Inherit the Bones

Chapter Thirteen

I arrived at the fairgrounds shortly before ten. The sun was an orange orb in a blue silk sky. There was a sharp quality to the sunlight that only served to highlight the trash and dirt of the Fellini Brothers’ Circus of Amazements. I put on my sunglasses and walked to the box office at the front of the fairgrounds, watching where I stepped. The grounds were littered with evidence of visitors. Empty soda cans and cups and crumpled foil wrappers lay scattered among orange rinds and apple cores and paper plates and those cardboard tubes that cotton candy is wound upon.

In the distance, just beyond the red and white stripes of the big top, a man swept trash into a large bag, pausing every few seconds to wipe his brow and adjust his grip on the broom. The air was heavy with the smell of rotting fruit and farm animals. I heard children crying, their voices rising together in panic, and I moved in the direction of their cries until the scent hit me and I realized it was not children, but goats.

Joseph Fatone met me at the closed ticket-taker stand. He was in his early seventies; deep grooves made parallel vertical tracks on his forehead and continued down to bookend his mouth. An unlit cigar hung from his thin pale lips and he patted at the four strands of hair on his head as though making sure they were still there.

“Thanks for meeting me here. It’s hard to get away, especially at a time like this. We’re all devastated, our family has been broken,” he said, his words garbled around the Cuban.

He offered me his hand and I shook it. It was clammy and damp and I resisted the urge to wipe my palm on the seat of my pants. Fatone pointed to an Airstream trailer just beyond the box office and we walked toward it. On the ground, orange raffle tickets lay among the trash like trampled poppies in a field.

“The family?”

Fatone nodded and held the trailer door open for me. “Yes, we’re a big family around here. Reed was a son, a brother to us all. He was a real great kid, full of heart and vigor. You don’t meet too many kids with vigor these days. Vigor went out of style fifty years ago.”

The air inside the trailer was musty and smelled of tobacco and lemon Pledge and burnt coffee grounds. Fatone gestured at the tiny kitchen table with its two mismatched plastic chairs and I carefully lowered myself into the one on the right. There was barely an inch between my belly and the edge of the table and I scooted back in the chair as far as I could.

Fatone sat across from me and picked up a chipped mug.

As he drank, I took a look around the trailer. It seemed to be his office and his home. There was a narrow, unmade bed behind a halfway open door near the back of the Airstream. A stack of dishes filled the tiny kitchen sink. The prints on the walls were hunting and fishing scenes clipped from various men’s magazines, mounted in cheap black plastic frames. A sad-looking spider plant hung out of an old coffee can, its tips brown and brittle.

Fatone took another long sip from the mug and his next words wafted toward me on a breeze of booze.

“I still can’t believe he’s gone. I keep expecting him to turn up at the door with T, hollering that the elephants have gotten loose or that he needs to borrow the car. He was such a jokester, that one. A real wise guy.”

He took another sip from the cup and coughed. I smelled tomato juice and put my money on a Bloody Mary.

“T?” I asked.

“Tessa O’Leary. Calls herself T. She and Reed were, uh, well… you know. Going together,” Fatone said. He touched his head again, found the hairs intact, and returned his hand to his lap.

“Dating?”

In the window behind me, I heard the angry buzz of some small insect beating itself against the pane, too desperate to get out of the trailer to notice the open door a few feet away.

He nodded. “Yup, ever since Omaha. Oh, they were friends before that, everyone is friends, you know. But eventually, they all pair up, even the old ones. Everyone’s got a partner.”

“Do you have a partner, Mr. Fatone?”

“I had a wife once. It didn’t really take, her and I. Now, you might say I’m like an old grandpa,” he said. “I have a lady friend every now and then, but nothing serious. Those days are behind me.”

I nodded. “Mr. Fatone, how long have you been the manager for Fellini’s?”

The old man leaned back and pursed his lips and stared at the ceiling. The short-sleeve shirt he wore was yellow and thin and it strained against his belly. I watched as dark patches of sweat made half-moons in the pits of the shirt.

“Well, I started with them back in the late seventies, when it was just Jack Fellini. Then he got his brother Sam involved, and it became the Fellini Brothers. When Sam was killed in the plane crash in eighty-five, Jack promoted me to general manager. So, yeah, it’s been about twenty-five, thirty years. Jesus, the time goes fast, doesn’t it?” he said. “Hey, can I get you a soda pop? Or some water?”

“No, thank you. And how’s it been, business, I mean? I imagine you’ve seen a lot of changes over the years.”

Fatone nodded. “You know, the circus used to be the greatest thing in town. When that long caravan of trains and trucks would roll in, the energy and excitement was just electric. It was a real family event you know, parents and kids together, having a good time. And then… I don’t know. Somewhere, I think it was in the late 1980s, everyone sort of lost their innocence. Maybe it was the recession. The circus became this antiquated creature, going from town to town, feeding and then moving on.”

I said, “That’s a strange way to describe it. You make it sound like some kind of parasite.”

He shrugged. “It was bad for a while there, but it’s better now. I think folks are ready for joy again in their lives. The kids just adore coming, you know. They love the animals, the cotton candy, the clowns, too. All of it, it’s just a blast.”

“And Reed Tolliver? Did he like the scene?”

The old man nodded again. He took another sip from the mug and stretched out his legs to the side of the tiny table. I noticed his socks were mismatched and I wondered if he was color-blind. Maybe he just didn’t care.

A breeze came in through the open trailer door, ruffling a stack of papers piled high in the corner. I wished Fatone would open the windows, too. The trailer was parked in the shade but the heat was already beginning to rise inside the tiny space.

Fatone said, “Reed was in bad shape in Cincinnati. We had finished our run and were packing up the tents and animals and he showed up at my door. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks, real skinny, kind of strung out.”

“Drugs?”

Fatone shook his head. “I never saw him touch them. Believe me, I keep my eyes open for that sort of nonsense. Once they start using, they’re no good to me. The risk is too high for something to happen, someone to get hurt. You know, Deputy, I’m not a real hard-ass… but the one thing everyone around here knows is that I run a clean operation. Yes, ma’am.”

He waited for me to acknowledge this statement, so I scribbled a few words in my notebook and gave him a very serious nod. He looked pleased at this.

“What else can you tell me about Reed Tolliver?” I asked.

Fatone said, “I still remember, as bad of shape as he was in, there was this real honesty about him that shone through. Kind of a sweetness.”

Tiny beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and he leaned over and cranked open one of the trailer’s windows. “I’m sorry, it gets warm in here pretty quick.”

“And he asked you for a job?”

He nodded. “Reed said he needed work, and that he’d been in theater. I had him do a few routines on the spot, and he was good, real good. And I’d just lost my best clown, Fred, so what the hell. I don’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. “Did you get his story from him?”

“You mean his life story? I don’t like to pry, that’s not really my business. But I got the sense he was a foster kid, maybe he ran away from a bad situation. You see that a lot these days, really sad shit, pardon my French. Like I said, though, he was a sweet kid. He was the kind of guy who’d chase you down the street to give you the shirt off his back.”

That certainly was in line with everything I’d ever heard about Nicky Bellington. It made sense he’d display the same nature as Reed Tolliver.

I consulted my notes. “Is his girlfriend, Tessa-T-is she available? I’d like to speak with her.”

Fatone stood. He walked over to a narrow ledge covered in loose file folders and opened one and scanned the contents and then said, “2B. The younger employees are all staying down at the Cottage Inn. She’s in 2B. I told her to take a few days off, she’s just real tore up about Reed.”

The Cottage Inn was a cluster of tiny cabins built along a narrow stretch of the Arkansas River that ran parallel to town. I knew it well. I’d been there just a few months ago, on a domestic call that resulted in a young man shooting his even younger wife in the abdomen. She bled out before the ambulance could get her to the hospital.

It was a beautiful location with bad juju, as Brody would say.

Fatone and I spoke for a few more minutes. He told me Fellini’s had more than two hundred regular employees, staying at various campgrounds, hotels, and motels in the area. I consulted my notes again and asked Fatone to put together a list of everyone who hadn’t already been interviewed by our officers. Then I called Sam Birdshead and asked him to swing by with a partner and pick up the list and get started on the rest of the employees.

I stood and walked out of the trailer. At the bottom of the steps, I turned around and looked back up at the general manager. “Thank you, Mr. Fatone. I’ll be in touch soon.”

He leaned down and shook my hand and gave me a sad smile. “Wait, don’t say it… don’t leave town, right?”

I looked up at him. An errant nose hair, gray and tiny, hung from his left nostril, just touching the whiskers that dotted his upper lip.

“It would be better, sir, if you and the others stay in Cedar Valley for the foreseeable future.”

Fatone nodded. “We’ll lose money, of course, but it’ll give everyone a break. We’ve been hitting the road pretty hard. The towns keep rolling by, week after week. Same story in each of them, until now, that is.”

I started to walk away, then thought of something and turned back to him. He stood in the doorway, looking off in the distance at the man I’d seen earlier, still sweeping up the previous day’s trash.

“Mr. Fatone, I would also advise you to tell your employees to be careful. Whoever killed Reed did it viciously, without remorse. This person may be targeting certain individuals, or it could be random. We simply don’t know yet. So, be careful. And tell your group to be careful, too.”

He said, “Absolutely, Deputy. We’re all spooked. We’ll be on the lookout. That’s what families do, you know-we watch out for one another.”