“Get in the house, Peters,” Taylor said threateningly.
“At nine this morning. Said it was urgent.”
“Thanks,” I said and followed Taylor inside.
He closed the door and I stood there waiting for my eyes to adjust to the light trickling in through the closed shades and half-drawn curtains of the living room.
“John,” I said. “I think you and Jim were planning to be greedy. I think you and your brother were planning to take Dali’s money and keep the clock.”
“Only if the clock was worth a lot of money,” he said, walking across the room and pulling back the drapes.
The room wasn’t exactly washed in light now, but I could see a little better. A green sofa with wooden arms sat against one wall of the room. There were spots on the green, turning white from too many bodies and too much sweat. The once-dark wooden arms were scratched with dirty yellow lines. There were two other chairs in the room. One was red, a washed-out red that had given up trying to look like silk the night Taft took his first bath in the White House. The remaining chair was blue with embroidered tree leaves only slightly darker than the background. There were two lamps, one on an end table between the chairs and one floor lamp trying to be modern but missing it by two decades. Newspapers were open and everywhere.
“Charming place you have here,” I ventured.
“Jim and I haven’t touched it since Mom died,” he said, moving across the room to an open door. “Jim,” he called.
I followed him. We looked through the bedroom door at two beds, twin beds that looked a bit small for the Taylor kids.
“Nice beds,” I said, following him back into the living room.
“Mom and Dad bought them for us when we were seven. Where the hell is Jim? He was supposed to be here.”
There was only one room left, the kitchen, where we found Jim seated at a square table with chrome legs and a white Formica top. Jim was face-down on the newspaper spread out on the table. I knew he was dead because something with a wooden handle was buried in the back of his neck. It was buried so deep that I couldn’t see any of the blade. On the table, facing the handle, was a clock, the triplet of the two I had seen sitting in front of two other corpses over the past two days. This one wasn’t ticking. The key was in the hole under the minute hand.
There was no painting. We’d taken the nickel tour of the place and I hadn’t seen it. John Taylor stood, feet slightly apart, hands at his side, looking at his dead mirror image on the table.
“Go in the other room and sit down,” I said.
Taylor didn’t seem to hear.
“Go sit.”
He was shaking now, like a little balsa wood model of a Spitfire. Like the one my nephew Nat had hanging over his bed.
“You’re too big for me to carry, Taylor. Go sit down.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, his face white.
“I’ve got a brother,” I said.
“You don’t understand. I hated him,” said Taylor. “We were never him and me. We were us. No one thought about us as … as …”
“Individuals.”
“Individuals,” he repeated, his eyes fixed on his brother. “I hated him. I don’t think I can live without him. I don’t know how.”
I wanted to tell him to save it for a headshrinker or his neighborhood priest, but he wasn’t really talking to me. I moved to the table and touched the corpse. Still warm. I heard a sound and looked up at the window in the back door. Frank Buxton, the clock appraiser, was standing there watching. He blinked once and backed away.
“I think you can expect the police in about five minutes,” I said, turning back to Taylor, who hadn’t moved and didn’t seem to hear.
“The police,” he repeated dumbly.
“You know where the painting is?”
He shook his head no.
“You see the painting?”
He shook his head yes and said, “You want a liverwurst sandwich? That’s all we …” His voice trailed off.
There was a large glass fruit bowl on the counter near the sink next to an open box of Kellogg’s Pep. There was one rotting banana in the bowl. I took it out and put it in the sink. Then I opened the briefcase and shoveled about half the money into the bowl.
“That’s for the clock,” I said.
Taylor pulled his eyes from his brother and looked at the bowl of money.
“For the clock,” I repeated.
“You’re a straight shooter, Peters,” he said.
“Like Tennessee Jed,” I agreed.
“Sorry I tried to kill you.”
I picked up the clock. It was damned heavy. It would have been bad enough if I weren’t carrying the briefcase.
“Open the door,” I said, “and get to a phone. Call the cops. You might beat Buxton to it. At least you’ll be on record as having called.”
He shuffled to the back door and opened it.
“And hide the money.”
But John Taylor wasn’t listening to me. He had turned his back to the door and stood facing his dead brother. I kicked the door closed and tried to keep from breaking my neck as I made my way down a narrow cement pathway to a dirt alley behind the house. The alley led to a dead end. I crossed a tiny yard with a lawn that had been mowed within the decade and found myself on a small street that looked just like the one the Taylor brothers lived on. I was sweating now and the clock was getting heavier. I lurched on like Lon Chaney in his mummy suit until I came to a street that showed some sign of life and led back to Rosecrans. I was about four blocks from the Taylor house now. Traffic was light in the early afternoon, but I spotted a Black and White cab and waved him down, balancing the clock and the briefcase in one hand.
“Nice clock,” said the cabbie through his window.
“Thanks,” I said and told him to head back to the shipyard.
I got my Crosley with no problem. The clock sat on the seat next to me and looked straight ahead all the way back downtown and into No-Neck Arnie’s garage. I didn’t even bother to look for a space on Hoover or Main and I wasn’t going up against the pumpkin man again. I slid over, taking the clock in my arms, and got out. I reached back inside and retrieved the briefcase. I wasn’t looking forward to carrying them both to the Farraday, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave them with No-Neck Arnie.
“Peters,” said Arnie, an overalled little man with a barrel chest and enough oil and grease on his body to fuel Huntington Beach for a week.
“Arnie,” I said. “Fix the door.”
“Busy,” he said. “Where’d you get the clock?”
“Other side of hell,” I said. “I’ll be in my office about an hour. What’ll it cost to fix the door?”
Arnie walked around to the driver’s side door, wiped his hands on his overalls and tried to open it.
“You did that last week,” I reminded him.
“Warp, heat, alignment differentials change in a week,” he answered, in the mysterious tongue of auto mechanics.
“How much?”
“Twenty bucks,” he said.
The clock was heavy, the briefcase handle sweaty.
“Twenty bucks,” I agreed.
Arnie looked at me suspiciously.
