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

My host was a loose tube of bones in a red tank top and blue running shorts. And alligator shoes on his bare feet. He caught me looking at them and said, “I got an allergy to everything but lizard. You carrying?”

When I hesitated he showed me the muzzle of a nickel-plated .357 magnum under the magazine he had lying face down on his lap. I didn’t think he was the Ebony type. I took the Smith & Wesson out of its belt holster slowly and handed it to him butt first. His lip curled.

“Police Special. Who you, Dick Tracy? I got what you want here.” He laid my revolver on his side of the dash and snaked an arm over the back of the seat into the compartment behind. After some rummaging he came up with a chromed Colt Python as long as my forearm. “Man, you plug them with this mother, the lead goes through them, knocks down a light pole across the street.”

“I’ve got no beef with Detroit Edison.”

He dropped his baggy grin, put the big magnum back behind the seat and its little brother on the dash next to my .38, and held out his palm. I laid seventy-five dollars in it. He folded the bills and slid them under a clip on the sun visor. “You after hot iron.”

“Just its history.” I recited Blum’s list so far as I remembered it. “They came up gone from a house on Kendall a little over a week ago,” I added. “Unless someone’s hugging the ground they should be on the market by now. Some of those pieces are pretty rare. You’d know them.”

“Ain’t come my way. I can let you have a .45 auto Army, never issued. Two hunnert.”

“How many notches?”

“Man, this is a virgin piece. The barrel, anyway.”

“The guns,” I said. “You’d hear if they were available. It’s a lot of iron to hit the street all at one time.”

“When S & W talks, people listen. Only I guess it missed me.”

“Okay, hang your ears out. I’ve got another seventy-five says they’ll show up soon.” I gave him my card.

“Last week a fourteen-year-old kid give me that much for a Saturday night banger I don’t want to be in the same building with when it goes off. Listen, I can put you behind a Thompson Model 1921 for a thousand. The Gun That Won Chicago. Throw in a fifty-round drum.”

I looked back at him with my hand on the door handle. I’d clean forgotten that item on Blum’s list. “You’ve got a Thompson?”

His eyes hooded over. “Could be I know where one can be got.”

I peeled three fifties off the roll in my pocket and held them up.

“I trade you a thousand-dollar piece for a bill and a half? Get out of my face, turkey white meat.” He turned on the sound system. The pickup’s frame buzzed.

“Ooh, jive,” I said, turning it off. “You keep the gun. All I want is the seller’s name. There’s a murder involved.”

He hesitated. I skinned off another fifty. He put his fingers on them. I held on.

“I call you, man,” he said.

I tore the bills in two and gave him half. “You know the speech.”

“Ain’t no way to treat President Grant.” But he clipped the torn bills with the rest and gave me back my gun, tipping out the cartridges first. There’s no more trust in the world.

Shadows were lengthening downtown, cooling the pavement without actually lowering the temperature. I caught a sandwich and a cold beer at a counter and used the pay telephone to try the Birmingham number again. A husky female voice answered.

“May Shinstone?”

“Yes?”

I told her who I was and what I was after. There was a short silence before she said, “Leonard’s dead?”

I made a face at the snarl of penciled numbers on the wall next to the telephone. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shin-stone. I got so used to it I forgot everyone didn’t know.”

“Don’t apologize. It was just a surprise. It’s been two years since I’ve seen Leonard, and almost that long since I’ve thought about him. I don’t know how I can help you.”

“Just now I’m sweeping up whatever’s lying around. I’ll sort it out later. I need some stuff on his life before January 1934.”

“That isn’t a story for the telephone, Mr. Walker.”

There was something in her tone. I played around with it for a second, then poked it into a drawer. “If you have a few minutes this evening I’d like to come talk to you about it,” I said.

“How big is your car trunk?”

“Would you say that again, Mrs. Shinstone? We have a bad connection.”

“I’m giving up the house here and moving to an apartment in Royal Oak. I have one or two things left to move. If your trunk’s big enough I can dismiss the cab I have waiting.” She gave me her address.

I said, “I’ll put the spare tire in the back seat.”

I paused with my hand on the receiver, then unhooked it again and used another quarter to call my service. Lieutenant Alderdyce had tried to reach me and wanted me to call him back. I dialed his extension at Headquarters.

“I spoke to Mrs. Blum a little while ago,” he said. “You’re fired.”

“Funny, you don’t sound like her.”

“She’ll tell you the same thing. Blum’s death is starting not to look like suicide and that means you can go back to your bench and leave the field to the first string.”

“How much not like suicide is it starting to look?”

“Just for the hell of it we ran Blum’s prints. We got a positive.”

“He told me he’d never been printed.”

“He must’ve forgot,” Alderdyce said. “We didn’t mess with the FBI. They destroy their records once a subject turns seventy. We got a match in a box of stuff on its way to the incinerator because it was too old to bother feeding into the computer. There is no Leonard Blum. But Leo Goldblum got to know these halls during Prohibition, whenever the old racket squad found it prudent to round up the Purple Gang and ask questions.”

“Blum was a Purple?”

“Nice Jewish boys, those. When they weren’t gunning each other down and commuting to Chicago to pull off the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre for Capone they found time to ship bootleg hootch across the river from Canada. That was Goldblum’s specialty. He was arrested twice for transporting liquor from the Ecorse docks and drew a year’s probation in ’29 on a Sullivan rap. Had a revolver in his pocket.”

“Explains why he never registered his guns,” I said. Licenses aren’t issued to convicted felons. “That was a long time ago, John.”

“Yeah, well, there’s something else. Ever hear of Bloody July?”

“Sounds like the name of a punk rock group. No, wasn’t that when they killed Jerry Buckley?”

“The golden boy of radio. Changed his stand on the mayor’s recall on July 22, 1930, and a few hours later three Purples left him in a pool of blood in the lobby of the Hotel LaSalle. And during the first two weeks of the month the gang got frisky and put holes in ten of their mob playmates. It was a good month not to be a cop.”

“All this history is leading someplace, I guess.”

“Yeah. We got a lot of eager young uniforms here. One of them spent a couple of hours after his shift was over pawing through dusty records in the basement and matched the bullet that killed Blum with the ballistics report on the shooting of one Emmanuel Eckleberg, D.O.A. at St. Mary’s Hospital July 6,1930.”

“Yesterday was July sixth,” I said. “You’re telling me someone waited all these years to avenge Manny Whatsizname on the anniversary of his death with the same gun that was used to kill him?”

“Eckleberg. You want someone to tell you that, call Hollywood. I just read you what we’ve got. You’re walking, right?”

“Give me some time to square away a couple of things for my report.”

He might have said “Uh-oh.” I can’t be sure because I was hanging up. It was getting to be a hell of a case, all right.