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

“Could be the burglars overlooked it and he just didn’t tell you. And it wouldn’t be the first time a suicide took something he loved with him. Generally it’s the wife. You’re lucky, Mrs. Blum.”

“That he cared less for me than he did for his dog? I deserve that, I guess. Marrying an old man for his money gets boring. All those other men were just a diversion. I loved Leonard in my way.” She lined up her fingers primly on the purse in her lap. The nails were sharp and buffed to a high gloss, no polish. “He didn’t kill himself. Whoever killed him shot the dog first when it came at him.”

I offered her a cigarette from the deck. When she shook her head I lit one for myself and said, “I’ve got a question, but I don’t want one of those nails in my eye.”

“Insurance,” she said. “A hundred thousand dollars, and I’m the sole beneficiary. It’s worth more than twice the estate minus debts outstanding. And yes, if suicide is established as cause of death the policy is void. But that’s only part of why I’m here, though I admit it’s the biggest part. At the very least I owe it to Leonard to find out who murdered him.”

“Who do you suspect?”

“I can’t think of anyone. We seldom had visitors. He outlived most of his friends and the only contact he had with his business partners was over the telephone. He was in semi-retirement.”

She gave me the name of the firm and the partners’ names. I wrote them down. “What did your husband do before he went into construction?” I asked.

“He would never tell me. Whenever I asked he’d say it didn’t matter, those were dead days. I gather it had something to do with the river but he never struck me as the sailor type. May could tell you. His first wife. May Shinstone, her name is now. She lives in Birmingham.”

I wrote that down too. “I’ll look into it, Mrs. Blum. Until the cops stop thinking suicide, anyway. They frown on competition. Meanwhile I think you should find another place to stay.”

“Why?”

“Because if Mr. Blum was murdered odds are it was by the same person who stole his guns, and that person sneezes at locks. If you get killed I won’t have anyone to report to.”

After a moment she nodded. “I have a place to stay.”

I believed her

After she left, poorer by a check in the amount of my standard three-day retainer, I called Ben Perkins. We swapped insults and then I drew on a favor he owed me and got the number of a gun broker downtown, one who wasn’t listed under Guns in the Yellow Pages. Breaking the connection I could almost smell one of the cork-tipped ropes Perkins smoked. When he lit one up in your presence you wouldn’t have to see him pull it out of his boot to know where he kept them.

Eleven rings in, a voice with a Mississippi twang came on and recited the number I had just dialed.

“I’m a P.I. named Walker,” I said. “Ben Perkins gave me your number.”

He got my number and said he’d call back. We hung up.

Three minutes later the telephone rang. It was Mississippi. “Okay, Perk says you’re cool. What?”

“I need a line on some hot guns,” I said.

“Nix, not over the squawker. What’s the tag?”

“Fifty, if you’ve got what I want.”

“Man, I keep a roll of fifties in the crapper. Case I run out of Charmin, you know? A hunnert up front. No refunds.”

“Sixty-five. Fifty up front. Nothing if I don’t come away happy.”

“Seventy-five and no guarantees. Phone’s gettin’ heavy, man.”

I said okay. We compared meeting places, settling finally on a city parking lot on West Lafayette at six o’clock.

My next call was to Leonard Blum’s construction firm, where a junior partner referred me to Ed Klagan at a building site on Third. Klagan’s was one of the names Andrea Blum had given me. I asked for the number at the building site.

“There aren’t any phones on the twenty-first floor, mister,” the junior partner told me.

An M. Shinstone was listed in Birmingham. I tried the number and cradled the receiver after twenty rings. It was getting slippery. I got up, peeling my shirt away from my back, stood in front of the clanking fan for a minute, then hooked up my hat and jacket. The thermometer at the bank where I cashed Mrs. Blum’s check read eighty-seven, which was as cool as it had been all day.

It was hotter on Third Street. The naked girders straining up from the construction site were losing their vertical hold in the smog and twisting heat waves, and the security guard at the opening in the board fence had sweated through his light blue uniform shirt. I shouted my business over the clattering pneumatic hammers. At length he signaled to a broad party in a hardhat and necktie who was squinting at a blueprint in the hands of a glistening, half-naked black man. The broad party came over, getting bigger as he approached until I was looking up at the three chins folded over his Adam’s apple. The guard left us.

“Mr. Klagan?”

“Yeah. You from the city?”

“The country, originally.” I showed him my I.D. “Andrea Blum hired me to look into her husband’s death.”

“I heard he croaked himself.”

“That’s what I’m being paid to find out. What was his interest in the construction firm?”

“Strictly financial. Pumped most of his profits back into the business and arranged an occasional loan when we were on the shorts, which wasn’t often. He put together a good organization. Look, I got to get back up top. The higher these guys go the slower they work. And the foreman’s a drunk.”

“Why don’t you fire him?”

He uncovered tobacco-stained teeth in a sour grin. “Local 226. Socialism’s got us by the uppers, brother.”

“One more question. Blum’s life before he got into construction is starting to look like a mystery. I thought you could clear it up.”

“Not me. My old man might. They started the firm together.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Mount Elliott. But you better bring a shovel.”

“I was afraid it’d be something like that,” I said.

“All I know is Blum came up to the old man in January of ’34 with a roll of greenbacks the size of a coconut and told him he looked too smart to die a foreman. He had the bucks, Pop had the know-how.”

He showed me an acre of palm and moved off. I smoked a cigarette to soothe a throat made raw by yelling over the noise and watched him mount the hydraulic platform that would take him up to the unfinished twenty-first floor. Thinking.

The parking lot on West Lafayette was in the shadow of the News building; stepping into it from the heat of the street was like falling headfirst into a pond. I stood in the aisle, mopping the back of my neck with my soaked handkerchief and looking around. My watch read six on the nose.

A horn beeped. I looked in that direction. The only vehicle occupied was a ten-year-old Dodge club cab pickup parked next to the building with Michigan cancer eating through its rear fenders and a dull green finish worn down to brown primer in leprous patches. I went over there.

The window on the driver’s side came down, leaking loud music and framing a narrow, heavy-lidded black face in the opening. “You a P.I. named Walker?”

I said I was. He reached across the interior and popped up the lock button on the passenger’s side. The cab was paved with maroon plush inside and had an instrument-studded leather dash and speakers for a sound system that had cost at least as much as the book on the pickup, pouring out drums and electric guitars at brain-throbbing volume. He’d had the air conditioner on recently and it was ten degrees cooler inside.

My eardrums had been raped enough for one day. I shouted to him to turn down the roar. He twirled a knob and then it was just us and the engine ticking as it cooled.