Melting Clock Read online

  “Looks great.”

  “Take care of that Crosley of yours and it’ll be worth something in twenty years,” he said, nodding at my car.

  “I need it for transportation,” I said.

  “The future,” he said, pushing his unruly hair back. “That’s where I live. That’s how I made my money.”

  “The present,” I said. “That’s where I live and why I don’t have any money. This is your place?”

  “My place, and my wife’s. You’re the detective.”

  “I’m the detective,” I admitted, following him up the stone walk to the front door, which opened suddenly. A woman the size of Alaska stepped out, closed the door, and looked over our heads down the driveway. Her yellow-white hair was bun-tight and her cloth coat was open, revealing a serious white uniform. I glanced back over my shoulder to the driveway, where a cab was pulling up. Zeman and I parted so the woman could get through.

  He leaned back in. “Find the paintings and the clocks or tell them as soon as you can that you can’t do it,” he said softly. “I’ll give you five hundred cash if this is all over either way in two days.”

  Behind us the cab door opened and closed and, a beat later as Zeman opened his front door, the cab took off.

  “Five hundred,” he repeated. “I’ve got an investment in Salvador Dali. Quite a collection, thirty paintings, drawings, and even some jewelry and sculpture. You’ll see it inside. Know what it’ll be worth in twenty years?”

  “As much as a Hupmobile,” I guessed.

  “Much more,” he said with a grin. “I’ve got an investment in the man, an investment for me, my kids, my grandchildren. I’ll be nice to him. That’s business, but I tell you, Toby, between the two of them, they drive me and the wife crazy nuts. Wife’s taken off for Palm Springs till they go. I’m a prisoner of my investments.”

  “I’ll do my best to wrap this up in two days,” I said, “but …”

  He pulled a business card from the pocket in the bib of his overalls and handed it to me. It had a little thumb print on it and an address and phone number on Sunset Boulevard. Mr. Zeman’s line of business was printed under his name: Investments. I unzipped my wind-breaker pocket, tucked the card away, and zipped up again as Zeman opened the door and let me in.

  The living room into which we walked was bright and big, white walls to a skylight in the ceiling. The furniture was all modern, whites and blacks with hardwood floors and colorful patterned rugs.

  “Decorated by Dali himself to show off the paintings,” said Zeman, folding his hands behind him as I looked around at the walls and the seven pictures hung there. They were all different sizes. The smallest was a black-and-white study of an egg on a seashore. Something had pecked through the egg and was trying to get out, something with a beak and a human arm. The painting was about the size of the cover of an atlas.

  There were bigger ones, some of them filled with little objects, all of them colorful. Seashores or deserts with long pianos on the beach and old men with huge behinds hovering over girls. Seashells and limp things that shouldn’t be limp, books, shells, pianos, radios, watches. They looked like they were melting from the heat. A grasshopper sat on the shoulder of a woman who was kissing a tall man. From the angle you couldn’t be sure whether he was, in fact, kissing her or the grasshopper.

  “Response?” asked Zeman, beside me.

  “I don’t know. Strong. Hard to look away from. Sad, maybe.”

  “Dali’s paintings are not sad,” came a woman’s accented voice, the voice I had heard an hour earlier on the phone. “Dali’s paintings are a celebration of the inner voice. He doesn’t not paint what other people see. He paints what no one sees.”

  “I’ll go with that,” I said, looking at her.

  She was small and clearly the boss wherever she went. She moved past Zeman into the middle of the room and looked around at the paintings.

  “That,” she said, pointing at the largest one above a white sofa, “is me.”

  She was right. It was Gala Dali painted like an angel with wings, floating in the air about as high as a basketball net while below a quartet of men, one with a cockeyed grin, looked up under her dress. She was dressed in black—the real Gala, not the one in the painting. I figured her for thirty-five, her face pale and not quite pretty but clear, her dark hair brushed back. She was a woman who took the world seriously, which was probably quite a problem, since not many people in the world were prepared to take her husband seriously.

  “Dali will be down in a minute,” she said. “He just awakened from his dreams and is dressing. Please sit.”

  I sat in a wooden chair painted black.

  “I’ll be out working on the Hup if you need me,” Zeman said to both Gala and me. Though it was his house, the information didn’t seem to be of much interest to her. She looked at me with dark, dark eyes, trying to see something that would tell if I was worthy of an audience with the great man.

  Zeman went back outside and Gala was alone with me, her hands clasped together in front of her like a concerned Mexican chaperone.

  “The clocks,” she said. “I want the clocks returned, but Dali’s paintings are more important.”

  “What do they look like? The clocks and the paintings?”

  “Only Dali can truly describe his own work,” she said with pride. “The clocks are for the table, the size of two heads high and numbers in gold. They are deep, dark red-stained birch wood from the Ural mountains and on the bottom of each clock is an inscription in Russian. How did you break your nose?”

  “It says, ‘How did you break your nose’ in Russian?”

  “You are trying to be witty,” she said dryly.

  “My brother broke my nose, twice,” I said.

  “He wanted to break your nose?”

  “The second time, probably. First time was an accident. He was a violent kid. He’s a violent man.”

  “Brothers are serpents of the mind.” The voice came from the stairway on my left.

  I looked up. Dali stood at the top of the stairs dressed in a clown’s outfit, a big floppy red suit with puffy white buttons, oversized slap-shoes. He wore no makeup. He didn’t need any. I watched him come down the stairs and enter.

  It wasn’t a bad entrance as entrances go, but I’ve lived in and around Hollywood for almost half a century and I’d served security stints when I was with Warner Brothers and on my own. My favorite was the night Thelma Todd walked into a Victor McLaglin party, took off her white mink coat, and revealed one hell of a beautiful nude body. She looked down as if her having nothing on was a complete surprise. I was at the door, backing up the butler to keep out crashers. I saw Thelma Todd from behind. Dali in a clown suit didn’t come close.

  Dali came in, looked at his wife—who nodded—and examined me, touching his nose from time to time as if he were considering how to put me into one of his paintings. I didn’t like the idea.

  “Brothers are vampires,” he said. “Brothers are vampires and fathers are ghouls. Mothers are saints whom we mistreat. You agree?”

  He stopped circling and waited for my answer. Gala seemed to draw in her breath. Somewhere outside and not too far away a noisy lawn mower was being pushed.

  “No,” I said.

  “You need money?” he asked, pointing his chin at me. “You want to work?”

  “It’s either that or learn to barter,” I said. “And I’ve got nothing to trade with.”

  “I like you, Peters,” he said with an accent that couldn’t decide whether it was French or Spanish. “You have the face of a peasant.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “But I have liked Fascists and Surrealists,” he whispered, leaning toward me so the Fascists and Surrealists would not hear him. “The Fascists wear brown shirts that look like the merde and the Surrealists paint with the merde. They have much in common.”

  “Then I withdraw my thanks.”

  “You think Dali is mad?” he asked, now moving to the matching white
chair across from me and trying to sit in it with back-erect dignity, which is hard to do when you’re wearing an oversized red suit and size 30 shoes. Gala moved forward to stand behind him and put her hands on both his shoulders. He reached up with both hands and touched hers. It looked like genuine affection, but I wasn’t the one to recognize genuine affection.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “The difference between me—” he pointed to himself in a grand gesture—“and a madman is that I am not mad.”

  He had said that before. I knew it, but instead of pointing it out I took a chance and said, “Are we going to keep it up like this or is there some place on the program when we have an intermission and you tell me what I’m doing here?”

  “He is rude, Dali,” Gala said, lifting her chin imperiously.

  Dali patted her hands to reassure her.

  “Dali is rude,” he said. “He is honest. Would you like something to drink, Toby Peters?”

  “Pepsi if you’ve got it. RC will do. Water with ice, if it comes to that.”

  Gala left the room. I thought she was going for my drink. She never came back with it.

  When she was gone, Dali turned to me.

  “Three things I wish to tell you,” he said, holding up his right hand in a closed fist. “First”—and one finger came up—“I love American radio but your announcers, actors speak too fast. Second”—second finger—“I must have my paintings back, and Gala’s clocks.”

  His left hand went into the pocket of his clown suit and came out with an oddly shaped piece of wood. He played with the wood while we kept talking.

  “What were they paintings of and how big are they?” I asked.

  “One was the size of that one,” he said, pointing at a painting about the size of the front of a refrigerator. “Another was the size of that wall.”

  “Big picture,” I said.

  “Magnificent picture,” he agreed. “Months to paint.”

  “Third picture,” I said.

  His face went slack, the bug-eyed Huntz Hall look disappeared. The mask dropped and he looked human, frightened.

  “It is like this,” he said, standing and holding his arms out to show me that the missing painting was about a yard across and a yard and a half high.

  “They’ll be hard to find if I don’t’ know what they look like,” I prodded.

  “They are unmistakably Dali’s,” he said, a touch of the normal still there. “And that is the problem.”

  “I’m not an art critic or an artist,” I said.

  “And I am not a detective,” he said.

  I spent the next half hour asking him questions while he fidgeted with the piece of wood and paced around the room. The paintings and the clocks had been taken from his house in Carmel about a month ago. It had happened during the night when he and his wife were asleep. All of the paintings had been framed; they had been taken frame and all.

  “What can they do with these paintings?”

  “Probably nothing while Dali lives,” he said. “Nothing but show them to or sell them to people who will appreciate them. When Dali dies, they will be worth much and these … these insects can claim Dali sold the paintings to them or gave them.”

  “So you’re afraid they might kill you so they can sell them and kick the price up?”

  The reaction made it clear that Dali had never considered that possibility. He stopped pacing and looked at me. He blinked like an owl, his mouth opened. He froze.

  “You think they …?”

  “No,” I said. “Not a chance. These are art thieves, not people willing to risk a murder charge for a few thousand dollars.”

  “Many thousand dollars,” Dali corrected.

  “Many thousand dollars,” I agreed.

  “Your wife says you got a note. Can I see it?”

  Dali plunged his hand into the clown pocket and came up with a crumpled envelope. He handed it to me and stood back to watch my reaction. I pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope. The words were typed and there weren’t many of them:

  Look for the second PLACE in Los Angeles to find the first painting. You have till midnight on New Year’s Day.

  I looked up at Dali.

  “You may keep it,” he said.

  I nodded sagely.

  “You know what it means, these words?” he asked.

  “Do you?” I asked right back with a knowing smile as I stood and pocketed the envelope and letter.

  “No,” he said. “But there is only one reason this ladron would send such a note. He wishes to toy with Dali, to drive Dali mad, but Dali is beyond madness. Madness is a word without meaning.”

  I asked some more questions but didn’t get very much that would help. He had no idea who would steal his paintings. It wasn’t that he didn’t suspect anyone. He started on a list of those he did not trust. I wrote the names but gave up after twenty when he began to include people from his childhood, some of whom were dead. The list included Pablo Picasso, Luis Bunuel, Andre Breton, Dali’s father, and Francisco Franco.

  “Zeman,” I tried.

  “Yes, I do not trust him,” Dali said emphatically. “I trust only Gala. I do not even trust Dali. He is totally unreliable.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” I said. “One hundred dollars in advance and I’ll call you every day.” I moved toward the door and Dali followed, his clown feet plopping on the hardwood floor.

  “Gala gave me the money,” he said, pulling out a handful of bills and handing them to me. He put his hand back in his pocket and came out with more. I stopped at the door and counted while he played with his mustache and looked at a blank wall. He was two bucks short but what the hell.

  “You’ll hear from me,” I said.

  “You must find those paintings,” Dali whispered. “I’ve painted what I see within me, without censorship. The world knows that Dali fears no offense, but this painting … it will end the career of Salvador Dali. Find them all, but find that one and Dali owes you his art.”

  He took my hand in both of his after pocketing the piece of wood he had been playing with.

  “I’ll settle for twenty a day, expenses, and that painting,” I said, opening the door. “One more thing.”

  “One more thing,” Dali repeated.

  “When we started talking, you said you had three things to tell me. You only told me two of them.”

  Dali smiled as I stepped outside.

  “The third thing is that no one knows who I really am. On Tuesday there is a party in Carmel. On Tuesday, I will be both a rabbit and Sherlock Holmes.”

  With that, he closed the door.

  Zeman was working under the hood of the Hup. He stopped and moved over to my car as I crawled over the passenger side to the driver’s seat. There was no way to do it gracefully. I rolled down the window to hear what he had to say.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Not much to go on,” I said.

  “How’d you like them?” He nodded toward his own front door as if they might come out for a curtain call. I shrugged.

  “I can see where they might be a little tough to come home to every night.”

  “Make it a thousand-dollar bonus if you find them in three days, Peters,” he said as I turned the key and prayed for the Crosley to start. It didn’t. I was left filled with incentive and no idea of what the hell to do to find the missing paintings.

  “What about the clocks?” I asked.

  “Good pieces,” he said. “Might be worth a few thousand each. More if they work.”

  “They don’t work?”

  “No one has ever wound them,” he said. “Gala says they were gifts to the Russian royal family, but the tsar never got to use them. Revolution came before they could be wound … or something. She and her family got them out and haven’t allowed anyone to wind them.”

  “Why would anyone take clocks and paintings and then write crazy messages?” I asked.

  “I’m an investor, not a detective,”
Zeman said with a shrug as he moved away from the door. “Ask me about Dusenbergs or Brazilian bonds.”

  I started the engine, heard it ping to life. I put it in gear as the front door to Zeman’s house opened and Gala Dali stepped out holding a glass of bubbling dark liquid. My Pepsi. I put the car into gear and headed for what passed for sanity in Los Angeles.

  It was about seven when I hit Main Street looking for a place to buy a Pepsi and get a sandwich. Not much was open on New Year’s Day, not even Manny’s taco stand on Hoover. Usually I left the car at No-Neck Arnie’s, but everything was closed and there were plenty of parking spaces, including one right in front of the Farraday.

  The streets weren’t deserted. They hadn’t been deserted in downtown Los Angeles since the war had started. Nightfall and the blackout did put a damper on the town but didn’t close it down—it just went undercover. The outer door to the Farraday was open but the one inside was locked. Jeremy Butler had started locking it when even he was forced to acknowledge that he was losing the battle against bums looking for a corner of cool tile. It wasn’t actually a battle; Jeremy never complained about the bums. He never complained about anything. He went about his business, Lysol in great hairy hand and a poem forming in the mind under the bullet-smooth cranium.

  I listened to my footsteps echo across the inner lobby. There were a few lights on, enough to find your way to the stairs and elevator, but not enough to penetrate the far corners.

  The Farraday was silent and I was in no hurry. I had about five hours till midnight and a puzzle to work on. I didn’t think I’d solve it. I took the elevator, an ornate wire cage from the days of Diamond Jim Brady. The elevator never quite came awake. It moved slowly upward in a swaying daze. Usually I walked.

  On the way up I looked through the chipped gilt mesh at the offices on each floor where lies were sold. You want a lie to believe in? The Farraday was the place for it. Want to become a movie star? There were four agents in the Farraday. Want to sue everyone who ever told you the truth about yourself? You had a choice of lawyers, almost one to every floor. Did you want to think you were irresistible? Escort services for ladies and gents were on the second and fifth floor. Want to think you’re beautiful? Choice of two photographers, one of which was Maurice, Photographer to the Stars. The other was Josh Copeland, Glamour Portraits at a Reasonable Price. Bookies, pornographers, doctors of everything from throat to stomach, a single dentist—Sheldon Minck—who sold the promise of a winning smile and perpetual Sen-Sen breath. And then there was me on the sixth floor, where the elevator came to a jerky stop. I sold the lie that there was always one last chance when all reasonable attempts to solve your problems failed. Sometimes, usually because it was easy or I was lucky, I actually helped a client.