As I approached the ticket booth, I saw a sizable share of stands selling food and drink, and rides of every creed filling the allotted space. You name it, corn dogs, cotton candy, fried cheese curds, elephant ears, funnel cakes, ice cream, lemonade, and ice cones and slush drinks in every conceivable flavor. Dotted among them were the live ponies and camels harnessed to travel in ceaseless circles, the mini roller coaster, the mini motorcycles, cars, planes, boats, and trains, for the young, and the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Scrambler, and Spaceship for the tweens, the teens, and up, all unpacked from semis and quickly erected, connected each to another and to junction box hubs by miles of thick black cable crisscrossing the inner Pier. For someone who hadn't walked a midway in a very long time, the festivities were breathtaking, surrounded as I was by barkers, games, balloons, and all manner of stick-skewered foods. But rolling the drowned man, with the thunderstrike and vision that accompanied, had taken away my appetite. And rides had never appealed. My life was a circus ride on its own. And if and when I felt like puking all I needed to do was read a newspaper. I was on the hunt and, with the cops maybe three days or maybe three minutes behind me, I needed to get on with it.
“I'm not 'posed to sell any tickets after eleven-thirty.” That's what the acne covered string bean manning the ticket booth told me. “The circus closes at midnight.”
“It's eleven twenty-eight,” I replied.
“But the final performance is 'bout over. The circus closes at midnight.”
“It's eleven twenty-eight.”
“You ain't gonna get your money's worth.”
“It's my money.”
The kid shook his pimples in disbelief. But, unable to talk me out of my stubborn foolishness, sold me the ticket. I nodded my appreciation and headed through the gate into the food and family fun. I serpentined through the midway beneath the glow of thousands of flashing lights that may or may not have been the lights I saw in my vision. How, I wondered, was I to know? If they were, what then? Beyond the midway, moving east toward the lake, I passed through a gauntlet of smaller tents in a wide assortment of colored stripes that, combined, made up the circus Sideshow. Each tent featured a loud and colorful poster highlighting the specific attraction awaiting inside; the Doll Woman, the Tallest Man in America, The Lady Sword Swallower (bless her heart), Omar the Fire Eater, the Strong Man, Sybil the Bearded Lady, Benga the Pygmy, and Oola the Lizard Man. The kid in me was tempted. With the insane childhood my mother had provided, that part of my psyche would have relished an escape to a world of outcasts. But the cynical detective that kid had become dealt with all the freaks he cared for daily and then some. I had no need to pay for extras. A second look took the decision away. The tents were closed and dark, the Sideshow done for the night in favor of the final gala circus performance. The roar of the crowd could be heard from the Big Top beyond.
I passed expectantly into the hippodrome only to discover this circus looked pretty much like every other circus I'd seen in my life. There were three rings, the nearest to the entrance featuring a dark and empty lion tamer's cage, the farthest away featuring dark and idle vaults and teeter-totters of an already ended acrobat act. An audience of several hundred occupied the slanted rows of bleachers to my right, their keen attentions locked on a colorful couple in the brilliantly lit center ring demonstrating the dangers of the Impalement Arts (a knife thrower, to those of us from the projects). But, as I moved into the shadows to my left, circumnavigating the rings on the side of the tent opposite the crowd, I saw the artist was not throwing knives at the moment. He brandished a bullwhip, whirling it above his head like a helicopter rotor, then brought it down with an alarming crack, flicking a cigarette from between the lips of his beautiful and courageous assistant. The crowd appreciated the effort and let it be known.
I continued around the rings, trespassing behind the scenes (meaning behind two fat and three skinny clowns, and a seated band of drums and horns), while the artist at center ring discarded the whip in favor of an ax. With fanfare and a flourish he showed the weapon to the crowd then slammed it into a chopping block beside him, leaving no doubts as to its lethal reality. He withdrew it, turned to his target girl roughly fifteen feet away, took aim and threw – depriving her of yet another smoke. At forty-five cents a pack, the budget for the act's cigarettes alone must have been astronomical. The audience, apparently all stock holders in R. J. Reynolds, again, applauded wildly.
A white board was carried out and placed by two huskies in colorful costumes for what looked to be the act's finale. The girl stood before it. The artist, with seven knives clutched in his off hand, stood at a distance. With a snare drum lead-in and appropriately delivered rim shots, one by one the artist threw the knives neatly sticking each blade into the board in a tight outline around the girl.
I'd always wondered about acts of that nature, knife throwers, archers, trick shooters and the like; wondered if they didn't all employ a variation of the same magician's trick? Was he throwing knives at a vulnerable beauty? Or was he somehow palming them while mechanically actuated blades popped up in their stead from the back of the board? The thrills were a given. But did the act feature real danger? Staring on, occupied with that question, I backed without looking into the staging space for the parade finale – and into a perfectly innocent horse. The startled creature leaped back into the three behind it. I tumbled. The horses whinnied in fear and annoyance while their handlers scrambled to rein them in. I found my feet again in a cloud of sawdust. In the instant it took to produce that chaos, in the center ring the distracted artist threw his seventh blade. The knife sailed. His assistant yelped in pain and jumped back from the board. I got the answer to my question. The act was one hundred percent real.
The audience gasped as one. The girl, being only human, lifted her arm to examine the damage from the errant knife. She was bleeding like a pig. But she maintained her composure and, knowing and believing that 'The Show Must Go On', stuck out her chin and grinned. Shouts arose as a midget clown ran out waving a white towel. He looked to be surrendering. Then, with a flourish, he presented the towel to the target girl. She accepted it with mimed thanks and put it to her arm to tamp the blood. The clown cartwheeled away drawing the attention of the kids and all but the most morbid of the adults with him. Just like that the audience was laughing again.
The knife thrower was not laughing. Ignoring the clown and the crowd, he glared past his assistant to me with a red face and an unmistakable message in his eyes; the girl's injury was my fault. Though I didn't entirely buy it, I couldn't say he was wrong either. It had been an accident. In light of the knife thrower's rage (though I'd always used it sparingly and never considered it any part of valor), I tried discretion just this once. I retreated from the parade horses and their scowling handlers, and the lighted performance ring, and headed into the dark again on the far east side of the Big Top. The knife thrower and his assistant took their bows and accepted the applause of a forgiving audience. The girl smiled and ran off holding the bloody towel to her arm. The artist stormed off with blood in his eyes.
The moving finger having writ, the show moved on as the huskies rolled two huge golden braziers into the ring and, sharing a torch, set them alight. A third man pushed a platform out between them stopping it on the downstage side of the ring nearer the audience. Atop this middle construct stood a pedestal, as glittering gold as the braziers, with three thin poles rising six feet into the air, each pole topped by a hand-sized block.
The red-coated ringmaster rumbled into his microphone (in a European accent? German maybe?). Bursting with pride, he directed the audience's attention to the air above the center ring. The floor fell into darkness. The band began to play. A light bloomed at the top of the tent, over thirty feet in the air, on a little blonde pixie suspended in space. I fully expected a muscled partner in a leotard swinging nearby, ready to toss and catch the dainty acrobat (she looked entirely tossable), but saw none. She was alone; a solo act hanging on high. Her hands were s
tretched above her head, her fingers intertwined in a bright red scarf holding her aloft, running down and around her lithe body. Like the crowd, I stared waiting with baited breath. The music stopped. The acrobat dropped her left hand – and fell.
A collective gasp filled the tent as she tumbled head over heels, head over heels, toward the ground. The scarf, unwinding as she dropped, may have been supporting her but didn't look it and, alarmingly long though it was, had to end somewhere. Unbelievably, as if a hidden brake had been applied, she came to a graceful stop. She hung upside down, smiling at the audience, twenty feet below her starting point, the last few feet of the scarf wrapped in a figure eight about her boyish hips, with the tail end clutched in her right hand.
The audience breathed. The audience applauded.
She righted herself and, kicking her legs like a swimmer treading water, unwound the scarf from her hips without touching it. She slid slowly and sensuously down the tail of the scarf to the pedestal. That was enough for me. My night had left me breathless enough as it was.
Had the city fathers added to my excitement by bringing in the traveling circus? Or had they caused it? Was it the right circus? Or had I seen something entirely different; the carnival I initially imagined? Did the lights of this midway match the lights that had flashed in my dented brain? Had the drowned man Lisa pulled from the lake come from this circus? Or any circus or carnival for that matter? I didn't know. As usual, I didn't know a thing.
I didn't know how long Clay, the boat renter, would hold up under police questioning. My guess was not long. I didn't know how long my shenanigans could keep Lisa out of the soup. I hoped forever. All I knew was I had to learn all I could about our soggy corpse before the sun came up. With nowhere to start but the sights and sounds brought on by touching the drowned man… I had work to do. I found the door flap at the far lakeside end of the tent and left the pixie to her adoring crowd.
Leaving the Big Top, I entered a dark village of supply-filled tents, trailers, and trucks, a Caterpillar tractor, and a maze of stacked materials necessary, I guessed, to get a circus off the ground. All tucked away from the public eye. As was my nature, and mission, I wandered in and out of the shadows snooping behind the scenes and seeing what I could see.
The cyclone fence existed there on the back side of the circus, too, but not so much to keep people out as to funnel them from the Big Top to the east towers and residential block from the Navy days. This was, no doubt, the circus employees' entrance and all were being housed in the old dormitories. Beyond the dorms, a round shadow in the dark, was the roof of the renovated hall on the east tip of the Pier. A lifelong native of Chicago, I'd had no notion of how vast the structure was; a lifelong idiot, I had no idea where in blazes to start. What was I looking for? I hadn't any clue. (Lisa. Lisa. Lisa!) I circled round a flock of strutting seagulls feasting on swiped midway trash; seagulls, and seagull poop, everywhere. I leaned on a pallet of camel food, or monkey chow, or elephant treats, whatever it was… How did I know? I lit a cigarette, listening to Lake Michigan beyond the expanse of warehouses and wallowed in a moment of self-pity. What fool's errand was I on?
Muted musical stings, cries of delight, and applause escaped the back of the Big Top. It appeared the pimpled ticket boy had been correct, the show was drawing to a close. The band struck up a march as the ringmaster, his voice echoing, announced the end of the performers' parade; the traditional end of the circus, muffled by the tent walls, accompanied by the sound of the lake buffeting the Pier.
This could have been the circus in my weird vision; it probably was. So what? If our drowned man had taken a header into the drink there were unending places from which to have done so. Despite the massive 'castles' on each end, or the millions of square feet of warehouse all around, or the short guard rails or loops of drooping chain here or there, not an inch would have been impossible to circumvent and whole sections offered clear sailing to the edge. Anyone could have been chucked over anywhere and it wouldn't have taken a villain; a slight person with a slight push could have made it happen. Even if I knew where, I didn't know who (if there was a who) had helped. I didn't know when. I didn't know why. Murder? Accident? For all that, maybe the guy was a suicide who changed his mind after a couple of laps and started screaming for help?
I stamped out my smoke feeling like screaming myself; a fool's errand indeed. I started the switch from self-pity to self-loathing, wondering why I let me get trapped like this when… my dark thoughts were interrupted.
“What the fuck you lookin' for?”
Make that rudely interrupted. I turned but, to my confusion, saw nobody and nothing. Well, I saw the stacked supplies, trucks, and lots of dark and plenty of shadows, but I didn't see the speaker. Someone might have been hiding anywhere. But why? I didn't know. I wondered if I'd heard what I thought I'd heard? Knowing I had, I asked the night, “Are you talking to me?”
“I asked you a question, numb nuts,” came the gravelly voice. “What the fuck you lookin' for?”
Okay, I wasn't crazy. Still I didn't know from where the voice was coming. “I'd be more than happy to whip up an answer,” I said. “Where should I send it?”
“What are you? A smart ass?” A red-orange glow appeared in the dark, a floating dot the size of a dime, ten feet away, three feet off the deck of the Pier. It did a crazy eight in the air, brightened, then dulled as it entered a spill of light in front of a stack of hay bales. In that instant, the dot ceased to be a UFO and revealed itself to be the hot end of a cigar.
On the other end stood the midget clown.
Chapter Five
I goggled, watching the little clown stare at me, watching him smoke his cigar, recalling my vision and remembering the pencil-toting cartoon fish smoking the black stogie. I wondered what, if anything, the two had to do with one another? But what could they have to do with one another? This guy was neither a fish nor a cartoon but as equally unlikely. He looked like a kid in a clown costume with the voice (and diction) of a longshoreman. Between the darkness, the shadows, and the white grease paint on his face, his age was impossible to guess. He had blue tears painted on his cheeks, a red rubber nose, and a phony smile drawn over top of a real mouth twisted with a sneer. “I asked you a question,” he growled. “Are you a fuckin' smart ass?”
Make that a real dirty mouth twisted with a sneer. Sheesh.
“I'm a detective.” There was no point flashing my card in that light.
“After your bone-headed maneuver inside,” the clown said. “You're goddamn lucky you're not a pin cushion. City?”
“What?”
“You said you're a detective.” He sucked. The end of his cigar glowed bright. “City?”
“Private,” I said. “The name's Blake.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Well, give with your name. Maybe I can return the compliment.”
“I was right, you are a smart ass.” He chucked a white-gloved thumb at his costume. “In this get-up, in the Big Top, I'm Binky the Clown. Ain't that a hell of a thing? In my loin cloth, in the Sideshow, I'm Benga the Pygmy. We used to have a Congolese guy. He croaked. I'm his short-term replacement, no fuckin' pun intended. Don't call me Binky or Benga anywhere else or you'll piss me off. I fuckin' hate being called a dwarf. The Major's always callin' me a dwarf. Some night I'll cut his fuckin' head off. I don't mind little person and I got no problem with midget. Use one of those.”
“Quite a speech,” I told him. “You don't happen to have an actual name, do you?”
“Aaahh.” The midget smacked himself in the forehead. Little orange ashes jumped from his cigar. “Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I rant.” He took a hit off his cigar. “When I'm eating, taking a dump, getting a piece of ass, or walking down the street, I'm just plain Alfonso. Alfonso Valencia, that's my fuckin' name. Now, for the third time, what the fuck are you lookin' for?”
“I'm looking for someone who might know a guy.”
“You talk like a sausage,” the mid
get declared. He started toward me, bow legs, tiny steps, with a slight wobble from side to side. “Who's the fuckin' guy?”
“I don't know his name. We were never formally introduced.”
The midget shook his head and muttered, “Fuck!” under his breath.
Look, sisters and brothers, this story is just started, and you've only been introduced to Alfonso. I don't know how you feel about blue language but, by that point, I was already sick to death of it. I'm warning you, the midget swore every third word, every second I was in his company, for the whole time I knew him. And the F-bomb was an obvious personal favorite. I'm no prude but, as a form of communication, I've found a sparing use of expletives more effective than a downpour. Alfonso was a torrential rain. From here on out, I'll omit the lion's share of his swearing and, as much as I'm able, report the meat of the little man's comments. Just know he cussed, every word you might imagine, on average every third word. If you enjoy a steady diet of that – feel free to put it back in yourself.
But I was talking to Alfonso. “Who's in charge around here?”
“You don't want to meet him,” the little clown said. “Especially after your contribution to tonight's show. If I know Tommy–”
“Tommy? That the boss?”
“No! Tommy Dagger. The knife thrower. He's probably plottin' your demise. The circus manager, the boss, will be giving him a hand.”
I nodded, which was silly as it wasn't at all likely he saw it. “Still, who's in charge?”
“The manager is a guy named Karl Kreis. But nobody calls him that. He likes to be called The Major. I'm the unofficial second in command. In this circus, I got seniority. I make hiring suggestions, for performers and midway staff, the carnies, the ticket sellers. I hire the general maintenance staff myself. I know most everyone here… at least as well as a carny can be known.”
Red Herrings Can't Swim (Nod Blake Mysteries Book 2) Page 4
