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

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “I lost her,” he said. “I found her and then I lost her.”

  “So,” I said to Peg. “Agnes, who was found inside the tent with Puddles, could have let him out.”

  “But,” said Jeremy, putting his massive bulk into the chair near me, “Thomas Paul could not have. He was in the big tent all through the show. I found him quickly and watched him. When the show ended, I asked a father and son sitting next to him if Paul had been there all through the show. Paul’s face is not forgettable. He was sitting there when the father and son came in half an hour before the show started. I’m sure he didn’t know I was watching him. Strange man. He was more interested in the show than anyone I have ever seen at a wrestling match. I cannot always fathom the human mind.”

  “So,” I said, “that lets Mr. Paul out.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Gunther. His hand went to his neck as if to loosen his tie, but his. sense of decorum got the better of his instinct and the hand came down. “Perhaps it is Mr. Paul who has an accomplice.”

  “Agnes,” shouted Shelly.

  “Possible,” I said, pouring the last of Peg’s coffee for the group. “But why the hell would Paul want to ruin the circus?”

  No one knew. Peg smiled at me, and I suggested that we all go out and find someplace for my troupe to sleep.

  “Perhaps we should stay near our charges, our assignments,” said Gunther.

  I convinced them to call it a night and went outside with them, whispering to Peg that I would be back soon. People in costume were milling about, still up from their performance, talking about how it went, the murders, the runaway animals. We found Emmett Kelly in his wagon, and I asked him if he could put my friends up.

  “We’ll find room,” said Kelly soberly.

  “I’ll find somewhere else to sleep,” I said sacrificially.

  “No need for that,” said Kelly. “We’ll make room.”

  Then Kelly looked at me and understood.

  “I’m sorry about the lion,” Shelly said.

  “It’s OK, Shel,” I grinned.

  “I didn’t want to hurt him,” he said, taking Emmett Kelly’s bed when Kelly moved to search for some bedding for the others. “I just wanted to frighten him a little.”

  “Sure, Shel,” I said, backing out of the door with no desire to hear the tale the pudgy dentist would spend part of the night telling. I said good night to Kelly, Gunther, and Jeremy. Jeremy was already comfortably on the floor. Poor Gunther was looking for a place to change into the pajamas and robe he would magically produce from somewhere.

  “One good thing,” said Kelly to me as I started to close the door. “They found the missing elephant.”

  “Now all we need is a killer,” I said and closed the door behind me.

  I was back at Peg’s wagon in about fifteen seconds and knocking.

  “It’s me,” I whispered.

  “Toby?” she said. The wagon windows were dark.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think it would work,” her voice said, but there was no certainty in it.

  “How do we know unless we try?” I pleaded.

  “I’m not ready for something like this,” she said.

  “Let me in and we’ll talk about it.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Yes, I will,” I said with comic emphasis.

  She laughed, and a voice came booming from the next wagon, “Let him in, for Chrissake. I’ve got to get up at dawn and take care of fifteen horses.”

  She let me in.

  Peg was right. It didn’t work. I’m not sure what it was. Friendly but not comfortable. Touched but not moved. Friends. It wasn’t what I had had in mind, but it wasn’t bad either. There wasn’t enough room in her bed for both of us to sleep. We tried for an hour, but my back began to ache again. She fell asleep while I was talking about the time I had been in New York chasing down a couple of runaway kids. I was in the Wellington Hotel across from the Waldorf. I thought the kids were in the room next to mine. I was going to wait till it got dark, knock at their door when they thought they were safe, and do my best to talk them into coming back to Los Angeles with me. I wasn’t getting enough for the job to do anything else, and they were a pair of skinny little things with pimples who had some pretty good reasons for leaving home.

  I had looked out of my window after taking a shower and seen something moving in the window of the Waldorf across the way at about the fifteenth or sixteenth floor. It was a small kid, maybe two years old, with red hair. He was leaning out of the open window. The wind was blowing, and I looked into the light of the room behind him or her for an adult to do something. There was no one there. I thought of calling the Waldorf desk, but I couldn’t figure out what room it was, and by the time anyone got up there, the kid would be gone, one way or another. I thought of opening the window and yelling, but what would I yell even if the kid could hear me over the noise of the street? I might scare him into falling. But he was going to fall. No doubt about it. He or she put one foot up on the sill and looked down into the street.

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t decide whether to watch, run, close my eyes under the blankets, or pretend I wasn’t seeing. I whispered to the kid to please crawl back. Then I stood there for maybe fifteen seconds watching until a figure behind the kid pulled him back and closed the window. The figure, a woman, turned her back, and the kid ran over to the bed in the room and that was all I could see. No one had suffered for what had happened in that room but me.

  The pimply kids in the next room were laughing at Eddie Cantor on the radio when I knocked at their door a few minutes later. They opened it and asked what I wanted. They looked happy. I told them I had made a mistake, went to my room, packed, and headed back to L.A., where I told the parents that I couldn’t find the kids.

  Peg was asleep before I finished my story, which was fine with me because I wasn’t sure of what the incident meant to me. If she had asked, I had no idea what I would tell her. I knew it was important. I knew I had thought about it a lot lately, and maybe that was enough. But Peg was asleep and so was my right arm, and my back ached again. So I crawled over her, took one of her two blankets and her extra pillow, and got on the floor. The floor was cool and hard and just what I wanted. To get rid of the little kid in the window, I thought about who my killer might be. That should have been enough to put me to sleep, but it was still early.

  I listened to “Information Please” quietly on Peg’s small Emerson while I tried to think. Boris Karloff and John Carradine were the guests, and they didn’t get anything wrong. They knew that Jesse James was shot in the back of the head, that Robin Hood was killed by someone letting his blood, and that Hamlet and Laertes were killed with poison rapiers. They were doing better with their fictional killers than I was doing with my real one.

  It wasn’t working. I kept thinking of dead aerialists, a red-haired kid in a window, and falling elephants. Sometimes the thing you least want to think about or imagine jumps in front of you like a clown in heat and won’t go away: a disfigured man; some piece of rotten fish you ate when you were eight or nine; the memory of an elephant you never saw crumbling to the ground, landing on his knees and falling over dead.

  For me the image that came now was Dr. Bumps. Dr. Bumps had been a small-time grifter on Broadway whose hand was barely steady enough to pick the pockets of bums and drunks and too-far-gones. Dr. Bumps had two big bumps on his forehead, like horns just starting to form or cut off because he had once too often gored someone on a streetcorner.

  Dr. Bumps’s head always hurt, and he let anyone who would listen to him know just how much it hurt, how much the images inside were taking form and “bumping to get out.” You see, Dr. Bumps was convinced that anything he thought of could become real in his head, and if he didn’t get rid of the image, it could expand and kill him. So he spent most of his time in pain thinking of ways to distract himself from thinking about anything he could imagine. It’s hard to make a living, even as lousy a
one as he made, while you fight a battle in your head. Dr. Bumps lost the battle in the spring of 1939. I don’t know what he thought was growing in his head, but it was too much for him. He went down to Union Station, waited for an eastbound to Chicago, and jumped in front of it before it cleared the yard.

  We found out, when Jeremy Butler and I went to identify the body, that Dr. Bumps’s real name was Roland LeClerc III.

  Was there an elephant growing in my head? Dr. Bumps looked over my shoulder from the past and told me there was. I wasn’t going to argue with a dead nightmare.

  I found a box of Kix by moonlight and filled a bowl. There was a bottle of milk in Peg’s ice chest under the window and a hot plate in the corner. I think the milk was slightly sour. I used it anyway and felt better with my stomach full.

  When I’d finished my cereal someone knocked at the door, a small, I-don’t-want-to-intrude knock. I opened the door and let Emmett Kelly in.

  “I saw Elder down at the mess tent,” he explained, stepping in. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and overalls and looked like an undersized lumberjack.

  I offered him a seat and a cup of coffee. He took both and sat down with a lot of what was on his mind showing in his sun-browned face.

  “You never really told me about that attempt on your life,” I whispered, filling his coffee cup to the top. “It might help.”

  He looked relieved, as if that was what he had come for, and glanced at Peg to be sure she was asleep. I knew what he really wanted. I’d seen it on faces before. He wanted me to put the world back together.

  “Well,” Kelly began, looking at the wall as if the story he was about to tell would appear like a movie, “we were just setting up. Few days back. It’s always the same, but there’s something nice about it being the same. Like it was like this maybe a hundred years ago and it’ll be there a hundred years from now even if people drop bombs on each other, rocket up to Mars, or dig a tunnel through the middle of the earth. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said, understanding but not really understanding. I believed it, but I didn’t feel it. I wasn’t part of anything like that, hadn’t felt it about my family, the Glendale police, or Warner Brothers when I had worked for them. There was just me and today and maybe tomorrow and that wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was usually pretty good, but it wasn’t the kind of thing Kelly was part of.

  “So anyway,” he went on, taking his eyes from the movie that didn’t appear on the wall and turning them to me for an instant before looking down at the coffee cup in his hand. The top of his head was nearly bald, and I had the feeling that I could see the past in it but not the future. “Anyway, the tents were going up, wagons coming in, mud all over. There’s chicken rank in the circus, especially a runaround one like this one. Everybody’s worried about who’s higher in the coop, even some of us who’ve been around. I mean, we go year to year, and sometimes it stops for us. I’ve seen it. One year an act has it, the towners laugh, scream, clap their hands red. Next year, the magic is gone. No one knows for sure why. Maybe something inside you goes, jumps to someone else, goes no place particular. I mean, the circus goes on, but you don’t. You slip, lose it. Happened to me when I was doing the high act. Hanging by my teeth one night spinning around maybe fifty feet up without a net, I knew it was gone. I mean, I was never a great one up there, but I wasn’t bad. It just went. You can’t hold it in. The other thing—Willie—had always been in me. I mean, he might just walk away someday, but I don’t think so. I don’t think we’d get on without each other. Am I making sense?”

  I nodded. He made sense. Hell, there were all kinds of clowns in me. When I let them out, they usually caused me trouble. One clown in me wouldn’t shut up when I was with my brother; the clown just jabbed and prodded with a word to the body and then another combination to the heart and cheek, and my brother would smash my nose or arm or leg. I knew that clown of mine.

  “So,” said Kelly with a smile at me as if he knew about my inner clown, “where was I? Oh, yes. Everybody worries about where they stand, but we all help out, especially in a put-together show for an old friend like Elder. I think I was helping to tie the canvas on a side tent. My hands were cold in the morning, and the sweat was sticking my shirt to my back. A guy named Gus the Gus, big Dane, was pulling with me when someone called. I turned around, didn’t see anybody looking at me. The guy in the ticket booth had lost a roll of tickets, and they were unwinding and rolling downhill toward a puddle of mud. Gus the Gus could hold the rope. I patted him on the back, and with his face all red, he nodded that I could go. So I took off to help catch the tickets. It was like a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Kept expecting the tickets to have one of those cartoony faces, get up on two painted legs and run away. Well, I didn’t really, but you know.”

  I nodded again. I knew he was telling a story, and I wanted to be a good audience. Lots of reasons. I liked him. He was paying me, and he might have something that would help me.

  “Well, I passed the ticket guy,” said Kelly. “He’s little and rickety, former Shetland pony act, I think. I was gaining on the tickets, going down that little hill, and figured I’d get them before they hit the puddle when I had that kind of itchy feeling, you know, hot rash on the neck when things are going warm when they should be cool. I turned and saw the truck. It was coming behind me, a small rigging truck, red, designed specially for circus jobs. At first I figured he was trying to help catch the tickets, which was a pretty damn silly thought. But I couldn’t figure where else he was going.”

  “You didn’t see anyone in the truck, a driver?” I tried.

  Kelly looked back at the wall for a picture, touched his nose with his right forefinger, rubbed it and saw something.

  “What did you see?” I pushed gently.

  He shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said, moving his right hand down to rub his chin. “Have a sort of feeling there was a round something, like a balloon or a face or the moon. I didn’t really look up there. I just kept running and running harder when I heard that truck right behind me. I remember thinking that the damned fool was going to run me down, and those tickets weren’t worth my life.”

  Kelly looked at me to see if I was making sense out of this or thinking he was imagining things. I looked blank and straight without blinking so he’d go on, which he did.

  “Anyway, the tickets went in the mud, and I leaped over the puddle and did a flying side roll to the left. Hadn’t done one of those in almost ten years. Felt my side pull and hit a pile of Indian clubs a juggling act was unpacking. The truck went right by. I was rolling around in the clubs, but I watched it go. Missed me by no more than a foot, and there was no driver anymore, if there’d been one in the first place.”

  “Did you ask anyone if they had seen who started the truck?” I asked, reaching over for my cup. The cup was heavy and clean. Lots of things in this circus were heavy, clean, and repainted. I figured things were heavy so they wouldn’t get destroyed in all the moving, and clean because the circus people didn’t want to feel any shabbier than an Arab bandit life forced them to be.

  “No luck,” said Kelly, getting up to pour me coffee from the metal pot brewing on the hot plate. I watched the cloud of steam rise, put my hand over it and felt the moist circle of heat touch me.

  “Gus the Gus had been holding the rigging, hadn’t looked back. Ticket guy had his eyes on the tickets. Nobody saw. Nobody knew.”

  “Then that’s about it for now,” I said. “I’ll pick up on it in the morning.”

  “OK,” said Kelly, getting up to scratch his legs. “See you in the morning.” He went out, closing the door gently behind him.

  Whatever dreams I had were gone by morning except for one picture, Alfred Hitchcock near the lion cage. I remembered that he had been near the cage when I had talked to Henry the keeper. There was some chance that he had seen whoever had let the lion out or seen someone suspicious near the cage. After all, it had happened between the time I had talked to Henry and the start of the s
how, not too long, maybe fifteen minutes.

  I got up quietly. My watch said it was nine, but I knew better than to listen to my watch. Hitchcock might have left, but I might be able to find the name of the friend in Mirador he was staying with. Even if I didn’t, I could call him in Los Angeles. I also wanted a talk with Agnes Sudds about her failure to encounter Puddles in the supply tent.

  There was no need to be quiet. Peg was gone. There was a note on the small table:

  DAY STARTS EARLY FOR ME. IF YOU MISS

  BREAKFAST, MAKE SOME COFFEE. FRIENDS?

  PEG

  My back felt reasonable. My clothes looked as if they had been rolled into a ball and jumped on by a bear, and my face looked no better in Peg’s small mirror. I found her Ipana toothpaste, “For the smile of health.” I rubbed it on with my fingers and rinsed. The smile belonged to a healthy gargoyle.

  Shoes on, I went out to face the day regardless of what time it was. On the way to Kelly’s wagon I passed people, but they weren’t giving out anything more than gloom and polite grimaces. A double death in the circus was nothing that could be hidden.

  Shelly was the only one in the wagon when I got there.

  “Where are the others?” I said, rummaging through my cardboard suitcase obtained three years earlier as payment for a very small job from a very fat pawnbroker.

  Shelly was at the table drinking coffee. He wasn’t completely bald. A patch of hair touched each side of his head. The hair on the right side was pointed out, making him look like a mad professor in a Monogram horror picture for kids.

  “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.