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

  “But it’s murder,” I repeated. “No doubt. If you let a little circulation back into my arm, I’ll show you.”

  He let loose a little, and I led him toward the harness. My back had been to it, and the small group had gotten between Elder and me and the ring where the Tanuccis had been practicing. No one was watching us as we moved toward the rigging except the fat little man who stood at the edge of the huddled group.

  “Who’s he?” I asked Elder, who glanced at the man.

  “I don’t know,” Elder said indifferently. “Never saw him. Probably a lot louse, someone from town who hangs around, always wanted to join the circus but let it …”

  “Gone,” I said, stopping when I had a clear view of the rigging.

  The rope from which the harness with the severed belt had been hanging was gone. The rope was still swaying above the even cut.

  “Someone cut it down,” I said, hurrying forward and grabbing the rope to make it stop and tell me something. It didn’t. An animal whimper came from the group around the body. “The belt was cut almost all the way through,” I explained. “The killer …”

  “Hold it,” said Elder, putting his hand to his shiny head. The possibilities were coming too fast and hard, and he had to slow things down. I was the thing that had to be slowed. “Harness is gone, right. It is cut down, right. But I can think of some quick reasons other than a murder cover-up. Some morbid souvenir hunter could have snatched it. Or maybe one of the family or a kinker, a performer who has some crazy idea about burning the offending thing responsible. We got people from all over the damn world in this circus with all kinds of ideas. There are enough screwy things going on in a show like this without this Jackpot.”

  “Jackpot,” I repeated, looking around at the people in the tent.

  “Tall stories about the circus. We have so many of them that the very idea has a special name.”

  “Someone in this tent right now cut down that harness,” I said. “No one else got in here between the time I found the harness and now. You were talking to me, so that lets you out.”

  “Thanks,” he said sarcastically. “Now what do you plan, a search of everyone in the tent? A search for the harness?”

  “Damn right,” I said, “before …”

  But “before” came. Curiosity overcame restraint and respect. The crowd surged in. I tried to stay near the place where the harness had been. Whoever took it couldn’t have hidden it far away.

  “You better come with me,” said Elder.

  “But,” I protested, “we’ll lose the harness.”

  “You come or I carry you,” he said. The short, red-haired woman bumped into me. She was holding her red-sequined cap on her head. Its ostrich feather threatened to tickle God. Well, maybe He could do with a good laugh.

  Working against the crowd, with Elder ignoring questions put to him by people of all sizes, accents, ilks, and colors, we made it into the near sunlight. The fog was almost gone, and the sun burned gray.

  “Office,” he said, guiding me.

  “Wait,” came a voice from behind, Kelly’s voice.

  We didn’t wait, but he had caught up by the time we reached a circus railroad car that said “Office” on it. Elder followed me into the little space with a desk in the middle and a cot in the corner and motioned me to one of the three wooden chairs. I sat, and so did Kelly. Elder didn’t. He leaned against the steel wall of the office wagon, touched his fine mustaches to be sure they were still there and not drooping, folded his arms and glared at me.

  “Murder,” I repeated.

  I could sense Kelly sagging next to me. Elder said nothing. I looked into his eyes and saw something I hadn’t seen before and knew what he was going to say before he said it. I felt like speaking along with him, but the thought was just enough behind to keep it from happening.

  “Know how old I am, Peters?” he said. “Sixty-two. I’ve seen ’em torn up, and I’ve seen a few murders. Not with this circus, but others. I’ve even helped cover them up. The circus is its own world. It’s a moving world that only stops a few days in the world of someone else. You understand what I’m saying? Even if there was a murder, there wasn’t any murder.”

  The walls of the office were covered with old posters with faded pictures of clowns and girls in tights. The word “circus” stood out in every one, gaudy, proud. Mills, Sells and Floto; Mix; Cole. I looked at the posters and heard Elder out.

  “Maybe that’s something the management has to decide,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said, arms still folded and looking at Kelly, who had brought this Los Angeles outsider into the circus. “But I have no evidence of a murder, and I have no intention of …”

  “I believe him,” said Kelly softly.

  “Look, Emmett,” said Elder, pushing himself away from the wall and pointing a finger at Kelly.

  “Tom,” said Kelly with a sad smile, “you believe it too.”

  Elder’s accusing, attacking finger stopped in midair, and his hand moved to his face. Elder’s eyes closed and looked tired and wrinkled. He rubbed them.

  “The elephants, Tom,” said Kelly softly.

  One more drop in the decibel level, and I wouldn’t be able to hear either one of them. I had the feeling they could communicate without words anyway. I had the feeling that I didn’t belong in this world, couldn’t wisecrack my way through it like the bars, cracked streets, movie studios, and damp office buildings I was familiar with. I wanted to get up and leave.

  “Someone tried to do me, Tom,” Kelly said. “I told you. Peters is just …”

  Elder’s free hand came up with palm out to stop Kelly. His other hand covered weary eyes that didn’t want to see, but they had to. He put both hands at his sides and looked at me, having some difficulty focusing.

  “Not saying you’re right or wrong, what do we do next?”

  “You saw the Mirador police,” I said. “I’ve seen them trying to nail a killer. They nab the closest foreigner and call it a day. With the people you have here, Nelson will have the case wrapped up in an hour. Of course, he’ll have the wrong killer, probably someone who can’t speak English well enough to defend himself. Suggestion. Call Nelson back. Let him come to his own conclusion which, without our shoving the truth under his nose, will be that it was an accident. Meanwhile, we try to find the killer and turn him over to Nelson with something real to go on.”

  Something warm and sweet-smelling passed the wagon and came in under the door, reminding me how much alive I was and making me suddenly and insanely hungry.

  “Well?” I pushed.

  “How?”

  “I go through everyone in that tent,” I explained. “I find out how many have something against the circus, how many … like that. If we’re lucky, I get it down to one or two or three, and we turn them over. Go through their things, try to find some evidence. Hell, maybe we push them around or tell them lies.”

  Elder sighed and looked out the window. “OK, let’s give it a day or two and hope the killer, if there is one, has had enough. But keep it quiet.”

  “With everything that goes on here, that might just be possible,” I said.

  Elder laughed, one of those it’s-not-funny-but-what-else-can-you-do-to-me laughs. “You don’t understand the circus, Peters. You piss behind the calliope at three A.M. on a moonless night, and by morning you’ll have five questions at breakfast about your kidneys. Give it a try, give it a try. What do you need?”

  “Breakfast,” I said, and breakfast it was.

  Five minutes later, Kelly and I were seated together in a mess tent. The death of Tanucci had circled Kelly in a cone of silence which he had trouble breaking out of. It didn’t, however, affect his appetite. We were breakfast stragglers, sitting as far away from the kitchen as we could get. Our eggs, ham, and coffee were accompanied by the music of clanging spoons, metal plates, running water, and chattering cooks. I didn’t need to hear the words. They were talking about death. There is a tone of it that doesn’t
need words.

  “What happens to the circus when there’s an accident like this?” I said, trying to ignore the coffee I had just spilt on my shirt. Maybe I could button my top jacket button and hide it.

  Kelly shrugged, stopped eating, and tried to look through the wall in the general direction of Tanucci’s body.

  “We do the show,” he said. “Even the Flying Tanuccis. They just do less of an act. Maybe they even mention what happened. Maybe they don’t. We don’t close up shop. Can’t. A circus, especially a shoestring one like this, can’t take too many nights down.”

  He went back to his eggs, and I tried drinking my coffee carefully in a thick white porcelain cup that felt good against my palms.

  “And you have to be funny,” I said more than asked.

  Something like a chuckle came out of Kelly. “You know,” he said. “I usually am funnier when I’m down. The towners can’t tell. You know the story about Joey Grimaldi? First big circus clown about a hundred years ago. We’re still called Joeys because of him. One day his circus is playing Vienna, and Joey is so down he’s thinking of quitting. So he goes to a doctor’s office he spots on the way to his hotel and tells the doc that he’s so depressed that he’s thinking of taking his life.

  “‘Don’t worry,’ says the doctor. ‘I know just the thing to make you feel better, better enough to keep going. The circus is in town. Just go down there tonight and keep your eyes on Grimaldi the clown, and you’ll find yourself laughing.’”

  “Nice story,” I said, looking across the tent to watch the woman named Peg hurrying toward us.

  “Maybe,” said Kelly, reaching for another pancake, “but I don’t believe it, a Jackpot for clowns. There aren’t many suicides in circuses. Circus people seldom give up hope. We learn to live on hope. That’s what we talk about most of the time: next year, the next job, things getting better, homes we’re going to buy, places we’re going to visit, things we’re going to be.”

  “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I said with my crooked smile.

  “I used to think I was going to be a cartoonist. I was pretty good. The clown I do, Willie, I really drew him first for an ad agency I worked for back in Kansas City. Then I thought for a while I’d be a trapeze star, center-ring stuff. Was too for a while, did a teeth-hanging act. Damned hard on the jaws. Until a few months back I thought I might like to be in movies, but … If I ever grow up, I think I’ll just be a clown.”

  Peg was standing next to us with something in her hand. Her hair was gradually escaping from the hairpins, which tried to hold it against the wind. She was the kind of woman who left a trail of hairpins you could follow to the far reaches of Alaska.

  “Hi, Peg,” said Kelly. “Want some coffee?”

  “No … yes … I think no,” she said, patting back some hair. “Tom said I should give this to you.”

  I took the sheet of paper from her hand and looked down at the list. It had the names of everyone in the tent when the harness was removed. It included the name of Emmett Leo Kelly and was, as for each person on the list except for me and the final name, followed by a place of birth and a date. Kelly’s was Sedan, Kansas, December 9, 1898.

  Peg couldn’t make up her mind about staying or sitting. I pointed to the bench next to me, and she sat.

  “Sheriff is here,” she said.

  “And …” I prodded.

  “I think he’s convinced it’s an accident,” she said, reaching for a piece of toast on my plate, realizing what she was doing and pulling her hand back. I took the toast and placed it on the table in front of her.

  “I haven’t had a chance to eat,” she explained, picking up the toast with a guilty hand.

  “Your not eating doesn’t help the Tanuccis,” said Kelly, pouring her a cup of coffee.

  She took it, and I discovered that …

  … Dr. Patrick Y. Ogle had been born in Singapore Falls, Maine, eighty years earlier …

  … the Tanuccis were from Corsica …

  … one person in the tent at the time of the theft was a snake charmer named Agnes Sudds …

  … one person was a local businessman from Mirador named Thomas Paul …

  … and one person was a movie director named Alfred Hitchcock.

  One of them was probably the murderer. I showed the list to Kelly.

  “Can’t help you much,” he said. “I’ve only been with this circus a few weeks.” He handed the list to Peg, who was consuming whatever Kelly and I weren’t holding onto.

  “No,” said Peg.

  “My money’s on one of the outsiders,” said Kelly. “Probably that Hitchcock fella.”

  Which, I thought, is why you are a clown and I am a detective, though there were those who would argue that I would make a better clown than a detective.

  “OK,” I said, standing up. “Then let’s start with Hitchcock.”

  He was a short, fat man with a lower lip like a pouting tailor, hair sparse but neatly in place, and wearing a dark suit and tie that looked as if they had just been handed to him by Belman’s Cleaning and Dyeing in Hollywood. He was seated in Elder’s office with his hands folded on his lap like a schoolboy.

  “Hitchcock?” I said.

  “I am Alfred Hitchcock,” he replied, looking at me with large eyes hooded by lids which suggested indifference, but the eyes gave too much away. “Are you a policeman?”

  The word “policeman” seemed to come hard for him. I’d never seen Hitchcock before, but I knew who he was.

  “Suspicion,” I said.

  He looked frightened. His knuckles went white, and his hands remained clasped.

  “Of what?” he said.

  “No,” I smiled. “I’ve seen Suspicion. I’ve seen your movies. What are you doing here, at the circus?”

  “At the moment,” he said very slowly with a distinct English accent, “I am being very frightened. Before that I was trying to get some material for a sequence in a film I’m considering.”

  “A circus scene?”

  “Precisely,” he said with a slight uplifting of the right side of his mouth that represented pain or an attempt to be friendly. “I’m staying with an acquaintance nearby, and my plan was to stop by for a few hours this morning, get some sense of atmosphere, and present my ideas to the writer. Why have I been asked to talk to you, and who are you?”

  I sat on Elder’s cot. “Between us, I’m a private investigator. Name is Toby Peters. I’m pretty sure that aerialist Tanucci was murdered.”

  Hitchcock’s eyes opened with interest, and he shifted his fat body slowly to face me. “Murdered,” he repeated, either savoring the word or trying to hear it come from his own mouth when it was about something real. “You are sure?” he said.

  “As sure as I am that I’d marry Joan Fontaine if she’d have me,” I answered. He definitely smiled this time.

  “This is better than I could have hoped,” he said as much to himself as to me. “But I’m sorry. A man has been murdered, and all I can think of is my movie.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, wanting to lie back on the cot but unable to do so with the rigid, rotund director seated across from me. “You’re not a suspect. You’re more in the way of a possible witness. I saw you come in the tent earlier, and I saw you watching me when I walked over to the practice hitch.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It struck me as rather peculiar that someone should be walking away from the flow of the crowd, the movement toward death. It struck me as an interesting image, the isolation of one man moving away from where the world is looking.”

  “Did you see anyone go over to that harness, that thing I was looking at, maybe take it down?”

  Hitchcock pursed his lips, blinked his eyes, and nodded once. “Someone did, I believe. I wasn’t watching really, but I had the sense of a person in blue, rather tall, or something about the person seeming tall.”

  “Man, woman?” I tried.

  “A man-woman,” he mused. “No, I don’t think so. I should su
rely have noticed that.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking, but he must have been. What I surely couldn’t decide was whether the joke was on me or a private entertainment.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I react rather badly when disaster strikes anywhere but on a studio set.”

  “I forgive you,” I said, wondering how to get out of this polite, droll conversation and get murder back to the people where it seemed to belong. “Tall figure, blue?”

  “Correct,” he nodded, looking at the posters. “I never realized how frightening a circus could be.” Instead of looking frightened, he looked quite pleased. “Do you think it would be all right if I stayed today and possibly tomorrow? My friend lives in Mirador. He drove me over this morning.”

  “I guess so,” I said, giving up and lying down on the cot. “I suggest you stay away from the Mirador police.”

  Hitchcock rose slowly with a distinct grunt. He looked even fatter standing than he did sitting.

  “As I have indicated,” he said, “I have a morbid fear of the police, dating back to my childhood days when my father had a policeman put me in jail for an hour to teach me what happens to bad boys. I have endeavored since that moment to be a good boy and stay away from policemen.”

  “I’ll run off copies of that philosophy and send it to a few hundred friends of mine who could use it.”

  “Good afternoon,” Hitchcock said politely, moving to the door.

  “If you remember anything more about who was standing near that harness, let me know,” I said, closing my eyes. “I’ll be around.”

  “I shall,” he said and left the wagon.

  Thomas Paul, the “businessman” from Mirador, was the next person ushered into the wagon-office by Peg. When I heard the door open I sat up, and it’s a good thing I did.

  I hadn’t had a good look at the man in the business suit who had run into the tent an hour earlier. I knew he was big, but his face had been covered by a hat. That hat was still on, but it couldn’t hide the scar on his face, a purple scar that split his face in half. The right side was sharp-eyed and smiling with a secret joke. The left side was pulled down, distorted by what seemed pain or sorrow. He was a Janus who couldn’t be read, happy and sad at the same time. The scar cut across the corner of his mouth, so his speech was slightly distorted.