Catch a Falling Clown

10

Peg was right. It didn’t work. I’m not sure what it was. Friendly but not comfortable. Touched but not moved. Friends. It wasn’t what I had had in mind, but it wasn’t bad either. There wasn’t enough room in her bed for both of us to sleep. We tried for an hour, but my back began to ache again. She fell asleep while I was talking about the time I had been in New York chasing down a couple of runaway kids. I was in the Wellington Hotel across from the Waldorf. I thought the kids were in the room next to mine. I was going to wait till it got dark, knock at their door when they thought they were safe, and do my best to talk them into coming back to Los Angeles with me. I wasn’t getting enough for the job to do anything else, and they were a pair of skinny little things with pimples who had some pretty good reasons for leaving home.

I had looked out of my window after taking a shower and seen something moving in the window of the Waldorf across the way at about the fifteenth or sixteenth floor. It was a small kid, maybe two years old, with red hair. He was leaning out of the open window. The wind was blowing, and I looked into the light of the room behind him or her for an adult to do something. There was no one there. I thought of calling the Waldorf desk, but I couldn’t figure out what room it was, and by the time anyone got up there, the kid would be gone, one way or another. I thought of opening the window and yelling, but what would I yell even if the kid could hear me over the noise of the street? I might scare him into falling. But he was going to fall. No doubt about it. He or she put one foot up on the sill and looked down into the street.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t decide whether to watch, run, close my eyes under the blankets, or pretend I wasn’t seeing. I whispered to the kid to please crawl back. Then I stood there for maybe fifteen seconds watching until a figure behind the kid pulled him back and closed the window. The figure, a woman, turned her back, and the kid ran over to the bed in the room and that was all I could see. No one had suffered for what had happened in that room but me.

The pimply kids in the next room were laughing at Eddie Cantor on the radio when I knocked at their door a few minutes later. They opened it and asked what I wanted. They looked happy. I told them I had made a mistake, went to my room, packed, and headed back to L.A., where I told the parents that I couldn’t find the kids.

Peg was asleep before I finished my story, which was fine with me because I wasn’t sure of what the incident meant to me. If she had asked, I had no idea what I would tell her. I knew it was important. I knew I had thought about it a lot lately, and maybe that was enough. But Peg was asleep and so was my right arm, and my back ached again. So I crawled over her, took one of her two blankets and her extra pillow, and got on the floor. The floor was cool and hard and just what I wanted. To get rid of the little kid in the window, I thought about who my killer might be. That should have been enough to put me to sleep, but it was still early.

I listened to “Information Please” quietly on Peg’s small Emerson while I tried to think. Boris Karloff and John Carradine were the guests, and they didn’t get anything wrong. They knew that Jesse James was shot in the back of the head, that Robin Hood was killed by someone letting his blood, and that Hamlet and Laertes were killed with poison rapiers. They were doing better with their fictional killers than I was doing with my real one.

It wasn’t working. I kept thinking of dead aerialists, a red-haired kid in a window, and falling elephants. Sometimes the thing you least want to think about or imagine jumps in front of you like a clown in heat and won’t go away: a disfigured man; some piece of rotten fish you ate when you were eight or nine; the memory of an elephant you never saw crumbling to the ground, landing on his knees and falling over dead.

For me the image that came now was Dr. Bumps. Dr. Bumps had been a small-time grifter on Broadway whose hand was barely steady enough to pick the pockets of bums and drunks and too-far-gones. Dr. Bumps had two big bumps on his forehead, like horns just starting to form or cut off because he had once too often gored someone on a streetcorner.

Dr. Bumps’s head always hurt, and he let anyone who would listen to him know just how much it hurt, how much the images inside were taking form and “bumping to get out.” You see, Dr. Bumps was convinced that anything he thought of could become real in his head, and if he didn’t get rid of the image, it could expand and kill him. So he spent most of his time in pain thinking of ways to distract himself from thinking about anything he could imagine. It’s hard to make a living, even as lousy a one as he made, while you fight a battle in your head. Dr. Bumps lost the battle in the spring of 1939. I don’t know what he thought was growing in his head, but it was too much for him. He went down to Union Station, waited for an eastbound to Chicago, and jumped in front of it before it cleared the yard.

We found out, when Jeremy Butler and I went to identify the body, that Dr. Bumps’s real name was Roland LeClerc III.

Was there an elephant growing in my head? Dr. Bumps looked over my shoulder from the past and told me there was. I wasn’t going to argue with a dead nightmare.

I found a box of Kix by moonlight and filled a bowl. There was a bottle of milk in Peg’s ice chest under the window and a hot plate in the corner. I think the milk was slightly sour. I used it anyway and felt better with my stomach full.

When I’d finished my cereal someone knocked at the door, a small, I-don’t-want-to-intrude knock. I opened the door and let Emmett Kelly in.

“I saw Elder down at the mess tent,” he explained, stepping in. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and overalls and looked like an undersized lumberjack.

I offered him a seat and a cup of coffee. He took both and sat down with a lot of what was on his mind showing in his sun-browned face.

“You never really told me about that attempt on your life,” I whispered, filling his coffee cup to the top. “It might help.”

He looked relieved, as if that was what he had come for, and glanced at Peg to be sure she was asleep. I knew what he really wanted. I’d seen it on faces before. He wanted me to put the world back together.

“Well,” Kelly began, looking at the wall as if the story he was about to tell would appear like a movie, “we were just setting up. Few days back. It’s always the same, but there’s something nice about it being the same. Like it was like this maybe a hundred years ago and it’ll be there a hundred years from now even if people drop bombs on each other, rocket up to Mars, or dig a tunnel through the middle of the earth. Know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said, understanding but not really understanding. I believed it, but I didn’t feel it. I wasn’t part of anything like that, hadn’t felt it about my family, the Glendale police, or Warner Brothers when I had worked for them. There was just me and today and maybe tomorrow and that wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was usually pretty good, but it wasn’t the kind of thing Kelly was part of.

“So anyway,” he went on, taking his eyes from the movie that didn’t appear on the wall and turning them to me for an instant before looking down at the coffee cup in his hand. The top of his head was nearly bald, and I had the feeling that I could see the past in it but not the future. “Anyway, the tents were going up, wagons coming in, mud all over. There’s chicken rank in the circus, especially a runaround one like this one. Everybody’s worried about who’s higher in the coop, even some of us who’ve been around. I mean, we go year to year, and sometimes it stops for us. I’ve seen it. One year an act has it, the towners laugh, scream, clap their hands red. Next year, the magic is gone. No one knows for sure why. Maybe something inside you goes, jumps to someone else, goes no place particular. I mean, the circus goes on, but you don’t. You slip, lose it. Happened to me when I was doing the high act. Hanging by my teeth one night spinning around maybe fifty feet up without a net, I knew it was gone. I mean, I was never a great one up there, but I wasn’t bad. It just went. You can’t hold it in. The other thing-Willie-had always been in me. I mean, he might just walk away someday, but I don’t think so. I don’t think we’d get on without each other. Am I making sense?”

I nodded. He made sense. Hell, there were all kinds of clowns in me. When I let them out, they usually caused me trouble. One clown in me wouldn’t shut up when I was with my brother; the clown just jabbed and prodded with a word to the body and then another combination to the heart and cheek, and my brother would smash my nose or arm or leg. I knew that clown of mine.

“So,” said Kelly with a smile at me as if he knew about my inner clown, “where was I? Oh, yes. Everybody worries about where they stand, but we all help out, especially in a put-together show for an old friend like Elder. I think I was helping to tie the canvas on a side tent. My hands were cold in the morning, and the sweat was sticking my shirt to my back. A guy named Gus the Gus, big Dane, was pulling with me when someone called. I turned around, didn’t see anybody looking at me. The guy in the ticket booth had lost a roll of tickets, and they were unwinding and rolling downhill toward a puddle of mud. Gus the Gus could hold the rope. I patted him on the back, and with his face all red, he nodded that I could go. So I took off to help catch the tickets. It was like a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Kept expecting the tickets to have one of those cartoony faces, get up on two painted legs and run away. Well, I didn’t really, but you know.”

I nodded again. I knew he was telling a story, and I wanted to be a good audience. Lots of reasons. I liked him. He was paying me, and he might have something that would help me.

“Well, I passed the ticket guy,” said Kelly. “He’s little and rickety, former Shetland pony act, I think. I was gaining on the tickets, going down that little hill, and figured I’d get them before they hit the puddle when I had that kind of itchy feeling, you know, hot rash on the neck when things are going warm when they should be cool. I turned and saw the truck. It was coming behind me, a small rigging truck, red, designed specially for circus jobs. At first I figured he was trying to help catch the tickets, which was a pretty damn silly thought. But I couldn’t figure where else he was going.”

“You didn’t see anyone in the truck, a driver?” I tried.

Kelly looked back at the wall for a picture, touched his nose with his right forefinger, rubbed it and saw something.

“What did you see?” I pushed gently.

He shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said, moving his right hand down to rub his chin. “Have a sort of feeling there was a round something, like a balloon or a face or the moon. I didn’t really look up there. I just kept running and running harder when I heard that truck right behind me. I remember thinking that the damned fool was going to run me down, and those tickets weren’t worth my life.”

Kelly looked at me to see if I was making sense out of this or thinking he was imagining things. I looked blank and straight without blinking so he’d go on, which he did.

“Anyway, the tickets went in the mud, and I leaped over the puddle and did a flying side roll to the left. Hadn’t done one of those in almost ten years. Felt my side pull and hit a pile of Indian clubs a juggling act was unpacking. The truck went right by. I was rolling around in the clubs, but I watched it go. Missed me by no more than a foot, and there was no driver anymore, if there’d been one in the first place.”

“Did you ask anyone if they had seen who started the truck?” I asked, reaching over for my cup. The cup was heavy and clean. Lots of things in this circus were heavy, clean, and repainted. I figured things were heavy so they wouldn’t get destroyed in all the moving, and clean because the circus people didn’t want to feel any shabbier than an Arab bandit life forced them to be.

“No luck,” said Kelly, getting up to pour me coffee from the metal pot brewing on the hot plate. I watched the cloud of steam rise, put my hand over it and felt the moist circle of heat touch me.

“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.

“He has a script and a smart wife.”

“And a dog,” she added.

“And a dog,” I agreed. Then there was silence.

“I was with Sell-Floto for ten years,” she said. “Just joined this one last month.”

“And before that?” I pushed. Another silence.

“Five years with the Tom Mix Show, Helig’s, others,” she said, looking away. “I started when I was a real young kid.”

“Right,” I agreed. The frogs rustled behind me. “You happy in the circus?”

“I like the snakes, the ones without legs,” she said with a smile.

“Must get to you after all this time to still be in a sideshow while people like the Tanuccis are under the big top, center ring. Even the lions and elephants get center ring.”

Agnes laughed. I was surprised that I liked the laugh. The little-girl front cracked with that laugh. She shook her head.

“I’m not knocking off animals and people because I got dreams about dragging my snakes into the big top,” she said. “Snakes don’t drive you nuts. They soothe you. You learn from them. You learn to be perversive.”

“Passive?” I tried.

“Very,” she agreed. “Now, if you want to stop trying to nail me for murder and World War II, maybe we could be friends. I’d really like to know about private investigators. I listen to all the shows on the radio. Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, Richard Diamond, Nero Wolfe. I go to movies. Charlie Chan at the Circus was one of my favorites. Nothing like the circus, but like what people think about it. You know?”

The little-girl interest was back, and I liked it. She sort of swayed from hip to hip as she talked, and I felt as if I were being hypnotized. Maybe it was just the darkness, the air in the wagon, and my knowing that snakes named Murray and Abdul and frogs that were going to be swallowed whole were all around me.

“Well,” I said, “maybe we’ll talk again soon.” I backed to the door, reaching for the handle.

“Do you do anything besides talk?” she said, pursing her lips.

“We’ll talk about it,” I said and leaped out into the air, pushing the door closed behind me.

I breathed deeply and looked around. Gunther and his friends were nowhere around, so I headed toward the big top. Gunther intercepted me while I paused to watch a man about fifty walking behind three small boys in green tights and matching blue jackets. The man was shaking his head and shouting to them about looking straight ahead, always straight ahead.

“Funambulists,” said Gunther, looking at the quartet as it passed us. “Rope walkers. Family tradition. The word comes from the Latin funis-rope-and ambulare-to walk. It goes back thousands of years. Some say the acrobats arid rope walkers are the oldest tradition in the circus next to the clowns, if we acknowledge that the commedia dell’arte is, indeed, clearly a part of the circus tradition and not the theater.”

“I acknowledge,” I said. “What did you find out about Hitchcock?”

“He is here,” Gunther said, still watching the receding figures of the rope walkers. “In the big tent, watching. The circus grapevine is fast, and outsiders are sensed like a low-level voltage….”

“Shock,” I said.

Gunther nodded, adding the word to his vocabulary.

“I suppose that includes me, that outside shock?”

“Yes,” he said. “Your presence is felt. Mine is less so because I have been with a circus and for other reasons. Jeremy too, for some reason, is accepted, perhaps because of his wrestling and size. I’d best return to my duties outside the wagon of the reptile woman.”

“Thanks, Gunther,” I said and went into the big top.

There were streaks of sunlight coming through entrances to the tent and a central opening at the peak of the tent. Some of the lights were on, and people were practicing acts in various rings. In one side ring, the three Tanuccis were standing in a small group. The eldest Tanucci was pointing up to the trapeze and speaking earnestly.

In the center ring, a cage had been set up, a big animal cage, and inside it stood young Shockly and a tired tiger, looking at each other with mutual confusion, or so it seemed to me.

I looked around for Hitchcock, and Elder came to my side, his mustache trim and waxed, his scalp moist, his green sweater snug over his well-muscled chest and only the sag of a cheekbone revealing doubt.

“Tanuccis are trying to put a makeshift act together,” he said. “We have to pull them from center ring, but when word gets out about the murder …”

“Murders,” I corrected, but he went on.

“Murders,” he agreed. “People will want to see them. Things like this have happened before. We pulled Shockly up from an apprenticeship to see if he can handle the cats. We’ve got no show without a cat act. My partner back East is trying to get Beatty, but he’s hard to find. There’s Grunwald in England. Retired. We might get him, but by the time he got here the season would be over and we’d be headed for a home run, headed back to Florida.”

“Someone’s doing a good job wrecking the circus,” I observed, looking around for Hitchcock and spotting him sitting alone and placidly watching, his pudgy hands folded in his lap. He was dressed in a dark suit and seated several rows up in the wooden grandstands. “What’s Hitchcock doing here?” I said.

“He asked to watch,” replied Elder. “He’s a well-known film producer, and he keeps his mouth shut. Maybe it will make some good publicity. Who knows?”

“He’s a director,” I corrected, moving toward Hitchcock.

“What’s the difference?” said Elder, heading away without waiting for an answer.

Hitchcock looked up at me languidly while I climbed the stands. His eyes scanned my clothing. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” said I, sitting next to him but not too close.

“I do not wish to be rude,” he said, looking back at the Tanuccis, “but your trousers and jacket do not match. Nor does your shirt.”

“All I have left,” I shrugged, watching the Tanuccis in their huddle.

“I think it essential that one dress carefully and formally when one works,” he said. “It establishes the aura of seriousness necessary in a potentially chaotic situation.”

“Maybe so,” I sort of agreed. “But the world I work in doesn’t seem to be affected by my sense of anything.”

“The difference between life and movies,” said Hitchcock. “I prefer movies. In fact, I have no great affection for the real world.”

The Tanuccis were climbing the rope ladder to the trapeze, led by Carlo. In the center ring, Elder had entered the cage with Shockly and the tiger and was urging the kid on, saying something about how old the tiger was. The tiger seemed to be asleep.

“Absolutely fascinating,” sighed Hitchcock.

“I thought you were going back to Los Angeles,” I said.

“I am,” said Hitchcock evenly. “My friend was good enough to put me up for another night so that I might discover something more of the events of the last day. You have not, I may presume, discovered a murderer or a motive?”

“Nope,” I said, searching my pockets for something without knowing what, maybe Abdul the snake. Instead, I found a single peanut. I offered to share it with Hitchcock, who refused politely.

“Pity,” he said. “I’ll have to depart nonetheless. Might I suggest that you are searching for someone who is quite mad? When you discover the nature of that madness, the key to it, what obsession moves this man or woman, you will discover your killer.”

“Great,” I said, munching my peanut as the youngest surviving Tanucci, Tino, swung out on the trapeze. “Now all I need is a psychiatrist. You know a lion was let loose last night?”

“I am aware of that,” he said, his eyes watching Tino without moving his head.

“You were near the cage just before it happened,” I said, fishing some peanut from between my teeth.

Hitchcock glanced at me and made it clear, though he tried not to, that he did not approve of people picking their teeth in public. “May I assume, therefore,” he said, “that I am a suspect?”

“No,” I said. “You’re not a suspect. You’re a possible witness.”

“I was rather hoping for something grander than that,” he said, “but then it might mean an encounter with the police, a situation which I would do very nearly anything to avoid.”

The Tanuccis were trying some switches and routines tentatively, with the older Tanucci shouting changes, suggestions in Italian, encouraging, discouraging, supporting.

“Did you see anybody near the cage?” I went on.

“The keeper who has such great difficulty with the human language,” said Hitchcock, “and one other person, a woman. A red-haired woman with a gaudy costume. She stood beside me watching the lions. We exchanged no conversation.”

Agnes again, thought I.

“I left before she did,” he added. “There certainly may have been others. I left just in time to see the show.”

“Well,” I said, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to work.”

Hitchcock put out his pudgy right hand, and I took it. It was deceptively firm. “Perhaps we will encounter each other again,” he said. “If you are in the directory, I may call you, if you have no objection.”

“None,” I said. “And thanks for the theory.”

Elder was still trying to introduce the shy Shockly to the weary tiger when I went into the light. I’d have to talk to Agnes again, but I wasn’t sure of how it would go. I didn’t have enough to turn her over to Nelson, and I wasn’t sure I could break her down. It would take a little thought. I headed for the animal tent. It was dark but full of sounds.

Gargantua eyed me lazily when I came in. He was standing and trying to see beyond the bars to whatever strange events were taking place to his left, just out of sight.

Peg and Shelly came toward me with the doctor. Behind them I could see Puddles lying in her cage while the other lion leaned over her with what looked like concern.

“Did he kill her?” I asked Peg, whose hair was down completely.

“Kill her?” said Shelly. “I saved that animal’s jaw alignment. Filed down the left number three and evened them. Damn, Toby, wait till I report this to the county society.”

“He did a good job,” nodded the old doctor in what sounded like astonishment.

“He’s used to working with animals,” I said. “Puddles is probably one of the tamest patients Shelly’s had in months.”

“Just put her to sleep,” said Shelly with a gloat. “Easiest thing I’ve done. I’d like some of that stuff to put my patients out.”

“It’d kill a human,” said the doctor.

“Well,” gloated Shelly, “I could control it. Temper it, you know. Be careful.”

“I’d advise against it,” said Doc Ogle, but I could see Shelly considering a nice dose of whatever it was for Mrs. Ramirez and Mr. Stange. We would need a long talk at some point in the near future.

Shelly put an arm around the old doctor, who tried to shrink away, but Shelly wasn’t having any. Cigar in mouth, Shel was describing to the old man what he had done in terms which were far from technical.

“You see the way I sawed that damn thing down? Then all it took was the file and a tape measure. If you know what you’re doing, it comes easy. Now, about that fifty dollars …”

Peg, at my side, took my arm. “I’m sorry about last night, Toby,” she said. “It’s just that I’m …”

I gave her a squeeze and suggested that we forget about it and find a killer. It seemed a good idea to both of us.

Peg had to locate Elder. I told her where he was and left Shelly oppressing the doctor. I headed back for Agnes Sudds’s wagon, working out a plan. I didn’t have one quite worked out when I got there. I seldom did, but as it turned out, I didn’t need one.

I started to open the door to the wagon with the snake’s face on it and heard a cry behind me.

“No, Toby,” came Gunther’s voice. I turned to face him as he stepped out from behind a nearby wagon, but it was too late.

“Ah, Mr. Peters,” came a voice which was far from back home or friendly. “Perhaps you could just step in so we can settle a few things.”

I considered running, but I knew I’d get a bullet in my back. The thought made my tender spine tingle. So I stepped into the wagon and grinned at Sheriff Nelson and Deputy Alex. Agnes stood back in the corner, drinking something clear and cool-looking.

“Venom?” I asked, glancing at her glass.

Agnes gave a nasty smirk. Alex and Nelson wouldn’t even give that.

“You will hold out your hand,” said Nelson, adjusting his dirty white hat with one hand and leveling his pistol at me with the other. “Alex will affix a handcuff to your wrist, and we will go back to Mirador on this lovely morning to have that little talk that was interrupted yesterday.”

“She did it,” I said, nodding at Agnes.

Nelson sighed enormously. “Your hand, Peters, or I shall be forced to shoot you before Alex has the opportunity for further discussion.”

I looked at Alex, who touched his right hand to his neck. Maybe a quick bullet or two would be better than a few minutes with Alex.

Agnes, however, was more interested in what I was saying than what Nelson was going on about. “Me?” she said, plunking her now empty glass on the table. “I did it? I did what?”

“You had something to do with letting the lion out, probably the killings of the Tanuccis,” I said evenly, holding out my wrist.

“You bastard,” she shouted. Animals rustled throughout the room, and Nelson looked nervous.

“Now, just a minute,” Nelson shouted. Alex clamped a cuff on my right hand and made it tight.

Agnes moved to the trunk where Murray resided.

“There’s a python in there,” I said to Nelson.

He turned to the trunk, gun outstretched. “It would be best if you didn’t touch that,” he said. “I’ll blow a hole through you and it if I see any damn snake.”

Agnes hesitated.

“She had something to do with it,” I insisted.

“Then we shall just take her with us too,” said Nelson, nodding to Alex. Alex dragged me across the small room to Agnes. He grabbed her arm and clamped the other end of the cuff to her wrist. Agnes and I were now hitched.

“Now,” said Nelson, “we shall just leave quietly. I will brook no interference from the people here.”

Agnes kicked me two or three times, and I told her softly that if she did it one more time I’d smash her face with my free left hand. She kicked me again, and I raised my fist.

“OK,” she said, covering up.

Alex pulled us out the door and down the stairs. Outside, Gunther stood helplessly.

“Gunther,” I said. “Find Elder. Tell him Agnes and I are being taken to Mirador. I’m not going to cause any trouble, and I’d like a lawyer over there before anything happens to me.”

“I understand,” said Gunther.

“Call Marty Leib in L.A.,” I shouted back as Alex prodded Agnes and me forward. “Maybe he knows some good local lawyer.”

“I understand,” he said sadly.

Nelson was sweating as he got into the back seat of the police car. I saw the scratch on the police car as I got in. I had done a bit of damage to the Mirador police department and was, I expected, about to suffer for it. Agnes and I were crowded into the front seat next to Alex, who drove. Nelson sat in the back seat with his gun leveled at us.

And off we went in the general direction of Mirador.