“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.