Madball (12 page)

"Sure you don't want me to drive you back to town?"

"I am quite sure. May I ask why you make the suggestion?"

"Well, you're a bit polluted, mister. And them carneys are crooks, all of 'em. If you go in there they'll gyp you if they can and roll you if they can't."

Dr. Magus looked at him in shocked wonder. "Are you really certain of that? Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure. All the games in there is rigged. Sucker stuff. If you wanta gamble, you oughta go somewhere where they run a straight game."

Dr. Magus's eyes got even wider. "You could take me to such a place?"

"Well, yeah. Not right in Bloomfield, but a few miles out the other side of town."

"Would it have a roulette wheel? I ask because they would not let me play cards, I fear."

"Sure it's got a wheel. But what you mean they wouldn't let you play cards? You been there before?"

"No, no. But someone there would be almost certain to recognize me. I am one of the top
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it would be immodest for me to say I am the top
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sleight of hand artists in the world. I am especially famous for the Reynaldi sleight with a dollar bill. Here, give me back the one I just gave you for a tip and I'll show you. Thank you, my friend. Now I fold it thus twice, hold it between my thumb and fingers, make a pass so
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and it has disappeared."

"Not bad. But look, mister, you want me to take you to the Four Aces or not?"

"Some other time perhaps."

"Okay. Well, give me the buck back"

"That is the second step of the sleight and I am afraid I have not yet perfected it. But thank you just the same." Dr. Magus strode rapidly through the entrance gate before the driver could get out his side of the cab and around it
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if he intended to try. Dr. Magus felt fairly sure that he wouldn't; he'd realize by now that his passenger had been a carney and that it wouldn't be healthy to follow him onto the lot to start trouble. As, indeed, it wouldn't have been; there wasn't a carney on the lot who wouldn't have enjoyed helping take that taxi driver apart.

He saw that the midway was jammed and business was good. He threaded his way through the crowd to the mitt camp and let himself in without putting back the outer flaps that would make the joint open for business. He turned on the overhead bulb and put down on the table the cylindrical package he'd carried out from town with him, a bottle of Irish whisky.

He looked at his watch and sighed as he realized that, since it was only ten o'clock, he could and should open for business. With a crowd like that outside he might still take in twenty bucks or so by midnight, maybe thirty or thirty-five if he got a few live ones for five-dollar readings.

But to hell with twenty or even thirty-five bucks.

It was when he was in this exact degree of inebriation that, not often but occasionally, he really saw or thought he saw things in the madball. Like the time when, just about this drunk, he'd been giving a mark a cold reading with the pasteboards but had happened for no reason to glance to one side into the crystal and he'd clearly seen in it the face of a beautiful Negro woman
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and had known somehow that it had nothing at all to do with the mark he was reading cards for. And two days later Slim had touted him to make a two-buck bet on a long shot named Black Beauty and suddenly he remembered what he'd seen in the crystal and had surprised the hell out of Slim by giving him twenty bucks to put on the horse. And it had come in at sixteen to one. Slim had gone out to the track with it, luckily, or a bookie would have paid only ten, so Dr. Magus had three hundred bucks profit on his double sawbuck after he'd given Slim forty for the tip and placing the bet. And there'd been the time just last season in Green Bay when he'd been giving a mark a reading with the madball and had seen suddenly and clearly the picture of a car breaking through a railing and going off a bridge. Of course he'd said nothing about it to the mark. The next day he read that a car had gone off a bridge and killed the driver at two o'clock that morning and there'd been a small and blurry picture of the victim; it could have been the man he'd given the reading to. But he didn't investigate to find out if it really was the same man because it had scared him a little. He didn't want to see things like that. Of course those cases and the few others like them could have been coincidence, but it was funny that they happened only at times when he really saw or thought he saw something in the madball.

Well, coincidence or not, tonight while he was in the right shape and the right mood he'd give the madball a chance at the jackpot question, and to hell with business.

But first to relax. He made himself comfortable by getting out of his good clothes and into old ones. And because it had been a full hour since his last drink he unwrapped and opened the bottle of Irish. He had himself a medium sized drink and sat down at the little table and moved the crystal in its stand over in front of him.

He stared into it a
n
d concentrated: Where is the money? Will I find it?

From outside the canvas came the carnival sounds, the merry-go-round organ playing Blue Danube, the voices of the talkers, the crowd murmur, the thousand sounds that added up to one single sound as familiar to Dr. Magus as the beating of his own heart. He listened to them deliberately until his conscious mind could hear them no longer, until they were part of the night and one with the night, as silent as the music of the spheres.

There was a sudden bright flash of light in the crystal, then for a brief moment black darkness. Dr. Magus blinked, and again the crystal was as it had been before, reflecting his own distorted face and the interior of the mitt camp curving upon itself like an Einsteinian universe.

Dr. Magus looked around him and upward to see if there really could have been a flash of light anywhere that had reflected itself in the crystal and for a moment almost blinded him. But there was nothing.

He frowned. Had he really seen a flash in the madball or could it have been the sudden twinge of an optic nerve? If he'd really seen it, what could it mean?

Light? The money hidden in the diesel generator truck that made light and power for the carnival? Or in a fuse box somewhere in one of the individual tops or concessions? No, the diesel truck didn't make sense; the electricians, two of them, were working around it half the time. And it would hardly be in a fuse box
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too much chance of someone opening it to replace a fuse. Besides
- for the first time it occurred to him to wonder just exactly how bulky forty-two thousand dollars, mostly in large bills, would be. Surely bigger than would go in the extra space in an ordinary small fuse box.

Not too big, either, if they'd stuffed it into a musette bag at the bank. If he had the right thing in mind as a musette bag it wouldn't hold over a cubic foot.

Any size he decided, of course, would be a more or less random guess unless he knew the approximate number of bills of each denomination and there wasn't any way he could ask any such intimate questions about that bank robbery without being asked equally intimate and even more embarrassing questions in return. And the police, if anything ever led them to couple the bank robbery and the carnival in their minds, would dig in and figure out the same thing he had.

But with a little thought he could get a rough idea of the size of a package containing forty-two thousand dollars. Of course, in thousand-dollar bills you could carry it in your wallet. And in one-dollar bills you'd have trouble carrying it at all. But it wouldn't be either of those extremes. Thousand-dollar bills exist but aren't often used; there might possibly be a few of them but the bulk of the money would be in hundreds, some fifties, probably lots of twenties and tens, fives
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not too many singles or the musette bag wouldn't have held it.

After a while he decided that with any assortment that would be probable he didn't have to consider a package that would be smaller than a cigar box. And that, in considering or looking for a hiding place, only the minimum mattered. All he had to figure out was a hiding place right on the carney lot that would hold a package at least the size of a cigar box. Not necessarily the shape of, but at least the size of. And it would have to be a place which, in any ordinary course of events, wouldn't be looked into during the nine weeks that had remained of the season at the time of the robbery.

Damn it, the very difficulty of thinking of even one such place convinced him that there couldn't be too many such. And, at the same time, made him doubt his first judgment that they'd really hidden it on the lot.

Damn the crystal. If it (or through it God, the devil or his own clairvoyance if any) had tried to tell him something with that flash of light, why hadn't it been clearer about it? Why so cryptic and apparently meaningless a thing as a flash of light?

He pushed it aside, sighing with pleasure at its fiery smoothness. Even if that idea about the money was all wrong it had done one thing for him; it had loosened his financial inhibitions so that for one evening he had been drinking and would continue to drink the whisky he liked best instead of the kind he could best afford. And it had given him amazingly pleasant thoughts and dreams of having an amount of money almost beyond-

The thought hit him suddenly and it was so simple and logical that he wondered why he hadn't thought of it hours ago. Even whi
l
e he was sober. So logical that it might lead him to the money even if it wasn't with the carnival. True, in that case it might be in a lock box or other place where he couldn't get it himself, but even then there ought to be a sizable reward for telling them how to make recovery of so large a sum of cash.

He'd start tomorrow from the logical place to start.

Glenrock.

He drank a toast to Glenrock.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE SHOW WAS OVER, the last show of the big show. Behind the canvas partition which Leon always stretched across one corner of the freak show top as soon as the last mark was gone Dolly hurriedly took off the spangled trunks and halter and quickly pulled a gingham dress over her head, not bothering to put on panties and a bra under it. She sighed with relief when she'd successfully made the change before Leon came back to join her; tonight he'd put up the partition and then had gone to see the boss, probably to collect whatever amount was due for her doubling on the illusion acts. That had been a break because it had given her this chance to change out of her show clothes quickly before Leon came back to join her. Had he been here he would have watched her change
- and he might have, as he sometimes did, grabbed her and used her then and there, quickly and brutally. That would have been truly horrible tonight, when she was waiting to go to Joe; she'd feel defiled if Leon used her first. It could still happen after they went to bed, but at least one danger point was passed. She hoped he'd drink heavily tonight, even though that meant waiting longer before she could go to Joe, because when Leon drank heavily he was less likely to bother her. Leon was less unpleasant to her, too, when he'd been drinking, although he was always less likely to want her physically then. Sometimes he even got a little sentimental, even told her that he loved her, when he was partly drunk. She'd learned long ago that that was the only time ever to ask him for money for anything she needed, new shoes, a new dress. And if he said okay, he'd remember the next day and give her whatever he'd promised, although grudgingly. Sometimes when he was a little drunk and was being nice to her.

She would almost feel toward him as she once had and want him. But those times he almost never wanted her. He could be kind or he could be sensual but never both things at t
h
e same time. It was as though he had to be angry to want her. But drinking made him so different that she had often wished he'd give up knife throwing and do something else because he never threw a knife unless he was completely sober and for that reason never took even a single drink during the day or evening until after the final show. Not that she had any complaint about that, since it was at her that he threw those knives. But she could wish he'd find some other occupation that didn't require his being so cold sober and surly all day and all evening long. But what else could he do? Knife throwing was the only skill he had.

Now, her body safely covered, she pulled back an end of the canvas partition and looked out between it and the sidewall. He was still talking to the boss, clear over on the other side of the top. So it was safe now, if she worked fast, to empty the little bottle of sleeping stuff into
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no, it would be too risky now; she couldn't count on time enough to get the bottle out of his trunk and put it back, and he'd be mad as hell if he caught her with his trunk opened, let alone putting something into his whisky. That would have to wait a later chance, after he'd got the bottle out and opened it himself; probably he'd go to the doniker and that would give her lots of time. Even if he just stepped outside under the canvas there'd be time if she had the little bottle ready and the whisky bottle was standing there already opened.

At least she had time now to have the little bottle ready. She got it from her purse and put it in the pocket of the gingham dress, then remembered she hadn't tried the cork and made sure it wasn't too tight to come out easily by taking it out and putting it in again. It was a tiny bottle; it couldn't have held over a teaspoonful of fluid. The fluid in it was clear and transparent, for all the world like plain water. She wondered what it was. But what did the name matter as long as it worked?