Murder Most Conventional

by Verena Rose (ed)

  I peered around Kippers, who was frantically trying to retrieve something out of Bambi’s man-hand.

  “Diazepam?” Bambi read the label of the prescription bottle in what was, for her, a whisper. “Girl, what are you doing with this?”

  Kippers gave up the fight. “The clown’s life is a depressing life,” she intoned dramatically. “Besides, it’s just a weensy dose. You know, to take the edge off.”

  “Two milligrams twice a day,” Bambi read aloud. She upended the bottle and shook a few into her hand. “This prescription is from last week. Why’s the bottle nearly empty?”

  “I’ve been stressed, all right? Don’t know what business it is of yours anyway.” Kippers took a swallow of her drink and popped another curd.

  Bambi dropped the bottle back into the purse and shrugged. “Used to be a nurse.”

  Wow. I could imagine Bambi as a nurse. Efficient and capable, large and in charge. I bet no patient had the nerve to die on one of her shifts, either.

  “Still.” She moved the drinks away from Kippers and me as Peet delivered two mugs of hot tea. “Best watch the alcohol intake. You know those pills will make you sleepy on their own.”

  Kippers gave me a do something look born of alcoholic desperation, and out of the corner of my eye I could have sworn Bambi dropped one of the pills she’d palmed into the mug in front of Kippers. She moved the mug closer to the clown, and nudged her. “Tea will make you feel better. Promise.”

  Bambi and I made eye contact, and she read my tacit, drunken approval of her spiking Kippers’s drink. The sooner this clown was out of our hair, the better.

  Kippers grumbled, picked up a spoon and stirred, and took a couple of swallows of tea, then a few more until her mug was empty. I sipped mine, too. After all, I had a long walk in front of me. The heat felt good, though it was no manhattan.

  “What’s dramazipipam, anyway?” Was I slurring? Surely not.

  “Light tranquilizer,” Bambi answered carelessly. She signaled Peet for another gin and tonic.

  Kippers made some sort of noise, shoved her mug away, and put her head down on the bar with a little more force than I thought was necessary.

  Peet ambled over. “Damn. That’ll leave a mark.”

  “We’d better get her to bed,” I said reluctantly. We all looked at her.

  “Maybe I’d better get security to take her,” Peet said. “You don’t seem all that steady.” He eyed Bambi. “Though I suppose Bambi could handle her solo.”

  I nudged Kippers. “Wake up. Bambi’s going to put you to bed.”

  Peet leaned over. “Kippers?” He stared at Bambi. “Seriously, Bambi, is she breathing?”

  And that’s when all hell broke loose. Peet vaulted over the bar, knocking Kippers’s purse onto the floor, and Bambi dragged me off the stool and away from Kippers. She parked me at a table, simultaneously dialing 911, and with her phone under her chin started grabbing Kippers’s belongings off the floor and stuffing them into the purse, taking a moment to wipe the pill bottle on her shirt, I noticed. She requested an ambulance, tossed the purse on the table with me, and went to help Peet who had started CPR. Others, solemn-faced, gathered around to watch and worry.

  By the time emergency services arrived in the form of two EMTs hauling several cases of equipment, we were all openly speculating that it might be too late for Kippers. I wanted to weep, but the alcohol had numbed me. What if it was too late for her? Who would take care of her gouty cat now?

  The EMTs took over, and Bambi came to sit with me. I turned to her, and she answered my unspoken question, speaking directly into my ear. “No way a dose that small would have hurt her like this. Especially that fast. It was just one pill. It may have helped her go to sleep sooner is all. But it appears to me she had a massive heart attack. Peet told me he has EMT training, and even he couldn’t help her. They’ll do an autopsy if she doesn’t make it, you know.”

  I believed her. I had to. I’d seen her put the meds in Kippers’s mug and hadn’t done a thing to stop her. The alternative to not believing her was too painful to contemplate. Besides, she’d been a nurse. She knew about these things.

  I hoped.

  The EMTs were asking aloud if anyone knew whether Kippers was ill or took any medicine. Peet told them she had been drinking heavily for days, and Bambi dutifully reported that the clown had a low-dose diazepam prescription.

  But it was all to no avail, and a few minutes later the EMTs stopped their efforts, covered Kippers with a thin blanket, and began to pack up their equipment. Peet, now back behind the bar, began weeping.

  “Uh-oh.” Bambi had given the EMTs Kippers’s oversized purse once they had given up working on her. Now one of them, a tall, blond man who could have easily passed for Bambi’s brother, was holding the pill bottle that had been tucked inside. He talked quietly with his partner as they stood beside Kippers’s body.

  “What’s he saying, Bambi?”

  The EMT holding the pills had opened the bottle and tipped a few pills into his hand. I thought I heard him say something along the lines of “wrong dose.” What did that mean?

  Bambi and I sat still.

  His partner, a slim, dark-haired woman, answered him in a low voice. “The bottle says two milligrams.”

  “Well, take a gander at these pills. These are ten milligrams. Much stronger.”

  There was a pause. Then the female EMT whipped her phone off her belt and, dialing, left the room.

  Bambi looked sick. “The pills are wrong. I bet she’s gone to call the cops. Oh my God. Ten to one Kippers poisoned herself. And all that booze on top of it.”

  Poisoned herself? Maybe. Unless someone switched out her pills. But I kept that thought to myself. I closed my eyes for a moment, willing myself to unsee that one extra pill slipping into the clown’s drink. And unwilling to catch Bambi’s eye.

  Everyone in the bar was still speculating about Kippers in hushed voices when a handsome man in a suit appeared in front of our table, asking us all to go into the next room, a mini-ballroom normally reserved for special events. I supposed this qualified.

  He was met with stunned silence followed by a buzz of panicked conversation. “What was it, a heart attack?” “Something must be wrong. Otherwise why would they ask us to stay?” “Foul play. It’s got to be foul play.” “No way! She just had too much to drink and her heart couldn’t handle it.”

  As the handsome guy turned away from me, I could see he’d taken a tumble in the weather. The back of his coat and pants were covered in slush and mud. I resisted an urge to brush him off. It might have been misinterpreted.

  Twenty or so of us followed him next door to a room filled with comfortable seating, couches, and overstuffed chairs, even a fireplace. We were all choosing seats when he beckoned for Bambi and me to follow him into a small office adjoining the main area. A uniformed police officer sat at a table with four chairs, and he asked us to join him.

  The slushy (but still handsome) guy remained standing. “I’m Detective Dave DuPrey,” he told us. Detective DuPrey. I filed the name away, changed it to Detective Damp Pants and shortened it to DDP in my head. (Memorization technique.) “I am told by the bartender that you two were with the deceased when she passed out.”

  I winced at the idea of Kippers being called “the deceased.” Not that Kippers the Klown was any great shakes as a name, but it sure beat “the deceased.”

  He was staring directly at me.

  “It’s true!” Perhaps I was a little overenthusiastic. He really was incredibly good-looking. If you like that tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed type. I reminded myself he was covered in slush all over his backside.

  “And who are you?”

  I spread my arms in front of me. “Well, DDP, I can explain.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “She’s not much of drinker,” Bambi offered.
<
br />   “I can see that.”

  “Hey!” I waved my arms in case they’d forgotten I was sitting right there. “I’m just here on business. Kippers decided she’d rather hang out with me than the rest of the clowns. She had five or six drinks. Then, wham! She keeled over and her head hit the bar. We tried to wake her up to get her back to her room, and nothing. I mean, no breathing.”

  My voice broke and I swallowed hard. I hadn’t liked Kippers. But nobody deserves to die stone drunk at a clown convention. Surrounded by, you know, clowns.

  “That’s when Peet hopped the bar and went to work. He told Bambi he’s a trained EMT. And the EMTs got here, and then they called you.”

  “Okay.” He flipped open his notebook. “Your name?”

  “Princess.”

  “Your given name.”

  “Princess.”

  He waited.

  “Princess Jenkins.”

  “Princess Jenkins?” He eyed me up and down, taking in my pinstriped suit and dress heels, highlighted hair, big brown eyes, and skinny frame. I pretended he also checked to make sure I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. His gaze lingered on the now slightly crusty rum and coke stain on my chest. “What? You a working girl?”

  I sighed and gave the short version. “It was the ’80s. My parents liked Prince. They wanted a boy.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I think they drank a lot.”

  He returned the eyebrow and turned to assess Bambi. “And you are?”

  Bambi grinned at him. I was temporarily blinded by the flash of white so I didn’t quite catch his expression when she offered up her name. “Bambi.”

  Silence.

  “Bambi Swenson.”

  I could swear he turned pale, but he wrote Bambi’s name in his notebook.

  “And the deceased, what do you know about her?”

  “Kippers,” I confirmed.

  He grimaced.

  “Oh, wait.” I fished in my purse for one of the dozen or so business cards Kippers had pressed on me during our brief acquaintanceship.

  The card was simple, black and white, and plain, with just the words “Kippers the Klown” and a phone number on it, plus a small graphic of a circus clown in a dunce hat holding a balloon bouquet in one hand. It made the marketer in me cringe. What were her specialties? In what geographical area did she ply her trade? I knew she could do balloon animals. She gave me those, too.

  “Do you think she overdosed?” I blurted out. “Or maybe someone offed her?” Hey, I watch a lot of cop TV. Maybe too much.

  DDP stared. “What makes you say that?”

  Oops. Maybe I shouldn’t have. “We were sitting by the EMTs. We heard what they said about Kippers’s pills.”

  “Ah. Well, anything’s possible. I’m going to take everyone’s statement and contact information. We’ll know more in a few days. There’s always an autopsy in cases like this.”

  “Told you so,” Bambi mouthed at me.

  I sighed. “Statement? I have a statement.” I ignored Bambi shaking her head at me. “You know what, detective? I think Kippers was a fish out of water. Frankly, she was one of the most annoying people I’ve ever met and I can imagine any number of people had a boatload of reasons to kill her if it turns out that’s what happened. And on top of that, she was an awful clown. I think maybe clowning wasn’t her cup of tea.”

  Apparently I was just getting warmed up. “This was her first big convention. She said hardly any of the other clowns showed up for her ballooning class, and she didn’t feel welcome at the juggling seminar, powder-base makeup session, or the keynote speech either. She didn’t even fit in at the clown ministry class. She wasn’t having a good time. I felt sorry for her. She felt shunned by the other clowns.”

  He shook his head. “Shunned by clowns. Imagine.”

  Bambi shook her head, too. Not to be left out, I nodded, which somehow seemed right.

  “She just wanted to go home to her cat, which has gout. And her boyfriend.”

  “Her cat has a boyfriend?”

  “No.” What was with this guy? “She wanted to go home to her cat and her boyfriend.”

  “She had a boyfriend?” DDP sounded incredulous.

  “I know. Hard to believe, right?” Bambi sounded sad. “Big, tall guy. She showed us a bunch of pictures on her phone. Weird-looking couple, but someone for everyone, I guess.”

  “Was he depressed, too?” I wanted to know.

  “What do you mean, ‘Was he depressed, too?’” The detective snapped to attention. “How well did you two actually know this clown?”

  I shrugged. “Except for a couple hours I was sleeping, she’s been talking nonstop to me since yesterday.”

  “I just met her last night,” Bambi said. “But tonight I saw she had that prescription you already know about for diazepam in her purse. It was for a tiny dose, according to the label on the bottle, but still, not what you’d find in a purse every day.”

  “A clown’s life is a hard life,” I intoned dramatically. Perhaps wisely, they both ignored me.

  “And you’d know this because?” The detective looked at Bambi.

  She shrugged. “I used to be a nurse a long time ago. So I know a bit about meds. But the shift work and patients got to me after a while. I do PR for Packer Worldwide Printing now.”

  Detective DuPrey eyed her again. “I bet you were a good nurse. Okay, I’ll call the number on the card and see if I can get hold of the boyfriend.” He sighed. “So I’m finishing with Princess and Bambi and next up I have”—he consulted his notebook—“Bobbles and Wobbles, with their twin clown act.” He glanced around. “When are Dopey, Grumpy, Doc, and Sweepy going to show up?”

  “Sleepy,” I said.

  He gave me a strange look. “Well, yeah, it’s late. I’m sure you are.”

  “No. Sleepy. The dwarf. Not Sweepy.”

  “Hunh. You sure?”

  “Sure as shootin’,” I told him. At this point I absolutely did not hiccup.

  “Hunh,” he said again. He opened the door and stuck his head out. “Okay, I’m through interviewing these two. Now send in the clowns.” He turned and cut his eyes to me, waiting.

  Was that a cue for me to sing? I sat up and took a breath, but Bambi poked me in the back. Hard.

  “Funny,” I heard Bambi rumble behind me. Good old Bambi.

  He gave me a little nod and I swear that eyebrow quirked again, then we were out the door. There were a dozen or so clowns draped about the party room waiting to be interviewed. I grabbed Bambi’s hand and bolted before one of them could offer to make me a balloon giraffe or juggle scarves at me.

  We wound up—where else?—back at the bar.

  We were a glum bunch. I worried the detective would find out that Kippers had cost me a jackpot in the casino that very morning. Bambi worried someone else besides me may have seen her put that tiny pill in the clown’s tea. Even Peet was worried. It turns out Kippers hadn’t tipped him as much as one red cent, and he’d told several people at the bar that people like her were so miserable they were better off dead. Ouch. But I figured the way Peet had leaped over the bar to perform CPR on Kippers sort of took him out of the running as a suspect.

  And was it my imagination or did the clowns who came back to the bar after giving their statements to DDP all seem highly nervous? (Well, I mean, more nervous than clowns usually seem.) Rumors were already spreading about the pill bottle in Kippers’s purse. Was it Kippers herself who had switched her pills? Or did someone do it without her knowledge? Did one of these clowns dislike her to that extent? And why?

  Like DDP had said in all his damp-panted wisdom, anything was possible.

  Anything at all. Especially with this bunch of clowns who, along with us, closed down the bar before we all eventually straggled off to get some sleep, Bambi taking the spare
bed in my double room.

  And speaking (again) of clowns, I had to revise my opinion of clowns in general before I left Green Bay. The conference clowns, spearheaded by the ones who had been in the bar with us, held a short memorial for Kippers the next night in the long hall between the hotel and the casino. It was a touching service, with a moving speech by the convention president and a demonstration of balloon animal crafting by the few clowns who had been in Kippers’s class.

  The clowns I met were quite serious about their profession. Most had gone through years of training, not only for professional gigs but for volunteer work at children’s hospitals and charity events. Many were third- and fourth-generation clowns. Some had even been planning to mentor Kippers on her techniques. They were well aware she was feeling left out. Great people. And, as I said, a very touching, very professional memorial service.

  All the clowns and several hotel employees came, plus Bambi and me, and I’d like to think it wasn’t because we were all still snowed in and had nothing better to do. DDP came, too, in a clean suit this time.

  And two days later, without learning anything new, we all finally flew home. Well, all of us except Kippers.

  * * * *

  Bambi called a week later with the news that we were all red herrings in the demise of Kippers. We were, in fact, saved by the autopsy.

  “So, guess what, Princess? Turns out Kippers was loaded up with so much diazepam that it’s amazing she didn’t keel over before we had that last drinking session in the bar.”

  “Oh wow. You sure?” I was relieved and sad at the same time.

  “I’m e-mailing you the link to the story in the paper this morning,” Bambi said. She paused and I could hear her fingernails clicking on her keyboard. “According to this, there’s no way she should have had that much tranquilizer in her system, even if she’d swallowed the entire bottle of pills she had with her. She must have been high as a kite before she even arrived at the convention.”

  I opened my e-mail and scanned the story while she was talking. The reporter had interviewed Detective DuPrey, who had retrieved the meds from Kippers’s purse and confirmed that indeed the pills labeled two milligrams on the bottle were actually ten milligrams.