I felt ashamed that I’d lived in a circus town all my life but had always thought of clowns as people who entertained at children’s birthday parties.
Wincing at a pain shooting through my ribs, I said, “Stevie Ferrelli told me that a man came to see Conrad about a year ago claiming to be the son of Angelo’s brother. Do you know about a brother?”
He shook his head. “In sixty years, he never mentioned a brother.”
“He said Angelo had stolen the Madam Flutter-By act from his father, and he wanted Conrad to give him money.”
Pete stared at me. “Angelo never stole anything from anybody! I knew him when he was working up that act in 1944. I’m sure of the date because that’s when the big fire happened. God, that was an awful night. Angelo came back for me and lifted a tent pole off me, otherwise I’d have burned to death. The band played ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ to signal everybody to evacuate the tent. They played until everybody was out. They barely escaped themselves.”
He seemed lost in memory for a moment, then brought himself back.
“Anyway, Angelo was fooling around with the Madam Flutter-By act then, you know, getting the makeup right, the costume right. It takes awhile to get a character down. But it was all his own idea, I know that for a fact.”
“Conrad never mentioned anything to you? About the man claiming Angelo had stolen the act?”
“I never heard of it before just this minute, and it’s a load of elephant shit, excuse my French. Who was that guy, anyway?”
“Stevie said his name was Brossi. She hasn’t heard anything about him again, so maybe he dropped the whole thing. He told Conrad his father started the act when they were growing up in Italy.”
He laughed. “Angelo wasn’t from Italy! He always said he was, but that was part of his act. He was from Cleveland or someplace, a poor kid with big dreams who ran away to join the circus. Most of us were like that.”
“Stevie thinks he was from Italy.”
“Maybe Conrad thought the story about being from Italy was true. Hell, Angelo might have ended up believing it himself. Clowns, actors, writers, they all live in their imagination so much they get reality a little bit confused.”
Before we parted he scrabbled in his pocket and pulled out a business card. “Any time you want to know anything about Angelo Ferrelli, you give me a call.”
His pale blue eyes grew cloudy, the same wary, half-guilty look he’d had when he heard about the truck. “And you take care of yourself. You see a truck like that again, you call the police.”
Even this early in the morning, my Bronco had become a kiln while I was inside. After I started the engine and had the AC blowing full blast, I gave Conrad’s coat an anxious look to make sure it hadn’t melted while I talked to Pete. Mame and Reggie were my last two calls of the morning, and I decided to take Conrad’s coat home before I stopped at Mame’s.
No cars were in Stevie’s driveway, and she answered the door quickly. Conrad’s coat was folded over my arm, but she barely glanced at it.
As I came in, she said, “What happened to your face?”
“I slipped on my stairs in the rain last night and hit it.”
“God, your arms are bruised too.”
“It’s okay, I put some liquid stuff on it. I’m just sore.”
She nodded, relieved to be allowed to ignore my bruises.
I said, “Where do you want me to put the coat?”
She looked down at it as if she’d never seen it before. “You can put it in Conrad’s study.”
She moved toward the kitchen, and I went down a side hall. I remembered caving like that after Todd and Christy were killed. One minute I would be alert and the next I would be in a deep dark hole where sound barely reached me.
In Conrad’s study, I laid the coat over the back of his tall leather desk chair, spreading it so it wouldn’t wrinkle. It looked almost natural there, as if Conrad were sitting in the chair wearing it, only he didn’t take up any space.
On the way out, I paused to look at a bulletin board covered with photos of children’s faces. Many of them were disfigured, some horribly so. Beside each disfigured face was another normal happily smiling face. It took a few seconds to realize the photographs were before-and-after shots of children whose facial deformities had been surgically repaired.
I went to the kitchen and found Stevie standing in front of the sink, staring blindly out the window.
I said, “I noticed photographs of children in Conrad’s office.”
She turned to me and smiled. “Aren’t they wonderful? That project gave Conrad more pleasure than anything he’s ever done. Me too.”
“You pay for plastic surgery for them?”
“Sometimes we bring them to the United States, sometimes we send surgeons to them. Some surgeons donate their services, and we provide transportation and the patients. Some countries have good surgeons of their own, but they need supplies or proper facilities. We do whatever is needed.”
“You’ll continue to do that?”
She looked startled. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I felt myself blush. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“Yes, you do. I’m a young widow, and so far as anybody knows, I’ve never done anything on my own, I’ve just been Conrad’s shadow. But that’s not true. We were a team, and everything we started will continue.”
“What about Denton?”
“I’ll take care of Denton. He may plan on taking over the Ferrelli Trust, but he won’t.”
I said, “Stevie, you’re exhausted. Turn off the phones and take a nap.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the sink, looking ten years older than she had when she opened the door to me and Guidry two days before. When she opened her eyes, they were swimming in tears.
“You’ll come back this afternoon and walk Reggie?”
“You bet. I’ll see you then.”
She walked me to the door and gave me a quick hug good-bye. I’ve always wished I had hugged her back more tightly before I left.
12
When I pulled into Mame’s driveway, I saw her behind the glass watching for me. She was almost her old frisky self. I couldn’t say the same for myself. Before I brushed her, I clipped her leash on her collar and limped with her into the backyard and let her squat in the bahia grass and amble around on the pea-gravel path. Lifting her to the table to brush her made me groan. Good thing she only weighed eleven pounds. Another ounce would have killed my ribs.
I gave her fresh water and a half cup of senior kibble and left feeling optimistic about her. She was a tough little dog. She was going to be fine.
I was so hungry I was ready to eat the upholstery in my car, but this was Wednesday, the day I skipped breakfast at the Village Diner and drove over the bridge to the Bayfront Village to take Cora Mathers to her weekly hairdresser’s appointment. Cora was the grandmother of a former client who’d got herself murdered on my watch, and I felt responsible for her. Also, I liked her. Cora had survived more tragedies than most people even see on TV, and she still got up every day with a childlike hope that it was going to be good.
Bayfront Village is an upscale assisted-living condominium. Designed by architects who couldn’t decide between neoclassical, art deco, or Mediterranean, it has the befuddled look of a staid matron cast as an ingenue in a musical comedy. I pulled under the portico, put my gun in the glove box, and told the valet I was going in to get Cora.
He grinned. “Bet she’s in that senior sex class.”
“Excuse me?”
“Some lady is teaching about senior sex this morning. I’ll bet Miz Mathers is in there with the rest of them.”
I ignored his leer and went through the glass doors to the lobby. Inside, the air wasn’t much cooler, but a lot of elders sitting in the hyper-decorated conversational area wore sweaters. I didn’t see Cora, but there was an easel outside a meeting room with a hand-lettered sign announcing TANTRIC SEX FOR SENIORS.
I
ducked around the easel and stuck my head in the door. A hefty woman in a loose caftan stood beside a table holding a headless and armless sculpture of a woman cut off at mid-thigh. The woman had pendulous breasts and a bulging pudenda as big as a manatee’s head. The sculpture, not the teacher. Maybe the teacher too. Who could tell with that loose thing she was wearing?
About a dozen white-haired women and three men sat in folding chairs in front of her. Two of the men were asleep with their chins sagging on their chests, and the other one had taken his hearing aid out and was fiddling with it. The women all sat on the edge of their seats in rapt attention.
The teacher said, “In Eastern cultures, she is worshiped as the Great Mother, the Eternal Feminine. She has many names, and she lives inside every woman.”
She stroked a finger down the cleft of the statue’s vulva. “This is called the yoni. In the temples, worshipers stroke the Great Mother’s yoni in reverence for the life it represents. This is a sacred spot on your bodies, ladies. Whether he knows it or not, when a man touches a woman’s yoni, he is worshiping the Great Mother.”
Pink blushes rose to white hairlines as women remembered times their yonis had been worshiped. To tell the truth, I felt a little pink myself.
The class ended, the teacher wrapped the sculpture in a sheet, and everybody straggled out.
As they passed me, the man with the malfunctioning hearing aid shouted to his wife, “Did I miss anything?”
She yelled, “I’m a Great Mother.”
He smiled. “Of course you are, dear.”
Cora saw me and waved. Cora would have to stand on tiptoe to reach five feet, and soaking wet she wouldn’t have weighed eighty pounds. She wore a bright bird-printed shirt made for a much larger woman, over red pleated shorts that stopped an inch above her little freckled knees.
She said, “They’re teaching us about sex. I thought I already knew all about it, but I guess I didn’t.”
I steered her outside to the Bronco and helped her into the passenger side. The valet grinned and nodded in a rather slimy way, pleased that Cora had been where he said I would find her. I ignored him and ran around to the driver’s side and eased the Bronco down the brick drive, careful not to ram anybody pushing their walkers to the front door.
She said, “I guess it’s never too late.”
I looked at my watch. “Giorgio will wait for you.”
“I meant for sex. Been a long time since I had sex, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll give it another try.”
It had been a long time since I’d had sex too, and I didn’t want to talk about it.
She said, “I’m gonna have Georgie do my hair different.”
Her hairdresser’s name was Giorgio, and her hair stuck out around her face in wisps that seemed God-ordained to me, but if Cora wanted a new look, she ought to get one.
An hour later, Cora’s white wisps had been converted to lavender wisps, and my nails had smooth cuticles and were buffed so they shone like abalone shells. To celebrate, we went to the Oasis on Siesta Drive for lunch. The waitress didn’t seem put off by my bruises or the cat hairs clinging to my khaki shorts, and since it was off-season we had our choice of tables.
We both ordered the daily special, and while we waited Cora leaned over to peer at my face.
“Who hit you?”
“Nobody, I fell.”
“That’s what I always told people too. I’d say I fell or ran into a cabinet door.”
“I really did fall, Cora. This morning.”
“You shouldn’t let a man hit you. I always told Marilee that, but I guess she didn’t listen.”
There were so many misconceptions in that sentence I didn’t know how to begin to answer it. Marilee had been her granddaughter who was murdered, but it hadn’t been by a man who hit her, and no man had ever hit me. I was saved by the waitress bringing our food. Another good thing about summer, chefs all over town are waiting with poised food for the natives. Not like during season, when they can let money go to their heads and forget who really loves them.
The luncheon special was a crab cake atop a black bean cake atop an artichoke heart, the whole business wrapped in crispy thin phyllo and sitting on a bed of watercress and chopped tomato, all of it drizzled with silky gorgonzola cream. I took a greedy bite and decided that if I ever decided to have an affair, or just an afternoon quickie, it would be with the Oasis chef.
Cora looked doubtfully at her plate and patted her neon hair.
She said, “You think this makes me look younger?”
It really made her look like a lavender Easter chick, but I nodded vigorously. “Takes twenty years off.”
“Is that all? I’d like to take off thirty or forty, but I guess looking sixty-eight ain’t bad.”
I said, “What would you do if you were thirty or forty years younger?”
She pursed her lips and studied my bruised cheek again. “You mean your age? Well, being young ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”
She inched forward in her chair so her chin was closer to her plate, her lavender frizz catching the overhead light and casting rainbows on the white tablecloth.
“You take me, for example. I have a lot more fun now than I did when I was young.’Course I have a lot easier time of it now. Marilee saw to that, God rest her sweet soul. I guess if I was poor now like I was when I was young, I wouldn’t like being old any better than I liked being young.”
She took a bite of crab cake and chewed thoughtfully. “Now if I had me a man,” she said, “that would make it even better. I never had money and a man at the same time.”
I said, “There are plenty of widowed men at Bayfront Village. Why don’t you snag one of them?”
“They’re all too old to do it. I don’t see any reason to get a man that can’t do it, do you? Hilda Johnson took up with one of them old men, and he took some of that stuff that makes a man’s tallywhacker hard. His never got soft again, at least not for several days. Hilda was pretty excited about it at first, but then he commenced complaining that it hurt and she finally let him call an ambulance. I don’t know how the doctors got his thing soft again, but he’s kept it to himself ever since. We don’t know if he’s embarrassed or just afraid of Hilda.”
I took a big swallow of water to hide my grin, and Cora leaned forward and lowered her voice.
“Some of the women at Bayfront are getting them little vibrating things. Gladys Majors has a whole catalog full of them. One of them is so little it fits on the end of your finger. Uses a little battery like for a hearing aid. You know, you could sit right there in your living room and blow your brains out with that thing and nobody would ever know.”
I swallowed wrong and had a coughing fit so bad the waitress came to see if I wanted her to thump my back. I waved her away, croaking that I was just fine, because a thump on the back would have probably caused me to faint from pain.
To change the subject, I said, “Cora, have you ever known any circus people?”
“Sure, lots of them. Ringling used to be a good place to work. We had a neighbor in Bradenton had something to do with the elephants. Dyer. His name was Dyer. Had a sneaky boy named Quenton that was sweet on Marilee, but she never had anything to do with him.”
As I remembered, every male in Florida had been sweet on Marilee.
Cora said, “Why’re you interested in circus people?”
“Oh, I met a man whose father was a clown, and that got me thinking about it.”
“That fellow Dyer had to shoot an elephant one time. It went crazy or something, and he shot it with a gun that had drugs in it. He said it ran a few steps and then just keeled over dead. He felt bad about it, but you can’t have a crazy elephant running around trampling people.”
We were both subdued after that, thinking about what it would be like to shoot an elephant with enough drugs to kill it.
As we were leaving, I held the door open while Cora inched her way over the threshold. Noontime traffic zipped past on the stre
et beyond the parking lot. A dark blue pickup raised up on tall tires drove past, and I jerked to attention. It sped south, toward the curve and the north bridge to Siesta Key.
Cora stood on tiptoe to see what I was looking at. She said, “How do they get in those things? Do they have to use a ladder? Silly things, you ask me. Look like they’d be dangerous.”
As I stepped off the curb to help Cora down, pain from my bruised ribs shot through my torso. “They’re damn dangerous.”
After I took Cora back to Bayfront Village, I wanted more than anything to go home and take a nap, but I stopped at the market to pick up staples: fruit and yogurt and cheese and Cherry Garcia ice cream. In the ten-items-or-less line, I read the headlines on idiot magazines while I waited behind a man who had at least twenty items. When it was my turn, the checker rolled everything over her scanner and stuffed it in a plastic bag.
When I handed her money, she said, “If I eat ice cream, it just runs right through me. Takes about fifteen minutes, and out it goes.”
Not knowing how to respond to that fascinating information, I said, “No kidding?”
She counted out my change. “Yep, I have a problem with fat. It’s in one end and out the other, whoosh!”
She demonstrated, shoving both hands down her sides. The man in line behind me suddenly wheeled his cart backward and went to another checker.
She gave me a friendly smile. “Have a nice day.”
The automatic doors sighed me through, and I crossed the parking lot carrying my fatty ice cream and watching for speeding blind people or pickups on monster tires. Life is treacherous.
13
When I made the last turn on the twisty drive leading to my place from Midnight Pass Road, I saw that neither Michael nor Paco was home. I also saw a dark Blazer parked at the side of the carport. Guidry was in it, sitting like a meditating Buddha with the windows rolled down.
Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund Page 10