Unhappy Hooligan Page 19

  “Don’t worry about me,” put in Fatso cheerily. “I’m going to get some color shots of backstage at the circus—maybe I can make Look or Life.”

  Rook nodded, and led Jason aside. “The show breaks at 4:40,” he said. “That’s when we move. We’ve probably got to pick up some local law—”

  “Attended to,” said Jason complacently. “Sheriff What’s-his-name will be with us shortly.”

  “Well, there’s somebody else who has to be with us if we can get him. That will be up to Chief Parkman and his boys. I know it’s damn short notice but I found out only a few minutes ago what happened last night and how I might be able to stage a real payoff scene. I’d appreciate it if you would get the Chief on the phone and then let me talk to him.”

  Jason shrugged and followed Howie Rook to the telephone booth. Jason put through the call, said a few words and then poked his head out. “The Chief’s on,” he said. “I don’t know what this is all about, but go ahead.” Rook crammed his bulk into the booth. “Hello,” he said. “The whole thing, for your information, has been going to hell in a hand basket, but I am surer than ever that the murderer is here. He thinks he’s safe, and he’s laughing up his sleeve at all of us, but maybe even now we can bust him wide open with a certain surprise I have in mind. I need the help of one guy. He knows me. I interviewed him once after he made a movie, and he has just enough ham in him to get a kick out of this. He’s a regular…” Rook went on to explain.

  “A midget?” cried the Chief incredulously.

  “Midgets are people, and sometimes very remarkable people! We could never have built our army bombers if some of the little guys hadn’t quit show business and worked in aircraft factories, going into places no normal-sized man could enter. Ask Lockheed or Douglas. We gotta get this guy. If he isn’t listed in the phone book, try the Screen Actors’ Guild. If that doesn’t work, try the drugstore at Hollywood and Canyon, or that little bar on Calrose Way where everything is in miniature and they only serve short beers—it’s a midgets’ hangout. The point is, I need Little Willy, and I need him fast. He’ll blow this thing wide open…”

  “Somebody’d better,” said Chief Parkman. “All right. Put Jason back on.” There was something of a delay, during which Rook fidgeted.

  “He says it’s crazy, but he’ll do it,” said Jason as he came out of the phone booth. “If the guy can be found. I guess your letters to the newspapers have put the Indian sign on the Chief—or else he’s giving you enough rope to hang yourself.”

  “Rope!” Rook murmured, and felt slightly happier. He sent Sergeant Jason back to his entourage, and then made his way back up the Midway. He was heading for Clown Alley but caught himself and turned toward the silver wagon. For once he found Mr. Timken alone, chewing morosely on a sandwich. “Well,” said Timken, “what now?”

  “There’ll be a postponement,” Rook told him, “at least until after the afternoon show.”

  “I shouldn’t mind,” said Timken, “if the postponement was permanent because—”

  “Thanks,” Rook told him, and hurried away. He paused to wolf down a hot dog, and then sought the seclusion of Clown Alley, where he hastily began to throw on the make-up for his last public appearance. This time Hap Hammett judiciously okayed his efforts.

  “You’re really finally getting the hang of it,” said Hap. “A little more on the neck and ears—that’s right.” He added certain masterly touches to the eyes, twiddled the rubber nose a bit to the left, and then nodded. “You’ll do,” he said. “But you seem a bit on the shaky side.”

  “Insufficient sleep, and irregular meals, to say nothing of too little beer,” Rook told him. “Plus the fact that I’ve stuck my neck out a mile and a half…”

  “In more ways than one,” Hap told him. “Du Mond was just here, looking for you.”

  “Oh, God!” said Howie Rook. He climbed into his costume and went outside for a breath of air, said air consisting of a small and very devoted apparition in the shape of Speedy Nondello, smelling of soap and chocolate.

  “Hi!” she cried, seizing him. “Mr. Rook, is it true that you’re going to fix it for me to stay in this country and be a Girl Scout, and everything? Is it?”

  “I hope so,” he admitted. “I promise nothing. Speedy, I’m planning something—something that may not come off at all. And you’re part of it—you’re mixed up in it good. But if I fall on my face, will you still like me?”

  She thought about it. “I’ll love you,” Speedy decided. “I always wanted an uncle just like you.”

  “How I wish that some other ladies felt the same way,” Howie Rook said fervently.

  She got it. “You mean du Mond, maybe?”

  “It could be, bratling. Is she working today?”

  “Not upstairs. You know, mister, I really think she’s about ready to give up the circus—”

  “So am I,” said Howie Rook firmly. He patted her head and gave her a shove in the direction of the nearest cotton-candy stand, then headed into the menagerie, where he found Mary Kelly du Mond in conference with the little apelet. This bumptious beauty, he was beginning to feel, was his appointed fate. She poured herself over him, like syrup over waffles. And he noticed that both her eyes were blue again, the black discoloration gone, presumably by a deft application of make-up. “Howard!” she cried breathlessly. “I wanted so much to talk to you. I got—I got a note, and I don’t know what to do about it. It was written with grease pencil on my dressing-room mirror last night, and it said, ‘Darling, I’ll come back to you and you’ll wear mink and diamonds. O.K.?’”

  “Huh?” said Rook.

  “But I don’t know who it’s from! You didn’t write it, did you?”

  “I did not. Could it have been from Gordo?”

  “I don’t know! I never saw his handwriting, or yours, or Olaf’s.”

  Rook nodded. “Presumably Olaf, who seems to have turned up missing today. It sounds like him, and his absence is the keynote of this whole problem.”

  She was dubious. “But, Howard, it isn’t like him! To leave a note like that, and then to disappear. He knows I haven’t encouraged him. And it wouldn’t be Gordo. I don’t know what to do—I can’t stand the idea of somebody waiting to come back and pick me like I was a grape or something! I’m the kind of girl who likes to make her own mind up…”

  The lovely face was upraised, the blue eyes limpid. And just then Howie Rook was saved by the happy sound of Captain Larsen’s—nee Taras—popguns, the signal for the finale of the cat act that opened the show. In a moment Leo Dawes would segue into the clown music, the gay strains of “High Riding.”

  “Later, my dear,” he said hastily. “There is our cue.” And Rook hurried back to Clown Alley just in time to pick up Hap Hammett and Cordelia and make the entrance; it was like coming home although he realized that most of the circus people were inclined to turn from him now; they withdrew into their shells.

  But not Hap—and not Cordelia. As Rook did the first walkaround with them, and then the second, he realized that both veteran clown and dog were giving him unusual support; Cordelia had somehow sensed the tension and took pains to trip him up only half as much as usual, nor did she worry at his trousers when he beat her to a dog biscuit. In spite of this warming friendliness, it was somehow hard to Howie Rook to jump through the paper hoops, thinking of that biggest and most important hoop that he would have to jump through after the finale. He had gone out, so far out, on the limb—he had almost sawed it off after him.

  Yet the sheer swing of the performance carried him along, the inspired blare of Leo Dawes’ cornet. And there was always the loving, incredulous, undemanding applause of the children in the bleachers which got under his skin. A few more weeks of this crazy, mixed-up life and he would never want to leave it. The power to bring quick, easy laughter to a child’s heart…

  And another power…the power to take human life, the sometimes misused power which even the weakest of us has! A gibbering idiot with a match can se
t fire to the tallest, finest edifice; a self-deluded fool can convince himself that he is somehow above all the laws of God and man…

  Howie Rook thought about these things, even as he went along mechanically in the last crazy-act. In the light of the amazing ability, the amazing know-how in a rough-and-tumble game that these people had, it was increasingly hard for him to believe that one of them had gone bad. Yet he was now sure of it. He was surer than ever of it when—in the last break before the finale—he received a message from Tom Reale.

  “So,” said Reale, “I have a message for you—in fact, I have two messages. First, Miss Yvonne McFarley called you from Los Santelos and said that she had checked on a certain case you were interested in. The name of the murdered man was Fink. The names of the others involved were all Pappadopolus—Greek names. But that was the trial transcript that her father quite possibly must have been studying about the time he was murdered.” Rook nodded. “Thank you very much. We are slowly filling in the holes. And now, if you will excuse me—”

  He went back to take part in the last walkaround and in the finale, even riding on the motherly elephant, but this time having his behind protected with a pad. He had time to smile and grimace at the box in which sat Mavis McFarley and two Los Santelos detectives and a tall, baldish man who was waving a cowboy hat and who must be, of course, the representative of Lemon County law. Fatso, the photographer, presumably also had a seat but was roaming up and down trying to get off-key pictorial shots of the circus—of what was behind the circus, of these people and their lives.

  There was a good deal Howie Rook could have told him. There was a good deal that Rook himself had picked up during his brief period here. But so many things could not be put into words and he himself was giving it up forever, giving it up this afternoon.

  12

  …the mental spasms of the tortured Cain…

  —William E. Aytoun

  “THIS IS IT!” SAID Howie Rook under his breath later that afternoon. “‘Now’s the day and now’s the hour…’”

  The thing was at last coming to a head; a group of a dozen or so bedizened and painted principals were already—under Tom Reale’s shepherding—gathered uncertainly in a group before the cat cage at the corner of the back lot. They all seemed, to Rook, restless, puzzled, and jittery. Some at least were obviously suspicious as to the real reason they had been brought here.

  Fatso, the busy little photographer from the Tribune, efficiently herded them together around the bedazed Speedy Nondello, whose mother had arrayed her in her very best dress and bound her dark pigtails with red ribbon. Then he set up his camera and went enthusiastically to work, with much pacing of distances and use of the light meter.

  “Take all the time you possibly can,” Rook had told him. “Stall while you change plates, and all that. And remember to get them looking glum, even the clowns. The gag is that all the stars of the Big Top are saddened at bad news for the Circus Darling; that’s the slant. We want this to be the sort of thing that will be picked up by the press services.”

  Fatso knew his stuff. He gave them, again and again, the “Just one more” routine. He took interminable group shots; he took each individual circus star in a duo with Speedy; he took Speedy alone and with her parents, and each parent separately. Howie Rook, hovering in the background, realized that the loyal little photographer was shooting most of his stuff with blank plates, a dry run, but this sort of thing could go on only so long. The circus stars were getting exceedingly restive and itchy; they wanted to get out of make-up and costume and head for the cook tent and dinner and for whatever modest amusements the little town might afford. Besides, the light was fading fast.

  “I may have to switch to flash bulbs,” Fatso admitted aside to Rook.

  Even the seven great tigers in the cage in the background, who had really been only mildly interested in this from the beginning, were now yawning. Howie Rook began to feel that he was as much of a failure as a master of ceremonies as he had been up to now as a practicing sleuth; he drew Little Maxie aside and took the midget at least partway into his confidence.

  “Sure,” said Maxie, delighted. “I’ll wait up at the front door and keep an eagle eye out; if the guy gets here in time, I’m to rush him back and fix him up faster than a John Robinson quick-show. Right?”

  “Right,” agreed Rook, feeling slightly more confident. “I’ll depend on you, man.”

  Maxie’s wizened little face broke into a wide grin. “Gotcha, clown,” he said and scooted off.

  Rook turned to Mr. Timken who stood on the outer edge of the group, obviously taking a rather dim view of the proceedings, worry lines in his face now set in concrete. “Who is this you’re waiting for?” asked Mr. Timken.

  “A sort of substitute for our missing midget,” said Rook. “Olaf Klipp may be more important to us in his absence than he ever was in his presence.” Rook hesitated and then said, “For his size he seems to have been a very busy guy around the place—and not only with the pretty girls.”

  Mr. Timken thought, and nodded. “So he was. For all his snappishness, Olaf was very useful. I told you that he was responsible for our discovery of our present Captain Larsen—you have no idea of how much work he went to to help the guy get the job and get clearance into the country through Immigration.”

  Rook lighted a cigar. “The men came from the same country—at least they got letters with the same sort of stamps from home, so it’s no wonder that Klipp and Larsen-nee-Taras were friendly. But we can’t go into that now. I have set up a ceremony here which isn’t working out. Is there anyway that you and Tom Reale can hold them for just a little while more—until our star actor appears?”

  “No,” said the circus manager. “These people have done a tough show today. They’re tired and they know their rights. They can’t be pushed. But maybe one guy can help out.” He nodded toward Hap Hammett. “Turn him loose now and let him do a spiel.”

  “But I was saving him—”

  “Turn him loose, Rook. Hap has done everything around the circus since he started umpty-seven years ago cleaning up after the bulls. He’ll know something to do, he can ad-lib with the best of ’em.”

  It was a cinch that something had to be done, and right now! The circus people were increasingly restless. The equestrian director was pointedly looking at his watch, the acrobats and riders were mopping the sweat from their brows. Captain Larsen’s face was set in a scowl. Mary Kelly was smearing on more lipstick with a not too steady hand—but perhaps that was because her faithful Gordo had materialized from nowhere and was standing on the edge of the crowd trying to catch her eye. Leo Dawes was edging his way out of camera range, obviously thinking of making a quiet exit. So was Bozo Klein, and some of the rest of the clowns.

  Howie Rook beckoned to Hap Hammett, and led him aside. “Hap,” he pleaded, “will you jump through one hoop for me? Will you take over and bally this thing and stall for time? We simply gotta hold ’em!”

  Hap’s eyes gleamed. “Will I? Listen, mister, I was a talker on the Midway for two seasons. You watch, and listen!” Hap turned back, to face the crowd and the trained tigers—to face the Nondello family, lovely Mary Kelly du Mond, Captain Larsen, and Bozo, and Mr. Timken, and Tom Reale, and the lady with the pink hair, and all the rest. From a voiceless, pantomimic clown Hap suddenly transformed himself into the glib side-show barker who outtalks and outthinks the cash customers. His normally soft voice became a stentorian bellow, needing no megaphone and no amplifier. It was hypnotic, overpowering—and somehow in spite of all sense and all reason it fixed them all there in their tracks.

  “I have been asked by the management,” Hap shouted, “to thank each and every one of you good people for coming here and giving your own time to have pictures taken with our beloved little pal, Speedy Nondello. These photos, soon to be nationally released by the widespread services of the United Press”—here he caught Howie Rook’s eye, and added—“and by the Associated Press and by the I.N.S. and all t
he other feature syndicates, and of course the stories to be written for all the newspapers by our own Mr. Howard Rook, may possibly cause such a storm of protest that the Department of Immigration may have to reverse their recent decision regarding the application for citizenship by Speedy’s father and mother—” He bowed to the Nondellos, who automatically bowed back, pleased but puzzled. “This little lady here deserves her chance to become an American citizen, to go to our schools and become a Girl Scout, which is her most dearest wish and one with which each and every one of us is in complete accord…” He turned his head slightly sidewise, and whispered to Howie Rook, who stood nearby, “Prompt me, man. I’m wearing thin.”

  Rook prompted, as he himself had been prompted out on the Hippodrome track by this same veteran clown he had grown to love and admire. But his eyes were on Mavis McFarley, who stood flanked by Jason and Velie and the local sheriff. Her green eyes were moist and pleading and hopeful…”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Hap Hammett cried in his bugle tones. “You will each and every one of you see the value of this nation-wide publicity—for Speedy, for the circus, and for you as individuals. Through the courtesy of Mr. Howard Rook, prints of these photographs now being taken will be made available to you all, each and every one of you, without cost. And I will shortly ask you, with your indulgence, to sign a petition on Speedy’s behalf, a petition to the State Department of the United States of America, and to the Bureau of Immigration, and to our congressman whoever he may be, asking to have Speedy’s father’s and mother’s application for first papers reconsidered, so that Speedy may have another chance to grow up in the land she has learned to love. It is not, you understand, that Speedy does not love her beautiful homeland and that she will not, as she grows up, want to take trips back to sunny Italy”—here Hap Hammett gave a look toward some of the other aerialists whom he knew to be Italian nationals—“but like your ancestors and mine, who came from the Old World to the New, she and her parents want to put their roots down here, permanently. You, each and every one of you, know how much it means to people in our profession, our walk of life, to have a permanent home, a little acre that is ours!” There was a dramatic pause, and Hap said, out of the corner of his painted mouth, “I’m dying, Howie. What do I do now, recite the multiplication table or something?”