A Carnival of Killing (13 page)

Four long stem glasses of champagne stood waiting for us on our table, so we clinked them together and my three companions drank theirs while I continued to hold mine high.

“Mustn’t let yours go to waste,” Al said when he’d finished his. He grabbed my glass and poured it down the hatch.

“Waste not, want not, Sir Flaming Photographer,” I said.

“I wasn’t hot for that title, but I’ve been called more inflammatory things than that,” Al said. He picked up his camera and went off to shoot more pictures of the people in the crowd.

Al had returned, the band had taken a break and the crowd noise had dwindled from a roar to a murmur when Carol said it was time for us to go home. We all stood up, put on our hats and coats and started toward the nearest ballroom exit, which had been opened to let some of the heat from the crowd dissipate into the hall.

I was about to say it had been a perfect evening when the air was rent by a woman’s scream that would have instantly transformed a quart of milk into a carton of cottage cheese.

A Shot in the Dark

The scream came from outside the ballroom, in the direction of the restrooms across the hall. Because we were near an open door, the four of us beat the pell-mell rush of bodies out of the ballroom, and we were in the hall before knots of frantic people clogged all the exits.

We saw a flash of red disappear through a door beneath a lighted exit sign, and two women wearing Klondike Kate costumes emerge from the ladies room. One of them fell to her knees and leaned forward, pressing her forehead against the carpet. The other one knelt beside her and put an arm around her shoulders.

A couple of men dressed as members of King Boreas’s royal family dashed out through the exit in pursuit of the red streak. They were followed by a waddling fat man in a tuxedo shouting, “I’ll nail the fucker!” Al and I raced toward the exit while Carol and Martha ran to help the two women on the floor.

We’d just gone out the door and felt the shock of the outside air when we heard a muffled bang, followed by a man shouting, “Oh, shit! Oh, my god! Oh, son of a bitch!” Hobbling toward us in the dim light of the alley was the fat man in the tux. He was supported on each side by a Boreas royal family member.

Al opened the door for the trio, and we followed them in. The fat man was Sean Fitzpatrick, who was moaning in pain between curse words. In his right hand, he clutched the small pistol he’d shown us at the
Daily Dispatch
.

A dark-red stain was spreading across the top of his right shoe.

“My god, Tex, did you shoot yourself in the foot?” Al asked.

“Oh, Christ, it hurts like a son of a bitch,” Fitzpatrick said. “Somebody call 911.”

“What the hell were you doing?” I asked.

“I was gonna plug the bastard that ran out the door, but the damn gun went off before I got it out of my leg holster.” Someone dragged up a chair from the ballroom and he plopped onto it.

“You were carrying a gun hidden in a leg holster in the ballroom?” I asked.

“I was gonna have a press conference Monday and say how easy I got it in and how harmless it was,” Fitzpatrick said. “It was a subtle way of provin’ my point.”

“Subtle?” Al said. “That was about as subtle as a fart during the silent prayer.”

“Has anybody called 911?” Fitzpatrick wailed.

“They’ve been called. You’d better get that shoe off,” said one of the Boreas court members who had helped Fitzpatrick after the shot.

Fitzpatrick tried to bend down, but his belly got in the way so he couldn’t reach his foot. The other Boreas court member knelt, pulled his white costume gloves from his pocket, put them on and went to work untying the bloody shoe. When he finished, he looked up at Sean and said, “We’d have caught that guy if you hadn’t shot yourself.”

More people crowded around the wounded warrior, so Al and I turned our attention to the woman we’d seen fall to the floor. By this time, she also had been helped onto a chair, but she was near hysteria as a circle of women tried to calm her. When she raised her head to speak to one of her comforters, I saw that it was Toni Erickson.

Martha saw us and stepped away from the circle, which included Esperanza, Angela Rinaldi, and two others in Klondike Kate attire.

“Did she say what happened?” I asked.

“She keeps saying that a Vulcan tried to kill her,” Martha said. “She’s so upset that we can’t get any more than that.”

“That was the red we saw go out the back door,” Al said. “How’d she get away from him?”

“I don’t know,” Martha said. “The Klondike Kate in the yellow dress was with her. Maybe she helped. I’ll see if she’ll come over and talk to you guys.”

After a brief, low-volume conversation, the Kate in the yellow dress detached herself from the circle and came to us. “Are you the reporter I talked to about Lee-Ann?” she asked in a booming tenor voice. I said I was, and she said her name was Hillary Howard. Big surprise.

“What happened in the ladies’ room?” I asked.

“I was in a stall, you know, doing my thing, when I heard a scuffle out by the sinks,” she said. “I quick pulled everything together and stepped out. There was Toni and a Vulcan. He had something around her neck and she was fighting and trying to tear it off. I yelled at the guy and picked up the first thing I saw, which was one of those metal boxes the hand towels are in, and bopped him on the head with it. He let go of Toni and ran out. I started to chase him, but Toni was half strangled and scared out of her mind, so I had to help her.”

“Did you see the Vulcan’s face?” I asked.

“No, I couldn’t see anything,” Hillary said. “He was wearing his helmet and goggles and greasepaint.”

“Looks like she’s calmed down some,” Al said. “She knows you, Mitch. Maybe you can talk to her.”

I approached Toni, who sat quietly with her head down, and knelt in front of her. “Toni, it’s Mitch from the paper,” I said in a stage whisper. “You know, the guy you’ve been talking to.”

She looked up into my eyes. Her cheeks were wet with tears and the spot of grease she’d acquired when she kissed me had become a black streak down the right side of her face. Her eyes were rimmed in red and open a little too far.

“A Vulcan,” she said. “He tried to kill me.”

“Tell me what happened,” I whispered.

“I was washing my hands at the sink and I saw this red thing in the mirror coming up behind me. He must have been hiding in a stall. I tried to turn around and fight him, but he got something around my throat and pulled it tight. I got my hand loose and hit him in the nuts like you’re supposed to do but it didn’t seem to hurt him. He must have been wearing a cup or something, I don’t know. Then I tried to pull the thing off my throat because I couldn’t breathe and, thank God, Hillary came out of the stall and hit him with the towel holder and he ran out and I screamed and the next thing I knew I was on the floor in the hall. Did he get away?”

“He did, so far,” I said. “The police are on the way to look for him.”

“Why would some Vulcan try to kill me?”

“Could have been the same one who killed Lee-Ann.”

“You think he’s some kind of crazy, trying to kill all us Klondike Kates?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I felt a tap on the shoulder, and looked up to see a middle-aged man leaning over me.

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “I’d like to look at the woman who was attacked.”

“Sure,” I said to him. To Toni I said, “You take it easy now. There’s a doctor here to see you.”

I rose and saw two EMTs and a couple of cops attending to Sean Fitzpatrick. One male EMT was on his knees removing Fitzpatrick’s blood-soaked sock. The female EMT was trying to take his pulse while he continued to moan in pain. One of the cops had taken the pistol out of Fitzpatrick’s hand and was bagging it in plastic. The other was shaking his head in disbelief.

“Lucky Tex was wearing the holster down low,” Al said. “If he’d had it up on his hip he might have shot off something vital.”

“Oh, thanks for painting that picture,” I said. “Now I’ll think of that every time he greets me with ‘how’re they hangin’.’”

“This kind of screws up our theory about Lee-Ann’s murder, doesn’t it?” Al said.

“You’re right. Unless the missing Mr. St. Claire flew back from New York today, he can’t be the Klondike Kate killer.”

“So why’d he run away?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Quarantined

The hall was suddenly swarming with policemen, both uniformed and plain clothed. One of the suits was yelling through a bullhorn, ordering everyone who wasn’t a doctor or an EMT to return to the ballroom and find a seat. “Nobody leaves this hotel until we tell you to,” he said.

Al had shot pictures of the activity around Fitzpatrick and Toni, and I wanted to get to the office and write a story. We made a move toward the door through which the villainous Vulcan had fled, but we were stopped by Detective Mike Reilly, who was a self-important martinet and not one of our favorite officers.

“I might have known you two would be right in the thick of any incident,” Reilly said. “Get your butts back into the ballroom right now.”

“We’ve got a story to write and photos to process,” I said. “We’ve got less than an hour until deadline.”

“And I’ve got a shit load of witnesses to talk to, including you,” Reilly said. “Are you gonna cooperate or do I have to cuff you?”

We cooperated. Al couldn’t transmit his pix because we didn’t have access to a computer, but I found a reasonably quiet corner and called the desk on my cell phone. I explained to Gordon Holmberg, the Sunday city editor, that I had a great story about an attempted murder and Al had pix of the intended victim, but we were stuck in the ballroom until further notice. “I can dictate the story to somebody,” I said. “And maybe somebody can come over here, slip in and get Al’s camera.”

Holmberg said he’d send a courier for the camera and switch me to a reporter for my story. Newspapers used to have skilled rewrite editors who could be trusted to handle a story on the phone. However, rewriters have gone the way of the dodo bird, so I found myself talking to Corinne Ramey, who became very upset that she’d left before the action. I calmed her down and dictated a report on the attempted strangulation, complete with commas, periods, and paragraph breaks. You can’t be too careful when you’re dealing with a kid just out of journalism school.

Five plainclothes cops, directed by Reilly, circulated through the crowd, asking for a brief statement on what each person had seen and heard, taking names, addresses, and phone numbers as they went.

Reilly herded all the costumed Vulcans into one area and ordered those wearing hats and goggles to remove them. He took their names, addresses and phone numbers, and said that homicide detectives would be talking to each of them. “One of you Vulcans is missing, and I want to find out which one it is and what any of you know about him,” Reilly said.

“You know who I don’t see in that group of Vulcans?” Al whispered to me.

“Well, you probably don’t see the killer because he ran out the back door,” I said.

“I also don’t see the hotshot PR man who talked to us tonight. What’s his name? Ted something.”

“Carlson,” I said. I took a couple of steps closer to the group of Vulcans and scanned the faces. “I don’t see him, either.”

“Think we should tell Reilly?”

“What’s Reilly ever done for us? I’ll call Brownie first thing in the morning.”

“Will Brownie be working on Sunday?”

“I bet he’ll be working this Sunday,” I said. “In fact, if the attempted murder had been successful, he’d be here right now.”

Our attention was turned to some loud voices at one of the exits to the hall. After a moment, the uniformed cop guarding that door motioned for us to join him. Waiting outside the door was Sully. “They sent me after your camera,” he said. “This fine officer was kind enough to let me get this close to the crime scene.”

Al passed his camera over the yellow plastic tape stretched across the opening, and Sully took it and waved goodbye.

“Wonder how much the bribe was,” Al said as we walked back to join the women.

“Sully can put it on his expense account,” I said.

“Sully knows that my crime scene shots will knock his routine crap out of the paper. I hope he doesn’t delete everything in my camera on his way back to the office.”

“That’d be a very negative response to your fine photo work.”

“Speaking of response, I wonder what the cops have done with the intended murder victim,” Al said.

“I’ll see if I can find out,” I said. I spotted Detective Aaron Goldberg, who I knew had a better attitude than Reilly, and approached him. He said that Toni had been taken to Regions Hospital for an examination and whatever treatment might be necessary. He also said that a leather thong that was presumed to be the attacker’s weapon had been found on the floor of the ladies’ room. “We’ll try to match it to the marks on her neck tomorrow, when she’s calmed down,” he said. “We didn’t dare try to put that thing around her throat in the state she’s in tonight.”

After phoning that information to Corinne to add to my story, I was told by Reilly our foursome could leave the hotel. “Make sure none of you leave the area for the next couple of days,” he said. “We definitely want to talk to all of you since you were first on the scene.”

“We all live right here in town,” Al said.

“Yeah, well probably the killer does too, and I’ll bet he ain’t hanging around,” Reilly said.

“Have a good night, detective,” I said as we put on our coats for the second time.

Reilly grunted, and I suspect that only the presence of Martha and Carol prevented him from responding with an obscene gesture.

When we finally got home at a few minutes after 1:00 a.m., Martha and I were both physically exhausted and emotionally fried. Again we postponed our attempt at Number 62 and went to sleep after some rolling and thrashing. When I awoke, she was sitting up in bed with the Sunday morning paper in her lap.

The attack on Toni was splashed across two-thirds of the front page above the fold, with my story wrapped around a three-column photo of a trio of Klondike Kates hovering over Toni, who had her head down and clasped between her hands. The story jumped to page three, where it was accompanied by a shot of the Boreas court prince untying Fitzpatrick’s shoe.