The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 1)

Loren D. Estleman Bloody July

“This one is special to me,” Loren D. Estleman writes about “Bloody July.” “I have long wanted to incorporate elements of Detroit’s Prohibition past into a contemporary story, and while it is a past the present city administration would rather pretend never happened, I contend that it is Detroit’s violent history that has created its unique modern character. In addition, the personal element in this one parallels an incident in the history of my own family, which for the sake of delicacy and domestic tranquility I would rather not detail.”

Estleman is a thirty-two-year-old newspaper reporter turned novelist. He lives in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, forty miles from Detroit where his detective Amos Walker works. The most recent of the Amos Walker novels is Sugartown (1984).

The house was a half-timbered Tudor job on Kendall, standing on four acres fenced in by a five-foot ornamental stone wall. It wasn’t the only one in the area and looked as much like metropolitan Detroit as it tried to look like Elizabethan England. A bank of lilacs had been allowed to grow over the wall inside, obstructing the view of the house from the street, but from there inward the lawn was bare of foliage after the fashion of feudal estates to deny cover to intruders.

I wasn’t one. As instructed previously, I stopped in front of the iron gate and got out to open it and was on my way back to the car when something black hurtled at me snarling out of the shrubbery. I clambered inside and shut the door and rolled up the window just as the thing leaped, scrabbling its claws on the roof and clouding the glass with its moist breath.

“Hector!”

At the sound of the harsh voice, the beast dropped to all fours and went on clearing its throat and glaring yellow at me through the window while a small man with a white goatee walked out through the gate and snapped a leash onto its collar. He wore a gray sport coat and no tie.

“It’s all right, Walker,” he said. “Hector behaves himself while I’m around. You are Amos Walker?”

I cranked the window down far enough to tell him I was, keeping my hand on the handle and my eye on the dog. “You’re Mr. Blum?”

“Yeah. Drive on up to the house. I’ll meet you there.”

The driveway looped past an attached garage and a small front porch with carriage lamps mounted next to the door. I parked in front of the porch and leaned on the fender smoking a cigarette while Leonard Blum led the dog around back and then came through the house and opened the door for me. The wave of conditioned air hit me like a spray of cold water. It was the last day of June and the second of the first big heat wave of summer.

“You like dogs, Walker?”

“The little moppy noisy kind and the big gentle ones that lick your face.”

“I like Dobermans. You can count on them to turn on you someday. With friends you never know.” He ushered me into a dim living room crowded with heavy furniture and hung with paintings of square-riggers under full sail and bearded mariners in slick Sou’westers shouting into the bow wash. A varnished oak ship’s wheel as big around as a hula hoop was mounted over the fireplace.

“Nautical, I know,” said Blum. “I was in shipping a long time back. Never got my feet wet but I liked to pretend I was John Paul Jones. That wheel belonged to the Henry Morgan, fastest craft ever to sail the river. In my day, anyway.”

“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.”

“I was up in the Heights getting a lesson in police work, Warner Brothers style. Check out the wife’s alibi?”

He nodded, rolling the cold cigarette along his lower lip. “A pro bowler in Harper Woods. You’d like him. Muscles on his elbows and if his I.Q. tests out at half his handicap you can have my pension. Blum started getting cold around midnight and she was at Fred Flintstone’s place from ten o’clock on. She married Blum four years ago, about the time he turned seventy-five and turned over the operation of his construction firm to his partners. We’re still digging.”

“He told me he used to be in shipping.” Alderdyce shrugged. I said, “I guess you called Perkins.”

“The number you wrote on the card. Blum didn’t score any more points with him than he did with you. I’m glad we never met. I wouldn’t want to know someone who wasn’t good enough for two P.I.’s with cardboard in their shoes.”

I lit a Winston, just to make him squirm. “What I most enjoy paying rent on this office for is to provide a forum for overdressed fuzz to run down my profession. Self-snuffings don’t usually make you this pleasant. Or is it the heat?”

“It’s the heat,” he said. “It’s also this particular self-snuffing. Maybe I’m burning out. They say one good way of telling is when you find yourself wanting to stand the stiff on its feet and ask it a question.”

“As for instance?”

“As for instance, ‘Mr. Blum, would you please tell me why before you shot yourself you decided to shoot your dog?’ ”

I said nothing. After a little while he broke his cigarette in two and flipped the pieces at my wastebasket and went out.

I finished my smoke, then broke out my Polk Administration Underwood and cranked a sheet into it and waited for my report to the husband of the runaway wife to fall into order. When I got tired of that I tore out the blank sheet and crumpled it and bonged it into the basket. My head said it was time to go home.

“Mr. Walker?”

I was busy locking the door to my private office. When I turned I was looking at a slender brunette of about thirty standing in the waiting room with the hall door closing on its pneumatic tube behind her. She wore her hair short and combed almost over one eye and had on a tailored black jacket that ran out of material just below her elbows, on top of a ruffled white blouse and a tight skirt to match the jacket. Black purse and shoes. The weather was too hot for black, but she made it look cool.

I got my hat off the back of my head and said I was Walker.

She said, “I’m Andrea Blum. Leonard Blum is — was my husband.”

I unlocked my door again and held it for her. Inside the brain room she glanced casually at the butterfly wallpaper and framed Casablanca poster and accepted the chair I held for her, the one whose legs were all the same length. I sat down behind the desk and said I was sorry about Mr. Blum.

She smiled slightly. “I won’t pretend I’m destroyed. It’s no secret our marriage was a joke. But you get used to having someone around, and then when he’s not—” She spread her hands. “Leonard told me he tried to hire you to trace his stolen guns and that you turned him down.”

“I’d have had to tell the police that a cache of unregistered firearms was loose,” I said. “Three out of five people in this town carry guns. They’d like to keep the other two virgin.”

“Don’t explain. I was just as happy they were taken. Guns frighten me. Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. The police think Leonard’s death was self-inflicted.”

“You don’t.”

She moved her head. The sunlight caught a reddish thread in her black hair. “The burglary infuriated him. After that other detective refused to take the case he was determined to find one that would. He was ready to do it himself if it came to that. Do people shoot themselves when they’re angry, Mr. Walker?”

“Never having shot myself I can’t say.”

“And he wouldn’t have killed Hector,” she went on. “He loved that dog. Besides, where could he have gotten the gun? It was one of those missing.”

“Could be the burglars overlooked it and he just didn’t tell you. And it wouldn’t be the first time a suicide took something he loved with him. Generally it’s the wife. You’re lucky, Mrs. Blum.”

“That he cared less for me than he did for his dog? I deserve that, I guess. Marrying an old man for his money gets boring. All those other men were just a diversion. I loved Leonard in my way.” She lined up her fingers primly on the purse in her lap. The nails were sharp and buffed to a high gloss, no polish. “He didn’t kill himself. Whoever killed him shot the dog first when it came at him.”

I offered her a cigarette from the deck. When she shook her head I lit one for myself and said, “I’ve got a question, but I don’t want one of those nails in my eye.”

“Insurance,” she said. “A hundred thousand dollars, and I’m the sole beneficiary. It’s worth more than twice the estate minus debts outstanding. And yes, if suicide is established as cause of death the policy is void. But that’s only part of why I’m here, though I admit it’s the biggest part. At the very least I owe it to Leonard to find out who murdered him.”

“Who do you suspect?”

“I can’t think of anyone. We seldom had visitors. He outlived most of his friends and the only contact he had with his business partners was over the telephone. He was in semi-retirement.”

She gave me the name of the firm and the partners’ names. I wrote them down. “What did your husband do before he went into construction?” I asked.

“He would never tell me. Whenever I asked he’d say it didn’t matter, those were dead days. I gather it had something to do with the river but he never struck me as the sailor type. May could tell you. His first wife. May Shinstone, her name is now. She lives in Birmingham.”

I wrote that down too. “I’ll look into it, Mrs. Blum. Until the cops stop thinking suicide, anyway. They frown on competition. Meanwhile I think you should find another place to stay.”

“Why?”

“Because if Mr. Blum was murdered odds are it was by the same person who stole his guns, and that person sneezes at locks. If you get killed I won’t have anyone to report to.”

After a moment she nodded. “I have a place to stay.”

I believed her

After she left, poorer by a check in the amount of my standard three-day retainer, I called Ben Perkins. We swapped insults and then I drew on a favor he owed me and got the number of a gun broker downtown, one who wasn’t listed under Guns in the Yellow Pages. Breaking the connection I could almost smell one of the cork-tipped ropes Perkins smoked. When he lit one up in your presence you wouldn’t have to see him pull it out of his boot to know where he kept them.

Eleven rings in, a voice with a Mississippi twang came on and recited the number I had just dialed.

“I’m a P.I. named Walker,” I said. “Ben Perkins gave me your number.”

He got my number and said he’d call back. We hung up.

Three minutes later the telephone rang. It was Mississippi. “Okay, Perk says you’re cool. What?”

“I need a line on some hot guns,” I said.

“Nix, not over the squawker. What’s the tag?”

“Fifty, if you’ve got what I want.”

“Man, I keep a roll of fifties in the crapper. Case I run out of Charmin, you know? A hunnert up front. No refunds.”

“Sixty-five. Fifty up front. Nothing if I don’t come away happy.”

“Seventy-five and no guarantees. Phone’s gettin’ heavy, man.”

I said okay. We compared meeting places, settling finally on a city parking lot on West Lafayette at six o’clock.

My next call was to Leonard Blum’s construction firm, where a junior partner referred me to Ed Klagan at a building site on Third. Klagan’s was one of the names Andrea Blum had given me. I asked for the number at the building site.

“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.”

“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.

The address I wanted in Birmingham belonged to a small crackerbox with blue aluminum siding and a rosebush that had outgrown its bed under the picture window. My watch read seven-thirty and the sky showed no signs of darkening. You get a lot more for your money by hiring a private investigator in the summertime.

My knock was answered by a tall slim woman in sweats with blond streaks in her gray hair drawn up under a knotted handkerchief. She had taken the time to put on lipstick and rub rouge into her cheeks, but she really didn’t need it. She had to be in her early seventies but looked twenty years younger. Her eyes were flat blue.

She smiled. “You look like you were expecting granny glasses and a ball of yam.”

“I was sort of looking forward to it,” I said, taking off my hat. “No one seems to knit any more except football players.”

“I never could get the knack. Come in.”

The place looked bigger inside, mainly because there was hardly any furniture in it and the walls and floor were bare. She led me to a heavy oak table with the round top removed and leaning against the pedestal base. “Will it fit?” she asked.

“Search me. I flunked physics.” I put my hat back on and got to work.

It was awkward, but the top eventually slid onto the ledge where the spare belonged and the pedestal fit diagonally into the well. She carried out a carton of books and slid it onto the back seat. “Take Telegraph down to Twelve Mile,” she said, getting in on the passenger’s side in front.

On the road I asked if Mr. Shinstone was waiting for her in Royal Oak.

“He died in ’78. I would have sold the place then, but my sister got sick and I took her in. She passed away six weeks ago.”

I said I was sorry. She shrugged. “You were married to Leonard Blum when he was Leo Goldblum?” I asked.

She looked at me, then untied her handkerchief and shook her hair loose. She kept it short. “You’ve been doing your homework. Have you got a cigarette?”

I got two out, lit them from the dash lighter, and gave her one. She blew smoke into the slipstream outside her window. “I started seeing him when I was in high school,” she said. “He was twenty and very dashing. They all were; handsome boys in sharp suits and shiny new automobiles. We thought they were Robin Hoods. Never mind that people got killed, it was all for a good cause. The right to get hung over. The world was different then.”

“Just the suits and automobiles,” I put in. “Prohibition was repealed in December 1933. In January 1934, Goldblum shortened his name and invested his bootlegging profits in construction.”

“He and Ed Klagan, Sr. had a previous understanding. I don’t know how many buildings downtown are still being held up by people Leo didn’t get on with. Mind you, I only suspected these things at the time.”

“Was Manny Eckleberg one of them?”

“Who was he?”

I told her as much as I knew. We were stopped at a light and I was watching her. She was studying the horizontal suburban scenery. “I think I remember it. It was during that terrible July. Leo and some others were questioned by the police. Somebody was convicted for it. Abe Somebody; my sister dated him once or twice. Leo and I were married soon after and I remember hoping it wouldn’t mean a postponement.”

“Why was he killed?”

“A territorial dispute, I suppose. It was a long time ago.”

“Did you divorce Blum because of his past?”

“I could say that and sound noble. But I just got tired of being married to him. That was twenty years ago and he was already turning into an old crab. From what I saw of him during the times I ran into him since I’d say he never changed. Turn right here.”

She had three rooms and a bath in the back half of a house on Farnum. I carried the table inside and set both pieces down in the middle of a room full of cartons and furniture. She added the box of books to the pile. “Thank you, Mr. Walker. You’re a nice man.”

“Mrs. Shinstone,” I said, “Can you tell me why Blum might have been killed by the same gun that killed Manny Eckleberg?”

“Heavens, no. You said he was killed by a gun from his collection, didn’t you?” I nodded. “Well. I guess that tells us something about the original murder then, doesn’t it? Not that it matters.”

She let me use her telephone to call my service. I had a message. I asked the girl from whom.

“He wouldn’t leave his name, just his number.” She gave it to me. I recognized it.

This time it rang fourteen times before the voice came on. “What’ve you got for me, Mississippi?” I asked.

“They’s a parking lot on Livernois at Fort,” he said. “Good view of the river.”

“No more parking lots. Let’s make it my building in half an hour.”

I broke the connection, thanked Mrs. Shinstone, and got out of her new living room.

The sky was purpling finally when I stepped into the foyer of my office building. A breeze had come up to peel away the smog and humidity. I mounted the stairs, stopping when something stiff prodded my lower back.

“Turn around, turkey white meat.”

The something stiff was withdrawn and I obeyed. The lanky gun broker had stepped out from behind the propped-open fire door and was standing at the base of the stairs in his summer running outfit and alligator shoes. His right hand was wrapped around the butt of a lean automatic.

“Bang, you dead.” He flashed a grin and reversed the gun, extending the checked grip. “Go on, see how she feels. Luger. Ninety bucks.”

I said, “That’s not a Luger. It’s a P-38.”

“Okay, eighty-five. ’Cause you discerning.”

“Keep the gun. I’m getting my fill of them.” I produced my half of the two hundred I’d torn earlier, holding it back when he reached for it.

He moved a shoulder and clipped the pistol under his tank top. “He goes by Shoe. I don’t know his right name. White dude, big nose. When he turns sideways everything disappears but that beak. Tried to sell me the tommy gun and some other stuff on your list. Told him I had to scratch up cash. He says call him here.” He handed me a fold of paper from the pocket of his shorts. “Belongs to a roach hatchery at Wilson and Webb.”

“This better be the square.” I gave him the abbreviated currency.

“Hey, I deal hot merchandise. I got to be honest.”

They had just missed the hotel putting through the John Lodge and that was too bad. It was eight stories of charred brick held together with scaffolding and pigeon splatter. An electric sign ran up the front reading O L PON C. After five minutes I gave up wondering what it was trying to say and went inside. A kid in an Afro and army BVD undershirt looked up from the copy of Bronze Thrills he was reading behind the desk as I approached. I said, “I’m looking for a white guy named Shoe. Skinny guy with a big nose. He lives here.”

“If his name ain’t Smith or Jones it ain’t in the register.” He laid a dirty hand on the desk, palm up.

I rang the bell on the desk with his head and repeated what I’d said.

“Twenty-three,” he groaned, rubbing his forehead. “Second floor, end of the hall.”

It had been an elegant hall, with thick carpeting and wainscoting to absorb noise, but the floorboards whimpered now under the shiny carpet and the plaster bulged over the dull oak. I rapped on twenty-three. The door opened four inches and I was looking at a smoky brown eye and a nose the size of my fist.

“I’m the new house man,” I said. “We got a complaint you’ve been playing your TV too loud.”

“Ain’t got a TV.” He had a voice like a pencil sharpener.

“Your radio, then.”

The door started to close. I leaned a shoulder against it. When it sprang open I had to change my footing to keep my face off the floor. He was holding a short-barreled revolver at belly level.

A day like this brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “Detroit iron.”

“You’re the dick, let’s see your I.D.”

I held it up.

“Okay. I’m checking out tonight anyway.” The door closed.

I waited until the lock snapped, then walked back downstairs, making plenty of noise. I could afford to. I d had a good look at Shoe and at an airline ticket folder lying on the lamp table next to the door.

I passed the reader in the lobby without comment and got into my crate parked across the street in front of a mailbox. While I was watching the entrance and smoking a cigarette, a car parked behind mine and a fat woman in a green dress levered herself out to mail a letter and scowl at me through the windshield. I smiled back.

The streetlights had just sprung on when Shoe came out lugging two big suitcases and turned into the parking lot next door. Five minutes later a blue Plymouth with a smashed fender pulled out of the lot and the light fluttered on a big-nosed profile. I gave him a block before following.

We took the Lodge down to Grand River and turned right onto Selden. After three blocks the Plymouth slid into a vacant space just as a station wagon was leaving it. I cruised on past and stopped at the next intersection, adjusting my rearview mirror to watch Shoe angle across the street on foot, using both hands on the bigger of the two suitcases. He had to set it down to open a lighted glass door stenciled ZOLOTOW SECURITIES, then brace the door with a foot while he backed in towing his burden.

I found a space around the corner and walked back. Two doors down I leaned against the closed entrance to an insurance office, fired a Winston, and chased mosquitoes with the glowing tip while Shoe was busy striking a deal with the pawnbroker.

He was plenty scared, all right.

It was waiting time, the kind you measure in ashes. I was on my third smoke when a blue-and-white cut into the curb in front of Zolotow’s and a uniform with a droopy gunfighter’s moustache got out from behind the wheel.

The glass door opened just as the cop had both feet on the pavement. He drew his side arm and threw both hands across the roof of the prowl car. “Freeze! Police!”

Empty-handed, Shoe backpedaled. The cop yelled freeze again, but he was already back inside. The door drifted shut. A second blue-and-white wheeled into the block, and then I heard sirens.

A minute crawled past. I counted four guns trained on the door. Blue and red flashers washed the street in pulsating light. Then the door flew open again and Shoe was on the threshold cradling a Chicago typewriter.

Someone hollered, “Drop it!”

Thompsons pull to the left and up. The muzzle splattred fire, its bullets sparking off the first prowl car’s roof, pounding dust out of the granite wall across the street and shattering windows higher up, tok-tok-tok-tok-tok.

The return shots came so close together they made one long roar. Shoe slammed back against the door and slid into a sitting position spraddle-legged in the entrance, the submachine gun in his lap.

As the uniforms came forward, guns out, an unmarked unit fishtailed into the street. Lieutenant Alderdyce was out the passenger’s side while it was still rocking on its springs. He glanced down at the body on the sidewalk, then looked up and spotted me in the crowd of officers. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Mainly abusing my lungs,” I said. “How about you?”

“Pawnbroker matched the guns this clown was selling to the hot sheet. He made an excuse and called us from the back.”

I said, “He was running scared. He had an airline ticket and he checked out of the hotel where he was living. He was after a getaway stake.”

“The murder hit the radio tonight. When his suicide scam went bust he rabbited.”

The plainclothes man who had come with Alderdyce leaned out the open door of the pawnshop. Shoe was acting as a doorstop now. “He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two, John.”

“Hey, this guy’s still alive.”

Everyone looked at the uniform down on one knee beside Shoe. The wounded man’s chest rose and fell feebly beneath his bloody shirt. Alderdyce leaned forward.

“It’s over,” he said. “No sense lying your way deeper into hell. Why’d you kill Blum?”

Shoe looked up at him. His eyes were growing soft. After a moment his lips moved. On that street with the windows going up on both sides and police radios squawking it got very quiet.

It was even quieter on Farnum in Royal Oak, where night lay warm on the lawns and sidewalks and I towed a little space of silence through ratching crickets on my way to the back door of the duplex. The lights were off inside. I rang the bell and had time to smoke a cigarette between the time they came on and when May Shinstone looked at me through the window. A moment later she opened the door. Her hair was tousled and she had on a blue robe over a lighter blue nightgown that covered her feet. Without makeup she looked older, but still nowhere near her true age.

“Isn’t it a little late for visiting, Mr. Walker?”

“It’s going to be a busy night,” I said. “The cops will be here as soon as they find out you’ve left the place in Birmingham and get a change of address.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but come in. When I was young we believed the night air was bad for you.”

She closed the door behind me. The living room looked like a living room now. The cartons were gone and the books were in place on the shelves. I said, “You’ve been busy.”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful? I’m one of those compulsive people who can’t go to sleep when there’s a mess to be cleaned up.”

“You can’t have gotten much sleep lately, then. Leaving Shoe with all those guns made a big mess.”

“Shoe? I don’t—”

“The cops shot him at the place where he tried to lay them off. When he found out he was mixed up in murder he panicked. He made a dying statement in front of seven witnesses.”

She was going to brazen it out. She stood with her back to the door and her hands in the pockets of her robe and a marble look on her face. Then it crumbled. I watched her grow old.

“I let him keep most of what he stole,” she said. “It was his payment for agreeing to burgle Leo’s house. All I wanted was the Colt automatic, the .38 he used to kill Manny Eckleberg. Shoe — his name was Henry Schumacher — was my gardener in Birmingham. I hired him knowing of his prison record for breaking and entering. I didn’t dream I’d ever have use for his talents in that area.”

“You had him steal the entire collection to keep Blum from suspecting what you had in mind. Then on the anniversary of Eckleberg’s murder you went back and killed him with the same gun. Pure poetry.”

“I went there to kill him, yes. He let me in and when I pointed the gun he laughed at me and tried to take it away. We struggled. It went off. I don’t expect you to believe that.”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe because it stinks first-degree any way you smell it,” I said. “So you stuck his finger in the trigger afterwards and fired the gun through the window or something to satisfy the paraffin test and make it look like suicide. Why’d you kill the dog?”

“After letting me in, Leo set it loose in the grounds. It wouldn’t let me out the door. I guess he’d trained it to trap intruders until he called it off. So I went back and got the gun and shot it. That hurt me more than killing Leo, can you imagine that? A poor dumb beast.”

“What was Manny Eckleberg to you?”

“Nothing. I never knew him. He was just a smalltime bootlegger from St. Louis who thought he could play with the Purple Gang.”

I said nothing. Waiting. After a moment she crossed in front of me, opened a drawer in a bureau that was holding up a china lamp, and handed me a bundle of yellowed envelopes bound with a faded brown ribbon.

“Those are letters my sister received from Abe Steinmetz when he was serving time in Jackson prison for Eckleberg’s murder,” she said. “In them he explains how Leo Goldblum paid him to confess to the murder. He promised him he wouldn’t serve more than two years and that there would be lots more waiting when he got out. Only he never got out. He was stabbed to death in a mess room brawl six months before his parole.

“I was the one who was dating Abe, Mr. Walker; not my sister. I was seeing him at the same time I was seeing Leo. He swore her to secrecy in the letters, believing I wouldn’t understand until he could explain things in person. The money would start our marriage off right, he said. But instead of waiting I married Leo.”

She wet her lips. I lit a Winston and gave it to her. She inhaled deeply, her fingers fidgeting and dropping ash on the carpet. “My sister kept the secret all these years. It wasn’t until she died and I opened her safety deposit box and read the letters—” She broke off and mashed out the cigarette in a copper ashtray atop the bureau. Do I have time to get dressed and put on lipstick before the police arrive? They never even gave Leo time to grab a necktie whenever they took him in for questioning.”

I told her to take as much time as she needed. At the bedroom door she paused. “I don’t regret it, you know. Maybe I wouldn’t have been happy married to Abe. But when I think of all those wasted years — well, I don’t regret it.” She went through the door.

Waiting, I pocketed the letters, shook the last cigarette out of my pack, and struck a match. I stared at the flame until it burned down to my fingers.

He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two.

I dropped the match and vaulted to the bedroom door. Moving too damn slowly. I had my hand on the knob when I heard the shot.

The temperatures soared later in the month, and with them the crime statistics. The weatherman called it the hottest July on record. The newspapers had another name for it, but it had already been used.