“You’re actually sure you saw them take Susie out of the tank?”
“Are you nuts, Eddie? I saw them take a dead monkey out of the tank. If it wasn’t Susie, what was it? There isn’t any other chimp around.”
I stood there thinking. Suddenly the whole thing made such monstrous nonsense that it frightened me.
Estelle put her hands on both my arms and shook me. “Eddie,” she said, “are you going to tell me what it’s all about or—are you drunk, really?”
“I’m not drunk,” I told her. “Oh, hell, I might as well tell you.” I told her what I’d seen through the open window of Hoagy’s trailer.
She stood looking at me after I’d finished. Then she said, “Eddie, I’m scared.”
“So am I. ‘Stelle, you ready to go home? Can I put you in a cab?”
“Why? What are you going to do? You’re not going to—”
I nodded. “I’m going to. I’ve got to know.”
“Then I’m going along.”
I started to argue with her and then changed my mind. I wasn’t too crazy about going out alone into the woods at night to dig up a body—even the body of a dead chimp.
CHAPTER IX
Estelle waited in front of our ball game booth until I went back and got a flashlight and the little short-handled shovel we used for trenching after a rain. I put on my cravenette coat, too, so I could carry the shovel under it, out of sight.
As we started across the midway, Estelle said, “Eddie, while you were in there I was thinking. What if Hoagy’s bought another chimp. He could have.”
“He’s not that crazy.”
“Why not? I mean, if he’s crazy enough to buy one chimp, why not another if the first one dies? And if he knew where he could get another right away— Have you talked to him or to Marge since last night?”
“No. But, damn it, it’s silly.”
“Well, look, we have to go by their place anyway, so if there’s a light— Eddie, there is one. They’re up.”
I said, “It’s a million to one shot, but okay. Only let’s not both go in; we’ll have to stay awhile. I’ll wait and you look in a minute. Pretend you’re hunting for Lee or someone.”
I waited in the shadow of the posing show top. She was back in five minutes. She said, “No, Eddie, I was wrong. I didn’t even have to ask. Hoagy’d taken down the bars; there wasn’t even a cage any more, so that’s proof enough.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sure you want to come along?”
“Yes, Eddie. But—why don’t you talk to Hoagy about it? He isn’t there now—but Marge says she thinks he’s in the G-top, and you could get him to come outside a minute to talk. And ask him if he’s sure it was Susie—”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to ask Hoagy. I don’t want to ask anybody, to take anybody’s word. I want to know.”
“All right, Eddie. Let’s go.”
We gave Hoagy’s trailer a wide berth so Marge wouldn’t see us. We cut across an open field and we were in the woods.
I’d been through them early yesterday morning, and they weren’t very big by daylight. But at night they seemed enormous.
I remembered there was a path through them and I figured they’d have buried her near the path. So, with the flashlight, we hunted along the edge until we found the beginning of the path before we went in.
Estelle was scared. She hung onto my arm so tightly that it hurt. I kept the flashlight moving, watching the path ahead and the open areas on both sides of it, watching for a mound or for freshly turned earth.
We missed it the first time and found it on the way back, a dozen paces off the path. It was a little mound of fresh dirt, about four feet by two, still showing the imprints of the spade that had tamped it down. It was a neat, workmanlike job. It looked like a child’s grave.
The same thing must have hit Estelle. Her hand tightened again on my arm. “Eddie,” she whispered, “it looks like a grave.”
“It is,” I said. “But just a monkey’s grave. Anyway, I think it is. I’m going to make sure.”
“Eddie, no! Please don’t.”
“I’ll take you back first,” I offered. “I can—”
“No, if you’ve got to do it, I’ll stay. I’ll hold the light for you.”
“Attababy,” I said.
I gave her the flash, and she stood a little back and held it while I used our trenching shovel. The earth was still loose enough to dig easily. Two feet down, I came to canvas. I kept on working until I’d cleared the dirt off the top of it. Then I took the flashlight away from Estelle. “Better turn around,” I told her. “It won’t be pretty, I guess.”
I held the light for her until she got back to the path. She didn’t turn away, but from that distance she couldn’t see down into the grave anyway, so it didn’t matter.
I didn’t like the idea of looking myself, but I was going to be damn sure what was inside that canvas. I wasn’t going to settle for a glimpse of fur.
I unfolded the canvas, and made sure. I dropped the canvas back and straightened up.
Estelle said, “Eddie—is it—?”
“It’s Susie,” I said.
She came back a little nearer and I gave her the flash to hold again while I refilled the little grave and tamped the dirt down again with the flat of the shovel.
Neither of us said anything until we got to the edge of the woods, in sight of the lot, the tops and booths silhouetted against the night-lighted midway, the Ferris wheel and the high-dive pole tall against the faintly moonlit sky, the lighted trailer windows, the big silent vans.
Estelle caught my arm. “Wait, Eddie, not just yet. I’ll bet I’m white as a sheet—like you were when you saw whatever was at the trailer window. And I’m shaky. I— Eddie, have you got that half pint you bought at the tavern?”
“My God,” I said, “I forgot all about it. I could have used a drink when I was playing ghoul back there. I can still use one.”
For just an instant I turned the flash on Estelle, and she hadn’t been kidding. I mean, her face was really pale and she was trembling. She must have been even more scared than I, back in the woods. But she’d stuck it out.
It was different here, out of the woods and past our gruesome job, and in sight of the lights of the carney. I knew how she felt, wanting time to compose herself before going the rest of the way back.
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have a drink and rest a minute.”
I took off my coat and spread it on the grass for us to sit on, and then I put the flashlight back in my pocket and got out the bottle.
I opened it and passed it to Estelle and she drank and passed it back. It was a good brand; it went down a lot smoother than Carey’s whisky had. It put a warm feeling in my throat and a warm spot in my chest.
Estelle said, “Don’t be a pig, Eddie. Save me some. I’m cold.”
She was shivering a little, and I put my arm around her as I passed back the bottle. She snuggled up a little and said, “You’re nice and warm, Eddie. But remember—no passes.”
“Right,” I said.
It was nice sitting there, in the quiet and the dark, with the carney lights to look at, and nothing to worry about.
Only, I thought, my God I wish it was Rita here with me now. I started to count back how many days I’d been waiting now, but before I finished counting Estelle gave me back the bottle. We killed it, taking our time, because there wasn’t any hurry.
Estelle sighed. “I feel better now, Eddie. I feel swell.”
“Want to go back?”
“If you do.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Neither do I.”
Her face was a white blur in the dark, very near to mine. And her body was warm against mine.
I thought, to hell with no-passes, and I kissed her. It turned into a long kiss.
Then she whispered, “Why don’t you pretend I’m Rita, Eddie?”
That was just what I’d been thinking. But I said, “That wouldn’t be fair to
you, Estelle.”
“Why not, Eddie? It doesn’t have to mean anything, does it? It could just be—fun.”
That, too, was just what I’d been thinking.
When I woke the next morning, Uncle Am was sitting on the edge of his cot, pulling on his socks. There was an alert, listening sort of look on his face, not the usual sleepy look people have when they first wake up.
I sat up quick.
He glanced over at me. “Something’s wrong, Ed. Feel it? Listen.”
I opened my mouth to ask what he was talking about, and then I shut it and listened instead. Maybe it was my imagination, because of what he’d said, but there was something a little different. I couldn’t decide what it was.
There seemed to be something different in the air, too, a feeling of subdued excitement with a little fear mixed in, sort of like the moment after a flash of lightning when you’re waiting for the thunder to come. Or maybe it was like the feeling you have when someone comes up to tell you something and you know by his face that it’s bad news—but you don’t know what it is yet, and you’re waiting for him to speak.
I’ve wondered since whether I’d have felt that by myself; I mean, if Uncle Am hadn’t suggested it by his question and by his manner and the hurried way he went on dressing after he’d said it.
Another murder, was my first coherent thought. And then, Who?
But there wasn’t any percentage in guessing. I swung my feet off the cot and started racing Uncle Am getting dressed. I didn’t beat him; he had too much of a start on me. But I tied him, and we went out of the tent together, and through our passage to the midway.
The place was full of cops.
That was my first impression; on second look it boiled down to about a dozen, and when I counted the dozen, there were only six. They were working in three groups of two each, and they were working down our side of the midway, toward us. Each pair of them was talking to a carney. Some of the cops had open notebooks.
I stepped farther out into the midway and looked around. There seemed to be a center of excitement in front of the jig show. There was a little knot of people, some of them men and mulatto girls from the jig show, a few of them white carneys. It sounded like someone over there, a woman, was crying.
I started over that way and someone said, “Hey, you,” and I stopped and looked around. It was one of the cops, walking toward me. He asked, “We got your name yet?”
“No,” I said. “What’s up?”
Uncle Am came walking over and so did the other cop of that particular pair; the carney they’d been talking to went on down the midway toward the entrance.
The first cop had a notebook and pencil. “Your name?”
“Ed Hunter. What’s wrong?”
“You’re with the carney?”
I nodded. “What’s it all about? What’s happened?” He was writing my name in his notebook; he didn’t answer. He looked up and asked, “With what show?” Uncle Am was standing beside me by then; he nudged me to shut up.
He said, “He works for me, Officer. My nephew. We run a ball game. And we’ll answer questions from now till next week, but naturally we’re curious as hell as to what’s happened. We just woke up. It’ll save both you and us time in the long run, and be a hell of a favor to us besides, if you’ll take time off between questions to tell us in one short sentence what this is all about. Not the details, mind you, just one sentence. Also we’ll be able to answer your questions more intelligently.”
The cop grinned. He said, “Okay, Jack, you win. Last night a kid named Booker T. Brent was killed. Now what’s your name?”
Uncle Am told him and he wrote it down. He said, “Okay, we’ll take both of you together. Were either of you off the lot since midnight last night?”
Uncle Am said no, and I started to say no, too, and then changed it and said, “I was a block away—that tavern a block down the drag toward town.”
“Feltner’s?”
I told him I hadn’t noticed the name but that it was a block north of the carney entrance gate and he nodded. “What time?”
I said, “I didn’t notice, but it would have been after twelve —not much after. Say between twelve and one. We were there about half an hour, and then came back to the lot.”
He wanted to know who was with me, and I told him.
“You know the kid that was killed?”
I shook my head, but Uncle Am said, “Sure you do, Ed. But you didn’t know him by his real name. That’s Jigaboo.”
“Hell,” I said.
God damn it, I thought, why did it have to be Jigaboo? He was so alive, so damn good a tap dancer and so nice a kid. It just didn’t seem possible that Jigaboo was dead.
The cop was saying, “Yeah, that’s how they billed him: Jigaboo. When did you see him last?”
I thought back. “About the middle of the evening. I got hungry and took a few minutes off to go over to the grab joint for a hamburger. The jig show was putting on a bally and he was on the platform, dancing a few steps, when I went by.”
“You didn’t see him after the carney closed?”
“No.”
Uncle Am said about the same thing; that the last time he’d seen the kid had been on the bally platform, only earlier in the evening when he’d gone to the chow top while I’d spelled him at the ball game.
The cop said. “Okay. This your concession here?” Uncle Am nodded.
“Anybody else work with you or for you?”
“No, just the two of us.”
“Always sleep on the lot?”
“Yeah. We got a living top pitched back of the booth.”
“Okay,” the cop said. “Ambrose Hunter, Ed Hunter. Okay.” He and the other cop went on down the midway. Pop Janney was walking along toward us and they got him between them; the notebook flipped open again.
I started toward the group in front of the jig show platform, and Uncle Am said, “Wait, Ed.”
I did, and he said, “That’s the kid’s father and mother in there. Let ‘em alone. They don’t want a crowd.”
“But we want to find out—”
“Sure, Ed, we want to find out. But not from them. There’s nothing we can do for them, so just stay away.”
“Where do we find out?”
“Let’s get it really straight instead of picking up rumors all over the lot. Cap Weiss is still in town. When he was around yesterday he said he was staying at the Ardmore till noon today. It’s a little after that, but this would have come up before he left, so he’s sure as hell still in Fort Wayne.”
I asked him, “You think this ties in the same bundle as the midget business?”
“How the hell would I know—without knowing how and where the kid was killed? Let’s go use a phone. Not the office wagon one—how’s about that tavern you and Estelle went to?”
“It’s got a phone in a private booth. Sure.” We went to the tavern. Uncle Am ordered a beer and I settled for a coke. While the bartender was getting them, Uncle Am went back to the phone booth.
He came back in a few minutes. He said, “Weiss is at headquarters. He was still checked in at the Ardmore but not in, so I tried headquarters and got him. I told him—”
“What’s he doing there? I should think he’d be coming out here to the lot.”
“He isn’t He must be working on some angle from there; maybe they got somebody in for questioning. I told him we had some stuff to tell him and that we weren’t too crazy about going to headquarters, so he said he’d meet us at his hotel at three.”
I looked at the clock over the bar; it was one.
“Why so long?” I asked him.
Uncle Am glanced down the bar at the bartender and saw he wasn’t paying any attention to us. He lowered his voice a little.
“Ed, we’re not going to hold out on him. I want you to tell him what you told me late last night, about what you saw out of the trailer window.”
“Or what I thought I saw,” I said. “But what’s that got to do wit
h how soon we see him?”
“We want to see Estelle first. Look, it’ll tangle both of you up and do nobody any good if you tell one story about what you two kids did last night and she tells another. If they talk to her first and she swears you and she weren’t off the lot, she’ll be in a jam.”
I took a sip of my coke. “Okay,” I said, “I can tell them what I saw, but why do I got to tell them we went out in the woods and dug up the monkey? I already told those harness bulls back on the lot that I was away from the carney only to go to the tavern for a half hour. I’m on record.”
Uncle Am said, “Yeah, you did. Well, if they get tough about that you’ll have to backtrack and say you didn’t think of the woods as being away from the lot because they were so close, part of the same property, sort of.”
“Sure, but why—”
“Don’t be dumb, Ed. You tell ‘em you thought you saw Susie or an ape like her, and don’t you think they’re smart enough to get the same idea you did? They’ll go out and dig up Susie, too. And there’ll be marks to show she’s been dug for already, since she was planted, and they’ll find our trenching shovel wherever the hell you left it and—”
“My God, didn’t I bring that back?”
“You didn’t have it when you came back last night”
I thought back. “I didn’t leave it at Susie’s grave. I—we stopped a while at the edge of the woods on the way back. I must have left it there.”
“Having other things on your mind, I’d guess,” Uncle Am said. “Here’s the main question right now. You know where Estelle is staying or do we have to hunt for her?”
“She’s staying at the Ardmore, same as Weiss. I got a cab for her to send her downtown from the lot last night.”
“Then what you waiting for? Go call her up before she gets away from the hotel and make a breakfast date for us. Uh—not at the Ardmore; we don’t want to run into Weiss too soon. There’s a restaurant in town called Maxie’s. Tell her to meet us there at two o’clock.”
The Dead Ringer Page 12
