Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 1. Whole No. 833, January 2011

Terence Faherty returns this month with a new adventure for Scott Elliott, the second series character he created, after the popular Owen Keane. A former actor and World War II vet turned private security operative, Elliott takes on a case here involving a supposed artifact from World War I. But as in most of Elliott’s cases, Hollywoood itself is at the forefront of the drama. Mr. Faherty is a winner of the PWA’s Shamus Award and a past nominee for the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

1

Wally Wilfong was known a-round Hollywood as an operator. Not a camera operator, which was a respectable profession and maybe even a calling. Wilfong was a guy who worked the no man’s land between the studios, sometimes scaring up money for an independent film, sometimes representing a naive young hopeful, sometimes brokering an exchange of equipment or talent between the major lots, places where he’d never find a home.

He hadn’t always had his nose pressed against the candy-store glass. Before the war, he’d worked on the sane side of the cameras for Paramount, where I’d apprenticed as an actor. We’d both done a stretch in the army and both ended up in the European Theater of Operations, along with a few million other innocent bystanders. Wilfong and I had one other thing in common. We’d both come back to Hollywood after the war to find our places taken and our welcomes expired.

I’d gone to work for a private security firm, Hollywood Security, which patrolled that no man’s land I mentioned earlier. So I’d crossed paths with Wilfong once or twice. But the first time he visited our offices on Roe Street was a morning in late December 1954.

We were decorating those offices for Christmas, an annual rite that the head man, one Patrick J. Maguire, tried to put the kibosh on every year. Paddy was thwarted in this — as in so much else — by his wife Peggy, the power behind the Hollywood Security throne. She and I were hanging ornaments on the reception-area tree — an all-aluminum one — when Wilfong made his entrance.

I noted that he checked the front sidewalk through the front door’s glass as it closed behind him, but his greeting was breezy enough. Wilfong was a shorter-than-average guy who sprang for a lot of extra padding in the shoulders of his suits. Today’s gray example needed pressing, and his two-toned shoes could have used a shine. Whoever had shaved his not inconsiderable chin that morning had been in a hurry.

“The big guy to home?” he asked Peggy.

On any other day, she would have told Wilfong to wait while she checked or even to come back a week from Tuesday. But Paddy had just made a remark critical of her metal tree — specifically what a great job it would do cleaning out a drain — so she showed our visitor right in. I tagged along to get a good look at Paddy’s reaction, which was a mistake. Peggy pushed me in after Wilfong and shut the office’s double doors behind me.

Normally some small talk between the client and Paddy would have followed, with a witty aside or two thrown in by me. Wilfong rushed things along a bit by drawing a gun from his suit-coat pocket.

It was a small automatic, and Wilfong had his finger on its trigger, though he wasn’t pointing it at anything in particular. I was tensing myself for a dive at it when Paddy held up his hand like a traffic cop.

“If you’re collecting for the Salvation Army,” he said, “you’re supposed to use a bell.”

Wilfong blinked, looked down at his hand, and said, “Right.” He set the gun down on the arm of the chair next to him, its muzzle pointed toward a neutral corner.

“I want you to save me from that,” he said.

“Tempted to end it all?” my boss asked. He then lit a cigar, which was as close to a sigh of relief as I expected him to issue. His wide-screen face, which had once been described as a map of Ireland carved on an Easter ham, looked almost bored as he added, “The holidays take some people that way, I’m told.”

“I’m not afraid I’ll kill myself with it,” Wilfong said. “I’m afraid it will get me killed. It’s already put ten million people in the ground.”

Paddy and I gave the gun another look. It was an ordinary .32, either brand-new or very little used. I’d have been surprised to learn it had been fired a hundred times, never mind ten million.

Paddy had the same thought. “Must have gotten most of them with the first shot,” he said.

Wilfong came down heavily in the chair whose arm supported the gun. The automatic didn’t even hop.

“That’s a Browning Model Nineteen-ten. Maybe the gun that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in nineteen fourteen. Maybe the gun that started the First World War.”

“Maybe is right,” Paddy said. “They’re still making that particular popgun. There must be a few hundred thousand floating around.”

“Only four of them matter,” Wilfong said. “The guy who murdered the archduke and the guy’s accomplices had four Nineteen-tens, brand new, with consecutive serial numbers. Only one of them was used in the assassination, but nobody knows which one it was. The Austrians, who ended up with the pistols, didn’t keep a record. They stuck all four in a museum in Salzburg and forgot about them.”

I was impressed by Wilfong’s knowledge, but even more so by his quiet delivery. He was usually a salesman’s salesman, leaning into you when he talked if not actually grabbing your lapels. Now his bleary eyes were half closed and he was rubbing one prominent temple like it might be a magic lamp.

“How do you happen to know all this?” I asked.

“And what makes you think this is one of the four?” Paddy chipped in.

“Salzburg was taken by the U.S. Army,” Wilfong said. “By that point in the war, there was as much scavenging as fighting going on. More maybe. The GIs who liberated that museum took everything they could carry, including the four Brownings.”

“You were one of those GIs,” I said.

He nodded. “None of us could read German. We didn’t know what we were taking, except that they were guns. Guns were the primo souvenirs, better even than booze. Plus, they were almost as good as cash. Lugers brought the best price, but anything that made a noise would sell.”

“But you didn’t sell yours,” Paddy observed.

“Never got that hard up. It came home with me in my duffel bag. Now I wish the ship that hauled us back had hit a mine.”

He seemed to notice for the first time that the office had windows and that their drapes were open. He grabbed the automatic and slipped it back into his pocket.

“Somebody’s killing us off for those guns,” he said, “all four of us, one by one. And I’m next.”

2

Paddy ordered up some coffee for Wilfong and sweetened it with the bottle of Irish whiskey he kept in his desk.

Wilfong sipped for a long ten-count and said, “One of my buddies from the old unit, one of the four who’d taken home a Browning, called me a couple of weeks ago. He said he’d come across a magazine article about four pistols that disappeared from Salzburg in nineteen forty-five. The article told all about the assassination and even gave the serial numbers of the missing guns. My buddy had already found his gun on the list.”

“The buddy’s name?” asked Paddy, who liked to collect the odd fact.

“Pat Skidmore. Pat said he was going to get in touch with the guy who’d written the article, some professor from a college out his way. Pat lives in Frankfort, Kentucky, if he’s still living.”

Paddy and I exchanged a glance. The speaker drank again and continued.

“I told Pat to hold off. I didn’t see any percentage in it for us. The Austrians aren’t going to pay to get those guns back. They’re just going to take them. And not say thank you when they leave. I wanted time to think of a way to make a buck out of the deal, a finder’s fee, if nothing better. Pat wouldn’t wait. Something about holding on to his gun was giving him the creeps.

“Pat had already called the other two guys who took Brownings from that museum. One of them, Bob Wilson, was okay with giving his back, but the other one, Joe Reid, said all the current Austrian bigshots used to be Nazi bigshots and they could go hang themselves.

“I waited for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t hear back from Pat. And every day of that wait, I thought about my Browning more and more. I started to wonder if all the bad breaks I’ve had since the war could be tied to that gun.”

“So it’s also unlucky?” Paddy asked.

“With all the people killed and maimed by it,” Wilfong said, “how couldn’t it be? It even maimed us, Elliott,” he added, turning my way.

“How do you figure?” I asked. I was surprised to find that my mouth was dry.

“There wouldn’t have been a Second World War if there hadn’t been a first one. You and me would never have been snatched out of Paramount. I could be head of production today, and you might be Audrey Hepburn.”

“Scotty’s eyebrows are too thin,” Paddy said. “Let’s get back to you not hearing from this Skidmore.”

“I finally got so antsy, I called him long distance. Got his wife. She said Pat was missing. Got all hysterical on the phone. All I could make out from what she was saying was that some stranger had come to see Pat. A guy with a German accent.”

“So you think this buddy of yours is dead?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to reach Wilson and Reid. I haven’t been able to. When I talked to Pat, he mentioned where they live — Bob’s in Texas and Joe’s over in Jersey — but neither one answers his phone. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Okay,” Paddy said. “Let’s talk about what you suspect. Stop me if I wander too far from the path. You think this Skidmore got in touch with the author of the magazine article and told him what had happened to the Brownings. Then, either the professor or Skidmore himself got the word out to the wrong party. That party is now collecting the guns by whatever means necessary. We can assume it isn’t anyone official, since Skidmore wanted to give the Austrians his gun. So they wouldn’t have had to kidnap him to get it.”

I said, “Whoever snatched Skidmore got more than his gun. He got Wilson and Reid’s names and addresses.”

“And my address,” Wilfong said. “I know that for a certainty.”

Paddy sat up. “You’ve been visited by a man with a German accent?”

“Almost. A kraut came by my place yesterday. I’ve been staying away from home for... business reasons, so I missed him. But a neighbor passed the word. Now I’ve got the willies like I haven’t had them since I handed in my uniform.”

I pointed in the general direction of the pocket that held the gun. “So leave that out on your front step tonight with the empty milk bottles. When Herr X gets his mitts on it, he’ll leave you alone.”

“Maybe,” Wilfong said, “if he isn’t punishing us for stealing them in the first place. But it isn’t as simple as that.”

“It never is when money’s involved,” Paddy observed.

I hadn’t heard much talk of money, so I thought the great man was straying from that path he’d just spoken of. Turned out, I was lagging behind.

“You guessed it,” Wilfong said. “I’m hard up right now and no prospects on the horizon. Worse than that, I owe some serious money to an unpleasant guy.”

“Name of?” Paddy asked.

“Tip Fasano.”

“We know the gentleman, don’t we, Scotty.”

Did we ever. Fasano was middle management in the local gambling syndicate and an all-around tough egg.

I said, “Fasano’s the business that’s keeping you away from home?”

“Yes. He’s got somebody watching my place. If there’s any money to be made from this gun, I’ve got to make it and quick. Otherwise, it’ll be a tossup who punches my ticket, the mystery man or Fasano. If I can set up a deal, I want Elliott here to tag along when I make the exchange. He can carry my gun and two or three of his own.”

“You spoke of percentages earlier,” Paddy said. “What’s ours?”

“Ten percent of my take.”

Paddy haggled it up to twelve, and they shook on it.

3

Wilfong vetoed Paddy’s suggestion that we hold on to the Browning for him — and did it emphatically.

“Hell no. If this collector guy gets the drop on me, I want the dingus where I can hand it over before he asks twice. If it’s a choice between my neck and paying off Fasano, I’ll take my neck. Besides, the thing still shoots. That’s an argument that works with mystery men and bookies.”

He also turned down — less emphatically — my offer to watch his back until he worked out his deal.

“No offense, Elliott, but you were in the field artillery. You’re fine for a showdown, but not for moving quiet and quick, which is what I have to do now.”

I could have pointed out that Skidmore, Wilson, and Reid had all been infantrymen, for all the good that had done them. But I didn’t. Our new client looked wrung-out already.

Paddy asked, “How do you intend to make contact?”

“I dunno yet. Maybe I’ll stick a note in one of my empty milk bottles.” He stood up.

Paddy said, “While you’re giving my wife a number where you can be reached, I’ll have a word with Scotty. Then he’ll see you to your car.”

As soon as Wilfong cleared the office, Paddy went back to what he’d been doing when Peggy ushered us in, which was cleaning a spot on his necktie. His taste in ties was flamboyant, to put it politely. Today’s, which featured a peacock feather design in orange and blue, was slightly gaudier than the Alcoa fir tree in the lobby.

“What did you think of Wally’s story?” he asked as he worked.

“It held my interest.”

“But then, you’re a sucker for the movies. Still, it could be a nice Christmas bonus for us. Which makes me wonder how we can improve our chances of collecting, short of following Wally around. I think we need to get a line on this Austrian gun collector, whoever he is. Invisible men give me the heebie-jeebies. Any thoughts on that?”

“Pat Skidmore of Frankfort, Kentucky, would be the guy to ask, if he hadn’t gotten so invisible himself. That leaves the author of the magazine article about the guns, I guess. Like you told Wally, this professor might have tipped the wrong party. Or he could have helped Skidmore do it himself.”

Paddy checked his tie under the desk lamp and grunted contentedly. “Sounds like you should ask the professor. If you can tear yourself away from the tinsel.”

Wilfong’s car was a 1950 Mercury Monterey with 1949 whitewalls. Maybe ’48s. When we reached it, I asked him which magazine had run the article on the Brownings.

“I dunno,” he said, his head on a swivel now that we were out in the open. “The only magazines I read are the ones my dentist carries. If I know Pat, it was Field and Stream. Wish me luck, buddy.”

I did. Then I went inside and used Peggy’s phone to call my screenwriter wife, Ella. At one time, she’d worked publicity for Warner Brothers. I asked her if she still had any contacts in their research department.

“One, Scotty, but I use her for my script work. I thought you detectives had your own sources. Doesn’t Paddy pay off any librarians?”

“Only to forget his late fees.” I gave her a one-reel version of Wilfong’s tale. She was impressed.

“He could probably make more selling the movie rights than the gun. You want the magazine that published the article? I’ll see what I can do.”

That gave me some time to kill. I unparked my car, a copper brown ’53 Packard Clipper whose dour grillwork was heavy in the lower lip, which is to say, bumper. The Clipper and I moseyed over to the main library building. I didn’t bother with their indexes of periodical literature, since they weren’t fresh enough to contain a reference to an article that must have appeared in the last month or so. I did flip through the magazines they had out, which was a small boatload. None contained any mention of the Brownings.

After that, I moved on to a little job we were doing for the character actress Marjorie Main. That occupied me until I knocked off at dinnertime, an early dinnertime. Ella and I had two kids shy of school age, a boy for her and a girl for me, as the song lyric says, and I was anxious to see them. The run-up to Christmas had been a lot of fun so far.

Plus, I had homework to do, though I didn’t know that until I got there. Then Ella, a petite, seasonal blonde who was leaning more toward brunette as the days got shorter, handed me a copy of The Gentlemen’s Quarterly with a September publication date.

“Warner Brothers came through for you,” she said and kissed me.

“They owed me,” I replied. “I had a lousy seat for Mildred Pierce.”

After we were all fed and the kids were in bed, Ella settled in with a novel she’d been asked to adapt, a racy one with some major-league décolletage on its cover. I opened The Gentlemen’s Quarterly.

Wally Wilfong had joked about the magazines he read in his dentist’s office. The Gentlemen’s Quarterly was more like something you’d find in a machine shop. There was a redhead in shorts fly-fishing on the cover and, beneath her, a teaser for the article I was after: “Four Guns That Changed the World.”

That title was a little deceptive, I learned as I read, since on July 28, 1914, the day the archduke and his wife were killed, only one of the Brownings had actually gone off. The article contained a lot of background on Franz Ferdinand, one unpopular heir to the throne, and a recap of the slipshod investigation conducted afterward. I’d already guessed that it had been a rush job since they hadn’t bothered to tag the actual murder weapon.

Wilfong or his source, the missing Skidmore, had gotten one detail wrong and omitted another. The serial numbers of the four handguns weren’t consecutive, only very nearly so. And the article noted in passing that there were other theories about the guns’ disappearance, though its author, Paul Carey, who was identified as a professor at Steed College in Johnson City, Tennessee, didn’t say what they were. It was easy to understand why Wilfong hadn’t mentioned competing theories. He knew firsthand, after all, that the light-fingered G.I. explanation was correct.

I sat for a while, smoking a Lucky Strike and wondering how Professor Carey had felt when Pat Skidmore called about the Brownings. Then I wondered whether Carey might have an Austrian accent. Then I turned on the television and watched an old chestnut, Christmas in Connecticut, until Ella tired of only reading about sex.

4

I arrived at the offices of Hollywood Security around ten the next morning, having stopped on my way in to wrap up the Great Marjorie Main Caper of 1954. Inside, Peggy was seated at her desk, giving the fisheye to a large citizen who was lounging behind a racing form.

“Paddy just asked for you,” she said to me.

The big racing fan lowered his paper and focused his tiny eyes on the intercom next to Peggy’s elbow, a puzzled expression on his face. I guessed from that that Paddy hadn’t requested my presence via the little black box. I was less puzzled than our guest, being used to the Maguires’ telepathy act. Still, I verified the order.

“He wants me right now?”

“Five minutes ago,” Peggy said.

The linebacker made a move as though to block me. Then my “I beg your pardon” flummoxed him all over again. I stepped around him and opened Paddy’s double doors.

I got flummoxed then myself. My boss, in shirtsleeves, was standing next to his desk facing two goons bigger than the one I now had behind me. They’d both glanced my way, though neither was giving me his full attention.

“Scotty!” Paddy boomed. “The very man I wanted to see. Show these gentlemen the trick you do with the gun.”

Just showing them a gun would have been a trick right then, as I wasn’t carrying one. But I did my best to oblige.

“Nothing up my sleeve,” I said, raising my left arm and tugging on my suit coat to display more shirt cuff.

That got them interested. When they were good and turned my way, Paddy grabbed them by their collars and knocked their heads together. He held on to one with his left hand and tossed the other at me.

He tossed him so hard that the guy was still dancing like Ray Bolger when he arrived at my end of the room. I could have tagged him while he was off balance, only his friend with the racing form grabbed me from behind. Paddy’s special delivery hit me square in the chest, and the three of us tumbled out through the office door, landing in a heap in front of Peggy’s desk.

The next thing I saw was Peggy coming over that desk — all eighty pounds of her — yelling, “Hey, Rube!”

That was a universal distress call among the lower strata of show business, and it brought two Hollywood Security operatives charging out of our back room: Lange, our resident lion tamer, and our current rookie, whose name was Mahoney. Or maybe they were drawn by the sound of my playmates and me rolling into the Christmas tree.

After that, as battlefield reports sometimes put it, the fighting became general. When it was over, our side held the field. It was very nearly a Pyrrhic victory, there being sufficient bloody noses, split lips, and budding black eyes to go around. And our aluminum tree wasn’t even up to cleaning drains now.

Only Paddy seemed to have come through unscathed. He emerged from his office smoking a new cigar and adjusting his coat and hat. I thought he might have talked his way through the late unpleasantness until I went to collect our third guest and found him slumped against Paddy’s desk, asking what round it was.

When he and I rejoined the others, Paddy left off examining Peggy’s bleeding lip. He told her to avoid mistletoe and turned to Lange and me.

“We’re taking these gentlemen back to their employer, Tip Fasano. Dress for the occasion. I’d suggest forty-five caliber.”

“Call the police,” Peggy told him.

“There’s no police can get us out of this one,” Paddy said, and his sober tone quieted her. “There is a call you can make for me, though,” he added. “Try that emergency number Wally Wilfong left. Set up a meeting.”

That reminded me of a little telephone business of my own. While Peggy daubed at a cut above my eyebrow with a handkerchief, I told her all I knew about Professor Carey and asked her to set up a call with him for later that day.

5

Once upon a time, Tip Fasano had operated out of a barbershop on Figueroa, where he’d played at cutting hair himself. Nowadays, he played at being a business executive, using a swanky office in the Valley, near Universal Studios. We caravanned out there, Paddy, Lange, and the three wise men riding in style in our new pals’ black Cadillac Fleetwood, and me tagging along behind in my Packard.

Fasano’s office was the headquarters of his legitimate business, which sold supplies to barbershops and beauty salons, so we didn’t have to shoot our way in. Or even state our business. The girl receptionist took one look at our parade of walking wounded and waved us right through.

The gambler’s office dwarfed Paddy’s to about the same degree that the Fleetwood had shaded my Clipper. The carpet was royal blue, and the walls it ran between were the same color in a lighter shade. All around were pedestals holding bits of broken statuary that looked like they’d just been dug up in Pompeii. The owner of the hardware sat behind a big block of mahogany that had brushed chrome inlays running around it like the straps on a steamer trunk.

Fasano wasn’t what you’d call handsome — his nose had been stepped on at some point in his career — but in the seven or eight years I’d known him, he hadn’t aged a bit. His hair was still dark and wavy, the skin well tanned, the whites of his eyes as clear as a baby’s. Those whites were visible briefly as we trooped in. Then Fasano went back to his trademark slit-eyed stare, which had chilled the blood of many a brave man, mine included.

Paddy seemed unaffected. “Salutations of the season, Tip,” he said. “Your elves got lost this morning and ended up in my office. I thought I’d bring them back before they got rolled by a crippled newsie.”

“Thanks,” Fasano said. “Talk to them any first?”

“As a matter of fact. They had some crazy notion that we’d taken over Wally Wilfong’s debts. I had to disabuse them.”

“They look disabused,” Fasano observed.

I found I was feeling sorry for the three torpedoes, even the one who’d poked me in the eye. The next page of dialogue cured me of that.

“Word on the street is you’re holding something valuable for Wilfong,” Fasano said. “Word also is that Wilfong is among the missing. So I think it would be better if I hold the pearl or painting or whatever the hell you’ve got, as security for Wilfong’s marker.”

Paddy said, “The only thing Wilfong left was a bad taste in my mouth. He had an old gun he claimed he could sell for a pile, but he didn’t trust us with it.”

“A gun worth real money? What, the one that plugged Lincoln?”

“Close,” Paddy said. “Wilfong also has an interested buyer. We’re to provide a bodyguard for the transfer. That’s the limit of our involvement.”

“Guess it’s my turn to do the disabusing, Maguire. You’re involved right up to your top chin. You might have roughed up my boys. You might even have the drop on me now. But the winning hand you don’t have. My organization’s a lot bigger than yours. And we know where to find you, day or night.”

He singled me out for an especially knife-edged stare. “Still married, Hollywood? Any kiddies yet?”

Paddy stepped between me and the desk, and Fasano chuckled.

“That’s right. Don’t dig a deeper hole for yourselves. I’m willing to overlook this morning’s carrying-on because you guys did me a favor once. But I’m not writing off what Wilfong owes me. That’s business. If I let myself be taken by a small-timer like that, the big fish will be spitting hooks all over town.

“So here’s the deal. You hand over this golden gun or you hand over the ten grand I’m owed or you hand over Wilfong. I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Now catch a breeze.”

Instead of leaving, Paddy stepped up to the desk, leaning over it. It didn’t look so big then. “Just so you know, Tip,” he said, “if all our chips are on the table, yours are, too. I’d play this hand real careful if I were you.”

“Good advice any time,” Fasano said. “Here’s a Christmas present in return. Wilfong doesn’t have to be breathing when you hand him over.”

6

Fasano’s receptionist stopped us on our way out. She had Peggy holding on the line for Paddy. During the call, he did more listening than talking and seemed more concerned with straightening the bow on the pot that held the receptionist’s poinsettia than with anything his wife was saying. We were almost to the Clipper before he let the other shoe drop.

“That number Wilfong left belonged to the girlfriend he’s been staying with. Seems they were visited last night by a guy with a German accent. Wilfong left with the caller and hasn’t come back. Drive us over to Sunset and Western, Scotty, and let’s hear the story firsthand.”

The girlfriend’s name was Dolly Palmer, and the front parlor of her third-floor walk-up had just enough room for her, the three of us, and a flocked tree. Palmer had hair bleached like motel sheets and a figure that was one bonbon away from overripe. Her face was kind, though, and might have been pretty if she hadn’t been crying.

“I knew something was wrong with Wally,” she told us. “He hasn’t been himself for a couple of weeks. Can I get you some coffee? An eggnog?”

“Maybe later,” Paddy said.

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 consulted 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, according 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.”

“Yes. I told him I’d sold it as soon as it had come out of pawn. Then he wanted to know who to. I told him I didn’t have the records anymore. The state doesn’t make me keep them that long. So then he bought another gun like the one he’d pawned.”

And Plan B had been launched, with the help of Nackenhorst’s bilingual nephew. The old man picked at a patched elbow and asked if I needed anything else.

“Just the name of the buyer of the original Browning,” I said.

“I told you—”

I poked him in the S for Stanford, but gently. “You strike me as the sort who has a hard time throwing away bottle caps, never mind ledgers. Dig out the one for ’forty-five, and I’ll be on my way.”

I thought that would be the start of a long negotiation, but I was wrong. Nackenhorst considered me while chewing a withered lip, weighing me in some mental balance as he had Wilfong and God knew how many others.

Then he said, “Somebody should tell her. Before she reads about it in the paper.”

He wrote something on the back of a business card — the very one I’d given him the day before — and passed it over.

“Guess you’ll do as well as anybody,” he said. “Better, maybe.”

11

It took me awhile to decipher Nackenhorst’s scrawl, even though part of the name he’d written was quite familiar. “Wilfong’s mother?” I asked.

“Wife,” the old man said. “Ex-wife. She and I had an arrangement years ago. I’d let her know whenever Wally hocked something, and she’d buy it back.”

“Okay. So you remember her name. But how do you happen to have her address down by heart after all these years?”

“I looked it up after Wilfong came by. I meant to call on her, to let her know he was looking for the gun. Mrs. Wilfong made me promise years ago not to tell Wally about our deal. That’s why I didn’t tell him who had the Browning. I thought about going to see her, but I never did. Christmas rush and all. It might have saved him if I had.”

I patted the pawn broker’s arm. “He was playing his own long shot by then,” I said.

The address Nackenhorst had given me belonged to a bungalow court apartment on Rosewood, and the party in question no longer lived there. But the custodian had saved a forwarding address, which he coughed up for a fin. His special holiday rate.

The new address took me out to Echo Park, to a prewar cottage on a street lined with them. Most were decorated for the big holiday, and a few were overdecorated. The one I was after erred on the tasteful side, each window holding a single electric candle. I considered that a very apt touch.

Mrs. Wilfong, first name Rosemary, was a little old for the Debbie Reynolds ponytail she had her hair in. She was as slim as Reynolds, though, and had the regulation upturned nose. Her eyes were a washed-out hazel and her full mouth was turned down at the ends like the grille on my Packard. The expression looked as welded-on as the Packard’s, too. Then suddenly it softened.

I figured my black eye had aroused her maternal instincts until she said, “Scott Elliott. From Paramount. We all thought you were going to be the next big thing.”

“We?”

“The girls in the Paramount front office. I worked there before the war. We were all pulling for you.”

“My draft board pulled harder,” I said. “May I come in?”

She hesitated. I thought she might be expecting company. She was dressed for some, in a chocolate-brown blouse whose upturned collar and half-sleeve cuffs were trimmed in sawtooth lines of pink, and a full pink skirt that had zigzag stripes of the blouse’s brown.

I added, “I won’t be long.”

“I don’t have long,” she said. “We’re having our Christmas luncheon today. I work for an insurance company now. Not as glamorous as Paramount, but it’s steady.”

Rosemary had a real tree, unflocked. It stood in a corner of her front room, beside some built-in shelves. On one of these rested a hand-tinted portrait of her ex-husband, circa 1942. Ella kept a similar one of me in the same uniform with the same dopey smile on my face.

Rosemary’s own smile had headed off to the party without her, maybe because I’d stared at the photo too long. “Are you here about Wally?” she asked.

“You met him at Paramount?”

“Yes. He was going to be running the place someday. That was the joke he always made. It didn’t work out.”

“Is that what broke you two up?”

“No,” she said. “I never wanted any of that. I’m not sure Wally really wanted it when we got married in nineteen forty-one. But after the war, when he’d convinced himself that he’d been cheated out of his life, he wanted it badly. By the end, it was all he wanted.”

Rosemary had been addressing her front windows. Now she turned to face me. “Wally’s in some kind of trouble, isn’t he?”

“Not anymore,” I said.

I told her the whole story then, complete with a flashback set on a crowded troop ship. She cried a little and asked to be excused for a minute. She came back with a shoe box and a story of her own.

“After the war, when Wally started to sell off his things, I tried to buy them back. I thought he’d want them someday when he was himself again. I got to know Mr. Nackenhorst, and he’d call me whenever Wally came into his shop.”

She handed me the box. It was packed tightly with pieces of Wilfong’s life. Among other fragments, I found a Bronze Star, a silver cigarette case, and a small automatic, a Browning .32.

As I checked the serial number against the four I’d written down in my official operative’s notebook, I was reminded of the moment in The Maltese Falcon when Sidney Greenstreet finally gets his hands on the black bird for which he’d given so much of his life. I felt a little of the same nervous anticipation, which was crazy. I hadn’t chased the little automatic around the world or even the country. Still, as Wilfong had said, all our lives had been turned upside down by those long-ago murders in Sarajevo. And maybe the popgun I held in my moist palm had been the lever.

Unfortunately, the scene played out exactly like the one in the Greenstreet movie. The serial number of Wilfong’s Browning didn’t match. He’d won a lead falcon in that crap game after all. I put the Browning back in the shoe box, or tried to.

“Take that with you,” Rosemary said.

“It’s not one of the Sarajevo guns,” I said. “Nobody will come after it.”

“I don’t care. It’s the gun that killed Wally. Not whatever he used down in Mexico.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me either,” Rosemary said. “I mean, I’ll never understand why Wally wouldn’t let any of that go. Why he had to stay in the one town in America where he was a failure when he could have gone anywhere else and been a success. Why the things he’d lost meant so much more to him than the things he still had.

“You said Patrick Skidmore told you that Wally got upset when he realized he’d pawned a gun that might be worth a few dollars more than he’d gotten for it. Did that make sense to you? It makes perfect sense to me. I watched Wally fret himself into a whole new man over his lost chances. It was a man I couldn’t live with, not even for the love of the man he’d once been. Take the gun, please.”

I pocketed the automatic, and Rosemary saw me to the door. When I was on the front step, she asked who she could call about bringing Wally home to be buried. I told her I’d set it up.

She said, “Of course you will,” and smiled again, adding, musingly, “Scott Elliott. From Paramount.”

12

Something about Rosemary Wilfong’s parting words kept prodding me in the gut as I drove away. I decided it was the mention of our old employer, hers and mine and Wilfong’s, Paramount. My showing up on her doorstep had revived the past for her, as Skidmore’s call had done for her ex. For him, it had been one more reminder of lost chances and, as it turned out, one reminder too many. But for Rosemary, closing the circle had been comforting somehow. I was a messenger from happier times, from a world of make-believe and Hollywood endings. I’d even promised to deliver one of those endings, in the form of a dead husband she could bury, perhaps with his Bronze Star pinned to his chest.

I found myself hoping that burying the past would work out for Rosemary. It was what her ex-husband should have done. Wilfong should have taken that phony Browning he’d bought from Nackenhorst and thrown it into Santa Monica Bay as a symbol of all the past chances he was putting behind him, once and for all.

On impulse, I decided to do it for Wilfong, using the Browning he’d left behind. Or maybe I was doing it for myself. My postwar life had turned out differently, thanks to Ella and Paddy, but I still had my share of regrets to bury in the form of a likely proxy.

I was a long way from the bay, but I happened just then to be passing a cross street that ended in midair. A new freeway overpass was being built, an everyday occurrence around greater Los Angeles. This effort was fairly far along. The foundation walls were already up on the far side of the cut. On the side where I parked my car, a form of plywood and scaffolding was awaiting its convoy of cement trucks, which would probably arrive right after the Christmas break.

Access to the site was controlled by a sawhorse painted yellow and a length of chain-link fencing that was a foot or two short of what they’d needed. I squeezed through the resulting gap and walked to the end of the pavement, where I could look down into the big mold.

Inside was a web of reinforcing steel, so tightly woven that Tiny Tim himself couldn’t have climbed to the bottom. I waited for a break in the traffic behind me before I pulled out the Browning. I didn’t say a prayer for Wilfong, though he probably could have used one. I knew Rosemary would take care of that. I just tossed the gun in, listened to it rattle its way down through the rebar, and headed back to work.