Catch a Falling Clown tp-7 Read online

  “Did anyone hate your brother, have a fight with your brother before this morning?” I asked. “Was anything on his mind?”

  “Yes,” said the young man. “Marco say, said, he saw someone in the elephant tent. Saw him when circus up go do something. Then elephant go fried. Marco said maybe it not accident. Now, maybe …”

  “Maybe,” I finished, “someone killed Marco because he saw them setting up the rigging to kill the elephant. Then Rennata saw the same person fooling with your equipment and figured she had a murderer. It makes sense.”

  “The elephant,” sighed Elder.

  “Thanks,” I said to the Tanuccis, taking each of their hands. “We’ll find Rennata and bring her back.”

  “Grazie,” said the mother, a firm blonde with enough makeup to show she was hiding her face and feelings. Elder and I backed out of the wagon, and the trio didn’t move.

  Outside the wagon, we looked beyond the circus grounds for a two-ton elephant and saw nothing.

  “As Charlie Chan would say, ‘Two-ton elephant must leave deep tracks in mud.’”

  Elder nodded in agreement. “Right to the road down there, but two tons isn’t enough to make holes in asphalt and rock.”

  The road was the one I had come down to find the circus. It led down to the highway going one way and off into the farmlands in the other.

  “I’ll head for town,” I said. “You take some people the other way.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” said Elder sensibly. “Nelson finds you in Mirador and you might not come out.”

  “Right, but I know the town better than you and how to stay away from him.”

  “That’s a lousy argument,” said Elder, pulling his jacket over his neck. The afternoon was cool, but not cold. The sky had clouded over and promised something damp. My back twinged, and I looked at my watch. I hadn’t any reason to know the time before this, and my watch didn’t help much. It was my one inheritance from my father, if you don’t count the debts on his Glendale grocery store. The watch stopped when it wanted to, started when it wanted to, and showed a hell of a lot more independence than my old man ever did, which may have been why I kept it. My old man’s indecision was probably a major contribution to my brother Phil’s becoming an angry cop and my seeking out violence.

  Whatever the reason, my watch said it was two o’clock.

  “What time is it?” I asked Elder. We stepped out of the mud rut to let some bears walk by, led by a man who looked almost as much like a bear as the bears. The bears, in fact, were dressed better than the man, in blue tutus. They would be cute from the audience. The audience wouldn’t have found them so cute this close up. Bears definitely do not brush their teeth.

  “Lotze,” grunted the man who looked like a bear, when one of the bears hesitated and decided to growl in my face. Elder ignored the whole thing and bit his lower lip.

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  “I don’t either, but we have no choice,” I answered.

  “You, Peters, are a liar,” grinned Elder, a wise grin I didn’t care for. My ex-wife had a grin like that. “You do like it. You’re as happy as a seal in a fish house.”

  I shrugged. He was right. There are some people who run from trouble and call it evil, and others who exist for games and thrills. There are some people who tell you boxing matches are savage and others like me who simply like to watch two guys fight. The big dangers you don’t set yourself up for, don’t have a choice about, like war, they aren’t fun. It has something to do with making the decisions or having them made for me. I was going into Mirador. I never claimed I was smart. I’m more a bull terrier than a fox.

  “If either of us isn’t back in one hour,” I suggested, “someone from the circus should go for the state police. There’s a state police headquarters about twelve miles south on the Pacific Coast highway.”

  “Right,” said Elder. “There’s no point in telling you to be careful. You have no intention of being careful.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said, and I really meant to be.

  Ten minutes later, with a thin drizzle hitting my windshield, I headed toward Mirador while I listened to Hop Harrigan. After the announcer told us how to spot Nazi planes, Hop had to deal with two Japanese who had taken his plane and planned to do a suicide run at a dam.

  There was no elephant on the main street of Mirador. The drizzle had sent humans inside too. I drove down one of the streets off the town circle. Mirador wasn’t too big, but it did sprawl around. I drove down the familiar road, where Howard Hughes had rented a house in which a murder had taken place, and past the Gurstwald estate, where the murderer had come from. No elephants. I drove around hills and roads for another twenty minutes till I started to worry about my gas and went back toward town along the beach road.

  I almost missed it. If the rain had been a little heavier and darker, I would have. I stopped the car, got out and listened to the light drops ping off my head, and looked at the elephant tracks in the sand.

  I had switched to my rumpled gabardine windbreaker, a May Company special whose zipper had been destroyed by my two-year-old niece Lucy. The rain pittered a warning to my trick back, but I couldn’t stop.

  My.38 was in the car, but I didn’t think a.38 would stop an elephant. It might make him good and mad, but it wouldn’t stop him. It wasn’t really the elephant I was worried about.

  The tracks were clear, not too deep but clear, and I followed them along the shore and around a bend in the rocks, where I found myself looking up at the lost hope of the county, the hidden ambition of the town, the unfinished hotel and recreation spa inhabited now by softly cooing gulls and one or two loudly cawing crows. No elephant.

  “Rennata,” I called. “My name is Peters. Elder sent me.”

  I thought I heard something, a shuffling, breathing sound behind one of the creaking boards of a building. Around the corner I went and found myself eye to knee with the elephant. His eyes, red and frightened, were a good four feet above me.

  What do you say to an elephant on the beach?

  “Hi,” I tried. “How’ve you been?”

  The elephant took a step back from me, a lumbering step, and waved its trunk. Beyond him on the sand I could see a heap of cloth which might or might not contain a human form. I pushed my back against the rusted steel side of a building next to the elephant and began to ease my way past, saying soothing things like, “Good boy,” and “Easy, big fella.”

  I had just decided to try a lullaby when hell tore loose. My pushing against the steel siding had given it all it needed to declare its freedom from the single old bolt that held it. The sheet came loose with a screech and clattered against a pillar.

  The elephant bellowed, raised one massive right front foot or paw or hoof or whatever it’s called, and threw a wild jab in my general direction. I tripped backward as the elephant kicked a steel beam inches from my head and started a clanging that echoed out to sea.

  The elephant took another step toward me, and I scrambled back into the rubble, ignoring bruises and bumps. I backed into a corner as the gray hulk moved forward, shaking the long unfinished floor. His weight swayed the warped wood, and I grabbed a glassless window ledge and started to scramble out. The elephant came right after me as I rolled on the sand and looked back over my shoulder. He crashed right through the side of the house, sending out a shower of shrapnel the Big Red One would have backed away from. I didn’t know how fast an elephant could run, but I didn’t think I could outrun one. On the other hand, I didn’t think I had much choice. I went down the beach, and he came bellowing after me.

  I wasn’t in bad shape. Oh, I’d cut back on the number of days I played handball at the Y on Hope Street back in Los Angeles, but I’d been doing some running and lifting. Fear helped a lot too. I beat the elephant to my car by about four steps, scrambled inside, and went for my glove compartment. The compartment was open, and the gun was gone. The gun was gone, and my Buick was rocking. An elephant was trying to shake
me out. A foot thudded against the door at my side, and I could see the dent stop just short of my leg. I put the key in the ignition, turned it on, and gunned the motor. The elephant backed off with a roar that would have frightened Kong. But something had him going, and he came at me again. He stood bellowing a challenge in the drizzle, elephant against car. I knew the car wouldn’t survive a battle, and I didn’t want to kill an elephant if I didn’t have to. So I hit my horn. The first blast startled him. The second blast sent fear into his already blazing eyes. The third, followed by my backing up, sent him running down the beach in the general direction of I-don’t-know-where but the opposite direction from where I knew I had to go.

  I watched the gray lump disappear and wondered what people would think when they saw the creature racing in the general direction of Mexico. I wondered even more what Arnie the no-neck mechanic would respond when I showed him my door and told him it had been kicked in by a wild elephant.

  I drove down the road as close as I could get to where the ghost town stood and the heap of clothing lay. Then I made my way down to the spot, with a good idea of what I would find. There were no footprints around the body except those of the victim herself. I could see it was Rennata Tanucci, knew it was before I pulled back the coat crumpled over her face.

  The bullet holes, two of them, were easy to find, one in the middle of her chest, the other in her stomach. I knelt next to her body and followed her hand that seemed to be pointing to something in the sand. The something was a crude drawing that she had apparently made. It looked like a snowman next to a snowman. One snowman was bigger than the other, and the bigger one had two eyes, a hole for a nose, and a mouth that drooped crazily. Both figures were inside a crude box, which may have been a house. It’s hard to apply rules of taste to the last creation of a dying artist. The message, whatever it might mean, was shallow and almost worn away by the rain. Her head was turned toward the shore, and her open eyes looked at a brick house on the far ridge above the beach.

  “Lady,” I said softly, covering her again, “I wonder what the hell you were trying to tell us.”

  “No doubt,” came a voice from behind, “that she expired with the hope that we would catch you. In which case, I am pleased to report, we have achieved that end.”

  I didn’t turn to Nelson’s voice right away. There was something I wanted to see first, and I saw it, my.38, about a dozen feet from the body where someone had thrown it.

  “You can’t expect to go chasing elephants and shooting people on beaches without attracting some attention,” said Nelson with clear satisfaction.

  I turned and stood up. Nelson and Alex were facing me. Nelson had his gun out. Alex didn’t.

  “Murder, as you know, is a rare thing in Mirador, Mr. Peters, a rare thing indeed. It is my belief, however, that if it does come, it is good if it is done by an outsider and good if I catch that outsider and even better if it takes place shortly before a major election.”

  “Then I’ve done you a favor,” I said.

  He nodded with a self-satisfied smile. “You might, indeed, say that,” he said. “Now, if you would be so good as to step a few feet away from the body of that unfortunate woman, Alex will get that weapon, which, I assume, is yours.”

  I stepped away slowly. Nelson might take it into his head to simplify matters by gunning down his murderer in a rousing battle. The thought entered his mind as if by telepathy, and he glanced at Alex, who clearly wasn’t having any.

  “The conscience and strength of my deputy are an inspiration to us all,” Nelson said sarcastically, as Alex moved forward to get the.38 in the sand. “You need not bother about handling the weapon, Alex. With this drizzle and sand, fingerprints are unlikely and, certainly in this case, unnecessary.”

  “Nelson, I didn’t kill this woman.”

  “We shall see,” he said, rocking on his heels. “Your gun. We catch you over the body. She, as I recognize, is one of the circus people and, if I am not mistaken, the wife of the young man who met his demise this morning. You and the lady friend have a little falling-out, Peters?”

  A sudden blast of wind plastered my wet pants to my leg, pushed Nelson sideways, and made a groan through the ruins.

  “Don’t move,” came Nelson, fighting the wind.

  “I’m not moving unless the wind moves me,” I said. Alex, I saw, hadn’t been affected by the blast of air. He held the pistol out for Nelson, who examined it with the joy one would expect to see in the eyes of a pearl diver who has just come up with a beauty the size of a marshmallow.

  “There are no low-life circus freaks to do battle for you now, Peters,” said Nelson. “So Alex and I will just take you back to our little jail, arrange for this body, and have ourselves a chat, a cup of coffee, and a confession or two.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” I repeated.

  “Oh, yes, you did,” he said. Then he looked up into the rain and showed his not too straight and not terrible white teeth. “Good day to spend indoors chatting.”

  “You …”

  “What am I, Peters?” he said, losing his joy-of-life attitude. “How the hell do you know what I am? I do more good in this world in one day than you’ll do in your whole miserable lifetime. Just ask Alex. Ask him about the parties for the Mex kids I give, the handouts.”

  “Alex,” I said, feeling my back start to sag in pain. “Is he a saint?”

  “Let’s get back,” said Alex, walking past Nelson and heading toward the ridge.

  “Tell him, Alex,” Nelson shouted. “Tell him.”

  “Sheriff Nelson is a good man,” Alex said, his back still turned. He made it sound like something he was reading on a pack of matches.

  “Sheriff,” I said, pushing the wet hair from my face and trying to pull my broken-zippered windbreaker close. “There’s a dead woman over there. You think we might show her a little respect and let her go in peace without all your elephant crap?”

  “Someday,” hissed Nelson, “I’m going to be governor of this whole damn state.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” I said, following Alex.

  6

  Nelson was as good as his word. He put on some clean, dry socks when we got back to the jail and made himself a cup of coffee. Then we sat, him behind his desk with his feet up and a cup of coffee in his hand, Alex standing behind me, and me dripping in a wooden chair across from Nelson.

  “Like some coffee?” Nelson asked with a twinkle.

  I didn’t answer, didn’t even let myself sneeze for a second or two, and then let it out.

  Nelson scrambled back. “Can’t go spreading those germs all around here,” he said seriously, shaking the spilled coffee from his hands.

  “Maybe we should give him a dry shirt,” Alex said behind me.

  “All right. All right,” Nelson agreed and went back to his feet-up pose. I could hear Alex move behind me, the wooden floor creaking. Behind Nelson’s head was a series of framed certificates and plaques. One was from the students of Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School at Mirador for giving a safety lecture back in 1938. Another was for completing an extension course from the University of Southern California in basic civics.

  I took the shirt handed to me over my shoulder, removed my jacket and shirt, and put on the dry one, which smelled faintly of alcohol.

  “Got a complete sheet on you, Peters,” Nelson said, tapping something before him. “Like to know your life story, straight from the Los Angeles PD? I’ve had it here ever since our last little social encounter.”

  I said nothing. He sipped and read aloud. “Toby Peters, born Tobias Leo Pevsner. I can see why you might not like the name you were born with, too sort of Jew-sounding. Let’s see, now, born Glendale, California, November 14, 1897. Mother died when you were just a baby. Father owned a grocery store. Older brother is an L.A. police lieutenant. You went about a year and a half to junior college and then joined the Glendale police in 1917. Father died in 1932. Your brother was in the first big war, wounded whil
e you stayed back.”

  “You in the war, Nelson?”

  “I was unable to serve,” he said. “Let us get back to you. You have been known to consort with known criminals.”

  “I try to catch them sometimes. It’s difficult to catch them unless you get near them. You might ask a real cop sometime.”

  “Your wife left you,” Nelson went on. “You a violent man with women, Peters?”

  “I am a pussycat with everyone,” I said. “I’ve been thinking seriously of joining a seminary, Little Brothers of the Meek. I deplore violence, shudder at the sight of blood, and confess to any and all crimes when tight-assed sheriffs frighten me.”

  Nelson’s grimace wouldn’t move into a grin. “We shall just see about what frightens you, Peters.”

  “You know, Nelson, you sound like Richard Loo in a cheap war movie. You’ll never get the role. You’re too small, too silly-looking, too smug, too transparent, too …”

  “That’s it,” shouted Nelson, slamming his coffee cup on the table. “Alex, I think you should take our Mr. Peters here into the back cell and use your powers of persuasion to convince him to confess. I, meanwhile, will see to the body of his unfortunate victim.”

  Alex didn’t reply, so Nelson went on. “You understand, Alex?”

  “Sure,” said Alex, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me up.

  “We will talk a bit later, Mr. Peters, when you have had a few contemplative hours to consider the cleansing nature of confession.”

  I winked at Nelson, whose teeth gritted together loudly enough to hear. Then he stamped out into the rain. Through the storefront window, Alex and I watched him get into the police car.

  “In back,” said Alex.

  “Hey, it’s Nelson you’re mad at, not me.” I moved ahead of him to the narrow walkway between the two cells. The whole damn jail was no bigger than my Hollywood rented room.

  “You’ll do,” Alex said evenly, pushing me into the second cell, the one furthest from where anyone could hear us.