Carnival of Death

by Keene, Day

  Daly looked over his shoulder. The man addressing him was a perfectly formed midget, not more than three and a half feet tall.

  “No,” the midget assured him. “You’re not seeing things. The name is Colonel Tom Thumb, no relation to the original. At your service, sir.”

  “How do you do,” Daly said.

  The midget pointed the glowing end of his oversized cigar at him. “You are Tom Daly, the telecaster from KAMPC-TV?”

  Daly got to his feet and tried to brush the worst of the oil and water from his suit. “That’s right. Now may I ask to what I owe this honor, Colonel? Don’t tell me you waded ashore at the Bay of Pigs?”

  The other man ignored the question to ask one of his own. “We didn’t get to see your program last night. We were too busy packing and making plane reservations. But the newspapers quote you correctly? You are the clem who believes that Mickey and Paquita are innocent?”

  Daly returned his handkerchief to his pocket. “I was up until a few minutes ago. But right now, I’m not certain of anything.”

  He turned his head as the door of the self-service elevator opened. The emerging giant was as tall as the midget was small and the huge white sombrero he was wearing made him look even taller.

  “It’s all right, Uriah,” the midget said. “I’ve found him. Mr. Daly, meet Uriah Heap.” He explained, “We call him that because he’s a heap of Uriah.”

  The giant encased Daly’s hand in a hand the size of a small ham. His voice was surprisingly gentle. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Daly.”

  Daly retrieved his hand. “It’s nice to meet you. Now may I ask what you gentlemen want with me?”

  The giant set the midget on the roof of Daly’s car. “You tell him, Colonel.”

  “We’re here,” the midget began, “on behalf of Mickey and Paquita Laredo. You see, while it’s been a number of years since we worked with Mickey, there are a lot of us circus and carnival people who have good reason to remember him. When he was the star of the Flying Laredos, he was good to a lot of us. When any of us were in trouble and needed a little help, Mickey was always the first to reach in his pocket and his hand never came out empty. That’s why, in spite of all the money he used to make, he’s broke. At least one of the reasons. He never turned down a friend. And now that he’s on a spot, if we can, we want to return the favors he did us. That’s why we’re here.”

  Daly was impressed. “Go on, please.”

  Colonel Thumb continued his explanation. “A lot of folks would be here if they could. But most of them are working and can’t get away, so they flew Uriah and me out here, as a committee of two, to see what we can do about this Hey Rube.”

  The giant said, “If you don’t happen to know, Mr. Daly, that’s a term we circus and carnival people use as a rallying call when one of our own is in trouble. And from what we’ve heard on the air and read in the newspapers, someone is really trying to do it to Mickey and Paquita, but good.”

  Daly had never felt more at ease with anyone on such short acquaintance. “Well, thanks for coming, fellows. I appreciate it. I was beginning to think that Gene and I were alone in our thinking on this one. But just what do you hope to do for the Laredos?”

  The midget puffed furiously at his cigar. “Anything we can. And we represent a lot of people. Once the Hey Rube was sounded, every kinker and animal man and talker and bull boss and spec girl and whistle tooter in the business wanted to get into the fight.” He tugged a thick roll of bills from his pocket “We’ve collected eighteen thousand dollars so far. And we can raise as much as we need.” He pushed the bills at Daly. “Take it and get the kids the best mouthpiece in town. And when you talk to the guy, impress on him that money is no object We can raise four times that if we have to.”

  Daly was even more impressed. He said so, but refused to accept the money. “Well use it if we have to, but you and Uriah keep it for now. I’ve already arranged for a lawyer and he’s doing everything, legally, that he can.”

  Uriah leaned one of his elbows on the roof of the car and asked shrewdly, “Which isn’t very much, eh? All right We flew out here to help. You tell us what we can do. And we don’t give a damn if it’s legal or illegal.”

  Daly thought a moment “You can help me locate two people.”

  “You name them.”

  “A Tommy and a Thelma Banks. If I have this figured correctly, Tommy, an eighteen-year-old punk who ran the miniature train for Mickey, was the clown who unlocked the door of the money compartment and threw a few thousand dollars to the crowd to create a diversion while he passed the bulk of the money to a confederate.”

  Colonel Thumb took a notebook from his pocket “Can you give us a takeoff point?”

  Daly gave him the street number of the youth’s last known address. “But you won’t find him there. His landlady hasn’t seen him since Friday afternoon and there has been an all points bulletin out on him since Sunday morning. All we really know about him is that he is in some way connected with a blonde woman who calls herself Thelma Banks.”

  The midget poised his pencil over his notebook. “Sister, wife or shack job?”

  “We don’t know,” Daly admitted. “But both of them, at times, are known to have driven a 1961 Volkswagen carrying California license plates HIU-587. And the car is registered to her.”

  Colonel Thumb wrote the license number under the address of the rooming house. “Can you describe either of them, Mr. Daly?”

  Daly gave him the description that Laredo had given him. “He’s eighteen, possibly nineteen, years old. Rather good-looking. Wears his hair long. A typical punk, according to Mickey. Oh, yes — and he likes the girls.”

  “And the woman?”

  “She’s blonde. Naturally or not we don’t know. Probably five feet three or four, one hundred and fifteen or twenty pounds. Well formed. Large, firm breasts. Likes to run around in her birthday suit And she isn’t particular where or with whom she sleeps.”

  “How do you figure that?” Uriah asked.

  Daly told him. “We’re almost certain she was the woman who waited for Davis in a getaway car at the scene of the robbery. The woman, or girl, who first slept with, then shot him to cheat him out of his share of the loot. She is also reputed to have entertained different men in a secluded mountain cabin every weekend for the past year. I know I caught her playing house with one of them.”

  “Then you’ve seen her?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “With one exception, she could have been any of the girls who attended the dead guard’s funeral. But it was too dark in the cabin for me to see anything, even if I hadn’t been pistol-whipped half unconscious as I walked in the door.” Daly was still furious when he thought of it. “However, by guiding one of my hands over her more feminine attributes on a personally escorted tour, she made certain I knew how generous nature had been to her and that she was unquestionably female.”

  “And then?” Colonel Thumb asked.

  “She finished pistol-whipping me.”

  The giant sighed. “I don’t like to get sentimental at a time like this. But she sounds like a broad, and I do mean a broad, that I used to know in Sioux Falls. She was one of those dames who got her kicks by hurting others. What do you call people like that?”

  “Sadists,” the midget told him.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THE LA HACIENDA MOTEL, consisting of fourteen small individual units of stucco construction, once painted white, had, in its day, been a pleasant oasis for out-of-state motorists who wanted to spend one or more nights on the outskirts of Los Angeles. There had been beds of flowers and blooming shrubs between the units. Children played in the sand pile and birds sang in the branches of its olive and orange trees. Travelers had warmly recommended the La Hacienda to friends who might pass that way.

  Time had changed that Time and the freeway and the relentless growth of the city. Now there was a gasoline station on one
side of the court, a liquor store on the other, an elevated eight-lane channel of steel reinforced concrete where the olive and orange trees had been, and the La Hacienda no longer catered to families.

  For a number of years after the owners of the other tourist courts in the immediate vicinity had sold their properties for the land value and either retired or built elsewhere, the owner of the La Hacienda had hung on grimly, his units vacant most of the time, barely earning enough to pay taxes. Then he’d discovered that sex could not only be pleasant but profitable and even if the flowers and the shrubs and the trees were gone, the La Hacienda had blossomed again.

  Now without any extensive remodeling and at an increase in prices, he frequently rented one unit as many as five and six times in one night. There was no law in California that said that the owner of a motel had to ask a couple to show him their marriage license. And to men out on the town with their neighbors’ wives, ambitious movie and television extras willing to use their bodies as rungs in the ladder they hoped to climb, secretaries happy to work overtime, middle-aged wives bored with their husbands, old men seeking an ephemeral illusion of youth, and to the general run of starry-eyed young and amorous, the clang of a tire being changed, the noisy rumble of the heavily loaded semitrailers and the continuous roar of cars passing the rear of the court on the elevated freeway didn’t present any problem. They hadn’t come to the La Hacienda to talk.

  On the Wednesday night following Daly’s meeting with Colonel Tom Thumb and his fellow circus sideshow performer, the full-figured platinum blonde who usually asked for Unit 14 entered the office of the court a few minutes after midnight, as always trailing a wake of expensive perfume and this morning carrying a morning paper and an unopened fifth of whiskey in a brown paper bag.

  It had only happened the one time. It would probably never happen again, but the youthful night clerk on duty was always glad to see her. One of his more pleasant memories would always be the one time that her date had stood her up and she’d phoned the office after waiting an hour to ask if he would be so kind as to step next door and buy her a bottle of whiskey and deliver it with some cracked ice.

  “Nice to see you, Mrs. Bennett,” he enthused. “A beautiful night, eh?”

  The blonde woman shrugged her mink-covered shoulders. “It’s all right, I guess. Did you save the unit I asked you to reserve?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The clerk laid a registration card on the desk. “Unit 14. I marked it occupied as soon as you phoned.”

  As always, the blonde woman signed the card “Mr. and Mrs. Milo Bennett.” She added a Beverly Hills address, then paid for the unit with a twenty dollar bill. “Mr. Bennett will be along in a few minutes.” She gave her standard excuse. “He stopped to have the car serviced.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The clerk asked hopefully, “Would you like some ice tonight?”

  “No. Not tonight.”

  Getting a better grip on the whiskey in the paper bag, she left the office and walked down the gravel drive. Unit 14 was the last unit in the court and the freeway noise was deafening here. She unlocked the door with the key the clerk had given her.

  “Would you like some ice tonight?”

  That was a laugh. Ice was the last thing on the young punk’s mind. Young or old, rich or poor, at least in the one respect all men were alike. As far as women were concerned, they all had one thing in their minds. The corners of her mouth turned down. Pigs, that’s what they were. And they didn’t care how many other pigs had wallowed in the trough as long as they got their turn.

  She tossed the morning paper on the bed. Then, without removing her coat, she took the fifth of whiskey from the bag and broke the seal and poured a stiff drink into one of the grimy glasses on the battered dresser. The warm whiskey tasted good.

  She realized she hadn’t closed the door. She closed it and put the key in the lock but didn’t turn it.

  Then, pouring more whiskey in the glass, she carried the glass with her into the old-fashioned bathroom of the unit and sipped at the whiskey from time to time as she removed her clothes.

  There was only this one last hurdle. She hoped she didn’t lose her nerve. She didn’t think she would. She didn’t see any reason why she should.

  She hung her coat and her dress on hooks on the back of the bathroom door, then unhooked the wisp of lace covering her breasts, worked the elastic of her sheer scanties down over her hips and debated removing her stockings.

  For some reason the fact that an otherwise nude woman was wearing stockings seemed to make most men more amorous. It was a minor natural phenomenon she’d never been able to fathom. Shrugging, she removed her garter belt and rolled her stockings below her knees, walking back into the bedroom completely nude except for her stockings and her spike-heeled shoes.

  It felt good to get out of her clothes. There were times when she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She picked her purse from the dresser and put it on the night table. Then she lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed and read the early edition of the morning paper while she waited.

  There was the usual international crisis. A man in Woodland Hills had murdered his wife and her lover. The N.A.A.C.P. was planning a massive demonstration. Space officials were predicting that the United States would land a man on the moon before Soviet Russia did.

  No story made headlines for long. The public’s taste was too jaded. Now, four days after it had happened, the robbery of the armored truck at the new East Valley Shopping Plaza had been relegated to the inner pages. She folded the paper to page three. There was nothing in the brief follow-up story that hadn’t been printed before.

  As yet the District Attorney’s office hadn’t set a date for Mickey and Paquita Laredo’s trial. How could it? The eyewitnesses were still arguing about how many clowns there had been and whether or not Dr. Alveredo — now proved a fake — had left the scene in a car driven by a blonde woman. Seemingly the only witness to that had been the five-year-old Mexican-American child whom Tom Daly had had on his program.

  Most of the story was a recapitulation. The police had recovered five thousand, four hundred and twenty dollars of the money, most of it in silver, that allegedly had been thrown to the milling teen-agers and adults around the truck. Another five thousand dollars in bills, the money found in one of the horses on Mickey Laredo’s carousel, had been identified by Miss Grace Lindler of the Ramsdale Armored Truck Company as part of the load the garage cashier had checked into the truck on the Saturday morning it had been robbed. There were, however, as yet no clues that might aid the detectives working on the case to recover the bulk of the money.

  She snuffed her cigarette in the tray on the night table and resumed reading. A Miss Thelma and a Tommy Banks were still being sought in connection with suspected arson in the burning of a mountain cabin in the Big Bear City area. The police also wanted to question Miss Banks, believed to be a platinum blonde of questionable morals, in the fatal shooting of James Davis aboard his boat the La Femme in the Redondo Beach marina. Readers were asked to contact either the newspaper or the police station nearest them if they should chance to see a 1961 Volkswagen with California license plates HIU-587.

  If you liked that sort of thing, it made rather interested reading. Personally, she found it rather boring. She dropped the newspaper on the floor and picked her purse from the night table, removing a small-caliber revolver. She spun the cylinder to make certain that all of the chambers were loaded.

  Satisfied that they were, she stood up and turned back the spread and the top sheet and slid the gun under the far pillow. Then deciding the pillow was a poor hiding place, she recovered the revolver and kicking off her shoes, stretched out full length on the double bed and dropped the hand holding the gun between the edge of the wall and the mattress. Then raising her hand again she tried a dry run and smiled thinly. The floor between the bed and the wall made a much better hiding place than the pillow. It was much more efficient. There would be no need for any fumbling. While her compa
nion’s attention was centered elsewhere, when the proper time came, and she wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry about it, all she would have to do was raise her arm and wait for the rumble of a passing truck to drown out the sound of the shots.

  She laid the gun back on the floor, then ran her hands slowly over her breasts, down her body and between the yielding softness of her inner thighs and sucked in her breath sharply. She’d read that, biologically speaking, women differed from men in that sexual desire couldn’t be engendered in them by memories of past contacts and performances. If so, it wasn’t true of her. She hoped Carver wouldn’t be late. Then after he’d taken care of her need and she’d done what had to be done, the police could go blow their whistles.

  • • •

  Uriah said, “It was the Colonel’s idea. After we talked to Mr. Daly last night, we pounded the pavement all morning and most of the afternoon, getting nowhere. We talked to maybe thirty ex-circus and carnival people. All of them knew Mickey Laredo. A few had worked with Jocko. But no one we talked to had heard of a Tommy or a Thelma Banks. Then about three o’clock this afternoon, the Colonel had this brainstorm. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Let’s stop using our feet and use our heads. Everyone agrees on one thing. The costumes of the clowns who heisted the truck were identical with Mickey’s. Professional clown costumes are what you might call specialized merchandise. You just don’t go out and buy them anywhere. And if you wanted to masquerade as a special kind of a clown, where would be the best place to buy or rent a costume? At a theatrical outfitting company.’”

  DuBoise swore under his breath. “Of course. We should have thought of that.”

  The giant continued. “So we checked the yellow pages in the phone book and found twenty outfitters listed, beginning with the Acme Costume Rental Company on Beachwood Drive and winding up with the Western Costume Company on Melrose. And somewhere in the middle we found the one we wanted. Give Mr. Daly their card, Colonel.”