“That doesn’t sound like the name of an ore carrier.”
“It wasn’t”
I waited, but he didn’t embroider. He was crowding eighty if it wasn’t stuck to his heels already, with heavy black-rimmed glasses and a few white hairs combed diagonally across his scalp and white teeth that flashed too much in his beard to be his. There was a space there when we both seemed to realize we were being measured, and then he said:
“My lawyer gave me your name. Simon Weintraub. You flushed out an eyewitness to an accident last year that saved his client a bundle.”
“I’m pretty good.” I waited some more.
“How are you at tracing stolen property?”
“Depends on the property.”
He produced a key from a steel case on his belt, hobbled over to a bare corner of the room, and inserted the key in a slot I hadn’t noticed. The wood paneling opened in two sections, exposing a recessed rectangle tall enough for a man to stand in, lined in burgundy plush.
“Notice anything?” he asked.
“Looks like a hairdresser’s casket.”
“It’s a gun cabinet. An empty gun cabinet. Three days ago there wasn’t enough room to store another piece in it.”
“Were you at home when it got empty?”
“My wife and I spent the weekend on Mackinac Island. I’ve got a place there. Whoever did it, it wasn’t his first job. He cut the alarm wires and picked the locks to the front door and the cabinet slick as spit.”
“What about Hector?”
“I put him in a kennel for the weekend.”
“Are you sure someone didn’t just have a key?”
“The only key to this cabinet is on my belt. It’s never out of my sight.”
“Who else lives here besides your wife?”
“No one. We don’t have servants. Elizabeth’s at her CPR class now. I’ve got a heart I wouldn’t wish on an Arab,” he added.
“What’d the police say?”
“I didn’t call them.”
I was starting to get the idea. “Have you got a list of the stolen guns?”
He drew two sheets folded lengthwise out of his inside breast pocket, holding them back when I reached for them. “When does client privilege start?”
“When I pick up the telephone and say hello.”
He gave me the list. It was neatly typewritten, the firearms identified by make, caliber, patent dates, and serial number. Some handguns, four high-powered rifles, a few antiques, two shotguns. And a Thompson submachine gun. I asked him if he was a dealer.
“No, I’m in construction.”
“Non-dealers are prohibited from owning automatic weapons,” I said. “I guess you know that.”
“I’d have gone to the cops if I’d wanted a lecture.”
“Or a warrant for your arrest. Are any of these guns registered, Mr. Blum?”
“That’s not a question you get to ask,” he said.
I handed back the list. “So long, Mr. Blum. I’ve got some business up in Iroquois Heights, so I won’t charge you for the visit.”
“Wait, Walker.”
I had my back to him when he said it. It was the way he said it that made me turn around. It didn’t sound like the Leonard Blum I’d been talking to.
“Nothing in the collection is registered,” he said. “The rifles and shotguns don’t have to be, of course, and I just never got around to doing the paper on the handguns and the Thompson. I’ve never been fingerprinted.”
“It’s an experience no one should miss,” I said.
“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t holler cop. For a long time now I’ve lived for that collection. My wife lays down for anything with a zipper; she’s almost fifty years younger than me and it’s no more than I have any right to expect. But pleasant memories are tied up with some of those pieces. I’ve seen what happens to old friends when they lose all interest, Walker. They wind up in wheelchairs stinking of urine and calling their daughters Charlie. I’d splatter my brains before I’d let that happen to me. Only now I don’t have anything to do it with.”
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.”