The Big Clock

by Kenneth Fearing

  “And you don’t forget Joanna, do you?” I said, softly. “And that Berleth woman, and Jane, and that female refugee from Austria. And God knows who else. You can’t forget any of them, can you, including the next one.”

  She seemed to choke, for a speechless moment, then she moved like a springing animal. Something, I believe it was an ashtray, went past my head and smashed against the wall, showering me with fine glass.

  “You son of a bitch,” she exploded. “You talk. You, of all people. You. That’s priceless.”

  Mechanically, I reached for the decanter, splashed brandy into my glass. I fumbled for the stopper, trying to replace it. But I couldn’t seem to connect.

  “Yes?” I said.

  She was on her feet, on the other side of the low table, her face a tangle of rage.

  “What about you and Steve Hagen?”

  I forgot about the stopper, and simply stared.

  “What? What about me? And Steve?”

  “Do you think I’m blind? Did I ever see you two together when you weren’t camping?”

  I felt sick and stunned, with something big and black gathering inside of me. Mechanically, I echoed her: “Camping? With Steve?”

  “As if you weren’t married to that guy, all your life. And as if I didn’t know. Go on, you son of a bitch, try to act surprised.”

  It wasn’t me, any more. It was some giant a hundred feet tall, moving me around, manipulating my hands and arms and even my voice. He straightened my legs, and I found myself standing. I could hardly speak. My voice was a sawtoothed whisper.

  “You say this about Steve? The finest man that ever lived? And me?”

  “Why, you poor, old carbon copy of that fairy gorilla. Are you so dumb you’ve lived this long without even knowing it?” Then she suddenly screamed: “Don’t. Earl, don’t.”

  I hit her over the head with the decanter and she stumbled back across the room. My voice said: “You can’t talk like that. Not about us.”

  “Don’t. Oh, God, Earl, don’t. Earl. Earl. Earl.”

  I had kicked over the table between us, and I moved after her. I hit her again, and she kept talking with that awful voice of hers, and then I hit her twice more.

  Then she was lying on the floor, quiet and a little twisted. I said: “There’s a limit to this. A man can take just so much.”

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t move.

  I stood above her for a long, long time. There was no sound at all, except the remote, muffled hum of traffic from the street below. The decanter was still in my hand, and I lifted it, looked at the bottom edge of it faintly smeared, and with a few strands of hair.

  “Pauline.”

  She lay on her back, watching something far away that didn’t move. She was pretending to be unconscious.

  A fear struck deeper and deeper and deeper, as I stared at her beautiful, bright, slowly bleeding head. Her face had an expression like nothing on earth.

  “Oh, God, Pauline. Get up.”

  I dropped the decanter and placed my hand inside her blouse, over the heart. Nothing. Her face did not change. There was no breath, no pulse, nothing. Only her warmth and faint perfume. I slowly stood up. She was gone.

  So all of my life had led to this strange dream.

  A darkness and a nausea flooded in upon me, in waves I had never known before. This, this carrion by-product had suddenly become the total of everything. Of everything there had been between us. Of everything I had ever done. This accident.

  For it was an accident. God knows. A mad one. I saw there were stains on my hands, and my shirt front. There were splotches on my trousers, my shoes, and as my eyes roved around the room I saw that there were even spots high on the wall near the lounge where I had first been sitting.

  I needed something. Badly. Help and advice.

  I moved into the bathroom and washed my hands, sponged my shirt. It came to me that I must be careful. Careful of everything. I closed the taps with my handkerchief. If her boy friend had been here and left his own fingerprints. If others had. Anyone else. And many others had.

  Back in the other room, where Pauline still lay on the carpet, unchanging, I remembered the decanter and the stopper to it. These I both wiped carefully, and the glass. Then I reached for the phone, and at the same time remembered the switchboard downstairs, and drew away.

  I let myself out of the apartment, again using my handkerchief as a glove. Pauline had let us in. The final image of her own fingers would be on the knob, the key, the frame.

  I listened for a long moment outside the door of 5A. There was no sound throughout the halls, and none from behind that closed door. I knew, with a renewed vertigo of grief and dread, there would never again be life within that apartment. Not for me.

  Yet there had been, once, lots of it. All collapsed to the size of a few single moments that were now a deadly, unreal threat.

  I moved quietly down the carpeted hall, and down the stairs. From the top of the first floor landing I could just see the partly bald, gray head of the man at the switchboard. He hadn’t moved, and if he behaved as usual, he wouldn’t.

  I went quietly down the last flight of stairs and moved across the lobby carpet to the door. At the door, when I opened it, I looked back. No one was watching, there was no one in sight.

  On the street, I walked for several blocks, then at a stand on some corner I took a taxi. I gave the driver an address two blocks from the address I automatically knew I wanted. It was about a mile uptown.

  When I got out and presently reached the building it was as quiet as it had been at Pauline’s.

  There was no automatic elevator, as there was at Pauline’s, and I did not want to be seen, not in this condition. I walked up the four flights to the apartment. I rang, suddenly sure there would be no answer.

  But there was.

  Steve’s kindly, wise, compact, slightly leathery face confronted me when the door swung open. He was in slippers and a dressing gown. When he saw me, he held the door wider, and I came in.

  He said: “You look like hell. What is it?”

  I walked past him and into his living room and sat down in a wide chair.

  “I have no right to come here. But I didn’t know where else to go.”

  He had followed me into his living room, and he asked, impassively: “What’s the matter?”

  “God. I don’t know. Give me a drink.”

  Steve gave me a drink. When he said he would ring for some ice, I stopped him.

  “Don’t bring anyone else in on this,” I said. “I’ve just killed someone.”

  “Yes?” He waited. “Who?”

  “Pauline.”

  Steve looked at me hard, poured himself a drink, briefly sipped it, still watching me.

  “Are you sure?”

  This was insane. I suppressed a wild laugh. Instead, I told him, curtly: “I’m sure.”

  “All right,” he said, slowly. “She had it coming to her. You should have killed her three years ago.”

  I gave him the longest look and the most thought I had ever given him. There was an edge of iron amusement in his locked face. I knew what was going on in his mind: She was a tramp, why did you bother with her? And I know what went on in my mind: I am about the loneliest person in the world.

  “I came here, Steve,” I said, “because this is just about my last stop. I face, well, everything. But I thought—hell, I don’t know what I thought. But if there is anything I should do, well. I thought maybe you’d know what that would be.”

  “She deserved it,” Steve quietly repeated. “She was a regular little comic.”

  “Steve, don’t talk like that about Pauline. One of the warmest, most generous women who ever lived.”

  He finished his drink and casually put down the glass.

  “Was she? Why did you kill her?”

  “I don’t know, I just don’t know. From here I go to Ralph Beeman, and then to the cops, and then I guess to prison or even the chair.” I finished my drink
and put down the glass. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

  Steve gestured. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Forget that prison stuff. What about the organization? Do you know what will happen to it the second you get into serious trouble?”

  I looked at my hands. They were clean, but they had undone me. And I knew what would happen to the organization the minute I wasn’t there, or became involved in this kind of trouble.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know. But what can I do?”

  “Do you want to fight, or do you want to quit? You aren’t the first guy in the world that ever got into a jam. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to put up a battle, or are you going to fold up?”

  “If there’s any chance at all, I’ll take it.”

  “I wouldn’t even know you, if I thought you’d do anything else.”

  “And of course, it’s not only the organization, big as that is. There’s my own neck, besides. Naturally, I’d like to save it.”

  Steve was matter of fact. “Of course. Now, what happened?”

  “I can’t describe it. I hardly know.”

  “Try.”

  “That bitch. Oh, God, Pauline.”

  “Yes?”

  “She said that I, she actually accused both of us, but it’s utterly fantastic. I had a few drinks and she must have had several. She said something about us. Can you take it?”

  Steve was unmoved. “I know what she said. She would. And then?”

  “That’s all. I hit her over the head with something. A decanter. Maybe two or three times, maybe ten times. Yes, a decanter. I wiped my fingerprints off of it. She must have been insane, don’t you think? To say a thing like that? She’s a part-time Liz, Steve, did I ever tell you that?”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “So I killed her. Before I even thought about it. God, I didn’t intend anything like it, thirty seconds before. I don’t understand it. And the organization is in trouble, real trouble. Did I tell you that?”

  “You told me.”

  “I don’t mean about this. I mean Carr and Wayne and—”

  “You told me.”

  “Well, at dinner tonight I was sure of it. And now this. Oh, God.”

  “If you want to save the whole works you’ll have to keep your head. And your nerve. Especially your nerve.”

  All at once, and for the first time in fifty years, my eyes were filled with tears. It was disgraceful. I could hardly see him. I said: “Don’t worry about my nerve.”

  “That’s talking,” Steve said, evenly. “And now I want to hear the details. Who saw you go into this place, Pauline’s apartment? Where was the doorman, the switchboard man? Who brought you there? Who took you away? I want to know every goddamn thing that happened, what she said to you and what you said to her. What she did and what you did. Where you were this evening, before you went to Pauline’s. In the meantime, I’m going to lay out some clean clothes. You have bloodstains on your shirt and your trousers. I’ll get rid of them. Meanwhile, go ahead.”

  “All right,” I said, “I was having dinner at the Waynes’. And they couldn’t seem to talk about anything else except what a hell of a mess Lanoth Enterprises was getting into. God, how they loved my difficulties. They couldn’t think or talk about anything else.”

  “Skip that,” said Steve. “Come to the point.”

  I told him about leaving the Waynes’, how Bill had driven me to Pauline’s.

  “We don’t have to worry about Bill,” said Steve.

  “God,” I interrupted. “Do you really think I can get away with this?”

  “You told me you wiped your fingerprints off the decanter, didn’t you? What else were you thinking of when you did it?”

  “That was automatic.”

  Steve waved the argument away.

  “Talk.”

  I told him the rest of it. How I saw this stranger, leaving Pauline, and how we got into a quarrel in her apartment, and what she had said to me, and what I had said to her, and then what happened, as well as I remembered it.

  Finally, Steve said to me: “Well, it looks all right except for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “The fellow who saw you go into the building with Pauline. Nobody else saw you go in. But he did. Who was he?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know.”

  “Did he recognize you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The one guy in the world who saw you go into Pauline’s apartment, and you don’t know who he was? You don’t know whether he knew you, or recognized you?”

  “No, no, no. Why, is that important?”

  Steve gave me a fathomless glance. He slowly found a cigarette, slowly reached for a match, lit the cigarette. When he blew out the second drag of smoke, still slowly, and thoughtfully blew out the match, and then put the burned match away and exhaled his third lungful, deliberately, he turned and said: “You’re damned right it is. I want to hear everything there is to know about that guy.” He flicked some ashes into a tray. “Everything. You may not know it, but he’s the key to our whole set-up. In fact, Earl, he spells the difference. Just about the whole difference.”

  Steve Hagen

  WE WENT over that evening forward and backward. We put every second of it under a high-powered microscope. Before we finished I knew as much about what happened as though I had been there myself, and that was a lot more than Earl did. This jam was so typical of him that, after the first blow, nothing about it really surprised me.

  It was also typical that his simple mind could not wholly grasp how much was at stake and how much he had jeopardized it. Typical, too, that he had no idea how to control the situation. Nor how fast we had to work. Nor how.

  Pauline’s maid would not return to the apartment until tomorrow evening. There was a good chance the body would not be discovered until then. Then, Earl would be the first person seriously investigated by the police, since his connection with her was common knowledge.

  I would have to claim he was with me throughout the dangerous period, and it would have to stick. But Billy would back that.

  After leaving the Waynes’, Earl had come straight here. Driven by Billy. Then Billy was given the rest of the night off. That was all right, quite safe.

  There would be every evidence of Earl’s frequent, former visits to Pauline’s apartment, but nothing to prove the last one. Even I had gone there once or twice. She had lots of visitors running in and out, both men and women. But I knew, from Earl’s squeamish description, the injuries would rule out a woman.

  The cover I had to provide for Earl would be given one hell of a going over. So would I. That couldn’t be helped. It was my business, not only Earl’s, and since he couldn’t be trusted to protect our interests, I would have to do it myself.

  Apparently it meant nothing to him, the prospect of going back to a string of garbage-can magazines edited from a due-bill office and paid for with promises, threats, rubber checks, or luck. He didn’t even think about it. But I did. Earl’s flair for capturing the mind of the reading public was far more valuable than the stuff they cram into banks. Along with this vision, though, he had a lot of whims, scruples, philosophical foibles, a sense of humor that he sometimes used even with me. These served some purpose at business conferences or social gatherings, but not now.

  If necessary, if the situation got too hot, if Earl just couldn’t take it, I might draw some of the fire myself. I could afford to. One of our men, Emory Mafferson, had phoned me here about the same time Earl was having his damned expensive tantrum. And that alibi was real.

  The immediate problem, no matter how I turned it over, always came down to the big question mark of the stranger. No other living person had seen Earl, knowing him to be Earl, after he left that dinner party. For the tenth time, I asked: “There was nothing at all familiar about that person you saw?”

  “Nothing. He was in a shadowy part of the street. With the light behind him.”

  “And you hav
e no idea whether he recognized you?”

  “No. But I was standing in the light of the entranceway. If he knew me, he recognized me.”

  Again I thought this over from every angle. “Or he may sometime recognize you,” I concluded. “When he sees your face in the papers, as one of those being questioned. Maybe. And maybe we can take care they aren’t good pictures. But I wish I had a line on that headache right now. Something to go on when the story breaks. So that we can always be a jump ahead of everyone, including the cops.”

  All I knew was that Pauline said the man’s name was George Chester. This might even be his true name, though knowing Pauline, that seemed improbable, and the name was not listed in any of the phone books of the five boroughs, nor in any of the books of nearby suburbs. She said he was in advertising. That could mean anything. Nearly everyone was.

  They had gone to a place on Third Avenue called Gil’s, and for some reason it had seemed like an archeological foundation. This sounded authentic. The place could be located with no difficulty.

  They had stopped in at a Third Avenue antique shop, and there the man had bought a picture, bidding for it against some woman who apparently just walked in from the street, as they did. It would not be hard to locate the shop and get more out of the proprietor. The picture was of a couple of hands. Its title, or subject matter, was something about Judas. The artist’s name was Patterson. The canvas looked as though it came out of a dustbin. Then they had gone to the cocktail lounge of the Van Barth. It should not be hard to get another line on our character there. He certainly had the picture with him. He may even have checked it.

  But the antique shop seemed a surefire bet. There would have been the usual long, pointless talk about the picture. Even if the proprietor did not know either the man or the woman customer, he must have heard enough to offer new leads regarding the clown we wanted. The very fact he had gone into the place, then bought nothing except this thing, something that looked like it belonged in an incinerator, this already gave our bystander an individual profile. I said: “What kind of a person would do that, buy a mess like that in some hole-in-the-wall?”

  “I don’t know. Hell, I’d do it myself, if I felt like it.”