Melting Clock

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “I will,” I said. “Can I have Doc Hodgdon give you call?”

  Phil shrugged. “Ruth’s got great teeth,” he said. “The kids all have her teeth.”

  “Wouldn’t be so bad if they had our teeth,” I said.

  “You know how old mom was when she died?” he asked.

  “Forty-three,” I said. I wasn’t likely to forget. She died giving birth to me, which, I was sure, was one of the reasons Phil had decided before he even saw me that he would make my life miserable.

  “Ruth is forty-three,” he said.

  “Come on, Phil. It’s …”

  The opening door stopped me.

  Seidman. He looked at me and then at Phil’s back and then back at me. I shrugged.

  “You can walk,” he said to me, and then to Phil, “Liebowitz says he’s doing the papers and wants you to sign off. He says you answer to the D.A.”

  Phil laughed. It didn’t seem very important to him. I got up and moved to the door.

  “I’ll call Ruth,” I said.

  “Thirteenth Street, Town of the Spectator,” Phil answered. “You got till midnight.”

  There should have been more, but there wasn’t. Phil didn’t want more and I didn’t know how to give it.

  I moved past Seidman, went down the hall past the Coke machine and down the stairs to the desk to pick up my things. I signed for everything and got it all back except for the note to Dali. I didn’t complain.

  I took a cab back to Lindberg Park, paid with Dali’s advance and made a note of the payment and tip as an expense item in my notebook. Across the street a cop was standing at the door to Place’s place. He looked at me suspiciously. My khaki Crosley had been sitting there all night and was hard to miss. I got in the passenger side of the Crosley, which I had not locked the night before, and slid into the driver’s seat. I was halfway down the block before the cop got into the street. In the rear-view mirror, I could see him writing my license number. I hope he got a merit badge.

  It was Saturday. Kids were out playing. Lawns were being watered and I had till midnight to find a painting on Thirteenth Street.

  Manny’s was open for breakfast. Since it was a weekday and a little after eight in the morning, I had no trouble finding a parking space right on Hoover. Two days in a row. How lucky could I get?

  Manny’s Saturday breakfast crowd was there, including Juanita the fortune teller, who had an office in the Farraday. I liked Juanita, a shapeless sack of a woman who dressed as if she were trying out for a road company production of Carmen. Out of Juanita’s overly painted lips sometimes came a zinger that made me think she might be the real thing.

  She spotted me over her cup of coffee and said, “Give me one at Santa Anita, Peters.”

  “You’re the fortune teller,” I said, sitting next to her on a red leatherette stool.

  “I can’t use it for myself,” she said. “I told you that. If I could use it for myself, you think I’d be half a month back on my rent?”

  “No,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “You look like a wreck.”

  Manny had started a breakfast taco when he saw me walk through the door. Manny was a culinary master of impeccable taste. He always took the cigarette out of his mouth when he served a customer, and he changed his apron at least twice a month. He was about forty, dark, with a bad leg he claimed to have earned riding with Pancho Villa as a kid.

  “She’s right,” said Manny, putting the breakfast taco, black coffee, and a Pepsi in front of me.

  “Spent a night in the Culver City lockup,” I explained, picking up the taco and trying not to lose too much hot sauce, avocado, and egg. “Guy got murdered.”

  Manny handed me the morning paper and strolled back to the grill, a man of little curiosity. Nothing could match his adventures, real or invented, with Villa.

  “A dead man will do it,” Juanita said.

  “What?”

  “Someone’s going to be killed by a guy name Guy,” she said, looking into her coffee. I leaned over to see what was in the cup. Nothing but darkness and the same day-old java I was drinking.

  “You talking to me?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Someone’s going to be killed by a guy named Guy or Greg in Mark’s town. I just saw it in the coffee.”

  “Who killed the guy last night?” I asked, taking another bite of breakfast taco and nodding to Manny to get another. He was way ahead of me.

  “How should I know?” Juanita said. “This stuff just comes.”

  I told her about the dead guy and the messages.

  “Beats crap out of me,” she said, getting off her stool while I took the last bite of taco and reached for the Pepsi. “I’ve got to get to work. Got three mothers coming. Kids, the soldiers, sailors, they don’t come. They don’t want to know what’s going to happen to them. It’s the mothers who want to know.”

  “What do you tell them?” I asked.

  “Lies, usually,” Juanita said. “Remember, Greg or Guy’s going to do it in Mark’s town. Oh yeah, this Greg or whatever has a beard.”

  She left and I read the paper and finished my coffee. The news was good. U.S. bombers were battering the Japs on Wake Island, and the Russians were still pushing back the Nazis. Basil “The Owl” Banghart and Roger “The Terrible” Touhy were going to Alcatraz after escaping from Stateville in Illinois, where they were doing a long haul on kidnapping. There was a picture of Banghart in the paper. He did look a little like an owl.

  I finished my breakfast, dropped a buck on the counter, and waved at Manny, who leaned back with his arms crossed and nodded, smoke curling up into his face as he dreamed of that last cavalry charge against Black Jack Pershing.

  I could tell Jeremy had been up and at work as soon as I opened the outer door of the Farraday. The smell of Lysol was unmistakable. It’s a smell I like. I like the smell of gasoline, too.

  I went into the suite of Minck and Peters. Shelly wasn’t there. His party hat sat on the dental chair as if he had melted and left only it and the odor of his last cigar. I went into my office, opened the window, sat down, and called my sister-in-law Ruth.

  “How you doing, Ruth?” I asked cheerfully.

  “Fine, Toby,” she said.

  “Happy New Year,” I said.

  “You know, don’t you, Toby.”

  “Know? Know what?”

  “You’re brothers,” she said lightly. “I could tell the way you said ‘Happy New Year.’ He told you? You saw him?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “I know people always say this but if there’s anything I can do …”

  “You can do a lot, Toby,” she said. “You can come over here tomorrow for dinner. You can take the kids out to the park so I can spend some time with Phil. He’s taking it hard.”

  “I know,” I said. “Are you?”

  “Taking it harder.”

  “It’ll be all right,” I assured her. “I told Phil I know surgeon who’ll know the right guy.”

  “Thanks, Toby,” she said.

  “They can take care of those things now,” I said. “Army’s developed all kinds of … hell, I don’t know what I’m talking about, Ruth.”

  “Odds I’ve heard are about three-to-one in my favor,” she said. “Before the war they were three-to-one against. I guess war is good for something. Gives doctors a lot of practice and a chance to experiment on dying men.”

  “Ruth—”

  “I’ve been lucky, Toby. My husband was too old to be drafted and my sons are too young.”

  “I’ll come by tomorrow at noon,” I said. “That okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Toby, do you realize this is the longest conversation we’ve ever had?”

  “Yeah, we finally had something to talk about.”

  She laughed on the other end and said, “Lucy wants to talk to you.”

  Lucy was Phil and Ruth’s youngest, somewhere between two and three. When she was one she used to clobber me with her favorite toy, a Yale p
adlock.

  “Uncle Toby?” came a small voice.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Moon is ca-ca,” she said seriously.

  “Sometimes I think you’re right, kid,” I said, and either Lucy or Ruth hung up.

  Next call was to Doc Hodgdon, who was retired but still saw a few patients in his home. He wanted to know when we could get together for handball. I told him it would have to wait till I finished the case I was on. I told him about Ruth and he said he knew a few people. I gave him Phil and Ruth’s number and promised to call him next week.

  Then I made the call I dreaded. Barry T. Zeman answered the phone.

  “It’s me, Toby Peters,” I said.

  “Did you find them?” he said.

  “I found one of the paintings and one of the clocks. Is Dali there?”

  “They never leave the house,” he said. “He doesn’t like the outdoors. She goes running out when he needs something or she asks me to send my driver, J.T. The houseboy quit the second day they were here. The cook asked for a week off. Actually, he said he would be gone until the Dalis left. The housekeeper, who has worked for my family for thirty-eight years, has suddenly discovered an ailing relative in Lac Le Biche in Alberta, Canada.”

  “Life is hard,” I admitted. “Can I talk to Dali? He’s the client. He can fill you in.”

  He put the phone down and I waited. Gala came on.

  “Yes?” she said eagerly.

  “The Place in the note was a man named Adam Place. He’s dead, murdered. The police have one of the paintings and one of the clocks. The killer, or maybe Place, ruined the painting and left a message.”

  I told her about Thirteenth Street and Dali came on the phone.

  “Which painting?” he asked.

  I described the painting.

  “You must find the other ones.”

  I told him about Thirteenth Street.

  “Ah,” he said. “A mystical number. I once had a dream of a crystal with exactly thirteen sides floating in a hole in the head of a giant beast who sat on an enormous egg. I painted that image in a fit of rage in a single day and had to rest for a week.”

  “That’s very helpful,” I said.

  “It is,” he said with great seriousness, “alchemical. Find the other paintings. Find Gala’s clocks. Find them. My dreams are filled with fathers and the naked breasts of faceless women.”

  It could be worse, I thought, but I said, “A man’s been murdered. Shot between the eyes. It might be a good idea to let the police know what’s going on.”

  “No,” said Dali.

  That’s not really accurate. He didn’t say “no,” he screamed. A nearly hysterical “nooooooooooooooo.”

  “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have anything,” I said when the wail had played itself out.

  “I am plagued,” he wailed anew. “Who is this Wollowa Beckstine on the radio who they keep telling the time?”

  “What?”

  “It’s five o’clock Wollowa Beckstine,” he said solemnly.

  “Bulova Watch Time,” I explained.

  “Bulova Watch Time,” Dali repeated. And then, “Dali can’t work.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dali’s work is an obligation, a burden.” It was almost a sob. “Do you know how difficult it is to shock the world every twenty-four hours?”

  “It’s the curse of painters and politicians,” I said.

  “You are making a joke? You are joking at Dali?”

  Gala took over the phone, her voice shaking. “Dali does not like to be the ass of jokes.”

  “The butt of jokes,” I corrected.

  “No, he says ‘ass’ of jokes. In the world of Salvador Dali, all jokes are made by Salvador Dali.”

  She hung up.

  There is nothing like an appreciative client.

  I went in search of Jeremy Butler. He’d solved the riddle of the first message for me. Maybe he could solve the second one in time for me to save a painting and maybe a life. Besides, I needed to hear a reasonably sane voice.

  5

  Most women would have been wary about answering a door to an apartment in a nearly empty downtown L.A. office building, but Alice Pallis did not hesitate. Alice feared neither man nor beast … nor robot Alice was a formidable creature of no mean proportions who, less than a year ago, when she was still in the porno business, had hoisted a two-hundred-pound printing press and carried it four flights down the fire escape when the cops came calling.

  When I stepped in, Natasha was lying on a blanket on the floor of the huge open room, which only a few months earlier had been brown, leather, musty, and filled with books. Since Alice and Jeremy had married, the room had brightened considerably. Alice had replaced all of the furniture with flowered sofas and a huge pink and purple rug covered the floor.

  Natasha lay gurgling and playing with the pages of a thick blue-covered book.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked.

  Alice smiled beautifully at her infant daughter. Natasha nibbled gently at the corner of the book.

  “She absorbs,” said Alice.

  “What’s she reading?” I asked.

  “Fairy tales. Andersen. Jeremy believes that she should be surrounded by the proper books; that the words, the stories, come alive in the hands of one who is prepared to learn.”

  “You believe that?” I asked.

  “I’m learning,” she said.

  “I need Jeremy.”

  “It’s his meditation time,” said Alice. “He’s at Pershing Square. When he comes back he’s going to read a fairy tale to Natasha.”

  Natasha stopped gnawing and looked up at me. She smiled. I left feeling a little better than when I had walked in.

  Finding Jeremy was no great problem. I walked over to Pershing Square, which wasn’t quite deserted, but it wasn’t as crowded as it usually was, possibly because it looked like rain. A little guy who was shivering in spite of the eighty-degree temperature was standing on a box, a Chiquita Banana box, pounding his left fist into his right palm and shouting.

  Jeremy and about five other men stood listening. Jeremy towered over the others and seemed to pay the most attention to the little guy. I started to say something to Jeremy; he put a finger to his lips to quiet me. I noticed a magazine under his arm. We turned to listen to the little man who was saying:

  “… and the first step will be a temporary prohibition of alcoholic beverages based on wartime need. That’s the way the Eighteenth Amendment came last time, after the war, and they’re talking about it again. Temporary will become permanent and the bootleggers, gangsters, and politicians will lobby to keep it that way, and the country will agree to keep it that way because it will add to the underground economy, and who will suffer?”

  He looked around for an answer. The six of us didn’t have an answer. Jeremy didn’t drink and I was good for a Rainier beer about once a month. So the little guy answered for us.

  “I’ll suffer and people like you and me will suffer. The alcoholics, the winos. Drinking will go back to the middle classes. It’ll be a game. For us it’s a damn necessity and we’re the ones who’ll suffer. Now isn’t some straight citizen out there going to tell me I’ll be better off?”

  He looked around for a straight citizen to do battle with him. Jeremy and I were the closest thing to it in the small group. No one wanted to mess with Jeremy.

  “Not me,” I said.

  “Then amen to you, brother,” said the little man, clutching himself as the first drops of rain came. One man in the small group shuffled off.

  “It’s not the government’s job to save my life or tell me what’s good for me,” he said. “Why not ban smoking? Coffee? As long as I don’t hurt you, you’ve got no right to hurt me.”

  Two more in the dwindling crowd went for shelter as the rain got a little more serious. The little man was shivering seriously now but he didn’t plan to give up, though there were only three of us left.

  “The brewers, th
e distilleries, they’re going to fight it, but they lost before and they’ll lose again. I’m going to run for Congress and in Congress I’m going to fight, scream, and filibuster for the right of every man to have a drink when he wants or to goddammit commit suicide with dignity if he wants.”

  The rain was serious now. The man next to Jeremy moved forward and helped the shivering little man from the box. He picked up the banana crate and led the little man toward the shelter of a store awning nearby. Jeremy and I moved the other way under the protection of a wind-blown tree.

  “That man used to be a senator,” he said, rubbing the sheen of water from his smooth head. “Not a state senator, a United States senator. Without conviction and cause he would be dead in a few months. Every man needs a joy of life or a sense of meaning.”

  “No quarrel with that,” I said, and then as the rain imprisoned us in darkness against the trunk of the tree, I told him what had happened since I had last seen him.

  “The streets in Santa Monica are numbered,” I said. “But there is no Thirteenth there either. Thirteenth Euclid.”

  “Spectator,” Jeremy said pensively.

  “You’ve got an idea,” I said hopefully.

  He took the magazine from under his arm and showed it to me. It was the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly. He flipped it open, found what he was looking for, and read to me:

  “Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the silent films of yore.”

  He closed the magazine and looked at me.

  “That’s nice, Jeremy.” I felt a chill creeping through my soaked windbreaker.

  “It’s in a short story by a young man named Vladimir Nabokov,” he explained. “You have forgotten a house, Toby Peters.”

  “Can you help me remember, Jeremy?”

  “It is never so meaningful as when one remembers oneself,” he admonished.

  “Then I’ll regret my loss,” I said. “While you’re trying to improve my mind …”

  “Your soul,” he corrected.

  “My soul,” I accepted. “Another person could be murdered.”

  “Why does the note say ‘Señor’?” asked Jeremy.

  “The note’s to Dali. He’s Spanish,” I said.