Melting Clock

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Jeremy shook his head sadly, patiently.

  “The first note had ‘Place’ in capital letters,” he said. “And this one has ‘Street.’”

  “So,” I said, watching a woman dash across the street with a sheet of cardboard over her head. “Street is someone’s name. Where? There aren’t thirteen people named Street in the L.A. phone book.”

  “Señor,” said Jeremy, “it is in the Town of the Spectator.”

  “Hollywood,” I said.

  “In Spanish, spectator is mirador,” Jeremy explained.

  “Holy shit. Jeremy, remember when we were in Mirador about a year ago on the Hughes case, the sheriff was …”

  “Mark Nelson,” said Jeremy.

  A shot of thunder.

  “I don’t like things like this,” I said. “I like it straight and simple. I don’t like puzzles, and I sure as hell don’t want to risk running into Nelson. What am I going to do?”

  Jeremy looked down at me and said nothing.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m going to Mirador.”

  When the rain slowed enough to make it less than insane to do so, I headed back to the Farraday Building. When I got there, I put on a dry if not clean shirt I kept in my office and removed the .38 Smith & Wesson five-shot revolver I kept locked in the lower drawer. I almost never carried the gun. In the last five years, I had lost it three times, been shot by it once, and never used it to stop or even confront anyone threatening me. But now I was on the trail of a killer who was leaving clues like at a Crime Doctor movie, a killer who had made a third eye in the forehead of a taxidermist named Place and was ready to do something equally nasty to a citizen named Street.

  I made it to the Crosley with a newspaper over my head, got in and headed for the Pacific Coast Highway. The skies grumbled, stayed gray but stopped raining as I did my best to keep from thinking. It didn’t work. Try it some time.

  Was someone killing people just because their names left interesting clues? Did Place have anything to do with the Dali theft? If there was a Street in Mirador, was he or she a part of this or just a poor sap who happened to have the right name?

  An hour later I turned off the highway at the Mirador exit and two minutes later was on Main Street. I didn’t know if Mark Nelson was still sheriff. I hoped I didn’t have to find out. We hadn’t gotten along like arms-around-the-neck buddies.

  Downtown looked almost the same as it did the last time I had hit town. There were six store-front buildings on the main street. One of them was the sheriff’s office, another was a restaurant named Hijo’s. A place that used to sell “Live Bait” was now a hardware store, and three shops that used to be boarded up were now in business, though closed for the day. One of the shops, Old California, a few doors down from the sheriff’s office, sold antiques. The second specialized in “New and Used Clothes” and the third was Banyon’s Real Estate. The war boom had hit Mirador. There was no one on the street but a big guy in overalls looking into the window of the antique shop. Whatever was in there had his full attention. His face was flat against the window.

  I kept driving till I came to a gas station I remembered. It was open. I got the kid on duty to fill the Crosley and went in to look at his phone book. The kid, tall and pimply with straight corn-colored hair and overalls, came in and said, “Eighty-three cents.”

  “How many people live in Mirador?” I asked.

  He shrugged as I handed him a dollar.

  “Keep the change,” I said.

  “Maybe a few thousand if you count the rich ones who only come in the winter,” the kid said, pocketing the whole buck and putting nothing in the till.

  “There are thirty listings in the phone book for people named Street,” I said.

  “Lot of Streets,” he replied seriously.

  The inside of the station was small, crowded with stacks of oil cans and old Dime Detectives. It smelled of gasoline and musty pulp magazines.

  “Why?”

  “Streets founded the place,” he said. “My grandma on my ma’s side is a Street.”

  “The thirteenth Street listed in the phone book is a Claude Street,” I said. “On Fuller Drive. How do I get there?”

  “Claude’s probably in his shop,” said the kid, picking up a comic book and sitting in a wooden armchair behind a battered desk covered with old issues of Black Mask. “Spends most of his time there now that the tourists are back.”

  “And where’s his shop?” I tried.

  “Passed it on the way in. Old California Antiques on Main Street.”

  I was going to say thanks and leave, but the kid put his comic book down and came up with a rifle from nowhere.

  “Hands on your head,” he said, standing.

  I put my hands on my head.

  “Why are you asking all these questions about Mirador?”

  “I’m looking for Claude Str—”

  “You a Jap spy? No, maybe you’re a Nazi. Japs landed you in a submarine. I’ve been watching the beach a year. So have Andy and Dad.”

  “I drove up in a car, remember?” I reminded him as he reached for the phone.

  “Smart. I know you guys’re smart. I know you got big subs,” he said.

  “Not big enough to hold a car,” I tried.

  “Big enough to hold that little Jap car,” he said, nodding toward my Crosley.

  “It’s an American car. And how would they get it out of the submarine? Through the little trapdoor?”

  This gave him pause.

  “Smart,” he said.

  “I’m a private detective, undercover,” I said. “Call the sheriff. Call Mark Nelson. He knows me.”

  Yeah, I thought, Nelson knows me. He told me never to come back to Mirador unless I wanted to go through life walking like a sloth on my knuckles.

  “You know Sheriff Nelson?”

  “Like a brother.”

  He lowered the rifle and took his hand away from the phone. I slowly took my hands away from my head, without asking permission.

  “Sorry,” the kid said. “Just that we’ve been expecting the Japs for two years. We’re ready for them, too. I practice every Friday.”

  “Great,” I said. “They usually land at night. Keep a flashlight handy and get them one by one as they come out of the little door.”

  The kid nodded, taking in this sage advice. I gave him another dime for a Whiz candy bar and a Pepsi from the refrigerator in the corner and got back in my Crosley.

  Nothing was happening in the center of town and I felt less than comfortable parking near Sheriff Nelson’s office, but no one appeared on the street when I got out and headed for the door of the Old California Antique Shop. The guy in overalls who had been looking in the window was gone. I tried the door. Locked. I knocked. No answer. Through the window I could see shelves of curlicue lamps, clocks with gold-painted cupids, and fancy little boxes.

  It looked like the kid was wrong and Claude Street wasn’t at work. I couldn’t blame him. Business on the street wasn’t even good enough to be called bad. It wasn’t raining but looked as if it might. The rich people were probably in their beach houses with their binoculars and hunting rifles, waiting for the invasion.

  There was a narrow grassy space between the antique shop and the hardware store. It was worth a try. I walked between the buildings and found the back door of Old California. I didn’t knock this time. I tried the handle. The door opened. I went in and closed it behind me.

  I was in a back room, very dim. There were no windows, but there was a curtain across the door leading into the shop. The curtain was thin. I went in. A man, who for want of better information I took to be Claude, was lying on the floor, his legs sprawled across an overturned chair and a hole, a little bigger than the one in Adam Place’s forehead, in his throat. On a table, ticking happily and watching over the scene, was Gala Dali’s second clock. The glass face of the clock was broken and covered with blood. Over the clock, hanging from the wall was Dali’s second painting, a grasshopper sitting on an e
gg. The egg was cracked and a small human head and arm were trying to get out. The grasshopper seemed to be looking down at the human and I had the feeling that when the little guy got out he’d be grasshopper food. There was something else in the painting—or had been until someone had splashed green over the lower right-hand third of the canvas. Written in yellow over the green was,

  Time is running out. One clock. One painting.

  Last chance. Look where he ate the sardine.

  Claude was a slightly overweight man with a little yellow wig—I could tell it was a wig because it had fallen off when he fell—and round blue eyes locked on a not-very-interesting light fixture in the ceiling.

  To be sure he was who I thought he was, I checked his pocket and found his wallet. He was Claude Street, all right. I took a closer look at the Dali painting and saw a bloody handprint like a signature in the lower left-hand corner. The blood was still wet. I looked at the floor, listened to the ticking of Gala Dali’s clock, and let my eyes follow the trail of dripped paint to the curtain. I got my .38 in my hand, then moved to the curtain. I pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the front of the store. Nobody, at least nobody inside. Outside the window, standing in front of my Crosley, was the man I wished least to see, Sheriff Mark Nelson of Mirador.

  Nelson was a wiry little man, about forty, in a lightweight white suit and a straw hat. He squinted at me through the window as if unsure of what he was seeing. I stood still. He moved right up to the window, took off his straw hat, shielded his eyes with his right hand, and looked at me and the .38 in my hand.

  I considered my options, put the .38 back in my pocket and moved to open the front door of the Old California Antique Shop so the now-smiling sheriff could enter.

  “Mr. Toby Peters, you are a trial and a tribulation,” said Sheriff Nelson about five minutes later as he ushered me into his office two doors down from the Old California Antique Shop. “A trial and a tribulation. You were so on the occasion of our last meeting and you are once again.”

  The sheriffs office was a remodeled store about the same size as the one run by the recently deceased Claude Street, but the layout was different. There was a low wooden railing with a gate. Visitors on one side. Cops and robbers on the other. Nelson held the gate open for me and I went in, past a desk and chair with a bulletin board behind them full of notes, clippings, and “Wanted” posters. To the left was a cubbyhole of an office with “Sheriff” marked on the door. To the right were two cells, both with open doors, neither occupied.

  Nelson had my .38. He had taken it as soon as I had opened the door of the Old California Antique Shop. He had then walked through the curtain and seen Claude Street’s body. It was when he came back through the curtain the gun in his hand aimed at my chest, that he first declared me “a trial and tribulation.”

  Nelson pointed to the first cell. I stepped in. He closed it behind me.

  “There have been four murders in the history of this municipality,” he said, shaking his head and looking constipated.

  “The Indians probably killed each other from time to time before we came here,” I suggested. “And the Spanish—”

  “One of these murders, in 1930—” he went on.

  “Woman on the beach brained her husband with rock,” I recalled.

  Nelson smiled, a very pained smile.

  “You have a memory worthy of remark,” he said. “You are correct. The next murder we had was a little over one year ago and you were very much a thorn in my side during that episode. The third murder should not really count. A Mex farmer south of town shot a man who, he says, was engaged in an unappreciated folly with the Mex farmer’s wife. And now this. Mr. Toby Peters, you have been involved in one-half of the murders which have taken place in Mirador since I became sheriff.”

  There was a cot in the cell. I remembered it had a lurking spring. I sat down on the cot and looked up at Nelson, who was wiping the inside band of his straw hat.

  “I’m going to tell you something, sheriff,” I said. “I know you won’t do anything about it, but I’ll feel better having said it. The person who killed Claude Street can’t be far away. The paint on the picture and on the floor was still wet. He didn’t have a car parked, at least not nearby. Mine was the only one out there till you pulled up.”

  Nelson moved to the chair at the desk and sat. He looked at the phone and then swiveled the chair with a screech like teeth against a blackboard and glared at me.

  “I do not care for you, Mr. Peters,” he said. “That you may have surmised from my demeanor. The Municipality of Mirador has grown in population and industry since you were last here. Murder most violent is not conducive to tourism.”

  “I noticed the boomtown excitement,” I said.

  “See, there you are. Sarcasm. Big city sarcasm.” He plopped his straw hat on the desk and looked at the phone. “That’s what people move down here to get away from.”

  “Nelson,” I said. “Pick up the phone and call the Highway Patrol. This is out of your league.”

  “You are a truly vexing person,” he said. “I will indeed call the Highway Patrol in a few moments—to inform them that I have apprehended the murderer of a member of one of Mirador’s oldest families.”

  “Oldest,” I repeated. “Not most prominent, most beloved?”

  “Oldest will suffice,” said Nelson, looking away from me through the front window of the office. Two kids, one boy, one girl, both about ten, were walking down the middle of the street unthreatened by Mirador’s growth of population and industry. “And respected.”

  “Respected?”

  “Any family which is capable of contributing one hundred and six votes in a town of a little more than two thousand permanent residents is a respected family,” Nelson explained, letting his fingers touch the phone.

  “One hundred and five,” I corrected.

  “One hundred and six is what I said and what I meant,” Nelson said with irritation. “Mr. Claude Street was a newcomer to this community and had not yet registered to vote.”

  “Newcomer?”

  “One who has recently come,” Nelson said with a shake of his head, as if talking to a semi-retarded nephew, “from Carmel.” He said “Carmel” as if it were a particularly sticky and unpleasant word.

  “It was not easy to rent that store,” he said.

  “You own the store?”

  “If it is of any concern to you, I own all of downtown,” Nelson said, without enthusiasm. “And as you can see, it has made my fortune.”

  “Nelson, I didn’t kill Claude Street,” I said. “You know that.”

  His back was to me now and he was staring at the phone.

  “I know no such thing,” he said in total exasperation. “The evidence would suggest quite the contrary. I found you with a gun in your hand.”

  “It won’t match the bullet in Street’s neck.”

  Nelson’s sigh was enormous.

  “You could have shot him with another weapon that you disposed of or have hidden,” he said.

  “You’ve wasted a good five minutes.”

  “Do you know what I truly wanted to do with my existence?” he asked, picking up the phone and lifting the receiver off the hook. He turned to me quickly, and I shook my head to indicate that he had not previously shared this confidence with me—nor had I figured it from the many clues he had dropped.

  Into the phone he said, “Miss Rita Davis Abernathy, will you please connect me with the office of the Highway Patrol … No, Miss Rita, you may not inquire … It is police business … I am confident that if you display even a modicum of patience and listen in on the line after you connect me—which I am as sure you will do as I am sure my mother’s favorite child is sitting in this chair … Thank you, Miss Rita.”

  While he waited for Miss Rita to put him through, Nelson turned to me and remarked, “I wanted to be a man of the cloth, as my father was before me, and his father before him.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.
r />   “I did not have the calling,” he said.

  “Amen,” I said as into the phone he said, with great animation, “Lieutenant Freese? It is I, Sheriff Mark Nelson of the Municipality of Mirador. A homicide has taken place.”

  He looked at me again and continued, “It is likely that I have apprehended the person who committed the crime, but it is also possible that he had assistance or that … I will be happy to get to the point if you will; my father always said that a man should be allowed to finish what he … About ten minutes ago … I have no deputy on duty. As you may recall, I have only one deputy, Deputy Mendoza, who is using his day off to—Thank you.”

  He hung up the phone and turned to me again.

  “What has happened to civility in this world?”

  He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  “A lost art,” I sympathized.

  “There is but one church in this town and the minister, alas, is without style or substance.” Nelson stood up.

  I knew—and Nelson knew—that he should go a few doors down and at least give the impression he knew what he was doing, but he didn’t have the heart for it. In the long run, he was doing the right thing, staying out of the way till the Highway Patrol showed up.

  “How few of us are fortunate enough to achieve our life ambitions,” he said.

  “It’s better to have ambitions and not achieve them than to have none at all,” I responded.

  Nelson looked at me seriously for the first time since our eyes had met through the window of Claude Street’s Old California Shop.

  “First Corinthians?” he asked.

  “Charlie Chan in Rio,” I answered.

  Neither of us spoke again until the Highway Patrol car pulled up in front of the sheriff’s office about twenty minutes later. I lay on the cot looking at the ceiling and Nelson sat looking out the window at the car from which two Highway Patrol officers in full uniform and as big as redwoods stepped out and looked around. There wasn’t much to see.

  Nelson was up, hat in hand, as phony a smile as I’ve seen anywhere but on the face of a receptionist at Columbia Pictures.

  “It is not my day,” Nelson said between his closed smiling teeth. “The Rangley brothers.”