Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) Read online

  “Maybe you’re right,” I answered and backed out of the door as Carlos bent to help a groggy, one-eyed Lope to his feet.

  There is something about me that brings out the worst in dogs, cats, and humans. Something in me is a challenge. I used to think I was cursed. A woman who said she was a witch once put a curse on me. The woman was my own aunt, but her daughter, my cousin, who claimed she was a more powerful witch, supposedly took the curse off, which gives you some indication of my family tree. Curses aside, I think it is simply my face coupled with an uncontrollable urge to bring people to life by prodding them a little. My father wanted me to be a doctor. I’ve got the curiosity, but not the ambition.

  I got into my car and backed out with the lights out. I scraped the police car parked next to me with a sickening scraaatch, turned on my lights, and headed back toward the highway.

  Had I but known that three days later I’d be in a cage with a gorilla, I probably would have remained and taken my chances with Lope and Alex; but half the fun of being alive is not knowing what tomorrow will bring. The other half comes by pretending that you don’t care.

  I found the circus in Aldreich Field without much trouble. It was a huge, dark series of tents, the largest one a central big top with a flag, a bunch of trucks, and mobile wagons. The dark outline of a train with a few dozen cars formed a rear wall behind the scene.

  I followed the road to the closest tent, turned off into the mud, and got out to find the man who had hired me. The circus looked like a bunch of black paper cutouts, the kind of thing you’d pick up at the drugstore for a six-year-old whose parents you were visiting. There was even a radio sound-effects record to go with the picture, something right out of “I Love a Mystery.” Howling wind across the field, the murmur of animals, voices laughing, and someone raising someone else two bits on a poker hand behind one of the cutouts.

  I made my way around mud holes, wagon ruts, footsteps, and debris to the nearest wagon with a light on. I knocked. Voices inside were arguing. I knocked again.

  “A minute,” came a male voice with a European accent I couldn’t place.

  The door swung open. It was a few feet above me, and at first all I could see was another black cutout against sudden light. This one looked vaguely like a man.

  “Yes?” he said, looking down at me. My eyes adjusted and began to make out the man and another figure behind him. The man in the door was wearing a red velvet robe. His hands were in his pockets. His head was a mane of bright yellow hair over a smooth face; his voice suggested more years than the front showed. Behind him at a table sat a young man looking toward me, a thin, pale, yellow-haired imitation of the man at the door.

  “Yes?” he repeated.

  “I’m trying to find somebody,” I said.

  “I am somebody,” he replied, pointing to his chest. “I am Sandoval.”

  I was clearly supposed to know who Sandoval was, but my face must have made it clear that I didn’t.

  “Sandoval of the great cats,” he explained. “My picture is on the posters. My animals are the most wild. Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty are not even amateurs compared to Sandoval.”

  “Oh, that Sandoval,” I said, trying to get the conversation moving before I sank any deeper into the mud. “I’m looking for someone with the circus, someone I’m supposed to meet.”

  I told him who I was looking for, and he gave me directions on how to get there. The kid at the table behind him listened, his eyes not on me but on the back of Sandoval, whose directions to me were a little vague.

  “Good enough?” asked Sandoval, throwing his mane back.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” said Sandoval and then, over his shoulder, “Shockly, bid the man good night.”

  The boy at the table half rose and said a weak good night. Sandoval sighed enormously and threw out his hands before whispering to me in a voice that could not only be heard by the boy but by anyone within a football field’s length.

  “The war has made a ruin of all human endeavor,” he said. “We can get only apprentice boys with names like Shockly who must be taught even the minimal touches of confidence and pride.”

  Sandoval had enough confidence and pride for the kid, the U.S. Marines, and the entire USC football team, but I nodded in professional agreement as he closed the door.

  I made half a dozen wrong turns in the dark and stepped into something I didn’t want to think about before I found myself back at my car. I was tempted to curl up in the back seat, but the last time I had done that my back had been so sore in the morning that I couldn’t straighten up.

  So I returned to my search. This time I ran into two frail figures side by side. I took them for late-night lovers at first, but when I stepped in front of them I realized that their union was even more permanent than love. They were Siamese twins joined at the hip and wearing a single giant coat to keep out the night.

  They were used to seeing faces a lot more frightening than mine around a circus, and they gave me good directions on how to find my client. They also told me their names were Cora and Thelma. I thanked them and went on my way, wondering how the two of them had managed to carry on the whole conversation with both of them saying every word as if I were talking to an echo.

  Three minutes later I was at the right railroad car, knocking. Someone inside said, “Hold it,” and a few seconds later the door opened and a voice with a Missouri twang said, “Yes?”

  “Peters,” I said. “Toby Peters.”

  A hand came down and took mine. “Kelly,” he said. “Emmett Kelly.”

  He helped me up out of the night and into the warm light of his room.

  Someone had electrocuted an elephant. There was no doubt about that. The wrinkled gray bulk lay on its side, feet out, trunk curled down, eyes closed. A single night-light cast shadows on his feet, and the maybe of a breeze made the sparse wiry hairs of his body bend and shiver. I have seen humans lying dead. Even when the death was bloody or crazy, it always seemed part of something natural that made me angry, not sad. And here was this smelly mass of an animal filling me with sorrow.

  “Something really sad about it,” said Kelly at my side. I looked at him and could see that he was talking about himself as well as me.

  Kelly was about my size, receding hairline, a nose like Bob Hope’s, and a mouth that moved easily into a warm grin. His shoulders were slightly stooped and his chest thin. He was about my age, maybe a year or two younger, and there was a look on his face that made it clear that he was carrying something he wanted help with.

  After I had entered his train car, Kelly had excused himself from Tiny Tyne, a plump fellow clown he had been playing rummy with, introducing me not as a private detective but as a friend of a friend looking for a job.

  “What was that all about?” I asked as he led the way across the field.

  “Sorry, Mr. Peters,” he whispered. “I don’t know if what I think is happening is happening, and I’m not putting my neck out till I know.” As we walked, stepping around shadows and footprints of mud, he told me about the circus.

  The Rose and Elder Circus was a thin idea held together by favors, hope, and a few dollars from the hardware empire of Joshua R. Rosenbaum, the Rose and the angel. His investment was on the verge of nightmare, which is somewhere between Palm Springs and Mirador. It was an after-the-season show put together from acts, crew, and equipment rented from the big shows that had ended their seasons. Rose and Elder’s biggest attractions were Kelly the clown and Gargantua the gorilla from Ringling. Kelly had gone along for the one-month run as a favor to Elder, an old friend.

  The show was a patchwork of acts on the way up and on the way down, grifters and grafters, refugees and runaways. The doctor for the show was over eighty, some of the acts couldn’t speak English, and about half of the crew had never seen a circus before.

  In spite of this, Elder, whose idea the whole thing was, had managed to put on a circus, three rings, popcorn, peanuts,
elephants, and sideshows. He had a dozen trailers, seven trucks, and fifteen railroad cars.

  “In here,” Kelly said, pointing the way with his lantern, and in I went.

  The elephant lay in a corner, and we simply looked at him in silence for a few minutes.

  “What makes you think someone killed him?” I said.

  “Her; this bull’s a female,” he said.

  “Bull?”

  “All elephants are called bulls in the circus,” he explained. “She was a good one. Two years ago, ten Ringling elephants died of arsenic poisoning in Atlanta. Police said it was an accident. Last year, there was a fire in the elephant tent when we were in Kansas. Lost another dozen.”

  “But …” I tried.

  “Look,” he said and walked behind the dead animal where he lifted a piece of canvas. I followed him and found myself looking into a gray dead eye of the elephant. It was hard to force my eyes away to the sight under the canvas.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Wires, rigging for tent lights. All attached to that pole where this bull was tied with a metal chain. Someone just touched the two wires together, and she went down. I was in here when it happened, and I saw a little spark. So I went over when they called the doc. Someone had gotten to the pole and pulled the wire off. Must have seen me coming and backed off before they could hide it. I couldn’t prove anything, so I just shut up when the doc said the elephant had a heart attack.”

  I looked down at the mass of wire, which meant nothing to me, and then at the man who held the lantern.

  “It’s more than the elephants,” I said.

  “More than the elephants,” he said. “Whoever did this saw me coming to check the wires. I think they know I’m thinking more than they want me to think. Truck went wild yesterday, almost ran me down. Driver was off having a sandwich when it happened. It might have been an accident.”

  “OK, but why would anyone want to kill the elephants?” I asked, keeping my eyes from those of the bull behind me.

  “We’ve got maybe forty elephants in this circus,” he said, the lantern light sending shadows to his face that suggested the face of a clown or a skull. “An elephant normally costs fifty thousand dollars. Something like that. Kill off the elephants and you haven’t got much of a circus. Damn, you can’t even replace elephants with the war on.”

  We both looked at the dead elephant for a few more seconds and headed toward the entrance to the tent.

  “What do they do with a dead elephant?” I said.

  “Don’t know,” sighed Kelly, stepping into the night. “Don’t want to know. What I want to know is who is trying to ruin this circus and maybe kill me.”

  “In reverse order,” I said.

  “Together,” he corrected. “It’s too late to meet people. You can start in the morning. What can you do?”

  He stopped and looked at me.

  “I can start asking questions and try to find someone with a motive for trying to …”

  “No, I mean what can you do that would fit in a circus?”

  I thought about it for a minute. I could fire a pistol, but not very well. I could take a punch but had already taken too many of them. I … “Nothing I can think of,” I said.

  “I’ll think of something in the morning,” Kelly said. “Don’t talk in front of Tiny. Tiny’s a good enough guy, not a bad clown, but he’s a talker. I’ll get you some cherry pie when we get up.”

  “Cherry pie?” I said, following him up the stairs of the train car.

  “Circus for easy work,” he said.

  “Right,” I said, following him up the three metal steps.

  Our footsteps clanged across the field and echoed back at us from the nearby railroad cars. Kelly stopped at the top and looked back.

  “I like it at night like this,” he said. “You look out and know what’s under those tents and in those wagons, and you can’t believe that tomorrow it’s all gonna be moving and that you’re going to be out in front of thousands of people, well, maybe hundreds. It’s like another world you know is there and can’t believe will come out.” He shrugged and stepped into the railroad car.

  Tiny was still there. There was an extra mattress in the wagon. Kelly wanted to sleep on it, but I told him a hard mattress on the floor was good for my bad back.

  The two clowns played rummy under a small, yellow-bulbed lamp, and I took off my jacket and shirt, scratched my stomach and felt my stubbly face. Kelly told me where to find soap, water, and a towel. It had been a light day. I had done some driving, laid out a drunk in a tavern, met a clown or two, and examined a murdered elephant. I expected the days to get busier and was bothered by the fact that I felt tired. Somewhere in my battered suitcase back in my battered car was a toothbrush whose bristles sagged like a forgotten Christmas tree and a can of Dr. Lyon’s tooth powder that would have done me no harm, but I wasn’t up to it. I lay back on the mattress with my arms under the thin pillow and looked at the wooden ceiling. Tiny asked me a question, which I answered with a lie before I fell asleep.

  Dreams, I’ve discovered, come in threes. I can usually remember the first two, and I always feel that it is the third one, the one I can’t remember, that will really tell me something. In my first dream, I was wandering through the streets of Cincinnati. Everything was red, bright red, not the red of blood but the red of good-smelling new bricks. Even the cars were red. As usual in my dreams, there were no people in Cincinnati but me. I walked into a row house and closed the door behind me, suddenly scared, not of what was inside, but of something outside. Then someone or something knocked at the door. I didn’t want to open it. I knew what was on the other side. A clown would be on the other side. Not my old friend Koko, but a six-foot clown with a grinning face. Who needs a clown at your door? Nothing’s funny about a clown.

  “Who’s there?” I said, holding one foot against the door.

  “I have a message,” came the high voice from the other side of the door.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to make it sound tough.

  “Life is a circus,” came the high voice.

  “A circus?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Usually that means living is fun. But a circus is hard work, blisters to make a few minutes look funny, dangerous, or interesting.”

  “Then life is a circus?” I asked, looking around for someplace to hide.

  He didn’t answer. I knew he was looking for another way in.

  In my nightmare I told myself I was having a nightmare, but that didn’t make it better. I told myself to wake up, but I couldn’t. I think I whimpered, and then I was in another dream, a dream I’d rather not talk about. Then the third dream I can’t remember. But when I was safely in dream number three, I found myself back in Cincinnati, back in the house with the door. “Wait,” I said or thought, “this isn’t fair.”

  “Open the door,” came the high clown voice. “Open up.”

  “No,” I cried, trying to wake up, making the effort. I opened my eyes and found myself facing the grinning face. The voice came out of it, the clown voice.

  “That’s right,” he said, leaning over me. “Open them up.”

  Sheriff Mark Nelson of Mirador was kneeling next to my mattress, dressed in a white suit tapped with spots of sweat. Maybe he thought it was natty to wear sweat-spotted suits. His hat was in his hand, and his thumb was rubbing the dark sweatband. I looked around for Alex the deputy, and my mind was read.

  “I told Alex to wait outside,” said Nelson. “I wanted to renew our acquaintanceship. Nice, crisp, brisk day outside,” he sighed. “Good air round here.”

  “You want me to move to Mirador,” I said, trying to sit up.

  “Have to spruce you up a bit if it came to that,” he said. “You smell like a Mex field hand.”

  I was awake now and making no attempt to resist scratching my neck, face, and stomach. I was aware of the hole in my undershirt and the absence of my client.

  “What can I do for you?” I said.
<
br />   “Ah,” said Nelson, enjoying his moment before pouncing. “You could invest a few million dollars in Mirador real estate if you had it, but barring that, you can come for a little ride with me and Alex so we can talk over old times and the scrape you put on my car and Lope Obregon’s skull last night.”

  There was a bowl of water in one corner of the wagon and a mirror over it. I moved the five steps to it, examined the bowl to determine if it was clean, came to no conclusion, and stuck my face into it. It was cold and tight. I dried myself on a towel that was definitely not clean and turned to grin in the mirror. I looked rotten.

  “So I’m under arrest,” I said, reaching for my jacket, which had gotten kicked around by clowns or cops.

  “No, no,” chuckled Nelson, advancing on me. He was a few inches shorter than me, and his teeth were clean. His breath smelled minty and sweet enough to make me feel like throwing up.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ve got some work to do here. Been good to see you again.” I tried to step past him, and he moved out of the way.

  “Alex is out there,” he said. “He’s not going to let you go. I told you never to come back to Mirador. Now I’m going to show you I mean what I say. I really do. If I don’t show people I mean what I say, pretty soon people are going to start testing, taking advantage. Can’t have that happen.”

  “So we’re going for a little ride?” I guessed.

  “Precisely,” he said, pointing to the door. “And at the end of that little ride I’m going to watch with great regret while Alex …”

  “Teaches me that you mean what you say?” I supplied.

  “Thank you,” he said politely. “I rather expect that it will be a singularly instructive lesson, and I cannot vouch for what remains of your nose.”

  “Sheriff, did anyone ever tell you that you sweat like a hog?” I whispered.

  Nelson’s grin dropped for a full half-second and then came back happier than ever.

  “We have chatted long enough,” he said. “Now let us get to it.”

  There were no windows I could go through, just the door. I stepped out into the morning. It was foggy, a gray fog that hid the tents and train and anything else not more than fifteen feet away, but it didn’t hide the sounds. Motors were churning, people calling, animals bellowing. Laughs, shouts. The spots of light that managed to make their way through the fog were like pinholes that showed nothing beyond themselves. Alex was clear and near in his denims and white cowboy hat. He was bulky and dark, not a beer bulky but a natural bulky, and I knew what he could do. There was no smile on his face, no sign of recognition.