Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) (8 page)

“He knows,” came a voice, but it wasn’t Elder’s. It was the now youngest Tanucci, Tino.

Carlo said something quickly and earnestly to the boy. The mother put a hand on his arm, and Tino touched her reassuringly.

“My English,” he said, “is not so very good, but is enough. Rennata told us that Marco was maybe morted, murdered.”

He was a short figure, the darkest of the clan, with straight black hair down his neck. He was somewhere in his late teens, but I couldn’t tell where. His forehead was creased with the strain of publicly speaking English, a task he had probably not planned to take on for some time.

“What did she say?”

“She say she saw something, someone, and someone saw her seeing this,” he said. “It was not so clear to me, something to do with our equip … I don’t know how you say this word.”

“Equipment,” I supplied. “She saw someone messing with your equipment before your brother fell. Is that it?”

“
Sí
,” he agreed. “She saw.”

“Who was it?” I pushed.

The young man shook his head. “I no know. She say she would take care. She was a very mad.” He showed mad by shaking his head furiously. “She say she … That’s all.”

One simple conclusion was that Rennata Tanucci had seen whoever cut the harness or whoever had taken it down after the murder. She was now going to find that person and do something to him or her involving an elephant. The number of unpleasant things someone could do with a two-ton elephant did not elude me or Elder.

“She’s crazy enough,” Elder confirmed, touching his lower lip.

“It can’t be that easy to hide an elephant,” I said.

The Tanuccis listened to what they couldn’t understand, and the young man tried to translate for them.

“Did anyone hate your brother, have a fight with your brother before this morning?” I asked. “Was anything on his mind?”

“Yes,” said the young man. “Marco say, said, he saw someone in the elephant tent. Saw him when circus up go do something. Then elephant go fried. Marco said maybe it not accident. Now, maybe …”

“Maybe,” I finished, “someone killed Marco because he saw them setting up the rigging to kill the elephant. Then Rennata saw the same person fooling with your equipment and figured she had a murderer. It makes sense.”

“The elephant,” sighed Elder.

“Thanks,” I said to the Tanuccis, taking each of their hands. “We’ll find Rennata and bring her back.”

“
Grazie,
” said the mother, a firm blonde with enough makeup to show she was hiding her face and feelings. Elder and I backed out of the wagon, and the trio didn’t move.

Outside the wagon, we looked beyond the circus grounds for a two-ton elephant and saw nothing.

“As Charlie Chan would say, ‘Two-ton elephant must leave deep tracks in mud.’”

Elder nodded in agreement. “Right to the road down there, but two tons isn’t enough to make holes in asphalt and rock.”

The road was the one I had come down to find the circus. It led down to the highway going one way and off into the farmlands in the other.

“I’ll head for town,” I said. “You take some people the other way.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” said Elder sensibly. “Nelson finds you in Mirador and you might not come out.”

“Right, but I know the town better than you and how to stay away from him.”

“That’s a lousy argument,” said Elder, pulling his jacket over his neck. The afternoon was cool, but not cold. The sky had clouded over and promised something damp. My back twinged, and I looked at my watch. I hadn’t any reason to know the time before this, and my watch didn’t help much. It was my one inheritance from my father, if you don’t count the debts on his Glendale grocery store. The watch stopped when it wanted to, started when it wanted to, and showed a hell of a lot more independence than my old man ever did, which may have been why I kept it. My old man’s indecision was probably a major contribution to my brother Phil’s becoming an angry cop and my seeking out violence.

Whatever the reason, my watch said it was two o’clock.

“What time is it?” I asked Elder. We stepped out of the mud rut to let some bears walk by, led by a man who looked almost as much like a bear as the bears. The bears, in fact, were dressed better than the man, in blue tutus. They would be cute from the audience. The audience wouldn’t have found them so cute this close up. Bears definitely do not brush their teeth.

“Lotze,” grunted the man who looked like a bear, when one of the bears hesitated and decided to growl in my face. Elder ignored the whole thing and bit his lower lip.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“I don’t either, but we have no choice,” I answered.

“You, Peters, are a liar,” grinned Elder, a wise grin I didn’t care for. My ex-wife had a grin like that. “You do like it. You’re as happy as a seal in a fish house.”

I shrugged. He was right. There are some people who run from trouble and call it evil, and others who exist for games and thrills. There are some people who tell you boxing matches are savage and others like me who simply like to watch two guys fight. The big dangers you don’t set yourself up for, don’t have a choice about, like war, they aren’t fun. It has something to do with making the decisions or having them made for me. I was going into Mirador. I never claimed I was smart. I’m more a bull terrier than a fox.

“If either of us isn’t back in one hour,” I suggested, “someone from the circus should go for the state police. There’s a state police headquarters about twelve miles south on the Pacific Coast highway.”

“Right,” said Elder. “There’s no point in telling you to be careful. You have no intention of being careful.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said, and I really meant to be.

Ten minutes later, with a thin drizzle hitting my windshield, I headed toward Mirador while I listened to Hop Harrigan. After the announcer told us how to spot Nazi planes, Hop had to deal with two Japanese who had taken his plane and planned to do a suicide run at a dam.

There was no elephant on the main street of Mirador. The drizzle had sent humans inside too. I drove down one of the streets off the town circle. Mirador wasn’t too big, but it did sprawl around. I drove down the familiar road, where Howard Hughes had rented a house in which a murder had taken place, and past the Gurstwald estate, where the murderer had come from. No elephants. I drove around hills and roads for another twenty minutes till I started to worry about my gas and went back toward town along the beach road.

I almost missed it. If the rain had been a little heavier and darker, I would have. I stopped the car, got out and listened to the light drops ping off my head, and looked at the elephant tracks in the sand.

I had switched to my rumpled gabardine windbreaker, a May Company special whose zipper had been destroyed by my two-year-old niece Lucy. The rain pittered a warning to my trick back, but I couldn’t stop.

My .38 was in the car, but I didn’t think a .38 would stop an elephant. It might make him good and mad, but it wouldn’t stop him. It wasn’t really the elephant I was worried about.

The tracks were clear, not too deep but clear, and I followed them along the shore and around a bend in the rocks, where I found myself looking up at the lost hope of the county, the hidden ambition of the town, the unfinished hotel and recreation spa inhabited now by softly cooing gulls and one or two loudly cawing crows. No elephant.

“Rennata,” I called. “My name is Peters. Elder sent me.”

I thought I heard something, a shuffling, breathing sound behind one of the creaking boards of a building. Around the corner I went and found myself eye to knee with the elephant. His eyes, red and frightened, were a good four feet above me.

What do you say to an elephant on the beach?

“Hi,” I tried. “How’ve you been?”

The elephant took a step back from me, a lumbering step, and waved its trunk. Beyond him on the sand I could see a heap of cloth which might or might not contain a human form. I pushed my back against the rusted steel side of a building next to the elephant and began to ease my way past, saying soothing things like, “Good boy,” and “Easy, big fella.”

I had just decided to try a lullaby when hell tore loose. My pushing against the steel siding had given it all it needed to declare its freedom from the single old bolt that held it. The sheet came loose with a screech and clattered against a pillar.

The elephant bellowed, raised one massive right front foot or paw or hoof or whatever it’s called, and threw a wild jab in my general direction. I tripped backward as the elephant kicked a steel beam inches from my head and started a clanging that echoed out to sea.

The elephant took another step toward me, and I scrambled back into the rubble, ignoring bruises and bumps. I backed into a corner as the gray hulk moved forward, shaking the long unfinished floor. His weight swayed the warped wood, and I grabbed a glassless window ledge and started to scramble out. The elephant came right after me as I rolled on the sand and looked back over my shoulder. He crashed right through the side of the house, sending out a shower of shrapnel the Big Red One would have backed away from. I didn’t know how fast an elephant could run, but I didn’t think I could outrun one. On the other hand, I didn’t think I had much choice. I went down the beach, and he came bellowing after me.

I wasn’t in bad shape. Oh, I’d cut back on the number of days I played handball at the Y on Hope Street back in Los Angeles, but I’d been doing some running and lifting. Fear helped a lot too. I beat the elephant to my car by about four steps, scrambled inside, and went for my glove compartment. The compartment was open, and the gun was gone. The gun was gone, and my Buick was rocking. An elephant was trying to shake me out. A foot thudded against the door at my side, and I could see the dent stop just short of my leg. I put the key in the ignition, turned it on, and gunned the motor. The elephant backed off with a roar that would have frightened Kong. But something had him going, and he came at me again. He stood bellowing a challenge in the drizzle, elephant against car. I knew the car wouldn’t survive a battle, and I didn’t want to kill an elephant if I didn’t have to. So I hit my horn. The first blast startled him. The second blast sent fear into his already blazing eyes. The third, followed by my backing up, sent him running down the beach in the general direction of I-don’t-know-where but the opposite direction from where I knew I had to go.

I watched the gray lump disappear and wondered what people would think when they saw the creature racing in the general direction of Mexico. I wondered even more what Arnie the no-neck mechanic would respond when I showed him my door and told him it had been kicked in by a wild elephant.

I drove down the road as close as I could get to where the ghost town stood and the heap of clothing lay. Then I made my way down to the spot, with a good idea of what I would find. There were no footprints around the body except those of the victim herself. I could see it was Rennata Tanucci, knew it was before I pulled back the coat crumpled over her face.

The bullet holes, two of them, were easy to find, one in the middle of her chest, the other in her stomach. I knelt next to her body and followed her hand that seemed to be pointing to something in the sand. The something was a crude drawing that she had apparently made. It looked like a snowman next to a snowman. One snowman was bigger than the other, and the bigger one had two eyes, a hole for a nose, and a mouth that drooped crazily. Both figures were inside a crude box, which may have been a house. It’s hard to apply rules of taste to the last creation of a dying artist. The message, whatever it might mean, was shallow and almost worn away by the rain. Her head was turned toward the shore, and her open eyes looked at a brick house on the far ridge above the beach.

“Lady,” I said softly, covering her again, “I wonder what the hell you were trying to tell us.”

“No doubt,” came a voice from behind, “that she expired with the hope that we would catch you. In which case, I am pleased to report, we have achieved that end.”

I didn’t turn to Nelson’s voice right away. There was something I wanted to see first, and I saw it, my .38, about a dozen feet from the body where someone had thrown it.

“You can’t expect to go chasing elephants and shooting people on beaches without attracting some attention,” said Nelson with clear satisfaction.

I turned and stood up. Nelson and Alex were facing me. Nelson had his gun out. Alex didn’t.

“Murder, as you know, is a rare thing in Mirador, Mr. Peters, a rare thing indeed. It is my belief, however, that if it does come, it is good if it is done by an outsider and good if I catch that outsider and even better if it takes place shortly before a major election.”

“Then I’ve done you a favor,” I said.

He nodded with a self-satisfied smile. “You might, indeed, say that,” he said. “Now, if you would be so good as to step a few feet away from the body of that unfortunate woman, Alex will get that weapon, which, I assume, is yours.”

I stepped away slowly. Nelson might take it into his head to simplify matters by gunning down his murderer in a rousing battle. The thought entered his mind as if by telepathy, and he glanced at Alex, who clearly wasn’t having any.

“The conscience and strength of my deputy are an inspiration to us all,” Nelson said sarcastically, as Alex moved forward to get the .38 in the sand. “You need not bother about handling the weapon, Alex. With this drizzle and sand, fingerprints are unlikely and, certainly in this case, unnecessary.”