THE ALARMING CLOCK
Ed Noon Mystery #5
Michael Avallone
STORY MERCHANT BOOKS
BEVERLY HILLS
2012
Copyright © 2012 by Susan Avallone and David Avallone. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.
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Story Merchant Books
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http://www.storymerchant.com/books.html
For Lucille—
and all the time we lost.
Contents
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter One
It wasn’t a very big package. Just about half the size of a small breadbox, done up in brown wrapping paper and double-corded with plain India twine. But it wasn’t an ordinary package by any stretch of a private detective’s imagination. It was sitting in plain sight of my battered old desk with a square of white envelope poking out from under its bulgy bulk. I saw it when I came back from the drug store.
I got some ideas as I put my hat on the wall peg. I must have left the office door unlocked again and somebody had walked in, got tired of waiting and left. It wasn’t mail of any kind. Even as I walked towards it, I could see there wasn’t a postage stamp in sight. No writing, no descriptions, no directions, no nothing. Just the square of white envelope with the package squatting on top of it like a frog on a lily pad.
I sat down in my swivel chair, elevated my feet to a desk rest, pulled the envelope from beneath the package and settled back. I turned it over a couple of times in my fingers before opening it.
The envelope was brand new. Hardly a pressure mark on it. I tore it down the right side. A matching white sheet of stationery, not the office kind, came out in my hand. I fanned it open.
There were just a few hastily scrawled lines on it:
Mr. Noon
Imperative you hold this for me until I can contact you later. You may open package to inspect it but do not by any means let the enclosed leave your hands. Many people would kill you for this item but it can also make you a millionaire. A mutual friend sent me to you.
Will call soon.
Roland Ritz.
Crackpot clients aren’t anything new in the private investigations field. I laughed and tossed the letter in the waste-paper basket. A message to Garcia from an unknown client I can do without. The friend sure as hell must be mutual if the name couldn’t be included. People who always talked about how rich their little problems were going to make me always brought out the skeptic in me anyway. But the package intrigued me. I love a mystery and I love being my own boss with no time clock to kneel to. That’s one of the reasons I went into the private peeper racket. It wasn’t because it paid good dough. That’s for sure.
I looked at the brown papered package. Then I picked it up, hefted it. Not very heavy. I thought about Roland Ritz’s mysterious letter. The way he talked, the box would have to contain radium or at the very least, the Hope Diamond. Maybe it was a new subway plan which showed you how to get from Brooklyn to Boston without changing trains. Roland Ritz. The more I thought about it, Mr. Ritz, in sound, tone and deportment sounded exactly like a wild-brained amateur inventor. Two to one he was suspicious of everyone in the patent office.
I lit a cigarette when I decided to open the package. I dug into a side pocket, fished out the penknife that keeps company with my car and office keys and pinched the blade open.
Then I heard a noise. A very familiar noise and yet a very distracting one. I didn’t feel like laughing anymore. Something in the room was ticking. Softly yet distinctly.
Sure. A clock ticks, you say. What’s so scary about a clock ticking? Nothing, I’ll admit, but when the ticking is coming from a strange package that you find on your office desk when you come in and there’s an odd message attached to it, you have to go according to the book. Maybe it was a clock. And then again maybe it was a time bomb. I happen to be in the sort of racket where things like time bombs can be the order of business.
I let the package be, skipped over to the tiny sink by the clothes closet, plugged it up and let some water start filling. I tried not to get too panicky about it because my imagination was way ahead of me. One thing I am not too keen about is demolitions. Even in the war when necessity demanded association with the damn things, I was not too keen about it. There’s a big gimmick in explosives of any kind. They don’t have any brains at all and seem to go off whenever they think it’s high time. They’re tricky, inconsistent and plain old fancy hell.
I turned the water off before the sink over-ran, took the package up gingerly and got back to the sink without running. I didn’t start to breathe again until I was holding the box underwater letting it soak real good. Water will take the teeth out of any explosive in most cases. I hoped this was one of the cases. I left the box to soak and went back to my cigarette which was burning a hole in the desk. I sat down again and did some thinking.
I had bounced out of the mouse auditorium pretty early for a change. Nine o’clock to be exact. I’d been hungry, needed some shaving equipment at the drug store and had stopped by the French tailor’s to see if my two suits were ready. They hadn’t been so I had had another cup of coffee and come back upstairs. Give or take fifteen minutes, I couldn’t have been gone more than an hour and a half. I wondered just when Mr. Roland Ritz had checked in with his mysterious ticking parcel. I looked at my watch. It was ten-three-oh.
Ten minutes later after more flying guesses, I got up out of the chair and went over to the sink again. I’m not sure about the operating procedure with imagined time bombs but I figured ten minutes was enough time for the water cure to take. I’m a game guy anyway. And my curiosity had got the best of me. No matter what it did to the cat, I had to see what Mr. Roland Ritz had left for me. I wanted to see what his idea of a short cut to being a millionaire was.
Opening the package wasn’t easy. The India twine salaamed to the penknife but the brown paper was a fooler. The laugh was on me as I half-twisted, half-tore the thick paper away from the box. It was waterproof with that thick, cosmolene inner tubing that I remembered from GI days and nights. It gave me a bad turn for a second but the damage was already done. Time bomb or not, I already had the cardboard box in my hands and was spreading the corrugated head of the thing. The flaps parted and I stared down into the interior.
The ticking was a helluva lot louder now that I could see what was causing it. I suppose it was funny. But the whole damn thing was still so peculiar, I didn’t know what the joke was or where it was. Or who it was on either.
It was an alarm clock. And not a very expensive one at that. I lifted it out of the box and set it down in front of me. Mr. Ritz, whoever he was, had some sense of humour.
The thing that was so valuable, that people would try to kill me to get, was one of those tinny, not-too-sturdy, round faced clocks that you could buy for about two ninety-eight in any department store. The thing was so cheap looking Macy’s would have been ashamed to tell Gimbels.
I stared at it for a full minute. Saw the standard brand name, the cheap metal, the glass face with the minute and hour hands laced at twenty to eleven which was exactly what the present time of day was and tried to figure it out. I couldn’t. Some joker named Roland Ritz had left me an alarm clock with a life-and-death letter attached and I was supposed to wait until Mr. Ritz showed up to explain all. Well, the hell with him. I took the clock over to the sink, submerged it in the pool of water and left the office and headed down the hall.
I stopped a few doors from my own. My door says ED NOON PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS on the frosted glass in modest three-inched black. This one said Watch Hospital in smaller letters. The even more modest line underneath said—Alexander St. Peter, Proprietor.
I tapped on the glass three times because the light was on and went in.
I closed the door behind me expecting to find Alec hunched over his work table, sitting under the hooded lamp, looking into the sick works of one of the dozens of busted watches that he’s such a phenom at mending. Phenom is right. Alec is a World War Two vet who lost both hands in a dynamite shack at Fort Riley before he could even go overseas to lose them for a slightly better reason. Metal hooks are all he has for hands but he could still take a watch apart and put it together faster than rent increases. He was a great kid. I liked him.
“Hey, Alec,” I called. “You on deck?”
He wasn’t at his work table even though the lamp was shining down on a sick patient. Springs and bits of bright metal parts gleamed up from the padded velvet top of the table. A row of already-repaired watches with their name tags attached were lined up on one side just waiting for their owners to come and get them.
I heard the sound of water running in the bathroom. Feeling something I couldn’t explain, I flung myself towards the noise.
Alec’s office is larger than mine. It’s one of the few offices in the building that is equipped with a bathroom. It’s not much but when the time had come to make a choice, I’d let Alec have this place and I’d taken the mouse auditorium. Hell, Alec not having any hands, I figured he was more entitled to the thing just to make it a little easier.
I stared down at the bathtub which was so loaded with hot water that the spout was buried beneath the surface. Even as I hastily turned the water off, my mind had taken in a couple of things.
Alec had been ready for a morning bath when he had been interrupted. A guy doesn’t turn his bath water on and then go out for a cup of coffee or a pack of cigarettes. And a guy who needs a pair of hooks for hands doesn’t leave them behind.
I picked them up and looked at them. Alec had placed them on the terry cloth covered seat of the john stool. That figured. They’d be near at hand when he was through with his bath. What didn’t figure was the hooks still being there and Alec not. I rubbed the sandpaper on my face and tried to get a figure two with one and one. Alarm clocks. Alec St. Peter, a watch repair man. No soap. It just wouldn’t or couldn’t add up. I went back into his office. I looked in the clothes closet. I found what I was looking for. Or rather what I wasn’t looking for.
Alec’s heavy top coat was missing. And it was raw February weather. He’d gone out all right. But with running water and without his hooks. That meant only one thing to me. He hadn’t left because it was his idea. Somebody had taken him and somebody had been just decent enough to figure he’d be no trouble at all without his clever hooks.
I was worried. Real worried now. Everything was happening around me and all I could do was sit and fret or call the cops. I drummed nervously with my fingers on Alec’s work desk. Maybe there was something in the office that might tell me…
The phone rang. I nearly jumped a foot. I flew over to it, jerked the receiver off the stand.
“Hello,” I barked. “Alec—”
“Excuse me, please.” The voice was urgent, fast and anxious. “I must contact an office next to yours, Mr. St. Peter. I have tried ringing but there is no answer. I wonder if you would be so kind—”
“St. Peter isn’t here,” I snapped. “This is the office next to him—” I was slow. It didn’t hit me until just then. “Hold on. Is this Roland Ritz?”
The voice got really anxious now. It climbed about eight octaves higher.
“Mr. Noon, is that you? You saw the package, you have it in a safe place—?”
“Stop the music, Mr. Ritz. What is all this? I saw the alarm clock, yes. I’m holding it, yes. What gives? Why didn’t you wait for me—?”
“I couldn’t! They were too close—I barely eluded them. Mr. Noon, I’ll come as soon as I can. You must hold the clock until I can explain further—”
“That’s perfect.” I gritted it out. “Now, on top of everything you give me this secrecy act. Look, Ritz. Something’s happened to the owner of this office. A very swell kid. And time’s awastin’. Can’t you clue me a little—?”
It was no time for anything as far as Roland Ritz was concerned. He blurted something unintelligible that had “clock” in it and hung up. Just about as frantically as a guy dodging a bill collector whom he sees dining two tables away from him.
I stared at the phone for a long time. Trying to figure out what had happened to Alec St. Peter. Trying to figure what cooked with Mr. Roland Ritz. And above all, trying to make some sense out of that two bit alarm clock sitting in the sink in my office.
Alarm clock. I worried my lips with my teeth. It was beginning to alarm me, all right.
Chapter Two
One thing about thinking. You have to do some of it sooner or later in this crazy mixed-up thing we call life but in certain situations, you’re only wasting your time when you think. Especially when you haven’t got all the pieces to play around with. This was one of those times. And action doesn’t speak louder than words. It shouts.
I got organized. I turned the lights out in Alec St. Peter’s office and went back to my own workshop. I took Alec’s metal hands with me. As I carried them into the mouse auditorium, I suddenly wondered what it must be like to have hooks instead of flesh and blood fists. Alec never talked much about them even if he seemed to be completely unselfconscious about them. You can never really tell about cripples.
I set them down gingerly on the desk and took a look-see at the sink. I fished the dripping clock out, uncorked the plug and wiped the metal and glass dry. The clock had stopped ticking now. The water had either cured it or killed it.
The hands had stopped at nearly eleven. I took another long look at the thing. There wasn’t much to it in appearance. A plain circle of plastic plainly stamped with ordinary block numerals. Standard metal banding for sides with a tinny back plate that jutted out the customary winding and setting devices. A small base plate made the thing stand easily enough but it looked like one good puff would blow the whole works apart.
No sir. Outside was nothing. But inside was something else. I don’t know enough about clocks to rip out their guts. I was counting on Alec to help me out with that end of it. But Alec was gone and Roland Ritz was asking me to sit and wait until he came calling in person.
When I caught myself drumming my fingers again, I cut it out. I did one thing, though. I took the smaller clock that was on my desk and buried it in a side drawer. In its place I set down Roland Ritz’s valuable little item. It looked like it belonged on my desk. With the cheap four-drawer file, the faded leather chairs and the crummy office. For the time being, that’s exactly what I wanted it to look like.
I still hadn’t made up my mind about calling the cops in. I’d been in their hair plenty lately. This was one piece of business I would like to settle in my own backyard without Headquarters help. But what the hell did I do next? I was hung up between a crazy phone call and worrying about Alec St. Peter
.
The answer came automatically. Shaving is a wonderful journey into time if you’re in no hurry and just have to sit things out. I opened the package I had brought back from the drug store, cracked open the razor blades, and set myself up in business at the sink again. I shucked my coat, draped it over a chair, unstrung my tie, rolled up my sleeves and turned some hot water on.
While I waited for the water to warm, I opened the medicine cabinet, unearthed my razor and squeezed the tube into shape for some lathering.
I lit a cigarette, drew on it, set it down again on the lip of the bowl and got going. I lathered up as if it were going to be my last shave. My face stared back at me from the cracked mirror of the chest out of yards of cream and soap. I let it settle in, smoked some more, and then picked up my razor.
The right side of my face was as bared as a baby’s backside when the door behind me opened slowly. I kept on shaving but my left hand travelled to the middle of my waist and closed around the butt of the .45 that I had tucked there from force of habit. I cocked it quietly and waited.
The door stopped moving inward. But nobody came in. I put my razor down and turned. The .45 was on the door now. I edged away from the sink and slinked Apache-style to the wall and took up a position beside the four-drawer file that is the only standard piece of business furniture in the mouse auditorium.
I made a mental note to keep my office door locked from now on so people would have to knock first. It was getting monotonous the way characters kept barging in on me.
This was no character though. The arm that suddenly poked around the end of the door told me that. There was no hand where it should be. Just a smooth bare stump where the wrist normally joins the tendons of the hand.
I eased the hammer of the .45 forward, tossed it on to a nearby chair, moving forward eagerly, relief washing away caution. Then I checked myself, braking to a stop. The door had flown inwards, slammed back against the inside wall, and Alec St. Peter tottered in like a drunken man.
The Alarming Clock Page 1
