Red Herrings Can't Swim (Nod Blake Mysteries Book 2)

by Doug Lamoreux

  “Then you're the guy I'm looking for.”

  “For what?”

  “To help me identify someone. A drowned man washed up near the harbor, south of here, earlier tonight. I have reason to believe he might have gone in the water here at the circus.”

  “Why? What reason? He could have gone in anywhere. Couldn't he? Why not Michigan? Why not Canada? Something brought you here. What?”

  The little guy had a working brain. I made note of it. Then I said, “I'll reserve that for the moment.” What else could I say? I couldn't tell him I'd been guided there by a psychic flash. Why ruin a beautiful budding friendship? “But I'd like to test whether or not my reasoning is sound. Did you see or hear anything unusual or out of the way tonight?”

  “I see and hear unusual crap every night.” He puffed. “People are weird. There are too many to count and they all belong in a circus. If you ask me, Blake, you're fartin' in the breeze. You ain't goin' to find nothin' here to help you.”

  “Probably not. But you're not opposed to my trying?”

  The little clown shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

  “All right,” I said. “How about I describe my drowned man? You tell me if he rings a bell.”

  He puffed his cigar, waiting.

  “He was small,” I began. “Maybe five-four.”

  “Not a good start,” Alfonso said, glowering up at me. “Try it from my perspective, ass hat. He's five-foot-four; a big guy.”

  I grunted. “Yeah. Huge.” God, that's all I needed, a sensitive midget. “Should we pause while I dab your eyes with a hanky?”

  “F— you, Blake. Just give me a little respect.” His cigar glowed. “Finish your description.”

  “Gray hair with no clue what it used to be, thin on top. A hundred and twenty pounds–”

  “Soaking wet?” Alfonso asked. I stared. He stared back, then growled, “It's a joke. A hundred and twenty pounds… soaking wet.”

  “That's him to a tee.”

  “Moving on. What about age? Had he got fifty to look forward to yet?”

  I shook my head. “He's got nothing to look forward to; he's dead. But fifty, not a chance. He already waved goodbye to sixty.”

  Alfonso considered. “What makes you think he belongs here?”

  “Like I said, for now you're going to have to call it a hunch.” I gave him another minute to think. “Well? Are you missing anyone at the circus?”

  The little guy sighed a ton. “That description could fit a million ticket buyers.”

  “Did you have a million ticket buyers today?”

  The little clown sneered. “We had five or six hundred for sure.”

  “See. That's a lot less than a million, so we're already closing in. How about employees?”

  “Your description could fit a dozen guys that work here.”

  “It could,” I agreed. “But does it?” I watched him study the inside of his head. It was worse than I thought. He wasn't merely a sensitive midget with a filthy mouth, he was thoughtful too. “What do you think, Alfonso? You got one like it?”

  “Like I said, there's a few older guys around here. There's Ed and Butch. They feed the animals. But it ain't likely them. They're always together, if you know what I mean?” I didn't have any idea what he meant. Alfonso made no attempt to hide his disgust at my ignorance. “They're a pair.” I squinted but still couldn't see it. I shrugged my bewilderment. “They got sugar in their gas tanks, Blake. They're light in the loafers, for Chris-sake!”

  “Is that what you've been getting at?” I sighed. “What do I care?”

  “You're missin' my point, Bulldog Drummond. The point bein', they're always together. So if you only got one body, it prob'ly ain't them. 'Cause they're never apart.”

  “Brilliant. Unless one killed the other, huh?”

  “F—! I never thought of that.”

  I nodded without enthusiasm. “Anybody else?”

  “Yeah. There's Pete, the popcorn ball guy.” He was pointing in the air, imagining the midway in his head. “Earl, across the way, elephant ears and cotton candy, he ain't no spring chicken. There's Selma, open shift ride tickets. But you said a guy. Still there's Selma's worthless husband. I don't remember his name right off. Maybe she punched his ticket?” Alfonso laughed. “That'd be great! What does Selma call him?”

  He thought about it, remembered, and told me. I'll skip it for you. It was just another example of Alfonso's (and, no doubt, Selma's) colorful vocabulary. The midget went on.

  “There's the dart game guy, Tim somethin', he's new. There's Mickey the Geek. There's Vlad in the shootin' gallery. Hell, old guys all over the place, now I'm thinkin' about it, like ticks on a deer's ass. What was he wearing?”

  “A worn brown, or tan, suit jacket. It was hard to tell the color for sure; it was wet. Gray button-down shirt beneath green bib coveralls, pretty well worn, work boots, also well worn. The jacket had a tear in the lining. Right there.” I mimed it for him. “Inside front left.”

  “Damn.” He hit his cigar and blew the smoke over his right shoulder. “The gray shirt and green bibs make it sound like Mickey.”

  “Mickey?”

  Alfonso nodded. “Mickey the Geek.”

  “Is that a stage name?”

  “No, Sherlock. His middle name is 'The'. 'Course it's a stage name.”

  “All right, don't lose your shirt.”

  “Well, you ain't listenin'!”

  “I'm listening. You're saying he was your Sideshow geek?”

  “No,” the midget said. He shook his head. “See, you ain't listenin'. Mickey was a Sideshow geek. Back in the old days.” Alfonso laughed. “The good old days. You should have seen those guys back then. Grab a chicken. Snap. Bite the head clean off. God, did the audience squeal. That was a long time ago. I was young, young, young and the old timers, the real circus performers, were on their way out. The animal rights yobs started poppin' up like weeds and losin' their minds on a regular basis. They had to give up the chicken routine; you know, adapt. The modern geek, he's a different creature. He's still somethin' to see though. Eat anything. Eat any goddamned thing. Nuts, bolts, toothpicks, coins, jewelry, rocks, toys, anything they can get past their tonsils, and wash it down with lighter fluid. But, no, Mickey was not our Sideshow geek. This crap circus don't have one.”

  “Wait, what? Then what are you going on about?”

  “I was telling you about Mickey, back then.”

  “Well, what about Mickey, now?”

  “Mickey now is Michael Gronchi, his real name. 'Mike' to most around here. 'Mickey' to a few of us. 'Hey You' to our boss. Mickey doesn't perform anymore. He sweeps up and drinks. Mostly he drinks. If the guy you found is Mickey… He could have just fallen off the pier.” Alfonso sadly shook his head.

  He toked the cigar and blew a gray cloud against the black night. “If it ain't Mickey, I don't know. There's The Major, of course, the boss I mentioned; the manager. He ain't as old as the others, but he ain't young.” A light gleamed in his eyes. “We should all be so lucky it's The Major. He'd look great dead. He's part of the reason I'm willin' to talk to you.”

  “You're willing to talk to me?”

  “You're a private dick, right? I got a case I wanna hire you for.”

  “I'm already on a case, for me.”

  “We do two shows a day. You can do two cases.”

  “When we're finished with this,” I said, trying to keep him on the tracks.

  “We are finished. I gave you the crop. I'm out of old guys.”

  “I still have more questions.”

  “Then ask.”

  “Does a cartoon fish mean anything to you?”

  “A cartoon fish?”

  “Yes. A cartoon fish, smoking a cigar, does it mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know it's a stupid question, but I'm… What did you say?”

  “You deaf?” Alfonso growled. “I said, Yeah. The smokin' fish. What about it?”

&nbs
p; “What is it? What's it mean?”

  Alfonso cocked his head, ogling me (quite a sight in full clown get-up), his cigar standing straight in the corner of his mouth. Again the gleam in his eyes. “I told you. I need your help, Blake,” the midget said. “I got a case. There's a lady, right here in the circus, is in danger.”

  “What sort of danger?”

  “How many sorts are there?”

  “Brother,” I told him. “You'd be surprised.”

  “We're talkin' about a lady needs help.”

  “No, Alfonso. You're talking about a lady. I'm still talking about a guy, maybe Mickey, and a fish. Remember?”

  “I remember. But I ain't tellin' you, or showin' you, one more damned thing until you agree to help me with my problem.”

  “Okay! All right. I'll listen to your trouble. But after I get a handle on the case that brought me here. Not before.”

  “I want a commitment, Blake. I help you. You help me.”

  “I said, All right. I'm committed. I will look into your case. After you give me all you have on Mickey. And the fish.”

  “Come on,” Alfonso said, starting away.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Where do you think? To look at the smokin' fish.”

  Alfonso led me around the outside of the Big Top toward the foreboding warehouses lining the south Pier. They stood, black and threatening, with a black, green, and white (swirled gray in the gloom) frosting of seagull guano dripping from the eaves. We passed into and through one of the vast empty structures and back out into the night air on the south side. Lake Michigan shown before us. He turned and started up the Pier, headed west, back toward the distant shore. It was a thousand-yard walk, the equivalent of ten trips up and down Soldier Field, with him leading and me taking baby steps not to step on him. We stopped well short of land. The midget pulled the cigar from his mouth and pointed.

  There it was, as big as life, exactly as I'd seen it in my… Well, in whatever you call the things that randomly happened to my brain. The image from my hallucination revealed; a cartoon fish, this one drawn wearing a hat, with a gun turret and conning tower on its back in place of its dorsal fin, smoking a cigar, blowing smoke rings, and carrying – not a No. 2 pencil (as I wrongly guessed) but – a yellow torpedo under its pectoral fin, inside a bright blue circle. Suddenly it made sense. We were standing on Navy Pier looking at a moored submarine and, in particular, at the logo painted on its conning tower. What I'd seen in my vision had been a close-up view of the famed World War Two naval vessel, the USS Silversides, permanently moored there as a tourist attraction.

  I'd hit pay dirt. Whatever was going on in my head had, as in my last case, led me in the right direction. Mickey the Geek seemed right. Some checking would decide that. But there was no doubt Navy Pier and the Silversides were right. Somehow or other the drowned man had been here. I started for the submarine like a kid for the packages under the tree on Christmas morning.

  “Yo, Blake,” Alfonso yelled behind me. “What the hell you doin'? You can't go out there.”

  “Don't sweat it,” I told him. “Trespassing and me are old partners. Come on.”

  I hopped the locked security gate and made short work of crossing the gang plank. But, as I stepped onto the deck of the boat, Alfonso's exaggerated cough made me turn back. He was leaning against the outside of the gate, looking like a baby clown in a playpen, cigar askew in the corner of his mouth, sneering. “Well, Blake?” he barked, and shook the metal fence with his tiny gloved hands. “I'm supposed to fly over this damned thing?”

  I hurried back, reached over the fence, grabbed him under the arms and, with a grunt, lifted him over. His size was deceiving. He was small but built solid as a brick crap house. “Blake!” Alfonso growled. “Set me down or buy me flowers.” I set him on the gang plank.

  I pulled a pocket flashlight and cupped the lens, doing what I could to throw the beam down and invite as few onlookers as possible. I started onto the deck. Alfonso followed in his bow-legged fashion, three steps to my one, down the starboard side of the boat headed toward the bow. I passed the light from the deck, up the conning tower, forward, down the side, and to the water, again and again. I wasn't sure what I was looking for but, owing to the recent workings of my fragmented noggin, I was more than a little curious about whether or not our drowned man had gone into the drink off the deck of the famed submarine. And, truth be told, I was more than a tad nervous walking across her gray metal plates. At any instant, I half expected to be triggered by the location and shoved into another mental nightmare. Still, breathing deeply, I inched steadily forward.

  In the bow, I stopped, concentrating. I closed my eyes and tried to recall the details of the visions I'd received. In my mind's eyes he was there before me, the old man before he'd gone for his swim in the harbor. Upright, sweating, screaming, his face contorted by fear. Then he fell into the darkness. Over the side of the boat? It must have been. I heard again that brutal thump and cry of pain. I heard the splash into water. I saw him again, the drowned man, bobbing in the water and foam, sputtering and choking in the dark. I heard his pained and exhausted cry, “Help! Help… me! Down… here…” I stared down at the cold black water, ten feet below the deck, and shivered.

  I turned away, not wanting to see it anymore, half afraid at any second I'd be living it again. (Wasn't that a stupid way to think of it?) The fact was I was terrified of dying it again.

  Alfonso jabbered in a whisper, blowing smoke at my back, and cussing for color. I wasn't paying much attention but, if you took out the F-bombs and boiled the rest down, it amounted to, “Are you findin' what we're lookin' for?” I was more and more certain we'd found 'where' we were looking for. Beyond that I wasn't sure.

  I was about to tell him so when I spotted something interesting along the starboard side of the hull. I grabbed the chain rail for balance and leaned to look. It was interesting and suggestive. About five feet down I noted the metal flashing of what must have been an engine exhaust hood jutting from the sub's side. I paused and threw the light on it. I studied it and, more importantly, something hooked onto it, seeing something I shouldn't have seen. I leaned over the rail, ignorantly, as it was too far away. I dropped to the deck, slipped under the chain, and stretched over the side for all I was worth. My guess had been wrong, it was more than five feet away. That blew because, whatever it was, and I thought I knew, I'd decided I wanted it. I inched forward on my belly, uneasily, as the optical illusion created by the angle made the object seem out of reach while the black water beyond seemed dangerously close. That wasn't the only reason for my hesitation. My clothes were drying after my wrestling match with the drowned man's corpse. I had no interest in tumbling into the lake and soaking them again. And, as mentioned, I feared anything that might trigger the head thing. Believe me, I didn't want that. But I had to reach that exhaust hood.

  I closed my eyes, took a breath, and chased the fear away. Then, ready to proceed, I shouted in a whisper over my shoulder, “Alfonso. Grab my feet and hold on!”

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “There's something here. Out of reach. I want it.”

  “Want all you want. I can't hold your weight.”

  “I said, I want it. I need it.”

  He swore. His cigar whizzed past my head and into the drink. “I can't hold you.” He swore. He pulled his red nose off and stuffed it in his pocket. He threw his little hat to the deck. Then he swore again. “Switch places. Come on. You lower me down.”

  That's what we did. And, thank God it was dark, because I'm sure we'd have been a sight for the tourists, a block-headed private dick dangling Binky the Clown by his ankles (just below his big red shoes), bitching and swearing, off the side of that submarine. And I'm telling you, small as Alfonso was, it was no easy chore. Little folks are heavy. But with effort, several nervous and colorfully worded threats from the upended midget, and a bit of luck (probably his as I never have any), Alfonso reached the object of my desi
re and grabbed hold. On his “Got it!” I hauled him back up onto the deck.

  Alfonso jumped to his feet, dancing around his hat, waving the prize. It wasn't exactly Rocky atop the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art but I shared his sense of victory.

  The prize was exactly what I thought it was, what my intuition told me it would be, a slip of gray material. The piece of fabric torn from inside the drowned man's suit coat. He'd done a swan dive, or been helped to dive, off the bow of the Silversides. In my vision he'd fallen, there had been a thump, and he'd splashed down. The thump had been the old man hitting the starboard side of the sub and catching his coat on the exhaust before he hit water. My throbbing head had led me to the spot.

  Great. Now who in the world was the drowned man?

  Having done all the damage we could do there, we cleared the deck of the submarine and returned down the gang plank. “My drowned man was here,” I told Alfonso as I picked him up again and lifted him over the security fence. Then I hopped it myself back onto Navy Pier. “That's no longer in doubt. Now I need to know for sure who he was. What's chances of looking up this Mickey? Talking to him? If he's here and able to talk, that is. And, if he's not, talking to the rest on our short list?”

  “What's chances? Tonight? No chance at all.”

  “I need to identify this old guy.”

  “Yeah. You said.” Alfonso snipped the end off a new cigar with a beauty of a gold 'Sunday-go-to-meeting' cigar cutter that glinted in the moonlight. “But you ain't goin' to do it tonight. I mean, how you goin' to know? If he's here, Mickey, that is, he's in bed. The old ones would all be in bed by now, or near all. Those that ain't will be spread out across the Pier or the city.”

  “Can't we roust them? The ones that are here.”

  “No. They wouldn't appreciate it… a lot. Besides, The Major would kick my ass. Then he'd kick yours.”

  “This is important, Alfonso.”

  “To who? Not to me. Not at this time of night. I need my job. You can come back in the mornin'. Make it early, if you like, old men get up early, take a piss, cough up phlegm, drink coffee.”