Carnival of Death

by Keene, Day

  She continued quietly, “Looking back now, I can see how naive I was.” She shrugged. “But, after all it was my first experience with sex and I thought you had to be in love with a man to feel that way when he possessed you. Then one night when I was sitting in a little bar the man on the next bar stool started to talk to me. And because I was feeling so sorry for myself, because somehow, someway, I wanted to get even with Tim, I let him buy me a lot of drinks, then take me to a motel.” Her voice turned bitter. “And drunk as we both were, I loved it. I discovered you didn’t have to be in love, it didn’t even have to be with any particular man. All he had to be was male and able.”

  Keeping his eyes on the revolver in her hand, Daly shifted his position cautiously. “And that’s when Mrs. Milo Bennett and Thelma Banks were born and you started wearing the bandeau to accentuate the difference between them and Miss Lindler?”

  The plain-faced cashier nodded. “That’s right.” She added primly, “After all, even if I was a thief, rather because I was in as deep as I was, I had to hold on to my job. And bonding companies don’t look with favor on cashiers of armored truck companies who are flagrantly promiscuous.”

  She asked Daly if he had a cigarette. He lighted one and stepped away from the door to hand it to her and the girl on the bench raised the revolver she was holding and said sharply, “No. Just toss it to me. I don’t want to have to kill you yet. Not until we finish our little tête-à-tête. I want someone to know my side of this.”

  Daly tossed the cigarette. “You’re sick, Grace. You need help.”

  The girl picked the cigarette from the floor and put it in her mouth. “That may be.” The lighted cigarette bobbling in her mouth as she talked, she continued almost tonelessly, “Meanwhile I was getting in deeper and deeper at Ramsdale. There was the rent on the cabin in the mountains, the Volkswagen registered to Thelma Banks, the pink Cadillac, Mrs. Bennett’s mink coat and the expensive clothes she wore, and a new man almost every night and every weekend. Trying to find one who could put out the fire. That is, except for Jim Carver.” She explained, “He was the first one after Tim. The one who taught me you didn’t have to be in love.”

  “How about Davis?” Daly asked.

  “He came into the thing on a fluke. One of the men I stayed with, don’t ask me which one, I haven’t any idea, got me pregnant. And Davis had aborted a girl I know. So I looked him up and he aborted me for five hundred dollars — and me.”

  “And Tommy Banks?”

  “I didn’t know he existed until about a month ago. That’s when I knew I had to do something drastic to straighten out my accounts. I’d been taking for over a year and covering up like mad. No matter how tired I was from the weekend or the night before, I didn’t dare miss going to work one day. Then I got my big idea. All I had to do was figure out how to rob one of the trucks and pin the job on some likely patsy.”

  “Why the Laredos?”

  “They were handy. With his background he made a logical suspect.”

  “Where did you hear of them?”

  “From Carver. He handled the publicity for a number of shopping centers. And one night when we were at the La Hacienda he just happened to mention them and the more he told me about them, the better prospects they sounded like for what I had in mind. Then when a week or so later he told me that Laredo was looking for a punk to run his miniature train I let a likely-looking punk pick me up and took him up to the cabin and the next week, using the name Tommy Banks, he asked Laredo for the job and I had an inside wire, someone to keep me posted on all of their movements.”

  “But why did you have him use the name Banks?”

  “Because he needed a car to drive. And it was cheaper to have him change his name than buy him one.” She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Besides, it was about time for Thelma Banks to disappear and it was a part of my plan to have him ‘disappear’ at the same time.”

  “And now he’s disappeared.”

  “So I hear. What a pity. He was a very immature lover, but there was so much he could have told the police.”

  “It was Tommy who told you that Mickey Laredo was going to be on my program?”

  “That’s right And it was too good an opportunity to miss. That’s why I had him and Carver work you over.” She added, wryly amused, “Using a Spanish accent. ‘Un momento, senor. We will not detain you for long. But please to give a message to Chico. Tell him not to try it Tell him that we are watching him and that one is our pigeon.’”

  Daly paid the girl grudged tribute. “You even wrote the dialogue.”

  “Si, senor.”

  While they’d been talking morning had brightened the drawn shade on the window and the normal street noises below it were growing in volume as the city awakened. Restless, the girl stood up. Then, leaving the oversized robe where it fell, she crossed to the red leather chair and sat with her bare feet on the seat, hugging her drawn-up knees with one arm as she regarded Daly over the barrel of the revolver. She made a pretty, if lethal-looking, picture.

  Wetting her lips with her tongue again she asked, “Now have you any last questions, Mr. Daly? Before I pull the trigger of this gun?”

  “And then?”

  “Then rush out in the hall in simulated hysteria and scream rape. At least attempted rape. You see my story will be that you forced your way in here and tried to attack me and I had to kill you in defense of my honor.”

  “It won’t work, Grace.”

  “That’s the gamble I’m going to have to take. With you out of the way, I still have a chance. Oh, I’ll probably have to stand trial. But no jury in the world would believe the things I’ve admitted to you. Who could possibly believe such things of a drab little spinster who in her long years of loyal service to the Ramsdale Armored Truck Company has never been late to work one morning or ever been a penny short in her accounts? And my books balance now. I wrote the last entry at the La Hacienda about two o’clock this morning.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  DALY TRIED to keep her talking until he learned the one last thing he needed to know. He used the one name he thought might keep her talking.

  “You loved Kelly very much, didn’t you, Grace?”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. “We’ve been over that phase of the business.”

  “But you haven’t told me where Tim fit into the looting of the truck. What was his part in the picture?”

  The girl stopped hugging her knees with her free arm and stroked one arm of the red leather chair as she considered the question. “I guess,” she said finally, “you could say he was my human sacrifice.”

  “Would you mind explaining that?”

  “Well, as I told you before, the only thing that Tim liked better than women was money. He was always looking for the big ‘killing.’ So I called him and told him I had to see him one last time. And he came over and when I told him what I had in mind, he was so grateful to me he stayed all night.” She continued to stroke the arm of the chair. “He was so gentle and kind it was almost like old times. You see, I told him I’d planned the whole thing to get him back and he believed me. He thought I was doing it for him and once it was safe for us to quit our jobs we’d fly to South America, or somewhere, and live in luxury for the rest of our lives.” She stopped stroking the arm of the chair. “Just Tim and me, and whatever pretty little slut happened to excite him at the moment.”

  “You killed him, didn’t you, Grace? You killed him to create the main diversion.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The chloral hydrate wasn’t in the lemonade.”

  The nude girl was amused. “Of course not. I only planned it to look that way. It was in the two gelatin capsules I gave Tim before the truck left the garage.” She seemed to relish the memory. “I told him that after he drank the lemonade all he had to do was slip them into his mouth and bite down on them and while he would get a little sick when he came to again, he would be worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Only he did
n’t know how sick he was going to be.”

  She stood up and faced Daly. “Now you tell me one last thing. What made you suspicious of me?”

  “A number of things,” Daly said quietly. “Your frugality in returning the two clown costumes. A parking citation. A pretty young mother who after she’d nursed her baby wrapped a towel tightly around her breasts to keep from soiling her negligee. But, basically, because you killed one too few people. Because you missed one very important witness.”

  “Make sense.”

  “All right,” Daly said. “I will. There’s been something about this affair that’s puzzled me right from the start. That was the fact that outside of the silver and bills thrown to the crowd and the five thousand dollars conveniently found in one of the horses on Mickey Laredo’s kiddy carousel, none of the one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars alleged to have been on the truck was recovered. So after leaving the La Hacienda, Gene and I rode out to the other end of the valley and recorded this.”

  Moving slowly so he wouldn’t startle the girl into shooting, Daly took a small transistor-powered tape recorder from his pocket and turned it on and after several false starts he found the place on the tape he wanted. The five-year-old sounded sleepy.

  “Si. I was riding on the pink pony all the time and he was way up in the air where I could see everything.”

  Then his own voice, “Thank you, Luisa. Now I know that you’re sleepy, honey, and I’m sorry I had to awaken you, but there’s something I want you to tell me. You saw the clown throwing money to the big boys and girls?”

  “Si.”

  “Did he put any of it into his own pockets?”

  “No. He just threw it to the boys and girls.”

  “Did he give any of the money to another clown?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was looking.”

  “Do you know how many clowns there were?”

  “Si. There were three clowns. The bad clown who started the little train and ran away. The bad clown who threw the money, then shot the old man and the senora with the baby. And the nice sad clown who stopped the train, then tried to help the old man who was shot. The one with the tears on his cheeks who belongs to the pink limonada senora.”

  “Now think carefully, Luisa. Did you see any of the clowns with sacks of money in their hands?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see any of the other clowns go near the truck?”

  “No, Senor Daly. Only the one clown was by the truck. The one who shot the nice old man. And when he came running past the merry-go-round all he had in his hand was a pistola.”

  Daly stopped the tape recorder. “So, if neither Tommy Banks or Carver carried any of the money off the lot, and Laredo didn’t go anywhere near the truck, and one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars was missing when the police arrived a few minutes later, there’s only one explanation. Despite the fact you were able to show a receipt for it, the bulk of the money never left the garage. The whole thing was an act. There wasn’t any robbery at the shopping center. The money had already been stolen. You used what you needed to balance your books, then hid out the rest to be used at your convenience, possibly in still a fourth identity.”

  Her voice barely audible, the girl asked, “The police have heard that recording?”

  “Yes.”

  It had been a long night. Daly was tired. He added quietly, “Now if you really want to pull the trigger of that gun, go ahead. But I think I ought to warn you that Gene DuBoise and Lieutenant Schaeffer and a police matron are waiting in your living room and have been since shortly after you led me in here.”

  The girl looked at the gun in her hand. “No. I don’t want to shoot you. I never really wanted to shoot anyone.” She tossed the gun on the seat of the chair and sat back on the bench and busied herself at the dressing table as DuBoise and Lieutenant Schaeffer and the police matron came into the room.

  Schaeffer gripped Daly’s arm. “Thanks, Tom. We almost made a big mistake.”

  Daly nodded. There were a number of loose ends to be tied up, but the police would take care of them. All that he could do now was to see that Paquita and Mickey received the reward that had been offered, plus ten percent of any monies recovered. It would at least in part compensate them for the ordeal they’d been through. One person’s loss was always another’s gain. With his rides paid for, a little cash in the bank, and the child who was on its way to inspire him, who knew? Mickey Laredo might well be a big name in the amusement world long after the man who had cost him his leg was dead and forgotten.

  Daly started to leave the room with DuBoise and turned back as the police matron said, “Now look here, Miss. You’ll have to put on more than that before I’ll take you downstairs.”

  There was reason for her to speak sharply. The onetime meek and modest cashier of the Ramsdale Armored Truck Company was standing in front of her dressing table wearing two round dabs of rouge on her cheeks, a set of long black false eyelashes, a beautifully coiffed and expensive blonde wig and nothing else. As Daly watched, she picked a pair of white opera length gloves and her purse from the dressing table and, grotesque as the whole picture was, her smile was, somehow, almost shy and virginal as she fluttered her long false lashes at an imaginary companion.

  “I’m ready whenever you are, Tim. Where you taking me tonight?”

  Daly doubted if it would work. It was as good a defense as any. It was also the only one she had. In a cannibalistic world peopled at least in part by male geeks who preyed on susceptible women, the law didn’t take into account the catalystic reactions of, or make exceptions for, plain-faced girls like Grace; girls who, having reached thirty without ever once having found favor in a man’s eyes, wanted desperately for just once in their lives to know what it was like to be a whole woman.

  “I’m sorry, Grace,” Daly said.

  He was. He’d gone a long way for a story. He had one. But he wasn’t happy about it Nor was he particularly proud of being male.

  “Sincerely sorry,” Daly said.

  Then without looking back he joined Gene DuBoise and together they walked down the long hall and down the stairs and out into the fresh, clean morning air.

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  If you enjoyed this Fiction title from Prologue Books, check out other books by Day Keene at:

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  Bring Him Back Dead

  It’s a Sin to Kill

  The Big Kiss-Off

  Too Black for Heaven

  Who Has Wilma Lathrop?

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  Copyright © 1965 by Macfadden-Bartell Corporation

  Copyright Registration Renewed © 1993 by Al James (Day Keene, Jr.) (C)

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  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-5980-5

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5980-8

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-5979-1

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5979-2

 

 

 
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