Melting Clock

change clothes. I wanted him to change clothes, but I didn’t want him to take time to think. The Crosley was battered but it ran.

The house was a little bungalow about two minutes away, inland, on a street just off of what passed for downtown Carmel. There was a light on inside. We walked down the sidewalk to the front door, a battered William Tell and Sherlock Bunny after midnight.

The door was open. This was Carmel. People still left their doors open. I knew that was changing everywhere.

We entered the living room, a small, neat box of a room with old sun-faded furniture on spindly legs that didn’t look as if they could support Odelle. There was a Dali painting on the wall. I didn’t see anything different about it. Nude woman on the left, her back half turned. Some figures in heavy black dresses in the middle, under some rotting stone arches. A desert in the background. Hills, sky.

Dali saw me examining the painting.

“A reproduction,” he pronounced with distaste. “Dali disdains reproductions. Paint must have dimension.”

We moved past the tiny lighted kitchen into the only other room in the house, a bedroom with an unmade oversized bed. Above the bed was a big painting of a woman with two babies in her arms. I looked around and headed for the closet in the corner.

“Where are you going?” Dali asked.

“It might be in there,” I said.

“No,” said Dali. “Dali has changed his mind. He no longer wants to find the painting.”

“Changed his … well, Toby Peters has not changed his mind. I lost my hood, got clobbered by a state cop, almost fell off a tower, and came close to losing my head to find that painting. I’m finding it. Tell Salvador Dali when you see him.”

“It is not in the closet.” Dali’s round eyes were opened wide and moist. His mustaches were drooping and in need of a quick fix of wax.

“How do you know till we …” I began, but he pointed at the painting of the woman and two babies over the bed.

I looked at the picture again and understood why Dali was afraid of having the public discover his secret painting. There was nothing surreal about it. It looked almost like one of the religious paintings in National Geographic, a madonna and child, only this was two babies. The mother, obviously posed by Odelle, looked down at them: two naked, smiling boys.

“That is my mother,” said Dali, his eyes wet with tears. “And that is me and my brother, who died before I was born. We were both named Salvador Dali.”

“I like it,” I said.

“Sentimental romanticism,” said Dali softly. “My enemies would crucify me, call me a fraud. My paintings, those in the other room, come from the dungeons of my soul. This one comes from my heart. The world must never know that Salvador Dali has a heart. If the world knows that Salvador Dali has a heart, enemies will come and eat it.”

There was a washroom off the bedroom. Dali disappeared into it. I heard the water running and then he came out holding a sopping washcloth in his paw. He stepped up on the bed and stood in front of the painting for a moment, took a deep breath, and attacked his signature in the lower left-hand corner.

I could hear his breath coming in little gasps as he raised the cloth in front of the face of the little boy on the left. His hand swayed.

“I cannot,” he said.

“Your name’s not on it anymore.”

“But there are those who would know,” he said.

“I’ve got an idea. I’ll cut my fee in half and you give me the painting. I’ll hang it in my office. No one’s going to believe it’s a Dali, not in my office.”

Dali put the washcloth in his mouth and sucked it while he thought. When he removed it, a small blotch of orange paint showed on his right cheek.

“Take it,” he said with a great sigh. “Take it. Perhaps one day I shall visit it. Perhaps one day when I do not worry so much about the vulnerability of my heart I will clasp it to my soul.”

“Makes sense to me,” I said, getting on the bed and lifting the painting down.

We had to cover the painting with a blanket from Odelle’s bed and tie it to the top of the Crosley with some drapery cords we found in a closet. It wanted to slither down the windshield at first, but I eventually had it secured.

On the way back to his house, Dali spoke only once:

“Very few people know who I am. And I am not one of them.”

13

We caravaned home to Los Angeles. Alice drove one car, with Jeremy and Natasha in the back seat. Gunther drove alone in his giant black Daimler, and I led the way in my massacred Crosley. Odelle was in the Monterey jail waiting for an L.A. cop to come and bring her back to book her for Taylor’s murder.

Gala had paid me in cash. I told her I wanted to submit a bill, that I had all the notes, that I would cut it in half and wait for payment but she declined.

“No, we put an end. Dali must put an end.”

We settled on $130, plus the painting. With the $500 from Barry Zeman, I now had $630.

I led the way in case I had a breakdown. The breakdown threatened but never quite came and I chugged into No-Neck Arnie’s with Gunther right behind. Jeremy, Alice, and Natasha had headed back to the Farraday.

“Vehicle is dead,” said Arnie, rubbing his hands on his overalls. “What happened?”

“Executioner came after it with an ax,” I said.

“That’ll ruin ’em every time,” he said.

Gunther drove me to the Farraday and waited while I went upstairs, and put the Dali painting in my office. It filled an entire wall and covered some cracks that needed covering. Shelly was nowhere around. There were some phone messages scrawled by Shelly and punctured on the metal spindle on the desk. I called Phil’s house and a woman answered. I didn’t recognize the voice.

“This is Toby,” I said, looking at the phone messages. “Phil’s brother.”

“I’m Mrs. Dudnick. Nathan and David said you were coming to take them to a movie after school, but Mr. Pevsner told the boys not to expect you.”

“I’ll be there, Mrs. Dudnick,” I said, seeing that another message was from my ex-wife, Anne. “How’s Ruth?”

“Surgery was this morning. Haven’t heard yet.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be over at four to pick up the boys.”

The third message on the spindle read: Woman called. Said she was Greta Garbo. Will call back.

Shelly was seated in his dental chair doing a dental crossword puzzle in one of his journals when I came out.

“When did the Garbo call come, Shel?”

“Six-letter word for ‘tooth rot,’” he mulled.

“The Garbo call,” I repeated.

“Lousy imitation,” Shelly said, looking up from his puzzle and launching into awful Garbo. “I vant to be by mineself.”

“‘To be alone,’ Shel. She didn’t say ‘mineself.’”

“Mineself. Alone. Whatever. Well?” he asked.

“Well?” I answered.

“The tooth. Dali was supposed to paint me a tooth, remember?”