Melting Clock (22 page)

Natasha chewed on my nose as Gala turned the key and the guests screamed and cheered.

Jeremy was at her side now. He shoved her toward the ocean as a bullet blasted out of the clock. Jeremy’s hand shot back as if it had been punched by Joe Louis.

The crowd stepped back. Screams. Shouts. One or two vegetables and a woman-man laughed. Gunther leaped onto the throne next to Dali, who put his hands over his eyes. Gunther ripped a piece from his coroner’s cloak and grabbed Jeremy’s bleeding hand. From where Natasha and I stood watching her father, he showed no sign of the pain he must have been feeling.

Dali jumped from the throne, took a quick look at his wife to be sure she was all right, and draped Jeremy’s uninjured arm around his shoulder. Gala took the other and together they helped Jeremy up the hill to where Natasha and I stood waiting.

Natasha reached for her father and Jeremy removed his good hand from Dali’s shoulder to take her.

“We’ll get you to a doctor, Jeremy,” I assured him.

“We will get him to the finest surgeon in the world,” proclaimed Salvador Dali.

“An emergency room will be fine,” said Jeremy. “I received a much more severe laceration when Carl ‘the Monster’ Frisson bit me during our match in Montreal in 1926.”

“My car is here,” said Gunther. “I will take him.”

“You’ll probably run into Alice and Odelle,” I said. “Sal, you’re standing in the grass.”

“So?” said Dali, a paw aimed at the ground.

“Grasshoppers,” I reminded him.

Dali laughed.

“Salvador Dali laughs at grasshoppers,” he said. “Monks have chased Dali with axes. Clocks have attacked his Gala. I will immortalize this moment. Gala will be depicted as a martyr. Dali will eat grasshoppers and laugh at the Metro.”

“I’ve got a question,” I said, turning to Gala. “You’re Russian. The curse on the clocks is in Russian. Why didn’t you …?”

“Nonsense, superstitious nonsense,” she said. “I knew the curse was put there to increase the value of the clocks.”

I was going to point out that in this case the curse had been real, that two people had died because of it and she had come close to being the third victim, but she was on to another topic.

“The painting,” said Gala, pulling at her husband’s white furry arm. “The third painting.”

“Yes,” Dali said, suddenly sober as we watched Gunther and Jeremy amble into the darkness.

Dali turned to look down the hill at what was left of his party. The bonfires were dying on the beach and the crowd had thinned to a few shadows. One of the tables had been carried out by the tide and waves and lay on its side half out of the water. The other table tottered with each wave, and the last of the food slid off into the surf.

“You know where Odelle lives?” I asked.

“A house, not far from here,” said Gala. “She lived with her mother till her mother died last year. The house is on Lotus Street. Three streets that way, then left, a blue wooden house.”

“Let’s go,” I said. “We can all squeeze into my car.”

“I will stay here,” said Gala.

I could see that Dali didn’t want to go without her, but she urged him to turn and go with me. I wanted to change clothes. I wanted him to change clothes, but I didn’t want him to take time to think. The Crosley was battered but it ran.

The house was a little bungalow about two minutes away, inland, on a street just off of what passed for downtown Carmel. There was a light on inside. We walked down the sidewalk to the front door, a battered William Tell and Sherlock Bunny after midnight.

The door was open. This was Carmel. People still left their doors open. I knew that was changing everywhere.

We entered the living room, a small, neat box of a room with old sun-faded furniture on spindly legs that didn’t look as if they could support Odelle. There was a Dali painting on the wall. I didn’t see anything different about it. Nude woman on the left, her back half turned. Some figures in heavy black dresses in the middle, under some rotting stone arches. A desert in the background. Hills, sky.

Dali saw me examining the painting.

“A reproduction,” he pronounced with distaste. “Dali disdains reproductions. Paint must have dimension.”

We moved past the tiny lighted kitchen into the only other room in the house, a bedroom with an unmade oversized bed. Above the bed was a big painting of a woman with two babies in her arms. I looked around and headed for the closet in the corner.

“Where are you going?” Dali asked.

“It might be in there,” I said.

“No,” said Dali. “Dali has changed his mind. He no longer wants to find the painting.”

“
Changed his
… well, Toby Peters has
not
changed his mind. I lost my hood, got clobbered by a state cop, almost fell off a tower, and came close to losing my head to find that painting. I’m finding it. Tell Salvador Dali when you see him.”

“It is not in the closet.” Dali’s round eyes were opened wide and moist. His mustaches were drooping and in need of a quick fix of wax.

“How do you know till we …” I began, but he pointed at the painting of the woman and two babies over the bed.

I looked at the picture again and understood why Dali was afraid of having the public discover his secret painting. There was nothing surreal about it. It looked almost like one of the religious paintings in
National Geographic,
a madonna and child, only this was two babies. The mother, obviously posed by Odelle, looked down at them: two naked, smiling boys.

“That is my mother,” said Dali, his eyes wet with tears. “And that is me and my brother, who died before I was born. We were both named Salvador Dali.”

“I like it,” I said.

“Sentimental romanticism,” said Dali softly. “My enemies would crucify me, call me a fraud. My paintings, those in the other room, come from the dungeons of my soul. This one comes from my heart. The world must never know that Salvador Dali has a heart. If the world knows that Salvador Dali has a heart, enemies will come and eat it.”

There was a washroom off the bedroom. Dali disappeared into it. I heard the water running and then he came out holding a sopping washcloth in his paw. He stepped up on the bed and stood in front of the painting for a moment, took a deep breath, and attacked his signature in the lower left-hand corner.

I could hear his breath coming in little gasps as he raised the cloth in front of the face of the little boy on the left. His hand swayed.

“I cannot,” he said.

“Your name’s not on it anymore.”

“But there are those who would know,” he said.

“I’ve got an idea. I’ll cut my fee in half and you give me the painting. I’ll hang it in my office. No one’s going to believe it’s a Dali, not in my office.”

Dali put the washcloth in his mouth and sucked it while he thought. When he removed it, a small blotch of orange paint showed on his right cheek.

“Take it,” he said with a great sigh. “Take it. Perhaps one day I shall visit it. Perhaps one day when I do not worry so much about the vulnerability of my heart I will clasp it to my soul.”

“Makes sense to me,” I said, getting on the bed and lifting the painting down.

We had to cover the painting with a blanket from Odelle’s bed and tie it to the top of the Crosley with some drapery cords we found in a closet. It wanted to slither down the windshield at first, but I eventually had it secured.

On the way back to his house, Dali spoke only once:

“Very few people know who I am. And I am not one of them.”

W
e caravaned home to Los Angeles. Alice drove one car, with Jeremy and Natasha in the back seat. Gunther drove alone in his giant black Daimler, and I led the way in my massacred Crosley. Odelle was in the Monterey jail waiting for an L.A. cop to come and bring her back to book her for Taylor’s murder.

Gala had paid me in cash. I told her I wanted to submit a bill, that I had all the notes, that I would cut it in half and wait for payment but she declined.

“No, we put an end. Dali must put an end.”

We settled on $130, plus the painting. With the $500 from Barry Zeman, I now had $630.

I led the way in case I had a breakdown. The breakdown threatened but never quite came and I chugged into No-Neck Arnie’s with Gunther right behind. Jeremy, Alice, and Natasha had headed back to the Farraday.

“Vehicle is dead,” said Arnie, rubbing his hands on his overalls. “What happened?”

“Executioner came after it with an ax,” I said.

“That’ll ruin ’em every time,” he said.

Gunther drove me to the Farraday and waited while I went upstairs, and put the Dali painting in my office. It filled an entire wall and covered some cracks that needed covering. Shelly was nowhere around. There were some phone messages scrawled by Shelly and punctured on the metal spindle on the desk. I called Phil’s house and a woman answered. I didn’t recognize the voice.

“This is Toby,” I said, looking at the phone messages. “Phil’s brother.”

“I’m Mrs. Dudnick. Nathan and David said you were coming to take them to a movie after school, but Mr. Pevsner told the boys not to expect you.”

“I’ll be there, Mrs. Dudnick,” I said, seeing that another message was from my ex-wife, Anne. “How’s Ruth?”

“Surgery was this morning. Haven’t heard yet.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be over at four to pick up the boys.”

The third message on the spindle read:
Woman called. Said she was Greta Garbo. Will call back.

Shelly was seated in his dental chair doing a dental crossword puzzle in one of his journals when I came out.

“When did the Garbo call come, Shel?”

“Six-letter word for ‘tooth rot,’” he mulled.

“The Garbo call,” I repeated.

“Lousy imitation,” Shelly said, looking up from his puzzle and launching into awful Garbo. “I vant to be by mineself.”

“‘To be alone,’ Shel. She didn’t say ‘mineself.’”

“Mineself. Alone. Whatever. Well?” he asked.

“Well?” I answered.

“The tooth. Dali was supposed to paint me a tooth, remember?”

“I guess he forgot. He had a lot on his mind.”

Shelly put his magazine in his lap, pulled out a cigar, lit it and thought for a few seconds before saying, “Can’t trust artists or hardware store clerks.”

I wanted to call Anne but it would have to wait. I went downstairs, got into Gunther’s ear and asked him to drive me to the hospital. It took about fifteen minutes. We got there just after noon, and my stomach was growling.

“I’ll meet you back at Mrs. Plaut’s,” I said. “Thanks for everything, Gunther.”

“I am pleased to have been of service,” he said, looking clean-shaven and spiffy in his powder blue suit complete with matching vest.

I found Phil in the surgery waiting room, his tie loose, his eyes red.

“How is she, Phil?” I asked, sitting next to him.

He looked at me and shook his head as if remembering some long-ago stupid question I had asked him.

“She’ll be okay,” he said. “Doctor said it looks like she’ll be okay. Goddamn doctors.”

“Goddamn doctors,” I agreed.

“You trying to be funny?” he asked, turning to me, his fists tight, ready. He needed a shave.

“No,” I said. “I’m not trying to be funny. You want to go get something to eat?”

“No,” he said.

We sat in silence for about three minutes, looking at the door, waiting for a nurse, a doctor, a report.

“You’re still wanted for taking evidence from the scene of a crime,” he said.

“I didn’t kill that guy, Phil. You know I—”

“I know. I heard. Some shit about clocks and dead guys committing murder. It’s Cawelti’s case. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“How about when we hear about Ruth we go out for something to eat and go back to my office?”

“Back to your office?” Phil said, looking at me with red eyes. “Why the hell would I want to go to your office?”

“I bought a painting,” I said. “Mother and two kids. Looks like you and me and Mom.”

“What have you been drinking, Tobias? Mom died when you were born. You didn’t even know her.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Hell,” Phil said suddenly, running his thick right hand over his short-cropped white hair, “Let’s go look at your painting.”

My brother punched my shoulder and we both stood up. I looked down at my father’s watch.

“Quarter after one,” I said.

Phil looked at his watch.

“Quarter after one,” he agreed.

THE

END