Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) (15 page)

“Gus the Gus had been holding the rigging, hadn’t looked back. Ticket guy had his eyes on the tickets. Nobody saw. Nobody knew.”

“Then that’s about it for now,” I said. “I’ll pick up on it in the morning.”

“OK,” said Kelly, getting up to scratch his legs. “See you in the morning.” He went out, closing the door gently behind him.

Whatever dreams I had were gone by morning except for one picture, Alfred Hitchcock near the lion cage. I remembered that he had been near the cage when I had talked to Henry the keeper. There was some chance that he had seen whoever had let the lion out or seen someone suspicious near the cage. After all, it had happened between the time I had talked to Henry and the start of the show, not too long, maybe fifteen minutes.

I got up quietly. My watch said it was nine, but I knew better than to listen to my watch. Hitchcock might have left, but I might be able to find the name of the friend in Mirador he was staying with. Even if I didn’t, I could call him in Los Angeles. I also wanted a talk with Agnes Sudds about her failure to encounter Puddles in the supply tent.

There was no need to be quiet. Peg was gone. There was a note on the small table:

DAY STARTS EARLY FOR ME. IF YOU MISS

BREAKFAST, MAKE SOME COFFEE. FRIENDS?

PEG
        

My back felt reasonable. My clothes looked as if they had been rolled into a ball and jumped on by a bear, and my face looked no better in Peg’s small mirror. I found her Ipana toothpaste, “For the smile of health.” I rubbed it on with my fingers and rinsed. The smile belonged to a healthy gargoyle.

Shoes on, I went out to face the day regardless of what time it was. On the way to Kelly’s wagon I passed people, but they weren’t giving out anything more than gloom and polite grimaces. A double death in the circus was nothing that could be hidden.

Shelly was the only one in the wagon when I got there.

“Where are the others?” I said, rummaging through my cardboard suitcase obtained three years earlier as payment for a very small job from a very fat pawnbroker.

Shelly was at the table drinking coffee. He wasn’t completely bald. A patch of hair touched each side of his head. The hair on the right side was pointed out, making him look like a mad professor in a Monogram horror picture for kids.

“They went back to find the people they’re supposed to be watching,” he said, staring glumly into his cup. “I’m thinking of going back home, Toby. Mildred said one night was all right. And I’ve got Mr. Stange this afternoon. And Mrs. Ramirez …”

I found my razor, put in a fresh Blue Blade, and took off my shirt. “I understand, Shel,” I said, lathering the thin bar of soap in a dish of cool water. And I did understand. Fun is fun, but sleeping on a cot after a lion almost kills you isn’t fun.

“Toby, I have some very important work to finish before …”

“Before you get killed in a circus,” I continued, trying not to cut my throat while I watched both it and Shelly’s reflection in the mirror. “Shel, you’re not going to get killed here.”

He shrugged, having little faith. “My profession …” he started but didn’t know how to finish.

Fortunately, his profession took a turn for the better. Kelly came rushing in, dark jacket, green turtleneck sweater and all traces of Willie the Clown gone. “You’re a dentist?” he asked Shelly.

“Right,” said Shel, without looking up.

“We’ve got an emergency, a really bad tooth,” said Kelly.

Shelly didn’t look terribly interested. “I’ve got to get back to Los Angeles,” he said, his eyes blinking behind his thick glasses. He fished into his jacket pocket and found the stub of a cigar. I could smell it when it reached the air even before he lit it.

“It’s an emergency,” said Kelly evenly and earnestly. “I know money won’t make a difference, but we can pay fifty dollars if you’ll just take a look and try to do something.”

Professional pride welled in Shelly’s face. “Emergency,” he mused. “Well, let’s get to it.”

I finished shaving while Shelly told Kelly that he would have to go to his car for the emergency supplies he carried with him. By that I assumed he meant the small box of extra rusted tools he was always planning to pawn but could never get a decent price for unless three bucks was a decent price.

“What’s the trouble?” asked Shelly, following Kelly, who opened the door for him to urge him out.

“Hurt her tooth last night when she got out, bit something probably, or someone,” said Kelly.

Shelly stopped, put a hand on the wall. “The lion?” he gasped.

“Right,” said Kelly, stepping down. “Puddles.”

I rubbed the water and soap off of my face with a towel someone else had used earlier and went behind Shelly. “Can’t let these people down, Shel,” I whispered and gave him a solid shove through the door.

He stumbled, and Emmett Kelly caught him. I could see Shelly open his mouth to cry or protest. His hand went up to his head and touched his fringe of hair. Now both fringes had points, and he looked less like a mad dentist than a clown.

“How’s the lion tamer?” I asked Kelly.

“He’ll live,” said Kelly, guiding Shelly down the path between the wagons, “but he might be a popcorn salesman from here on.”

“Maybe he’ll become a clown,” I laughed.

“No,” said Kelly seriously, a firm hand on Shelly’s shoulder. “He isn’t serious enough to be a good clown.”

Shelly turned his head to me for help, and I waved at him with a smile. I put my second shirt on and my suit jacket, which was brown and didn’t match my blue pants, but my windbreaker was bloody and gone, and I had no choice, unless I wanted to get back into the clown getup.

By asking a few questions of a chubby woman in a blue robe and curlers supporting her few strands of orange hair, I found out where Agnes Sudds and Abdul were making camp. By herself, the chubby woman told me confidentially. No one wanted to share space with the snakes. The chubby woman said she herself had nothing against snakes, but snake people were near the bottom of the circus social rung. Snakes were sideshow stuff, not big top. The chubby woman had a dog act, she told me, though I hadn’t asked. I really didn’t have to. I could smell it. The circus was full of smells that betrayed people.

Gunther was standing about forty feet from the wagon of Agnes Sudds when I came near. He was talking to two other people, a man and a woman who were even smaller than he was. I walked over to them, and the conversation stopped.

“This,” said Gunther properly as always, “is my friend Mr. Peters. Toby, this is Fran and Anton Lieber. We worked together once in …”

“Madrid …” supplied Fran, who had a little-girl voice but the face of experience.

“We also worked together in
The Wizard of Oz
movie,” added Anton.

Gunther’s memory of that movie was not a fond one. I shook hands with both Anton and Fran. They had obviously been talking little-people talk, which I didn’t think was anything different from big-people talk, but they were of a fraternity made by God or Darwin, and I wasn’t.

“She is in the wagon,” Gunther said to me, taking a step away from the Liebers after I had taken my leave of them.

“OK, I’ll keep an eye on her for a while. See if you can track down Alfred Hitchcock. He’s probably left, but he may be staying with someone in Mirador. I sure as hell can’t go to Mirador with any questions.”

“I understand,” said Gunther. I noticed that he had changed clothes. He now wore a gray three-piece suit with a perfectly starched shirt and an immaculate pink tie and matching handkerchief in his pocket. He turned and moved back to his friends, and I walked boldly up to the wagon decorated with a snake painting that started with the head at the door and went around to the left, circling the entire wagon and emerging on the right side. The tail was a rattle, and the open-mouthed head was a warning, but I knocked, and Agnes Sudds’s voice told me to come in.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The shades over the two wagon windows were thick and drawn. A small lamp was on, but the bulb was just a few watts and painted over in brown.

“Sorry,” came Agnes’ voice. “Some of the guys don’t like a lot of light. It puts them to sleep.”

I stood until I could see her figure in the corner near an open trunk. Then I could see that the trunk was a cage. Then I could see that Agnes wasn’t alone. A large, thick snake was draped around her waist and over her shoulder, and she was stroking its head.

Agnes was dressed in a gray sweat shirt and trousers. Her red hair, red like that of the kid in the window of the Waldorf, was tied with a ribbon and hanging down her back. She looked cute, a little like Lucille Ball. Or she would have looked cute if it weren’t for the snake, who looked like the one painted on the wagon.

“Murray,” she said, smiling and stroking the snake. “His name is Murray. You want to make friends?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I mean, you and I, yes, but Murray and I can stay cordial.”

“Cordial,” she repeated. “Education and everything. Snakes feel good. Cool, friendly, soothing. Holding a snake is very restful. They like being near warm bodies.”

“That a fact?” I said with a smile. “How’s Abdul?”

“Resting,” she said, putting a finger to her lips to indicate that we had to be quiet. I wondered where Abdul-the-green might be resting. In some corner of the room? Above me? I decided to make the visit short.

“Have a seat,” she said, still standing.

“I’m comfortable,” I said. “Murray posed for the picture on your wagon?”

“No,” she said, rolling her eyes upward at my stupidity. “Murray is a python. The picture is a rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes are not friendly. But it makes a nice picture on the wagon. You know. Identifies me. Like Charlie McCarthy and Chase and Sanborn.”

“I see,” I said, looking around for Abdul and others of his ilk. The wagon was small and the neatest one I had yet seen in the circus, even neater than Peg’s. It was decorated in restful browns made more brown by the painted bulb. The walls were paneled in wood, with one wall of small cages filled with grass in which, I was sure, lurked slithering snakes.

My hand reached out and touched something cold against the other dark wall, and I pulled it away. I had touched a cage, and something had rustled inside it.

Agnes laughed gently. “Those are frogs,” she said. “I keep dozens of them.”

“You have a frog act too?” I asked.

“No, I feed the frogs to Murray and some of the others.”

Murray looked at me and seemed to yawn. He had clearly never seen as stupid a human as I was.

“Can I do something for you?” Agnes said with something that might have been interpreted as seductive. “Or is Peg doing everything you need? But Peg can’t be doing very much.” She crinkled her nose like Shirley Temple. “Peg is the circus good girl.”

“And you’re the circus bad girl?” I said, trying to stay in the middle of the room and glancing up at the ceiling a few feet over my head.

“Not bad, exactly,” she said. “Mina, she works with the horses. Now that’s a bad girl. I’m just average bad, if you like average bad.”

“I like information,” I said. “I’ll talk about degrees of badness later. Would you mind putting Waldo back in his bed while we talk?”

“His name is Murray,” she said, looking into the snake’s rheumy eyes. “He needs affection or he gets leathergic.”

“I think that’s lethargic,” I corrected. “OK, I’m a little curious about why you and Abdul didn’t spot Puddles in that tent last night. It isn’t a very big tent, and he’s a very big lion.”

“
She’s
a very big lion,” Agnes corrected me as she began to untangle Murray gently from her body. “I don’t know. Maybe she was scared and just being quiet. Maybe she circled around behind me. Maybe Abdul scared her, or she came under the tent as I was leaving. Why?”

Murray was almost unwound, and Agnes began to coax him into the trunk. She cooed to him while waiting for my answer.

“You didn’t like Rennata Tanucci,” I said. “Her husband liked you. Someone might think you had a reason to want to get rid of both of them. First the husband, maybe because he was going back to his wife, and then the wife because you resented giving him up.”

Murray was safely back in the box when Agnes locked the trunk and turned her eyes on me. I expected hate or anger. I was trying to provoke her, but she looked amused.

“I turned him down,” she said, lifting her chin. “I don’t need to chase flyers. Plenty of men in this circus know a class act when they see one.” She put her hand on her hip and looked at me with a smile. I couldn’t make out much of her body under the sweat suit, but she was reminding me of what I had seen the day before.

“How long have you been with the circus?” I asked.

The hand came off the hip. “What’s that got to do with it?” she asked with some of the amusement gone.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m trying to find a killer. I’m trying to eliminate people. I’m doing a job. If I can eliminate enough people, what I’ll be left with is a killer. There might be an easier way, but I don’t know easier ways.”

“The Thin Man doesn’t work like that,” she sneered.