Catch a Falling Clown tp-7 Read online

  “They went back to find the people they’re supposed to be watching,” he said, staring glumly into his cup. “I’m thinking of going back home, Toby. Mildred said one night was all right. And I’ve got Mr. Stange this afternoon. And Mrs. Ramirez …”

  I found my razor, put in a fresh Blue Blade, and took off my shirt. “I understand, Shel,” I said, lathering the thin bar of soap in a dish of cool water. And I did understand. Fun is fun, but sleeping on a cot after a lion almost kills you isn’t fun.

  “Toby, I have some very important work to finish before …”

  “Before you get killed in a circus,” I continued, trying not to cut my throat while I watched both it and Shelly’s reflection in the mirror. “Shel, you’re not going to get killed here.”

  He shrugged, having little faith. “My profession …” he started but didn’t know how to finish.

  Fortunately, his profession took a turn for the better. Kelly came rushing in, dark jacket, green turtleneck sweater and all traces of Willie the Clown gone. “You’re a dentist?” he asked Shelly.

  “Right,” said Shel, without looking up.

  “We’ve got an emergency, a really bad tooth,” said Kelly.

  Shelly didn’t look terribly interested. “I’ve got to get back to Los Angeles,” he said, his eyes blinking behind his thick glasses. He fished into his jacket pocket and found the stub of a cigar. I could smell it when it reached the air even before he lit it.

  “It’s an emergency,” said Kelly evenly and earnestly. “I know money won’t make a difference, but we can pay fifty dollars if you’ll just take a look and try to do something.”

  Professional pride welled in Shelly’s face. “Emergency,” he mused. “Well, let’s get to it.”

  I finished shaving while Shelly told Kelly that he would have to go to his car for the emergency supplies he carried with him. By that I assumed he meant the small box of extra rusted tools he was always planning to pawn but could never get a decent price for unless three bucks was a decent price.

  “What’s the trouble?” asked Shelly, following Kelly, who opened the door for him to urge him out.

  “Hurt her tooth last night when she got out, bit something probably, or someone,” said Kelly.

  Shelly stopped, put a hand on the wall. “The lion?” he gasped.

  “Right,” said Kelly, stepping down. “Puddles.”

  I rubbed the water and soap off of my face with a towel someone else had used earlier and went behind Shelly. “Can’t let these people down, Shel,” I whispered and gave him a solid shove through the door.

  He stumbled, and Emmett Kelly caught him. I could see Shelly open his mouth to cry or protest. His hand went up to his head and touched his fringe of hair. Now both fringes had points, and he looked less like a mad dentist than a clown.

  “How’s the lion tamer?” I asked Kelly.

  “He’ll live,” said Kelly, guiding Shelly down the path between the wagons, “but he might be a popcorn salesman from here on.”

  “Maybe he’ll become a clown,” I laughed.

  “No,” said Kelly seriously, a firm hand on Shelly’s shoulder. “He isn’t serious enough to be a good clown.”

  Shelly turned his head to me for help, and I waved at him with a smile. I put my second shirt on and my suit jacket, which was brown and didn’t match my blue pants, but my windbreaker was bloody and gone, and I had no choice, unless I wanted to get back into the clown getup.

  By asking a few questions of a chubby woman in a blue robe and curlers supporting her few strands of orange hair, I found out where Agnes Sudds and Abdul were making camp. By herself, the chubby woman told me confidentially. No one wanted to share space with the snakes. The chubby woman said she herself had nothing against snakes, but snake people were near the bottom of the circus social rung. Snakes were sideshow stuff, not big top. The chubby woman had a dog act, she told me, though I hadn’t asked. I really didn’t have to. I could smell it. The circus was full of smells that betrayed people.

  Gunther was standing about forty feet from the wagon of Agnes Sudds when I came near. He was talking to two other people, a man and a woman who were even smaller than he was. I walked over to them, and the conversation stopped.

  “This,” said Gunther properly as always, “is my friend Mr. Peters. Toby, this is Fran and Anton Lieber. We worked together once in …”

  “Madrid …” supplied Fran, who had a little-girl voice but the face of experience.

  “We also worked together in The Wizard of Oz movie,” added Anton.

  Gunther’s memory of that movie was not a fond one. I shook hands with both Anton and Fran. They had obviously been talking little-people talk, which I didn’t think was anything different from big-people talk, but they were of a fraternity made by God or Darwin, and I wasn’t.

  “She is in the wagon,” Gunther said to me, taking a step away from the Liebers after I had taken my leave of them.

  “OK, I’ll keep an eye on her for a while. See if you can track down Alfred Hitchcock. He’s probably left, but he may be staying with someone in Mirador. I sure as hell can’t go to Mirador with any questions.”

  “I understand,” said Gunther. I noticed that he had changed clothes. He now wore a gray three-piece suit with a perfectly starched shirt and an immaculate pink tie and matching handkerchief in his pocket. He turned and moved back to his friends, and I walked boldly up to the wagon decorated with a snake painting that started with the head at the door and went around to the left, circling the entire wagon and emerging on the right side. The tail was a rattle, and the open-mouthed head was a warning, but I knocked, and Agnes Sudds’s voice told me to come in.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The shades over the two wagon windows were thick and drawn. A small lamp was on, but the bulb was just a few watts and painted over in brown.

  “Sorry,” came Agnes’ voice. “Some of the guys don’t like a lot of light. It puts them to sleep.”

  I stood until I could see her figure in the corner near an open trunk. Then I could see that the trunk was a cage. Then I could see that Agnes wasn’t alone. A large, thick snake was draped around her waist and over her shoulder, and she was stroking its head.

  Agnes was dressed in a gray sweat shirt and trousers. Her red hair, red like that of the kid in the window of the Waldorf, was tied with a ribbon and hanging down her back. She looked cute, a little like Lucille Ball. Or she would have looked cute if it weren’t for the snake, who looked like the one painted on the wagon.

  “Murray,” she said, smiling and stroking the snake. “His name is Murray. You want to make friends?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I mean, you and I, yes, but Murray and I can stay cordial.”

  “Cordial,” she repeated. “Education and everything. Snakes feel good. Cool, friendly, soothing. Holding a snake is very restful. They like being near warm bodies.”

  “That a fact?” I said with a smile. “How’s Abdul?”

  “Resting,” she said, putting a finger to her lips to indicate that we had to be quiet. I wondered where Abdul-the-green might be resting. In some corner of the room? Above me? I decided to make the visit short.

  “Have a seat,” she said, still standing.

  “I’m comfortable,” I said. “Murray posed for the picture on your wagon?”

  “No,” she said, rolling her eyes upward at my stupidity. “Murray is a python. The picture is a rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes are not friendly. But it makes a nice picture on the wagon. You know. Identifies me. Like Charlie McCarthy and Chase and Sanborn.”

  “I see,” I said, looking around for Abdul and others of his ilk. The wagon was small and the neatest one I had yet seen in the circus, even neater than Peg’s. It was decorated in restful browns made more brown by the painted bulb. The walls were paneled in wood, with one wall of small cages filled with grass in which, I was sure, lurked slithering snakes.

  My hand reached out and touched something cold against the
other dark wall, and I pulled it away. I had touched a cage, and something had rustled inside it.

  Agnes laughed gently. “Those are frogs,” she said. “I keep dozens of them.”

  “You have a frog act too?” I asked.

  “No, I feed the frogs to Murray and some of the others.”

  Murray looked at me and seemed to yawn. He had clearly never seen as stupid a human as I was.

  “Can I do something for you?” Agnes said with something that might have been interpreted as seductive. “Or is Peg doing everything you need? But Peg can’t be doing very much.” She crinkled her nose like Shirley Temple. “Peg is the circus good girl.”

  “And you’re the circus bad girl?” I said, trying to stay in the middle of the room and glancing up at the ceiling a few feet over my head.

  “Not bad, exactly,” she said. “Mina, she works with the horses. Now that’s a bad girl. I’m just average bad, if you like average bad.”

  “I like information,” I said. “I’ll talk about degrees of badness later. Would you mind putting Waldo back in his bed while we talk?”

  “His name is Murray,” she said, looking into the snake’s rheumy eyes. “He needs affection or he gets leathergic.”

  “I think that’s lethargic,” I corrected. “OK, I’m a little curious about why you and Abdul didn’t spot Puddles in that tent last night. It isn’t a very big tent, and he’s a very big lion.”

  “She’s a very big lion,” Agnes corrected me as she began to untangle Murray gently from her body. “I don’t know. Maybe she was scared and just being quiet. Maybe she circled around behind me. Maybe Abdul scared her, or she came under the tent as I was leaving. Why?”

  Murray was almost unwound, and Agnes began to coax him into the trunk. She cooed to him while waiting for my answer.

  “You didn’t like Rennata Tanucci,” I said. “Her husband liked you. Someone might think you had a reason to want to get rid of both of them. First the husband, maybe because he was going back to his wife, and then the wife because you resented giving him up.”

  Murray was safely back in the box when Agnes locked the trunk and turned her eyes on me. I expected hate or anger. I was trying to provoke her, but she looked amused.

  “I turned him down,” she said, lifting her chin. “I don’t need to chase flyers. Plenty of men in this circus know a class act when they see one.” She put her hand on her hip and looked at me with a smile. I couldn’t make out much of her body under the sweat suit, but she was reminding me of what I had seen the day before.

  “How long have you been with the circus?” I asked.

  The hand came off the hip. “What’s that got to do with it?” she asked with some of the amusement gone.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m trying to find a killer. I’m trying to eliminate people. I’m doing a job. If I can eliminate enough people, what I’ll be left with is a killer. There might be an easier way, but I don’t know easier ways.”

  “The Thin Man doesn’t work like that,” she sneered.

  “He has a script and a smart wife.”

  “And a dog,” she added.

  “And a dog,” I agreed. Then there was silence.

  “I was with Sell-Floto for ten years,” she said. “Just joined this one last month.”

  “And before that?” I pushed. Another silence.

  “Five years with the Tom Mix Show, Helig’s, others,” she said, looking away. “I started when I was a real young kid.”

  “Right,” I agreed. The frogs rustled behind me. “You happy in the circus?”

  “I like the snakes, the ones without legs,” she said with a smile.

  “Must get to you after all this time to still be in a sideshow while people like the Tanuccis are under the big top, center ring. Even the lions and elephants get center ring.”

  Agnes laughed. I was surprised that I liked the laugh. The little-girl front cracked with that laugh. She shook her head.

  “I’m not knocking off animals and people because I got dreams about dragging my snakes into the big top,” she said. “Snakes don’t drive you nuts. They soothe you. You learn from them. You learn to be perversive.”

  “Passive?” I tried.

  “Very,” she agreed. “Now, if you want to stop trying to nail me for murder and World War II, maybe we could be friends. I’d really like to know about private investigators. I listen to all the shows on the radio. Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, Richard Diamond, Nero Wolfe. I go to movies. Charlie Chan at the Circus was one of my favorites. Nothing like the circus, but like what people think about it. You know?”

  The little-girl interest was back, and I liked it. She sort of swayed from hip to hip as she talked, and I felt as if I were being hypnotized. Maybe it was just the darkness, the air in the wagon, and my knowing that snakes named Murray and Abdul and frogs that were going to be swallowed whole were all around me.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe we’ll talk again soon.” I backed to the door, reaching for the handle.

  “Do you do anything besides talk?” she said, pursing her lips.

  “We’ll talk about it,” I said and leaped out into the air, pushing the door closed behind me.

  I breathed deeply and looked around. Gunther and his friends were nowhere around, so I headed toward the big top. Gunther intercepted me while I paused to watch a man about fifty walking behind three small boys in green tights and matching blue jackets. The man was shaking his head and shouting to them about looking straight ahead, always straight ahead.

  “Funambulists,” said Gunther, looking at the quartet as it passed us. “Rope walkers. Family tradition. The word comes from the Latin funis-rope-and ambulare-to walk. It goes back thousands of years. Some say the acrobats arid rope walkers are the oldest tradition in the circus next to the clowns, if we acknowledge that the commedia dell’arte is, indeed, clearly a part of the circus tradition and not the theater.”

  “I acknowledge,” I said. “What did you find out about Hitchcock?”

  “He is here,” Gunther said, still watching the receding figures of the rope walkers. “In the big tent, watching. The circus grapevine is fast, and outsiders are sensed like a low-level voltage….”

  “Shock,” I said.

  Gunther nodded, adding the word to his vocabulary.

  “I suppose that includes me, that outside shock?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Your presence is felt. Mine is less so because I have been with a circus and for other reasons. Jeremy too, for some reason, is accepted, perhaps because of his wrestling and size. I’d best return to my duties outside the wagon of the reptile woman.”

  “Thanks, Gunther,” I said and went into the big top.

  There were streaks of sunlight coming through entrances to the tent and a central opening at the peak of the tent. Some of the lights were on, and people were practicing acts in various rings. In one side ring, the three Tanuccis were standing in a small group. The eldest Tanucci was pointing up to the trapeze and speaking earnestly.

  In the center ring, a cage had been set up, a big animal cage, and inside it stood young Shockly and a tired tiger, looking at each other with mutual confusion, or so it seemed to me.

  I looked around for Hitchcock, and Elder came to my side, his mustache trim and waxed, his scalp moist, his green sweater snug over his well-muscled chest and only the sag of a cheekbone revealing doubt.

  “Tanuccis are trying to put a makeshift act together,” he said. “We have to pull them from center ring, but when word gets out about the murder …”

  “Murders,” I corrected, but he went on.

  “Murders,” he agreed. “People will want to see them. Things like this have happened before. We pulled Shockly up from an apprenticeship to see if he can handle the cats. We’ve got no show without a cat act. My partner back East is trying to get Beatty, but he’s hard to find. There’s Grunwald in England. Retired. We might get him, but by the time he got here the season would be over and we’d be headed for a home run, hea
ded back to Florida.”

  “Someone’s doing a good job wrecking the circus,” I observed, looking around for Hitchcock and spotting him sitting alone and placidly watching, his pudgy hands folded in his lap. He was dressed in a dark suit and seated several rows up in the wooden grandstands. “What’s Hitchcock doing here?” I said.

  “He asked to watch,” replied Elder. “He’s a well-known film producer, and he keeps his mouth shut. Maybe it will make some good publicity. Who knows?”

  “He’s a director,” I corrected, moving toward Hitchcock.

  “What’s the difference?” said Elder, heading away without waiting for an answer.

  Hitchcock looked up at me languidly while I climbed the stands. His eyes scanned my clothing. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Good morning,” said I, sitting next to him but not too close.

  “I do not wish to be rude,” he said, looking back at the Tanuccis, “but your trousers and jacket do not match. Nor does your shirt.”

  “All I have left,” I shrugged, watching the Tanuccis in their huddle.

  “I think it essential that one dress carefully and formally when one works,” he said. “It establishes the aura of seriousness necessary in a potentially chaotic situation.”

  “Maybe so,” I sort of agreed. “But the world I work in doesn’t seem to be affected by my sense of anything.”

  “The difference between life and movies,” said Hitchcock. “I prefer movies. In fact, I have no great affection for the real world.”

  The Tanuccis were climbing the rope ladder to the trapeze, led by Carlo. In the center ring, Elder had entered the cage with Shockly and the tiger and was urging the kid on, saying something about how old the tiger was. The tiger seemed to be asleep.

  “Absolutely fascinating,” sighed Hitchcock.

  “I thought you were going back to Los Angeles,” I said.

  “I am,” said Hitchcock evenly. “My friend was good enough to put me up for another night so that I might discover something more of the events of the last day. You have not, I may presume, discovered a murderer or a motive?”