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

  “Good morning, Alex,” I said. “Como está?”

  Now that we were outside and within Alex’s reach, Nelson felt safe enough to violate my body. He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently, as if he were a trainer preparing his fighter before the scheduled four-rounder.

  “Alex isn’t much of a talker, as you may recall,” said Nelson. He fit his hat back on his head and played with it quickly to make it feel snug. “Car’s over there,” he said. “Fog is tempting, but Alex would catch you, and Alex gets mad if he has to run in the morning.”

  “You still doing Alex’s talking for him?” I said. “He’s a big boy. Maybe he can tell me how he feels. Maybe Alex doesn’t want to march on my face.”

  Some figures, I couldn’t tell how many, were moving toward us through the fog as Alex stepped forward to help guide me to the sheriff’s car.

  “Alex will do what he must,” said Nelson piously. “Is that not right, Alex?”

  Alex shrugged. I had no idea what Alex thought about me, whether he liked me, hated me, or didn’t give a damn either way. I did know from looking at him that he’d do what Nelson wanted, that times were still hard and money scarce in Mirador.

  Nelson and Alex flanked me and moved forward two or three feet before two figures in the fog came in range. One of the figures was Emmett Kelly. The other was a sinewy man with a perfect thin, waxed mustache. He was wearing a gray windbreaker and had a serious look on his lined face. His head was totally bald and looked polished.

  “Hold on,” said the bald man with Kelly.

  “I mean to,” said Nelson. “I mean to hold real tight to this rascal. He has committed several crimes and must come to town to deal with his rash acts.”

  “My name is Elder,” said the man with the mustache. “I’m one of the owners of this circus. We hired Mr. Peters last night. He is part of this organization.”

  “And …” grinned Nelson, tightening the grip on my arm.

  “And we expect charges to be stated and the employee to be released in good health when those charges are dealt with,” said the man. Kelly caught my eye and nodded knowingly. I winked. I didn’t know what we were communicating, but it beat being dragged into the fog by the two-man Mirador police force.

  “In fact,” said Elder, stepping forward, “if the charges are not too grave, we would appreciate dealing with them now. Maybe we can settle this without recourse to a trip to town. We are a bit shorthanded. The war and … you understand, I hope.”

  I think Nelson was about to say that he did not understand when more figures emerged from the fog. It looked like one of those patriotic movies I used to see in grade school with people out of American history stepping through mist to tell me to be a good American and support the war or the President, and they were just as silent as those silent images, but they weren’t Presidents. They were a dozen or more men of all ages whose muscles were outlined under their work shirts and jackets.

  “I mean to take this man,” said Nelson, his voice cracking rather like Jean Alvero, the prostitute of the night before, but there was nothing charming in Nelson’s statement, nor was there anything forceful. I looked at Alex, who showed only a twitch of annoyance. There was no backing down in Alex, but he and I and everyone including Nelson could tell that Nelson meant the opposite of what he was saying.

  Alex, Nelson, and I were now circled by the circus chorus, and Elder kept getting more and more polite. Nelson’s hat came off, and the sheriff found that it needed immediate attention and cleaning with a soggy handkerchief.

  “The charges are?” said Elder.

  “Assault, disorderly conduct, damage to public vehicle, drunk and disorderly,” said Nelson, whose grin was gone.

  Elder advanced to within three feet of Nelson and showed an incredibly lined, weatherbeaten face over his mustache. “I’d really like to know who brought the charges.”

  “A respected member of our community,” screeched the sheriff.

  “Well,” said Elder, looking evenly at Alex and then at the sheriff. “We are shorthanded, and I’m afraid if you take our man here it might mean we couldn’t do our show tonight, might have to pack right up and not play our second night in Mirador. Now, I understand some important people in this country plan to bring their kids tonight, you know, take their minds off the war. I think they need a little entertainment, and they’d be awfully damned angry if the circus pulled up and left. They’d like to know who was responsible, and I’m afraid we’d have to tell them about this.”

  Nelson’s eyes went around the circle of faces and came to me. I choked on a smile.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” he said. “You’d lose too damn much money.”

  “We’d do it,” said Elder. “And you’d lose too. You appointed or elected here? Doesn’t matter either way.”

  “Do we take him?” said Alex, looking placidly at Nelson. You could read whatever you wanted or nothing into Alex’s face. Nelson might have read disapproval.

  “I’m really sorry about last night,” I said soberly to Nelson. “I apologize, and I’ll pay for the paint job on the police car.”

  “You step one foot outside this circus ground,” Nelson hissed softly in my ear, “and I’ll grab your ass so tight you’ll need a surgeon to get me loose.”

  “Colorful,” I whispered back.

  Alex let go of my arm and walked into the fog in the general direction of town.

  “Take two free tickets for tonight,” said Elder, handing the white pieces of cardboard to the sheriff. Nelson snatched them and shoved them in his pocket. Even the chance for a little dignity couldn’t deter Nelson from something he could turn into cash.

  “I am not an evil or vindictive man, Peters,” he said, turning to me. “I’m a man who has a job to do and does it. Mirador has to stay untouched. The people expect that, pay for it, and I mean to give them what they pay for.”

  “Protection,” I said.

  “That is right,” he said, looking directly into my eyes, and I could see that he meant it. In his own way, he really thought he was a just man on a righteous mission. When was I going to meet a bad guy who knew he was a bad guy? Why did all the bad guys think they were good guys? As he disappeared into the fog, I wondered whether Hitler thought he was a good guy. I was sure he did, and that sudden thought made me feel depressed just when I felt I should have been relieved. I’d just been saved from a beating. I didn’t keep count of such things, but it would have been number sixty or seventy, and I would have absorbed it. It was the inability of people to know where they belonged in my fantasy that caused me the real pain.

  “Thanks,” I said, putting out my hand to Elder, who took it firmly. The circus figures melted back into the fog, and sounds of waking returned.

  “The sheriff bluffs awfully easy,” he said with a grin that turned his already sun-creased face into a walrus-leather mask. “I’m glad that deputy isn’t in charge here, or you’d be on your way to whatever they planned for you.”

  Light began to penetrate the fog, and I started to see shapes and activity.

  “Emmett told me about you,” said Elder, looking back at some sound he separated from the noise. “I don’t think there’s anything going on here, but it’s his money if he wants to pay you. I just don’t want any panic talk, and I don’t want you stirring anything up that isn’t there.”

  A shiny wagon, a massive gold-painted thing, lumbered out into view, pulled by a squat red truck with massive tires. The truck rumbled past us, drowning out other sounds and our conversation; and I found myself looking into the face of the creature in the cage, the gorilla, whose hands clung to the bars of the jiggling cage and who examined me without curiosity.

  Kelly backed away as the cage pulled past.

  “Gargantua,” he said, without affection. “When I joined Ringling a year ago,” he went on, watching the wagon rumble off, “they wanted me to be part of an act with him. It was called The Wedding of Gargantua. Willie, that’s my clown, would be the jailer o
utside the cage, keeping the gorilla from running away before the wedding. I never liked the idea, and the monkey didn’t take to me. Went wild. We gave up the idea. I think some clown did him wrong once.”

  By now the fog was almost gone. I could smell something cooking, and my stomach rumbled.

  “Let’s take him to chow,” said Elder. “Peters, let’s just call you an unpaid member of circus security for a few days. You do what you have to, to satisfy Emmett, and then we say good-bye. Fair enough?”

  “OK with me,” said Kelly, putting a hand to his balding head.

  “Right,” I added.

  “But I tell you there’s no secret plot going on here,” said Elder. “I’ve been circusing for …”

  “Elder,” came a scream, and the three of us turned our heads. A woman, her hands in the pocket of a mannish gray jacket, came running forward. She spotted Elder and slowed down to a fast walk. Her dark eyes scanned the three of us, and her mouth was open as if someone had slapped her and she was afraid to say so.

  “What is it, Peg?” Elder said.

  “Tanucci, the young one,” she gasped. “He … he took a fall. The doc’s with him.”

  Elder ran off with the woman after him. I looked at Kelly, whose eyes were wide.

  “An accident,” I said. “Circuses must have accidents all the time.”

  “Yes,” said Kelly. “But most of the accidents happen to the laborers, not the performers.”

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s take a look.”

  Before we could take ten steps after Elder, something happened. Kelly sensed it before I did and stopped. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, and then I could tell that the sounds of the circus had changed. The machine sounds had dominated a few minutes ago. Now the sound of animals took over. Bleats and cries and screams and roars, a sad madness of sound.

  “What …” I started.

  “I think Tanucci’s dead,” said Kelly.

  There were four Tanuccis. Five if you counted the one lying dead on the rolled-up canvas in the corner of the tent. The dead Tanucci was dressed like the live ones, in blue tights and a top. His arms were at his sides and his legs together as if he were about to dive into the sky. Just one step forward, a perfect flip of his dark arms and tight, compact body, and he would go soaring into the air and through a hole high above in the big top. But that wasn’t going to happen. What might happen was that Tanucci’s body would roll from its balanced place on the mat and lose its dignity.

  The four remaining Tanuccis were an older man and woman, a young woman, and a teenage boy. The older man and woman held each other’s hands and looked at the body. All four of them looked down, as if the dead man held a camera and they had been told to pose solemnly.

  It had happened to me before, that nightmare moment when everyone is turned to stone and no one wants to break the spell, even though everyone knows whoever doesn’t break it will stay there forever. The next step meant choosing an emotion or letting one out that you maybe didn’t know was there. Or worse, it meant feeling nothing, which soon turned to guilt.

  Elder broke through and walked over to the Tanuccis, taking the older man’s arm in both of his. “Carlo, I am sorry, truly sorry. What happened?”

  The young Tanucci girl turned her head in a daze toward Elder. “The rigging,” she said. “The Mechanic tore. Marco … he came down on …”

  “Rennata is the only one who speaks English,” Kelly whispered to me, his voice almost as unsteady as hers.

  “Who’s the Mechanic?” I whispered back, keeping my eye on the doctor who was examining the body. The doctor was a remarkably old man named Ogle, who looked as if he would probably need help getting up and would surely need help if the body rolled over on him.

  “Mechanic’s a what, not a who,” said Kelly. “The leather safety harness flyers wear in practice sessions. Someone controls it from the ground. They must have been working out something new or having trouble with something old.”

  At the entrance flap of the tent, a crowd had gathered but was being held back by a trio of men.

  “Do accidents happen a lot in the circus?” I said. Elder was going down the line of Tanuccis, consoling them in English they couldn’t understand but with a tone they could.

  “No, not much,” said Kelly. “Sometimes, but usually when it does happen it’s because an animal acted like an animal. You know, a lion or a bear smells something, hears something. But it happens.”

  Peg, the dark-eyed woman with the gray man’s jacket who had called Elder to the tent, stayed just a step behind him, trying to see his face to know how she was supposed to act.

  “He’s dead,” said Doc Ogle in a high monotone. It was the tone of my landlady back in Los Angeles, the tone of the deaf who have no idea how loud they are talking and no sense of emotion in the words they can’t hear. Everyone else in the tent had known Tanucci was dead the moment they saw him, but the doctor’s pronouncement hit behind the knees of the older Tanucci woman, who crumpled forward and would have smashed face first into a metal rigging bar if the older man had not pulled her back and up with a single, powerful pull.

  The tent smelled of horse and elephant crap, of straw arid stale sweat. For twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses I sometimes had to get a little closer to things beating below the surface than most of us want to get. It always attracted me, that exposed, tender fear. I wanted to touch it in others but was afraid of how it might contaminate me. Grief was as dangerous as disease.

  The Tanuccis moved forward toward the body, supporting each other, and Kelly stepped up to help the Tanucci girl, who looked a little unsteady.

  “Neck bone and spinal cord just snapped like that,” said the doctor, struggling to get up. He wore a dark plaid coat, and his wild white hair had been combed by a drunken witch. He looked more like a clown than Kelly, and his voice cut through the smells and sobs like a set of instructions for building a model airplane.

  “Probably not a long fall,” he said, addressing himself to everyone assembled. “Probably dead as soon as he hit.”

  “Thank God,” said Peg.

  Well, that was one way of looking at it. I knew some who might be a little angry with God for allowing Himself to accept the whim of young Tanucci’s death, but maybe God was just an onlooker.

  I shook my head. I mean I literally shook my head to try to clear it. Sometimes I get angry and sometimes I get serious. Not often, but sometimes. I almost never get depressed. To get depressed you have to have a long-range plan that fouls up. I don’t have any long-range plans. I go job to job, concussion to concussion, dime to dime. If people get in the way of a car or a bullet or one of the grisly weapons including bad luck, I step to the side and keep going, hoping for not much more than the chance to finish up whatever I’m working on.

  But the circus got to me. First the dead elephant, and now the Tanuccis. Hell, if I was going to feel guilty, I might as well feel it all the way. I felt worse about the dead elephant than I did about Tanucci. Tanucci picked the circus. He had a chance, maybe had some enemies, maybe didn’t check the harness. Maybe …

  I walked past the small crowd and glanced at the people at the entrance, straining to see in. One or two of them were Cora and Thelma, the Siamese twins. Beyond them, more people were talking, asking questions. The ones in front had heard the doctor and seen the reaction. I moved to the circus ring in the corner and to the trapeze in its center, no more than a dozen feet over the ground. The Mechanic thing Kelly had mentioned dangled down from a pole. It swung slightly in the flat air about six feet over the ground. I didn’t even have to touch it to see what I didn’t want to see. The place where the leather belt had given way was torn for about one quarter of an inch. The other three inches of the belt were cut. I couldn’t tell how thick or tough the leather was or how sharp the knife had been that cut it, but it was clear that the final break in the leather had been jagged and rough and the rest along a straight line.

  I was about to touch the harness to be s
ure when I heard Elder’s voice behind me say to either the doctor or the Tanuccis, “We’re going to have to call the police.”

  The word police may have done it. Maybe it was something else, but a small group from the tent entrance broke through, a group of four. Then someone took charge at the entrance and cut off the crowd. The last one through was a short, fat man who waddled forward slowly, far behind. In front of him were a big man wearing a dark gray suit and a dark gray look, a thin man in gray work clothes whose silent tears caught the light against his pale cheeks, and a red-haired young woman in spangled blue tights wearing a little hat with a tall feather.

  “Hold it,” shouted Elder, stretching out his right hand toward the crowd. “Right there. Stop. No one else in here. No Kinders, no brass. Peters.”

  I turned and moved to Elder, who whispered, “We’ve got to get Nelson back here. You want to take the home run. Now’s the time.”

  “Can’t,” I said, trying to ease him away from the Tanuccis. “Cops don’t like it when people they want to nail run away from murder scenes.”

  It was Elder’s turn to move me away from the others by grabbing my jacket and stepping back. His grip could have gone through my arm.

  “Hold it,” I cried, trying to shake him loose with less success than Billy Conn had had against Joe Louis.

  “Look,” he said evenly, looking over my shoulder at the small group gathering around the doc, the corpse, and the grieving family. “Don’t try to make a profit on this. Don’t turn the circus into a …”

  “Circus?” I finished.

  “For a lot of these people,” he said, his mustache bobbing up and down, “the only thing they call hometown or a religion or anything is the circus. You make them think murder, and the panic you’ll see is like nothing you’ve ever seen. These are people who put their life on the wire every day and twice on Saturdays and Sundays.”