Unhappy Hooligan (21 page)

Parkman read aloud incredulously:
“Hap Hammett,
veteran clown. Age 6o(?). Thymocentric, but reasonably adjusted. Reaction to the dog-rabbit episode very typical, he went right on clowning as if nothing had happened, but worried stiff for fear dog would catch and tear up rabbit and have to be destroyed or banished. Overaffection for mongrel dog indicated, speaks to her and about her as if she were a person. Anthropomorphism? Also marked schizoid tendencies; two entirely different personalities depending on whether in clown make-up and costume or not. Quick switch from introvert in street clothes to extrovert buffoon in clown character. IQ probably around 120. (Expenses—rabbit, $1. Boy to smuggle rabbit in and let loose—$2.50.)

“Bozo Klein,
formerly side-show thin man but put on weight and switched to clowning ten years ago. Abnormal height, sensitive about it. Probably a mild thymocentric hyphenate. Reaction to itch powder in make-up interesting but unremarkable, fluffed latter part of his act with mule and then changed clothes and went out for a beer. Withdrawn, introspective, introvert. IQ around 100. Age about 45. (Expenses—50 cents for Magic Itching Powder.)” Chief Parkman snorted in disgust.

“Just read on,” said Howie Rook quietly. “The worst is yet to come.”

Parkman read aloud:
“Captain Larsen,
tiger trainer. Prepituitary type, some thymus plus parathyroid. Cycles of irritability interspersed with shorter cycles of forced friendliness. Age about 40. Interesting to see what effect a spray of human blood would have on his tigers. Possible work through Doc Bowen or the Blood Bank??? Larsen plays poor poker; cautious on good hands and bluffs wildly on weak ones, his play is entirely predictable. Not apparently very interested in women, but state of mustache indicates certain vanity. IQ probably around 120. I
fink!”

“That last is the best rendition I can give of his hieroglyphics,” Rook admitted apologetically. “Why the man would descend to baby talk—”

Parkman nodded, and continued.
“Gordo Mazetti,
professional athlete and safety man for Mary Kelly, also doubles with horse acts and around menagerie. Pyknic type, will be fat in his forties. Age about 28. Heavy drinker, usually solo. Potential alcoholic, but compensates with constant heavy exercise. Some narcissism, worship of own body. Frantically jealous, particularly of anybody who can spend more money on Mary Kelly than he can. When he throws a knife at a target he visualizes real or imagined enemy or rival before him. Wears three religious medals on chain around his neck; probably never goes to Mass. IQ around 90. (Expenses—entertaining M.K.—$24.50.)”

“That’s Gordo, all right,” nodded Howie Rook. “Not a character you would care to meet in a dark alley, nor for that matter in a lighted one. Beauty-and-the-beast stuff, as far as Mary Kelly is concerned.”

“But what in hell
is
all this?” Parkman demanded. “Who did McFarley think he was, God or somebody?”

“He seems to have rushed in where angels, or psychoanalysts, would fear to tread. But read on.”

Chief Parkman let his cigar die quietly in the ashtray as he read on. Now and then he snorted. Finally he tossed down the notebook and its translation. “I can hardly believe any of this!” he finally exploded. “To let mice loose among the elephants…”

“It’s all true; it actually happened. The man took advantage of his
in
with the circus to work a complicated pseudoscientific test. And he wrote it all down, in jargon which he himself only half understood, probably. Itemizing every expenditure. He teased Mary Kelly’s worshiping Neanderthaler by hinting he was a millionaire playboy making avid passes at her, he teased the midgets—all of whom have king-size inferiority complexes, and even gave Olaf Klipp, the littlest midget, a space suit and helmet on his birthday.

“He worried Mr. Timken, the circus manager, with fake threatening phone calls—the circus is always jittery about such things because of ‘accidents’ in the past. He sucked a lemon in front of Leo Dawes, the bandmaster, so that the guy blew some sour notes and lost his tempo and caused a serious accident to a girl acrobat. He introduced loaded dice into a crap game being played by the black gang, and then ducked out and watched the fireworks from a distance. Not even the equestrian director and Tom Reale the mailman were spared—he gave the former a fake movie call for an audition, sensing that the guy was a ham at heart, and he had someone tip off Reale that he was going to be arrested for failing to register and get a federal license to make book on the races. And so on and so on, all down the line. McFarley pried into everybody’s weakness like a dentist’s drill into a sore tooth. So you see—”

“It’s a wonder they didn’t
all
want to kill him!” growled Chief Parkman.

Rook shrugged. “They didn’t
all
know what he was up to. The guy was clever, and he covered his traces pretty well—though some of them did start calling him the ‘Jinx Man’ behind his back. I think—I’ve got a hunch that just one person at the circus saw through him, no more. And just between ourselves, is there motive enough for murder in any of those cute little psychological experiments that McFarley played? There’s a big difference between wanting to kill somebody and actually performing the job, you know.”

Parkman nodded thoughtfully, and relighted his cigar. “There are very damn few of us who have lived around without once or twice wishing somebody dead. Only we laugh it off or drink it off, and forget it. It takes a real psychopathic individual to step over the line.”

“Yes, but—” Rook began.

“You know what?” The Chief wagged his cigar. “I like the dame for it.”

“Mavis? Excuse me, but I think you’re nuts.”

“No, I mean the dame at the circus. This Mary Kelly du Mond or whatever it is. If McFarley gave her the fast talk and led her on, and then she found out that he was no millionaire and that he was just using her to experiment on, like you’d experiment on a rat in a laboratory…”

“She wouldn’t kill anybody, and if she did she’d not be able to keep the secret for twenty-four hours,” Rook said stoutly. “Kelly isn’t the type.”

“No? Beautiful women are quite often the exact type. They think that, because of their looks and their sex appeal, they can get by with murder. Look at Madeleine Smith, and Elizabeth Wharton, and Cordelia Botkin, and our own local Barbara Graham…”

“I never liked the verdict on that last one,” Rook said. He picked up the notebook and the translation. “This is either the key to the whole thing, or else I’m barking up the wrongest tree in the blindest blind alley in history. Maybe—maybe it’s what isn’t here that’s really important. I mean what somebody
thought
might be there. Because somebody committed a robbery looking for this notebook night before last, and they only missed it because it had happened to have slipped down through a ripped pocket and into the lining of a costume jacket—the one McFarley wore and the one I wear now. That proves the murderer is worried. I’m going to figure out a way to worry him some more.”

“You’re going back to the show?”

“Naturally.”

“Alone? Better I should give you a couple of the boys. If Jason and Velie went with you—”

“Sure, they’d arrest everybody who’s on that list of McFarley’s experimental subjects and try to beat the truth out of them. No, Mr. Parkman, no again. It wouldn’t work. The circus people are close-mouthed and clannish where the law is concerned; some of them have been pushed around too much in the past. And at the first trace of any strong-arm stuff they’d yell, ‘Hey, Rube!’ and toss your bright boys into the briney. You’ve got no jurisdiction out of the city, remember. No, I’m working on a better plan. We’ve got to make our man declare himself—if it is a man. And we’ve got to use circus methods. When in Rome, wear a Roman nose and burn Roman candles.”

“I hope you know what you’re up to,” said the Chief dubiously.

“I hope I know, too,” said Howie Rook, “and if you take my advice you’ll remove the heat from Mavis. She’s jittery already, and I’d very much like to have her on hand for a little party I’m dreaming up.”

“And you’d also maybe like a free trip to Hawaii, with no holds barred?”

Rook blinked, and then nodded. “Oh,
so!
You are using a planted microphone in her hotel room, then!”

“Natch,” admitted Parkman. “We omit no reasonable precautions, why should we? All is fair, my dear Howie, in love and war and criminal investigation. Okay, okay. When you think you’re ready to throw this mysterious party you’re talking about, I’ll take it upon myself to have two of our men and some local law and Mavis McFarley all there. In for a dime, in for a dollar. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got other work to do.”

“Thanks,” said Rook. He helped himself to another of the Chief’s Corona Coronas, and took his departure. Once out in the corridor he manfully resisted an impulse to drop down to the detective bureau to needle Jason and Velie a bit. It wasn’t the time; he might have to put up with them later, but there was no use taking them into his confidence at the moment. There were too many strings untied, too many stones under which he had not had time to look.

He stopped in at a near-by phone booth and called Vonny McFarley’s number, with no result except that he was again greeted by Miss Deep South, who regretted that Vonny was out. “She’s workin’,” explained the girl. “Or practically—she’s auditionin’ for a job as dress model out at Robinsberg’s Eastwood. But I could have her call you—”

“You could not,” said Howie Rook. “But tell her I’ll phone her in the morning around nine o’clock, and she’d better be there. The name is Rook—”

“Niyun o’clock?” gasped the girl. “But we—Vonny never gets up early—”

“I’ll keep ringing until she does,” promised Howie Rook, and hung up. Then he went over to the
Tribune
Building and buttonholed Lou Elder at the desk in the crowded, noisy, ink-smelling city room. It was a desk Howie Rook knew well, still ornamented by the baseball bat that he himself had kept handy as a warning to publicity men.

Lou’s face was grave. “It’s all fixed about the photographer,” he said quickly. “And you can have all the space you want, maybe even a feature in the Sunday mag section. But it looks like that’s as far as we can go. I took it up with Karp and Judkins in the business office, and they were pretty cool on the idea…”

“Thanks,” said Rook, rising.

“Where you going, pop?”

“I’m going upstairs to see them.”

“They’re out,” Lou said. “I mean really out.”

Rook nodded. “Important newspaper business. Karp is probably trying to break a hundred at Lakeside, and Judkins is having a high colonic, or something. But this thing is really big, Lou. Hit ’em again on it when you can locate those penny-pinching characters—tell them the story blows tomorrow. I’ll phone you from the circus grounds tomorrow morning. I don’t have to remind you that this sheet—and you—owe me something.”

“Yes, but—” Lou scowled. “Oh, all right. I’ll make another pitch first thing in the morning. I’ll do my best, pop.”

“Thanks,” said Rook, and departed, feeling despondent but dogged. The weight of years was on his shoulders; part of that, he knew, came from lack of sleep and food and beer. Those lacks he could rectify at once, and he did.

It was late in the afternoon when he caught the bus for Vista Beach, and he was still tired enough so that he closed his eyes on nearly a hundred miles of some of the most beautifully breathtaking coastal scenery in California; he slept the sleep of the dead. Drowsily disembarking at last, he went to his hotel and changed into sport clothes. Then he started out for the circus grounds. He had his usual trouble in locating a taxi, and finally resorted to hitchhiking, being carried down Highway 101 in a ramshackle truck driven by a Japanese gardener who turned off a side road half a mile before they reached the circus grounds. Rook congratulated himself that he had plenty of time to make the evening show, at least.

Only the circus wasn’t there any more.

He stood alone on a barren waste of soiled sawdust, decorated with bits of candy wrappers, popcorn sacks, pop bottles, burst balloons and cigarette butts. Half dazed, he moved around the area, not knowing what he was looking for. Maybe a clue—it was about time he stumbled on something along those lines. But it wasn’t his lucky evening—he saw nothing except one lonely toy chameleon, which scuttled hastily into its lair in the sawdust at his approach. Dropped by some child, he thought. Well, it would have a better chance here in the open, on its own, than in some hastily contrived aquarium to be constantly teased by grubby little fingers…

There was no telephone booth now where he could phone for a taxi—Rook had the two-mile walk back into town, growing slowly and steadily angrier as he walked. He was normally—he told himself—a patient man. But things were beginning to pile up on him; he was being stopped and hindered and thwarted at every turn. And now even the circus wouldn’t stand still; though he had seen that fantastic little city come into being only a few days ago, it had seemed so perfect, so complete and permanent, that even now it was hard for him to believe that in such a short space of time it could have burst like a soap bubble…

“‘Here today and gone tomorrow…’” he quoted, not that it made him feel any better. It was not too difficult to find the circus’ immediate itinerary; he picked up a copy of the
South Coast News
at the Vista Beach drugstore and discovered that it was playing Seaside, fifty miles to the south, today and tomorrow. And there was no bus for almost an hour.

Throwing all discretion to the winds, he dug rashly into the remainder of the expense money that Mavis McFarley had advanced him, and commandeered a taxi for the trip. After another nap, which lasted most of an hour, he was in Seaside—past and out of Seaside, and at the circus grounds. Again the location was on a flat headland above the Pacific, the Big Top and the lesser tents looking as set and permanent as ever, myriad color lights blazing, a fair crowd still roaming the Midway. But the show was under way. Rook had been around long enough now so that, from the strains of music coming from the Big Top, he knew just what acts were on. It would be just about time for the clown fire-rescue scene, and he heaved a sigh of relief at not having to be the one rescued this time.