“You haven’t interrupted a clandestine assignation, if that’s what’s worrying you,” said Mavis dryly. “We were just leaving.” She was quite obviously itching to get away—and Howie Rook realized that never once, while they had been in the apartment, had she let her eyes fall on that dimly chalked outline on the rug.
“Vonny will probably be along any minute, so you might as well wait for her,” she said. Benny didn’t seem sure what, if anything, he wanted to do; they left him pondering and went out. “And they were supposed to have parted forever!” said Mavis in the hallway. “But no doubt her suddenly becoming an heiress—” She shrugged. They came out into the sunlight. “Drive you home?” offered Mavis.
Her voice was not too insistent, and Rook thanked her and said he thought he would take a bus downtown and do something about his wardrobe. She pressed his hand rather warmly, coming close enough so that he could get the scent of night-blooming cereus again, and then with a wave she took off in her flashy, flashing convertible.
“Whew!” murmured Rook, and headed for the tailor’s, where he went rather berserk, choosing a conservative pin stripe “banker’s” suit and all the rest of the trimmings, which included a gray Homburg, a pair of hand-made English shoes, and so on and so forth. “I will look,” he said to himself with some distaste, “like the tycoon of tycoons. I must remember to carry a copy of The Wall Street Journal and smoke dollar cigars instead of this old pipe.” He was not a man to do things by halves.
Nor was he a man to leap to conclusions; he never even trusted his own hunches and intuitions. He returned to his rooming house tired, and yet deep in thought. Murder in the newspapers or in the police files was one thing; murder at close range was another. James McFarley had been cruelly robbed of twenty or thirty more years of living; the two women in his life lived now and might always live under a dark cloud. For Rook was not eliminating Vonny from his speculations, not at this stage—and not eliminating anyone who had stood to gain so great a sum of money by McFarley’s sudden demise.
Pouring himself a comforting mug of dark ale, he sat himself down with his files of old newspaper clippings—clippings that always had served to prove almost anything he wanted to prove. Nothing that he found seemed to have any direct bearing on the case at hand, but there were tantalizing parallels here and there…
He reread the Beulah Overell trial, and some things on Lizzie Borden. Then there was the Pincus affair in New York City’s Bronx—the little inoffensive tailor who had died in a locked and bolted room from having a handkerchief jammed down his throat, Russian style; about the Farring case in Little Rock, where a hunted man in a locked and barred room had been shot through the peephole in his apartment door, to stagger back across the room before he died and to present an unsolvable problem to the police. There were others—
Finally Rook took up the telephone and called the assistant city editor of the newspaper which had some years ago bought out his own sheet and thrown him and half a hundred others into the scrap heap as a result of the consolidation. But young Lou Elder—now bald, pudgy Lou Elder—was one of the lads he had broken into newspaper harness years ago; now he reigned in the city room where Rook himself had once been czar.
“Maybe can do,” came Lou’s high tenor voice over the roar of the city room. “What’s the story behind it, pop?”
“Never you mind. I’ll give it to you if it gets ripe, but lay off now.”
“Okay. Call you back.”
Howie Rook sat himself down and for the rest of the afternoon immersed himself in the borrowed books about the circus, finding that there was a great deal more than he had ever imagined going on behind the scenes of that ancient and traditional fanfare of popular entertainment. “Perhaps,” he thought to himself, “I have bitten off a bit more than I can chew.” Automatically he put a cracker into his mouth, and just then the phone rang.
“Yes, Lou?” he answered hopefully, spewing cracker crumbs.
But it was Mavis McFarley’s dulcet tones. “How’re we doing?”
“The clothes will be ready tomorrow afternoon; I found a ready-made that was a pretty good fit even for a stylish stout. Otherwise I’ve just been reading and thinking.”
“Good, good. Then you should be ready to join the show Monday at Vista Beach. I can arrange it somehow, maybe through the president of the Circus Saints and Sinners. Remember, you’re supposed to act like a circus-struck fan, just simply mad to follow the elephants.”
“In these thirty-dollar shoes?” murmured Rook. “Very well, I’ll do my best,” he promised. Mavis gave him her private phone number and told him to call her any time from anywhere. “Good luck with the elephants,” she said. “And don’t see any pink ones.”
“Madam, I drink but beer, to which I have with the years developed a certain tolerance. Good-by.”
He really thought the good luck she had wished him was showing signs of flickering within the next fifteen minutes, when the phone rang again. But neither was it Lou Elder this time.
It was Yvonne McFarley, and her young voice was strained and suppressed with rage. “You said to call you,” she said, “and I’m calling. I just wanted to say that if Mavis said anything to you about—about—” She stopped.
“About Mr. Valentino?” Rook prompted.
“Huh? That’s no deep secret; everybody knows we were married. I mean—I mean about the suspicion she has that I might—I might have killed my own daddy—”
“Well,” said Rook as she bogged down again, “it really seems to me that the mutual animosity between you and Mavis leads you both into false assumptions. If you must know, Mavis isn’t accusing you. And if she thought you were guilty, she’d hardly be retaining me and sending me off to snoop around the circus, would she?”
“N-no. But I warn you, don’t trust that woman!”
“I am long since past trusting any woman,” said Rook. “Good-by.”
Back to his books—and then the phone did jangle again, and it finally was Lou Elder. “Got it,” said Lou.
“You got what, where?”
“The dope you asked for. Tried Martin, McFarley’s law partner of yesteryear, and he clammed up. Tried the insurance people, ditto. Tried the court records on the legal separation proceedings between the McFarleys—they were supposedly locked up, but you know us when we get on the track of something. Brace yourself, pop. Part of the deal was that McFarley was to take out a one-hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy with Mavis as irrevocable beneficiary. Now, why—?”
“Thanks Lou, I’ll be calling you if and when anything gets hot.” Howie Rook hung up, and turned back to his clipping files with a sudden new interest. Big life-insurance policies often had meant big trouble in the past. Look at Ruth Snyder.
There were many other clippings in his file about things like that. And of course you only read about the people who got caught; a lot of them got away with it. He went on delving for another four or five hours, then finally turned in and as usual went immediately to sleep. But just as he drifted off, Howie Rook woke with a sudden, galvanized jerk, remembering belatedly that all life-insurance policies have a one-year suicide clause!
If McFarley had been murdered, Mavis stood to reap a comfortable fortune. If the man had killed himself as the police were inclined to believe, the policy would be null and void and she would only get the return of the first premium!
Perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of proving who did it as proving that McFarley didn’t! Rook looked down a dark and clouded pathway, with pitfalls—and warring women—everywhere.
At long last he fell asleep again, to dream of being chased by elephants with great greenish eyes…
3
Oh, the elephants they go by,
And the band begins to play
And the little boys under the monkeys’ cage
Had better keep out of the way.
—Old Song
HOWIE ROOK’S FLING WITH the circus had a most auspicious beginning, whatever its ending
was to be. He had started out from Los Santelos, with Monday’s dawn, in a crowded Greyhound. Now, after leaving his suitcase at a little hotel in the town of Vista Beach, he had taken a taxi out to the circus grounds, situated on a high plateau above the incredibly blue Pacific.
Early as it was, the circus people had been earlier. He stood aghast at the pandemonium going on all around him—and then even as he watched, slowly and wonderfully the Big Top began to climb its center poles from out of a welter of rope and canvas; it was a breath-taking moment. Caterpillars roared and skidded, Diesels screamed, and then a vast angular thing mushroomed and swelled and rose into the sky as if it never meant to stop.
Men scurried here and there like ants in a disturbed anthill; there were incoherent shouts and cryptic signals, and it was hard to believe that anyone had the slightest idea what he was trying to do. But in a matter of minutes the main tent was up. Rook moved cautiously along what was already beginning to shape itself up as the Midway, where lesser tents were springing up on either hand. He felt suddenly awed and a little apprehensive. Was he, Howie Rook, going to plunge into this strange new world which was neither carnival nor zoo nor vaudeville nor parade but a combination of all four? It was a self-contained city, a world of its own, with not one but a thousand secrets.
A newspaperman—even an ex-newspaperman—is at home almost anywhere, but at this moment Rook felt as out of place as pants at a picnic. On his right the garish banners and fanciful cartoons of the Strange People were being strung, and he paused to ponder the fascinating horrors of Harry the Human Seal, the Alligator Woman, the Armless Wonder and all the rest of the freaks and attractions. There was still a Sword Swallower and a Fire-eater and of course a troupe of Genuine Hula Girls; could they, he wondered whimsically, be the same Hula Girls he had admired in his forgotten youth?
He went on, dodging trucks and tractors, past candy and concession booths that seemed to spring up even as he watched. Once, at an exasperated hail of warning from an attendant, he had to leap nimbly aside to make room for a long line of elephants which had silently approached his rear. Led by a benevolent but firm old lady elephant, they came swiftly on and past, each with her trunk looped cozily around the tail of the one preceding, moving with a rhythmic swinging, a relaxed grace and balance, that would put a ballet dancer to shame.
Finally, as the organized confusion of tractors and wagons and rolling cages and trucks increased bewilderingly around him, Rook took momentary refuge in a little cul-de-sac between booths, where a bald man in a bright Hawaiian sport shirt and purple slacks was overlooking the construction of a small booth advertising the sale of live chameleons. The man had the eyes and general expression of a ferret. “Greetings, friend,” he said. “Just what can I do for you?” He was presumably about to go into his pitch.
“I do not want to buy one of your ‘bugs,’” said Howie Rook, anxious to show off his recently acquired knowledge of circus argot. “I’m just looking for Mr. Timken.”
The man stared at him critically—as if the reddish little eyes saw the jackdaw’s feathers beneath Rook’s new peacock plumes. “And just what do you want with him, friend?”
“I have an appointment, if it’s any of your business,” snapped Rook. He disliked this flamboyant gentleman on sight, and more than that he disliked being called “friend” by somebody who obviously wasn’t. “For your further information, I’m going to be in it.”
“He’s going to be in it,” said the man to the other who was nailing up the booth, and the attendant snorted. But ferret-eyes jerked his thumb. “Try the silver wagon over there.” Then he said something sotto voce about “First of May”—which was silly because this was October.
Rook went on, slightly nettled. There turned out to be two wagons marked “Tickets” flanking the entrance to the main tent, but they were painted a cardinal red. A little to one side, however, there was a peeling gray-and-gilt trailer set up. He came to it, stood on the step, and gingerly knocked at the double door. The top half was immediately opened by a plumply pleasant woman of uncertain age who wore remarkable pink hair; after some explanation on his part she nodded and threw open the lower half, beckoning him inside.
The interior of the “wagon” offered just about enough room in which to swing a hip cat, but somehow it managed to contain the lady with the pink hair, her desk and chair and filing cabinet, a half partition, and a cubicle with another desk and a swivel chair in which sat a tall, thinnish man dressed in gray flannels, with a carnation in his buttonhole; there were worry lines etched across his forehead, but there were also laugh lines around his mouth.
“This is Mr. Rook, Mr. Timken,” said pink-hair, just as if the circus manager had not been within three feet of the conversation all the time. Timken rose and shook hands. If he was delighted at the prospect of this newest addition to his performing personnel he concealed it very well, though he upended a large wastebasket for his visitor to perch on in lieu of a chair.
“Yes, I got a wire about you yesterday,” he said. “You want to come and play clown with us for a few days.”
“If it won’t be too much trouble.”
“Don’t worry, we can take almost anything in our stride. We’ve had half a dozen distinguished guests with us this season, one a judge and one a state senator. See those names up there?” Timken indicated a three-sheet on the wall behind him, representing a mammoth clown face. “You may as well add your moniker.” And Rook signed with a flourish, just below James McFarley’s name.
“I was wondering—” he began cautiously.
But Timken winked at him, and turned. “Honey, will you run out and see if there’s any coffee ready yet?” When she was gone, the circus manager turned back to Rook. “Certainly glad to have you with us,” he said in a rather loud tone. “Any member of that great organization of fans, The Circus Saints and Sinners, is always welcome at the circus—”
A shadow moved away from the opaque side window, and Timken dropped into more normal tones. “I’ve got orders to cooperate with you to the hilt,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s all about—maybe I’m not supposed to ask.”
“As far as that goes, I want to be a clown—that’s all.”
Timken shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, maybe I’m just a born worrier, but there were a couple of Los Santelos detectives here the other day asking some questions about the last guest clown we had, a guy named McFarley.”
“Oh, yes, I read something about it in the papers. Suicide, wasn’t it?”
Timken nodded. “Yeah.”
Rook’s eyebrows went up. So Chief Parkman’s men had known all along about McFarley’s association with the circus—which his wife had only suspected intuitively—and yet Parkman hadn’t wanted to, or hadn’t had time, to fill Rook in! “I still won’t give them the correct time,” he said, half aloud. “Oh?” he said non-committally.
“Yeah,” continued Timken. “They wanted to know if he seemed despondent or anything. As if anybody here could tell if he was or if he wasn’t—he wore his clown make-up all the time he was on the lot, like a kid with a new Davy Crockett cap.”
Rook said cautiously, “I suppose the policemen questioned everybody on the circus lot, and upset the show?”
“Not at all,” said Timken. “The cops didn’t seem to take it very seriously, and they didn’t talk to anybody but me.” He looked sideways. “Don’t you go committing suicide, while you’re with us at any rate.”
“I doubt if it’s contagious,” Howie Rook said.
Timken seemed about to say something more, and then evidently thought better of it. “Okay, so you go be a clown,” he conceded. “And have fun. Our people are used to having friends barging in. If there’s anything else I can do for you, you know where I am.”
Rook thanked him and asked what he was supposed to do first.
“You’re to report to Hap Hammett, the dean of our clowns, only he won’t be around Clown Alley till about one o’clock. You might wander around what we call the
back yard and get the general feel of the place. Oh, one thing—” He took out a card gaudily emblazoned with red elephants and tigers, then scribbled on the back, “Okay for Mr. Rook to go anywhere on the lot,” and signed it. “That means anywhere except the lion’s cage and the women’s dressing rooms.” It was evidently one of his favorite pleasantries. “Good luck.” The interview was obviously over and Mr. Timken was obviously mystified. Rook would have liked to have told him all, but somehow he felt it unwise to show his hand too early.
And so Howie Rook was thus embarked on the most exciting adventure of his life. He came out of the silver wagon into a choking dust storm, churned up by the myriad wheels of trucks and tractors, the hoofs of beautiful prancing Arabians and of zebras and dromedaries and hippopotamuses—or was it hippopotami? He wasn’t sure. Sprinkling wagons were doing their best to lay the dust, and half a hundred men were frantically slinging fresh clean sawdust everywhere, but still the general effect was that of a Vermont snowstorm. Rook ruefully realized that his dark pin stripe and gray Homburg and English shoes were hardly the proper costume, after all. They picked up dust, and they set him apart as a dude. So he took refuge inside the main tent, the massive Big Top. It was quieter here and he could breathe more freely. Already the marvelously complicated grandstand and bleacher trucks, Rube Goldberg contraptions that opened up into tiers of seats and dividing aisles, and had dressing rooms tucked underneath, were being jockeyed into place, walling in the vast oval. In all three rings, acrobats were working; smallish, tense, heavily muscled men and women in practice costume were meticulously adjusting and testing the rigging on which, in a few hours, their lives would depend.
Twice, in his slow promenade around the track—no, he must remember to call it the Hippodrome—he was stopped by guards and had to show his magic card, his open-sesame. The circus, Rook realized, was far from the haphazard, happy-go-lucky world he had imagined. He had made almost a full circle, counterclockwise, and then came at last to a canvas-partitioned addition, a lane where the thirty great elephants, the camels, the giraffes, the hippos, and all the rest of the menagerie stood.
Unhappy Hooligan Page 4