Dead Clown Blues

by R. Daniel Lester

  “Do you see that?” I asked the wino in the doorway.

  The wino looked up. “Wha?”

  “Over there, the Buick. Look like clowns in there to you?”

  “Clowns?” he said, turning it into a two-syllable word that didn’t start with the letter “C.”

  “Yeah, clowns. Like at the circus.”

  “Don’t like clowns,” he said, looking the wrong way.

  “No, over there.”

  The wino turned, squinted. “Could be, mister, I don’t know.”

  The Buick turned the corner out of sight.

  “Yeah,” I said, “me neither.”

  The wino passed me his brown bag. “You look like you could use a friend,” he said.

  I sniffed. Cheap wine, rotgut. Jeez, I must’ve looked like hell. I passed the bottle back. The old wino shrugged like it was my loss and took a gulp of bad medicine.

  “Been on this stuff for years and ain’t never seen a car full of clowns, far as I can recall.”

  “Good to know,” I said, as I reached in my pocket and gave him the mickey of bourbon and the money I had leftover from Taffy’s Hastings Park advance. I didn’t want anything to do with money anymore. It turned clowns into monsters and janitors into greedy torturers. But the wino hadn’t reached that conclusion yet. He smiled huge.

  “You’re a good man,” he said.

  I moved on, doing my best to step shadow to shadow. Better safe than sorry. It took me five minutes to get to the morgue. I found a doorway across the street to lurk in. I turned my collar up against the rain and waited. And waited. One minute turned to five turned to forty-five. I was about to call my hunch a damn liar when a guy dressed in all white exited the door. He lit a cigarette and leaned up against a tree.

  “Frankie?” I asked, as I got to the curb. Up close, he looked as shifty as a house built on quicksand.

  He looked me over. “Yeah?”

  “I’m a friend of Moyer’s. Cleveland Moyer.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Sure about that?”

  He blew a lungful of smoke in my direction. “Like I said, daddio, I don’t know the cat.”

  “Well, he seems to think different.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yeah, he told me some pretty funny stories.”

  He looked me over again. “Moyer has friends?”

  “Well, an acquaintance.”

  “Ah, I see,” he said, leering, nodding now with way too much understanding. Then he checked around, as if to make sure we weren’t being listened to. “Okay, buddy, a five will get you through the door, but it’s a ten-spot to take photos. And fifty, well, let’s say for a half a c-note, I’ll leave the room and won’t come a knockin’ if you catch my drift.”

  Ugh. I did catch his drift and the drift stunk worse than the stink of formaldehyde coming off Frankie. “Gee, that’s tempting, but maybe just a few questions.”

  “Hmm. Questions are a buck a piece.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We live in expensive times, what can I say?”

  I dug around in my wallet and held out a dollar bill.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “You know the guy who drowned in the lake last week?”

  “Yeah, I met his corpse, you could say.”

  “Anything different about that corpse?”

  Frankie whistled. Frankie stared at the stars. Frankie contemplated the dirt under his nails. Greedy scumbag. I dug out another buck.

  “Different like what? Talking?”

  “No, different like any signs the death wasn’t, you know, voluntary.”

  “Sure, like a sign saying ‘I was murdered’ with an arrow pointing to the bad guy.”

  I fake guffawed. “You do stand-up? I’d love to catch your show. Bet you don’t leave a dry eye in the house.”

  Frankie stubbed out his cigarette against the tree and put his hand through his hair. His hair was greased up enough to ring out and have the oil to run a car over to a drug store to buy more hair grease. Time was ticking. I had only moments left before he skedaddled back to work. I took out a five-dollar bill. He grabbed for the five but I pulled it back.

  “Not so fast,” I said.

  “Okay, you want to play it like that, buddy, fine. See, I’m like a ghost in there. Cops get to talking and don’t notice I’m around so I hear things. And what I hear about your clown is there were no signs of struggle other than what the cops figure he got when he went over that embankment and hit the water. Some bruising on his chest that matches the steering wheel. The water in his lungs was fresh water, which matches what’s in the lake. The tire tracks and other evidence match the scenario. At least enough to explain the death of an old drunk with nothing to show for his life but a bloated boozy liver and drywall plaster under his fingernails. You dig?”

  “Drywall plaster?”

  “Yeah, the stuff they make walls out of, you deaf or somethin’?”

  I’d heard Frankie loud and clear, and this time, when he grabbed for the five, I didn’t move my hand away.

  14

  Not seeing any circus cars full of murderous clowns lurking in the darkness, I used my key to get in the front door of the office building and felt my way around in the moonlight until I found the light switch for the basement. The whole while, Jim’s rant echoed in my head. His going on about “it” being in the walls and so forth. At the time, it was the nonsense of a drunk back on the bottle. Now, it made sense. “It” was money. “It” was the robbery haul. And “it” was in the walls, where he’d hidden the loot before being arrested. Exactly the reason Jim had got a job as a janitor here, so he could poke around without standing out.

  And he’d definitely done his share of poking. Downstairs, there were plastered up holes in the wall everywhere and a pickaxe leaning up against the wall in a storage closet, right next to a mop, a broom and a fold-up cot. Interesting. The floors upstairs hadn’t been mopped since Jim drowned but down here it was like a hospital, swept and sanitized. Must’ve been quite a mess for Cleveland Moyer to lift a finger. Funny though, he’d never mentioned it and Moyer was the type to mention anything to anybody if he thought it’d get him a reaction.

  I closed the storage room door and thought it made a strange sort of sense, if all Jim had come back for was the money. Apply for a job in the building where you stashed the cash all those years before and write down a phony address on the application form. Then, spend your nights taking a pickaxe to the walls and sleeping in a room about the size of a jail cell, which would probably feel more like home than anywhere could anymore.

  I stumbled up the stairs to my office, a wobble in my legs and my heart. The dream was dead. If the money had once been there, it wasn’t anymore. The treasure map had burned up, been reduced to ash. I thought about the last week, confused where it ended and began. From money famine to money feast to money sick to money gone, with a clown funeral and some torture mixed in for good measure.

  I leaned back in my chair and put my feet up on the desk.

  When I woke up there was a giant clown leaning over me, his huge scary face inches from mine. Wilhelm said nothing.

  I said, “Help me, Jesus.”

  But it was Wilhelm who helped me out of my chair, down the stairs and out to the street. It was still night so there was no one around, no witnesses. But there were two sleds parked outside, identical black Buick Continentals with the circus logo on the side. Both crammed to the windows with Dead Clowns. The little one, Napoleon, hopped out.

  “Get in,” he said, not meaning the backseat.

  It was my first ride in the trunk of a car and I had to give the Buick engineering team credit for designing a trunk with ample legroom. After the car stopped, I was hauled out into the glare of bright spotlights and placed the opposite of gently into a chair arranged in the middle of the circus ring. My hands were tied behind my back. My ankles were tied to the chair legs.
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  “Tell me, Fitch,” said Napoleon, “if a man screams at the circus and no one who gives a shit is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

  I looked around for friendly faces and saw none. At this point I’d have settled for Ichabod but he was nowhere to be seen. “Adora know about this?”

  “Who cares? What Adora don’t know could fill an ocean. But you want to know what we’ve learned criss-crossing North America over the last twenty years, Fitch? After all the strong-arming, beat downs and intimidation?”

  “That you need some new material. Because this happened to me last night. Tied to a chair in the middle of the woods. Check the script.”

  Napoleon clapped. “Fitchy, you’re quite a character. You remind me of Lefty’s Bull Terrier, the one that hangs from the car tire and swings all day. Neither of you know when to give up, do you? Well, you should now. Because this will hurt. Very much. But you could save yourself a world of pain by answering one simple question right now.”

  “It’s not that one about the screaming and if anyone hears it, is it? That one’s tricky.”

  “Nope,” said Napoleon. “This one: where is it?”

  “Oh, that oldie. Still don’t have the moola, huh?”

  “No, because you do. You work in the building, you’re a wannabe dick and you got a fever for stolen loot. That much is obvious.”

  My face said it wasn’t obvious at all.

  Napoleon didn’t like that. “What do you think, fellas, a suitcase?” He opened the question up to the floor, spreading his arms wide. There were a few hums and hahs from the Dead Clowns, a few nods, as they sized me up, though for what I wasn’t sure. “Yeah,” continued Napoleon, “a suitcase, I’d say. See, every once in a while, Fitch, we don’t hear what we want to hear and we gotta take a guy apart, like a butcher. Never just for kicks, you understand. Strictly business. But if a guy’s got to disappear, then he’s got to disappear proper. But we got all day here, so let’s hope for your sake it doesn’t come to that.”

  He gave a look that said I was more than welcome to spill the beans. Only I didn’t have any beans to spill.

  “Okay, play it that way. Wilhelm, your turn.”

  Wilhelm, standing behind me to my right, unleashed a devastating kidney punch that set my whole side on fire. If it hadn’t been for the car battery I’d have never known pain like that before. When I could contemplate words again, I gave it a go—because if you’re going to swing at a pitch it might as well be for the fence.

  “You know what I think? That you killed Jim. He took a lot of money. Your money. You wanted him dead. But you couldn’t do it when he crashed his car through the big top, could you? Too many people around. You played the victims and tracked Jim down later to exact vengeance.”

  Napoleon laughed. “A drowning? Does that seem like our style to you, Fitch? Wilhelm, show him what I mean.”

  The big bastard clown unleashed another kidney punch. And another. And one more after that. My right side exploded. An inferno. The fire spread out across my whole body. I whimpered. I wept. I threw up on myself. Swallowing bile, I said, “Okay, so you’re saying you didn’t kill him?”

  Napoleon shook his head. “No, but I wish we had. I was only an apprentice when Jim murdered Roosevelt.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Huh?”

  Napoleon grinned big. “Didn’t know that, did ya, smarty pants? Yeah, Jim shot him in the armed robbery, only we didn’t want that made public since Roosevelt was dirtier than a whore’s knees. Too much light shined in the wrong places makes the dark not so nice a place to crawl around anymore. So we donated a little money to local law enforcement when the time was right and it got called a tragic gun-cleaning accident. That’s what the official record said and that’s what the papers reported.”

  But I still wasn’t sure. ”People seem to have a lot of accidents when you’re around, don’t they? Gun cleaning accidents, drowning, maybe a slip in the shower, oops. You said it yourself: you clowns got experience killing and making it look like something else. So you issued the order for Jim and these clowns carried out the execution. Just like with the others.”

  Napoleon nodded. “Me, sure, I could run this mob, and probably will in the near future all things go according to plan. But for now, lil’ doggie, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “But if Roosevelt’s been dead for years and it’s not you, who’s been running the Dead Clowns?”

  My words met silence.

  My words echoed back to me.

  My words now said:

  Hey, you, King of the Stupid Jerks, the answer was staring you in the face—because once a Carmichael, always a Carmichael. The Queen, indeed.

  Napoleon came over and poked me in the forehead. “Now you’re gettin’ it.”

  “So Jim wasn’t murdered?”

  Napoleon shrugged.

  “So he was?”

  Napoleon shrugged again.

  “Well,” I said, “somebody must have gotten the money and it sure as shit wasn’t Jim.”

  “I won’t say we didn’t want to have a more private chat with Jim, maybe one like this, where Wilhelm could work out his frustrations with the world with nothing but a broken moral compass and a piece of lead pipe, but he drove away from here that night. And that’s the truth.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  Napoleon didn’t answer.

  “Hello, earth to Napoleon.”

  He wasn’t paying any attention. Actually, none of the Dead Clowns were. They were looking over at the big top entrance where Earl was standing with Bartell’s rifle. He had a white bandage wrapped around his head but the ear I tore a chunk from was bleeding through. Earl walked closer, gun aimed from the hip in our general direction. But he only had eyes for me.

  “Dead Clowns,” I said, “meet Earl. And Earl meet the Dead Clowns.”

  Earl motioned with the gun. “Step aside, clowns.”

  None of the clowns moved.

  Napoleon laughed. “You piss this guy off, too, Fitch?”

  “He ripped off half my ear with his teeth,” said Earl.

  “After you electrocuted me,” I said. “Let’s not forget that, Earl.”

  The Dead Clowns “oohed” and “tee-heed.” Napoleon whistled, ouch.

  “And you lied about the money,” said Earl. “The others are still digging but I don’t think it’s there at all.”

  “Money?” Napoleon tilted his head towards Earl, a sign for the others to keep an eye on him now that this conversation was getting interesting. “What do you know about my money, old timer?”

  “Fitch said he found the cash and buried it in the forest.”

  “I fuckin’ knew it,” said Napoleon, talking through bared teeth. “Fitch, you lying son-of-a-bitch. We’re gonna break you up into so many pieces they’ll call you Humpty Dumpty.”

  “Not if I shoot him first,” said Earl.

  Rock bottom meet Fitch. Fitch meet rock bottom.

  It was a new low. I’d inspired more than a few arguments in my time but never about who was going to get the privilege of killing me. Luckily for me, it became academic, as the ground began to shake. I didn’t understand why at first. Then I did, remembering the sound. I turned my head and there was Mary, the elephant, stampeding towards us like she had returned to the African plains that birthed her. Adora, once again to the rescue, was riding her back, yelping like a warrior goddess. Honestly, the strangest damn thing I’d ever seen. And I’d seen some stuff.

  It got chaotic. The clowns panicked and scattered, which when you’re wearing giant clown shoes isn’t that easy to do. It would’ve been a funny bit but for the sound of death approaching. Earl grinned and lined me up in the rifle sight but then my chair got knocked over and I ate dirt. Maybe I heard the shot whistle past where my head used to be, but maybe not. Tied up and immobile, I could do nothing but close my eyes and hope that with so many of us to choose from Mary would make the right decisi
on. And if she didn’t that it’d be painless.

  And at first, Mary did pick well.

  Wilhelm screamed as the elephant trampled him to death.

  15

  I woke up in the hospital. Curtains were opened and closed. Nurses moved in and out. The croaker, who had to be ninety if he was a day, shined a light into my eyes and made notes. I kept worrying he’d stroke out but at least we were in a hospital if he did. Mostly, I ate chocolate pudding and drank apple juice, and the word on the street was I was going to live. Almost lost a kidney, didn’t. Loss of consciousness. Bad concussion. Cuts. Bruises. But an elephant foot had come about a ruler’s length away from my brain, so I knew it could’ve been worse.

  And I’d seen worse in that circus tent: crushed skulls, slack skin, jutting bones. I shook my head to try and rattle the memories out. But they stuck. The drugs helped. Everything around me happened behind a hazy screen.

  The first day I was there, I had visitors. The police wanted to know what I was doing snooping around the circus in the first place.

  I said, “Possible career change.”

  The police wanted to know if I knew what happened to Earl Standard, the missing janitor whose car was found in the forest, half a click away from the circus, abandoned and burned down to the chassis.

  I said, “Engine trouble?”

  The police wanted to know if I noticed anything peculiar about Mary, the elephant.

  I said, “Sorry, flunked out of vet school.”

  The police wanted to know if I had any reason to believe that the clowns who died were involved in any criminal conspiracy.

  I said, “Clowns, what clowns?”

  On day two, I begged the nurse for a pad of paper and a telephone. She finally relented, wheeling one in with a long cord that stretched out my room and down the hall. She told me I had twenty minutes, so make it snappy. So I did, making eight calls: one to information for several numbers, three to car dealerships, two to outboard marine shops and the last to a construction firm. Which made seven calls. The last was to the police, to make an anonymous complaint about some dangerous janitors in overcoats who were in the forest digging for buried treasure and torturing people with car battery juice. The desk cop was going to hang up on me so I mentioned the leader of their evil janitor cabal, Earl Standard, the rifle-toting psycho who disappeared into thin air and the cop said “who is this?” a bunch of times and then I hung up.