The gun was a 22-calibre Browning, sleek and black, with four bullets in its magazine.

“What should I do?” Abba Biya asked me. He owns a second-hand furniture shop around the corner from my house. I’d been walking by with my kids when he called me inside for advice.

A customer had found that gun in a bedroom dresser drawer, screamed and run out of the store, he said. The gun now sat on an antique chair.

“Call the cops,” I said.

“I’m a black guy,” Biya said. “Small things can destroy me. People will think I’m selling drugs.”

Biya came to Canada 16 years ago with nine bullets lodged in his body. He fought in the Ethiopian army for nine years. He knows guns.

This gun, he said, looks too old to be involved in a crime scene.

I prevailed upon him. He phoned the police.

They came to his shop, asked some questions and took the gun away for testing, to see if it was linked to any documented crime scenes.

“Found” handguns are very common, police officers later told me. “In some areas of the city, you’d think they grew on trees, so many are found,” said Det. Michael Grierson, who heads the Toronto police’s firearm investigation and analysis unit.

Last year, police recovered around 1,000 handguns, and only 300 were “crime guns.”

This was news to me. In my small life, a “found” handgun is a big deal.

I went back to Biya’s shop without my children a few days later.

Biya opened the place only two years ago, but he knows everyone in the neighbourhood. He’s a natural salesman. Twice a week, he gets a manicure, packs some business cards in his suit pocket and heads out to Yorkville to make new clients. Most of his business is clearing out estate homes. He dumps the clothes and books at Goodwill, and brings the good stuff to his store.

That bedroom dresser came from a house a few blocks away, he told me. It was the home of a former naval officer — he’d found four Second World War medals and a bugle. A nearby lawyer had hired Biya to clear out the house.

I called the lawyer. The man’s name, he said, was Kenneth Harrison. He’d grown up in the house and died there in his 80s. He had no living relatives, except for an older brother with advanced Alzheimer’s, who’d inherited the house after Harrison died and left it empty for four years.

Why would Kenneth Harrison have a handgun?

“I have no idea,” the lawyer said. “It might have been navy-issued.”

I cycled over to Harrison’s former house and knocked on the doors of his former neighbours. Many of them were new to the street. They didn’t know any of their neighbours, they said. The old-timers, though, had some stories.

During those four years, raccoons had moved into his house and his garage had collapsed on the 1951 Morris Minor he’d inherited from his mother but never driven.

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Harrison, they told me, was reclusive. When he went out during the day, he wore a suit jacket and dark glasses. He cut his grass and shovelled his driveway — with an ice scraper, no less — only at night.

After the war, he’d worked for a company fixing typewriters. But then, he’d contracted tuberculosis and stopped working.

He’d lived in that house his entire life, save for the war and the short time he was married.

“I’ve lived here for 30 years, he never said a word to me,” said Eric Spurrell.

“Once in a while he’d speak to me, but mostly he’d just nod his head,” said Murray Harper, who lived a few houses away from Harrison for 65 years before moving to Barrie. “I didn’t know he had a gun. I didn’t think he was that type of person. Maybe he had it for his own security.”

Harrison’s home has been resold already for a handsome price. All his former furniture — including that dresser — was quickly purchased and moved into other people’s homes. His medals are now part of a collection owned by another Danforth business owner.

And soon, his gun will disappear too.

Grierson told me police testing revealed it had no criminal history.

It’s slated to be destroyed.

When it is, the final memory of Kenneth Harrison will melt away.

As much as I dislike guns and encourage their destruction, the end of this story makes me feel sad.

Catherine Porter usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: cporter@thestar.ca