Melting Clock

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “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.

  Up two flights of stairs and two minutes later with the cop behind me I saw my face in the mirror of a candy machine. The stubble was almost a beard and it was gray.

  “That door,” he said. “Left.”

  I went through the door and found myself in an interrogation room: one table, four chairs, one lieutenant I knew named Seidman, and my brother, Phil. Lieutenant Steve Seidman, tall, thin, and white-faced, not because he was a mime but because he hated the sun, leaned back against the wall, holding his hat in his hand. He didn’t have much hair left, but that didn’t stop him from patting it down and giving me a shake of the head that said, Toby, Toby, this time you’ve really done it.

  My brother, Captain Phil Pevsner, was not shaking his head. He sat in a chair behind the desk, hands palm down on a green ink-stained blotter, eyes looking through me.

  Phil was a little taller than me, broader, older, with close-cut steely hair and a hard cop’s gut. His tie always dangled loosely around his neck, as it did now, and his face often turned red with contained rage, especially when I was in the same room … or even on the same planet. Today’s tie was a dark, solid blue; standard Phil.

  For some reason, “How are Ruth and the kids?” were the magic words that usually brought Phil out of a chair, a corner, or a daydream and into my face and lungs. He had decided years ago that I asked him about his family just to provoke him. He had been wrong the first three times.

  “Happy New Year,” I said cheerfully.

  Phil came around the desk like a bear with a mission. I knew I had found three new words to drive him mad. Seidman moved quickly from the wall and got between me and my brother. Seidman was a pro with more than seven years experience of saving me from Phil Pevsner brutality.

  “Phil,” Seidman said, making it sound like my brother should remember something about his own name.

  “Move, Steve,” Phil said, looking past his partner and into my smiling face.
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  “Phil,” Seidman repeated, holding his hands up but not touching my brother. Even he was not ready for that.

  “He’s laughing at me,” Phil said. “Does he know what kind of shit he’s in this time?”

  “He’s got a lot on his mind,” said Seidman.

  “He’s right,” I said sincerely.

  “Shit,” said my brother, holding up his hands to show his palms to Seidman and to me. He backed up, went around the desk, and sat heavily. The chair made a rusty squeal as he turned away and found a fascinating squashed beetle to look at on the wall. I had the rush of an idea that Phil and Dali might have a lot in common. I hoped they would never have the chance for a discussion of contemporary art. It would either end with Dali dead or Phil in a straight-jacket.

  “Sit down, Toby,” Seidman said, moving back to the wall and patting down his wisps of hair.

  I sat down in the chair across from Phil.

  The war had been Phil’s big break. He had been promoted right up the ladder from Homicide Sergeant to Detective Captain of the whole Wilshire District. Seidman had moved up with him. The rise hadn’t been because of Phil’s skills, but in spite of them. Phil was a basher. Phil hated criminals, sincerely hated them. Phil wanted to end all crime but knew it would never happen. The resulting frustration meant that every time he came face-to-face with a felon he became enraged. Other cops loved Phil. He was the one you frightened suspects with. No one in homicide had to play bad cop. They just called Phil or, if the criminal had been around a while, they just evoked his name. But the armed forces had taken the younger, ambitious police talent and Phil had been promoted to a job he hated, sitting behind a desk dealing with complaints from vendors about cops taking avocados, filling out forms, talking to visiting Chambers of Commerce from Quincy, Illinois. He had lasted about a year as boss of the Wilshire and then had been booted back to homicide after too many complaints. Seidman had asked to go back to homicide with him. Phil had been happy with the demotion. His wife, Ruth, with three kids in the house, had resumed worrying about her husband’s high blood pressure.

  “I appreciate your coming,” I said.

  Seidman shook his head; Phil said nothing and kept staring at the bug.

  “Did you kill him?” asked Seidman.

  “No, Steve. Am I a killer?”

  “Toby, don’t answer my questions with questions. Phil and I leave and two guys who don’t know you are going to come through that door and put you on the top of page two of the Times.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” I said.

  “Ask him about the handkerchief,” said Phil, very softly.

  “You had a bloody handkerchief,” said Seidman, who was back to playing with his hat.

  What could I say? It was bloody because I used it to fish Adam Place’s wallet out of his pocket and put it back and then wipe my fingerprints off the doorknobs?

  “I didn’t do it, Phil,” I said to my brother’s back.

  “Ask him about breaking in,” said Phil.

  “Did you—” Seidman began, but I jumped in.

  “Can we eliminate the middleman here? Maybe we can save a little time and you can find the killer.”

  “If I talk to him, I kill him,” said Phil. “He’s made my life a toilet.” Phil leaned forward and punched the wall about two inches above the bug, leaving a depression in the general shape and size of a fist.

  “I can deal with a middleman,” I said. “I went into Place’s house because I was on a job. I had reason to believe a valuable piece of property had been taken by Place and would be destroyed by midnight. I knocked at the door. He didn’t answer. I went in through the window, found him, and called the police immediately.”

  “You pick up a Hunky accent during the night?” said Phil, forgetting immediately that we had agreed on a middleman.

  “I didn’t want to get involved.”

  “What about the painting?” asked Seidman.

  “My client’s. It was stolen.”

  “It was a mess,” said Seidman.

  “I was going to give it back anyway,” I said. “You got me for picking up stolen property and trying to return it. By the way, the clock in Place’s bedroom—that was my client’s, too.”

  “We got you for breaking and entering, burglary, homicide, and attempting to leave the scene of a felony,” said Seidman, ignoring my addition of the clock to the problem.

  “I wasn’t leaving. I was going outside to wait for the police.”

  “Were you going to talk to them in Bohemian?” asked Phil.

  I didn’t like it when I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t know if he was boiling up or cooling down.

  “I made a mistake,” I said.

  “Maybe your client got there first, and when he saw what Place had done to the painting he went nuts and killed him,” Seidman suggested.

  “No, not this client,” I said.

  “Who is he?” Phil said, so softly I almost missed it.

  Now I was scared. Just before Phil completely lost control he made one last effort, always a failure, to be so calm and quiet that the unwary might think he had dozed off. But I had almost half a century of experience.

  “Come on,” I said. “You know I can’t tell you.”

  Phil spun around and looked at me. He was grinning. I had never seen that before.

  “He’s a suspect,” Phil said. “And we’re going to get him or you’re going to go up on charges of interfering with a homicide investigation.”

  “What about murder?”

  “Medical examiner says Place was shot before eight,” said Seidman. “Both your landlord at the Farraday, Butler, and Minck say you were in the Farraday till eleven.”

  “The bullet, Steve,” I said. “Is it from a thirty-eight? My gun’s a thirty-eight and I haven’t fired it. You can take it to ballistics.”

  Seidman shifted and looked uneasy.

  “Can’t match the bullet. No known make or caliber.”

  “Look for the second Place in Los Angeles to find the first painting. You have till midnight on New Year’s Day,” said Phil, looking directly at me with that new grin. “We found the note in your wallet. You were too late, Tobias.”

  “We’re playing with a wacko,” said Seidman. “Did this guy kill Place just because he had the second name in the phone book?”

  “Which of you figured it out?” I asked, my eyes fixed on my brother’s face for the slightest twitch that would tell me he was ready to attack, and that neither Seidman nor the Fifth Army would stop him.

  “It didn’t take much,” Phil said. “We had a clue you didn’t mention. Place’s dead body.”

  “Look—” I started.

  “No, you listen,” Phil said. “You’ll find the next on Thirteenth Street at midnight tomorrow.”

  “In the town of the spectator,” I added.

  “What?” asked Phil, sensing a needle.

  “The writing on the painting. It ended with ‘the Town of the Spectator,’” Seidman explained.

  “Who gives a shit?” said Phil. “There is no Thirteenth Street in Los Angeles. There are only seven listings for Street in the phone book and there’s no Thirteenth Street. Pico is Thirteenth Street. There’s a Thirteenth Avenue.”

  “He says Street, he means Street,” I said.

  “How many paintings are there, Toby?” asked Seidman. “Are they all by Dali? Who’s the guy who owns the paintings, the guy you’re working for?”

  I sat up a little and pulled at my underwear. I was fragrant from the night in the lockup, fragrant and hungry.

  “Come on, Steve,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound like a whine. “If I give you the name of my client, I’m out of business. My reputation will be shot. It’s what I’ve got to sell.”

  “You can sell apples on the street in front of Union Station,” said Phil. “I’ll buy a dozen.”

  “Phil, you’re my brother, and I really love you, but you’ve got no sense of humor.”

  This time the fist came
down on the desk. Everything on the blotter and beyond, the in-box, a few pencils, the photograph of somebody’s wife, danced around. Phil went cold blank, a very bad sign. Seidman saw it and stepped away from the wall again, motioning for me to get up. I figured he planned to block his partner, not enough to do much good but enough to give me a start out the door. I wasn’t sure where I’d go when and if I did make it beyond the Coke machine.

  “Phil,” Seidman warned.

  I started to get up.

  “Let him go,” said Phil, folding his hands in front of him on the desk, his knuckles going white.

  “What?” asked Seidman.

  “Let him go,” Phil repeated. “Go downstairs with him and tell Liebowitz to let him go. Tell him I said so.”

  “Mike Liebowitz isn’t going to—” Seidman began.

  “Mike Liebowitz owes me his job,” said brother Phil. “If he gives you a hard time, tell him to remember the Pacific Electric case in ’36.”

  “Steve,” I said. “It’s a trick to get you out of the room.”

  “No trick,” said Phil with a laugh. “I’m not in the mood for tricks.”

  He turned the squeaky swivel chair so he was facing the wall, and Seidman and I exchanged what’s-going-on looks. Seidman shrugged first. Then he went out the door. Silence. The room needed a window.

  “Phil,” I said.

  “Ruth’s got a growth in her left breast,” he said. “The doctor says it doesn’t look good.”

  “Shit, Phil, I’m—”

  “Just shut up, Toby,” he cut in, holding his hammy right hand up.

  I shut up. More silence.

  “She needs surgery,” he said. “Day after tomorrow. The boys don’t know. Surgeons are fucking butchers. You know that?”

  “Some of them—”

  “They’re butchers,” he repeated.

  “I play handball with a surgeon,” I said. “Good one named Hodgdon. He’s kind of old, specializes in bones, but he’d know a—”

  Phil shook his head.

  “Found out Wednesday,” he said. “Hell of a New Year’s present. We haven’t told anybody, not even Ruth’s mother.”

  “I’m sorry, Phil,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Give her a call. Don’t let her know you know.”