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.”