Unhappy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  “I was just wondering—” Rook manfully tried again.

  “Yeah—say, your glass is empty. Aw, come on—you need it after that belly-flop you took this afternoon.” Tom Reale generously filled up the glasses, and drained his at a gulp. “You were really quite a thing,” he said. “Du Mond will be grateful for the try, if and when she gets out. You planning to make out with that girl?”

  “Why—” began Rook.

  “Because if you are, keep out of dark alleys. That Gordo character is a hothead.”

  “And a knife thrower, I understand.”

  Reale nodded. “He’s not too bad. We had a sort of tournament last spring. Gordo took Leo Dawes, he took Hamilton, the boss of the black gang, but then he got taken by Tommy Thompson, the top rigger. I wouldn’t care to have him mad at me, though. Those Sicilians—”

  Rook nodded. Gordo was an obvious suspect—too obvious a suspect for his money. “You’ve been with the show for some years,” he said casually.

  “Nineteen years next spring—why?” Reale took up the bottle, saw Rook’s glass still full, and refilled his own.

  “I wonder if you remember a friend of mine—I forgot her last name, but she was Bubbles something. Worked as a chorine and dancer, I think it was in ’47.”

  Reale thought. “Bubbles. Sure I remember her. Very pretty, and played very hard to get, so the word went. Why?”

  “I don’t just know why,” Rook told him. “Just asking.” He had managed to send the second slug of gin after the first, and now he handed back the tumbler and arose. “I must get along, or I won’t have any dinner,” he said. “Thanks for letting me see your collection. I’m a collector myself, as I told you.”

  “But not stamps?”

  “No,” said Howie Rook as he headed toward the flap. “I collect odd newspaper clippings—mostly about murder.” And on that happy note he took his departure, realizing that he had learned exactly nothing except the names of a lot of foreign small currency.

  He came out into the Midway again to find that the shadows were lengthening. Dinner in the cookhouse would be over now—he would have to get something in town, where he had a very special errand.

  But first he stopped off in the deserted menagerie for a brief chat with Biddy, not knowing exactly why except that he felt the need of talking to a friendly listener who wouldn’t repeat anything he said.

  This time the engaging apelet greeted him with a pantomimed kiss—she seemed to have the memory that elephants are supposed to have and usually don’t—and she never once reached for the water pistol, though he stood ready to duck. Biddy skirled and chattered at him, and then went through her repertoire on the flying rings.

  The padlock on the door at the end of the cage-wagon hung loosely from the hasp, and Howie Rook had to resist a foolish impulse to open it up. Biddy pantomimed that she would enjoy that, or any other break in the monotony. “Biddy,” he said, “why do people kill other people, huh?”

  The orang cocked her carroty head and tried to understand.

  “They do it for greed or gain; they do it from fear; they do it from jealousy. It all boils down to that, doesn’t it?”

  Biddy jumped up and down in a futile attempt to express her agreement.

  “Apes don’t kill each other, I understand. Nor do they get married and divorced and argue over money and take out insurance and keep diaries and write books. You just eat and sleep and make love and swing through the trees, but that’s because you’re dumb beasts. You don’t know any better. Good-by for now.” He presented Biddy with a stick of chewing gum, exchanged pantomimed kisses through the bars, and hurried off.

  Hitching a ride into Vista Beach, he stopped off at the local hospital to inquire after Mary Kelly du Mond. It was a very small, very neat and clean hospital, and the nurse at the reception desk was a very large and pleasant nurse, who surprised him by saying, “Miss Kelly? You can see her for a few minutes if you’d like to.”

  She was sitting up in bed, reading True Love Stories. “They didn’t have a copy of Billboard around,” Mary Kelly explained. “You’re a dear to stop by, but there’s nothing broken. And Gordo’s already been released. Come over closer, you.” She reached up and caught his head and pulled him down to her, kissing him firmly on the mouth. “That’s for trying to catch me,” she explained during the lull in which Howie Rook manfully attempted to catch his breath and regain his dignity.

  Blushing red as a spanked baby’s behind, Rook said, “Yes, I took a wonderful belly-flop and covered myself with glory and sawdust.”

  But her eyes were melting. “It’s one of the nicest things that ever happened to me. I—I—”

  “Biddy sends her love,” said Howie Rook hastily.

  “She misses me, I bet. I always drop in the menagerie after the show and give her an apple or a banana. You know, sometimes I used to let her out of the cage when nobody was looking, and take her for a little walk. Once I even took her for a ride in a taxi, and did she love it! She’s a real doll!”

  In her frilly nightgown, with her raven-dark curls against the white pillow, Mary Kelly looked, Rook thought, rather like a doll herself—a doll with one blue eye and one black and blue. “I’m glad you’re not badly hurt, my dear,” he told her. “If there’s anything I can bring you—?”

  “Oh,” the girl said lightly, “I’m too darn tough to stay here. I’ll probably be back with it tomorrow; maybe I can’t swing for a few days, but they’ll work me into some extra spec numbers and stuff like that. You know, I’d never have taken that silly spill if it hadn’t been for not sleeping all night, and—and worrying—”

  “Worrying about what?” Rook wanted to know. “Gordo?”

  She nodded and sighed. “He did see us together in that little café last night, and he was there waiting for me outside my sleeping car when I got back. He was half crazy, and he grabbed me and pushed me around, and threatened to kill me and himself and everything! But he has no right to act that way—I never even once made the mistake of taking him up on his offers to go dancing, and stuff like that. He has absolutely no business—”

  “No?”

  “No!” Her jaw was set. “You do believe that, don’t you? If there’s any romance, it’s all on his side. Oh, I’m grateful, very grateful, to him for—well, like catching me. But that’s all. And as we said the other night, nobody knows what goes on in Gordo’s mind. Sometimes he frightens me. Anyway, this morning I was so upset that I even went out and bought a gun for protection—not that I know how to use one. And then he ups and quits the show—he said he was through—only I guess he just couldn’t help hanging around to see what would happen to me without him down below. Maybe he thought that I’d go chicken, that I’d be afraid to go up there and swing. Hah! Maybe he thought that I’d come on my knees begging him to change his mind. Well, it would have been all right—except that—” She stopped.

  “There is more to Gordo than meets the eye,” Rook said cautiously. “We can be glad he was there, though.”

  “Yes, we can.” She hesitated. Then: “And I’m glad you were there,” she told him, very warmly indeed. “You know, I’ve been thinking—”

  “Thinking what?”

  She smiled, and half closed her eyes. “Lots of things. Maybe—maybe that older men are the nicest kind after all. So much more dependable and trustworthy and safe for a girl like I.”

  Howie Rook hastily stood up. “My dear, I have to get up to Los Santelos and eat crow for dinner. I have to tell the police that maybe they’re right and I’m wrong, and that amateurs cannot always outsmart the regularly constituted authorities. I still have some faint hopes, though.”

  “I have hopes too,” said Mary Kelly softly, obviously not getting what he was driving at.

  Rook bade her a not too fatherly good-by and took off, wondering if by any chance he was getting in over his depth. “They say there is no fool like an old fool,” he told himself as he waited for the waitress at the Grotto to bring his steak. But at the momen
t, with the taste of Mary Kelly’s lipstick on his mouth, Howie Rook didn’t feel a day over twenty-nine.

  9

  “What one man can invent, another man can discover,” said Holmes.

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  HOWIE ROOK CAME BACK to the circus lot that evening full of his own deep dark thoughts. He was almost positive now that Mary Kelly du Mond had made a pitch, as they say, for James McFarley, that she had gone out with him to the Polar Club (else how could she have known it was a nightspot?) and that she had been invited to the cocktail party on that last night. Like the other guests, she had come and found the place dark and the door locked; she had prudently kept her mouth shut.

  Or could she have been admitted? Could she have discovered that her ingenuous dreams of being the third Mrs. McFarley were founded on soap bubbles? Those ostensibly innocent, childlike women were the most dangerous of all, he firmly believed.

  And that possibility, thoroughly explored, opened up several others equally confusing. Both Gordo and Olaf, the midget, had proprietary interests in the bumptious, lovely dark-haired girl. If one of them had become convinced that he was losing her forever to an outsider like McFarley…

  And then there was Mavis herself. Was it remotely possible that in her one season with the circus she had toyed with the affections—to put it politely—of some one of the circus people who had got in touch with her while the show was playing Los Santelos, who had learned that she was back in circulation again through the legal separation, and then had been brought up short by learning that the McFarleys were contemplating a reconciliation? Suppose that this man—and it could have been almost anybody who had been with the show during Mavis’ one season—had decided to take matters into his own hands, and eliminate the husband?

  Far-fetched, of course. But murder was never, as Rook knew, a sensible sort of thing. Murderers were never realistic, or they would not venture to jeopardize their own lives in order to take another.

  And then there was the Jinx Man stuff—and the fateful notebook in which he had such high hopes. McFarley had been an obvious murderee; just as some people are accident-prone, he was murder-prone. “A plethora of suspects,” said Rook to himself. Back in Clown Alley he submitted to the friendly ministrations of Maxie, who daubed him again with make-up. But his heart wasn’t in it.

  “There!” said Maxie finally. “You’ll pass.”

  “I hope,” Rook breathed. “Maxie, how long have you been with it?”

  “Since the year one,” said Maxie. “Why?”

  “You remember a girl named Bubbles something, who was a show girl and dancer back in ’47?”

  Maxie thought, and shook his head. “I wouldn’t know,” the little man said almost apologetically. “You see, I got a wife about my own size that I met when we were doing a Shrine Circus. We got a pint-sized house in Florida, with everything to scale except the kids’ room. Our two boys are both around six feet. The oldest plays tackle for Sarasota High.”

  “Oh,” said Rook. “Good enough. Well, if you don’t remember her—how good are you with the knife-throwing act?”

  Maxie looked puzzled, then grinned. “I stink. It’s not my racket. Good act, though, if you can do it. Some of the Little People can. You should see Olaf!”

  “He makes with the knives, then?”

  “One of the best. Why?”

  “I was just wondering,” said Rook slowly. He put on his ridiculous clown costume, even up to and including the Iron Maidens; he waited in his camp chair until Hap Hammett arrived, slapped on his make-up in less than five minutes, and then clumped down the steps and said that it was time to get with it.

  As they went slowly toward the clown entrance, Rook saw little Olaf capering ahead of them in his clown-cop costume. “I wish I knew,” said Rook, “if that little guy was ever mixed up with the girl you knew as Bubbles…”

  “If he wasn’t,” said the veteran clown, “it would be a miracle. If she was that lovely…You see, it’s a sort of compulsive thing for midgets; they are really full-grown people except in size. Sometimes they handle it, like Maxie. Sometimes it ferments, like Olaf. But most of them gotta prove that they’re as good or better than everybody else.”

  “Yes, I see,” Rook said as they stood under the flaps and waited for the music cue.

  “Everything is high-key for the Little People,” Hap went on. “They love hard and they hate hard. There goes our music, man. Get with it!”

  So to the strains of “High Riding” they raced out onto the Hippodrome track, Cordelia hamming it up like the little actress she was. Rook clowned mechanically, he went through all the prescribed motions, but his mind was far away.

  He jumped through the hoops, he raced around the Hippodrome track after Hap Hammett and Cordelia, he caught his breath in the breaks…but his mind was churning.

  And then finally it was over. It gave him a certain satisfaction to be able to take off his own make-up in his own pail with his own soap and towel. “Now you’re getting the knack of it,” said little Maxie approvingly.

  “I lose five bucks on you,” said Bozo sadly as he prepared to take off. “I bet with Tommy Thompson that you’d never stick it out for four shows. You’re tougher than you look.”

  Howie Rook wished fervently that he was as tough as he looked at the moment. But he turned down Hap Hammett’s invitation to join him in a late supper in town.

  “I think I’ll stick around awhile,” he said. And he plunked himself down in his canvas chair, lighting up a cigar. Swiftly the dressing room cleared, the performers—looking exactly like the average citizen, the guy next door, in their “citizen dress”—took off for parts unknown. And at last he was alone.

  The inevitable poker games and crapshooting began in secluded corners. Tom Reale, a cigarette drooping from his lips, came by and went on his way with a friendly nod. The circus rested, and all was quiet except for occasional screams and squeals from the cats, the silly, evil laughter of the hyenas, a petulant trumpet or so from the baby elephants.

  And Howie Rook waited. It was almost eleven o’clock when he slowly arose from his chair, put on a pair of gloves, doused his cigar, and began to move. He moved quietly, slowly…

  His first move was into the nearest dressing space, the hard ground between the bleacher trucks where the midgets dressed; it was here that the poker game had taken place. The lights were off, but he took a pencil flash from his pocket and lit it.

  Olaf’s funny old-fashioned trunk was locked, but the lock gave easily under the pressure of a bent six-penny nail. And as Rook lifted the lid, he stared full into the face of Mavis McFarley—her picture was pasted inside. It was a younger, prettier Mavis, and it was signed, “Always and Always, Bubbles.”

  There were a number of other girls’ pictures, too, pasted around it; evidently Olaf played the field, or tried to. The trunk itself held costumes, clothing, comic books, and all sorts of oddments. But there wasn't a single throwing knife anywhere.

  Rook slammed the trunk shut, and locked it with a slam of his palm. That was that.

  He went outside, and on. By now he knew, rather vaguely, where most of the circus performers held out; his next call was on Tommy Thompson, the boss top rigger. Here were no costumes, naturally—only a change of blue jeans and shirts, and a matched set of throwing knives, all well worn. They seemed much like the one Howie Rook had in his pocket, its point carefully sheathed in cardboard now, but the set seemed to be complete as it was, without his.

  Doggedly, Howie Rook continued his search. Captain Larsen, he knew now, had a cubicle almost halfway around the Big Top, not far from where his big cats were caged and now asleep—except for an occasional bass rumble now and then, presumably from Gladys. He made sure that he was not being followed, and then lifted the flap and went inside; here he drew a blank. The trunk was locked and double locked, the suitcases were also locked. They were far beyond his powers as a cracksman. But on the tent pole there was a paper target marked with the tip of thr
owing knives; evidently Larsen, like so many of the rest of them, amused himself in his off hours with this ancient pastime.

  So that again was that. Rook came out into the open again, watching carefully to see that he was not observed, and made his way on toward the lesser tops, the tents around the big horse top. It would be here if anywhere that Gordo had his base of operations, doubling as he did. By a slow process of elimination he came to the right spot at last; here was Gordo’s suitcase lying beneath his uniforms. Rook ruthlessly forced the lock—and looked at a wad of athletic equipment, T shirts, jockstraps, and so on. Underneath there was a spring-type musclebuilder, some skin-diving equipment, and a set of knives. They were throwing knives, well worn by use. He counted them carefully, and there were only eleven, an incomplete set.

  “It just couldn’t be that easy!” said Howie Rook as he closed the suitcase. He cut off his flashlight and came carefully out of the dressing room—head first. And then the heavens fell upon him, ten thousand lights exploded and he tumbled prone on the sawdust.

  After minutes or hours, he came slowly awake—with a remarkable headache and a bump on the back of his skull. He got up slowly, somewhat staggering—and then he saw beside him a tent stake, one of the thousands of tent stakes which lay all over the circus grounds.

  Nobody was in sight, nobody at all. He was alone with the night and the gummy fog that drifted in from the ocean. But the opposition was beginning to move, and the more he could get them to move the easier the payoff would be, he hoped.

  “Everything may be for the best,” Rook reminded himself philosophically, since he was alive and able to move. He went back to the clowns’ dressing room, carefully locked the door, and kissed the place good-by. There was nothing wrong with him so far that a couple of aspirins couldn't help. A couple of quick beers and eight hours of sleep were indicated.