I was in the heart of the fur market, a few square blocks that added up to an ecologist’s nightmare. Several hundred small businesses were all clustered together, sellers of hides and pelts, manufacturers of coats and jackets and bags and accessories, wholesalers and retailers and somewhere-in-betweeners, dealers in trimming and by-products and fastenings and buttons and bows. The particular place I was looking for was on the far side of the avenue a couple doors west on Twenty-ninth Street. There Arvin Tannenbaum occupied the entire third floor of a four-story loft building.
A coffee shop, closed for the weekend, took up the ground floor. To its right was a door opening onto a small hallway which led to an elevator and the fire stairs. The door was locked. The lock did not look terribly formidable.
The dog, on the other hand, did. He was a Doberman, bred to kill and trained to be good at it, and he paced the hallway like an institutionalized leopard. When I approached the door he interrupted his exercise and gave me all his attention. I put a hand on the door, just out of curiosity, and he crouched, ready to spring. I withdrew my hand, but this did not mollify him much.
I wished Carolyn were with me. She could have given the bastard a bath. Clipped his nails, too, while she was at it. Filed his teeth down a bit.
I don’t screw around with guard dogs. The only way I could think to get past this particular son of a bitch was to spray poison on my arm and let him bite me. I gave him a parting smile, and he growled low in his throat, and I went over and broke into the coffee shop.
That wasn’t the easiest thing in the world-they had iron gates, like the ones at Barnegat Books-but it was more in my line of work than doing a wild-animal act. The gate had a padlock, which I picked, and the door had a Yale lock, which I also picked. No alarms went off. I drew the gate shut before closing the door. Anyone who took a close look would see it was unfastened, but it looked good from a distance.
There was a door at the side of the restaurant that led to the elevator, but it unfortunately also led to the dog, which lessened its usefulness. I went back through the kitchen, opening a door at the rear which led into an airless little airshaft. By standing on a garbage can, I could just reach the bottom rung of the fire escape. I pulled myself up and started climbing.
I would have gone right up to the third floor if I hadn’t noticed an unlocked window on the second floor. It was too appealing an invitation to resist. I let myself in, walked through a maze of baled hides, climbed a flight of stairs, and emerged in the establishment of Arvin Tannenbaum and Sons.
Not too many minutes later I left the way I’d come, walking down a flight, threading my way between the bales of tanned hides, clambering down the fire escape and hopping nimbly to earth from my perch on the garbage can. I stopped in the coffee-shop kitchen to help myself to a Hostess Twinkie. I can’t say it was just what I wanted, but I was starving and it was better than nothing.
I didn’t bother picking the lock shut after me. The springlock would have to do. But I did draw the gates shut and fasten the padlock.
Before returning to the Pontiac, I walked over to say goodbye to the dog. I waved at him and he glowered at me. From the look he gave me I could have sworn he knew what I was up to.
It was Mrs. Kirschmann who answered the phone. When I asked to speak to her husband she said “Just a minute,” then yelled out his name without bothering to cover the mouthpiece. When Ray came on the line I told him my ear was ringing.
“So?”
“Your wife yelled in it.”
“I can’t help that, Bernie,” he said. “You all right otherwise?”
“I guess so. What did you find out?”
“I got a make on the murder weapon. Porlock was shot with a Devil Dog.”
“I just ate one of those.”
“Huh?”
“Actually, what I ate was a Twinkie, but isn’t a Devil Dog about the same thing?”
He sighed. “A Devil Dog’s an automatic pistol made by Marley. Their whole line’s dogs of one kind or another. The Devil Dog’s a.32 automatic. The Whippet’s a.25 automatic, the Mastiff’s a.38 revolver, and they make a.44 Magnum that I can’t remember what it’s called. It oughta be something like an Irish Wolfhound or a Great Dane because of the size, but that’s no kind of name for a gun.”
“There’s a hell of a lot of dogs in this,” I said. “Did you happen to notice? Between the Junkyard Dog defense and the Marley Devil Dog and the Doberman in the hallway-”
“What Doberman in the hallway? What hallway?”
“Forget it. It’s a.32 automatic?”
“Right. Registration check went nowhere. Coulda been Porlock’s gun, could be the killer brought it with him.”
“What did it look like?”
“The gun? I didn’t see it, Bern. I made a call, I didn’t go down to the property office and start eyeballin’ the exhibits. I seen Devil Dogs before. It’s an automatic, so it’s a flat gun, not too large, takes a five-shot clip. The ones I’ve seen were blued steel, though you could probably get it in any kind of finish, nickel-plated or pearl grips, anything you wanted to pay for.”
I closed my eyes, trying to picture the gun I’d found in my hand. Blued steel, yes. That sounded right.
“Not a big gun, Bern. Two-inch barrel. Not much of a kick when you fire it.”
“Unless that’s how you get your kicks.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I frowned. It had seemed big, compared to the little nickel-plated item I’d seen in the Sikh’s enormous hand.
Which reminded me.
“Francis Rockland,” I said. “The cop who was wounded outside my bookshop. What gun was he shot with? Did you find that out?”
“You still say you weren’t there, huh?”
“Dammit, Ray-”
“Okay, okay. Well, he wasn’t shot with the Marley Devil Dog, Bern, because the killer left it on the floor of the Porlock apartment. Is that what you were gettin’ at?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh. You had me goin’ for a minute there. Rockland was shot-well, it’s hard to say what he was shot with.”
“No slug recovered?”
“Right. The bullet fragmented.”
“There must have been fragments to recover.”
He cleared his throat. “Now I’ll deny I said this,” he said, “but from what I heard, and nobody exactly spelled it out for me, but puttin’ two and two together-”
“ Rockland shot himself.”
“That’s how it shapes up to me, Bern. He’s a young fellow, you know, and bein’ nervous and all…”
“How bad were his injuries?”
“Well, it seems he lost a toe. Not one of the important ones.”
I thought of Parker, going around breaking important bones. Which toes, I wondered, were the important ones?
“What did you find out about Rockland?”
“Well, I asked around, Bern. The word I get is he’s young all right, which we already knew, but he’s also the kind of guy who can listen to reason.”
“How do you translate that?”
“I translate it Money Talks.”
“There’s not enough money in this one to make much noise,” I said. “Unless he’ll operate on credit.”
“You’re askin’ a lot, Bern. The poor kid lost a toe.”
“He shot it off himself, Ray.”
“A toe’s a toe.”
“You just said it wasn’t an important one.”
“Even so-”
“Would he settle for future payment if he got a piece of the bust? If he’s the ambitious kid you say he is, he’d be crazy not to.”
“You got a point.”
I had more than a point. I had a whole bunch of things to tell him, some of which provoked argument, some of which did not. At the end I told him to take it easy and he told me to take care.
It sounded like good advice for both of us.
The owner of Milo Arms, Inc., had a commendable sense of humor. His Yellow Pages ad showed the company trademark, the Venus de Milo’s limbless torso with a holster on her hip. Who could resist?
I make it a point to stay out of gun shops, but one thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t generally notice them. They’re almost invariably located one flight above street level. I guess they’re not that keen on the drop-in trade and the impulse shoppers.