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.
Milo Arms didn’t break the rule. They had the second floor of a weary red brick building on Canal between Greene and Mercer. The shop on the ground floor sold plumbing supplies and the upper floors bad been carved into residential units. I was loitering in the vestibule, reading names on doorbells, when a young couple left the building, the smell of an illicit herb trailing after them. The girl giggled infectiously while her escort held the door for me.
The gun-shop door was a solid wooden one with the torso-cum-holster motif repeated, along with an extensive list of the death-dealing items on sale within. There was the usual run of locks, plus a padlock on the outside.
I gave a knock and was reassured to hear neither a human response nor the guttural greeting of an attack dog. Just blessed silence. I got right to work.
The locks weren’t much trouble. The padlock had a combination dial that looked like an interesting challenge, and if I hadn’t been out in public view and urgently pressed for time, I might have sandpapered my fingertips and tried out my Jimmy Valentine impression. Instead I tried my hacksaw blade on the thing, and when that didn’t work—it was a damned good lock, made of damned good steel—I took the easy way out and unscrewed the hasp from its mounting on the jamb. There’s tricks to every trade, and if you just live long enough you get to use ’em all.
God, what a grim place! I was only inside for five minutes or so, but what an uncomfortable five minutes they were. All those guns, all close together like that, reeking of oil and powder and whatever else it is that makes them smell the way they do. Infernal machines, engines of death and destruction, killers’ tools.
Ugh.
I locked up carefully on my way out. The last thing I wanted to do was make it easy for some maniac to rip off a wholesale lot of guns and ammo. I even took the time to remount the padlock, leaving the hasp more tightly bolted to the jamb than I’d found it.
Guns!
Busy, busy, busy.
I found Carolyn at the Poodle Factory, where she was catching up on her bookkeeping and not enjoying it much. “This is such an unpleasant business,” she said, “that you’d think there’d be money in it, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong. Well, at least there’s a big show coming up at the Armory.”
“Does that mean business for you?”
“Sure. You can’t win ribbons with a dirty dog.”
“That sounds like a proverb. How were the Blinns?”
“Their usual charming selves. I pigged out on shortbread.”
“Beats Twinkies and Devil Dogs. Was Gert happy to see her bracelet back?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“We mainly concentrated on the photographs,” she said, all crisp efficiency now. She spread out the four snapshots on the mottled Formica counter. “Gert never saw this guy before in her life,” she said, pointing. “She’s sure about that. She doesn’t think she saw this one, either, but she can’t swear to it.”
“But she recognized the other two?”
Her forefinger hovered above one of the snaps. She’d been nibbling the nail again, I noticed. “This dude,” she said, “has been around a lot. No idea when she first saw him but it was a while ago. He’s been there with Madeleine and he’s also been there alone, entering or leaving the building by himself.”
“Fascinating. What about our other friend?”
“Artie thinks he