Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

Palmer looked like she needed a drink right then. We can’t have been a very comforting sight. Lange’s nose was as red and swollen as Rudolph’s. My swelling was over my right eye and threatening to shut it down completely.

  “Tell us about this visitor with the accent,” Paddy said. “Did he state his business?”

  “When I answered the door, he asked for Wally. I couldn’t say no; Wally was sitting right behind me on the couch. Wally told me to go into the kitchen and shut the door. He didn’t want anything to happen to me.” She sobbed over that last gallantry.

  “Hear anything through the door?”

  “A little. They were talking about a gun. A pistol, the guy with the accent called it. That scared me. I don’t like guns. I got busy doing the dishes. I didn’t hear anything else until the front door closed.

  “When I came out, they were both gone. The guy had taken Wally with him. And he’d taken something else. This morning, I noticed my jewel box had been moved. The bracelet Wally gave me for my birthday was gone. It had real stones. Sapphires.”

  We sat out another bout of sobbing, Lange shifting his big feet around like the floor had suddenly gotten hot.

  Then Paddy asked, “Can you describe this visitor for us? He was a big man, I suppose. Blond-haired, maybe? Any scars or monocles?”

  “I don’t know if you’d call him big. He was very tall, but very skinny, too. But he did have blond hair, very blond, as blond as mine. He was just a kid, really. That was another reason I let him in. I should have slammed the door in his face.”

  Paddy slipped in ahead of the next sob. “Are there any of Wally’s papers around? It would help if we could see anything he left behind, even a phone number. Help Wally, I mean.”

  Palmer pointed to a little table that held a phone and a cardboard manger scene. “He was working on some papers over there. Something to do with a big movie deal he has going. But I haven’t seen them since yesterday. Since Wally took the trash down to the incinerator.”

  “Thoughtful guy,” Paddy said.

  He retrieved a pad from the table, looked it over, and passed it to me. There were daisies around the border of each page, but nothing written on any of them, not even an impression passed through from a missing sheet.

  Paddy said he’d take a cup of coffee if the offer was still good, and Palmer headed for the kitchen. When its swinging door closed behind her, Paddy issued his orders, first to Lange.

  “Toss the place. We’re looking for a Browning thirty-two or anything related to where it might be, such as a claim check or a locker key.”

  To me, he said, “Try the incinerator. A tire iron makes a great poker.”

  I didn’t need to dirty the Clipper’s hardware. The incinerator, which was in the weedy lot behind the apartment building, came equipped with an iron rod three feet long that hung from a hook by the burner’s heavy door. That door was stone cold, which was heartening. The contents of the big metal box were less encouraging, being ash and a rusted tangle of things that wouldn’t burn, none of which was a Browning automatic.

  But persistence paid off. Caught in a crack in the firebox near the flue was the unburned corner of a sheet of notepaper bordered in daisies. On it was written “flight” and below that “Mexico City.”

  ---7---

  Paddy and Lange were exiting the apartment building when I came around from in back, vital clue in hand. Paddy took it hard, by which I mean he chuckled ruefully.

  “Looks like we’ve bitten a rubber peach and no mistake. Lange, cab it out to the airport and check on the Mexico City departures since last night. See if anyone matching Wilfong’s description took one. Scotty, you can drop me by the office on your way to find the pawnshop where that bracelet ended up.”

  “Why trace the jewelry? Why not the Austrian?”

  “Because I’m starting to wonder if there is such a creature.”

  “You think the dame’s lying?” Lange asked.

  “No. But I think Miss Palmer would make the ideal audience for a Punch and Judy show.”

  Paddy raised his homburg in the air, and a passing taxi pulled to the curb. When Lange was in it and on his way, Paddy steered me toward my car, lecturing as we went.

  “How’s this scenario? Wally Wilfong had a big movie deal in the works—though he told us he didn’t even have one on the horizon. He needed room to maneuver, but a certain Tip Fasano was crowding him so hard he couldn’t even sleep in his own bed. He heard the story of the four Brownings, maybe from an old pal or maybe not. Maybe he really was in Salzburg in ’forty-five or maybe not. Either way, he saw a chance to lay down a smoke screen for himself. He got his hands on a Browning Nineteen-ten and wove us a little bedtime story. Then he passed on a fragment of the same tale to Fasano, giving us prominent billing, and arranged to be kidnapped. That gave him time to do whatever he’s got to do in Mexico City. He counted on Fasano coming after us and on us chasing will-o’-the-wisps, like this so-called Austrian.”

  “But why bother with pawnshops?”

  “There’s no better place to buy a used gun. If Wilfong picked his up at a hockshop, he likely took the bracelet back to the same one. We’re all creatures of habit. So if you find the bracelet, you’ll probably clear up the question of the gun.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re sure of the gun already.”

  “Almost sure,” Paddy conceded. “But ten to one against means there’s still a slim chance it’s legit. If it is, it could be our ticket out of this mess.”

  When I delivered Paddy to the office, I picked up a message for myself. Peggy had reached Professor Carey and arranged for me to call him at his home around three our time. That call would be step one in the process of identifying a creature Paddy no longer believed in—the avenger with the German accent—but I pocketed the number and headed out.

  I started with the pawnshops nearest the major studios, the territory Wilfong usually traveled. This close to Christmas, they were all busy, both with bargain hunters and with people working the old O. Henry dodge: trading in used treasures so they could buy new ones for new loves. I was a long time getting short answers at the first two places I visited. Then I tried an older establishment called Nackenhorst’s Jewelry and Loan Company.

  Despite its fairly specific name, Nackenhorst’s had the usual variety of merchandise on display, including a rack of guns. I started at the jewelry case, looking for sapphire bracelets and not finding one. Still, my stocking wasn’t entirely empty. The clerk hovering nearby was very tall and very thin and very blond, matching all three of the superlatives Dolly Palmer had used to describe Wilfong’s foreign caller.

  “Wie geht’s?” I said, which was German for “How’s it going?” Or so I’d been told during the postwar occupation.

  “Sehr gut,” the beanpole replied. Then, perhaps remembering where he’d last used his German, he stammered in English, “May I help you?”

  I asked about a recently pawned sapphire bracelet, which happened to be stolen, and his stammer became life-threatening. He was saved by Nackenhorst himself, a bent, horse-faced gentleman in an unlikely Stanford letter sweater, patched at the elbows.

  “Stolen, you say,” the old man lisped once he had me in a back room and well away from the holiday shoppers. He had several pieces of jewelry on his desk, one of them a very nice bracelet with blue stones. “I’m a pretty good judge of that, usually. Good judge of customers, I mean, especially regulars. This customer—”

  “Wally Wilfong,” I cut in, to hurry us along. “That bangle belongs to his girlfriend. Your clerk—”

  “My nephew, Kurt.”

  “Kurt helped Wilfong lift it by posing as a German caller last night. If we ask him, he’ll say he thought the whole thing was a practical joke, which is probably true. Wilfong will say that he only borrowed the bracelet, if anyone asks him. So will its rightful owner, once Wilfong’s had a chance to work on her.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Nackenhorst asked. “And what’s your interest, Mister ...” He c
onsulted the business card I’d handed him. “Mr. Hollywood Security?”

  “I’m not interested in the bracelet. I’m interested in a gun Wilfong bought sometime in the last couple of days.”

  “What did he do with it? Stick up an orphanage?”

  “We’re more of a YMCA,” I said. “Did Wilfong buy a gun from you?”

  Nackenhorst pulled at one of his patched elbows and said, “Yes. It was a very specific order, too. The gun couldn’t be new, but it had to be good as new. Luckily, he wanted a Browning thirty-two. There must be a million of those.”

  “Only four that count,” I told him.

  ---8---

  Back at the office, Paddy and I exchanged bad news. I told him that Wilfong’s Browning was a fake, and he gave me Lange’s report from the Los Angeles airport.

  “Wilfong was on the ten-thirty flight to Mexico City this morning. Must have had to wait until that pawnshop you found opened so he could get the cash for his ticket. Ten-thirty was about when we were caroling with Tip Fasano’s boys. I wonder if that was a coincidence.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I sent Lange down Mexico way. You’re taking the rest of the afternoon off.”

  “How come I’m not the one going after Wilfong?”

  “I figured you’d want to stay close to your family with Christmas creeping up. Especially given the season’s greetings Fasano threatened us with.”

  I figured it differently. “You’re sending Lange because you mean to hand Wilfong over. You don’t think I could do it.”

  “I know how soft you are when a fellow veteran’s involved, Scotty. I’ve seen it nearly get you killed. Let’s say I’m saving you from a moral dilemma. Give my best to Ella.”

  I might have done just that, if Peggy hadn’t stopped me on my way out to remind me that it was time for my call to Tennessee. I no longer had a good reason to make that call. I knew the invisible gun collector I’d been trying to trace was as phony as the rest of Wilfong’s story. But I was a little sore at being eased off the Browning case. Calling Professor Paul Carey was a way to keep my foot in the door.

  The professor’s soft drawl had me pressing the receiver hard against my ear. “I’ve gotten a lot of inquiries about those guns since the article appeared,” he told me after I’d introduced myself. “And none of them has been worth my time. I thought publishing the serial numbers would cut down on the nuisance calls, but it didn’t much. Are you claiming to have one of the Brownings, Mr. Elliott?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m calling about someone else’s claim. Was the part of the article about the guns being stolen by GIs accurate? You hinted about other theories.”

  “Nobody knows for sure what really happened. So many records were destroyed over there in ’forty-five that every theory is a guess. The museum angle is just the best guess. I’ve also heard a rumor that Austrian policemen kept the guns as souvenirs and another that they ended up in a monastery, a gift to the priest who gave the archduke and his wife the last rites. A pretty tasteless gift, if you ask me, but stranger things have happened. For my money, though, the four pistols are in the United States right now. Have you examined your claimant’s gun?”

  “Not exactly. Did you get a call from someone named Wally Wilfong?”

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  “How about a Pat Skidmore of Frankfort, Kentucky?”

  “I’ve spoken to a man named Skidmore, but he lives in Akron, Ohio.”

  Like all accomplished liars, Wilfong had kept one foot on the truth. “What did this Skidmore say?”

  “He claimed to know the whereabouts of one of the guns, but he denied any knowledge of the looting. He said a soldier chum of his had come by the gun on the boat ride home. That put me on my guard.”

  “Why?”

  “As I told you, I’ve spoken to a number of people regarding those guns. Most of them bought genuine Sarajevo guns from hard-up Germans, or thought they did. There seems to have been a brisk business in them. Some of the ones I’ve traced weren’t even Brownings, and none was from the group of four. Now, if Mr. Skidmore had admitted to being one of the looters, that would have made me more confident.”

  “It worked on me,” I said.

  ***.

  ---9---

  Next I called information for Akron, Ohio, and established that there was only one Patrick Skidmore living there. Then I placed a person-to-person call to his home. The rest of my free afternoon was gone by the time the long-distance operator called back to say she had my party on the line.

  Not that I took her word for it. When the connection was made, I asked, “Is this really Pat Skidmore?”

  “Who wants to know?” was the friendly comeback.

  Figuring I’d caught him in the middle of something important, like stenciling snowflakes on his window panes, I didn’t reply in kind. I gave him my name and added, “Wally Wilfong said you were a hard guy to reach.”

  “What? What are you to Wally?”

  “We both worked for Paramount, way back when. He told me you’d called him about a certain Browning automatic. That true?”

  “What’s it to you, buddy?”

  “He cut me in on the deal.” Me and my immediate family.

  Skidmore liked that about as much as I did. “What is this? Wally told me he didn’t have the gun. He said he’d hocked it. He went nuts when I told him the thing really was valuable. Gave me a big song and dance about it being the story of his life, about how he’d lost every chance he’d ever had. Now you’re saying he has the gun?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “That son of a bitch. Listen, if he sold you a piece, it’s coming out of his half. I staked him in that crap game, so half that gun is mine. I told Wally that when I called him about the magazine article.”

  “So Wilfong didn’t steal the gun?”

  “Steal it? Hell, no, he won it. In a crap game on the troop ship coming back. Some joker bet the gun when he ran out of cash. He said it was an important gun, that it had killed some bigshot. We thought he meant a Nazi. He actually tried to buy it back from Wally before we docked. It had to be one of those missing Brownings.”

  Not necessarily, not if Professor Carey was right about the number of phony guns sold to gullible Americans. I was out of questions that mattered, but not loose ends. I asked Skidmore about the two names Wilfong had woven into his tale, the other two looters, Joe Reid of New Jersey and Bob Wilson of Texas. According to Skidmore, they were casualties from his old unit and Wilfong’s, buddies killed by the same mortar round.

  “What the hell do Joe and Bob have to do with this?”

  “They were window dressing,” I said.

  “Window what?”

  I thanked Skidmore for his time. As I hung up, he was demanding his share plus interest.

  ---10---

  I drove home and told the story to Ella, including the threats made by Tip Fasano. We talked about shipping the kids off to my relatives in Indiana, just to be safe, and decided to sleep on it. Not that I got much sleep. I wasn’t kept awake by visions of dancing sugarplums, either.

  When I reported for duty the next morning, I found that I’d been wasting my worry. There’d been what a film critic might call a deus ex machina plot development. Our troubles were over and the case with them.

  “Lange wired us early this morning from Mexico City,” Paddy explained to me in the reception area, where he was actually helping Peggy decorate our replacement tree. “He found Wilfong dead in his hotel room last night. Suicide. He’d shot himself in that dome of his with the Browning Nineteen-ten he showed us.

  “Lange did some checking around. Seems Wilfong was scheduled to meet with representatives of the national film studio. That was the big coup Dolly Palmer told us about. Wilfong had talked them into letting him front for them on a distribution deal. Or he thought he had. They must have done a little research on our Wally. The studio men didn’t show for the meeting and wouldn’t take his calls, which, acc
ording to the hotel operator, got pretty frantic toward the end. Guess that was the last straw as far as Wilfong was concerned. I feel bad now about the suicide crack I made when he first came by.”

  If Paddy felt bad, he was putting on a brave front, which included tossing tinsel around like rice at a wedding.

  I asked, “What about Fasano?”

  “You don’t remember that little Christmas gift Tip gave us? We could hand over Wilfong alive or dead. I called to ask him where he wanted the body delivered. He settled for a copy of the death certificate. Say what you want about that crumb, but he’s a man of his word.

  “All in all, it was the best present anyone ever gave me. Though I suppose the thank-you card should really go to Wally Wilfong.”

  Paddy asked me to drive over to Columbia to pick up a check we were owed. I stopped on the way at Nackenhorst’s Jewelry and Loan Company. One of the things I’d chewed over during my sleepless night was the fate of the Browning Wilfong had brought back to Hollywood in 1945. He’d told Skidmore he’d hocked it, which seemed likely. Sometime around three A.M. I’d remembered what Paddy had said about all of us being creatures of habit. And I’d recalled something else: how Nackenhorst had tried to tell me—before I’d rushed him along—that he knew Wilfong. And maybe that they’d been doing business for years.

  I found the pawnshop owner in his backroom lair. He was wearing his letter sweater again. I was glad to see it, since it entered into my calculations, such as they were.

  I told the old man about Wilfong’s death. He wasn’t surprised, and I realized belatedly that I hadn’t been, either. Wilfong might have lied about everything else, but not about being at the end of his rope.

  I asked Nackenhorst how long he’d known the late operator.

  “Years and years,” he said. “He was always moving in and out of the chips. In and out, out and in. Like a lot of people in this town.”

  He ran a professional eye over my suit. I didn’t take it personally.

  “When he came to see you a couple of days ago,” I said, “it wasn’t to buy any old Browning. Not at first. He was looking for the one he’d hocked after the war.”