When I turned I was looking at a slender brunette of about thirty standing in the waiting room with the hall door closing on its pneumatic tube behind her. She wore her hair short and combed almost over one eye and had on a tailored black jacket that ran out of material just below her elbows, on top of a ruffled white blouse and a tight skirt to match the jacket. Black purse and shoes. The weather was too hot for black, but she made it look cool.

I got my hat off the back of my head and said I was Walker.

She said, “I’m Andrea Blum. Leonard Blum is — was my husband.”

I unlocked my door again and held it for her. Inside the brain room she glanced casually at the butterfly wallpaper and framed Casablanca poster and accepted the chair I held for her, the one whose legs were all the same length. I sat down behind the desk and said I was sorry about Mr. Blum.

She smiled slightly. “I won’t pretend I’m destroyed. It’s no secret our marriage was a joke. But you get used to having someone around, and then when he’s not—” She spread her hands. “Leonard told me he tried to hire you to trace his stolen guns and that you turned him down.”

“I’d have had to tell the police that a cache of unregistered firearms was loose,” I said. “Three out of five people in this town carry guns. They’d like to keep the other two virgin.”

“Don’t explain. I was just as happy they were taken. Guns frighten me. Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. The police think Leonard’s death was self-inflicted.”

“You don’t.”

She moved her head. The sunlight caught a reddish thread in her black hair. “The burglary infuriated him. After that other detective refused to take the case he was determined to find one that would. He was ready to do it himself if it came to that. Do people shoot themselves when they’re angry, Mr. Walker?”

“Never having shot myself I can’t say.”

“And he wouldn’t have killed Hector,” she went on. “He loved that dog. Besides, where could he have gotten the gun? It was one of those missing.”