Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) (9 page)

“Nelson, I didn’t kill this woman.”

“We shall see,” he said, rocking on his heels. “Your gun. We catch you over the body. She, as I recognize, is one of the circus people and, if I am not mistaken, the wife of the young man who met his demise this morning. You and the lady friend have a little falling-out, Peters?”

A sudden blast of wind plastered my wet pants to my leg, pushed Nelson sideways, and made a groan through the ruins.

“Don’t move,” came Nelson, fighting the wind.

“I’m not moving unless the wind moves me,” I said. Alex, I saw, hadn’t been affected by the blast of air. He held the pistol out for Nelson, who examined it with the joy one would expect to see in the eyes of a pearl diver who has just come up with a beauty the size of a marshmallow.

“There are no low-life circus freaks to do battle for you now, Peters,” said Nelson. “So Alex and I will just take you back to our little jail, arrange for this body, and have ourselves a chat, a cup of coffee, and a confession or two.”

“I didn’t kill her,” I repeated.

“Oh, yes, you did,” he said. Then he looked up into the rain and showed his not too straight and not terrible white teeth. “Good day to spend indoors chatting.”

“You …”

“What am I, Peters?” he said, losing his joy-of-life attitude. “How the hell do you know what I am? I do more good in this world in one day than you’ll do in your whole miserable lifetime. Just ask Alex. Ask him about the parties for the Mex kids I give, the handouts.”

“Alex,” I said, feeling my back start to sag in pain. “Is he a saint?”

“Let’s get back,” said Alex, walking past Nelson and heading toward the ridge.

“Tell him, Alex,” Nelson shouted. “Tell him.”

“Sheriff Nelson is a good man,” Alex said, his back still turned. He made it sound like something he was reading on a pack of matches.

“Sheriff,” I said, pushing the wet hair from my face and trying to pull my broken-zippered windbreaker close. “There’s a dead woman over there. You think we might show her a little respect and let her go in peace without all your elephant crap?”

“Someday,” hissed Nelson, “I’m going to be governor of this whole damn state.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” I said, following Alex.

Nelson was as good as his word. He put on some clean, dry socks when we got back to the jail and made himself a cup of coffee. Then we sat, him behind his desk with his feet up and a cup of coffee in his hand, Alex standing behind me, and me dripping in a wooden chair across from Nelson.

“Like some coffee?” Nelson asked with a twinkle.

I didn’t answer, didn’t even let myself sneeze for a second or two, and then let it out.

Nelson scrambled back. “Can’t go spreading those germs all around here,” he said seriously, shaking the spilled coffee from his hands.

“Maybe we should give him a dry shirt,” Alex said behind me.

“All right. All right,” Nelson agreed and went back to his feet-up pose. I could hear Alex move behind me, the wooden floor creaking. Behind Nelson’s head was a series of framed certificates and plaques. One was from the students of Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School at Mirador for giving a safety lecture back in 1938. Another was for completing an extension course from the University of Southern California in basic civics.

I took the shirt handed to me over my shoulder, removed my jacket and shirt, and put on the dry one, which smelled faintly of alcohol.

“Got a complete sheet on you, Peters,” Nelson said, tapping something before him. “Like to know your life story, straight from the Los Angeles PD? I’ve had it here ever since our last little social encounter.”

I said nothing. He sipped and read aloud. “Toby Peters, born Tobias Leo Pevsner. I can see why you might not like the name you were born with, too sort of Jew-sounding. Let’s see, now, born Glendale, California, November 14, 1897. Mother died when you were just a baby. Father owned a grocery store. Older brother is an L.A. police lieutenant. You went about a year and a half to junior college and then joined the Glendale police in 1917. Father died in 1932. Your brother was in the first big war, wounded while you stayed back.”

“You in the war, Nelson?”

“I was unable to serve,” he said. “Let us get back to you. You have been known to consort with known criminals.”

“I try to catch them sometimes. It’s difficult to catch them unless you get near them. You might ask a real cop sometime.”

“Your wife left you,” Nelson went on. “You a violent man with women, Peters?”

“I am a pussycat with everyone,” I said. “I’ve been thinking seriously of joining a seminary, Little Brothers of the Meek. I deplore violence, shudder at the sight of blood, and confess to any and all crimes when tight-assed sheriffs frighten me.”

Nelson’s grimace wouldn’t move into a grin. “We shall just see about what frightens you, Peters.”

“You know, Nelson, you sound like Richard Loo in a cheap war movie. You’ll never get the role. You’re too small, too silly-looking, too smug, too transparent, too …”

“That’s it,” shouted Nelson, slamming his coffee cup on the table. “Alex, I think you should take our Mr. Peters here into the back cell and use your powers of persuasion to convince him to confess. I, meanwhile, will see to the body of his unfortunate victim.”

Alex didn’t reply, so Nelson went on. “You understand, Alex?”

“Sure,” said Alex, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me up.

“We will talk a bit later, Mr. Peters, when you have had a few contemplative hours to consider the cleansing nature of confession.”

I winked at Nelson, whose teeth gritted together loudly enough to hear. Then he stamped out into the rain. Through the storefront window, Alex and I watched him get into the police car.

“In back,” said Alex.

“Hey, it’s Nelson you’re mad at, not me.” I moved ahead of him to the narrow walkway between the two cells. The whole damn jail was no bigger than my Hollywood rented room.

“You’ll do,” Alex said evenly, pushing me into the second cell, the one furthest from where anyone could hear us.

“I didn’t kill that woman, Alex,” I said.

He was rolling his sleeves up slowly, apparently not hearing me.

“I’m not going to confess to anything,” I said.

“My cousin Lope Obregon,” said Alex, facing me. “In the bar.”

“Hell, he was drunk and looking for trouble.” I backed against the wall, and Alex moved forward. I could feel the vibration of radio music from Hijo’s through the thin shared wall.

“Maybe so,” agreed Alex. “But he’s my cousin.”

My minimal study of fear has demonstrated to me that people under its spell are capable of amazing and frightening things. I did what neither Alex nor I expected me to do. Actually, my body did it without my bidding. In fact, given the chance to discuss it with myself, I wouldn’t have acted. I threw a hard right, my whole body behind it, in the general direction of Alex’s chin. He turned as it came, and I caught him in the Adam’s apple. He went backwards, clutching his throat and sucking for air.

“Christ,” I shouted. “That’s not what I wanted.”

Alex was on his knees, taking short breaths, trying not to die. I went for the cell door, slammed it shut behind me, gave it a pull to be sure it was locked, and went for the front of the station.

Alex was still choking behind me, but he was doing something else too, as I discovered a second later when the first bullet pinged off the cell bars behind me. The second bullet hit the big window of the police station. The window cracked and crumbled as I went through the door into the street. I threw my shoulder up to cover my face from the blast of glass.

Two arms grabbed me, and I pulled my fist back madly, determined to get away from Alex now regardless of the cost, because I knew for sure what the cost would be if Alex got his hands on me again.

“Peters,” said Elder.

His mustaches were glistening, and his coat was pulled over his shoulders.

“Elder, let’s get the hell out of here.”

A third shot convinced him, and he turned and leaped into a small gray Ford truck.

“What?”

“Just go, go, go,” I said near panic, and he went.

On the way back to the highway, I explained what had happened, and Elder explained that the hour had passed and he had decided to come looking for me in town instead of calling the state police. I told him about Rennata’s murder. His head dropped for a particle of a second and came up again.

I told him about the elephant and the drawing made by Rennata, about Nelson’s desire to pin the murder on me and my desire to stay alive.

“We’ll hide you,” he said.

“Bad idea,” I said back. “Just have someone pick up my car and drop me off at the highway, along here somewhere.”

“You’re giving up?”

“If I stay with the circus, you’ve got some big trouble coming down from the Mirador police,” I said.

“And the murders?” said Elder. “You’ve got a job. Remember, Kelly hired you to find a killer.”

“How are you going to hide me in the circus?” I said reasonably.

“If we don’t hide you and you don’t find the killer,” he explained reasonably, “you’ll go back to Los Angeles, get picked up, and be back in the Mirador jail. Either that or you’ll have to hide in Los Angeles till we find the killer, and we, meaning me, are without experience when it comes to finding killers.”

“Right,” I said. Night was coming. “I’ll need some help. I’ve got to get some people I trust from L.A. to help me, especially if I’ve got to do some hiding.”

“All right,” he agreed. “But you can use me too.”

“Elder,” I said as evenly as I could, “I can’t trust anyone within five miles of this murder including you, Emmett Kelly, or the sheriff of Mirador, especially the sheriff of Mirador.”

I made my call to Los Angeles and then put myself in the hands of Elder and Emmett Kelly. What they did with those hands was transform me into a clown. My brother would have said that it didn’t take much, but it had to be enough to fool Nelson and Alex, who made it to the circus no more than twenty minutes after us. I had a little blue hat on and a shiny suit with an inflated inner tube inside it. I began to sweat almost immediately and knew that the greasepaint wasn’t letting me perspire enough; I was getting sicker by the minute.

Almost any law-enforcement agent, even the dumb cops played by people like Bill Demarest or Nat Pendleton in the movies, would have considered a clown costume.

“I’m going to tear this circus apart, elephant puddle by elephant puddle, until I find Peters,” Nelson told Elder through closed teeth. Kelly, I, and four other clowns were within listening distance. I was playing with a fake rope that looked as if I was twirling a lasso, only the lasso was a rigid hoop. It was a third-rate gag but a first-rate disguise.

“Lots of elephants, lots of people,” said Elder evenly. He leaned against a huge trunk in Clown Alley, where we were putting on costumes and fixing props. “Besides, Peters isn’t here. If he killed Rennata, this is the last place he’d come. He’d get himself torn to pieces.”

“Maybe,” said Nelson. Alex was looking around at every face, and when he came to mine I concentrated on the little hoop. He fingered his Adam’s apple, and his eyes went past me. I was sick of twirling the lasso.