Carnival of Death (2 page)

The following questions, relayed to him by Terry, ranged from one by a man who wanted to know the exact number of light-years it would take a spacecraft to reach Venus to a query by a teen-aged girl in Beverly Hills who asked if he’d ever met Elizabeth Taylor.

Chain smoking cigarettes and sipping at his coffee mug from time to time, Daly answered the questions he could, commented on those that interested him and flatly admitted he didn’t know the answers to others.

He hadn’t the least idea how long it would take a spacecraft to reach Venus. Yes, he’d met Elizabeth Taylor, some husbands back. Yes, he was emphatically in favor of a new rapid transit system. No, he didn’t think the Negroes were being “pushy.” After all, how long could you expect a race to be willing to travel tourist class when they were expected to pay first class fares?

No, he didn’t think that the Los Angeles Police Department was either venal or stupid. He thought that the boys in the department, from the chief down, were doing a good job. Yes, he had read the recently released FBI report that the national crime rate had climbed seven per cent during the year just past. He stressed the fact, however, that the Los Angeles police were faced with an almost insoluble sociological and ethnical problem. Los Angeles had two major minority groups, both underprivileged, sketchily schooled, inadequately housed. Naturally they were resentful. Resentment bred crime.

There were nights when everything went wrong. Contracted for guests failed to show. The cameramen lost the picture. His telephone girl was stupid, or mumbled, or both. The questions phoned in gave him little to work with. Tonight, as if to make up for the unpleasantness in the parking lot, except for a few raucous commercials over which neither Daly nor his staff had any control, the program flowed as smoothly as thick cream.

There were no mechanical failures. No cues were missed. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the impermanence of the bodice of her evening gown, kept in place only by a generous Mother Nature, and an occasional hasty tug, Terry Carstairs made a highly ornamental and articulate telephone girl. Daly’s interview with the self-admitted retired female former bookmaker who was running for a seat on the City Council with only one plank in her platform, the legalizing of off-the-track betting, turned out to be a collector’s item.

It was Miss Adams’ contention, and Daly was inclined to agree with her, that if it was legal and moral for men and women who could afford to take a day away from their work to drive to Santa Anita or Hollywood Park to bet through the pari-mutuels, it should be equally legal for horse lovers who couldn’t afford to go to the tracks to try to brighten their drab existence by placing a bet with the corner bookie.

The
pièce de résistance
of the program, however, should have been his interview with the twenty-four-year-old Miguel Tomas José Guido Laredo. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Daly’s guest was courteous and cooperative. He answered all of Daly’s questions to the best of his ability. His, however, was a success story in reverse. At twenty-four, Laredo was a bitter, cynical young man. All he wanted or expected from the interview was the fifty dollar fee that Daly paid his guests.

D
ALY LIKED
Laredo on sight. He paid the youth the tribute of getting to his feet to shake hands with him as the former circus aerialist limped onto the set and into the living rooms of Daly’s estimated three-quarter of a million viewers.

“It’s nice to have you with us.”

“It’s nice to be here, Mr. Daly,” Laredo said. “Paquita and I watch your show every night that you’re on the air.”

“Paquita?”

“Mrs. Laredo.”

Daly resumed his chair and indicated where the younger man was to sit. “It says here that your full name is Miguel Tomas José Guido Laredo. What do I call you? Miguel?”

The other man smiled thinly. “Mickey will do fine. At least that’s what most people call me.”

“But I thought you were Cuban.”

“No,” Laredo said. “Of Cuban ancestry. I was born right here in Los Angeles.” He added wryly, “In the star performer’s dressing room, between the opening fanfare and the grand finale. While the circus was playing a ten-day stand at the Colosseum.”

“That’s interesting,” Daly said. “I take it then that your parents were performers.”

“They were the star aerial act. The Flying Laredos. Then, a few years later, my parents decided they liked Los Angeles so well they bought a home in Hollywood and we started wintering here instead of in the regular winter quarters in Sarasota, Florida. In fact, I graduated from Hollywood High School.”

Daly smiled. “That explains why you have no accent. But, during the season, even as a child, you traveled with the circus? At least part of the time?”

“All of the time,” Laredo said. “The circus was my life. As far back as I can remember, and years before that, all the members of my family have been circus people. Most of them aerialists, both in this country and in Europe. And I followed in the family tradition. I started when I was three years old. As a kinker.”

The word was new to Daly. “What’s a kinker?”

“Another name for an acrobat or a tumbler. Usually one who works on the ground.”

“The circus evidently has a terminology of its own.”

“It does. For example, a clown is a joie, a luey or a paleface. A clown equestrian is a Pete Jenkins. A girl who rides in the grand opening is a spec girl. The musician who plays the calliope is a blowoff pusher.”

“That’s interesting,” Daly said. “And how long did you stay a kinker?”

Laredo smiled. “Not long. By the time I was ten I was doing a featured slack wire act. Meanwhile I practiced on the high traps four or five hours a day. And when I was fifteen, my mother and father and one of my uncles who worked with them took me into their act as a flyer and I became one of the Flying Laredos.”

Daly said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but those are two terms I think I know. The high traps are the high trapeze. And a flyer is the trapeze performer who is thrown from one catcher to another while the catchers hang away up there by their knees.”

Laredo nodded. “That’s right. As in the song about the daring young man on the flying trapeze. Only it isn’t quite as easy as it looks.”

“I’ll buy that.” Daly said. “And then …?”

“Then for the next few years, until I joined the invasion brigade, I traveled all over the world with the act.”

Daly protested, “But a few minutes ago you said you graduated from Hollywood High School.”

“That’s right.”

“But how could you go to high school and still travel all over the world?”

“That was easy. During the off season I attended class just like any other student. Then, when the circus went on the road or the act played an independent date, my teachers laid out a course of studies and I trooped a private tutor to make certain I didn’t fall behind the rest of the class.”

“That must have taken a great deal of money.”

Laredo was bitter. “It did. But I was making five hundred a week as a flyer when I was fifteen years old. And when I was eighteen and Paquita and I were married, as a wedding present, my folks and my uncle made me a full partner in the act and from then on I got a fourth of ten grand.”

“In other words, when the act was working, you earned two thousand five hundred dollars a week.”

“That’s correct.”

“And how many weeks a year did you work?”

“Never less than thirty. It depended on the weather and on the number of towns that the advance man could fit into our schedule.”

Daly was impressed. “That comes to around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. And you gave that all up to join the invasion brigade, wade ashore at the Bay of Pigs, have your left leg practically shot off by machine gun fire, then sweat out the next eighteen months as a prisoner of war?”

“That’s what I did.”

“And you’re not bitter about it?”

“Sure I’m bitter. Along with all of the other guys in the brigade, I wanted to win. If we had been given the support we were promised, I think we would have.” Laredo made a gesture of impatience. “But all of that is past history. All that happened back in 1961.”

Daly persisted, “But why? I mean why did you get mixed up in a deal like that? If you were born and raised in Los Angeles, you aren’t a Cuban national. You are a citizen of the United States.”

“That’s true,” Laredo admitted. “It’s rather difficult to explain. It was just something I felt I had to do. True, I wasn’t born in Cuba but my mother and father were. In Oriente Province. You see, the first Laredo to come out of Spain, a Don no less, started a plantation there about the time that Columbus was sent back home in chains. All I heard all my life, in dressing rooms and on circus lots, from one end of this country to another, was how beautiful and how wonderful Cuba was. So, when the present regime took over and fouled up things the way they have, I guess I felt obligated to do something about it.”

At a sign from Keeley, Daly broke for a commercial. When they returned to the air, he attempted to guide the interview into what he had hoped would be the meat of their conversation, the actual invasion. But while it was a difficult thing to analyze, Daly knew even as he questioned the younger man that this wasn’t going to be one of his more outstanding interviews.

This one he would get letters about, few of them complimentary. Laredo’s loss had been too great, he was still too bitter to be objective. Questioning him about the invasion and his trial and the months he had spent in prison was too much like asking a man to turn his soul inside out so the mawkish curious could gawk at it. Daly dropped the subject and asked Laredo how he was currently earning his living and ran into more trouble.

“Well,” Laredo said wryly, “as you can imagine there aren’t many openings for one-legged trapeze artists. So when Paquita and I finally got back here to L.A. I invested what little money I’d saved, and it wasn’t much, in three kiddy rides.”

“Kiddy rides?” Daly puzzled.

“That’s right. A small carousel, a miniature railway and a pint-sized Ferris wheel. And right now I’m playing what we call the supermarket and shopping plaza parking lot circuit.”

“Would you explain that?”

“Certainly. I set up my rides on the parking lots of supermarkets and shopping centers and big discount stores as part of the ballyhoo. You know, to draw a crowd. In fact, I’m opening a new shopping center out in the East Valley tomorrow. Is it all right to give it a plug?”

“Why not?”

Laredo looked into the camera. “Don’t miss the opening of the new East Valley Shopping Plaza tomorrow. That’s at the junction of Willowcrest Road and San Victoria Boulevard. We’re opening a brand-new bank and a supermarket and a deluxe one-stop service station and about every kind of store you can name. All at the one location. If you hold the lucky ticket you may win a Ford station wagon. And beginning at ten o’clock tomorrow I’ll be dressed as a clown and there will be free flowers for the ladies and free pink lemonade and free fun rides for the kiddies.”

Daly smiled. “You make it sound rather attractive, Mickey. But you just said free rides. If you give away free rides, how do you make any money?”

Laredo explained. “The stores give free tickets to the children. The children give the tickets to me. Then the stores pay me so much for every ticket I take in.”

“I see,” Daly said. “But on a deal like that you can’t possibly make the amount of money that you are accustomed to earning.”

“No,” Laredo said. He was understandably bitter. “I’m lucky if I take in enough to meet my payroll and make the monthly payments on my rides and equipment and have enough left over to live on.” He added quietly, “On the other hand I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Both Paquita and I like children. I’m still in one phase of the entertainment world. At least I didn’t have to go to work as a geek.”

Daly admitted, “You’ve stuck me again. What in the name of time is a geek?”

Laredo told him. “It’s another carnival and circus term, always deprecatory. Nowadays it is applied to any number of freaks. But the term was originally applied to any townsman or degenerate who either wanted to break into show business, or who wanted money so badly that he or she was willing to do a cannibal act and bite the heads off live chickens or pigeons in a freak show.”

Daly brought the interview to a close. “Thanks a lot, Mickey. It’s been interesting talking to you. But, before you go, does anyone ever call you Chico?”

“Yes,” Laredo said. “Not in Los Angeles. But quite a few of the boys in the invasion brigade used to call me Chico.”

“I see,” Daly said. “Now one last question. Would it make any sense to you if I told you that when I drove into the studio parking lot tonight two bruisers told me to warn you that they are watching you and for you not to try something as that one was their pigeon?”

“No,” Laredo said. “It would not.”

Daly saw that Keeley was giving him the hurry-up sign that signified that they were running out of time. He wrapped up the show with his usual sign off, then walked down the corridor with Terry to his combination dressing room and office.

DuBoise was in the office waiting for them, rewinding the audio portions of the show he always recorded in case of possible lawsuits.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I had a winner when I scheduled Laredo. But it seems I didn’t.”

Terry offered, “The interview with Miss Adams was a riot and I thought the question period went well. But the interview with Mr. Laredo was too raw, too real, somehow.”

Daly made three drinks. “It was just one of those things, I guess. But you can’t blame the man for being bitter. He had it made. How much did you give him, Gene?”

DuBoise filed the tape in the metal filing cabinet. “The usual. Fifty dollars. I’d have made an exception in his case and gone as high as two hundred. But with all that bitterness and pride bottled up in him, he’d probably have punched my face.”

“Probably,” Daly agreed. He added another ice cube to the drink he’d made for himself. “Did you check with the gate guard?”

“Yes,” DuBoise said. “I did. And he claims he didn’t see anyone.”