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.