The Big Clock

by Kenneth Fearing

  “Well, I wouldn’t feel like it. But there’s another line. We can surely get a lead on the artist. We’ll probably find a few clips in our own morgue. It’s possible the man we are looking for is a great admirer of this artist, whoever he is. We can locate Patterson and get the history of this particular picture. Two hands. A cinch. There may be thousands, millions of these canvases around the city, but when you come right down to it, each of them has been seen by somebody besides the genius who painted it, and somebody would be certain to recognize it from a good description. After that, we can trace it along to the present owner.”

  Earl had by now come out of his first shock. He looked, acted, sounded, and thought more like his natural self. “How are we going to find this man, ahead of the police?” he asked.

  “What have we got two thousand people for?”

  “Yes, of course. But doesn’t that mean—after all—isn’t that spreading suspicion just that much farther?”

  I had already thought of a way to put the organization in motion without connecting it at all with the death of Pauline.

  “No. I know how to avoid that.”

  He thought that over for a while. Then he said: “Why should you do this? Why do you stick your neck out? This is serious.”

  I knew him so well I had known, almost to the word, he would say that.

  “I’ve done it before, haven’t I? And more.”

  “Yes. I know. But I have a hell of a way of rewarding friendship like that. I merely seem to exact more of it. More risks. More sacrifices.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who’s in danger.”

  “I hope you’re not. But I think you will be, giving me an alibi, and leading the search for this unknown party.”

  “I won’t be leading the search. We want somebody else to do that. I stay in the background.” I knew that Earl himself would go right on being our biggest headache. I thought it would be better to take the first hurdle now. “In the first place, I want to disassociate you from this business as far as possible. Don’t you agree that’s wise?” He nodded, and I slowly added, as an afterthought, “Then, when our comedian is located, we want an entirely different set of people to deal with him.”

  Earl looked up from the thick, hairy knuckles of the fingers he seemed to be studying. His face had never, even when he was most shaken, lost its jovial appearance. I wondered whether he had seemed to be smiling when he killed the woman, but of course he had been.

  The question forming in that slow, unearthly mind of his at last boiled up. “By the way. What happens when we do locate this person?”

  “That all depends. When the story breaks, he may go straight to the police. In that case our alibi stands, and our line is this: He says he saw you on the scene. What was he doing there, himself? That makes him as hot as you are. We’ll make him even warmer. We already know, for instance, that he spent a large part of the evening with Pauline.”

  Earl’s round, large, staring eyes showed no understanding for a moment, then they came to life. “By God, Steve. I wonder—no. Of course you mean that only to threaten him off.”

  I said: “Put it this way. If the case goes to trial, and he persists in being a witness, that’s the line we’ll raise. Your own movements are accounted for, you were with me. But what was he doing there? What about this and that?—all the things we are going to find out about him long in advance. The case against you won’t stand up.”

  Earl knew I had omitted something big, and in his mind he laboriously set out to find what it was. I waited while he thought it over, knowing he couldn’t miss. Presently, he said: “All right. But if he doesn’t go to the police the minute this breaks? Then what?”

  I didn’t want him to become even more hysterical, and if that were possible, I didn’t want him to be even upset. I said, dispassionately: “If we find him first, we must play it safe.”

  “Well. What does that mean?”

  Elaborately, I explained: “We could have him watched, of course. But we’d never know how much he actually did or did not realize, would we? And we certainly wouldn’t know what he’d do next.”

  “Well? I can see that.”

  “Well. What is there to do with a man like that? He’s a constant threat to your safety, your position in life, your place in the world. He’s a ceaseless menace to your very life. Can you put up with an intolerable situation like that?”

  Earl gave me a long, wondering, sick, almost frightened regard.

  “I don’t like that,” he said, harshly. “There has already been one accident. I don’t want another one. No. Not if I know what you mean.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No. I’m still a man.”

  “Are you? There are millions of dollars involved, all because of your uncontrollable temper and your God-forsaken stupidity. Yours, yours, not mine. Besides being an idiot, are you a coward, too?”

  He floundered around for a cigar, got one, and with my help, finally got it going. Then, finally, he sounded a raw croak: “I won’t see a man killed in cold blood.” And as though he’d read my thoughts he added, “Nor take any part in it, either.”

  I said, reasonably: “I don’t understand you. You know what kind of a world this is. You have always been a solid part of it. You know what anyone in Devers & Blair, Jennett-Donohue, Beacon, anyone above an M.E. in any of those houses would certainly do to you if he could reach out at night and safely push a button—”

  “No. I wouldn’t, myself. And I don’t think they would, either.”

  He was wrong, of course, but there was no use arguing with a middle-aged child prodigy. I knew that by tomorrow he would see this thing in its true light.

  “Well, it needn’t come to that. That was just a suggestion. But why are you so worried? You and I have already seen these things happen, and we have helped to commit just about everything else for a lot less money. Why are you so sensitive now?”

  He seemed to gag.

  “Did we ever before go as far as this?”

  “You were never in this spot before. Were you?” Now he looked really ghastly. He couldn’t even speak. By God, he would have to be watched like a hawk and nursed every minute. “Let me ask you, Earl, are you ready to retire to a penitentiary and write your memoirs, for the sake of your morals? Or are you ready to grow up and be a man in a man’s world, take your full responsibilities along with the rewards?” I liked Earl more than I had ever liked any person on earth except my mother, I really liked him, and I had to get both of us out of this at any cost. “No, we never went this far before. And we will never, if we use our heads, ever have to go this far again.”

  Earl absently drew at his cigar. “Death by poverty, famine, plague, war, I suppose that is on such a big scale the responsibility rests nowhere, although I personally have always fought against all of these things, in a number of magazines dedicated to wiping out each one of them, separately, and in some cases, in vehicles combating all of them together. But a personal death, the death of a definite individual. That is quite different.”

  He had reduced himself to the intellectual status of our own writers, a curious thing I had seen happen before. I risked it, and said: “We could take a chance on some simpler way, maybe. But there is more at stake than your private morals, personal philosophy, or individual life. The whole damned organization is at stake. If you’re wiped out, so is that. When you go, the entire outfit goes. A flood of factory-manufactured nonsense swamps the market.”

  Earl stood up and paced slowly across the room. It was a long time before he answered me.

  “I can be replaced, Steve. I’m just a cog. A good one, I know, but still only a cog.”

  This was better. This was more like it. I said, knowing him: “Yes, but when you break, a lot of others break, too. Whenever a big thing like this goes to pieces—and that is what could happen—a hell of a lot of innocent people, their plans, their homes, their dreams and aspirations, the future of their children, all of that can
go to pieces with it. Myself, for instance.”

  He gave me one quick glance. But I had gambled that he was a sucker for the greatest good to the most people. And after a long, long while he spoke, and I knew that at heart he was really sound.

  “Well, all right,” he said. “I understand, Steve. I guess what has to be, has to be.”

  George Stroud VI

  THE AWFULNESS of Monday morning is the world’s great common denominator. To the millionaire and the coolie it is the same, because there can be nothing worse.

  But I was only fifteen minutes behind the big clock when I sat down to breakfast, commenting that this morning’s prunes had grown up very fast from the baby raisins in last night’s cake. The table rhythmically shook and vibrated under Georgia’s steadily drumming feet. It came to me again that a child drinking milk has the same vacant, contented expression of the well-fed cow who originally gave it. There is a real spiritual kinship there.

  It was a fine sunny morning, like real spring, spring for keeps. I was beginning my second cup of coffee, and planning this year’s gardening, when Georgette said: “George, have you looked at the paper? There’s a dreadful story about a woman we met, I think. At Janoth’s.”

  She waited while I picked up the paper. I didn’t have to search. Pauline Delos had been found murdered. It was the leading story on page one.

  Not understanding it, and not believing it, I read the headlines twice. But the picture was of Pauline.

  The story said her body had been discovered at about noon on Sunday, and her death had been fixed at around ten o’clock on the night before. Saturday. I had left her at about that hour.

  “Isn’t that the same one?” Georgette asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  She had been beaten to death with a heavy glass decanter. No arrest had been made. Her immediate friends were being questioned; Earl Janoth was one of them, the story went, but the publisher had not seen her for a number of days. He himself had spent the evening dining with acquaintances, and after dinner had spent several hours discussing business matters with an associate.

  “A horrible story, isn’t it?” said Georgette.

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you going to finish your coffee? George?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’d better finish your coffee, and then I’ll drive you to the station.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, heavens. Don’t look so grim.”

  I smiled.

  “By the way,” she went on. “I didn’t tell you I liked that new picture you brought home. The one of the two hands. But it’s in terrible condition, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It’s another Patterson, isn’t it?”

  A hundred alarm bells were steadily ringing inside of me.

  “Well, perhaps.”

  “Pity’s sake, George, you don’t have to be so monosyllabic, do you? Can’t you say anything but ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘perhaps’? Is something the matter?”

  “No. Nothing’s the matter.”

  “Where did you get this new canvas?”

  “Why, I just picked it up.”

  I knew quite well I had seen Earl entering that building at ten o’clock on Saturday evening. She was alive when they passed into it. He now claimed he had not seen her for several days. Why? There could be only one answer.

  But had he recognized me?

  Whether he had or not, where did I stand? To become involved would bring me at once into the fullest and fiercest kind of spotlight. And that meant, to begin with, wrecking Georgette, Georgia, my home, my life.

  It would also place me on the scene of the murder. That I did not like at all. Nothing would cover Janoth better.

  Yet he almost surely knew someone had at least seen him there. Or did he imagine no one had?

  “George?”

  “Yes?””

  “I asked you if you knew much about this Pauline Delos?”

  “Very little.”

  “Goodness. You certainly aren’t very talkative this morning.”

  I smiled again, swallowed the rest of my coffee, and said: “It is a ghastly business, isn’t it?”

  Somehow Georgia got packed off to school, and somehow I got down to the station. On the train going into town I read every newspaper, virtually memorizing what was known of the death, but gathering no real additional information.

  At the office I went straight to my own room, and the moment I got there my secretary told me Steve Hagen had called and asked that I see him as soon as I got in.

  I went at once to the thirty-second floor.

  Hagen was a hard, dark little man whose soul had been hit by lightning, which he’d liked. His mother was a bank vault, and his father an International Business Machine. I knew he was almost as loyal to Janoth as to himself.

  After we said hello and made about one casual remark, he said he would like me to undertake a special assignment.

  “Anything you have on the fire downstairs at the moment,” he said, “let it go. This is more important. Have you anything special, at this moment?”

  “Nothing.” Then because it could not be avoided, plausibly, I said: “By the way, I’ve just read about the Pauline Delos business. It’s pretty damn awful. Have you any idea—?”

  Steve’s confirmation was short and cold. “Yes, it’s bad. I have no idea about it.”

  “I suppose Earl is, well—”

  “He is. But I don’t really know any more about it than you do.”

  He looked around the top of his desk and located some notes. He raked them together, looked them over, and then turned again to me. He paused, in a way that indicated we were now about to go to work.

  “We have a job on our hands, not hard but delicate, and it seems you are about the very best man on the staff to direct it.” I looked at him, waiting, and he went on. “In essence, the job is this: We want to locate somebody unknown to us. Really, it’s a missing person job.” He waited again, and when I said nothing, he asked: “Would that be all right with you?’ “Of course. Who is it?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Well?”

  He ruffled his notes.

  “The person we want went into some Third Avenue bar and grill by the name of Gil’s last Saturday afternoon. He was accompanied by a rather striking blonde, also unidentified. They later went to a Third Avenue antique shop. In fact, several of them. But in one of them he bought a picture called Judas, or something to that effect. He bought the picture from the dealer, overbidding another customer, a woman who also wanted to buy it. The picture was by an artist named Patterson. According to the morgue,” Steve Hagen pushed across a thin heavy-paper envelope from our own files, “this Louise Patterson was fairly well known ten or twelve years ago. You can read up on all that for yourself. But the picture bought by the man we want depicted two hands, I believe, and was in rather bad condition. I don’t know what he paid for it. Later, he and the woman with him went to the cocktail lounge of the Van Barth for a few drinks. It is possible he checked the picture there, or he may have had it right with him.”

  No, I hadn’t. I’d left it in the car. Steve stopped, and looked at me. My tongue felt like sandpaper. I asked: “Why do you want this man?”

  Steve clasped his hands in back of his neck and gazed off into space, through the wide blank windows of the thirtysecond floor. From where we sat, we could see about a hundred miles of New York and New Jersey countryside.

  When he again turned to me he was a good self-portrait of candor. Even his voice was a good phonographic reproduction of the slightly confidential friend.

  “Frankly, we don’t know ourselves.”

  This went over me like a cold wind.

  “You must have some idea. Otherwise, why bother?”

  “Yes, we have an idea. But it’s nothing definite. We think our party is an important
figure, in fact a vital one, in a business and political conspiracy that has reached simply colossal proportions. Our subject is not necessarily a big fellow in his own right, but we have reason to believe he’s the payoff man between an industrial syndicate and a political machine, the one man who really knows the entire set-up. We believe we can crack the whole situation, when we find him.”

  So Earl had gone straight to Hagen. Hagen would then be the business associate who provided the alibi. But what did they want with George Stroud?

  It was plain Earl knew he had been seen, and afraid he had been recognized. I could imagine how he would feel.

  “Pretty vague, Steve,” I said. “Can’t you give me more?”

  “No. You’re right, it is vague. Our information is based entirely on rumors and tips and certain, well, striking coincidences. When we locate our man, then we’ll have something definite for the first time.”

  “What’s in it? A story for Crimeways?”

  Hagen appeared to give that question a good deal of thought. He said, finally, and with apparent reluctance: “I don’t think so. I don’t know right now what our angle will be when we have it. We might want to give it a big play in one of our books, eventually. Or we might decide to use it in some entirely different way. That’s up in the air.”

  I began to have the shadowy outline of a theory. I tested it.

  “Who else is in on this? Should we co-operate with anyone? The cops, for instance?”

  Cautiously, and with regret, Steve told me: “Absolutely not. This is our story, exclusively. It must stay that way. You will have to go to other agencies for information, naturally. But you get it only, you don’t give it. Is that perfectly clear?”

  It was beginning to be. “Quite clear.”

  “Now, do you think you can knock together a staff, just as large as you want, and locate this person? The only additional information I have is that his name may be George Chester, and he’s of average build and height, weight one-forty to one-eighty. It’s possible he’s in advertising. But your best lead is this place called Gil’s, the shop where he bought the picture, and the bar of the Van Barth. And that picture, perhaps the artist. I have a feeling the picture alone might give us the break.”