Unhappy Hooligan (26 page)

“Look,” he said, “it all comes down to this. McFarley had been around the circus for days—but that poker game was the first time he hadn’t been seen in clown make-up. It was the first time that Larsen recognized him—probably they recognized each other. And Larsen was sure that McFarley was going to make trouble. That’s why Larsen left the poker game so abruptly, and that’s why he got Klipp to go with him to investigate the potentialities—by going to McFarley’s apartment. It wasn’t really a premeditated murder. It was just, as they say, that it seemed to be a good idea at the time. And you will remember that Olaf had no love for McFarley—the guy had given him a child’s space-pilot outfit and thoroughly embarrassed him.”

“This is hard to put in the record,” said Sergeant Jason.

“I don’t care
where
it gets,” said Rook, “but it’s very obvious that this man Taras, who was known as Captain Larsen, was sure that McFarley, who had been implicated on the side of the law in his youthful misdemeanor, would remember him—and he may also have been certain that a money-hungry midget like Olaf who is deeply in debt and deeply anxious to make
big
with pretty blondes—”

“Wait a minute,” said the sergeant firmly. “I don’t get this. What is all this with the midget and the locked door?”

Rook nodded at him patiently. “Midgets—like monkeys—can throw bolts and get over transoms. This deal did not take a magician.”

Jason shook his head. “I don’t know—it’s too fast for me. And what’s this about the midget being missing? He’s not.”

Howie Rook said, “He is
very
missing. And while you’re here would you care to look at a knot I clipped from Olaf’s trunk? Only an experienced sailor can tie a knot like that.”

“But this cop-clown we just saw—” Velie cut in.

“A
fake
ghost,” Rook explained. “All clowns look alike; their own mothers couldn’t recognize them. Gentlemen, meet Little Willy, otherwise Bill Horton.” Rook indicated a handsome, very masculine but tiny man who was just finishing removing his make-up in Hap Hammett’s water bucket.

“Take it easy, mister,” cut in the Seaside sheriff. “I got a report to make too, you know. You’re saying that you imported this midget to take the place of the other one? I don’t—”

“Same size, same make-up,” Rook told him. “Maxie fixed him up so he was the living image of Olaf and cued him too.”

“And you’re saying that the real Olaf is dead and in his trunk?”

Rook nodded. “I think so. The knots suggest that, as I said. Larsen-Taras probably intended to drop the trunk over the cliff into the ocean at high tide tonight.”

“But—but—”

“It was simple. Little Willy is a friend of mine. I interviewed him for the newspaper once, after he starred in a gag Western movie where all the midget cowboys rode Shetland ponies. He kindly consented to double for Olaf today. It was just a trick to push the murderer over the edge of his self-control. It’s not nice to see somebody you thought you’d killed suddenly come romping in, good as new. So the man cracked wide open.”

“That he did, in more ways than one…” admitted the sheriff.

And then Little Willy joined them, toweling off his face. “Glad to meet you, gentlemen. Glad to make a quick buck too, the way the picture business is going. I think I may even hit the boss for Olaf’s job, permanent.”

“Sure, Mr. Timken will go for it,” spoke up Maxie from the side lines. “We’ll all be glad to work with a big movie star.” He turned to Rook. “I guess this is good-by, huh?”

They shook hands formally, and Maxie led Little Willy off toward the cook tent. Rook started to relax, then stood up as Mavis McFarley and Vonny approached him. “You were simply wonderful!” Mavis said, clutching his hand. “You remember what I said—”

“Yes,” Rook told her firmly. “I’ll send you a sizable bill one of these days.”

“But—”

“Oh, yes, the reward I went and offered without authorization. If you and Vonny want to chip in on that—”

Mavis stiffened, and the green eyes chilled a little. “Of course we do! It was well worth it, Mr. Rook. You are strictly a businessman, aren’t you? I must remember to send you all my detective work!” And she flounced away, hell having no fury…

Vonny remained. “Mr. Rook—Benny just up and asked me to marry him again. I—we wish you’d be best man.”

“I am at the moment too damn tired, my child, to be any kind of man. But best wishes and congratulations and I’ll send you an autographed picture of me in clown costume as a wedding present. Scoot now, will you, please?”

Vonny scooted, but with a warm and happy smile. Howie Rook relaxed in his folding camp chair, facing Hap Hammett who by this time was out of make-up. “Do you suppose,” said Rook, “that they have a dive in Seaside that sells dark beer?”

“I should think so,” said Hap, nodding gravely. Then he looked off. “Oh, oh! Here it comes.” He tiptoed away.

Mary Kelly du Mond suddenly materialized out of the deepening gloom. She seized Rook, and kissed him soundly. “You were simply wonderful!” she cried. “But now—but now I suppose that since it’s all over, you’ll be leaving us for good?”

Rook nodded, and Hap Hammett spoke up from the background. “If he ever wants to come back to the circus, Cordelia and I will always have a spot for him. Nobody can fall over his own feet like the one and only Howie Rook.” He tactfully went into the dressing room and shut the door.

“But I guess you see now,” whispered the lovely dark-haired girl in Howie Rook’s ear, “that it just wouldn’t work—I mean you and me. I guess I got carried away a little because you were so gallant and so nice—and maybe,” she added with some candor, “because I figured you for a rich utilities magnate, and everything. But I’ll always
think
of you.”

“What with?” said Hap Hammett, poking his head out of the dressing room door.

Mary Kelly tossed her head, kissed Howie again, and then went tripping off in her unique springlike walk.

“You’ve been jilted, I guess,” observed Hap Hammett dryly.

“I have been renounced forever,” agreed Rook, grinning slightly. “But I’ll try to be very, very brave.”

“You are lucky to get out of that alive,” said the big clown. “Ten to one she winds up this winter with Gordo slinging knives at her. Type casting. What would you say to a thick steak and a tall drink with me in the town?”

“Why not?” Rook agreed, brightening. “I am still on an expense account, so I’ll buy.”

And just then Mr. Timken came striding in, looking twice as harried as usual. “Congratulations, Mr. Rook,” he said. “I just got word that they finally contacted Mr. Rowland and he said
of course
he’d go along with the reward. And some guy named Elder on the
Tribune
said he’d talked on the phone to their photographer and that they’ll also go along on the reward, and they want a lot of copy on the story fast.”

“Splendid,” said Howie Rook.

“Huh? Oh, yes. We did pull that one off, didn’t we?” Timken brightened, and then saddened again. “But just think of the spot you put me on! We’ve got a performance tonight, and there isn’t anybody to work the tigers!”

“Don’t look at
me!”
cried Howie Rook, and got out of there fast.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Howie Rook Mysteries

M
IDNIGHT IS THE FABLED
witching hour. It is the time for young and star-crossed lovers to cling to each other in parked jalopies past all parental curfews, the time for lonely men of a certain age to take long walks and count their rosaries of remembered sins, and now and again it is the time to hear the beating of dark and invisible wings overhead.

Dragged forward by a tireless and impetuous black spaniel, the tall, long-striding man in the dark suit was almost to the middle of the crosswalk when he kept his own appointment in Samarra. He was whistling the melancholy “September Song” under his breath—but it was to be his last breath. From out of nowhere and the misty southern California night came the screaming Juggernaut of a station wagon.

There was the sickening sound of impact, and then man and beast rose in seeming slow motion to describe eccentric cartwheels in the air. Even in dying they were still grotesquely linked by the leather leash. Then they crumpled into shapeless nothings in the gutter, some twenty feet from the intersection, and were forever still.

The station wagon roared on past its victims, and also past the Model-A Ford parked inconspicuously in the shadow of an overhanging eucalyptus. There a boy and a girl had just been engaged in the slow process of untwining themselves and returning to the world from their own special Dreamsville. He had just flicked on his headlights, preparatory to taking the girl home (not more than twenty minutes late, if he drove all-out) almost at the split second of the tragedy. Now, though they had already seen more than they wanted to, they turned their heads to look incredulously after the speeding car. Just before it vanished in the distance they saw its lights flash on.

He was nineteen and she was sixteen (or almost) and their reactions to a “happening” like this were fairly predictable. The boy reached for the ignition key, but the girl caught his arm. “What are we going to do?” She was shaking with excitement.

“Don’t lose your cool, hipchick. What’s it got to do with us? We’re not getting involved!”

“So we just drive off and leave him in the gutter, like old garbage or something?”

“He’s good and dead! And remember, your folks think we’re at a walk-in movie in Westwood. This comes out and they’re going to start screaming again and accuse us of making out in the heap, and we’re still sort of on probation for what happened Easter Week, don’t forget!” Just then a porch light came on across the street and a front door opened. “See?” cried the boy in mingled triumph and relief. “Somebody else heard the smash, and they’ll rush to the phone and call the fuzz, so everything will be taken care of without our sticking our little necks out at all!” He put the hot-rod into a racing start and they were soon away from the scene of the tragedy, oblivious and uninvolved.

But one thing leads to another. Not quite twenty-four hours later, in the Stygian darkness of a small bachelor apartment on Larrabee Street in a dingy section of West Hollywood, the phone rang suddenly (how else?) and rang again and kept on ringing. Howie Rook unrolled his ursine bulk from the blankets, trod heavily out into the living room, and his “Hello!” was the rumbling protest of a grizzly dragged out of hibernation.

“Howie, old buddy!” It was Hal Agnews’ voice, the honeyed tones usually reserved for jurors and for lady clients. “Hope I didn’t wake you from rosy dreams of Sophia Loren?”

“If you must know, Counselor, I had Tigran Petrosian trapped in the finals of the World Match in Moscow, using the Caro-Kann variation of the Collé system, and it was inevitable mate in three. Why did you have to go and spoil it all?”

“Because I need you, Howie. It’s a case—a big one!” The effervescent defense attorney had no regular investigator on his staff, and so sometimes called on Rook for odd jobs of snooping.

“Like the other ‘big one’ where you were defending those loft robbers and sent me on a stakeout at a junkyard in Hawthorne for three nights in the rain? Or that multiple-assault thing where in one weekend I dug up more
against
our client than the police had been able to find in a month?”

“I said a
big
one and I meant it. Involving a lady in a jam. She’s lovelier even than Miss Holly Wood, the stripper I sent you a while back. And believe you me, this girl—she’s still only in her early twenties—is in even worse trouble! Will you lend a hand?” Agnews knew very well that under the crusty exterior, Rook had a romantic, almost quixotic streak in him, and sometimes played shamelessly on that weakness.

“When you say ‘big one’ you must mean homicide, and I haven’t seen anything in the papers recently that was even worth clipping for my files. Or hasn’t this broken yet?”

“Then you didn’t happen to read in the afternoon paper about Mr. John Charteris, socialite sportsman and civic figure, who got clobbered by a hit-and-run driver out in Brentwood last night?”

“N-no, I—wait! Was that the one where the man was walking the family dog, and both he and the pooch got hit at some dark intersection? I remembered it because of the dog.” Rook liked dogs.

“That’s the one. Our old friend Wilt Mays of the D.A.’s office, whom you will remember with mingled loathing and respect, has leaped to the conclusion that Charteris’ death was accidently on purpose—mostly because the driver didn’t touch his brakes. No skid marks.”

“Maybe the driver didn’t even see the pedestrian or the dog. Anybody walking at night should have sense enough to wear light-colored clothing or carry a newspaper or something—”

“Will you shut up and listen? An old man named Wilson, living on Darlington near the corner of Gretna Green where it all happened, came out onto his porch in time to see an old hot-rod being driven away from the scene, two kids in it. Just innocent bystanders, it seems. But they undoubtedly saw it happen.”

“That doesn’t help much,” said Rook. “Unless they’re located.”

“The police think they have the murder car. I got tipped off that the couple who owned it had left it—with the keys in the dash—on the parking lot of an all-night supermarket on San Vicente, about eleven
P.M.
They thought it wasn’t quite where they’d left it when they came out with their groceries, but they didn’t know anything was really wrong until they got home and discovered the front end was damaged—a dented fender, a cracked headlight, and some messy gobs of what the police lab identified as human and animal blood, plus fur and fabric. So evidently the car was borrowed for the express purpose of murder, then politely returned.”