The Alarming Clock Read online

  Only he wasn’t drunk. Even as he turned a bloody, bruised and badly-beaten face in my direction, I could see he wasn’t drunk. He was swaying, his eyes looking for me, and the condition of his clothes added more story to the condition of his face. The old GI overcoat that he wore had never been issued to him in its present condition. Huge rents and bloody slashes had made a vermilion mockery of the olive drab.

  I caught him before he fell and he sighed almost gratefully. His eyeballs rolled and his mouth was inches from my ear.

  “—Christ, Ed. Where were you—missed you—”

  His sudden weight brought me down to one knee. I cradled him against me as he trailed along the floor.

  “Alec—” The blood started bumping around in my head, churning angrily. “Who did it, boy?”

  Between battered lips, I caught the words. Crazy, never-say-die GI Joe talk.

  “Experts—” he gasped. “Musta learned it from the SS boys—”

  He was losing consciousness fast. There wasn’t time for much more. His lashes fluttered and a spurt of pain bubbled out of him. I held him, squeezed him.

  “Alec,” I pleaded. “Hang on. Give me a lead. What happened?”

  One of his stumps suddenly pushed at me feverishly. His eyes fought to stay open. His mouth worked.

  “—clock, Ed. There’s a clock—guys want it—watch out—want it bad—thought I had it. Beat me—”

  That’s all he was going to say. Because, suddenly he cursed and folded up like a wet newspaper. He’d taken some going over and it had finally caught up with him.

  I released him softly until he was stretched out quietly on the floor. I flew to the sink, wet some towels, dashed back like a crazy man, not knowing where to begin first or what to do first. Reflexively, I started mopping away at the red ruin of his face, feeling for his heart, his pulse. Solid, genuine fear had taken hold of my insides and wouldn’t let go.

  I saw his helpless stumps again, the long strong arms that ended into meaningless wrists and a million things exploded in my skull.

  And the damn phone rang again. Harshly, impatiently, jangling my nerves into a tangled mass of reflexes.

  I tore it off the hook, conscious of confusion and the poor, battered thing on the floor behind me.

  A voice purred in my ear:

  “Our little calling card precedes us, I think. Now that you have been more or less convinced of the sincerity of our purpose, we are coming up to pay you a visit. Do not make the same mistake the young man made. We are not playing games, Mr. Noon—”

  Something happened inside my head. And something came out of me that only a good psychiatrist could explain.

  “You dirty sonofabitch bastard—” I went on from there. A string of blind-red, unprintable, unintelligible curses.

  The voice refused to stop purring.

  “As you will, Mr. Noon. We are minutes from your door. Do not call the police, my friend. You would be dead before they reached your office. Now, if you will just wait for us, it will be a matter of minutes—”

  I was still cursing when the voice with the purr in it hung up.

  Chapter Three

  Funerals and tears are for later. No matter how you feel about a particular victim, when trouble is coming the only thing to do is get ready for it.

  The purring voice on the phone hinted that I’d be too late to try anything. I couldn’t exactly swear to what that meant. But there was one thing I could do. I did it.

  I got back into my clothes, washed the cream off my half-shaved face and took my .45 off the chair I’d thrown it on. I got behind the desk, bulwarked myself in the swivel chair and set up my defences. I trained the big .45 on the door of the office. Then I felt foolish and melodramatic. The voice on the phone must have thought of something like that. And it hadn’t bothered the voice on the phone. I started to get a cold sensation that wasn’t much relieved by the sight of Alec St. Peter sprawled out on my floor like something left after a particularly noisy and messy revolution.

  He’d have to keep for the time being. I couldn’t call the cops just yet and his heart still sounded okay. All he needed right now was just what he was getting. A peaceful blackout on the floor.

  Trouble was coming and I had to be ready for it. But sweat and hate and hot fury were doing their damnedest to upset my thinking. I got hold of myself but something inside me was still vibrating.

  Suddenly, footsteps swished quietly outside my door. The frosted glass that bore my name was transformed into a twisted pattern of blocked shoulders and square hats. It didn’t look like company was calling. More like a small crowd.

  The door knob turned slowly. My thumb worked back towards me and Colt .45 was as ready as it would ever be. I waited.

  They came in. Three of them. And their sudden entrance was laughable because they were all the same height and moved in the same stiff formal precise manner. Exactly like a well-oiled machine or a trick vaudeville team. Only they were that type of funny that also says in the very same breath that you’d be making a mistake if you laughed. Or if you even thought they were funny.

  The door closed behind them and they spread out fan-wise across my vision. They all had coldly blue eyes and blue-black jawbones. They weren’t dressed alike at all and one of them wore a tie that was a lousy match for the colour shade of his suit but something about the three of them shouted to the rooftops that they were cut from the same cloth, came from the same neighbourhood. Might even have been kids together. They were the oddest-looking trio I had come across in years, bar none.

  Nobody spoke for a few seconds but all three of them were staring at me expectantly as if the success of the party depended on my performance.

  I didn’t think they were funny but the short wait had cooled the murder in me. I found my voice.

  “I’d be perfectly in my rights if I dropped the three of you right where you stood,” I said. “One purring voice is all the proof I need. Purr for me, somebody.”

  The one on my left said something in his throat that sounded like walnuts being rubbed together and flung an angry glance at the man in the middle. He shook his head quietly, a cold smile pulling his lips back to show small white teeth. He took a short step forward and his hands came up, palms first. The cold smile broke into an artificially warmer one and I knew who the team spokesman was. I also knew he was the man with the purr. There was something alley-cat about his face.

  “You would be making a regrettable error if you triggered your gun, Mr. Noon.” It was the purrer all right. “Especially since you do not have all the facts. Most especially since the gun in your hand is not loaded.”

  I tried not to laugh right in his face.

  “You can do better than that. That gag is older than the pyramids.”

  His smile refused to go away.

  “Humour me, Mr. Noon. I’m a man who enjoys being humoured. Why don’t you press the trigger just once?”

  The purr in his voice was maddening. The bland mockery of his cold face helped. I fought down an urge to wipe his face off with one murderous blast of sound.

  “Change the subject, stupid,” I gritted. “Or I’ll press it four or five times. Why did you work the kid over? He never hurt anybody.”

  The Purr shrugged and spread his hands. He looked past my shoulder, his eyebrows lifted, his lips parted in a harsh guttural of sound and something awfully small and awfully hard pressed into the small of my back. I’d had it.

  “Do not move, please,” a voice volumed in my ear. A please was never more unnecessary. The .45 dangled floorward.

  The Purr was suddenly all business. He moved forward quickly, took the .45 from my fingers, reversed it in his hand, pressed it bore first to my temple and pulled the trigger.

  The hollow click seemed like a million years coming. Then his hand flicked across my face swiftly in a stinging slap of sound. His smile had vanished.

  “I don’t enjoy playing the clown, Mr. Noon. So always humour me. Your gun has been empty since you ran down
the hall to Mr. St. Peter’s office. My man has been hiding in your closet.”

  My head was starting to spin. What the hell was all this? I felt like I had wandered into one of those movies where spies and counter-spies are so much a part of the plot.

  The closet man was bigger than the other three by about a head and a hat. But he had the same steely look and didn’t seem to know that a brown tie and a blue suit are a lousy combination. Just like one of the others.

  I raised my hands. The Purr barked an order and his three helpers started to rove the office carefully. One of them went to work on the four-drawer file, another on the desk and the other one pulled the leather couch away from the wall and explored.

  The Purr had a foreign exchange with the giant that had played in my closet and the big man shook his head in a positive negative. The Purr cursed and turned to me. My thoughts were flying. They had kicked an awful lot of German gutturals around but somehow I sensed that the closet scout hadn’t spotted my trick with the clock. I was glad now that the sloppy paint job on the closet door had sealed up the keyhole the way sloppy paint jobs usually do.

  The Purr eyed me closely.

  “The package. Where is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “What package? I do my own laundry—”

  “Do not push, Mr. Noon.” His lips narrowed in a thin red line. “You know quite well that you are in possession of something that we are interested in. Here.” He dug into my waste-paper basket and spread Roland Ritz’s crumpled letter under my nose. Along with the torn outer wrappings of his package.

  I didn’t say a word. I just stared at him. Alec St. Peter’s brutally beaten face kept getting between us. I could almost hear his tortured breathing from the floor behind me.

  The Purr took a step in to me.

  “The clock, Mr. Noon. We must have it if you are to stay alive.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Scare the hell out of me if that’s your specialty. But why did you pick on that kid for a lousy clock that you could have picked up in Woolworth’s for three bucks?”

  His eyes widened. “Woolworth’s? What is that?” That told me plenty. They weren’t only not native sons but if they hadn’t heard of the Five-And-Ten, they hadn’t been in New York very long. “I am impatient, my friend. You had better produce the article quickly—”

  I showed him my teeth. “Ask Roland Ritz. He started this merry-go-round.”

  His smile was deadly. “I would dearly love to ask Mr. Ritz, as you suggest. But he’s not to be found. Now, I must insist—”

  There was a howl of triumph from the desk. The team member that had picked that vicinity for his probing ground had come up with my little clock which I had switched for Roland Ritz’s mysterious tick machine.

  “Maxim!” His voice was thick with Teutonic flavour. “No man keeps two clocks—”

  “Says who?” I interjected as quietly as I could. “Clocks are always going haywire. It’s better to have two. You synchronize them and—”

  “Be quiet!” The purr was gone from Maxim’s voice but his slapping hand had returned. It flicked across the other side of my face in real democratic fashion.

  The searching party gave up the ghost and gathered around the desk. They crowded around the two clocks with me right in the centre. Like I say, the whole situation should have been funny. But it wasn’t. They were all spouting Rhine Valley style until Maxim silenced them with a gesture right out of the old Prussian school.

  Maxim looked at me, his eyes calculatingly cold. “Clever, Mr. Noon. But we are familiar with such devices.” He paused deliberately. “Which clock did you receive this morning?”

  I threw back my head and laughed.

  “That’s your headache, Max.”

  “I can make it yours also, Mr. Noon.”

  “All you can do is kill me. And I kill hard. And you can’t do anything here. It’s only fair to tell you that I have a one o’clock appointment with a lady. A client. Her dog is missing. A cute Pomeranian. The dog I mean. She likes men. The lady I mean. But I don’t think five would interest her. Not at the same time anyway.

  His eyebrows almost knitted a sweater.

  “What are you talking about? I can’t follow you.”

  “That was the general idea, Max.”

  He frowned angrily but turned and murmured over his shoulder and two of his men stationed themselves on either side of me. He gave me up for the time being and studied the two clocks on the desk. He pulled the desk lamp over and twisted its goose neck so that the cone of light shone directly down on them. My office doesn’t get much sunlight. I looked at the clocks, hoping that the water treatment on Ritz’s had dried sufficiently to escape detection.

  But there was something else that I had forgotten about. And Maxim was not the boss of this outfit for nothing. He looked at me, his lips curled in a mocking smile.

  “The head always counts, Mr. Noon. You can do nothing without a head on your shoulders.”

  I shrugged. “Is that a threat or a conclusion?”

  “Both if you like. The clock in the drawer is running. The one on the desk is not. Also, it is rather damp. I think we find what we are looking for.”

  “Yeah, team,” I said feebly. “I’m glad for you. All of you. Now how about running along with the damn thing and leaving me to take care of Alec? He’s going to need some doctoring.”

  Maxim ignored the suggestion. “No matter. We take both the timepieces with us. That way we assure ourselves of no error. The identification of the correct clock rests in other hands besides my own. You, Mr. Noon, we take with us. You have been an unfortunate witness. Unfortunate for us. Unfortunate for you.”

  “That’s the way I like my death notices, Max. Polysyllabic.”

  He frowned. I bothered him.

  “You talk strangely for an American.”

  I smiled, cutting it very thin. “You talk perfectly for an SS man. Tell me—how did you make out at the Nuremberg trials?”

  He slapped me again. Only this time my head almost came down in left field. I felt exactly like a well-hit ball.

  My head was still ringing when they pulled me towards the door. We had to go around Alec St. Peter’s body to reach it. I tried to keep the blind anger out of my thinking. Maxim and his boys had come for a crazy clock. Something they couldn’t recognize when they saw it. What could the pitch be? Why was it so important that you would beat a helpless cripple half to death to get it?

  They pushed me out into the hallway and moved me none too gently down the badly carpeted foyer. Maxim took the lead, the other three spread out behind me like the wing of a football team. They were oddly all the same. Alec had sure tagged them right. Only they hadn’t had to learn anything from the SS boys. These were the SS boys.

  Military in bearing, clipped in speech and movement. Four faces all stamped from the same mould. Like the old Hitler pattern of Super Race. So many cogs that thought the same and functioned the same. But that was all wrong. That had been ten years and a long war ago. I felt like ’44 all over again. Germany and the Rhine Valley and the Elite Guard. Hitler’s SS terrorists who had made a hash of the Geneva Convention and moth-eaten gentleman’s agreements.

  I couldn’t piece it. And I was in the soup as it was. And poor Alec. Done in by the SS anyway. After all those years of handless victory. It wasn’t fair. I wasn’t going on any mental soapboxes but it just wasn’t fair.

  Maxim rang for the elevator, both his hands in the deep folds of his coat, each one clutching a silly alarm clock. Only one of them wasn’t silly. Roland Ritz wasn’t kidding about one thing. People were willing to commit murder to get it. I couldn’t see where the dough came in yet.

  I mentally cursed the mutual friend who had set Mr. Ritz on my tail.

  The elevator car was in use. I watched the floor indicator to see what level the arrow would halt on. My office is three flights up. Maxim fumed impatiently through his nose.

  Surprise, surprise. The arrow anchored on three and
stayed there. The doors slid open and Maxim and his men stepped back in mild confusion.

  I have only been surprised three times in my life. When I was born, when I found out somebody could actually love me—and this was the third time.

  Out of the elevator walked Alma Wheeler.

  Chapter Four

  She was blonde, she was beautiful. But she was a ghost. Or ought to be. Because she brought back ghosts with her. Ever heard of the Tall Dolores? The tallest female crook little old New York has ever known?

  My first big police case. It made all the papers. Dolores Ainsley who had died by my hand. Not intentionally. I’d only wanted to stop her, same way you try to hobble a runaway horse. But she’d tripped and fell and the .45 slug had torn the back of her head off. The case had made me famous. Ed Noon, Big Dame hunter. But Alma Wheeler had been Dolores’ sister. Dolores’ right-thinking sister. Alma had inherited all the good looks and all the brains and all the bright thinking. Even though she’d been a call girl. And I’d lost her. She’d walked out on me because I’d killed Dolores. She must have known then I hadn’t meant it but she couldn’t stand for me to kiss her or hold her. So she’d run away leaving me to wonder the years away.

  There’d been women before in my life. But there had been only one Alma. She walked out on me once for a lot of crazy reasons. When we had been absolutely nuts about each other. Now she was walking back into my life. Of all times.

  She sure picked her spots. And she hadn’t changed one bit. The curvy-cheeked face that had always seemed to smile so easily broke into a sun-bursting brilliance and her red lips fanned outward in a dazzling smile.

  “Do you always shave just one side of your face, Woolsey? It’s different if that’s what you were aiming for.”

  There were four other people there and they had all stopped as if someone had turned the juice off but Alma Wheeler had eyes only for me.

  She laughed happily. Me, I was still tongue-tied.

  “I’m back, Woolsey,” she said softly. “Aren’t you going to say—Welcome home, Wheeler?”