Unhappy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  “Thanks,” Howie Rook snapped.

  “And it’s okay on the photographer, and the human-interest story on the brat. Make it for Sunday, not over five thousand words.” Lou hesitated. “Sorry, pop. But I’ll keep Fatso Brune and his camera available…”

  “Have him available and reasonably sober at Seaside, the circus grounds, by one o’clock. Because I’m shooting the works today. If I fluff, save me a downtown newsstand or a bicycle route in the suburbs.” He hung up, and tried one last number.

  Chief of Police Parkman was in, though obviously not much relaxed by his first cigar of the morning. “You again,” he said. “What now, more clippings?”

  “I’m going to make some,” promised Rook. “Maybe even write ’em. Shortly after noon today, down here at Seaside. Are you keeping your promise, and do I get Jason and Velie? Maybe they could bring Mavis along with them—for your information I am convinced that her agent, and ex-boyfriend, is entirely out of the picture.”

  Parkman hesitated. “You realize, Howie,” he said, “that if we let that woman out of our jurisdiction, we have no possible chance to arrest her—if she gets into Lemon County where our men have no authority, she can just kiss the back of her hand to us and walk away.”

  “Which is all right with me,” said Rook, “because she’s not, to my way of thinking, the person we’re looking for. And, if she did make a break of that kind, she would be incriminating herself.”

  Chief Parkman ruminated. “You just possibly might have an angle there,” he said finally. “Okay, I’ll send Mavis down in care of Jason and Velie. The whole thing is completely unorthodox—”

  “That’s the way things sometimes get done,” Howie Rook told him, and hung up.

  He went back to the circus grounds, which in the late morning were just really beginning to show signs of life. But he was not halfway up the Midway before he realized that he was strictly persona non grata; his hard-won comradeship with the circus people was all one-sided now. They looked on him askance, to put it mildly.

  Which was not at all surprising. They had seen his homemade posters then. And suddenly he was on the other side of the fence; he was a danger, a potential menace…

  Tom Reale was the only one who spoke to him, coming out suddenly from the booth where the midget chameleons were offered for sale. Nor was his an exactly friendly voice. “Rook, Mr. Timken wants to see you.”

  “Why, I—of course, in a minute…”

  “Mr. Timken wants to see you right now,” interrupted Reale, and escorted him firmly to the silver wagon. “Go right in,” said the mailman.

  So Howie Rook girded his loins, hitched up his pants, and went in. Timken, all worry lines etched deeper than ever this morning, gave him a look and then turned to the pink-haired secretary. “Honey, I won’t need you for a while. Go get some coffee, or take a walk or something.”

  She went. Rook upended the wastebasket and sat down without an invitation. He lighted a dollar cigar. “Well?”

  “Not so well at all! Look here, Mr. Rook, I said when you came in here the first day that I’d give you all reasonable co-operation, but—I didn’t mean anything like your taking advantage of things and spreading those reward posters all over and disrupting the show. Frankly, there’s hell to pay. And this mixing the circus up in the ten-thousand-dollar reward! I distinctly told you that I hadn’t got an okay on that!”

  Rook nodded pleasantly. “I know. Nobody else okayed it either.”

  “Wha-a-at?”

  Rook shook his head. “I got turned down by the McFarley family and by the Tribune, as well as by your bosses.”

  “And you went ahead and stuck up those reward posters all the same?”

  “I did. The end seemed to justify the means.”

  Timken gulped. “Then you’re on your own! And if any reward is paid, you’ll have to pay it on your own.”

  Rook nodded. “But maybe you haven’t considered the fact that if any reward is paid, there’s ninety-nine chances out of a hundred that I’d only have to pay it to myself!”

  “Yes, but—” Timken was almost sputtering. “Those posters have set the place upside down. Your use of the circus name without permission…mixing us up in something that isn’t our business at all…”

  “The circus is plenty mixed up in McFarley’s murder,” Rook told him firmly. “I don’t know yet just how much, and in how many ways, but I intend to find out today.” And he went on to present his case, explaining only as much as he thought absolutely necessary. Mr. Timken listened, gnawing at one cigarette after another, until Howie Rook finally ran down and stopped.

  “This is—it’s incredible!” Timken said. “You expect me to believe that one of our people had some sort of grudge against McFarley, decided to kill him, and then used a baby ape out of our menagerie as an accomplice—just because it could climb in and out of transoms, and knew how to pull the trigger of any available pistol? Preposterous!”

  “On the surface, perhaps, yes. I’m not unalterably wedded to the theory myself, because of one or two flaws. But I can show you stranger ways of committing murder in my collection of clippings. Remember that the first real detective story of all time was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ where an ape did a human-fly act and killed two women with a razor while merely trying to shave them.”

  “Fiction!”

  “But nature often, as Oscar Wilde said, tries to copy art. Biddy’s cage is often left unlocked, and she loves to be taken out and to go anywhere with anybody she knows. I realize that you’re supposed to have night guards on the lot and in the menagerie, but I’ve noticed that they are almost invariably holed up in some tent, playing poker or shooting dice. It would have been easy as pie for somebody to take her out of the cage, borrow a jeep or car from the car pool, and drive up to McFarley’s apartment. Biddy is gun crazy, she’d think any gun was a water pistol and playfully let fire at any well-dressed person she saw. She thinks, as Mary Kelly explained to me the day I got initiated with the water cure, that all dudes are to be squirted. On the dark and rainy night when the murder occurred, she could have passed for a child—”

  “Did you ever see an ape walk?” Timken cut in. “They have short, bowed legs—they look nothing like a child, even in clothes.”

  “Maybe she was carried. She could have been shoved into the apartment through the transom—or maybe she was taken in and then left to come clambering out when summoned by somebody outside in the hall.”

  “You’re nuts!” said Mr. Timken firmly.

  “Maybe. There’s one flaw that bothers me. But the police have a record of some of their men in a traffic car seeing a man and a small boy walking a dog in the vicinity of the McFarley apartment house that night, close to eleven o’clock.”

  “So next you’ll say that the murderer borrowed Hap Hammett’s Cordelia and took her along too?”

  “No. Maybe there wasn’t a dog at all. It’s an old trick used by sneak thieves. When the law comes along who might ask questions about why you’re lurking around somebody else’s house, you just look hopefully into the shrubbery and whistle for dear old Fido. It works every time.”

  “Well, I don’t buy it,” Timken insisted angrily.

  “I don’t entirely buy it either,” said Howie Rook, “but it’s all I’ve got, as yet. The matter of that bolted door bothers me, though. How an ape could be taught to shoot the bolt, and then climb out of the transom—”

  “Well!” said Timken.

  “But if you can teach an ape to shoot a pistol, you can teach an ape to shoot a bolt. Or maybe the bolt could be manipulated from above by somebody leaning his head and arm through the transom. Anyway, my entire case does not depend on that angle. I happen to have another shot or two in my locker.”

  “I sincerely hope so!” said the other. “The way it looks now, the circus is going to get a lot of publicity, and all bad. We haven’t had any bad publicity since the Hartford fire.” Here he shuddered.

  “I know,”
Rook told him quietly. “I’m with it, I’m with you, in more ways than one. I don’t want to hurt the circus, either. If we get a break during the extra act I’m planning on putting on this afternoon—”

  “I doubt it,” Timken said. “Within ten minutes after you tacked up those reward posters, all our people got jittery as a hog on ice. They won’t break down and give anything away, they’re all on the defensive.”

  “But unless I miss my guess, one of them is particularly on the defensive. I’m only asking you to play along with what, on the surface, is just a publicity gag to try and help the Nondello kid be a Girl Scout, pure human-interest stuff. Everybody will go for that, both in and outside the circus.”

  Mr. Timken thought about it. Finally he nodded. “Okay. I’ll have Tom Reale round up all the people you want here, outside the silver wagon. We can get the name of the circus in the pictures that way.”

  “Outside the trained tigers’ cage in the back yard would be more pictorial, and more private. And why ask Reale the mailman? What authority does he have?”

  With a half smile, Timken said, “Because Tom is head of our security force of guards, if you must know. We used to call him the ‘spotter.’ He’s supposed to keep an eye on things; I told him to especially keep an eye on you. Haven’t you noticed him around?”

  Howie Rook suddenly realized that he had, time and time again. It had been Reale lurking in the shadows while he talked to Vonny McFarley; it had been Reale who cast a flashlight on him in the dressing room late at night. “I didn’t know,” he confessed. “I guess the bright sport shirt fooled me. But I’ll be glad to have Mr. Reale’s or anybody’s help in this matter. Because I admit that I’m still shooting in the dark. If only I had an answer to one or two more questions—”

  “Such as?”

  Rook sat back and lighted another cigar. “Sideways questions. Such as who among the circus people were really friendly with Mavis McFarley when she did a season with you as a showgirl eight or ten years ago. Under the name of Bubbles something.” He explained about that.

  Mr. Timken didn't remember her at all. “But I suppose I could look her up…”

  “There isn’t time,” Rook told him. “I know she knew a number of people casually, but I wish I knew if she’d been especially friendly with Captain Larsen. She had her picture taken with him and one of his tame tigers, I noticed.”

  The circus manager was amused. “That’s really a blind alley, Rook. I’ll vouch for Larsen.”

  “Why? There’s something phony about him. There’s an old circus poster on McFarley’s wall with a picture of him. There are others in the old programs. None of them look like Larsen today. Why should he change his identity, grow a mustache, put on and take off weight, and all the rest of it?”

  Timken was laughing. “You’re very alert, Mr. Rook. But you may as well know. There isn’t any Captain Larsen.”

  “What?”

  “I mean there hasn’t been since the original one got chawed up by a tiger he was trying to break into the act. The name and the tigers belong to the show—we get the beasts from the Ventura Jungle Compound already trained. And any man who puts them through their paces has to use the name of Captain Larsen; it saves new publicity and new posters. This Larsen has been with us only three years; he’s really named Herman Taras. When we found that we needed another man to work with the cats, we started scouting around—finally we got hold of him through one of our midgets whom you may have met, Olaf Klipp. Klipp vouched for him, and Mr. Rowland took a look at his work over there and we figured he could do what we had in mind. He’s a darned good showman. Everybody in the show knows about this deal, but they’re all sworn to secrecy. The name of Captain Larsen has been built up for so many years that it has a certain value which we like to retain. He’s no Clyde Beatty, but he’s working along in that direction.”

  “Then there is no possibility whatever that Larsen or Taras or whatever his real name is could have known Mavis McFarley when she was with the show?”

  “No! Impossible. Does that clear him for you?”

  Rook slowly nodded. “I’m clearing too many people,” he admitted. “Well, I guess I’ve got to depend on my super-dooper off-the-cuff show this afternoon.” He stood up.

  “If you work it out,” Mr. Timken said, “I won’t promise any reward, but I’ll see you get a season’s pass to the show.” He smiled grimly.

  Rook left the silver wagon and went slowly and thoughtfully back to Clown Alley—for probably the last time, he thought rather sadly. “I guess I won’t be working out with you and Cordelia this afternoon,” he confessed to Hap Hammett, who was busily answering fan mail in the dressing room.

  “You too?” said the big clown. “We both missed you the last few shows. Nobody can fall over his feet like you do. It’s a rare gift. But we’ll miss dear little Olaf more.”

  “Olaf?” gulped Rook.

  “Yeah. The midget went on a binge last evening, I guess. And sometime during the night he went and took a powder on us. Didn’t even give notice.”

  Howie Rook froze, almost but not quite falling down the dressing-room steps. “Yes,” continued Hap, signing his note with a flourish and a cartooned clown face in bright red pencil. “Olaf Klipp packed his trunk and skipped, between two days as the saying goes.”

  “Carrying it under his arm?”

  “Nope. I guess he’ll send for it, and whatever pay he has coming. He roped the trunk up and left it down in the midgets’ dressing space. We shall miss the little stinker, and his skipping is a nuisance.”

  “So?” said Howie Rook flatly, and then went down to look for himself. Sure enough, there was the little old trunk, shaped like an upside-down bathtub, marked with Olaf’s name in faded red paint, neatly roped and tied. Rook turned away, then did a double take and came back. He pondered for a long moment, then whipped out his pocketknife and turned back, hastily and intently beginning to saw at the rope as if his life depended upon it.

  “What in hell—?” came Hap Hammett’s voice from behind him. “What’s the idea! You’re not going to open up the little guy’s trunk?” Hap was standing in the tent flap, looking rather bewildered.

  “I am not,” said Rook fervently. “I—I just collect odd knots, like this beautiful double running bowline.” He hastily stuffed it into his pocket. “Of course I’ll retie the trunk…”

  “You’re a damn liar,” Hap told him, coming closer. “Howie, you’re not as First o’ May as I thought. You’re up to something!”

  “Maybe. Hap, just what is this First-of-May thing I’m always being accused of?”

  “It means wet behind the ears. That’s the day the circus always used to open. Nowadays it also means somebody who joins up for a free ride, and leaves the show when they get near their home town. But you haven’t answered me. You’ve got things on your mind that you’re not telling me.”

  Rook nodded. “I’m thinking that fillér and pengös are both Hungarian coins, and that Greek ships are not necessarily manned by Greek sailors…”

  “You feeling all right, Howie?”

  “I think I’m just beginning to.” Rook paused. “I’ve changed my mind, Hap. I’d like very much to make a farewell appearance with you and Cordelia this afternoon—if you’ll play along and make a final one with me at a special show I’m setting up after the performance. I need you for what I have in mind.”

  Hap Hammett shrugged and grinned. “You know me; I always like to get into the act.”

  “Wait,” said Rook, “until I make a certain important phone call and then I’ll come back and get into costume and make-up and do a few final walkarounds with you. Then we can really go into action; I had thought to pull the stunt before the performance, but it will have to wait until later now.”

  The veteran clown looked at him. “Just what’s it all about, Howie? We’ve chewed the same sawdust together. Don’t you trust me?”

  “I have reasons,” admitted Howie Rook, “why I can’t trust anybody yet. But
I’ll certainly have to have you in my act when it comes off. On the surface it’s just a sort of benefit for Speedy Nondello; underneath it’s a lot more important than that. Just play along, and even if I go out on a limb or fall from the high trapeze, don’t try to rescue me, just go on with the act. I’ll cue you, the way you did me that first day. Okay?”

  “Okay.” A wide, unpainted grin spread across the veteran clown’s face.

  Howie Rook nodded, and hurried off. He was a patient man, a quiet man, and it was only sometimes that he stood up on his hind legs and fought back. But he was fighting now. He went out and down the Midway again—and then ran almost head on into an entourage consisting of Detective-sergeants Jason and Velie, a stocky unshaven little man burdened down with camera cases—and Mavis McFarley. The lovely, green-eyed blonde looked understandably wan and brittle.

  “We just got here,” said Jason.

  “I hitched a ride,” said Fatso. “In the police car. Saves the Tribune some dough.”

  “Mr. Rook—Howie!” said Mavis. “Is it really true…?”

  “At the moment,” Rook said, “I don’t know what’s really true and what isn’t. But the performance that I planned is called on account of rain. At least it’s postponed until after the performance. We need a star performer…”

  “But what do we do—?” spoke up Velie.

  “What do you do? You’re on an expense account, aren’t you? Go have some cotton candy, or see the side show, or buy a chameleon. The ticket windows will be open soon, go in and catch the show. I’m the one that plays second billing to the trained dog. Do anything, go anywhere—I’m busy.”

  He drew Mavis aside. “Sit tight—watch the show, and then watch the show I’m going to put on afterward, and keep your fingers crossed, lady.”

  She reached up, and her lips brushed his cheek. “What I said about Hawaii still goes,” she told him in a whisper. Her hand touched him, and held on to him.

  “Yes, certainly…” muttered Rook, and hastily turned to Sergeant Jason. “I need you right now,” he said. “The others will have to amuse themselves for a while.”