Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) (22 page)

“Easy enough,” said the Sheriff of Nottingham, stepping out from behind a tent with a very large shotgun in his hands. We stopped. Behind us stepped Alex, also holding a shotgun.

“You shoot from there,” I said, “and you’ll kill each other.”

“And you in the cross fire,” said Nelson evenly, his white hat over his eyes.

“That hat doesn’t make you a good guy,” I said.

“Shut up, Toby,” whispered Shelly. “Do what they say.”

“I know who killed the Tanuccis,” I went on with more confidence than I felt.

Alex took a step up behind us, and Nelson stood his ground.

“So do we,” said Nelson. “Just put up your hands, all of you. You too, big fella and little fella, or maybe you won’t have any hands to put up.”

“I think,” said Jeremy, lifting his hands and whispering to me, “we try to take them now. If they get you back to …”

“No,” I said to him and then to Nelson, “OK. Let’s go. You’ve got me.”

“Indeed, indeed,” said Nelson, rocking on his heels. “I have a whole menagerie, a regular conspiracy of freaks.”

“You,” said Gunther indignantly, stepping forward, “are a semiliterate dunderkopf.”

“Sez you, peewee,” Nelson answered. “All of you just move along slow and sweet, like the little girls at the Catholic school in Palm Hills, and we will be friends.”

We moved in a single line with our hands up through the circus grounds and to a truck on the dirt road.

“Into the back of the truck,” said Nelson. “I’m going to drive, and Alex is going to be in the car right behind. We are going to go very slowly, and if one of you happens to fall out of the truck on the way back, there is a very great chance of an accident involving you and Alex’s car. We no longer have a police car. It met with a slight accident, the nature of which we will demonstrate on the person of Mr. Peters.”

“You have a way with words, Nelson,” I said, getting into the back of the truck.

Gunther had to suffer the indignity of being put up on the truck by Jeremy. Shelly needed the same help, but he didn’t see it as indignity. He was too busy blaming me for his troubles.

“I’m sorry, Gunther,” I said.

“You did not bring this to pass,” said Gunther, trying to keep himself and his wardrobe clean as he stood holding onto a piece of rope. Jeremy made himself confortable and kept his eyes on Alex as we drove.

“I don’t know how you talk me into these things,” said Shelly, cleaning his glasses on his dirty jacket. “Mildred is not a fool. She told me something would happen if I came here. Mildred went to college like me. She had courses in things like philosophy. I should have listened to her. I’m a dentist.”

I found nothing coherent in Shelly’s rambling, so I tried not to listen.

“Do you really know who the killer is?” Gunther asked as we bounced around. It came out, “Do … uh, uh … you … uh, uh … really … uh, uh …” Hardly the conditions for a prolonged conference.

“I’m not sure. I’ll tell you what I’ve got.” And I told him. He listened, nodded his head, thought, and nodded some more.

“There is hatred in that face,” Jeremy said, “but there is also something else too. Some sense of calm, balance.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The deputy,” Jeremy said, nodding to Alex in the car on the road behind us.

“He wants to kill me,” I said.

“He is not the one to fear,” said Jeremy. “It’s the one in the front, the sheriff, a frightened man. He sweats too much and is too far away from what he really is. A frightened man who doesn’t know who he is.”

“I don’t have to take that,” shouted Shelly. “Being a landlord doesn’t give you …”

“He’s talking about the sheriff,” I explained, and from the front of the truck came Nelson’s voice, “Shut up back there. We’re in town, and I don’t want you waking the dead or the citizens.”

The truck came to a stop, and Alex parked right in the middle of the street. He came out of his car, shotgun in hand. Nelson came around to the rear of the truck with his weapon out.

“Now,” he said. “You three and a half come out and get inside with no trouble.”

As he got off first, Jeremy took a dangerous step toward the sheriff, who backed away and cocked his shotgun.

“It would be best,” said Jeremy, “if you stopped trying to make something more of yourself by being offensive to us. It does not accomplish your end. In fact, it makes you look more pathetic.”

We were all off the truck now, and I had the uneasy feeling that we might be gunned down where we stood. The Mirador Day Massacre. Nelson looked far from pleased. I glanced at Alex, who was looking at me, and tried to read his look, but there was no reading it.

We paraded into the Mirador police station, pausing for only a second to notice the boarded-up window Alex had destroyed the day before. The sun was up now, low but bright. It was going to be a sunny day and a long one, maybe a very long one.

“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.