Melting Clock

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “It never happened,” Gala agreed. “Mr. Toby Peters, find Dali’s painting.”

  I looked at Odelle, whose eyes were moist with concern. Those eyes, which a minute earlier were dripping blood, were moist and begging me for mercy.

  “You got a Pepsi here?” I asked. “Or a beer?”

  “Odelle,” said Gala, and Odelle went clumping off down the hall.

  “Why would anyone kill two guys, leave goofy clues, and ruin two of your paintings?”

  “He is an artist,” Dali tried, pointing a finger toward the ceiling. “You must find the last painting. If it is not returned …”

  “And the clocks,” Gala added.

  “Cops in Culver City have one of the clocks. Cops in Mirador have another. The only way you’re going to get them back is to admit they’re yours, and then the cops start asking you questions. You want to go down to the Wilshire Station and answer questions?”

  “But it was only a … a … chiste,” said Dali.

  “A joke?” I said. “What are you …?”

  “Tell him,” said Dali, smoothing down his hair.

  Gala looked at her husband, then at the painting, and then at me as Odelle trotted back in the room, spilling beer from a cup shaped like an inverted skull. She held it out to me. I took it and drank deep while Gala Dali made up her mind.

  “Dali,” she said to her husband, “this time you have gone too far.”

  “It’s the only place I ever wanted to go,” Dali replied.

  “A man,” Gala said, turning to me. “We paid him to take the two paintings. We were going to call the newspapers and tell them about it and give interviews, but he took three paintings and the clocks and now people are being murdered. That does not please Dali.”

  I finished the beer and handed the empty glass to Odelle, who took it gratefully.

  “I can understand that,” I said. “You think you can tell me something about this guy? Novak, right?”

  “Novak?” Gala looked at me curiously. “No, his name was Taylor.”

  “How did you find this Taylor?”

  “He …” Gala began, but before she could finish a bullet shattered the window and blew a hole in the middle of the back of the naked woman in Dali’s painting. I jumped for Dali and pushed him out of the chair and to the floor.

  “Get on the floor,” I called back to Gala and Odelle, who stood there in a trance. Odelle held the empty skull cup in front of her.

  The second shot went into and through the chair in which Dali had been sitting a few seconds earlier.

  “Turn off the goddamn lights, then,” I shouted.

  Odelle moved to the light switch; Gala let out a scream and dropped down toward Dali and me on the floor. The third shot missed her, but not by much. The lights in the living room went out as Odelle galloped into the hall and hit the switch.

  Darkness. No more bullets. Dali was mumbling something in Spanish. Gala answered him in French. They were both holding onto me.

  I got free and crawled to the shattered window. In the darkness I could hear someone running away from the house.

  “Stay down,” I warned, getting to my feet and going for the door. My leg was sending desperate signals that running was not one of my options. Whoever fired at Dali was on foot. Maybe I could get in my car and find him before he got to his car, assuming he was going for a car and wasn’t one of the neighbors who’d had enough of the Dalis.

  A car pulled into the driveway. I opened the front door. Behind me, somewhere in the dark, I could hear Odelle hyperventilating like the Twentieth Century Limited. Barry Zeman, complete with tux and black tie, was getting out of a Stutz Bearcat.

  “Peters?” he asked.

  “Peters it is,” I said, moving for my car.

  “What happened?” he asked, looking at the broken window and the darkened house.

  “No time,” I said. “Dali will tell you.”

  I crawled into the passenger side of my car and shuffled over to the driver’s seat.

  “Where was Jim running?” he asked through my open window.

  “Jim?” I echoed, turning on the ignition.

  “Jim Taylor, J.T., my chauffeur,” he said, looking toward the street. “I just saw him running from the house.”

  “Was he carrying anything?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Which way?” I asked, inching the car past him.

  Zeman pointed to the left.

  “What—?”

  “Later,” I said, clanking into the night.

  Downhill, wide open on a flat road with nothing coming, the Crosley could hit forty miles an hour. But I wasn’t in that kind of a hurry. I turned left on the street. I didn’t know what Taylor looked like; I’d only seen him from the back in the garage the day before, when I first met the Dalis. But there weren’t many people walking the streets of Beverly Hills at this hour, and the guy I wanted was carrying a rifle or something big enough to hold a rifle.

  I coaxed the Crosley into doing its best. I didn’t want to panic Taylor. I wanted to spot him, slow down, follow him till I could nail him just before he got in his car.

  I almost missed him. There aren’t any cars parked on Beverly Hills streets—you park in the driveway or the garage. Only intruders park on the street, and the cruising cops are on them before they can get an autograph or break into Fred Astaire’s pantry.

  A few parties were going on, with cars parked in their respective driveways. I crept past the second party I came to in time to observe a Ford parked behind a white Rolls back into the street. The driveway lights caught the top of the driver and I could see he wasn’t dressed for a Sunday night party in Beverly Hills. I stopped in the middle of the street and turned off my lights.

  The guy in the Ford screeched off toward Sunset. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like at least even money that Taylor was in the Ford. I started my car again and moved forward with the lights out. The Ford turned on Elm and I went after him, hitting the lights after I made the turn. If he kept running, I couldn’t catch him, but if he kept driving this fast, chances were good the Beverly Hills cops would be around a bush and on his tail. He was two blocks ahead of me, crossing Carmelita, when he decided to slow down. When he made the left onto Santa Monica I was about a block behind him, feeling sure that, barring the long-feared attack of the Japanese Kamikaze fleet, I should be able to stay with him till I came up with a plan.

  First, an admission. Being in the traffic on Santa Monica, following a killer with a gun, felt good, solid. No riddles, puzzles, goofy paintings, just a good, clean killer with a rifle. I was comfortable.

  This was my town. These were the moments I lived for. I didn’t even have to listen to the radio. I wished Gunther were there to share it, or Dash, or even Shelly. No, not Shelly.

  Now all I needed was a plan.

  7

  Twenty minutes later, the Ford pulled into a parking spot on Nicholas Street next to Lindberg Park, no more than twenty or thirty feet from where I had parked last night. I knew I had the right man and I knew where we were going—the house of Adam Place, the dead taxidermist. What I didn’t know was why.

  I kept driving and watched him through my rear-view mirror as he got out of the Ford, looked around, and crossed the street. I was in no big hurry now. I parked a block away and told myself to get to a phone and call the Culver City constables. I told myself, but I didn’t listen. What did Alice in Wonderland say? “I always give myself such very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”

  I got out, checked my .38, put it back in my holster and walked toward Place’s place. There were no lights on in the house of stuffed animals, at least none I could see. No cop guarded the scene of the recent murder. Cops were too busy with wild sailors on leave and riots among the Mexicans. There was a red-on-white sign on the door: DO NOT ENTER. CRIME SCENE. BY ORDER OF THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT AND THE CIRCUIT COURT OF LOS ANGELES.

  I stayed away from the side of the house where Place’s neighbo
r lived, the one who had called the cops the night before, but that cut down the possible entries. A good-sized fence blocked the view of the neighbor to the right of the house. I used the fence to cover me while I walked to what I was sure was Place’s bedroom window.

  There were no street lights in the neighborhood. Even if there had been, they would have been out by now. There was also no moon, because of a heavy cloud cover, which you’d never know by reading the papers—no weather reports were published or given on the radio for fear of aiding the Japanese in an attack. That never made much sense to me. The Japanese had to have better weathermen than we did in California.

  I tried the window, but tried it so gently that I wasn’t sure I was putting enough pressure on it even if it were opened and greased with oleomargarine. Someone, probably Jim Taylor, was inside the house with a rifle, and Jim Taylor had already taken a shot at Dali tonight, not to mention that he had probably shot both Claude Street in Mirador and Adam Place in the same bedroom I was trying to enter.

  I pushed a little harder. The window was unlocked. It shot up with a rattle and there I stood, waiting for the bullet to go through my chest the way it had gone through the back of Dali’s painting of Odelle. Nothing. I climbed in the window and tried to remember what the room looked like.

  Then the light came on.

  The man was about thirty or thirty-five, with a serious look on his face. His hair was movie star curly, and he looked a little like Gilbert Roland, except for the pock marks on his face. He wore a blue sweater, dark slacks, and a rifle aimed at my chest.

  “Take out your gun with two fingers,” he said.

  “I can’t take it out with two fingers.”

  “Take it out carefully.”

  I unzipped my windbreaker, showed my holster and took out my .38 very carefully.

  “On the bed. Throw it on the bed.”

  I threw it on the bed. It didn’t bounce.

  “Now, close the window and pull down the shade,” he said.

  “I think—” I started.

  “Close it now or I’ll kill you.”

  His voice was vibrating like a cello string and he looked scared enough to mean what he was saying. I turned to the window, considered diving out, changed my mind and did what he told me.

  “I opened it for you,” he said as I turned to face him again. “The police locked everything. Cars are my living. I could have spotted your Crosley from the sound of the engine two blocks away.”

  “How did you get in?” I asked.

  “Key. Adam Place was my cousin.”

  “Claude Street?”

  “We got a mutual friend in Carmel.”

  “It doesn’t pay to be related or friendly with you,” I observed.

  “I didn’t kill them,” said Taylor nervously. “Why should I kill them?”

  “And you didn’t shoot at Dali tonight?”

  I took in the room without being too obvious about it, hoping there was something I could use, get to, someplace I could hide. The bed was there, still bloody. The bear was there, too. But the painting was gone. So was the clock. The rest of the room looked pretty much the way it had twenty-four hours ago, like a tidied-up version of Renfield’s room in Castle Dracula.

  “I shot at Dali,” he admitted. “But not to kill him.”

  “Not to kill him.”

  “No, to get him to pay for the painting I still have, for the last clock. Don’t you see? I got to get out of L.A.”

  “You want to run?”

  “Someone killed Adam and Claude after they agreed to watch a clock and a painting for me. I have the last clock, the last painting. I want to give them back. That Dali’s crazy. His wife’s crazier. It was just supposed to be some kind of publicity thing, you know?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Hey, I just need a little money so I can get away. Police are gonna be after me. I know it and someone’s killing— Look, I was gonna call, but you tell Dali. Tell him, tell her I need twenty-five thousand dollars and he can have his painting and his clock back. It’s all their fault anyway.”

  “Their fault?”

  “Stop doing that,” he warned, pointing the gun in the general direction of my face.

  “What?”

  “Asking me questions. I’ll tell you what you have to know. I wrote those messages on the paintings. It was Dali’s idea, Dali and his wife. If they’d just have let me alone. We was doing all right.”

  “We?”

  “Me, I. I like my work. Zeman treats me fine. I love cars. You love cars?”

  “Adore them,” I said.

  “You’re lying,” he said, his voice rising. “I see what you’re driving, how you don’t take care of it.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I hate the goddamn things.”

  When you talk to a nervous man with a gun, remember he is always right.

  “Where was I?”

  “Messages on the paintings,” I reminded him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to take the clocks, the third painting. It was just a publicity stunt. I take the two paintings. They hire someone to look for them.”

  “Me.”

  “Yes, they hire you to look for them. I leave the messages and you get the paintings back. Then the newspapers come in. Maybe Lowell Thomas and Movietone. That’s what they said. And I’d get a thousand dollars.”

  “Did Zeman know?”

  “That,” he said, “is a question. If you ask another question …”

  “The clocks and the paintings,” I reminded him, careful not to make the reminder a question.

  “I needed help carrying the paintings. I drove to Carmel with Claude. When he saw the third painting and the three clocks, he was, I don’t know, crazy. He told me we could make thousands and thousands.”

  I almost asked how, but caught myself and switched to, “Lot of money for a painting and some clocks. He must have thought they had some special value.”

  “Claude was smart. Claude knew about art, history, stuff like that. He could speak languages—Spanish, Russian, Dutch. I don’t know anything about all that, painting, clocks,” Taylor said. “I only know about—”

  “—cars,” I finished.

  Taylor was shaking his head now. The finger on the trigger of the rifle was twitching nervously.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” he said.

  “Gregory Novak,” I tried.

  “Gregory Novak. Who the hell is Gregory Novak?”

  “Someone who might have killed Claude Street, maybe killed Adam Place, too.”

  “I don’t know anybody named Gregory Novak,” he said. “I’ve got the last painting and the last clock. Dali wants them back, he gives you twenty-five grand by noon tomorrow.”

  “You mean tomorrow, Tuesday.”

  “Monday.”

  “Today’s Monday. It’s after midnight.”

  “Today. I’ll call you at your office. You don’t have the money, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll kill Dali or I’ll call the police, tell them about the whole thing, tell them it was Dali and his crazy wife’s idea and they got Adam and Claude killed. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  He was scared and ranting now.

  “I’ll let him know,” I said as calmly as I could.

  “The second clock’s not here,” he said. “I looked for it all through the house. Where is it?”

  “Police probably took it.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Did they give it back to the Spanish loony?”

  “They didn’t tell me, Jim.”

  “Don’t call me Jim. I’m not your servant.”

  “They didn’t tell me, Mr. Taylor.”

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “What do you want me to call you, for Chrissake?” I asked.

  The gun went off. Either he was serious about shooting me if I asked a question or the finger-twitching had worn down the trigger spring. The bullet tore past me into the wall and I turned and dived through the win
dow, taking the shade with me. The shade kept me from getting cut by the shattering glass. I did a belly flop on the grass and lost my wind. I tried to get up but didn’t have the air so I rolled to the right, pushing the torn window shade from me and expecting another shot from Taylor. He might not be able to shoot straight, but given enough chances at a close target he was bound to meet with some success eventually.

  No shot came as I got to my knees, but I did hear Taylor coming out the window after me. Lights came on in the house on the other side of the fence as I heard Taylor move toward me in the darkness.

  “Twenty-five thousand, cash, by noon,” he said. “I’m a desperate man.”

  And I’m a weary one, I thought, but said nothing. I couldn’t have said it even if I wanted to. I was still trying to get a near-normal breath. He moved past me, running toward his car across the street, the rifle in his right hand.

  I hobbled in the general direction of the Crosley. There was no telling how long it would take the cops to show up; I’d guessed wrong about that the last time I was here. Taylor was down the street and long gone when I made it to my car and got in. There were no more lights on in the houses along the street, but I had the feeling people were watching from dark windows. They couldn’t have missed the shot and the explosion of glass.

  No police cars screeched around the corner ahead of me to cut off my escape and I saw none in the rear-view mirror. I should have gone back for my gun after Taylor had left. It was too late now. I headed for Beverly Hills, half shot near sunrise, in need of a shave, and trying to think.

  I stopped at the all-night Victory Drugstore on La Cienega and got change from a woman of who-knows-what age behind the counter. She had a round pink face and a smile that said she was either simpleminded or believed fervently that Jesus was coming no later than Wednesday to take her out of this miserable job.

  “Got coffee?” I asked her.

  “Lunch counter’s closed,” she said. “But I can heat up what was left in the pot, if that’s okay.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, heading for the phone in the back of the store.

  My first call was to Zeman’s. It was answered by Zeman himself.

  “Did you call the police?” I asked.