Unhappy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  “Somebody ought to do something to stop her,” Rook said. “Mr. Timken or—”

  “Too late,” said Hap out of the corner of his mouth. “She’s up there.” The girl had already made her pirouette and was now balancing on the trapeze, first on two feet and then on one, swinging out farther and farther…

  “She’ll probably be all right,” the veteran clown said. “She’s done this all season without a fall, except once in practice. But I don’t like the way she looks.”

  Mary Kelly wasn’t all right; it became more and more apparent that her timing was subtly off. From where he stood in the wings, Rook could see Leo Dawes with his silver cornet manfully trying to pick up the music’s beat to match the faulty rhythms of the swinging trap, to slow the music down and pick it up again and get into some sort of cadence. But it didn’t seem to be working, and the bandmaster finally reluctantly nodded his head as a signal to cut the act short. But no whistle came from the equestrian director, and like a grinning automaton the dark-haired girl up in the air went into the more difficult parts of her act. She stood on her head with legs, then both arms, extended wide.

  “Watch!” murmured Hap Hammett unnecessarily. “And listen! If Leo Dawes breaks into another tune—”

  “I know,” said Howie Rook. “If he starts to play ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’…”

  “No,” corrected Hap, “that’s the Disaster Song, meaning all hell is breaking loose, like a tornado or something. If only the show is involved he’ll play what we call ‘The Chicken Song—’” Hap Hammett was almost talking to himself. “And there it goes!”

  The music segued into an eerie, improvised sort of number—still trying to maintain the beat and tempo for the girl who was losing it, who had lost it! And then it happened, as Howie Rook had somehow known from the beginning that it must. It all seemed to take place in slow motion, in a moment frozen out of time. Mary Kelly was suddenly in deep trouble up there, all alone. She wobbled, and fought for her lost rhythm, her lost balance. She was going…going…She grasped wildly with both hands at the trapeze, found it, lost it again—and then seemed to stay there, hanging on nothing at all.

  “Come on!” cried Hap Hammett, and burst out onto the Hippodrome. Rook darted, too, on winged feet—in spite of the heavy weight of the Iron Maiden shoes. All he could see was that lovely girl plummeting down…

  But far quicker still was Gordo the Muscle Man, who had materialized from the shadows of the opposite entrance, wearing street clothes. He vaulted lightly into the ring, half caught the falling girl in one last desperate gasp, and then collapsed with her on the tanbark in a tumbled mass. Both lay very still.

  And Howie Rook, the brave knight on a white charger, saw all this from a prone position in the ring not ten feet away, his eyes half blinded by the sawdust into which he had most ignominiously plunged when one of his enormous shoes had caught him and tripped him up on the edge of the ring bank.

  He tried to rise, to go on to the rescue of the girl who lay so still in a tangle of white limbs and soiled fairy costume. It was not to be; Hap Hammett and the other clowns were suddenly upon him. “Lie still, you dope!” said Hap furiously. And then, with wildly pantomimed grief, they dragged the would-be hero out of the ring and all the way to the exit by the heels!

  “But—but you said, ‘Come on!’” protested Howie Rook feebly when they let him stand up.

  The other clowns had raced back inside to continue the crazy-act, but Hap lingered, shaking his head. “I meant come on and work!” he explained almost wearily. “When an accident happens it’s the clowns’ job to get in there fast and distract the crowd, see?”

  By this time Mary Kelly and Gordo had been whisked away on stretchers, whistles had been blown, and the circus was continuing its natural beat quite as if nothing at all had happened. Hap went on for his next solo walkaround, then came back to the dressing room to find Howie Rook sitting outside in his new camp chair, looking disconsolate.

  “I’m sorry I blooped,” said Rook.

  Hap looked down at him. “You may not be any great shakes as a clown, mister—but you’re a right guy. And never mind, your lovely spill went over big; by this time most of the people in the audience think it was all part of the act, and the girl’s fall too.”

  “I wonder if she—if they’re badly hurt?”

  Hap Hammett shrugged. “We’ll find out later; the nurse won’t be letting anybody into the infirmary until the ambulance comes. It’s out of our hands. Here, take your mind off it by giving a look at these.” The big clown stepped lightly up the steps into the dressing room and then handed him a scrapbook and a sheaf of yellow, tattered circus programs of yesteryear.

  Rook’s heart wasn’t in it at the moment, but he sat down and buried himself in them for the next half hour, playing hooky from clowning for the time being at least. Finally there came the distant blare of the finale music, and the clowns trotted back and started to take off their make-up. They looked at him, Rook thought, with a sort of amused condescension—but they seemed friendlier than before. Bozo even paused to say, with a straight face, “Show me how to do that belly-flop sometime, it’s a natural.”

  Finally Hap Hammett came up, and sank into his own chair. “Any luck?” he wanted to know.

  “I can’t be sure,” Rook admitted slowly. “Maybe—just maybe—in this old program—” He frowned over the yellowing sheets, finally opening to a page of photographs titled “Beauties of the Big Top…New Loveliness for 1947.” There was a line of ballet girls in Tiller formation across the page, all wearing ornate costumes and fantastic hair-dos. “It could be that one, third from the end,” he said, pointing. “I can’t be sure. Green eyes don’t show in a black-and-white photo.” He squinted.

  “Green eyes don’t actually exist,” Hap told him, as if speaking from vast experience. “It’s just a sort of bluish hazel that picks up green; that’s why some girls wear the color so much. But wait a minute.” He rushed off, and in a minute was back with a magnifying glass. “Borrowed it from Jerry, the menagerie attendant—he spends his spare time repairing watches for the show people. Here.”

  They bent over the picture. “Ummm,” murmured Howie Rook. “It could be her, give a bleach and take off a few pounds here and there.”

  “Her name was Bunny—no, Bubbles something,” Hap told him. “A cute little Jane, as I remember her. That was the year I got married again, and so I didn’t mess around. Wait a minute—Bozo used to have a crush on her, and maybe he has a picture. He’s the kind of dope who keeps old pictures.”

  Hap went up into the dressing room again, elbowed his way to the rear, and after a few minutes triumphantly returned with a 9 x 12 photograph. “Bozo wants it back,” he said. “That’s the girl we knew as Bubbles. Does she fit?”

  Rook took it. “I think—I think it fits like a duck’s foot in the mud,” he said. The photo showed a curvaceous, very pretty girl with light brown hair, her bare arm thrown somewhat gingerly around the neck of a great sleepy tigress sitting on a chair, while a tall thin man in boots and sola topee looked on, his whip half concealed, his back to the camera.

  “That’s Gladys!” exclaimed Howie Rook.

  Hap looked puzzled. “No, we knew her as Bubbles, I’m sure of it.”

  “I mean the tigress. Yes, I’d almost swear that that’s Mavis McFarley as she might have looked eight or ten years ago.” He looked up at Hap. “How well do you remember her?”

  “The general consensus of opinion was that she was quite a dish,” Hap Hammett told him. “That was the year they were trying to doll up the circus, and get some Broadway hot shot to produce the extravaganza. She was one of the show girls in the troupe—they were kept pretty much separate from the regular crowd—you could say they were in it and not really with it. Bubbles wasn’t much of a dancer, but very photogenic; she looked swell in any costume or almost no costume at all. I remember she was afraid to ride a bull or even a horse in the spec numbers.”

  “Romances?” How
ie Rook pressed. “I see Captain Larsen let her be photographed with his pet tiger. Was he by any chance the boy friend?”

  Hammett shrugged. “Not that I ever knew of—and those things get around the circus pretty fast. Of course, with a stiff fine for romancing anybody with the show, it’s usually kept under cover. No, it would be my guess that Bubbles had her sights set considerably higher than a cat trainer; they’re supposed to be poor risks and they can’t get insurance.”

  “Not Mr. Timken, surely?”

  “Higher than that, as the rumor went. They were saying that she even once had ideas of being Mrs. John Rowland, Jr., but the big boss is a smart cooky—he side-stepped her and married a Parisian actress he met on one of his talent-scouting trips. As I remember, Bubbles liked all the boys, especially the ones who could do her any good in her career. In those days I used to have a clown magic act that I did in the off season, and she was after me to let her play straight woman in tights. But my wife would never of stood for it. When we ended the season I heard that Leo Dawes—he was between wives at the time—gave her a whirl in New York and introduced her to a guy that runs one of the big model agencies, so she was on her way.”

  “So,” said Howie Rook thoughtfully. He leafed through other old programs. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I notice a lot of familiar faces in the old days. Most of them seem to have weathered very well. But Captain Larsen has changed a lot with the years, what you can see of him, of course. In the photographs he always seems to keep his back to the camera, doesn’t he?”

  Hap was amused. “Well, mister—if you were having your picture taken with seven tigers, would you keep your eye on them or on the camera lens?”

  There was some sense to that, Rook had to admit. He looked further, and stopped at one picture. “By the way,” he said, “another thing. Why did you give me the eye when I was going to lend little Olaf Klipp a few bucks temporarily so he could get into the poker game? I thought it would be a good chance to make friends with him, especially since I got off on the wrong foot originally by calling him ‘Sonny.’”

  With a snort, Hap said, “Him? You might as well try to make friends with a zebra. An awful lot of midgets are peculiar people.”

  “Not all of them,” Rook said stoutly. “I like Maxie Kelso. And I once interviewed Little Willy in Hollywood—the tiny guy they made that Western movie around, with all the midgets playing cowboys and bandits on Shetland ponies—and he was as regular as anybody. He sends me a Christmas card every year, size of a postage stamp.”

  “Oh, I guess the majority of them are all right if you remember to treat ’em like people. But as I was telling you, if you ever lent any money to Olaf you could kiss it good-by. He’s in hock now for more than his pay for the rest of the season.”

  “Poker?”

  “Poker and dice, but mostly the horses. Olaf’s got hold of a system—you bet the favorite and double your bets until one wins, then drop back to your original bet again. Only trouble is that even if you start with a two-dollar bet on the first race, if the nags don’t run true to form you’re betting over two and a half hundred on the eighth. And to top off his troubles Olaf’s also got a terrible crush on Mary Kelly—sends her white orchids, and stuff. Real expensive courtship stuff. Midgets always go for big, beautiful girls; sometimes they even marry them. But of course Kelly just laughs him off.”

  “Oh,” said Rook, suddenly reminded. He hoped that Mary would be able to go on laughing. “Olaf’s been around a long time,” he said slowly, getting back to business. “Was he with it in ’47?”

  “Longer than that,” Hap told him. “Why?”

  “I was just wondering if he ever might have been smitten by the girl you called Bubbles…”

  Hap shrugged. “Maybe, she was always chasing. The little guy has a Don Juan complex; he fancies himself as God’s gift to women.”

  “Thanks,” said Howie Rook, and set about the difficult task of taking off his clown make-up. It went on, he now realized, a hundred times more easily than it went off. But at last he got into street clothes and set off in search of Speedy Nondello, the local oracle. She would know, if anyone did, or be able to find out for him.

  He finally found Speedy on the Midway, keeping up her strength with a mammoth cornucopia of cotton candy. “Hi there,” he said. “You want to make a quick two-bits, young lady? Run around to the infirmary or whatever they call it here and find out how Mary Kelly is—and Gordo.”

  “I already know,” Speedy told him. “They took ’em both to the Vista Beach Hospital. But they’re alive.”

  “Thank heaven,” said Rook. “You don’t miss much that goes on around here, do you?” he said, and gladly paid off.

  “No, I don’t,” she said, with a wide, gap-toothed grin. “I even saw you playing hero.”

  “Er—thanks.” Howie Rook swallowed. “Maybe you can help me with something else. You know everybody around the circus, and you go everywhere. Have you noticed anybody, anybody at all, who seemed to act differently since last Thursday, when Mr. McFarley failed to show up? Think hard, it’s important.”

  She thought hard. “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Everybody, almost,” Speedy told him. “They all seemed sort of relieved.”

  And that was that. He patted the gamin on the head and then walked slowly on—but she trotted companionably beside him. “You’re a cop, aren’t you?” Speedy asked suddenly, out of the blue.

  “What?” Rook stopped short.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Thanks,” said Rook dryly.

  “And something happened to Mr. McFarley and you’re working on the case, aren’t you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Lots and lots of things. You just said I don’t miss much that goes on around here.” She drew closer. “Mr. Rook, don’t say I told you, but why don’t you have a talk with Tom Reale sometime?”

  “The mailman?”

  “He’s not just the mailman.”

  “Yes, I know. He’s the circus bookie—”

  The dark eyes brimmed with amusement. “You talk to him anyway. But don’t tell anybody I told you to. I gotta run now, or I’ll miss dinner.” Speedy gave him an enigmatic look, turned two perfect flips, and rushed back up the Midway.

  Howie Rook stared after her for a long moment. The engaging urchin had obviously been trying to tell him more than she cared or dared to put into words. Well, at a time like this any lead was better than none. He set out in search of Tom Reale.

  “Probably around the silver wagon,” suggested Max Kelso. But Reale wasn’t there.

  “Probably in his office,” suggested Bozo the tall clown, who was manfully attacking a mammoth plate of frankfurters and sauerkraut. “It’s around in back of the kid show.” That meant, Rook knew by now, the long tent that lined one side of the Midway, where the freaks held forth.

  He finally found the “office,” a small tent nestling against the larger, and after ducking and dodging assorted ropes and rigging he came up to the flap. “Mr. Reale?” he called out, as he started to enter. There was the sound of a desk drawer being hastily closed, but when he entered Tom Reale was leaning back in his chair, smiling a welcoming if slightly puzzled smile.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Come in and set.”

  Rook sat down on the cot, which with desk, chair and trunk made up the furniture of the tiny place. He had a very good idea that Reale had hastily disposed of a bottle—and then he happened to notice that in plain sight on the desk top were the oil and rags and other paraphernalia with which gentlemen who carry pistols are wont occasionally to clean them.

  “What, if anything, is on your mind, friend?”

  Rook thought fast. “Why—when you gave me a ride this morning you were saying something about showing me your collection of postage stamps…”

  Brightening, the man said, “I sure was, I mean I sure did!” He almost fell over his own feet in his haste to g
et at the trunk to bring out a big imitation-leather scrapbook. “But it’s a funny kind of collection,” Reale apologized. “I don’t give a damn about getting the old and rare stamps that real collectors go for; I just want to get a complete collection of stamps that have the name of some piece of money printed on them, see? Because pretty nearly every country in the world has different names for its money, see? I suppose you’ll think it’s a sorta silly hobby…”

  “Not at all,” said Rook. “I was wondering—”

  “But silly or not, I get a great kick out of it. Now here’s a two-rupee stamp from India. Did you know they get rupees and annas and pies in India? I never did, until we had a snake charmer from Bengal last year. Poland has groszy—here’s a honey.”

  Howie Rook nodded with appropriate interest. “Did you—”

  “Austria has kronen and groschen, see? Denmark—we had a Dane with us one season, with the horses, and he got lots of mail—Denmark has öres. Say, would you join me in a short one?” Without waiting for an answer Reale took a bottle from his trunk and filled two shot glasses to the brim.

  “Thanks, but—” Howie Rook took the glass that was thrust upon him, sipped from it, and waited for a chance to ditch the contents behind the cot. “Did you ever get a chance to show your collection to Mr. McFarley, the guest who was with the circus last week?”

  Reale never flicked an eye. “No—that guy was too busy with his little notebook. Now here’s a twenty sen from Japan, and a two lire from Italy…”

  “But no drachmas? Nothing at all from Greece?”

  “No, like I told you. The Greeks are too smart to go with the show, or else too dumb to read.”

  “Anything from any of the countries bordering Greece, like Albania maybe?” Rook waited. “Or Yugoslavia, or Bulgaria?”

  “Nope. Now, as I was saying, in Rumania they got lei, and in Spain they got centimos…”

  “Funny about McFarley not showing up Thursday to have pictures taken, isn’t it?”

  Again no noticeable reaction but a sigh at distractions. “Oh, he probably got fed up with it. Clowning is hard work, and the boys were laying bets that you wouldn’t stick it out two days. Now, take Belgium and France, they both use francs; Germany uses pfennings (I got this from Bozo), Hungary has fillér and pengös. This swell ten fillér I got from Captain Larsen, and one of these days I’ll get a pengö from Olaf, only the little bastard has got the idea they’re worth money and nobody was ever madder for money than that little squirt.”