Stuart Kaminsky - Melting Clock

“Well?” I said.

“You’ve only got three hours,” Shelly answered, looking at his watch. “I’ve been gone almost two nights. I think I’ll go home.” He got up and headed for the door.

“Thanks, Shel,” I said, dropping crumbs into the now empty brown bag.

“Dali’s the painter who does the crazy stuff, right?” asked Shelly, turning toward me with an idea.

I nodded.

“You think you could talk him into painting a big tooth for me? You know, a tooth with a smile?”

“No, Shelly.”

“How do you know? You haven’t asked him.”

“I know.”

Shelly, unconvinced, retrieved his hat and went out, leaving the door open behind him. I looked at the note a few thousand times more and wondered what the second place in Los Angeles was. I wasn’t even sure what the first place was-the Brown Derby, Paramount, M.G.M.? I knew it wasn’t Columbia or Warners. Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard? The Beverly Hills Hotel? A little after ten and hungry again, I stuffed the note in my pocket, closed the window, turned out the light, and left the suites of Minck and Peters.

I was on the way down the stairs when I heard something move in the sixth-floor shadows. I stopped and waited a beat. Jeremy Butler stepped out.

“This is not a day of work,” he said. He was wearing dark trousers and a black turtleneck shirt. He had put on a few pounds in the ten years since he had stopped wrestling, but the arms and shoulders were still solid as a telephone pole.

“I’ve got a deadline,” I said.

“If we do not accept the events that mark the mythical passage of the year, if we do not honor the rituals and landmarks of time, great and small, seasonal and personal, we demean existence and its meaning. We demean ourselves.”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but shook my head and smiled as if I did.

“What are you working on?”

I told him quickly and he listened quietly.

“Salvador Dali is a tormented man,” he said when I finished. “When one lives the lie of madness long enough, one inevitably becomes mad and it is no longer a lie. One is trapped within the illusion that he can remove the mask, but he dare not try for fear that he will be unable to do it. The tragedy of Salvador Dali is that he thinks he is a clown claiming to be a genius when in fact he is a genius who truly believes himself to be only a clown.”

“How did you figure all this out, Jeremy?”

“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.”

Jeremy 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.