Unhappy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  At the moment Rook saw very little, but he said “Hmmm” and went manfully after his fillet.

  “So you’ll be going with the circus as an honored guest for a few days, playing clown…”

  “But I thought you wanted me to play detective. Why must I play the clown?”

  “Because Mac played the clown last week, I’m positive that he did! It’s always been one of his dearest ambitions; he was an inveterate circus buff. Sometimes the owners of the circus permit that sort of thing for influential friends. It creates good will, and the circus likes to have loyal friends, with influence, in every big town where they make a stand. And Mac was away somewhere during the time the show was in town; I know that because I tried to phone him and he was always out. He was an amateur playing clown. And somebody from the circus followed him home Wednesday night and shot him. It all adds up. And so, if you’ll go with the circus, and follow in his footsteps, you’re just simply bound to meet the same people he met, and you’ll have a chance to get the murderer to give himself away somehow. That part of it’s up to you.”

  “It is easier said than done, ma’am.” Rook took another bite of meat, chewed it thoughtfully, and then said, “So you kept in touch with your ex-husband, I understand.”

  She tossed her bright head. “Of course we kept in touch! We weren’t divorced; just legally separated, you know. We were discussing reconciliation, and I’d promised to give him my decision any day. I was going to say yes, of course—because I really did love the guy—but womanlike, I wanted him to dangle a little first.” She sighed. “How I wish I hadn’t been such a fool! But it’s too late now. It’s too late to do anything but get the murderer and see that he’s given the gas chamber. And I’ll devote every cent I have in the world to it, too!” Green eyes narrowed. “And I’d like to witness the execution!”

  “We’re going a little fast,” Rook reminded her. “And excuse me if I seem to be prying, but just why did you and your husband separate in the first place?”

  “Why?”

  “Was it the usual triangle thing? Because if there was any situation like that, the Other Woman or the Other Man might have a motive for murder, what with you two discussing a reconciliation.”

  “For goodness’ sake, no! Oh, there’s no use denying that Mac always liked women and they liked him. We both of us had other friends, naturally. This isn’t the Dark Ages, you know.”

  “I sometimes wonder. But go on, Mrs. McFarley.”

  She hesitated. “It was mainly just that I was jealous—jealous of his hobbies. Mac retired too young—he was a man still full of beans and business, as the saying goes—and he seemed hell-bent to waste himself on dozens of silly enthusiasms, with little or no time left over for me. He ran off in all directions at the same time. The big difference in our ages was a factor, maybe—but that wouldn’t have mattered so much if he hadn’t always been going off on wild tangents. I’m a woman who wants all of a man, and Mac was so wrapped up in so many things that included me out. I wasn’t one for sitting quietly at home with my knitting in the evening while he read Pepys’ diaries out loud, or fiddled with what he called the modern trends in parapsychology, and stuff like that.”

  Howie Rook carefully mopped up his luscious gravy with a piece of French bread. “So you found life with him a little dull?”

  “Sometimes, yes. Though he was a dear. Worst of all was the fact that Mac was so circus-mad! He was a grown-up little boy who could never stop trying to follow the elephants. He was a member of a club called Circus Saints and Sinners and of the Clown Fans of America—it was a sort of obsession with him. But I tell you, in spite of what the police say, he would never kill himself. No, he was murdered, I’m sure of it, by somebody from the circus who brought circus dirt in on their shoes. So the logical thing for you to do is to go with the show as a clown—I’ll check on it by phone, but I’m positive that’s where he was—and try to pick up a lead. The police can’t send anybody, and the show is out of their territory anyway by now. I’ll admit I thought of hiring an operative from some private detective agency, but none of their people could pass as an important businessman or judge or something, and that’s the only type who get to be guest clowns. I see now that you could pass easily, with a haircut and some new clothes, maybe. You’ll do it for me?”

  Rook, under the magic spell of her presence and her perfume, warmed by a good meal, would have gladly turned handsprings for her at the moment. And the case interested him very much, if only because it promised to give him a chance to demonstrate some of the theories he held dear. She had taken it for granted that he would give in, because now Mavis took a fat envelope from her handbag and shoved it toward him. “Expense money,” she said. “And there’s the address of a tailor inside. Get yourself a whole new outfit, and charge it to me. You’ve got to look the part.”

  “But couldn’t I just play the eccentric who affects shabby clothes?”

  “Certainly not! Circus people take outsiders strictly at their face value, and judge them by their appearance. You can create the right impression with smart clothes.” She leaned forward. “Please help me. You must help me, Mr. Rook. Can’t you see what a terrible life I’ll lead if I have to go on under a cloud of suspicion of having murdered my husband?”

  “But I understood you have an alibi—”

  “Oh, alibis!” She passed over that rather lightly, Rook thought. “When there’s a mysterious death of anybody as well known as Mac, there’s always bound to be talk. Some people will say I drove him to suicide, probably. I’m not going through the rest of my life under a cloud. No man will ever want to marry me—”

  “You have a man all picked out, then?”

  She flushed. “Certainly not! But I’m only thirty, and I don’t intend to be a gay California widow all my life. My so-called friends are already cutting me dead on the street and noticeably few have called up to condole with me about Mac.”

  Howie Rook nodded, and sipped at his third cup of coffee. “Before we leave the subject, what about the other women in your husband’s life—since the separation? Do you happen to know about the paper napkin that he tenderly carried in his wallet, with a lipstick kiss printed on it?” He went on to describe it.

  Obviously she hadn’t known, but her face softened. “Oh, the sentimental dear! The Polar Club is where Mac always took me on anniversaries and gala occasions: he must have picked up a napkin after I did my lip rouge, and kept it sacred.” Rook looked blank, and she said, “Oh, you men! Haven’t you noticed that after a girl puts on lipstick she uses something to take off the excess? Like this?” Mavis demonstrated with a tissue from her handbag, and then tossed it into a nearby ashtray.

  They were finished and on their way out of the restaurant when he murmured something and hurried back to the booth. The battered fedora he had so conveniently forgotten was still there, but the bus boy had already cleared the table. “Damnation!” said Howie Rook fervently. He had wanted that stained tissue, because his eye for color was usually good, and he seemed to remember that the geranium-colored imprint he’d seen in Chief Parkman’s office was not exactly the same shade worn by Mavis McFarley. He found her impatiently waiting by the front door. “Forgot my hat,” he explained as a cover.

  “You absent-minded geniuses,” she said. “Can I drop you off somewhere?”

  “You could perhaps drop me off at the apartment house where it happened,” he suggested. “Only I don’t clearly see just what excuse I can give to gain entrance to the place at the moment…”

  Mavis hesitated. “There might just possibly be a way. I might be able to fix that, if it’s really important for you to get in.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve moved back there, or are planning to?”

  “Certainly not! Under the terms of the legal separation—at which time I got a certain settlement, of course, Mac drew up a new will leaving everything to Vonny, naturally. That includes the apartment and the apartment building which he owned, and all the rest. I’m out of
it. But—but I do think I have my old key, if the locks haven’t been changed or anything. We could go in for a quick look around. But wouldn’t there be a cop there?”

  Rook doubted it. “It’s a popular misconception that the police always leave an officer at the scene of a murder after the formalities are over. It’s nowadays only done when there is some expectation of the murderer’s coming back to the scene of the crime, which rarely happens in real life. Besides, they’ve got this tabbed as suicide, remember?”

  They drove on west, toward the Village. “This visit is probably painful for you,” said Rook, looking at her sideways. “Not that the whole affair isn’t painful.”

  Mavis looked brave, and nodded.

  “And of course for Yvonne too,” he continued probing. “She seemed quite upset.”

  “Yes. I can only guess at what wild things she said to you about me. Probably that I was carrying on, or something—just because I used to keep in touch with old friends I knew when I was back in show business.”

  “I see. And what was this about her quarreling with her father?”

  Mavis went through a red light. “It was worse than a quarrel; they had a most tremendous fight down at the Beach Club. Vonny went into one of her tantrums and threw things at her father, and somebody called the local police, and there was hell to pay for a little while.”

  “About what?” demanded Rook, cautiously holding on to his hat.

  “Money, I guess. I wasn’t there. She wanted it, a big hunk of it, for some reason or other. And Mac wouldn’t give it to her unless she’d come back home to the apartment and be sensible instead of hell-bent to live her own life yet—at nineteen! You see, Vonny is a terribly spoiled kid, like so many adopted children. Yes, she was adopted—though she doesn’t know that I know it. For some reason she’s always been my sworn enemy. I made the mistake of interfering when she wanted to go and get married last winter; the little fool thought herself madly in love with some impossible musician named Benny Valentino. They even eloped finally; the marriage lasted three weeks and there was naturally an annulment.”

  “So the girl hates you because you tried to prevent her marriage?”

  Mavis tooled the car along, laughing mirthlessly. “I broke up with her father partly because of that business. But it was he who was opposed to the romance, and I was the one who said to let her go ahead and make her own mistakes. Naturally I was relieved to have a troublemaker like her out of the house; I swear she eavesdropped on my phone calls. But illogically, she somehow blames me for taking her side in the family argument.”

  “Wheels within wheels,” Howie Rook said. “The Orientals have a proverb that no house is big enough for two women.”

  “Not for me and Vonny, anyway.” They came to the big old apartment house overlooking the boulevard at the edge of the Village, parked the convertible in the street, and went through the little lobby. The Filipino at the desk smiled vaguely at Mavis but said nothing, and they went up in the elevator and down the hall to the apartment. They found that the key still worked, and came into the living room.

  “Stuffy old dump, isn’t it?” said Mavis, waving a slim hand. “But that was the way Mac liked it. If and when I came back to him I was going to insist that we build a smart modern place somewhere out in the Hills…”

  Rook was barely listening. The big, comfortably furnished, old-fashioned apartment was just the sort of place he himself would have liked. His eyes were first naturally drawn to the chalked outline on the rug where the body had lain; even the ministrations of the housekeeper had not completely obliterated it. It was in the center of the room and obviously too far from the open window or the transom for a killer to have been stationed anywhere but inside when the shot was fired. There were no signs of violence nor of any struggle. The occasional chair Rook had noticed tipped over in the police photo was straight again; the cocktail bar had been cleaned up and returned to its place in the dining room.

  Mavis sought it and—somewhat callously, Rook thought—poured herself a warm stiffish highball. He shook his head when she offered him one, and said, “I seem to remember that in the murder picture there were six highball glasses set out on the table. That would indicate that McFarley was prepared for the foursome—and for one other guest too!”

  “Of course!” Mavis cried. “I’ll bet that was I! Because when I came back to my hotel from the movies I found a message at the desk saying that Mac had called. I didn’t call back because it was so late. But don’t you see? He must have got a last-minute impulse to ask me to the party, perhaps hoping that I’d have a couple of drinks and then break down and let him make an announcement to his friends—our friends! If only I hadn’t gone to a movie that night!”

  “It must have been a very late movie,” Rook said. “You went alone?”

  She looked at him. “Just who are you working for?”

  “Sorry, I had to ask.”

  “Yes! No. That’s my business, and if the police are satisfied, you should be.”

  “Okay,” said Howie Rook mildly. Then he went across the room to look out of the one partially opened window, first down at the rushing boulevard with its streams of cars and then craning his neck to look up at the cornice of the roof five feet above. It seemed very doubtful to him that anybody could have entered or left the apartment that way. He turned back in, to look at the walls—at the mounted circus posters, which were the only decoration, contrasting oddly with the overstuffed furniture. They were all resplendent with elephants and clowns and giraffes and tigers cowering under the gaze of a stocky, bow-legged man in pukka-sahib costume. CAPTAIN LARSEN AND HIS JUNGLE KILLERS was the legend on that. NEW THRILLS FOR THE 1945 SEASON…

  “Mac’s idea of art,” put in Mavis. “I had to live with them.”

  Rook glanced at the desk without seeing anything remarkable; he briefly surveyed the three bedrooms and the dining room and kitchen, not really expecting to find anything the police had missed; they were very efficient in their own way. On the whole, he had to admit to himself that it was just a big, comfortable masculine apartment, furnished in “good” heavy pieces of another decade. It was hard for him to believe that the lovely woman who sat nervously chain-smoking in an easy chair had ever made her home in this place. There was nothing of her anywhere, not even a photograph.

  “I moved out, bag and baggage,” Mavis said—perhaps reading his mind. “Let’s hurry, shall we? I wouldn’t like Vonny to come popping in and find that we were snooping.”

  “Just a minute,” Rook told her. Most typically, he was looking at the titles of the books in the mahogany cases that lined one wall. It was all an olla-podrida of poetry, legal tomes, classic novels, texts on psychology by Freud and Jung and Jastrow and Rhine; there was a whole shelf devoted to the diaries and letters of Samuel Pepys and to biographies and studies of that justly famous father of the British Admiralty. “Mac was mad for Pepys,” Mavis put in. “Me, I never thought that the few racy spots were worth plowing through the rest of it for. But he did a book once—his only book—which he called The Don Juan Compulsion in Pepys. I think there’s a closetful of them somewhere, if you want to read it.”

  “Thanks, not at the moment,” said Rook. He bent down to straighten one of a long line of thick trial transcripts; it always bothered him to see a book upside down. It was like seeing a friend standing on his head. “I see your husband had an extensive library on the circus, too.”

  “Naturally. He bought everything published in that line.”

  He studied them. “I wish I could borrow one or two,” he said. “To brush up on the background before I plunge into the circus itself.”

  “Go ahead,” Mavis told him. “They’re not mine to lend, but Vonny will never know nor give a damn; she never reads anything but movie-fan magazines.”

  Rook glanced through them, and then chose Fred Bradna’s Big Top, Emmett Kelly’s Clown, and the translation of a European historical novel, Umberto’s Circus. “These would do, if you’re sure it�
�s all right?”

  “Sure.” Mavis was pouring herself another drink. “One for the road,” she explained. Just then a cat, a very large black cat, suddenly appeared on the window ledge. “Oh go away, Satanas,” Mavis said. He looked them over carefully for signs of dinner, then loftily withdrew.

  “Your husband’s? Shouldn’t somebody be feeding it?” Rook wanted to know.

  “Satanas? I never liked him—I hate all cats. Besides, with all the garbage cans out in the alleys he does very well for himself, I’m sure. But let’s get out of this place; it gives me the creeps.”

  Rook took one last look around, and followed her to the door. Then they froze suddenly as the bell rang. “We’re not supposed to be here at all,” Mavis whispered.

  So they let it ring. It rang twice more, and then a man’s voice called, “Vonny? Vonny, are you in there? It’s me!”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said Mavis, and opened the door. In came a wispy, pale young man somewhere in his twenties, who looked as though he could well spend a few afternoons at the beach or in the gymnasium—and also get a haircut, as his long locks were drawn back into a streamlined duck tail. He stared at them curiously, but said nothing.

  “This is my ex-son-in-law—I mean my ex-stepson-in-law,” explained Mavis coolly. “Benny Valentino—Benny, meet Mr. Howard Rook, a famous criminologist who is going to help us get to the bottom of things. We have police permission to look over the place,” she added calmly.

  Benny didn't seem to be interested; he only was bent seemingly on explaining his own presence here. “Vonny said she’d be over here today, to look over her father’s stuff. I didn’t mean to butt in on anything.”