Melting Clock (6 page)

“From his paintings, his autobiography. It was published last year, a sad attempt to shock.”

“What do you make of this?” I said, handing him the note.

He held it up to the light from the yellow bulb on the sixth-floor landing and read, then he returned the note to me.

“The word PLACE is capitalized,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“It may be a proper name,” he said.

“The second Place?”

“The second person named Place in Los Angeles,” he said.

“What second person named Place?”

“Perhaps,” he said, “the second person named Place in the Los Angeles telephone directory.”

J
eremy went back to his family and I went for the phone book in my office, hoping the right pages hadn’t been torn out by Dash during one of his visits. The page was there. The first Place listed was Aaron. He was followed by Adam Place, who lived on Nicholas in Culver City. It was a little after eleven. I considered calling but what would I say? “Have you got a stolen Dali painting?”

About twenty minutes later I was pulling into a parking spot on Nicholas across from Lindberg Park. There was no one on the street when I crawled out of the passenger seat of my Crosley and looked around for the address. It wasn’t hard to find, a rectangular one-story pink adobe house across the street in the middle of a block. There was a white sign in front of the house announcing
ADAM PLACE, TAXIDERMY.

From what I could see, Adam was asleep or out. No hint of light seeped through or around the closed vertical blinds covering every window. I went up the little walkway, stopped, and listened. I couldn’t hear anything. There was a white button next to the door. I pushed it, but didn’t hear any gong, buzz, bell, or clang. I tried again. Nothing. I knocked. The knock echoed down the block and into the rustling trees across the street in Lindberg Park. I knocked again.

Then I tried the door. Locked. It must have been near twelve and I had to make up my mind. Knocking was getting me nowhere. I could get back in my Crosley, watch the place and wait for a light or a human or the morning. That would definitely put me past the midnight deadline the thief had given. I stepped off the path and moved around to the side of the house. No point in trying a front window and risk being seen. The houses on either side of the adobe were barricaded by bushes. I went to the left and looked for a window and shadows to hide in. I found both. The first window was locked but the second one was open. I shoved it, pushed the blinds out of the way, and climbed in. When I got inside, I turned and closed the window behind me.

Darkness and the overwhelming smell of something dry and old. I followed the wall to the right, hand over hand, feeling for a light switch or a lamp. Adam Place, if he had a gun and was somewhere in here, had a perfect right to blow my head off. I thought about that as I moved along, figuring I’d eventually hit the front door and find some kind of light. It didn’t take that long. I bumped into furniture, tripped over a table, felt something brush my face and fall behind me, and then I felt it. Definitely a lamp. I turned it on and found myself looking into the angry face and sharp teeth of an animal about the size of my Crosley. I stepped backward, fell over a table full of stuffed birds, and landed on the floor in a flurry of dead wings. The animal with the angry face and sharp teeth was a puma. I’d seen one in the Griffith Park Zoo. This one was stuffed and dead.

If Adam Place was here, I was a noisy dead man, but no one came running or calling. I sat up, brushed away owls, gulls, doves, and a small eagle, and looked around the room. The lamp cast a washed-out yellowish circle of light over a room cluttered with stuffed animals looking directly at me. There were dozens of them, covering almost every spot of table, mantle, shelf, and even floor. And on the walls were paintings of animals. The wall was covered with paintings of elephants, bears, lions, the big ones looking just as stuffed as the ones below them. I got up and looked around, being careful where I stepped.

Through doves, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, and even a pair of armadillos, I tiptoed my way across the room to the next room. There was a light switch in there, just inside the doorway. I hit it and looked around what must once have been a dining room. Now it was just an extension off the living room. More paintings on the wall. Stuffed animals, some as small as mice, covered the chairs and filled a huge china cabinet whose doors were open. The big wooden table with claw feet was crowded with animals in various states of stuffing. A possum, its belly open and half filled with sawdust, lay on its back surrounded by sharp metal instruments.

I wanted to whistle “Violets for Your Furs” and go for the door, but I backed out of the room and went on. The house was small. There couldn’t have been much left. Somewhere in the darkness I could hear the serious ticking of a clock. I went through a kitchen, which had not yet been completely overtaken by dead animals but was well on the way, and found a bathroom. I hit the light and saw a sink, tub, wicker clothes hamper, and one stuffed animal, a small alligator, perched on the toilet bowl.

I moved back into the hall and found the first bedroom, or what should have been the bedroom but was the reptile room. Tables of snakes, lizards, and things I didn’t want to look at too closely. One wall was free of paintings. It was filled by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. All the books were, I was sure, about animals and how to do them in or do them up.

I figured it for a two-bedroom house and I was right. I found the switch in the second one and saw a stuffed grizzly bear in the middle of the room, guarding a big bed on which a man lay in roughly the same position as the possum in the dining room. There was a black, bloody hole in his forehead and a surprised look on his face. At the foot of the bed on a little table sat a big clock, Gala Dali’s clock, ticking, its face toward the dead man, now beyond time. The bed, neatly made, was covered in blood.

Over the bed on the wall was a painting. Dali was right. It was unmistakably his. It wasn’t very big and nothing like the other paintings in the house, except that the biggest figure was clearly an animal, a big white bird with a long neck and the head of a man wearing a derby hat. The bird was full of holes you could see through to a ridge of rocks behind it in sand. The Swiss cheese bird didn’t seem to be uncomfortable.

The bird wasn’t easy to make out because someone had used white paint to splash across the picture the words:

Señor, 13th Street at midnight tomorrow in the Town of the Spectator.

I checked the time on Gala’s clock. It was ten after midnight. Tomorrow had already started. I moved to the bed and pushed the dead guy over just enough to reach into his pocket and pull out his wallet with the not-too-clean handkerchief I had in my pocket. I didn’t get much blood on the handkerchief.

The dead guy was Adam Place, or someone carrying Place’s wallet. There were two tens and a single in the wallet, plus some pictures of the dead guy in an army uniform—World War I, not the current one. I dropped the wallet and moved to the phone near the clock. I got a cop on duty at the Wilshire Station and with my best Polish-Hungarian-Czech accent said, “Is man dead here.”

“How should I know?” asked the cop.

“No,” I said. “Is here, here a man dead in his bed. Very blood. Very dead. You come.”

“Where?” asked the cop, without enthusiasm.

I gave him the address.

“Wait there,” he said.

I hung up and looked up at the painting. It wouldn’t do Dali much good and it was evidence, an oversized piece of evidence. But he was my client and the only thing I had to sell was loyalty.

“What the hell,” I said to the grizzly bear, and leaned over the bed to get the painting down. I considered taking the clock, too, but I couldn’t carry the painting, the handkerchief I needed to wipe away my prints, and the clock, which looked as if it weighed about as much as Shelly Minck’s dental chair. If I hurried, I could get the painting in the car and come back for the clock.

With the painting under my arm I made my way out of the bedroom, turning off the light behind me. I hit the other lights and went to the front door. I had at least ten minutes to get out of the area, maybe more. The cop on duty hadn’t believed me but he’d follow through and a patrol would amble over and check it out about the time I was pulling up in front of Mrs. Plaut’s too late to get Apples Eisenhower.

I was wrong. I turned the latch with my handkerchiefed hand, opened the door carefully, and found myself looking at two uniformed policemen. The bigger one had his hand up ready to knock.

What was there to say? I pocketed the bloody handkerchief and said, “Yes, officers?”

“Got a problem here, sir?”

“Problem?” I said.

“Neighbor said there were noises, lights, saw someone crawling through a window,” said the smaller cop, who looked a little like Jimmy Cagney.

Both of them had their hands on their holsters. I kept mine in front of me.

“Noises?” I asked.

“Noises,” said Jimmy Cagney.

“And a man crawling in a window,” said the bigger guy.

“Where were you going with that painting, sir?” asked Cagney.

“Going?” I said, brilliantly.

“And what did you put in your pocket?” said the big guy, holding out his hand.

“I …”

“Just take it out slowly,” said Cagney, pulling his pistol and aiming it at my chest.

I pulled out the bloody handkerchief and offered it to the big cop. There wasn’t much light, but it was enough for them to see the blood.

“I think we’re coming in,” said Cagney.

“I think you are,” I agreed, stepping back.

It moved fast from that point. I was in handcuffs and on my way to the station in five minutes. I knew what the charge would be. Neither of the cops had bothered to ask me questions. Why should they? They had called in for the medical examiner and a homicide crew and we were on the way down the street with the painting in the trunk when a second patrol car pulled around the corner. We didn’t stop. I figured the second car was coming in answer to my call. They’d go in and find the body, too. It would probably take the L.A.P.D. a week to figure out what had happened.

No one talked to me that night. I asked to see my brother but no one paid attention. I wasn’t sure whether they believed Phil was my brother or they just didn’t care. I was in the Culver City lockup, and he was sleeping in North Hollywood. They took my ninety-eight dollars. I got a receipt.

The cop who took my prints was about seventy. He said they’d picked up a guy the week before because of his prints.

“Robbed a guy and beat him near bloody death,” the old cop said. “But the victim bit one of the assailant’s fingers off. Took a print from the bit-off finger and tracked him in a week.”

“Life’s little ironies,” I said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said the old cop.

I had a cell to myself. They do that with people suspected of being homicidal maniacs. It saves the embarrassment of explaining the violent overnight deaths of other prisoners.

All in all it had been one lousy day. I was sure I’d be up looking for dawn through the barred window and listening to other prisoners snore. I lay on the cot, put my head on my rolled-up windbreaker, and was asleep before I could remember what had been written on the Dali painting.

I dreamed of birds flying over a desert. The birds had vacant looks and their feet were stuck to little pedestals. They were searching for something, blocking out the sun, and Dali was there, in front of a giant nude woman sitting with her back to me. The woman was looking at one of Gala’s clocks, the one I had seen in Place’s bedroom. The clock was melting. Dali was wearing his big red suit and slap-shoes. Behind him was Koko the Clown, who flapped his arms and flew up in the sky with the birds. Dali danced over to me, a paintbrush in his hand, and dabbed a smear of white on my nose. I couldn’t move my arms.

He leaned over and whispered to me as Koko swooped down and stuck out his tongue.

“Listen to me. There is no longer a second place, and there is no Thirteenth Street in the present tense. Time is death.”

I wanted to shoo him away but my hands wouldn’t move. I didn’t want any more puzzles or riddles. My head throbbed from the sound of dead birds, and I longed for a simple missing senile grandmother, a play-around husband, or a murder for ten bucks by a dim-witted armed robber. My wishes were simple even in my dreams.

Dali danced off and Koko landed in front of me. The birds filled the sky, blotting out the sun, and Koko opened his mouth to tell me the answer to the puzzle.

“Get up,” he said.

That wasn’t the answer and it wasn’t Koko’s voice. I opened my eyes and looked into the face of a uniformed cop with a freckled bald head. The sun was coming in through the bars, and I could smell something that might be food.

“Up, Peters,” the cop said.

I sat up.

“No clowns,” I said.

“Just you, bub,” the cop said wearily. “They want you upstairs. Got your legs?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go,” said the cop and we went.