Dead Clown Blues

by R. Daniel Lester

  He straight-faced me and said yeah he remembered Jim came in most nights for the last month or so and drank club soda. Sat with some other guys who definitely did not stick to fizzy water.

  “The janitors? And one of ’em named ‘Earl’?”

  “Pal,” said the barman, “I don’t try and get to know my customers that well. Best not to ask questions. Nod, listen, pour the drinks. And all Jim told me was in the slump of his shoulders and the bend in his spine. As for the others, well, maybe they were janitors, maybe not.”

  “Any idea where Jim might’ve hung his hat?”

  “Like I said, pal, I just pour the drinks.”

  I asked if a few bucks would help shake the memory tree free of a nut or two, but the barman looked like all he wanted to do was shake my tree with the baseball bat he had stashed behind the bar. So I bid him adieu and spent some shoe leather making my way west.

  The Four Corners was the heart of my Vancouver, old Vancouver. Hastings and Main, the valves pumping blood out to the streets and avenues, the arteries. Which made Stanley Park the lungs, what with all those trees. The forest in the middle of the city. And the snapshot memories collected in my head. I remembered walking with my mother, along the seawall. She held my hand. I climbed rocks. There was brine in the air. The sand was cold. I chased away seagulls. I ate a hot dog.

  But that was then, before my world crashed.

  And this was now, when all I could see was wreckage.

  At Lost Lagoon, where Jim drowned, a beat cop was sitting under a tree, in the shade, working hard at keeping the criminals in check, at least the ones underneath his eyelids. He looked tired and spent and put out to pasture like a cow munching grass.

  “Good afternoon, officer,” I said.

  He opened his eyes, immediately suspicious. “Help you with something?” he asked as I approached.

  “What happened over there?” I asked, indicating the spot still marked by police tape where Jim’s car had gone into the drink. Tire tracks led from the road onto the grass to the sand and then to the water, where they ended. Two swans with no respect for human mortality were grooming themselves in the tracks.

  The cop tipped his cap up off his forehead, squaring it on his head. “What’s it to you?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Nothin’ to worry about. I heard it was some old drunk who couldn’t see straight and drowned himself in the lake.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “Hmm. Lots of accidents these days. Janitors. That nightclub owner that got himself run over by a laundry truck. Unlucky, I guess.”

  He stood up. “Say, you’re not one of them ‘pee-eyes’ is you? Always muckin’ about where you don’t belong.”

  “I’m simply an honest working man out for a stroll.”

  “Is that right? Got some proof?”

  Great, I seemed to be stoking the last ember of cop instinct he had left in the fireplace. But I’d found a stack of business cards in my office, wedged under the desk leg. And Brenkleman, the former inhabitant of my office, may have been a fly-by-night kind of hombre but he’d known his way around a first impression. The cards screamed expensive, weighty paper stock and a fancy logo to boot.

  The cop looked the card over then handed it back. “Okay, bully for you, you’re an accountant. My brother-in-law’s an accountant and he’s shadier than the spot beside my whale of a sister when she beaches herself on the sand at Spanish Banks.” He sat back down on the chair and tipped his hat down over his eyes again. “So beat it.”

  As always, it’d been such a pleasure dealing with the boys in blue. But I wished the crime scene could’ve told me something I didn’t already know. Jim’s car went into Lost Lagoon. Okay, the tire tracks said that much. A trained gumshoe probably could’ve knelt down beside the tracks and done a measurement with a ruler or something but that would’ve meant knowing what such a measurement would mean, as well as fighting a gang of swans for the territory. And swans, as I’d once learned, were vicious little beasts with angry demeanors and poor interpersonal skills. Goddamned swans.

  Next up on the agenda was a little trip to the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club to see if I could find William Witham, the friend of Jim’s that Adora had told me about. The yacht club was located at Jericho beach, which was farther than I wanted to walk, so I hopped on the bus.

  But after all that effort, the office had one of those “closed—back in five minutes” signs hanging in the door. I waited ten but no one showed. I cupped my hands to block the sun and put my forehead to the glass, but all I was looking in at was a marina office with the lights off. Not very exciting.

  I wandered out along the dock. The marina had it all: big boats, small boats and in-between boats. The Saucy Lass was an in-between boat. Not a luxury cruiser, but no rinky-dink fishing boat either. I called out a greeting, but like at the office, there were no takers. A seagull pecking at an open mussel on the deck of the neighbouring boat looked my way but the feathered thing was probably just wondering if my soft bits were as tasty as the mussels’. Seagulls were right up there with swans in my book. Crap on me once, shame on me. Crap on me twice, shame on you.

  No sign of William Witham, if he even owned the boat anymore, so I headed back to shore. As wooden dock met concrete, I saw a familiar face. Cleveland Moyer’s Caddy drove into the parking lot, towing a small boat on a trailer. He swung the car around and reversed down the boat launch, submerging the trailer and floating the boat. He hopped out, took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants to his knees, waded into the water, released the boat from the trailer, got back in the car and then found a parking spot for the Caddy. I’d never seen him so happy, grinning ear-to-ear, as he fit a boating cap on his head, went back down into the water, climbed aboard and motored away.

  A happy Cleveland Moyer. Would wonders never cease? It was like spotting a rare butterfly at the top of a mountain: you couldn’t quite believe you’d seen it and you were pretty sure you’d never see it again.

  7

  The dog was a killer that much was clear. All muscle, no fat. Jaw like a sprung bear trap and teeth that had known the tear of flesh. Certainly, the scars said the beast had been around the block, faced off in a junkyard or two, an alley or three. There were other dogs and probably a few humans that heard its bark and felt its breath on their skin in nightmares, if they were fortunate enough to have nightmares anymore. But I had to hand it to the car tire: it was giving up a good fight. The dog growled and drooled, drooled and growled, teeth sunk into the rubber, wrenching back and forth, neck muscles taut, hanging, spinning around and around.

  After striking out at the marina the day before, I’d decided to try another avenue of investigation and finally see the circus with my own eyes. The circus was out in the sticks so I took a cab. The cabbie wanted the money up front. No one trusted anyone anymore that was the problem.

  Finally, at the crest of a small hill, off a dirt road there it was: the Circus of Cacophony. The big top tent looked like a pimple about to burst.

  But I was early and the matinee show wasn’t scheduled to start for an hour, so there wasn’t much in the way of a crowd yet. I wandered for a bit and noticed a curtain that led “backstage,” going through without asking. No one stopped me and I soon came across a collection of ne’er do wells grouped around a hairless carny who was all sinew and muscle and had an intricate tattoo of a spider web covering his whole bald head. He was standing beside a pole that had a rope tied to the top. And the rope was tied around a tire. And the tire had the dog hanging off it. The brutish, slobbering beast was completely suspended, held up only by the power of its jaw. The carny swung the tire, spinning the dog around and around. I heard murmurs in the crowd, bets being made as to how long the dog would stay like that. Sounded like it’d been hours already. Well, if that was entertainment around these parts, I’d hate to see boredom.

  Suddenly, the ground began to shake. I thought
an earthquake but no one else seemed concerned. I turned and saw Adora Carmichael, dressed all in red, riding an elephant towards me. She looked like a maraschino cherry on top of, well, an elephant. Talk about an entrance.

  “A little something I picked up along the way,” she said to me as she rode up.

  I backed off, staring the massive creature in the eyes. The elephant was ancient and untouchable and didn’t give a hill of beans for the likes of me. Instead, it swatted at a fly with its trunk.

  “I think Mary likes you,” said Adora, from atop her perch.

  “And if she didn’t?”

  “Then we’d need to use a shovel to scrape you off the ground.”

  It was a more honest answer than I expected or wanted. “Happen often?”

  “Only once, I think. A few years ago, somewhere in India. That’s why we got her cheap. And if it happened again we’d be forced to put her down.” Adora suddenly went from sitting to doing a handstand on the elephant’s back. She stayed in that position like it was nothing, like balancing on her hands on top of an elephant was ho-hum-everyday-stuff, then lowered herself back to sitting, swung one leg over and gracefully dismounted. Two elephant handlers appeared, as if from nowhere, and led Mary away, towards the animal cages.

  “Out of curiosity, what puts an elephant down?”

  “Lots of bullets, Mr. Fitch. By the way, you just missed the police.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Who knows? The police are either asking why your pants are dirty or trying to get in them. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “Right, of course. Quite the set-up you got here.”

  Adora smiled. “Want the tour?” she asked, and since it wasn’t a question that expected an answer, I went on the five-cent tour led by a hundred dollar lady. Walking next to me, she smelled like fresh cut grass with a hint of lemon. Like springtime, that first day when the birds are chirping and the sun is warm. The rest of the circus didn’t smell that nice. Manure and sweat, mostly. But we got a lot of waves and nods from the circus folk and I figured maybe seventy-five percent were legit and the other twenty-five like toffee over a rotten apple. Looks good but hiding something sinister underneath.

  “So, the cops,” I said. “What’s their official story?”

  “A fairly straightforward one. Jim was an ex-con, a hopeless drunk, a car thief and so booze-addled he crashed through a circus completely by accident before driving into a lake. Case closed.”

  “And what do you think?

  “I want to believe that.”

  “Do you? Why pay me to dig around?”

  “I used to believe in the tooth fairy, too, Mr. Fitch, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a drunk clown with blood on his shirt and beer on his breath that my father had paid to slip a quarter under my pillow in the middle of the night. Sometimes the lie is better than the truth. But that doesn’t mean the lie should win.”

  Later, after Adora got called away to attend to some circus business, I found myself on my own again and feeling like a stranger in a strange land. No one was smiling anymore now that the Queen was gone. Their beady eyes said, “Scram, already,” and I was about to heed their words when I heard a voice.

  “Psst, over here,” it said.

  I looked around. Annie, dressed in a pink robe, was standing on the staircase of a little caravan and motioning for me to get in, quick. And the inner sanctum of a bearded lady was pretty much the opposite of what I expected. It was all pink, pink carpet, pink sheets, pink curtains, pink pillowcases. So pink my eyes hurt.

  Annie carefully locked the door behind me. “I knew you’d show,” she said. “I could tell at the funeral you were the nosing around type.”

  “That’s me. You have something worth a sniff?”

  “Only some things I learned since we talked. Juicy things. Illegal things.” She said the word “illegal” like it was a curse word.

  “Pretty shy for a circus type. I thought all of you were hardened to the ways of the world.”

  “Their ways, not mine. An artist needs her canvas, no? I have to go where the audience is.”

  “Speaking of an audience, you around when Jim crashed through the tent? I wouldn’t mind a firsthand account.”

  Annie shook her head, no. “A girl needs her beauty sleep, Mr. Fitch, so I only heard about it the next day. It’s the clowns you’d have to talk to for that scoop.”

  All roads led to the damn clowns. But Annie looked like she was ready to explode. I took mercy. “Okay, spill it.”

  She lowered her voice like the wall had ears. “Roosevelt Carmichael was a bootlegger,” she whispered. “He used the circus as a cover to move booze across state and country lines. And the clowns were his protection. The muscle.”

  “Why tell me this?” I asked.

  Annie nestled up against me, put her hand on my thigh. “Because you were very nice to me at the funeral and you remind me of my third husband.”

  “Three? Impressive.”

  “What can I say, Mr. Fitch. I like men and they like me.”

  “And I’m flattered,” I said, lifting her hand away, “but it would never work.”

  “Why not?” she asked, pouting.

  “Well, for starters, I’m allergic to the colour pink.”

  She did a little pouty face and shrugged off my rebuttal. Thankfully, a knock on the door saved me from further explanation as to why Carnegie Fitch and the bearded lady just weren’t a match made in heaven.

  “That’ll be them,” she said.

  “Them?”

  “The clowns.”

  That didn’t sound good. But Annie was right: when I came out of the bearded lady’s caravan, seeing pink spots everywhere, the clowns were waiting for me. It was enough to give a guy a healthy dose of the heebie-jeebies.

  The clowns had a mouthpiece: the tiny one from the funeral with the bandages around his head, who must’ve bounced off of Jim’s hood like a bowling pin. Not a dwarf or midget, just small. Symmetrical. He looked like he could fit anywhere, even in those hard to reach places. He introduced himself as Napoleon.

  “Don’t get up,” I said.

  “Ha ha, what a surprise. A short joke.”

  “I could tell you a longer one. It’s about this guy with a plastic sheep.”

  “Cut the wiseacre act, why don’t ya.”

  “So you’re the clowns, huh?”

  “The Dead Clowns,” he said.

  “Dead? You look pretty good to me.”

  “No, that’s we’re called, you idiot. The Dead Clowns. It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t ya think?” Then Napoleon went around the group, pointing, introducing each one to me. Frankly, I lost interest pretty quick. I never was very good with names. But a few stuck out: Ichabod was a skinny beanpole with a small head, lanky limbs and a criminal leer. Wilhelm was a man-beast with a single bushy eyebrow that sat atop a ridge of bone that jutted out from his skull, turning his deep-set eyes into dark pits of rage and sadness. Roy, acne-scarred and greasy-haired, wore a basket animal around his waist, hung by suspenders, so it looked like he was riding a horse. Apparently it was a classic circus routine, but considering the clown in the costume was about fifty, hadn’t shaved in weeks, smelled like a bottle of Bourbon threw up on him and was hopping around on crutches, the magic was most definitely lost. Plus, the horse was missing an eye and looked so raggedy that even fleas would likely find it an unsavoury motel.

  “So what’s the deal here?” I said. “Why the meet and greet?”

  “We want to know, shamus.”

  Actually, Wilhelm looked like he wanted to remove my arms from their sockets and then beat me with them, but I wasn’t about to split hairs. Napoleon hopped up on a footstool. We were eye-to-eye.

  “Tell me where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  “Don’t play coy, Fitch.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in school, little boy?”

  Napoleon faked a lau
gh but quickly went stone face again. “Seriously.”

  “By ‘it,’ do you mean a whole lotta cash?”

  His look said yes.

  “Lucky guess,” I said.

  “Sure it was.”

  “Take a peek. I have a horseshoe stuck up my ass.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. So, tell me what Jim told you about the money and you can even keep a bit, you know, like a finder’s fee.”

  Right. When it came to the Dead Clowns, I doubted I’d make it as far as the corner store carrying milk money without a knife blade in the gut, but at least I knew the big score was still out there. If Jim didn’t get it before he died and the clowns didn’t have it, who did? I considered my next move and decided not to break with tradition. The dumb act was tried-and-true. I said, “I appreciate your generous nature, Nap, but I really don’t know anything.”

  Napoleon thought this over. Then a slow, sick grin curled his lips. “Okay, so if you don’t know, maybe that sweet little dish at the diner knows. And what I wouldn’t do to get her to squeal.”

  I didn’t even think twice. I socked him one right on the nose. Blood poured out like an open faucet. It didn’t break but it bent. Wilhelm made a move to initiate the arm removal procedure, but I was saved by the bell. The bell called Adora. She waltzed over and crashed the clown party, to my relief and Napoleon’s obvious dismay. He looked sad like a kid being told that play time was over. But Adora was the boss and paid the wages. And she liked a good show, so cue the clowns. They launched right into it, without missing a beat, and I got the idea they’d done this kind of thing before, masking menace with frivolity. It was a gag and I was the mark.

  Napoleon squirted water in my face from a flower on his lapel. Ichabod lifted my wallet from my back pocket and tossed it to Wilhelm. Roy came to my mock defense and tried to get my wallet back. Wilhelm knocked Roy’s basket horse on the nose with a fist. Roy fell down like he’d been shot. Then the other Dead Clowns played keep away with my wallet as I considered punching at least one more clown in the face. Until I realized two things: first, only one more punched Dead Clown might not be enough and, second, I really liked my testicles where they were. Because, as he sprayed plastic flower water in my face, Napoleon had whispered, “Play along for the Queen and maybe the next time we see ya, we won’t cut your coconuts off.”