Carny kill

11

The scream belonged in Dracula's Castle. It definitely did not belong in Tarzan's tree house because it wasn't a fun scream. It was pure terror.

It seemed to go off right under me and it went down down down, like somebody had pulled a ripcord inside my bed. It stopped.

I sat up. My head didn't. It was in limbo. My equilibrium went weeeeee and I sagged into tilt.

"Sick," I said in a piteous voice. "Sick sick sick."

I opened my eyes and they swam around like a couple of punchy goldfish in little puddles of pain. It was still dark but some erratic blades of light were slicing through the bamboo struts of the tree house.

What idiot is doing that? I wondered. Go away, idiot. Sick.

I became cognizant of a mutter of voices rolling up under me like a restless wave and I got all panicky. What if my sick eyes were playing me a trick? Maybe it was really daylight and the marks were rushing up to the tree house to marvel at me drunk in bed in my own mess.

I stood up carefully. I didn't fall on my face. Good boy. Now-first the right foot, then the left. I walked toward the open door and it was like wading through a room made of gelatin. My eyes were all right though. It really was night.

A gang of people were milling around on the ground. Most of them were standing over something just to the left of the base of the other tree. I couldn't see what it was they were looking at. About five of them had flashlights and were chopping up the night with white light. One of the damn fools hit me in the eyes with a stab of it.

"Hey, somebody's up there!"

Big news. I started across the suspension bridge but it wasn't as easy as it looked. It and my wishy-washy equilibrium didn't get along too well. I got sick halfway across and you would have thought I'd dropped a hand grenade among them the way they yelled and scattered.

"Sorry," I mumbled.

I made it to the other tree and gave the trunk a loving hug. Somebody heavy and in a hurry was pounding up the steps. It was the storm trooper with the notebook and he'd caught some of the curdled booze on his fresh tan uniform shirt and he didn't seem to think it was such a hell of a big joke.

He threw his flash right on me and it was like being hit in the face with a baseball.

"The smart bastard again," he said. He put a grappling hook for a hand around my arm and gave me a jerk.

"All right, stupid, down them stairs!"

"Take it easy," I said. "I'm not myself."

"You never have been, smart bastard."

He gave me a shove and I slammed into the rail and reeled to the left and bumble-footed down three steps and each spine-jarring jolt did something unpleasant in my stomach. He came right after me, laying the crystalline glare of his flash in my eyes again. Stupidly, I tried to take a blind, off-balance swing at him.

He gave me a quick short one in the gut and I folded over like a newspaper. But the people below were safe this time-I didn't have anything left in me. The storm trooper gave me another sickening shove.

"I just want to get you alone for about five minutes, smart bastard," he said. He manhandled me on down the steps.

My wind was back by the time I reached the ground but I was still in sicky shape. Indistinguishable faces kept shifting by me in the flash-splintered dark. Everybody was talking but nothing they said made sense. And then Ferris was standing in front of me and he looked about as happy as Abe Lincoln did when they told him what had happened at Bull Run.

"Take that john's gun for a minute," I said to him. "I want to see him about something."

"Save the static for later," Ferris said. "What about that over there?"

"The sonofabitch gut-jabbed me!" I said. "If you don't-"

"Shut up!" Ferris yelled at me. "I said what about that?" He was pointing toward the base of the tree. I turned and looked. A couple of people stepped out of the way and I saw a little dark shape lying crumpled on the ground.

It was a very still little shape and it had small, pointed features and its eyes were open and sparking with reflected light and they seemed to be staring at me.

He wasn't wearing his apesuit, but Cheeta was dead just the same.

I was sitting at the table in the bunkhouse and a nice cop was feeding me black coffee. Other cops and plainclothes dicks kept coming and going while Ferris was trying to take his brooding stroll, and after he'd collided with a couple of them he blew up and yelled why didn't they all get the hell outside for five minutes, huh?

When we were alone he came over to the table and showed me his temper scowl.

"You sober enough to talk now? You want to tell papa about it?"

"Sober now, yeah. The whole trouble is I was too screaming drunk to know anything about it at the time. And how I ever got that bombed on half a jug of gin I'll never know."

"We'll worry about it some time," he said. "Let's worry about this midget now."

"I didn't push him," I said.

"Did I say it was murder?" he said.

"You're working up to it," I said.

He walked away. He didn't look happy.

"Let's take first things first so we'll know where we stand. I can turn in one of two reports and there will be no kickback. Suicide or accident."

He looked at me. I said nothing.

"What don't you like about the first one?" he asked.

I gave it a little thought.

"Well-I don't know the statistics on what percentage of midgets commit suicide, but I'll bet a buck it's mighty low. I can't ever remember hearing or reading about a suicide midget. Could be they have something inherently against self-destruction inside them. Know what I mean? The way colored people have an instinctive fear of dogs, or the way you never see a drunk Jap."

"Granny talk," Ferris said. "Come on. Why didn't he kill himself?"

"Because he was afraid," I said. "I don't mean of life- catching VD or losing his money on the stock market. It was a physical fear for his life. I've seen guys like him in Korea. They're usually the ones who break and run. And a scared man who is running for his life doesn't stop to take it himself."

"And Terry Orme was scared?"

"Yeah. I had a long talk with him a couple of nights back. He didn't say it but he was scared witless. Don't ask me what of. I don't know. Then early this morning he came into the tree house and tried to wake me. Said he had to talk to me. Said he had trouble. It doesn't add up to suicide within the same hour."

"Too bad you were such a drunken slob you couldn't help him." Ferris said it the way he meant it. Disgusted.

I said nothing. I took out a cigarette and rolled it between my fingers. He strolled over and thumbnailed a match for me.

"What don't you like about the second one?" he asked.

"That's the easy way out for you," I said. "Nobody would ever question it because it seems so logical. He was always climbing trees, and everybody knows that if you climb trees long enough the odds are you'll finally fall on your ass."

"So what's wrong with it?"

"One thing-the little bastard was good at it. He could climb like a monkey, and I've never heard of a monkey having an accident."

"Let's not go into the statistics again, huh?"

I knew what he was trying to do. Bait me. The way the inspector of police had played the student-murderer in _Crime and Punishment_. He was pretending to seek my assistance, hoping I'd reveal one card too many in my hand. I turned clam.

"All right, you tell me. Why didn't he fall-accidentally?" Ferris switched tactics in midstream. Now he was the harassed dick in the middle of a bewildering case.

"Maybe he did. Goddammit to hell I don't known. If it hadn't been for Cochrane's murder I'd never give Orme's death a second thought. Accident. Period. But…"

"But Cochrane's murder looks like a frame for his wife and I used to be married to his wife and I have a five-yearold strike against my name and Terry Orme and I were roomies up in the tree house and I've admitted we were both up there alone just before he took the big leap. Right?"

He looked at me. "Food for thought, ain't it?"

I actually admired Ferris. That's the truth. Plenty of dicks would look at poor little Terry Orme's body and write it off as an accident. These same hotshots would glance at the evidence against May and haul her off on a Murder One rap, and sit back to collect their medals.

But Ferris wasn't satisfied with the easy way. There was something about the whole thing that had a red-herring smell to it and his nose didn't much like the scent.

"So how much thought have you given it?" I asked him.

"Quite a bit," he admitted. He took a short circular stroll and came back to me again.

"Funny how handy you are whenever a body turns up. Have you noticed that too?"

I smiled and shook my head at him.

"You're trying to put the cart before the horse, Ferris. I'm never found standing by my lone over the body. Somebody else always spots bingo before I arrive. There must have been twenty ghouls gawking over Orme's body before I made my grand entrance. Who was it by the way who drew the lucky ticket this morning?"

"An old friend of yours. William H. Duff."

The initial haunted me but I couldn't think why just then.

"Bill? What was he doing around here in those wee hours?"

"Said he was looking for you. Wondering what you were up to. Said he'd found you out in the middle of the Swamp Ride a few hours earlier, snooping around with a flashlight."

Ferris' voice turned casual.

"Any special little thing you were looking for, Thaxton?"

"Good old Bill," I said. "We should make a team."

"I said-"

"I heard you. No, nothing special. Just working out an idea I had."

Ferris spread himself with sarcasm.

"Oh, well, don't tell me about it. I'm only struggling on a mere murder case. The more information that's withheld from me the better I like it. Makes my little chore more interesting. Creates more of a challenge."

I told him about my rowboat and lake theory.

He just grunted and nodded but I could see it appealed to him. I could also see that he felt like saying a dirty word because he hadn't thought of it himself. And I knew I was right when he went to the door and told one of his storm troopers to scout him up a map of the place.

"You were talking about how somebody else always finds the bodies before you do," he said to me. Funny thing- that Jimmy Bently, the freckle-faced kid who found Cochrane's body? He's not around any more."

"No? What happened to him?"

"Dunno. I wanted to check with him on some little point last night. So when I send a cop to go find him he comes back and says they say Bently up and quit yesterday. No notice, nothing. Just gone."

Ferris hadn't decided to lead me by the ear to the nearest jail, so I was still a free agent. I should have been working at my shell stand but nobody around there seemed to take much notice of me one way or another, so I had something I wanted to do on my own.

I went over to the payroll office and asked for Freckles' home address. They didn't want to give it to me at first, but after a bit of con I convinced them I was a friend of his and owed him a sawbuck and I wanted to be certain he got it before he took off for parts unknown.

The address they forked over didn't mean a thing to me and a nice young thing explained to me that it was back in the pine woods near some swamp or other. Not far from Neverland.

I went around to the rear of the nautch show and knocked on the door and a raven-haired, sloe-eyed piece in bra and panties and highheels opened the door and stood there patiently while I filled up my eyes and then she asked, "Finished?"

I said yes and thanked her and asked could I now see Billie for a minute?

"Billie! Man to see you. Better bring your boxing gloves."

Billie was wearing the same next to nothing outfit except that she had a kimono over it. I told her I wanted to borrow her MG for a couple of hours.

"Date?" She said it kidding, but I could see she really wanted to know.

"Uh-uh. I want to look up one of the Swamp Ride ops who quit yesterday. Just an idea I'm playing around with."

"You mean about the murders, Thax?"

"The law hasn't said it's plural yet, Billie. Terry might have had an accident, you know."

"Sure, I know. But the word is already around that it wasn't an accident. That he was pushed."

"Who's spreading the word? Bill Duff?" I was feeling mean and it must have showed. Billie gave me an odd look.

"Thax-what's wrong, honey? You act funny."

I shrugged. "Beats me. Though something's wrong all right, but I'm damned if I know what. At first it was pretty obvious that someone was out to make a patsy of May. But lately I've got the feeling that I'm being slowly pushed into a blind corner."

"Wait for me," Billie said "I'll put on some clothes. I'm going with you."

"What about your job?"

"What about it? I'm quitting, aren't I? To hell with 'em."

I had a smoke while I waited for her. One of the rummy sweep-up men shuffled up and bummed one off me and wondered where a man could find a drink at that hour, looking hopefully at me, and then slumped off dejectedly, and then Billie came out in an expensive blue suit and we left the lot.