Carnival of Death

by Keene, Day

  When Daly could speak he sat up and asked, “Did they get away?”

  “Yes,” DuBoise said, “I’m afraid so. I knew something was wrong as soon as the light went out, but by the time I waded back here they were out the door and halfway to the Volkswagen. Then when I started after them, the woman turned and did her best to kill me. She shot at me four times, all of them coming so close I swear I could hear the blessed angels whispering, ‘Bonsoir, Gene.’”

  Daly scooped up a handful of snow and held it against his throbbing temple. “I don’t suppose you saw her face.”

  “No. It was too dark. All I could see was that she was wearing a fur coat and there didn’t seem to be anything under it.”

  With DuBoise helping him, Daly got to his feet. “There wasn’t. And for some reason, she made certain I knew it.”

  He stood looking at the burning cottage. It was apparent, judging from the rapidity with which the dry wood was burning, that in the short time he’d waited on the porch Miss Thelma Banks and her boy friend had drenched the floor and walls and furnishings with kerosene or some other highly inflammable liquid, knowing the reek of perfume would cover the smell. Then, before leaving, to effectively obliterate any trace of their presence they had either raked the fire out of the fireplace or tossed a lighted match onto the fluid-soaked blazing bed.

  As Daly watched, part of the roof of the cabin fell in. He winced. If it hadn’t been for DuBoise, he would probably still be in the cabin. Miss Thelma Banks played for keeps.

  Chapter Fourteen

  IT WAS seven o’clock Monday evening when Daly awakened. He had reason for sleeping so late. It had been early afternoon before he’d gotten to bed. After he and Gene had phoned the fire department from the ski lodge, both the Big Bear City police and — when they’d returned to Los Angeles — the local homicide squad had questioned them for hours.

  “Now tell us this, Mr. Daly. If you and Mr. DuBoise thought this Thelma Banks might be even remotely connected with the looting of the armored truck, why didn’t you come to us instead of going to the cottage alone? Are you certain she and the man with her tried to kill you? Isn’t it possible they were just another pair of cheaters who panicked when their rendezvous was interrupted? Level with us now, Daly. Are you sure you aren’t blowing this thing up just to make a sensational program for one of your television shows?”

  Daly’s head ached, his mouth was filled with phlegm. He wished he had a cup of coffee but was reluctant to get up and make one.

  On the credit side, he and Gene, for what it was worth, had learned that not even the Big Bear City real estate firm which owned the burned cabin had ever met their tenant. They had advertised it in an issue of the Los Angeles Sunday Times and their amorous tenant had rented it by mail, paying the first month’s rent, as well as subsequent ones, by postal money order.

  Daly swung his bare feet to the floor and sat up on the edge of his bed. All he and Gene had gotten out of the long, cold drive was the ride. His chest itched. He scratched it and started to get to his feet, then sat back and covered his lap with the sheet as Terry turned on the ceiling light, then came over to the bed carrying a tray containing a pot of coffee and the evening papers.

  “It’s all right,” she smiled. “I’m a big girl now.” She set the tray on the night stand. “Besides, everyone thinks you sleep with your telephone girls. And if instead of first standing me up for dinner, then patting me good night Friday morning and flying to Las Vegas with Gene you’d have come up to my apartment and seduced me, you wouldn’t have gotten into this mess.”

  Her logic was confusing but pleasant Daly studied the girl’s face as he sipped the cup of coffee she poured him. Terry Carstairs was one of the nicest telephone girls he’d ever had on his program. She was pretty. She was young. She was shapely. She was his if he wanted her. Unfortunately, he had a conscience. Terry wouldn’t demand it but she was the marrying kind and, being a three-time loser, he didn’t know if he could afford to pay any more alimony.

  “I’ll keep you in mind,” he said dryly. “On the other hand, just to strike a balance, I think there should be one of everything, even in Hollywood.”

  “One of what?” Terry asked.

  “In your case, I hope, a virgin.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say,” the girl pouted. “What if the trade papers ever found out? I’d be laughed out of town.”

  The coffee was strong and fresh. It tasted good. Terry refilled Daly’s cup, then drew a slipper chair up to the bed and sat facing him. “Is it really true what it says in the paper, Tom?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That all the woman in the cottage was wearing was a fur coat.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How could you tell in the dark?”

  “Let’s just say,” Daly said, “that when I grabbed at her in an attempt to keep her from beating my brains in, I discovered that from the waist up she was built like an Italian movie star. And, as if that wasn’t enough, she moved my hand to make certain I had no doubts.”

  Terry’s cheeks colored. “You don’t have to be so graphic.”

  Daly picked up one of the newspapers on the tray. In spite of what he and Gene had tried to do, Mickey and Paquita Laredo had been indicted and bound over for trial on three counts of murder in the first degree.

  The pictures on the front page of the paper intrigued him. Accepting the older Kelly brother’s contention that the dead guard had been a ladies’ man, with everything to live for, an enterprising photographer had found, or taken, pictures of five girls with whom Kelly was reputed to have been on more or less intimate terms. Then the art department had arranged them in a heart-shaped mat, with the dead guard’s picture in the center.

  All of the girls pictured were young. All were passably pretty. All of them had nice figures.

  Terry hitched her chair closer to the bed. “Say. I have an idea. Maybe one of them was jealous of Kelly. Maybe he did her dirt and she killed him.”

  “That could be,” Daly said. “Now all you have to do is figure out how she got that chloral hydrate into the paper cup of pink lemonade that Paquita Laredo served him. Also why she picked that particular time.”

  Terry shook her head. “I’m not that smart. I’m just your telephone girl. I merely relay the questions. But could the mysterious Miss Banks have been one of Kelly’s girls?”

  Daly glanced back at the pictures. “It’s possible, but not probable. From what information we have, Thelma is a pro.”

  “Even so,” Terry insisted. “No girl, not even a call girl, likes to be jilted. So once you figure out how she could have poisoned him, all of the girls that Kelly played around with automatically become suspect.”

  “It’s a theory,” Daly admitted.

  Terry insisted, “It’s more than a theory. That’s the way life is. Do you think the girl in the cottage was involved in the robbery of the armored truck?”

  “In some way. At least she had guilty knowledge. Otherwise she wouldn’t have tried to burn me with the cottage and fired four shots at Gene.”

  “Then there you are.”

  “Where?”

  “While you actually didn’t see the girl, you know what kind of perfume she uses and what sort of a figure she has. So, to identify her, all you have to do is make a round of all of the girls Kelly knew, close your eyes and — ” Terry stopped talking, embarrassed. “No. That wouldn’t work very well, would it?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Daly said, dryly.

  He glanced at the other newspapers. Outside of the indictment of the Laredos, there was little in any of them he didn’t already know.

  The police were still trying to locate the elusive Dr. Alveredo and now a Tommy and a Miss Thelma Banks. There were the usual comments by well-meaning civic leaders decrying the teen-age riot fomented by the thrown money. The leaders of two of the Cuban exile groups in Miami had wired denying any guilty knowledge of the robbery. One of the lesser papers had devoted a few inch
es of its second page to a small picture of and an interview with the unattractive young woman he and DuBoise had met in Captain Franks’ office.

  The armored car firm’s garage cashier and head tally clerk wasn’t any more prepossessing in print than she had been in person. Her background, as detailed in the story, was as drab as her appearance. The newspaper gave her age as twenty-seven. She’d worked for the firm for nine years, starting as a filing clerk in the main office shortly after she had graduated from high school. She’d told the reporter much the same story she’d told in Captain Franks’ office.

  While she had never known the dead guard socially, she’d liked him very much. He’d been the only one of the guards, the only man in the office for that matter, who hadn’t treated her as if she were a computer with legs. He’d always had a smile for her and something friendly to say. Because she had done him little favors, once he had brought her a box of candy and another time he had given her flowers. Kelly’s death had upset her greatly and she hoped whoever had killed him and robbed the truck got the full punishment that he or she deserved.

  There was something about the printed interview that bothered Daly, but he couldn’t figure what it was, unless it was Miss Lindler’s entire lack of color. Even her reactions were gray.

  He looked away from the paper as Gene DuBoise came in. “How cozy,” the other man smiled. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “No, darn it,” Terry sighed. “Nothing.”

  “Did you just get up?” Daly asked him.

  “I’m afraid not,” DuBoise said. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t been to bed. While I know how you feel about the Laredos, as long as this thing has come up, I figured we might as well boost your rating a few points by cashing in on it.”

  “How?”

  “By canceling the guests scheduled for tonight and substituting others who are a bit more topical. One of them, a Miss Polly Madden, was one of Kelly’s girl friends.” DuBoise found the girl’s picture in the heart-shaped mat of pictures. “That’s Miss Madden right there. Your second guest will be a Spanish-speaking priest who, while he wasn’t in on the invasion, was jailed in the same jail where most of the brigade spent eighteen unpleasant months. And while he doesn’t know anything about that business on Saturday morning, he will be very happy to tell your viewers that in his opinion, from what he knew of the men by close association, none of the members of the invasion brigade, including Laredo, are psychologically capable of plotting such a thing as the robbery of an armored truck. As the good father put it, the members of the brigade are patriots, not brigands.”

  “And my third guest?” Daly asked.

  “This one you won’t believe.”

  “Try me.”

  DuBoise was proud of himself. “Senorita Luisa Vinifreda Teresa Garcia.”

  “You’re joking. You have to be.”

  “No. The kid is going to cost us five hundred dollars for the one show, but I figure she’ll be worth it. I know they’re not supposed to be, but nine out of ten criminal cases are pre-tried in the newspapers and by public opinion. And I’m hoping the child will sway a lot of sympathy to our clown friend and his pink limonada senora.”

  Daly studied the other man’s face. “Look, Gene. I know you. You’ve been my manager for five years. You’ll gamble away or spend any amount of money for a good time. But when it comes to the show, your Gallic frugality takes over. Normally you wouldn’t pay General DeGaulle and Brigitte Bardot five hundred dollars to do a duet of ‘Mademoiselle From Armentières.’ What have the police come up with now?”

  “It isn’t good,” DuBoise said quietly. “It seems that the D.A.’s office sent a work crew out to dismantle Laredo’s rides so they could be impounded as part of the state’s evidence. And what do you think they found?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “They found that one of the ponies on the carousel was hollow. And when a member of the crew felt inside it, he found five thousand dollars of the missing money.”

  “Oh, no,” Terry said.

  DuBoise continued. “The serial numbers on the bills check with the serial numbers on the list in the Ramsdale office.”

  “It’s a plant,” Daly said. “It has to be.”

  “I think so,” DuBoise agreed. “But the point of view depends on how you feel about the Laredos. And as if that wasn’t enough, Paquita has confided to one of the matrons that she is two months pregnant.”

  Daly said, “Giving Laredo that much more motivation to need and want money. Did he know?”

  “He claims not,” DuBoise said. “But it gives the District Attorney’s office another club to clobber him with. Now, even if they can’t prove he plotted with other members of the invasion brigade to rob the truck, they can claim he conspired with a couple of thugs to dress up in clown costume and help him get his hands on sufficient money to raise and take care of the child he knew was on its way.”

  Daly added, “In a manner befitting the son or daughter of a onetime top flight circus aerialist who earned two thousand five hundred dollars a week.”

  “That’s what the state will contend.”

  Terry asked, “But what about the girl up on the mountain? Where does she fit in?”

  “Your guess is as good as ours,” DuBoise said. “Maybe she’s Tommy Bank’s sister. Then, judging from what the barman at the ski lodge told us, that she drove up with a different man every weekend, she could be the communal moll of the gang who plotted to rob and who robbed the truck.”

  Terry sighed. “That’s life. Some girls are just born lucky, I guess.”

  Daly put on his dressing gown and walked over to the window and looked out. The view from the tenth story penthouse that he shared with DuBoise was tremendous. Especially at night. If night hid the palm trees and the swimming pools, it also hid most of the ugliness common to all great metropolitan areas. As far as he could see, out to the liquid black wall that was the ocean, the city was festooned with garlands of multicolored lights. He liked the night. Night was male and positive. At night there were no shades of gray.

  He sat on the sill of the window. “Let’s itemize what we know. We know that when the truck left the garage it was carrying one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. We’ve seen the receipt the dead guard gave Miss Lindler. We know that between six and eight thousand dollars in bills and silver were thrown to the crowd to create a diversion. We know that both surviving guards have been cleared of any complicity. We know, at least have reason to believe, that a punk who called himself Tommy Banks and who has some connection with a Thelma Banks, not only assisted in looting the truck, he panicked when Jocko tried to stop him and fired the shots that killed the old roustabout and the young mother.”

  Daly paused briefly, continued. “To get Mike Kelly out of the money compartment and Quinlan away from the scene, something had to happen to Tim Kelly. Now it appears that the dead guard was a chaser and probably in need of money. But we also know that men like Kelly seldom, if ever, commit suicide and it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume he knowingly drank a lethal dose of chloral hydrate.”

  “No,” DuBoise agreed with him. “It doesn’t.”

  Daly turned on the sill and looked out the window again. “It’s a frame, it has to be. Subtracting the money thrown to the crowd and the five thousand dollars the D.A.’s men found in the carousel, that still leaves someone out there with one hundred and sixty-odd thousand, unidentifiable, tax-free, dollars. A fortune. Who? And why did he or she or they hang this on a pair of nice young people like Mickey and Paquita Laredo?”

  Terry shook her head. “I pass.”

  DuBoise said, “That last one is easy, Tom. Because the Laredos were both handy and vulnerable. Because despite their circus background and surface worldliness, they are as guileless as newborn lambs. And the lambs of this world, unfortunately, have only two reasons for existence. One is to be fleeced. The other is to be eaten by their more voracious Carnivore anthropophagi.”

 
; “Watch your language,” Terry said primly.

  Chapter Fifteen

  IT WAS ten-fifteen when Daly phoned the subterranean garage under the building and asked the attendant to have his car ready, and exactly ten-thirty when he stopped the car in front of the black-and-white barrier arm that barred the entrance to the dimly lighted KAMPC-TV parking lot.

  “Right on the nose, Mr. Daly,” the uniformed guard complimented him. “And I can’t tell you how sorry I am about the other night. But I haven’t any control over foot traffic onto the lot.”

  “Forget it,” Daly said. “You can’t hurt an Irishman by hitting him on the head. That’s not where he’s vulnerable.”

  He drove onto the lot and across it to the marked parking space with the printed legend, RESERVED FOR MR. DALY.

  “It must have been quite an experience,” Terry said.

  “It wasn’t pleasant.”

  The girl moved closer to Daly. “You know what, Tom?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’m serious. Being the controversial figure you are, don’t you think you would be a lot safer if you had a loving wife who went everywhere you go?”

  “How loving?”

  “Very loving.”

  Daly turned off the ignition and set the hand brake. “That could be.” He walked around the car and opened the door for his telephone girl. “But it would put a hell of a damper on a lot of the wild Hollywood parties that I’m supposed to attend.”

  Father Hermosillo proved to be an interesting guest. The priest was articulate and sincere and expressed himself well. He’d never served a parish in Cuba, but he had been in Havana on ecclesiastic business for his order when he had been arrested and imprisoned on a charge of giving aid and comfort to the enemy by having heard the confession of a dying native saboteur.