The Melting Clock: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Sixteen) by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Author:Stuart M. Kaminsky [Kaminsky, Stuart M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-12-13T06:00:00+00:00

7

Twenty minutes later, the Ford pulled into a parking spot on Nicholas Street next to Lindberg Park, no more than twenty or thirty feet from where I had parked last night. I knew I had the right man and I knew where we were going—the house of Adam Place, the dead taxidermist. What I didn’t know was why.

I kept driving and watched him through my rear-view mirror as he got out of the Ford, looked around, and crossed the street. I was in no big hurry now. I parked a block away and told myself to get to a phone and call the Culver City constables. I told myself, but I didn’t listen. What did Alice in Wonderland say? “I always give myself such very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”

I got out, checked my .38, put it back in my holster and walked toward Place’s place. There were no lights on in the house of stuffed animals, at least none I could see. No cop guarded the scene of the recent murder. Cops were too busy with wild sailors on leave and riots among the Mexicans. There was a red-on-white sign on the door: DO NOT ENTER. CRIME SCENE. BY ORDER OF THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT AND THE CIRCUIT COURT OF LOS ANGELES.

I stayed away from the side of the house where Place’s neighbor lived, the one who had called the cops the night before, but that cut down the possible entries. A good-sized fence blocked the view of the neighbor to the right of the house. I used the fence to cover me while I walked to what I was sure was Place’s bedroom window.

There were no street lights in the neighborhood. Even if there had been, they would have been out by now. There was also no moon, because of a heavy cloud cover, which you’d never know by reading the papers—no weather reports were published or given on the radio for fear of aiding the Japanese in an attack. That never made much sense to me. The Japanese had to have better weathermen than we did in California.

I tried the window, but tried it so gently that I wasn’t sure I was putting enough pressure on it even if it were opened and greased with oleomargarine. Someone, probably Jim Taylor, was inside the house with a rifle, and Jim Taylor had already taken a shot at Dali tonight, not to mention that he had probably shot both Claude Street in Mirador and Adam Place in the same bedroom I was trying to enter.

I pushed a little harder. The window was unlocked. It shot up with a rattle and there I stood, waiting for the bullet to go through my chest the way it had gone through the back of Dali’s painting of Odelle. Nothing. I climbed in the window and tried to remember what the room looked like.

Then the light came on.

The man was about thirty or thirty-five, with a serious look on his face.

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