Melting Clock

2

It all started that Friday, New Year’s Day, 1943. Well, at least the year started that Friday. The things that led to me being nose-to-nose with an ax-carrying lunatic through the not-very-thick glass of my car window probably began when we were both born. Maybe a hell of a lot earlier.

It was sometime in the afternoon at Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house on Heliotrope in a not-so-bad area of Los Angeles not far from downtown. Mrs. Plaut had thrown a wild party the night before to welcome in the new year. To celebrate the occasion, she had put together a dress that looked like a shroud with lunatic flowers of every shape and color sewn onto it. There was very little of her in the first place. Eighty years of life had eroded her into a tough hickory cane lost in the enormity of that dress, the construction of which she had badly miscalculated, probably based on memories of a more matronly body.

Highlights of the Plaut festivities, in order, were:

• Mr. Hill, the mailman, his unnecessarily tight tie threatening to strangle him, singing a medley of songs starting with “Cupid’s Stupid Isn’t He?” and ending with, “The Donkey Serenade.”

• Mrs. Plaut’s elderberry punch, made from elderberry saft sold by her nephew Ridgeway, a traveling salesman who appeared for about half an hour about once a year looking back over his shoulder for dissatisfied custom ers or ex-wives.

• Guy Lombardo on the radio from 11:30 P.M. till midnight, when we sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

When Carmen Lombardo sang “and never brought to mind,” I thought I saw a tear in the corner of the eye of Gunther Wherthman, my best friend, who lives in the room next door to mine, and who also happens to be three feet tall and Swiss. Gunther had brought a date to the festivities, a graduate student in music history named Gwen, whom we had met on a case in San Francisco two months before. Gwen looked on Gunther with adoration, seeing only a gentle man who spoke and wrote eight languages and knew the difference between a woman and a lady. Gwen looked a bit more like a toothpick than a woman or a lady, but Gunther saw only the adoration.

I had asked Anne, my former wife, to spend New Year’s Eve with me but she’d said she had to stay home and do her nails instead. I had a feeling she was doing more than her nails. I tried Carmen, the cashier at Levy’s, but the ample Carmen had said she’d promised her son that she’d be with him New Year’s Eve.

“You wanna come?” she had asked without enthusiasm as she rang up my Reuben and Pepsi. “We’re gonna toast marshmallows and stuff.”

“What stuff are you going to toast?” I’d asked.

“Just stuff,” she said.

That had been the second-longest conversation I had ever had with Carmen. The longest one had been about Roy Rogers.

So, I had decided to stay home and join the Plaut New Year’s Eve party. I should have gone to Carmen’s house to toast stuff.

Mrs. Plaut had concluded New Year’s Eve with the reading of a passage about her Cousin Ardis Clickman, from her massive memoirs. I was editing her memoirs. At various times Mrs. Plaut thought I was an exterminator, then a book editor. I don’t know how she’d come to either conclusion. Many have tried to penetrate Mrs. Plaut’s fantasies. All have failed. I had long since given up telling her that my name was and is Peters, Toby Peters, private investigator, not exterminator, not editor.

“Mr. Peelers,” she said on that semi-sultry Los Angeles night, “you need pay special attention since you will get my inflection which is not available to you when you are at the task of editing the Plaut saga.”

“I’ll pay special attention,” I had promised.

I looked at her bird, whose name changed at Mrs. Plaut’s whim. From the perch in his cage, Carlyle-or was his name now Emmett? — cocked his head to one side and contemplated the tale Mrs. Plaut monotoned for almost an hour.

It had to do with “The Mister” who, along with Uncle John Anthony Plaut and Aunt Claudia had, on New Year’s Night, 1871, decided to attack the local settlement of Pawnees-always good fun when one grew weary of watching the fire crackle and re-reading Goody’s Journal.

It seems that “The Mister,” who would later marry Mrs. Plaut when he was ancient and she was a child, was particularly fond of the Pawnees. Since I valued my sanity more than my curiosity, I didn’t bother to question this. I doubt if Mr. Hill even heard it. His eyes indicated that, inspired by elderberry punch, he was off to undreamed of ports of call. No, it was Gwen, who took things and people at their word, who asked the question,

“Why did they want to attack the Pawnees?”

“One may like a class of human species and still feel the necessity of causing their demise for reasons to do with survival and such like,” Mrs. Plaut explained, patiently.

“Well,” I said when I thought she had finished her tale. “This was some party, but I’ve got to get up early.”

“I’ve never known a man to refuse a final cup of Grandmother’s elderberry punch,” she said, evening up the pages of the hand-written manuscript. Over the years, the thing had grown to massive proportions.

“I must,” I said sadly.

Mrs. Plaut placed her manuscript back in the linen-covered box from whence it had come and handed it to me.

“I think it’s time I took Gwen home,” said Gunther, jumping down from the sofa with practiced dignity and offering his hand to his date. He was the only one dressed for the occasion, complete with three-piece suit and tie with a matching handkerchief in the jacket pocket.

Mr. Hill, if his face was a reasonable window to his soul, was over the sea in Erin, dreaming of Leprechauns.

And that was it.

I wished everyone a happy New Year and went to the pay phone on the second-floor landing. I dropped in a nickel and called Anne. She answered on the first ring.

“Hello,” she said in the voice that never failed to stir memories.

“Annie, Annie was the miller’s daughter,” I recited. “Far she wandered from the singing waters. Up hill, down hill Annie went a maying …”

“Toby, I was in bed.”

“Happy New Year,” I said. “You want me to come over?”

“No,” she said.

“I’m sober,” I said.

“I can tell. You never were much of a drinker, even on New Year’s Eve.”

“I’ve had a depressing night,” I said.

“So you’d like to come over and depress me?”

“That was not my plan.”

“You didn’t have a plan, Toby,” she said quietly. “You never have a plan.”

And then I heard it-something, someone.

“You’re not alone,” I said.

She said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You couldn’t know,” Anne said gently.

“No, I’m sorry you’re not alone.”

“I hope you have a good new year, Toby,” she said.

“Yeah.” I hung up, imagining Anne who, at forty-one, was dark, full, and might be considering her third husband. I had been the first. Ralph, the second husband, was another story.

There was only one other person to call. I did it. A girl answered.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“Tina Swerler,” she said. “The babysitter. The Pevsners are out. It’s after midnight.”

“Did I wake up the kids?”

“Lucy and Dave are asleep. Nat’s still up.”

“Can I talk to him?”

Pause and then, “Uncle Toby?”

“Yeah.”

“You on a case?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Nat was twelve. He knew better than to ask me if I’d killed anyone today. That was David’s question. David was eight and kept track of my murders in the pursuit of justice. The last time I had checked with David the count was sixteen. I was still well behind David Harding, Counterspy. The truth was I’d never killed anyone, and had only shot in the general direction of a few people in the ten years since I’d left the Glendale Police Department. I was and am a terrible shot.

“Tina let me taste wine,” Nat said.

“How old is Tina?” I asked.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“Tell your father and mother I said happy New Year. And tell David and Lucy. I’ll try to stop by tomorrow.”

“You mean later,” he corrected me. “It’s already tomorrow.”

“It’s never tomorrow,” I corrected him.

“I guess,” he replied, perplexed. “Are you drunk, Uncle Toby?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Good-night, kid.”

“Good-night, Uncle Toby. Uncle Toby?”

“Yeah, Nat.”

“He doesn’t want to be called David, or even Dave. He wants to be called Durango.”

“Durango Pevsner,” I said. “I’ll try to remember. Thanks. Good-night.”

There was no one else to call. I wouldn’t go to Phil’s house in the morning. I didn’t know why. I just knew I wouldn’t go. I’d stay in my room till I went nuts. Then I’d go to my office or to a movie. Usually I could count on Gunther to accompany me to nearly any movie, but Gunther now had Gwen.

I went into the bathroom I shared with Mr. Hill and Gunther, put Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript on the sink and looked at my face in the mirror. I had shaved before the party but I still didn’t look like Victor Mature. The hair was there and dark, mainly, with flecks of gray. The nose was flat and the eyes brown. The ears stuck out a little, which should have detracted from the image of the guy who shouldn’t be messed with, the guy who knows how to take a punch and how to give one. Only I hadn’t given many punches.

I had a good face for my profession. Maybe I should have been better at it, but I lacked ambition. That was what Anne had always said, that I lacked ambition and was still about fourteen years old emotionally.

Who the hell was Anne with tonight? No, don’t think that way. Next thing you know you’ll be listening in on phone calls, going through her garbage for notes, taking photographs from trees, and following her around to girdle shops.

I went back to my room. My room at Mrs. Plaut’s was modest. Sofa with doilies made by the great lady herself, complete with a small purple pillow on which was sewn “God Bless Us Every One.” On the wall was a Beech-Nut Gum clock that told pretty good time, at least as compared to my watch. I took the watch off and put it on the little dresser near the door. It had been my father’s, the only thing he had left me. It told the right time twice a day if I was lucky and didn’t rewind it.

I had a bed, but I didn’t use it much. I dragged the mattress onto the floor to appease the God of Bad Backs. There were a few Gobel beers in the small refrigerator in the corner. They’d been there for months. I fished behind the milk and found one. I pulled it out, closed the door, sat at my little table for two, and popped the top with my Pepsi opener.

I didn’t want a beer, but I drank it. I owed it to Nat.

With Mrs. Plaut’s chapter at my side, I lay on the mattress and was asleep on the floor in my underwear before the Beech-Nut Gum clock clicked to one.

When I woke up in the morning, the cat was sleeping on the bed next to me.

The cat’s name is Dash. Notice I didn’t say “My cat’s name is Dash.” He’s not mine. He abides with me when he wants to come in through the window, get some attention, and eat. He’s big and orange and saved my life once.

I made the dangerous barefooted journey to the front porch in my blue beach robe that had Downtown Y.M.C.A. written on the back in black letters. I almost never beat Mrs. Plaut to the L.A. Times, but she must have slept in after a party that rivaled those thrown by John Barrymore and Fatty Arbuckle.

Back in my room, I fixed myself a bowl of Wheaties and a glass of Borden’s Hemo, did the same for Dash, and read the paper while I ate. I considered a second round for both me and the cat, but milk was up to fifteen cents a quart and clients were down almost one hundred percent.

My back was okay and I wasn’t feeling as sorry for myself as I had the night before, partly because the sun was bright, partly because it was a new year and the news wasn’t bad.

The Soviets were routing the Nazis, claiming that more than 312,000 Germans had been killed. Even Hitler was telling the Germans that it was going to be a tough year. And here at home, oleomargarine was hard to get.

In the movie section I found two choices, either Who Done It? with Abbott and Costello or Time to Kill with Lloyd Nolan as Mike Shayne. Tough choice. I decided on both of them, providing the Rose Bowl game was over early enough. I had a busy day planned.

I lay in bed grappling with Mrs. Plaut’s prose until the game came on. The Times had reported that Georgia coach Wally Butts had said Frank Sinkwich wouldn’t start. His star running back had a bad ankle. Sophomore Charlie Trippi would replace him. Trippi was supposed to be okay, but no offensive match for U.C.L.A. quarterback Bob Waterfield’s arm.

I slept on and off through most of the game and woke up when the crowd, reported at 93,000, roared and I heard a voice say that Sinkwich had gone in for the touchdown. Dash didn’t seem to be around.

“Telephone,” came Mrs. Plaut’s voice from outside my door.

I mumbled some dry-mouthed something that I hoped would satisfy her and let her know I was trying to rejoin the land of the living, but Mrs. Plaut was not an easy woman to reach. She came through the door and looked down at me. She was wearing what at first looked like a cloak and dagger but turned out to be a U.C.L.A. shawl and trowel.

“Telephone,” she repeated.

“Mrs. Plaut, though I know this will do me no good, to hold onto the illusion that you and I are capable of communication, I’ll ask you again, please don’t come in here without the following scenario: You knock and I answer. I answer one of several ways: Come in. Just a minute. Or, I can’t open the door now. There are variations on this.”

“Phone is waiting,” she said, looking first at me and then at the crumpled L.A. Times, “and I’ve got apples to peel.”

“I’m almost naked,” I said, sitting up.

“You are just noticing that?” she asked. “I knew it as soon as I came through the door. Kindly put the newspaper back together, especially the funny papers and the cooking, and bring it down to me.”

“Who …?” I began, but she was gone.

I put on my blue robe and went out to the phone on the landing. “Hello,” I said.

“Dali is distraught,” came a high-pitched woman’s voice with a distinct accent that might have been Russian.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said.

“When Dali is distraught, he cannot work,” she went on. “He can think only brown. Brown is not a good color for Dali to think in.”

“I see,” I said. Downstairs, Mrs. Plaut carried a bowl of apples out onto the front porch.

“Only Dali truly sees,” she said.

“What are we talking about?” I asked.

“You did not answer Dali’s letter.”

Then it hit me. A few weeks ago when I was lying on the mattress in broken-legged pain, Mrs. Plaut had handed me a pink envelope with an eye painted on it. She told me that the letter had been delivered by a woman in a funny hat.

“You’re the woman in the funny hat,” I said.

“I am Gala, the wife of Dali, formerly Gala Eluard, born Elena Deluvina Diakonoff.”

I considered asking her what the next race she was running in was, now that I knew her lineage, but I sometimes remember what side my bread is margarined on.

“What can I do for you?” I asked amiably, smelling insanity or a client or both. I have taken money from both the guilty and the insane. With the price of milk going up and margarine as hard to get as gas coupons, a man in my business took what he could get. Shoplifter patrol at the neighborhood Ralph’s Grocery was the only work I’d done for the past two weeks.

“You read Dali’s letter?”

I had read it. I still had it in the second drawer of my dresser. It said:

I cannot understand why man should be capable of so little fantasy. I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone; I do not understand why champagne is always chilled, and why on the other hand telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and so disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them. Please try to locate a telephone which does not offend you and call me at the number below. I am in need of your services.

“I called the number in the letter,” I said. “It was a Greek bakery.”

“Impossible,” she said. “Dali does not like Greek pastry. The dough is like gritty paper covered in honey.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said, “but it was a Greek bakery.”

“There are no Greek bakeries in Carmel,” Gala Dali said triumphantly.

“Well, you got me there. Yes, ma’am. But I called a Los Angeles number.”

“We are in Carmel,” she said.

“The letter didn’t say that.”

“Everyone knows Dali is in Carmel,” she admonished.

Although I was living proof that this was not so, I had no desire to prolong the discussion or provoke a possible client. I said nothing and after about five seconds she seemed to accept that as an apology.

“Are you available?” she said. “We must-”

Someone interrupted her in a foreign language and she answered. They went back and forth for a few seconds while I waited, wondering if I could still catch the Abbott and Costello movie or give up and listen to the Philco special, “Our Secret Weapon.” Rex Stout was going to expose Axis lies. Dash and I could curl up with some bran flakes and give our moral support to the Allies.

Gala came back on the line.

“Dali wants to know if you have blue eyes.”

“Brown,” I said.

More discussion in a foreign language.

“That is acceptable. Are you a Surrealist?”

“I’m a private detective,” I said patiently.

Then a man’s voice came on the phone, excited, so accented that I could barely understand what was being said.

“I do not deal with Breton and his Surrealists. Do you know why?”

“They don’t shower regularly.”

“No, I do not know if they shower regularly. The difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a surrealist.”

“I’ll remember that.”

The woman was back on the line now.

“Dali is upset.”

“I could tell. I’m a detective.”

“We must see you. We have lost weeks.”

“Why me?”

“Poldi,” she said.

“Poldi?”

“Stokowski, Leopold Stokowski,” she explained impatiently. “You worked for him. He told us you could help. Someone has stolen three of Dali’s paintings and three clocks, clocks my mother gave to me, the only things I have from Russia, from Dr. Lazovert in St. Petersburg when we-”

“I’m sure you considered this, but how about the police?”

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” she said and Dali took the phone from her to add, “No, no, no, no, no.”

And then she was back.

“There are things … there is something in one of the paintings that must never be seen by the public. The paintings were taken from our house. They were not meant to be seen. The shock would … it would be …”

She couldn’t imagine what it would be and neither could I. I didn’t know much about Dali. I knew he was Spanish, read that he was a bit nuts or putting on a show that he was nuts to sell his paintings. This was the Salvador Dali who painted men with shit on their pants, painted old men with erections that looked like melting pianos, and designed hats with figures of dead babies on them. This was the guy who said his plan was to shock the world every twenty-four hours. What the hell could he have painted that he thought the world couldn’t handle?

“… shocking,” I said.

“Shocking, yes. We have had a message from the thief,” she said. “I must read it to you.”

“Let’s talk business first,” I said.

“They have not indicated what they want,” she replied.

“No, let’s talk about my business. Twenty dollars a day, plus expenses, plus one original painting by Dali if I get any of the paintings back.”

“The money is nothing,” she said, “but you are asking for a Dali painting, a piece of his soul.”

“A small piece will be okay. And he turns them out fast,” I said.

She passed the terms on to Dali and came back on the line to say, “Yes.”

“One hundred dollars in advance when I get to Carmel,” I prompted.

“We are not in Carmel now,” she said. “The thief said he was in Los Angeles. We came in a limousine. We are in the Beverly Hills, the home of a friend. You must come now.”

She gave me an address on Lomitas; I told her I’d change and be there in about an hour.

“One hundred dollars when I get there,” I reminded her.

“Yes, yes,” she agreed and hung up.

I went back to my room, wrote the address in my battered spiral notebook, and got dressed, pleased with myself that I’d added the painting into my fee. I’d never seen one of Dali’s paintings. Didn’t think I’d like them from the descriptions I’d read, but it would be something Jeremy Butler might want. Jeremy was the landlord at the Farraday Building, where I had an office inside the office of Sheldon Minck, D.D.S. Jeremy, large, bald, somewhere in his sixties, had made a few dollars as a pro wrestler and invested the dollars in a downtown office building on Hoover, as well as various other properties around town. His specialty was taking buildings on the way down and using his muscle and will power to embarrass them and make them respectable and profitable. I had the feeling he hadn’t been particularly successful. But Jeremy was a poet, a poet who had recently married and fathered a remarkably beautiful round baby named Natasha. The Dali would be a gift for Natasha, if I got the paintings back.

I put on the best of what I had left in the closet. I didn’t have a clean suit or a sports jacket. I didn’t really have dirty ones either. A suitable addition to my wardrobe was high on the list of purchases planned for Dali’s advance money. I did have a windbreaker: showerproof, gabardine, brown, and lined with rayon. Zipper pocket over the left breast and reasonably clean. I’d picked it up new for eight bucks at Hy’s for Him. My underwear was passable, my socks dark, my trousers only slightly wrinkled and blue enough to hide any stains I didn’t want to investigate. It was the best I could do.

I dragged the mattress back on the bed, sort of straightened the covers and watched Dash crawl out from under the sofa and stretch. I gave him a few seconds to figure out where he was and then picked him up and tucked him under one arm. Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript was under the other.

I didn’t expect to avoid Mrs. Plaut. I didn’t even try. She sat peeling apples on the white-painted front porch swing, watching the neighbors when they appeared. I dropped Dash on the porch and he went down the stairs and out of sight into the bushes.

“That was some party,” I said, putting the manuscript box next to Mrs. Plaut on the swing.

“What do you think about kindergarten, Mr. Peelers?” she asked as I brushed orange cat hairs from my wind-breaker.

“I don’t remember it well, Mrs. Plaut,” I said. “I do remember Evelyn Yollin, the shortest girl in class, who-”

“No,” she interrupted when I had almost retrieved the image of little Evelyn, who might be a grandmother now. “Uncle Robert’s idea about kindergarten.”

I hadn’t read most of Mrs. Plaut’s chapter but I’d scanned it and didn’t remember an Uncle Robert. She looked up into my bewildered face.

“Not my Uncle Robert from Port Arthur, the radio Uncle Robert in New York who says we should get rid of the word kindergarten because it’s a German word.”

“Ah,” I said. “I haven’t really-”

“Nonsense,” she said, looking over the roofs across the street toward the eastern sky. “Plaut is a German name. What would they call kindergarten? What would they call Plaut?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Radio people, painters, and the emperor of Japan are crazy people,” she said, returning to her apples. “I’m going to make Apples Eisenhower. Eisenhower is a German name, too. If you do not come back before three hours it will be ready and you may have some. I cannot prevent you from giving some to the orange cat, but I would prefer that you not give him much. He’s beginning to look sassy though he no longer looks with hunger at my bird.”

“I’ll ration his Apples Eisenhower,” I promised.

“Speaking of rations,” she said. “Stamp number twenty-four in War Ration Book One is good for one pound of coffee until January twenty-one. Sugar stamp number ten in War Ration Book One is good for three pounds of sugar until January fifteen. Gasoline A coupon number four is good until January twenty-one. Stamp number seventeen in War Ration Book One is good for one pair of shoes until June fifteen.”

I didn’t ask how she remembered all of this. I just said, “You can have them all, Mrs. Plaut”

She nodded and went on, “Blue A, B, and C stamps in War Ration Book Two will be issued in February. They are worth forty-eight points worth of canned and other processed foods for the month of March.”

“You may have them all, Mrs. Plaut”

“War is hell, Mr. Peelers.”

“I’ve got to go, Mrs. Plaut. Dali’s expecting me.”

“The one from Tibet,” she said knowingly.

I’d been through this with her before so I said, “Yes, Mrs. Plaut.”

“Book or pests?” she asked.

It took me a beat to understand. “No, he hasn’t written a book and he doesn’t need an exterminator.”

“Ah,” she said with a very knowing smile. “They’re wrong about the kindergarten thing, you know.”

“They’re wrong,” I agreed. “I’ll see you later.”

My khaki-colored Crosley was, as all Crosleys are, almost small enough to pick up and carry under one arm. I’d bought mine used from No-Neck Arnie the mechanic for two hundred dollars. He’d got it from a guy who’d picked it up at a hardware store in 1940. It wasn’t a bad car. Maybe the reason it didn’t catch on was the brilliant marketing idea of selling them in hardware and appliance stores like ladders and coping saws.

I was feeling pretty good when I turned the corner at Heliotrope and drove over to Arlington to head north. Crossing the street when I got to Arlington were a man and a woman. The woman looked like Anne. I drove past and looked back. It wasn’t Anne.

I had paid No-Neck Arnie fifteen bucks to install a radio in the Crosley. Crosleys came without frills-just a speedometer, a fuel gauge, and a water gauge, but I needed company when I drove. One of the Eberle brothers was singing “This Love of Mine.” I turned the radio off and paid attention to the road.