Duplicity Dogged Тhe Dachshund

17

I took Tamiami Trail along the marina’s curve to Osprey Avenue, then turned on Siesta Drive to go over the north bridge and back to Siesta Key. I wanted to explore the odd look that had passed between Josephine and Pete and Priscilla when I told them about the truck trying to run me down. Too many people knew things I didn’t know. I don’t like being ignorant, especially when my life is on the line.

At the Metzgers’ house, Priscilla opened the door and silently beckoned me inside. She was wearing a knit top about the size of a cocktail napkin, and her thin upper arms bore large purple thumb bruises. I followed her down the hall and looked anxiously at the baby in the playpen. She was unmarked and standing, smiling happily at her mother. When I looked at Josephine, she was watching me with a veiled woman-to-woman acknowledgment in her eyes.

Josephine said, “Your bruises are looking better, Dixie.”

She stressed your, and Priscilla reddened.

I said, “Remember the truck that chased me? Can’t be too many of them around. I’d like to know if either of you knows somebody with a truck like that.”

Josephine’s mouth tightened and her eyes flicked toward Priscilla, but she shook her head.

“If I knew somebody was trying to kill you, Dixie, I sure wouldn’t keep quiet about it.”

Priscilla blushed again, but she kept her head bent over her sewing machine. The baby squealed and pumped her chubby knees while she held the top rail of the playpen with both hands. I went over to the baby and picked her up. I couldn’t help myself. She gave me a beatific smile and drooled on my hand.

Priscilla said, “Ooooh, gross!” and leaped up to dry my fingers with a tissue. “She’s teething,” she said. “I hope it won’t last much longer.”

She spoke in a child’s breathless rush. I supposed she’d never spoken in my presence before because she hadn’t had anything to say.

Josephine looked up from her sewing machine and Priscilla hurried back to her own place. She was stitching something that looked like a monster tutu. I remembered when Christy had drooled like that when her teeth were coming in, but I didn’t remember being grossed out about it the way Priscilla was. The difference probably was that I had been twenty-six when she was born and I doubted that Priscilla was even eighteen.

As I put the baby back in her playpen and helped her find her chew toy, Josephine said, “Dixie have you heard from Pete? He remembered something he wanted to tell you. Something about Denton Ferrelli and a man named Brossi.”

Priscilla’s head bobbed up from behind her sewing machine, then she bent back to the tutu thing.

The baby squealed at me, and I leaned over and smoothed the fine hair on her head.

I said, “She’ll be walking soon.”

Priscilla looked up and smiled proudly. “I walk her around a lot to give her practice.”

I smiled. “I did that too, with my little girl.”

“You have a little girl?”

“I did. She was killed when she was three.”

I was shocked to hear myself say that. I’d never before spoken of Christy so easily, never before put her into a normal conversation like that. Somehow it felt right to do it, as if she were still with me, living in my words about her.

The room was silent, both sewing machines brought to a halt, a tiny moment of recognition of Christy.

I said, “I have a dog waiting for me. I’d better be on my way.”

Neither of them said good-bye, just gave me silent waves. Nobody seemed to want to intrude on the moment that had just passed.

As I was getting into the Bronco, Priscilla ran out and put her hand on my arm.

In her sweet little-girl voice, she said, “What you said … about somebody chasing you in a truck?”

“Uh-hunh?”

“Well, the thing is, I may know somebody who has a truck like that—one of those trucks up on big tires … .”

Her voice faded more with each word until it was almost nonexistent, as if she were losing all the air in her lungs as she talked. I waited a moment to give her a chance to go on, but she seemed unable to say more.

“Priscilla, do you think you might know who tried to kill me?”

“Oh, I don’t think he would really kill you. He probably just wanted to scare you. I mean, he’s not like that.”

It has been my experience that women who say about violent men, he’s not like that are missing the obvious. I mean, if he does it, that’s what he is.

I opened my mouth to set her straight and then thought better of it.

“This person you know, can you tell me who it is?”

“Well, if I did, would it get him in trouble?”

It was such a dumb question that I couldn’t think how to answer it. What did she think, that I planned to send him a Hallmark card? When all else fails, go with the truth.

“Priscilla, the person driving that truck is mixed up in something a lot bigger than trying to run me down.”

“And that would get him in trouble?”

I suddenly realized there was a note of hope in her voice. She wasn’t worried about getting the guy in trouble, she wanted to get him in trouble.

“It would get him in big trouble.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it. Bye.”

She whirled away and ran inside. I stared after her and gritted my teeth. Damn! Trying to coax Priscilla to tell me what she knew would be like training a cat to use a commode. Possible, but only with an incredible amount of patience, a trait I was fresh out of right then.

I looked at my watch and groaned. It was after ten, and I still hadn’t made it to Mame’s house. With Mame’s old bladder, she shouldn’t be left so long without going outside. Guiltily, I jerked the Bronco into reverse out of the driveway and sped off so fast the tail parked at the curb fishtailed when he started after me.

At the entrance to Secret Cove, I slowed to the ten-mile-an-hour limit on the narrow brick-paved street. In that green tunnel of leafy oaks, everything seemed serene and safe. Mame was waiting at the glass insert by her front door, and she did a little happy bounce at my feet when I came in. After I took her out back to pee in the bahia grass, she trotted with me to the kitchen and watched me put out fresh water and food for her. Then we ambled out to the lanai for her morning brushing. The sky was a smooth sweep of robin’s-egg blue, yellow butterflies were flitting around an overgrown bush of lemon oregano outside the lanai door, and a woodpecker was rhythmically drumming on a mossy oak in the backyard. If I hadn’t known better, I would have been lulled into believing the world was pure and innocent.

After her brushing, Mame and I played chase-thetennis-ball until we were both winded, and then I nuzzled her good-bye and left her watching me through the glass by the door. The temperature was climbing toward 90 degrees now, and the air was beginning to suck the energy out of anything living. The tail had parked behind me in the driveway. His head was tilted back on his headrest and his eyes were closed. He was older than I had thought, his jaws soft and slack, with the look of somebody more accustomed to a desk job than following a woman around in the heat.

When I slammed the Bronco door, I watched him in the rearview mirror. He jerked upright, quickly started his engine, and whipped into the street so I could back out of the driveway. Only problem was that he pulled out in the short direction leading to the Ferrelli house. The street was too narrow for me to pass him, and it seemed churlish to make him come back in and back out the other way, so I headed in the only direction he’d left me.

All I had to do was turn right at the looped end of the street and drive the extra distance past the summer-closed waterside properties to Stevie’s house. But in the short stretch to the turn, I thought about what Priscilla had said about the truck. She obviously knew something, and my guess was that Josephine and Pete did too. Josephine had evidently decided to wait and let Priscilla tell me in her own time, but Pete might be persuaded to talk.

I slowed to a stop and pulled out the card Pete had given me with his clown class address. On the back, he had scribbled the days and hours he taught. Class was going on right now, so with the deputy tail close behind me, I headed north, back over the bridge toward Lockwood Ridge Road.

Sarasota has been a circus town since the late twenties, when John Ringling made it the winter quarters for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. My parents grew up seeing famous performers like Lou Jacobs, Emmett Kelly, and the Flying Wallendas on the street. They watched the filming of The Greatest Show on Earth, and during the world premiere went to the big circus parade down Main Street. Sarasota High School kids still perform high-wire and trapeze acts at Sailor Circus, and a second generation of the original Sarasota circus people have established Circus Sarasota, a European-style onering circus. Circus is so much a part of Sarasota that I’d always taken it for granted, like the manatees and dolphins.

Pete’s clown class was in a one-story white stucco building with circus murals painted on the outside walls. A huge black-topped parking lot surrounded it, but there were only about two dozen cars. I parked the Bronco and went into a deserted lounge with a long bar running along one side and a scattering of round cocktail tables in the middle. I threaded my way through the tables, following the sound of laughter, and found another room that had the look of a restaurant’s main dining area, with all the tables rearranged so people could see the speaker. Pete stood at the front of the room, and everybody else was intently watching him.

He grinned when he saw me, and I waggled my fingers at him and took a seat at a table by the door. I had expected the class to be young people, but they were mostly middle-aged or older, with a sprinkling of teenagers. All of them had friendly open faces and bright inquisitive eyes.

Pete took up his lecture where he’d left off. “You’ve learned wardrobe, juggling, and makeup. From now on we’ll be concentrating on skits. Before this course ends, we’ll go to some hospitals and perform skits. In the circus, skits are called gags. There are some standard gags like the Firehouse Gag that every clown knows, but you’ll be creating your own gags too. You have to do it the same way a movie director plans a scene—seeing it the way the audience will see it. A gag has three parts: the beginning, the middle, and the blowup. You set the situation in the beginning, lead the audience to believe a certain outcome in the middle, and surprise them with a different outcome in the end. My old friend Angelo Ferrelli—known to you as Madam Flutter-By—was a master at creating clever skits.”

One of the teenagers said, “Was he an Auguste?”

Pete looked pained. “No, he was a Whiteface. For those of you who don’t remember, Auguste makeup is in natural tones. In traditional skits, the Whiteface clown has the dominant, more dignified role, while the character or tramp clown is the one who gets kicked in the pants or hit with a pie. Tramp makeup is scruffy and unshaven like Emmett Kelly. Regardless of type, a clown is called a joey, and when a joey dies, we say he’s done his last walkabout.”

Pete disappeared behind a screen and, in what seemed like only a couple of seconds, reappeared transformed by a wild red wig, a round red nose, and baggy plaid pants. He and a woman named Loretta then demonstrated a skit that hung on her explaining how to fold a bandanna, while Pete followed instructions using a banana. It was silly and childish and made me laugh so hard I forgot about murder and fear and venomous snakes.

The skit ended with Pete looking foolishly at his plastic-lined pockets, where he had put his folded banana. Behind him, Loretta was surreptitiously squirting shaving cream onto a paper plate.

She balanced the filled plate on her fingertips and said, “Hey, Pete!” When Pete raised his head, she hit him square in the face with the pie, which for some reason caused us all to howl uproariously. Loretta tenderly brushed away the foam with a soft whisk while students furiously scribbled notes.

Pete said, “We don’t use whipping cream for pies because it makes such a mess.”

He turned to the audience. “Speaking of making a mess, anybody know why we don’t throw confetti in the circus anymore?”

He waited a beat and answered himself. “Because it sticks to hot dogs and falls in people’s drinks, and when the circus moves on somebody has to clean it up. We use popcorn now. Nobody minds getting hit with popcorn, and when the tent comes down the birds eat it.”

Pete ducked behind the screen again, and it suddenly hit me that the pain-forgetting laughter that had filled the room was the whole point of clowning. That’s why clowns are called holy fools. The Albert Schweitzers and Mother Teresas of the world are revered for their work with the sick and dying, but clowns do it anonymously. They put on funny faces and crazy costumes and do rib-tickling skits for no reason other than to make people forget their troubles for a few minutes.

The egomaniacs who kill and rob and destroy think themselves powerful, but any idiot can create destruction. The truly powerful are the men and women who use imagination and hard work to create moments of innocent laughter. For the first time, I understood why Conrad Ferrelli had wanted to give clowns and other circus professionals their own retirement home. They deserve it.

In a few seconds, Pete came out looking like himself again.

To the class, he said, “I want you to watch a video now of some famous clown skits. Watch closely. Take notes. This is something I’m going to want you to do for the rest of the course. The skits look easy. They look unrehearsed and spontaneous, but every move is carefully choreographed. Every skit has been rehearsed hundreds of times. You have to know all these gags and be able to perform them smoothly before you graduate. When the video ends, take a break and meet back here at one o’clock.”

I looked at my watch. It was eleven-fifteen. With luck, I could pick Pete’s brain until one o’clock.

He headed toward me with an enormous grin. “What a nice surprise.”

“Pete, would you have breakfast with me?”

“Honey, I had breakfast five hours ago, but I’ll have lunch with you. And I was just kidding about women saying I’m too small.”

“I’m sure you’re a titan among men, Pete, but that’s not why I want to have lunch with you.”

“You want to ask me questions about Conrad Ferrelli, don’t you?”

“Do you mind?”

“Hell, no, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But I’ll bet people looking at us will think I’m your hot honey.”

I laughed. “If I’m lucky, Pete, that’s what they’ll think.”

“Come on, I’ll take you to a place that has the best hot Cubans in town.”

In Florida a hot Cuban is a sandwich made of thinsliced ham, spicy pork, baby Swiss cheese, and sliced dill pickles. It’s called a Cuban because it’s stacked in a split Cuban roll, which gets its crispy crust from being baked in palmetto leaves. The whole thing is smashed flat in a hot buttered plancha—sort of like a waffle iron—and grilled until the cheese melts and the pickle juice steams into the meat. I only eat about one a year, because one gauge of how much time you have left before your arteries clog up is the number of Cubans you’ve eaten in your lifetime.

I followed Pete to a hole-in-the-wall café, and the deputy followed me. I wasn’t sure what the etiquette was for having lunch while being tailed, but when I got out of the Bronco, I gave him a wave and pointed inside. He must have been given orders not to talk to me, because he pretended not to see my hand signals.

Pete gallantly held the door open for me, and we gave our Cuban orders to a fat man in a white apron, then moved down the counter to pick up our drinks from an open cooler. Pete got a beer and I pulled out unsweetened iced tea. We carried them to a dark plastic booth and slid in to wait.