The customer is always right, as the saying goes; and also, the customer is sometimes paranoid. “We’ll look into it, Mr., uh, Ms. Zelda.”
“Aldo. My real name is Aldo Firkin. Zelda’s just a stage name.” He dabbed at the layers of peacock-colored eye shadow. “It’s all an act.”
“You don’t say,” I said. Sheyenne pretended to jab me with her spectral elbow, though I couldn’t feel her touch. She sometimes has to remind me to show a proper professional attitude in front of the clients.
The fortune-teller frowned, plucking at the absurd dress. “You think I want to dress up like this? I’m not a natural-born transvestite, but I can’t make a living otherwise. It’s a stereotype we can’t shake—nobody wants male fortune-tellers. What a sham! All these decades of fighting for equal rights, and I have to do this.” He adjusted the ridiculous wig. “Now, about my stolen cards? I really need them back. I’ve been doing my best.” With a burring rattle of laminated paper, Aldo/Zelda shuffled the regular playing cards. “But there’s nothing magical about these. I’m just making it up. My other deck—now, those cards were real, the magic just barely starting to wear off.”
His brow furrowed as he looked down at the old playing cards. “Oddly enough, my fortunes seem to be just as accurate with this ordinary deck. I must be really good at this.” He tapped the deck, drew a card, looked at it, and smiled. “Ah, correctly predicted that one. Maybe there’s real magic here!”
“Or maybe you’re just telling people what they want to hear,” I suggested.
Aldo grinned. “Ah, and that’s the real magic, isn’t it? Give cryptic fortunes and let the customer figure out the true meaning. ‘You will lose something very valuable to you, but you will gain something unexpected.’ That’s one I told the fat lady a few months ago.”
“Sounds like a bad horoscope,” I said.
“Actually, it sounds like a good horoscope,” Sheyenne said.
The gaunt vampire ringmaster walked by, still wearing his equestrian jacket; he kept to the awnings, shading his head with his black top hat to avoid the direct sunlight. Aldo waved. “Oscar! Come here—this is the private detective I was telling you about. Dan Chambeaux, meet Oscar Kowalski, ringmaster and circus owner.”
The ringmaster gave a formal nod, and we exchanged a cold grip. “Dan Shamble?”
“Chambeaux,” I corrected. “People always mispronounce my name. And I wouldn’t expect a vampire to be named Oscar Kowalski. I’d think something more like … Bela.”
Kowalski let out an annoyed snort. “Bela is a drama queen and a pain in the ass, but he does draw a crowd, and that’s what it’s all about.” He lowered his voice. “I’m glad Aldo called you to look into the thefts. We’ve had a rash of them over the past two weeks.” He shot a narrow-eyed glare at the transvestite fortune-teller. “But we need to be discreet.”
Aldo sounded indignant. “He’s a private detective, not a public one. And I couldn’t wait any longer—I need my magic cards back.”
“What other thefts?” Sheyenne pressed.
“Mostly minor items, low value,” Kowalski said.
“My fortune-telling cards are extremely valuable!” Aldo insisted.
The ringmaster continued, “But it causes a lot of nuisance and unease. We like to think we’re family here at the circus.”
“I miss the Bearded Lady,” Aldo muttered. “Harriet was like a mother to us all, really kept the circus tight-knit, like a family. Things were so much nicer before she went off to lead a semi-normal life of her own.”
Kowalski shook his head. “We all miss Harriet, but there’s not much call for everyday freaks after the Big Uneasy. People can see weirder creatures on any walk through the Quarter.”
I got back to business. “We need to know what the other items are. All the clues should lead to the same suspect.”
“I can get you a list—a long one,” Aldo said, then considered. “But if you’re investigating all of the thefts in the circus, then Oscar should pay your bill.”
The ringmaster’s shoulders drooped. “I’ll pay half … provided Mr. Shamble—uh, Chambeaux—can help us all out. Most of the other items aren’t worth much.”
“If there’s a thief running loose, maybe we should report it to Officer McGoohan?” Sheyenne suggested.
I explained, “I have a good friend on the police force. He’ll take your problems seriously.”
Kowalski cleared his throat. “That won’t be necessary. We must count on your discretion, Mr. Chambeaux. People don’t trust circus folk as it is, even here in the Unnatural Quarter, and I don’t want to do anything to reinforce that stereotype. You probably don’t like it when people consider all zombies to be brain-eating clods with speech impediments.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I work hard to stay well preserved.”
Kowalski tipped his hat. “I hope you can resolve this quickly and quietly. The circus is your client.”
“But find my magic cards first,” Aldo insisted as he jotted down the list on a scrap of paper.
“If we find the thief, we should find all of the stolen items,” I said.
Sheyenne and I read the list as we walked away. In addition to the magic fortune-telling cards (two sets, but I doubted we’d find the one he’d lost six months earlier), Aldo had listed a hammer (standard hardware store issue), glass milk bottle from one of the game booths, dagger from the knife thrower’s act, three costume-jewelry necklaces from Annie the fat lady (hence a rope-length of jewelry), and a cold Reuben sandwich from a refrigerator in the Flag. I figured we could discount that last item.
We had no trouble finding the fat lady, mainly because she wasn’t very mobile, but also because she was so large. In her open tent, Annie reclined on—and covered most of—a queen-sized bed. Plates mounded with chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and Danishes sat within reach of one hand; by the other side of the bed sat a tray of chicken wings and ribs. She had apparently been through several plates already, but despite the aftermath of her obviously enormous appetite, her face looked saggy. I didn’t think the fat lady looked healthy at all, but since I’m undead, I’m not one to point fingers.
Annie’s wide throat was round and somewhat tubular, like a pelican with a particular lucky catch of fish. She had permed gray hair and wire-rim glasses that made her look like the world’s kindest, and largest, grandmother. An enormous floral muumuu extended all the way down to her ankles; sleeves covered the wrists where they met the gloves. Under her gigantic tent of a dress, her mounded belly stirred and squirmed in a disturbing way, as if her intestines were rearranging themselves before our eyes.
Annie gave us a twinkling smile. “Hello, dears! Come in and stare—that’s what I’m here for. Would you like a cookie? I’ve got plenty.” She extended the tray to us.
“No thanks, ma’am,” Sheyenne said. “I’m ectoplasmic.”
“And I’m on a low-carb diet,” I added, even though it was just an excuse. My undead taste buds were no longer very discriminating, and Annie needed a constant stream of calories just to maintain her bulk. She consumed the rest of the cookies with methodical swiftness, as if it were her mission.
“We’re from Chambeaux and Deyer Investigations, and we’re here on a case.” I set one of our business cards on the bedside table next to the chicken wings. “We’ve been hired to investigate certain items that have gone missing. If there’s a circus thief, we’ll catch him.”
“A thief? Oh, my!” Annie held her hands to her face, licked a few crumbs from her fingers. “I refuse to believe members of my dear circus family are thieves.” Her mounded stomach shifted and churned, and Annie let out an embarrassed giggle, placing her hands flat on her belly. “Just a bit of indigestion—it tends to get extreme in my case.”
I held up Aldo’s handwritten list. “According to this, you’ve lost several items of jewelry?”
“Oh, dear me, I may have misplaced a few cheap necklaces—I’m always doing that. When I manage to walk around, I can’t see
the ground, and if something falls … well, I just give it up for lost. I wouldn’t call them stolen. The circus people are my family. I’m like a mother to them since Harriet’s gone. Someone has to watch out for everyone.”
I tipped my fedora. “If you think of anything, please let us know, ma’am. Any clue would help.”
Leaving the fat lady’s tent, we strolled along the midway, and soon Fazio the Clown buttonholed us again. “I saw you two talking with that fraud fortune-teller! He’s a fake—a complete fake. I doubt he could predict yesterday if he had a newspaper in front of him.”
If you had asked me before the Big Uneasy, I would have said that all fortune-telling was fake. Now, though, I’d seen plenty of evidence of functional spells. “He’s at a disadvantage if he lost his magic cards.”
“Not the cards—the sham costume. Him in his stupid wig and his clumsy makeup! It’s an embarrassment. Makeup is no joke. I work hard on my appearance, greasepaint over every inch of exposed skin.” He tugged at his shocks of pink hair, straightened the bald cap, then tweaked the bright red nose. “It’s a beautiful design, the perfect clown face—I’ve even got it trademarked. But Zelda, or Aldo, or whoever or whatever the name is, does it just to make a buck. It cheapens the art of face painting.”
“And why do you paint your face?” Sheyenne asked.
“For a greater purpose, of course—to get a laugh.”
Or a scream, I thought, remembering the terrified children.
“We’re investigating a rash of burglaries, not makeup techniques,” I said. “Any comments about his missing deck of fortune-telling cards?”
“I don’t know anything about the first one he lost, and not the second one either.” He snorted, then stormed off. “You should be investigating Aldo. His eye shadow is a crime!”
3
After gathering as much information as we could, Sheyenne and I returned to the Chambeaux & Deyer offices in the seedy, run-down section of the Unnatural Quarter (I realize that’s not very specific).
Sheyenne began compiling a list of circus suspects and digging up dirt on them. She’s good at uncovering details, whether they be sordid details, suspicious details, or just plain bookkeeping details.
A large part of my job is time management. Real life as an undead private investigator isn’t like a TV detective show, where the PI works on one mystery at a time and solves it without other clients getting in the way. In addition to investigating stolen items at the vampire circus, I had several active cases.
My partner, Robin Deyer, came out to brief me on the legal battles she had fought during the day. As a lawyer, Robin makes sure that downtrodden and underrepresented monsters get a fair shot in the legal system. She’s a young African American, as pretty as she is determined—and she is extremely determined. Her eyes had a faraway, preoccupied look because case subtleties ran through her head at all times.
I had taken her under my wing back when I was a human private detective. We shared office space, offered assistance on each other’s cases, and enjoyed working together. After my murder, I think Robin was hit even harder by my death than I was. When I came back from the grave, she welcomed me with open arms (after she got over the shock and uneasiness). She made a special point to treat me just as she’d always done, and we quickly got back to our usual routine.
“Any word on the gargoyle case?” I asked.
For several weeks Robin had represented a gargoyle who was suing the Notre Dame cathedral for unauthorized use of his likeness. Comparing the gargoyle himself with photographs of several specific stone figures on the ancient cathedral, the resemblance was undeniable.
Her expression tightened. “I think we’re going to lose that one. There seems to be an unbreakable statute of limitations clause in church law. Today, I’m neck-deep in that unnatural voting rights case.”
Robin was tilting at a different windmill, challenging voter restrictions recently put in place for the sole purpose of denying unnaturals the right to vote. (No one seemed to remember that in some corrupt cities, dead people had done more than their share of voting over the years.…) Both political parties insisted that the proposed voter suppression rules against unnaturals were disenfranchising their constituents, although neither side had been able to prove that unnaturals leaned toward any particular affiliation, as a rule.
After Robin described a brief she had filed and her court appearance schedule for the week, I told her about the vampire circus and headed to my office to take care of my own work. “I think I can wrap up the Amontillado case this afternoon.”
“Good,” Sheyenne called from the receptionist’s desk. “We need to send them a bill.”
Robin cautioned, “The outcome wasn’t what the client expected. Maybe we should offer a discount—”
Sheyenne cut right in. “The client is a client, and a fee is a fee.” If Robin had her way, she would do all cases pro bono, and Sheyenne often had to remind her about the facts of business. Even though I was undead and Sheyenne was a ghost, Robin still needed to eat, and we all had to pay the rent on the office space.
I suggested a compromise. “Give the client a coupon for his next case with us. We did solve the mystery, which is what he hired us to do.”
A wealthy man had asked me to track down a very rare cask of Amontillado, more than a century and a half old, and I found the cask behind a brick wall, along with an animated skeleton that had been manacled there. In the years since the Big Uneasy, the skeleton had managed to break loose from one manacle by detaching his entire bony hand. With his wrist released, he was able to reach the cask, work the bung loose, and pour the extremely expensive sherry down his throat. Of course, since he had no throat, the rare Amontillado spilled all over the vault floor and dried up. When I found the very expensive and very empty cask I’d been hired to track down, the skeleton laughed and laughed at the joke, saying in a rattling voice, “I drank it all, I drank it all!”
Now I sat at my desk and wrote up the report, reducing the total number of hours billed on the case just to make Robin happy, and to make me feel better as well; Sheyenne didn’t need to know.
It was full-dark outside by the time Sheyenne flitted through my closed office door. She carried a stack of papers, which could not spectrally pass through the barrier, so they fluttered to the floor outside. With an impatient frown, she flitted back out, picked up the papers, and opened the door to enter via the normal way.
“I ran down the usual suspects at the circus. Some very interesting background material.”
I took the papers. “Anything suspicious?”
She arched her eyebrows. “Naturals and unnaturals all working for a traveling circus run by a vampire—isn’t that suspicious enough?”
“I was hoping for something more specific.”
“So many aliases, stage names, plenty of skeletons in the closet—and not like the one you found with your cask of Amontillado.” She grinned at me.
“Speaking of that …” I handed her the bill and final report, which pleased her very much.
She continued with her summary, “First off, Oscar Kowalski is not a very talented businessman. He’s filed for bankruptcy twice since the Big Uneasy, barely scraped through, and seems to be in rocky circumstances right now.”
I said, “I don’t see how stealing a deck of fortune-teller cards, costume jewelry, and a cold Reuben sandwich would help his financial situation.”
“Probably not.” Sheyenne glanced down at her papers again. “Checking back along the circus route over the years, I found that two goblin roustabouts were arrested for petty theft, but they escaped and disappeared. Young twins. Their juvenile records should have been sealed, but Robin pried them loose because the law is still murky.”
“Robin used a murky law to her own advantage?” I asked. “Good for her.”
Sheyenne blew an imaginary breath through her lips. “The goblins were over eighteen years old—adults according to the letter of the law—but goblins live a long time
, and those twins are still adolescents as far as goblins go. Still, nobody’s bothered to change the law, so we got the arrest records. Not that it does us much good, if the twins are no longer with the circus.”
Robin would probably decide to challenge that law, now that she’d noticed the injustice.
“What else?” I asked.
“Aldo—or should we call him Zelda?—is late on his child support, and his ex-wife is trying to track him down.” She checked off items on her list. “Fazio got arrested for drunk driving in his clown car, but that was never prosecuted. Oh, and his clown license has expired.”
I frowned. “I didn’t know there was such a thing as a clown license. I find that very suspicious.”
Sheyenne blinked her blue eyes at me. “More suspicious than all the other things?”
“He’s a clown. I’m always suspicious of clowns.”
4
With the information Sheyenne had uncovered about the circus personnel, I went back to the midway early enough to catch the nighttime monster matinee. While unnatural crowds started to gather inside the Big Top for Bela’s performance, I stopped by Oscar Kowalski’s office trailer just outside the main tent. I wanted to ask him about bankruptcy filings, late child-support payments, Fazio’s expired clown license, and anything else that came to mind. Instead, I stumbled into another crisis.
“I refuse, Oscar!” Bela cried with an exaggerated and obviously fake Transylvanian accent. He raised his chin with an imperious air and flared the nostrils on his beak-like nose. “You must cancel the show. I can’t perform under these circumstances—it is impossible!”
“Nothing’s impossible, Bela.” Kowalski sounded long-suffering and annoyed. He sat at his desk with an open, and messily scribbled ledger. “Nobody’s canceling the show. You can go on, and you will go on.”
“But it’s been stolen!” Bela clutched at his throat, where I noticed the gold medallion was missing. (The far-too-clingy silver lamé bodysuit had previously demanded most of my attention.) “It’s my Air Commander medal, given to me for being a Flying Ace in World War Two—or World War One, I forget which. If I don’t wear the medal, then I won’t have the confidence to transform into a bat at the climax of my show.”
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