Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who liked to Quote Kipling

I would have gone right up to the third floor if I hadn’t noticed an unlocked window on the second floor. It was too appealing an invitation to resist. I let myself in, walked through a maze of baled hides, climbed a flight of stairs, and emerged in the establishment of Arvin Tannenbaum and Sons.

Not too many minutes later I left the way I’d come, walking down a flight, threading my way between the bales of tanned hides, clambering down the fire escape and hopping nimbly to earth from my perch on the garbage can. I stopped in the coffee-shop kitchen to help myself to a Hostess Twinkie. I can’t say it was just what I wanted, but I was starving and it was better than nothing.

I didn’t bother picking the lock shut after me. The springlock would have to do. But I did draw the gates shut and fasten the padlock.

Before returning to the Pontiac, I walked over to say goodbye to the dog. I waved at him and he glowered at me. From the look he gave me I could have sworn he knew what I was up to.

It was Mrs. Kirschmann who answered the phone. When I asked to speak to her husband she said “Just a minute,” then yelled out his name without bothering to cover the mouthpiece. When Ray came on the line I told him my ear was ringing.

“So?”

“Your wife yelled in it.”

“I can’t help that, Bernie,” he said. “You all right otherwise?”

“I guess so. What did you find out?”

“I got a make on the murder weapon. Porlock was shot with a Devil Dog.”

“I just ate one of those.”

“Huh?”

“Actually, what I ate was a Twinkie, but isn’t a Devil Dog about the same thing?”

He sighed. “A Devil Dog’s an automatic pistol made by Marley. Their whole line’s dogs of one kind or another. The Devil Dog’s a.32 automatic. The Whippet’s a.25 automatic, the Mastiff’s a.38 revolver, and they make a.44 Magnum that I can’t remember what it’s called. It oughta be something like an Irish Wolfhound or a Great Dane because of the size, but that’s no kind of name for a gun.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of dogs in this,” I said. “Did you happen to notice? Between the Junkyard Dog defense and the Marley Devil Dog and the Doberman in the hallway-”

“What Doberman in the hallway? What hallway?”

“Forget it. It’s a.32 automatic?”

“Right. Registration check went nowhere. Coulda been Porlock’s gun, could be the killer brought it with him.”

“What did it look like?”

“The gun? I didn’t see it, Bern. I made a call, I didn’t go down to the property office and start eyeballin’ the exhibits. I seen Devil Dogs before. It’s an automatic, so it’s a flat gun, not too large, takes a five-shot clip. The ones I’ve seen were blued steel, though you could probably get it in any kind of finish, nickel-plated or pearl grips, anything you wanted to pay for.”

I closed my eyes, trying to picture the gun I’d found in my hand. Blued steel, yes. That sounded right.

“Not a big gun, Bern. Two-inch barrel. Not much of a kick when you fire it.”

“Unless that’s how you get your kicks.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” I frowned. It had seemed big, compared to the little nickel-plated item I’d seen in the Sikh’s enormous hand.

Which reminded me.

“Francis Rockland,” I said. “The cop who was wounded outside my bookshop. What gun was he shot with? Did you find that out?”

“You still say you weren’t there, huh?”

“Dammit, Ray-”

“Okay, okay. Well, he wasn’t shot with the Marley Devil Dog, Bern, because the killer left it on the floor of the Porlock apartment. Is that what you were gettin’ at?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh. You had me goin’ for a minute there. Rockland was shot-well, it’s hard to say what he was shot with.”

“No slug recovered?”

“Right. The bullet fragmented.”

“There must have been fragments to recover.”

He cleared his throat. “Now I’ll deny I said this,” he said, “but from what I heard, and nobody exactly spelled it out for me, but puttin’ two and two together-”

“ Rockland shot himself.”

“That’s how it shapes up to me, Bern. He’s a young fellow, you know, and bein’ nervous and all…”

“How bad were his injuries?”

“Well, it seems he lost a toe. Not one of the important ones.”

I thought of Parker, going around breaking important bones. Which toes, I wondered, were the important ones?

“What did you find out about Rockland?”

“Well, I asked around, Bern. The word I get is he’s young all right, which we already knew, but he’s also the kind of guy who can listen to reason.”

“How do you translate that?”

“I translate it Money Talks.”

“There’s not enough money in this one to make much noise,” I said. “Unless he’ll operate on credit.”

“You’re askin’ a lot, Bern. The poor kid lost a toe.”

“He shot it off himself, Ray.”

“A toe’s a toe.”

“You just said it wasn’t an important one.”

“Even so-”

“Would he settle for future payment if he got a piece of the bust? If he’s the ambitious kid you say he is, he’d be crazy not to.”

“You got a point.”

I had more than a point. I had a whole bunch of things to tell him, some of which provoked argument, some of which did not. At the end I told him to take it easy and he told me to take care.

It sounded like good advice for both of us.

The owner of Milo Arms, Inc., had a commendable sense of humor. His Yellow Pages ad showed the company trademark, the Venus de Milo’s limbless torso with a holster on her hip. Who could resist?

I make it a point to stay out of gun shops, but one thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t generally notice them. They’re almost invariably located one flight above street level. I guess they’re not that keen on the drop-in trade and the impulse shoppers.

Milo Arms didn’t break the rule. They had the second floor of a weary red brick building on Canal between Greene and Mercer. The shop on the ground floor sold plumbing supplies and the upper floors bad been carved into residential units. I was loitering in the vestibule, reading names on doorbells, when a young couple left the building, the smell of an illicit herb trailing after them. The girl giggled infectiously while her escort held the door for me.

The gun-shop door was a solid wooden one with the torso-cum-holster motif repeated, along with an extensive list of the death-dealing items on sale within. There was the usual run of locks, plus a padlock on the outside.

I gave a knock and was reassured to hear neither a human response nor the guttural greeting of an attack dog. Just blessed silence. I got right to work.

The locks weren’t much trouble. The padlock had a combination dial that looked like an interesting challenge, and if I hadn’t been out in public view and urgently pressed for time, I might have sandpapered my fingertips and tried out my Jimmy Valentine impression. Instead I tried my hacksaw blade on the thing, and when that didn’t work-it was a damned good lock, made of damned good steel-I took the easy way out and unscrewed the hasp from its mounting on the jamb. There’s tricks to every trade, and if you just live long enough you get to use ’em all.

God, what a grim place! I was only inside for five minutes or so, but what an uncomfortable five minutes they were. All those guns, all close together like that, reeking of oil and powder and whatever else it is that makes them smell the way they do. Infernal machines, engines of death and destruction, killers’ tools.

Ugh.

I locked up carefully on my way out. The last thing I wanted to do was make it easy for some maniac to rip off a wholesale lot of guns and ammo. I even took the time to remount the padlock, leaving the hasp more tightly bolted to the jamb than I’d found it.