Unhappy Hooligan (12 page)

The girl shrugged her curvaceous shoulders. “Oh,
that.
You know, circus people are real funny sometimes. Like you can’t throw your hat on a bed and you mustn’t whistle in a dressing room, stuff like that. And there’s a band number—it’s von Suppé’s “Cavalry Overture”—whenever it’s played somebody dies or there’s a serious accident or something, or so a lot of people think. Leo Dawes doesn’t believe it himself, but he gets criticized so much when he plays it that he only uses it once in a while, to fill in.”

“Oh, by the way, did he play it recently?”

“Only a few bars of it, last week—the time the baby bulls got pernickety as they often do, and started to make an exit through the customers’ entrance. Why?”

“Just wondering,” said Rook. “Go on, my dear.”

“You mean about Mr. McFarley and the jinx thing? Oh, it’s just some people think it’s unlucky to have amateurs trying to get into the act, that it throws things off. But none of what happened last week was Mr. McFarley’s fault, except maybe the time he sucked a lemon in front of the grandstand and made Leo Dawes break up and bust up the rhythm for the Nondellos, and of course McFarley didn’t mean that, he just didn’t know any better. I’m sure it must have been just some darn fool juvenile delinquent—we get them around here occasionally—who let the rabbit loose and busted up Hap Hammett’s act—that Hap covered it wonderfully, as an old trouper like him would do. And it was probably the same little devil who put the white mice in the bulls’ hay and almost got them to stampede. Some kid with a lot of pet animals and real crazy ideas.”

“Mice?”
said Rook, putting down his beer.

“Oh, yes. It was in the middle of a show. Some of these little hoodlums will do just anything. This one let loose some pet mice around the bulls, and they of course went crazy. How would you like to have a mouse running up your nose, especially if you had a nose six feet long, God forbid? Biddy was the real hero of that one.”

“Heroine,” corrected Rook. “Go on, my dear.”

“Well, Gordo—he works with the bull men and around the horses when I’m not needing him; everybody in the show doubles and triples just like I have to ride in a howdah in the spec number—Gordo thought fast for once. He rushed over and got the little ape out of her cage, which, thank goodness, didn’t happen to be locked, and let her loose. The bulls of course are used to Biddy and don’t mind her at all because they live together. She just loves mice, so it came out all right.”

Rook was slightly bewildered. “You mean Biddy caught the mice?”

“Oh, yes, every one. And she ate them,” Mary Kelly said, almost apologetically. “Like they were smorgasbord.”

He gulped. “But at least that was rather fast thinking on Gordo’s part, wasn’t it?”

“Him?” she said. “All he’s really good for is to stand between me and a busted neck. And do you know, he’s got the nerve to keep trying to get me to team with him during the winter layoff in a knife-throwing act! Nobody, and I mean
nobody,
is going to throw knives at my fair white body, even if I have to wash dishes first!”

Rook, still conscious of that weight in his pocket and the rip in his new Homburg, said: “You don’t trust his aim, then?”

“No, it’s not that. I don’t trust Gordo. You know the old saying in show business about two-acts? They almost always drift into using a lower berth, to save train fare. And I’ll have none of that.” She attacked a large piece of lemon-meringue pie. “Gordo is tops with a knife, though. Probably the best in the circus.”

“You mean he isn’t the only one who has that hobby?”

“Heavens, no! The boys around the circus practice knife throwing the way farmers throw horseshoes, almost all of them. You see, you get so bored between shows. A lot of them are good at it. Leo Dawes is a whiz at it, Tommy Bayne, the boss rigger, is pretty good. Even the midgets work at it; you see a good knife act can get winter billing almost anywhere, and that takes care of the bread-and-butter thing.”

Rook hadn’t thought of that angle. The people of the circus did have a bleak period during the winter. “Then just what do most of you do during the layoff time?” he asked.

“Anything, almost. The clowns do some Shrine Circuses or a little TV work or maybe a vaudeville turn or even parlor-magic stuff for parties…”

“And the rest of you? The aerialists and equestrians and so on?”

“Most of them are foreigners on temporary work permits. The circus management has an
in
with Immigration; they can get anybody who is under contract to the show into the country on a work permit, but just for the circus season. When it’s over, they just have to grab the first ship home to the old country. It’s tough on some of them; like the Nondellos, they do
so
want to have Speedy stay here and go to school. She’s half Americanized already. They want to stay, but they’ve struck some snag, and Art and Gina are worried sick about it.”

“The Land of Promise, and we don’t perform all our promises.” Rook nodded, and ordered more beer. “So every fall most of the circus people scatter all over the world? It must be something of a job to get them all together again, come the opening day?”

“Oh, they come. Or else they’re replaced by somebody else just as good or maybe better…” She broke off suddenly, murmured something about powdering her nose, and fled. Rook blinked, then turned and surveyed the front of the bar. There was Muscle Man Gordo up forward, downing a tall drink.

“Ouch!” said Rook to himself. There was more here than met the eye—there was always more than met the eye, or the brain. “The world is out of joint, and why should I—” He watched as Gordo tossed off his drink, threw money on the mahogany, and went out.

Mary Kelly was taking her time in the powder room; during her absence a number of other circus people came and went—among them Leo Dawes, the man in the Hawaiian sport shirt, Bozo the clown, and Maxie and a group of dwarfs and midgets. Rook made himself as inconspicuous as possible, as at the moment he had no desire to join them in any conviviality.

Mary finally came back, and sat down. While away she had repaired her lipstick, much to Rook’s disappointment, as he wanted to check the color. “This place is getting to be like Grand Central Station,” she said lightly, almost too lightly. “Maybe because it’s the only dive in town.”

“I don’t think Gordo saw you,” Rook told her. “What if he did?”

She didn't smile. “Just that he’d have made a scene, probably. Or tried to join us or something, and embarrassed you. Nobody knows what goes on in that thick skull of his.”

“Was Gordo jealous of McFarley?”

“McFarley and everybody else I even look at! Even poor little Olaf, my most devoted swain.”

“Olaf? The clown midget?” Rook blinked.

She nodded. “Oh, sure—midgets always get crushes on big girls, didn’t you know? Olaf wants to marry me and take me away from it all, so he says. But he only makes about enough to keep me in underwear, and I hear he’s frightfully in debt besides. And of course I’d die first!”

“But—” Rook began.

“That’s the way it is with the little people. You see, they’re born in normal families, and they can marry normal people and usually have normal children too. But besides, I don’t like Olaf. Nobody does, except maybe Captain Larsen. Larsen gets a kick out of the little guy; and sometimes lends him money when Olaf is in one of his usual jams.”

“You were saying that nobody knows what goes on in Gordo’s head. Nobody knows what goes on in anybody’s head. A man with a black scowl may have a migraine headache—or he may be contemplating bloody murder.”

“Murder?”
she tasted the word, as if it were bitter on the tongue.

“Yes. Murder is rather a hobby of mine; I mean collecting clippings about unusual murders. Some of them are rather fascinating. There’s one from an A.P. dispatch some years ago. A woman and her lover, down in Chiloé, Chile, committed the perfect murder by tying up the unhappy husband and tickling him to death with chicken feathers!”

“Oh!” gasped Mary Kelly.

Rook nodded. “And they’d never have been caught if they hadn’t had a lover’s quarrel. She talked.”

The dark girl laughed a little nervously. “How fantastic! I’ll have to come up and see your clippings sometime, so much more interesting than etchings. But now it’s getting kinda late, and I have to—”

“I wonder,” interrupted Howie Rook very casually, “if the McFarley we’ve been talking about is the same James McFarley who was found shot dead in his apartment last Thursday morning? Of course you read about that?”

“What?”
Mary Kelly turned faintly green, as if she had been hit with a baseball bat across the stomach. “Then that’s why—” she began, and stopped short. “I didn’t know,” she said slowly. “In the circus nobody ever reads anything but
Billboard
or maybe the
Daily Racing Form.”
She studied the heavily bediamonded watch on her slim wrist. “I’m afraid I really have to go now. No, please don’t come with me; it’s better if I just take a cab out to the circus yards alone. If you bring me to the train it’ll be all over the circus tomorrow; my affairs are of so damn much interest to everybody. Oh, I don’t mean
that
kind of affairs,” she added hastily, with what might have been a blush.

When she was gone, Howie Rook philosophically sat down to finish his beer and think things over. He made a few more notes on his yellow copy paper. He had, he decided, learned a lot about the circus in one short day, even if he hadn’t learned much about James McFarley and the reasons for his demise.

He walked back to the hotel, took a brisk shower, then filled the tub and soaked his still-aching legs. He was asleep in five minutes, to dream not of murders or clues or clippings but only of a phantasm in which he was pinned behind bars and was being eternally squirted by Biddy the orangutan. He finally awoke, cold and squirming, to find that the shower outlet overhead was dripping on him and that the bath water had grown cold. He tottered off to bed and was just nicely asleep again when the telephone went off in his ear.

“Mmpff?” he managed to answer after it had rung four times. It turned out to be Mavis McFarley calling long distance from Los Santelos. It seemed that the determined woman had tried every hotel and motor court in the beach area, and had finally run him down. “My dear lady,” he pleaded. “It’s after two o’clock. Can’t it wait until morning, whatever it is?”

“No, it can’t.” Her voice was icy and sharp as a broken pane of frosted glass. “I just called up to tell you that you’re
through!”

“Through?” he echoed sleepily.

“Yes, through! Finished, washed up. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Howie Rook.

“The very
idea
of your starting inquiries about Mac’s life insurance, and what I stood to lose unless somebody could prove it was murder instead of suicide! Do you think I wanted all that dragged out into the open just at this time?” She was boiling with rage. “Don’t deny it—my husband’s law office called me today.”

Rook sighed. So Lou Elder’s emissaries hadn’t been too discreet. The current crop of journalism school graduates…
“I
made no inquiries,” he told her, which was true only in a literal sense. “But you’ve given me an idea. In situations like this, the more that’s dragged out into the open, the better. Unless, of course, one has something to hide.”

“Hide? What have
I
possibly got to hide?” She was almost hysterical. “I’d have told you about that insurance settlement, if you’d only asked me. Are you too stupid to see what’s going on? If I can be framed for Mac’s murder, the insurance money naturally will go to somebody else—and you figure out who that somebody would be!”

“You mean
Vonny?”

“Who else?”

There was something wrong with that, but, weary and half asleep as he was, Howie Rook couldn’t put his finger on just what. “Nobody is going to frame anybody,” he said firmly, “though the idea seems to come readily enough to some people’s minds.”

He yawned. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to bed and seek the arms of Morpheus—or seconal. I expect a hard day tomorrow.”

There was the rumble of a man’s voice in that distant room, but over the phone Rook was unable to catch any of the words. Mavis said, “But I thought I told you—”

“I think you’ve changed your mind. If the story of my summary dismissal should get into the newspapers—and I could easily see that it did—it would look even more suspicious than the insurance thing. Besides, my dear lady, it is easier to get me started on a problem than to stop me.”

“But—but I think I was tailed by a police car tonight—and there’s a man across the street who keeps an eye on my windows. I think the police are watching me!”

“All the more reason for my keeping on,” Rook pointed out reasonably. “Which of course I’m going to do anyway. Good night, Mrs. McFarley. Sweet dreams.” And he hung up on her before she could hang up on him.

“Yes,” I answered you last night.

“No,” this morning, sir, I say;

Colors seen by candle-light

Will not look the same by day.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I
T IS THE PROUD BOAST
of the Pullman Company that every sleeping car they ever manufactured—with the exception of the comparative few that have met utter disaster in a train wreck—is still running somewhere. The most venerable of all Pullmans, so Mary Kelly firmly believed, would be one hung up on the circus trains.

Her berth—the only home she knew from early spring to late fall—was in a rusty, creaky car once named Monadknock. The name had bled through the garish red paint, which is so traditionally the color of circuses and fire engines, but a great yellow 397 overlaid it. Inside, the upper and lower berths had been bolted into place, so that they could never be let down into seats as originally designed; while traveling, the circus people slept in them or lay in them and tried to read, or else stood in the aisles. There was no air conditioning, no heat, and no way of passing from one car to another. Forty people were locked up here in a crowded cubicle, more closely quartered than were the animals in the secondary trains.