“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.
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.”