Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) (25 page)

“Don’t move in there,” came Nelson’s voice. “Or I’ll fire the second barrel.”

“Nelson, no!” I yelled, spotting the gun and going for it. Marish let out a gasp and went through the door. I got to my feet, picking up a cut on my palm. I staggered out of the destroyed toilet and looked down the bar. Everyone was looking at Marish and me. Some had their mouths open. All had heard the explosion, and no one could miss the two shredded humans who had come through the door.

“Stop him,” I shouted after Marish, who was almost at the front door. He was leaving a trail of blood. No trail was needed, but my own knees weren’t doing well enough to carry me forward.

Marish put one hand on the door. Behind me from the toilet I could hear Nelson’s voice yelling, “What the hell is going on in there?”

The radio was now giving a calm male message in slow Spanish that made it clear radios were unaware of human activity. I didn’t know if Marish would get away or where he would go. I didn’t have to find out.

Emmett Kelly moved to the door and put a hand on Marish’s shoulder.

“Hold it,” he said. Marish turned, his wild bloody face showing all his hatred for the circus. The look took Kelly by surprise. He was used to a lot, but not that look of hatred.

Marish couldn’t resist. He threw a wild fat right at Kelly, who ducked and came back with a push to Marish’s chest. The fat man tumbled back over the Hijo drunk and went down in a lump.

I limped forward as Alex and Nelson came through the front door of Hijo’s with shotguns ready.

People began to scramble for corners and scream.

“Hold it,” I yelled. “Don’t shoot.”

Nelson’s eyes were wild and frightened, but they were probably no different from those of anyone else in the room, except he had the shotgun.

“It’s over, Sheriff,” said Alex evenly.

Nelson looked over at Marish and aimed his barrel at the fallen form. “Right,” said Nelson. “It’s over.”

It was at that point that my knees said the hell with it, and I crumpled to the floor, hoping for an inkwell.

When I opened my eyes after dreaming that Koko and I could fly over Cincinnati, I found the face of Doc Ogle.

“Full of holes,” came a voice behind him.

“Me?” I asked with a croak, trying to sit up.

“You and the whole damn story,” came Nelson’s voice. I looked past Doc Ogle, who had trouble straightening up. Nelson and Alex were there. I was back in the sheriff’s office on the bench.

“This man could use a hospital,” said the doc, packing something in his black bag. “Lacerations, concussion, goddamn crazy handprint on his back.”

In the cell beyond the first, I could see Marish, sitting with his head down. He turned his face toward me, and I didn’t like what I saw. The stitches didn’t bother me, but that look did. I turned away.

“I will explain it another time for you,” came Gunther’s voice. I turned my head in the other direction and saw Gunther, Jeremy, and Shelly.

“Don’t bother,” sighed Nelson. “I’ve got enough. I heard enough. Alex and I heard enough.”

“You’ll be a hero, Nelson,” I said, sitting up. “Caught a killer single-handed in a bloody gun battle. May even make the San Diego papers.”

“May at that,” said Nelson, pursing his lips.

“We’ll be happy to stay around and tell our part of this,” I volunteered. Jeremy walked over to me and gave me an arm. Hell, he picked me up.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Nelson, clearly preferring his own tale of his gun battle and whatever fantasy of heroism he was working on. “Just you and your friends pack up and get out. We don’t need you in Mirador, and we don’t need the damn circus either.”

“We’re going,” I said. Shelly led the way out, and Jeremy supported me.

“Maybe we’ll see you again sometime,” said Alex, leaning against the wall.

I tried to read through his words and couldn’t.

“Maybe,” said the Spirit of Seventy Wounds, and off we went into the afternoon, closing the door of the Mirador police station behind us.

The circus people were leaning against or loitering near half a dozen cars and trucks in what looked like a vigil. Peg and Elder spotted me first and moved in my direction. The Tanuccis were with them, and Emmett Kelly stood to the side with Agnes Sudds.

“Are you all right?” said Peg.

“Terrific,” I said.

“You look awful.”

“Maybe I don’t feel so terrific,” I admitted. “In fact, I think I’d just like to close my eyes and wake up in my bed back in Hollywood.”

“Alone?” came Agnes’ voice from behind.

“I’ll be happy to wake up,” I said, feeling something dark come over me.

Emmett Kelly took a step toward me with his hand out and his mouth open. That was my last memory of him, silent and looking a little sad.

I was aware of movement, I think, and Shelly’s voice talking about saberteeth. I was aware of snakes of green and Saint Patrick with an electric staff. I was aware of a body full of aches and the memory of a look of hate. And then I was aware of nothing.

The next time I woke up, I was just where I wanted to be, lying in my own room in Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse on Heliotrope in Hollywood. My bed was there, the sofa with doilies I wasn’t allowed to touch, and my wooden table and small refrigerator. I wanted to get up and have a bowl of Wheaties, but a hand reached out and pushed me back. It was a small hand.

“You must rest without disturbance,” said Gunther. We were the only two in the room. “The doctor has come here to look at you and declared you recoverable. The suggestion came that you be moved to a hospital, but I thought you would prefer …”

“I would prefer,” I said, sitting up. I was under one of Mrs. Plaut’s homemade quilts, dressed in a T-shirt and underwear and feeling an overall ache that made a lie of aches.

“A thousand natural shocks,” said Gunther sympathetically, watching me sit up.

“Something like that,” I said.

“It is that which flesh is heir to, Toby,” he said, handing me a cup of tea he retrieved from the table. “It is a bit cool but perhaps better for you for that.”

While I drank, Mrs. Plaut burst in. Mrs. Plaut was not a knocker. Even if she knocked, she would never hear the responding “Come in” or “Stay out,” and there were no locks on the doors of Mrs. Plaut’s rooms.

“Mr. Peters,” she said, crossing her thin arms. She was a tiny pink woman somewhere between seventy-five and a thousand, with the strength of a determined terrier. “You haven’t been killing people again, have you?”

“Not intentionally,” I said, sipping tea. “And not on the premises.”

“No more bodies here,” she said, stepping in to straighten a chair.

“I promised,” I said.

Satisfied, she dropped a bundle of handwritten sheets on my table. “Chapters,” she announced. “Papa and the well and Uncle Damper’s Eskimo wife.”

Mrs. Plaut was under the impression that I was, alternately, an exterminator and a screenwriter. I had never been able to determine how she came to this conclusion or when she made the transition from one to the other. I think she didn’t much care as long as I continued to make corrections of her family history, which was now well over 3,000 pages long. I was in for a night with Uncle Damper’s Eskimo wife.

Mrs. Plaut exited, and Gunther took my cup when I finished.

“There was something different about this one, Gunther,” I said. “I can’t grab it.”

“The circus,” said Gunther, cleaning my cup in the small sink on the far side of the room. “It has traditionally been a source of amusement for the young, a hint of danger, but when one penetrates its …” He searched for an English word and couldn’t find the right one.

“Whatever,” I said and put my head back for a few days of rest.

Koko wanted to play. I told him to go away. I had had enough of clowns and dreams.

It was a Tuesday when I walked into the Farraday Building on Hoover Street, which housed the offices of those on the way in and out of society I counted among my acquaintances, including me and Shelly Minck.

I loved the smell of Lysol that greeted me. It told me the world was normal, that Jeremy Butler was back in his building cleaning and battling decay and the trespassing bums who could make their way into the building through any crack or hole open to them.

It was great to feel the eroded marble under my feet. I was home, weak but home. I got on the elevator, knowing it might take me anywhere from five minutes to a week to get to my office on the fourth floor. The elevator and I split the difference.

Shelly was working on a patient I hadn’t seen before when I came through the door to our offices. He didn’t hear me. Neither did the bum in the chair.

“The clown, you know, Emmett Kelly,” Shelly was saying over the buzz of his drill. “I saved his jaw, his whole jaw. They called me down to work on him. And you know why?”

The guy in the chair grunted.

“Reputation,” said Shelly, holding his cigar aloft. “You have a reputation, and the world will come to you.”

The guy grunted in enthusiastic agreement. People in Shelly’s chair generally agreed with anything he said.

“Shel,” I said. He turned quickly, revealing his recently cleaned smock, and almost tore his patient’s eyebrow off with the buzzing drill. Shelly’s cigar went back in his mouth. “My car. Gunther said you took my car.”

“Arnie’s got it,” he explained. “You can pick it up anytime. You want to see a rotten mouth?” He pointed at his new patient, who gave a sickly grin. The mouth was certainly rotten.

“I’m fine, Shel,” I said, moving to the door of my own office beyond his.

“How are you, Toby?” Shelly asked, turning back to his patient.

I went into my office, smelled the dust, looked at the picture on the wall of me, my old man, and my brother with our dog, Kaiser Wilhelm. My private investigator’s license was next to it, needing dusting, and the cracks in the wall were just where they had always been and belonged.

I grabbed my Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine mug from my desk, ignored the ring inside it, and stepped back into Shelly’s office to get a cup of the darkness he made each day.

Shelly was humming “Perfidia,” and the world was back in order.

In my office, I made out a bill to Emmett Kelly. I was fair. I’m always fair. I didn’t charge him for clothing beyond my windbreaker and two pairs of pants. I didn’t overcharge him for what Arnie the no-neck mechanic would make me pay for whatever damage my car had taken from elephants and bullets. When I had finished, the total came to $186. It seemed like not very much for the four-day lifetime I had put into the case.

I put the bill in an envelope and mailed it to the address Kelly had given me. Then I sat back to enjoy my aches and Ovaltine. There was some mail, but I didn’t want to open it. There was a newspaper, but I didn’t want to hear that we were losing the war.

What I wanted least was the door of my office to open and my brother to walk in, but that’s what happened next. Phil was a little bigger than me, a little older, a lot grayer, and a lot meaner. He was a Los Angeles police lieutenant who had seen even more than I had and didn’t have the pleasure of sitting back when the case was over. Another ten cases were always on his desk. It kept him angry, but he had been angry even before he was a cop.

“You could have called me and Ruth,” he said.

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

“She worried anyway,” he said, loosening his tie. He was forever loosening his tie. “I could …”

And he could too. He could come in worrying about my health and get mad enough to beat the hell out of me.

But he looked away after taking one good stare at my cuts and bumps. Then he sat down in the single wooden chair on the other side of my desk. Something was on his mind.

“Nice day,” I said.

He looked back at the photograph of us and our dad and dog.

“A little cold for this time of year,” I went on.

“Shut up,” he rasped. “I’ll get to it.”

I shut up and started to open my mail. It was all junk, including one letter that told me I could help beat the Japs by buying a series of one hundred cards showing the silhouettes of all Axis planes and warships.