Catch a Falling Clown

14

“I’ll have you laughing through a toothless mouth,” hissed Nelson to Jeremy, as we prisoners sat on the small wooden bench while Alex turned on the lights.

“‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ’tis that I may not weep.’ Lord Byron,” said Jeremy.

“A bunch of smartasses,” said Nelson between his teeth.

“Know your enemy and break his arm,” said Jeremy, answering Nelson’s look of hate.

“That is not poetry,” said Gunther.

“In a sense,” said Jeremy. “It was said to me before a tag-team match in 1937 by Strangler Lewis.”

“I’m a dentist,” announced Shelly, trying to get up. His glasses fell from his nose, and he managed to grab them blindly. He didn’t see the two shotguns turn toward him.

“Sit down, Shel,” I said, grabbing his arm. He sat down.

“A dentist, damn it,” he repeated, putting his glasses back on and turning to me. There was a huge thumbprint in the middle of his left lens which Shelly ignored. “A few more years and I could have been a real doctor. Things like this shouldn’t happen to people who could have been doctors.”

“Now,” said Nelson, putting his shotgun on his desk, which was about fifteen feet from where we sat. “Now.” He got behind the desk, sat, and folded his hands. His white hat was still on his head, and the gun was within easy reach. Alex leaned back against the wall, shotgun up.

“You can be spared much discomfort,” began Nelson, “if you simply tell me what happened, how you came to kill all these people, including one of the most prominent people in our town. You will do it slowly, and we will all go to bed. I have had a busy night and day and wish a few hours of sleep. In addition, I don’t want to have to bring any state troopers back here. That would displease me.”

“OK,” I said. “We didn’t kill anybody. Paul tried to kill me. He and a partner killed the Tanuccis and covered for it. Paul tried to kill me because I found out about it. I went to his house for help, and he tried to kill me and Agnes. Ask her.”

Nelson’s knuckles went white. “You mean the young lady with the snake? Your young lady from the circus? You know what her word is worth?”

“Compared to yours?” I said. “About two bucks for every nickel.”

“Not funny, Peters,” said Nelson.

“I have some bad moments,” I admitted.

“Let us try again,” said Nelson, removing his hat and placing it on the desk near his shotgun.

“Nothing to try. Paul hated the circus, used to be part of one, had an accident which messed up his face and mind and killed some of his family. He was nuts.”

“That, I take it,” said Nelson, “is your clinical opinion?”

“Then why the hell do you think he was dressed up like that, for climbing on top of the big tent? Was he your neighborhood eccentric? The town idiot?”

“Few towns have two official idiots,” said Jeremy, looking at Nelson. I could swear I saw a smile in the corner of Alex’s mouth. Nelson turned to him, but the smile was gone.

“I am a tired man,” warned Nelson, fingering the shotgun, “and I demand civility.”

“You earn civility,” said Jeremy; “you do not get it by demanding it.”

“Paul was out of his mind,” I jumped in. “He came after me with an elephant prod, an electric thing, and I ran. He chased me up the tent and fell through. I tried to save him.”

Nelson looked up to heaven for strength to tolerate such tales, but heaven didn’t help him. “You are trying to tell me that a man would go around killing people …” he began.

“And elephants,” added Gunther.

“And lions,” added Shelly.

“No,” I said. “The lion hurt his tooth …”

“Stop it,” shouted Nelson, lifting his shotgun and banging the stock on the desk.

“Nelson, for God’s sake, why the hell would I want to go around killing circus people?” I said, trying to sound as weary as I was.

“Hired,” he said. “Someone had a grudge against those people and hired you down from Los Angeles to do some killing. You’ve been near some killing before. Right in this town.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Killer for hire. Circus performers, animals. Someone just read my ad in Dime Detective and gave me an extra ten bucks to find an elaborate way to kill Paul.”

“I don’t need the why,” insisted Nelson, who was obviously getting confused. “We caught you red-handed with one hand up your gee-gee and the other on the gun right on the beach.”

“And what were you doing on the beach?”

“Mr. Paul called us and said he saw …” Nelson stopped.

“Something getting through to you, Nelson?” I said.

Everyone was quiet now. A clock on the wall, which had been ticking all the time, suddenly insisted on being heard. I listened to it.

“You haven’t got a case against me,” I said. “It wouldn’t hold up long enough to make it worthwhile for my lawyer to come down here. He could probably handle it all with a phone call.”

Nelson looked up at the clock. It was hanging over Alex’s head and ticking for all it was worth. Nelson couldn’t take his eyes off the clock for a hypnotized second or two, and then he forced them away.

“I’ve got a leading citizen killed here, a police car destroyed, a window in the police station beyond repair, a deputy attacked, two circus people murdered. I cannot walk away from that.”

There was something definitely more reasonable in Nelson’s voice. What little confidence he had in our collective or individual guilt was oozing through the floor, but he had to have something else. Nelson would rather turn us in than walk away dry without an answer. I’d seen it before when I was a cop. You nail somebody for a stickup or even a killing, and you hold tight even when you’re sure he’s not guilty. Hell, you even go to trial, knowing you’re going to lose. Then when the judge or jury turns him loose, you shout fix and corruption and blame a weak system. Beats letting everyone know you have no idea who your killer is. That was the road we were going down now, and if I didn’t get us off it, a killer would get away. Besides, I wasn’t all that sure that a good prosecutor couldn’t nail us with the killings.

“Do you want me to tell you what to do?” I said.

Nelson looked at Alex, who kept looking at us. “Talk away,” said Nelson. “I can see no cost to listening.”

“Right,” I said. “I think I know who the killer is….”

“You said you knew for sure,” Nelson interrupted.

“I know for sure,” I said, “but I’ve got no real evidence. If you work with me, I’ll set the killer up for a confession you can hear.”

It sounded reasonable even to me, but I had no idea how I was going to do it.

“What does this plan involve?” asked Nelson.

“You let me go, and I set it up. You keep my friends here to be sure I’m telling the truth.”

“That is one rotten idea,” shouted Shelly, starting to get up, this time with a hand over his glasses. Alex motioned him back down, and back down he went.

“You know how much an extraction can really hurt if a dentist wants it to?” asked Shelly, looking at Alex with hatred.

“No deal, Peters,” laughed Nelson, near the end of the nerve he was faking. “You’d walk out on this crew of misfits quicker than I could fall off the chair.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” said Alex.

I had almost forgotten that Alex could talk.

Nelson turned his head to the deputy. “Well, well, an alienist in my own midst,” snickered Nelson. “The man you are willing to believe is the man who made a fool out of you, deputy, a large Mexican fool.”

“He wouldn’t run,” Alex repeated without emotion.

“All right,” Nelson said with the trembling voice of hysteria and no sleep. “Supposing we agree to let you roam around while we baby-sit with your barrel of monkeys. What next?”

Gunther began to whisper furiously in my ear. It was a plan. It was simple.

“If he needs a bathroom, all he has to do is come out and say it,” said Nelson. Gunther said it, and Nelson pointed the way. “No way out back there,” he added.

“You want to hear the plan or not?” I tried, testing a slightly aggressive tone of my own as we watched Gunther move down the corridor between the cells. I gritted my teeth. I was taking over. Jeremy gave me an approving nudge. Shelly had his arms crossed and was looking at the boarded-up window, having dismissed us from his world.

“Go ahead,” said Nelson.

He bought it. It wasn’t an easy sale, and he reserved the right to demand his money back, but he bought it. It took a few minutes to work out the details, and the final one came only when Gunther returned and whispered something to me.

“I need the keys to the truck or the car,” I said when I had finished.

“You want our shotguns too?” barked Nelson, but it was now the bark of a moody child.

“No,” I said. “I’d like my gun back, but I can do without it if I have to.”

“You have to,” said Nelson. I knew he would. I just thought it better to give him something to save his face.

“Be careful, Toby,” said Jeremy as Nelson handed me the key to the truck.

“I must be crazy myself,” mumbled the sheriff.

There were no shock absorbers worthy of being called shock absorbers on the truck. I bounced without event down the street, which was just waking up. The door of Hijo’s opened next to the sheriff’s office, and someone was fiddling with the lock of the “Fresh Bate” store.

There was clearly no day of mourning for Thomas Paul of Mirador. I got to Paul’s house after making a few mistakes, but I figured it out. It looked as if no one was there, and there might not be, but I had the feeling that there was. Gunther had said it was logical. Whoever was working with Paul would have to go back to his house to see if there was anything that could link the two of them. The killer might do it quickly or might take a long time. The killer might even say the hell with the whole thing and run for Acapulco.

But this killer had been in the game for a long time, had poisoned some elephants and started a fire the year before, had shared a hatred for the circus, and, if I was right, done some very dangerous and equally dumb things.

I parked in the driveway and went in, making a lot of noise. I didn’t want to catch the killer there and get myself killed. I was after a confession where others could hear it. I went into the living room, kicking things, singing “Flat Foot Floogie” and alerting any living thing within a hundred yards. The person I was trying to alert was not a hundred yards away but upstairs somewhere. I heard the creak and the step, and then it stopped. I kept singing and hurried for the phone.

There was no click on the line to indicate that anyone had picked up an extension. I asked for a number from the operator. It was 5454 and meant nothing to me.

“Quien es?” came a young man’s voice.

“Right,” I said loudly. “I’m out at Paul’s place now.”

“Que?”

“No, no point in staying here,” I said. “Look, it doesn’t mean anything unless you’re willing to tell the sheriff. Are you willing to tell him or not?”

“Que pasa aqui? Esta usted, Manuel?”

“I can’t force you to do anything,” I said with exasperation. “You can just pack up with the circus and go. Just forget two murders. If you saw who took the Tanuccis’ harness, and it wasn’t Paul, then it was someone working with Paul.”

“Es un chiste muy estupido, Manuel.”

“OK, then we talk. Come to town. Mirador. Right in the center of town there’s a little bar called Hijo’s. I’ll be there in ten minutes. It shouldn’t take you more than fifteen or twenty. We’ll talk, and if you agree, we go to the sheriff. Look, they’re trying to nail all this on me.”

“Loco en cabeza.” He hung up, and I kept talking.

“Just come,” I insisted. “Your life isn’t worth a box of popcorn if the bastard knows what you saw.”

I hung up the phone. I wondered whether I would have fallen for it, but it was hard to tell. I wasn’t a killer and I wasn’t crazy. Something creaked very slightly upstairs. I didn’t want to give the killer a chance to consider getting rid of me on the spot. I counted on the killer wanting me to point out the possible witness at Hijo’s, but I have been wrong so many times that I more than half expected a sharp phutt of a bullet hitting my back or the vibration of a chair against my head. I got neither. As I climbed into the cabin of the truck, I noticed a curtain move on the second floor of Paul’s house. I drove on down the road.

The trip back was faster than the trip out. I knew my way now. I parked on the street in front of Alex’s car, where the truck had been before, and stepped out. A little Mexican kid about nine stood outside the door.

“I seen you before,” the kid said, squinting up at my bristly chin and unforgettable face. “You came through when that guy got bumped off. Hey, you the guy they was looking for last night who cut off old Two-face’s head?”

“I didn’t cut off anyone’s head,” I said. “Now beat it.”

“Cost you,” he said.

I looked at the sun, the white clouds, and then at the sweet-faced kid asking for hush money.

“What’s the going price for covering a murder?” I said, digging into my pocket. I didn’t want to keep talking, but I didn’t want him messing the setup. I was willingly contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

“Four bits,” he said.

“Reasonable,” I said, giving him two quarters.

He took them in his hand and examined them carefully.

“You think I’m a counterfeiter in addition to a murderer?”

“Just being careful,” he said, pocketing the coins. “Don’t worry. I didn’t see nothin’, I don’t know nothin’, and I don’t say nothin’.”

I hadn’t seen a car at Paul’s house, but the killer wouldn’t have been dumb enough to park in the driveway. It would take a few minutes to get to wherever the car was, but that car couldn’t be far behind me now.

“Take it easy,” I said to the kid, moving toward Hijo’s.

“Hey, I take it any way it comes,” he said with a big grin.

“Ever thought of being a movie producer?” I said in front of Hijo’s.

“What’s it pay?”

“Almost as good as hush money,” I said.

“I’ll think about it,” he said seriously. “Hey, you’re not going into Hijo’s, are you? You can get in trouble in there, my old man says.”

“Got to,” I said with a grin. “I’ve got a killer to catch.”

The kid looked at me like I was crazy as I pushed open the door and left the day behind me.