Unhappy Hooligan (22 page)

He went immediately to the silver wagon, to beard Mr. Timken in his den. Once more he perched upon the upended wastebasket, and prepared to state his case. The circus manager was in a happy mood—for him. “Sellout tonight,” he said genially. “Maybe the word got around, and they were expecting you to make a personal appearance, huh?”

Howie Rook dryly said that he doubted it. “What word from the top?”

Timken’s worry lines deepened. “Well, now—the circus business, you must understand, isn’t like any other business. We work on a very narrow margin of profit, and we can’t sling money around as we used to. I’m afraid—”

“You mean Mr. Rowland turned it down?”

“Not exactly. As a matter of fact, he’s off on a trip somewhere and couldn’t immediately be reached. The other members of the board don’t want to take the responsibility, that’s the size of it. In their opinion, it’s a matter for the local police.”

Rook snorted. “The local police! Do you know what sort of law they have in these little resort towns? Usually one elderly gent in a cowboy hat, with a big gun and a big badge, who couldn’t find his own pants’ pocket in the dark.”

“Yes, I know,” said Timken. “We’ve learned to give ’em a wide berth, except for maybe sending along a few comp tickets. We usually handle anything that comes up our own way…”

“So who’s handling this? McFarley’s cold in his grave, and Mavis is worried sick for fear she’ll be arrested, and everything is going to hell in a hand basket, and all the co-operation I get I could put in my eye!”

“I’m sorry,” Timken told him, actually looking sorry. “If John Rowland were around—but he’s off on his yacht somewhere and they can’t reach him by radio. Maybe later.”

“Maybe later will be too damn late,” snapped Rook. And he went out of there.

He started back in the general direction of Clown Alley, and then just after he had passed the barrier and was ducking his way under the guy ropes, he was seized upon from behind by none other than Miss Speedy Nondello. “Hey, Mister Rook!” she challenged. “Wait a minute!”

“Yes, bratling?” he said.

“You been gone for days,” she said reproachfully. “I thought you’d maybe gone for good, without saying good-by or anything.”

“Not at all,” Rook told her. “I was busy.”

“Detectivating?”

“In a rather mild way, yes. But I’ve about decided to stop being so mild. I feel that I’m about to bare my teeth and hunch my back and howl like a curly wolf—just between ourselves. Hang on to your hat, sister. Pretty soon I’m going to throw a king-sized monkey wrench into the machinery, and you watch the sparks fly!”

She kept step with him. “You mean you’re going to make like Dick Tracy?”

“Maybe it’ll be more like Fearless Fosdick.” Speedy firmly stayed with him.

“I
know
something,” she said.

“Congratulations.”

“Something maybe worth a quarter, maybe?”

“Maybe,” he conceded. “What priceless gem of information have you stumbled upon?”

“Lots,” said the child. She took a deep breath. “Gordo’s quit the show—”

“I know that.”

“Yeah, but when he came back and caught du Mond everybody figured he was back in. It would have been all right with Mr. Timken. But when they let him out of the hospital, Gordo just disappeared! He wasn’t here yesterday or today. Du Mond was, though. She didn’t swing, but she was in a couple of spec numbers.”

“So she’s looking for a new human mattress?”

Speedy smiled. “Maybe, but she’s looking for more than that. Papa says that she’s going to leave the show at the end of the season, and—say, what are coupons, Mr. Rook?”

He said rather absently, “You’ve read magazines, haven’t you? Coupons, my fair young lady, are the little advertisements you tear out and send in—hernia and piles cured without surgery, learn electronics at home, how to develop your bust or take off fifty pounds in two weeks without dieting, stuff like that. Why?”

Speedy looked puzzled. “Oh,” she said slowly. “I don’t dig it. Because papa says that du Mond is going to give up show business and marry you and sit around the rest of her life helping you clip coupons!”

Howie Rook had never swallowed a cigar, but he came very close to it now. “Dear God!” he whispered, not irreverently. He hastily found a quarter, pressed it into the moist little palm, and kindly but firmly waved her away. He went back to Clown Alley and took out his make-up kit.

So Hap Hammett found him, a few minutes later, returning from his last solo walkaround. The big clown gave him a quizzical look. “Hello, truant,” said Hap. “You’re late—I doubt if you’ve even got time to put on your make-up and climb onto an elephant for the finale.”

“Once aboard a bull is enough,” Rook told him. He took his grease pencils and pad of yellow scratch paper, and sought the comparative seclusion of his folding camp chair, where he tilted a cardboard carton on end for a desk and set about the difficult task of literary composition. The show wound to a close with one last fanfare from Leo Dawes’ cornet; the clowns came back to pile up on the dressing-room steps and divest themselves of the motley and the goo, Bozo and several of the others giving him friendly if somewhat puzzled nods in passing. In ten minutes or so they were changed and dressed and away—all but Hap Hammett, who came to plump himself down in his own chair and light a cigarette.

“What are you up to now, Howie? Going in for art?”

“I am preparing a time bomb, believe it or not,” said Rook. He hesitated, then extended one of his completed creations, lettered in bright reds and blues and greens on yellow paper. “How does it strike you?”

Hap read:

$10,000 REWARD

FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THE ARREST AND CONVICTION OF THE MURDERER OF JAMES MCFARLEY—

CLEMENCY FOR ANY OR ALL INFORMANTS IF INVOLVED

SIGNED

ROWLAND BROTHERS SHOWS, PER MR. TIMKEN

THE LOS SANTELOS TRIBUNE, PER LOU ELDER

THE MCFARLEY ESTATE, PER HOWARD ROOK

“Well?” said Rook hopefully.

“Ten grand is a lot of money,” Hap Hammett said.

“And McFarley’s killing was a lot of murder.”

“Yeah, but—Rook, did you ever happen to have heard the one about how sometimes it’s a good idea to let sleeping dogs lie?”

“I have. And I’ve also heard that
murder will out!”

Dawn comes and darkness fades, and now the thing he fled

Is a monkey on his shoulder, clinging, clawing, still Undead.

—Theodore Orchards

T
HAT EVENING HOWIE ROOK
finished up what he had to do around the circus first and then took a very quiet departure. There was nothing more he could do here—or so he thought at the time—and his eyelids were gritty with sleeplessness. But the bomb he had planted was steadily ticking away, for whatever that was worth.

As he came out toward the half-darkened Midway he caught a glimpse of Mary Kelly standing beside the temporary phone booths, presumably waiting for a taxi, or for him, or both. Rook melted into the shadows of the Big Top again, being in no mood to fraternize with her or for that matter with any of the circus people. His name would, he suspected, already be anathema to them.

He waited for twenty minutes or more, and then finally saw her depart. For his lack of gallantry and enterprise he had a chill, lonely walk into the town, where he immediately sought his hotel, his tub and his bed. He was asleep almost as soon as he touched the pillow, dreaming not a whit and waking about nine o’clock feeling completely a new man.

“Today’s the day,” said Rook to himself as he dressed hastily and went out for breakfast. Then he came back to his room and set about his phone calls, his early elation ebbing moment by moment.

Vonnie McFarley, obviously not at her best this early in the morning, informed him that she had no intentions whatever in participating in any offer of a reward. “Benny agrees with me that the police ought to do their own work,” she said. “Besides, what is Mavis paying
you
for?”

“I often wonder,” Rook admitted. “By the way, something occurs to me. When I had my brief visit to your father’s apartment I remember seeing that one of his collections of trial transcripts had been put in the bookcase upside down. I am trying to remember the name of the case. Perhaps you could look it up for me. There might be an angle here somewhere. If on the night of the murder, your father had been impelled to look up some old references, and if he had been interrupted by the person or persons we suspect to be the murderer—see what I mean?”

“I could try,” said Vonnie.

“Do,” said Rook. “Anyway, if you want to be in what I suspect will be the last act of this little drama, I suggest that you have your Benny drive to Seaside early this afternoon—what I have in mind will be a curtain raiser for the main show, if things go right. Make it about one o’clock.”

“But—but I have an appointment…”

“You have an appointment here,” he told her, and hung up.

Rook’s luck with Lou Elder was hardly more promising. “Like I told you,” said Lou, obviously hauled out of bed by the call, “no dice on our chipping in on the reward. You’ll get space rates on the story, if there is one.”

“Thanks,” Howie Rook snapped.

“And it’s okay on the photographer, and the human-interest story on the brat. Make it for Sunday, not over five thousand words.” Lou hesitated. “Sorry, pop. But I’ll keep Fatso Brune and his camera available…”

“Have him available and reasonably sober at Seaside, the circus grounds, by one o’clock. Because I’m shooting the works today. If I fluff, save me a downtown newsstand or a bicycle route in the suburbs.” He hung up, and tried one last number.

Chief of Police Parkman was in, though obviously not much relaxed by his first cigar of the morning. “You again,” he said. “What now, more clippings?”

“I’m going to make some,” promised Rook. “Maybe even write ’em. Shortly after noon today, down here at Seaside. Are you keeping your promise, and do I get Jason and Velie? Maybe they could bring Mavis along with them—for your information I am convinced that her agent, and ex-boyfriend, is entirely out of the picture.”

Parkman hesitated. “You realize, Howie,” he said, “that if we let that woman out of our jurisdiction, we have no possible chance to arrest her—if she gets into Lemon County where our men have no authority, she can just kiss the back of her hand to us and walk away.”

“Which is all right with me,” said Rook, “because she’s not, to my way of thinking, the person we’re looking for. And, if she did make a break of that kind, she would be incriminating herself.”

Chief Parkman ruminated. “You just possibly might have an angle there,” he said finally. “Okay, I’ll send Mavis down in care of Jason and Velie. The whole thing is completely unorthodox—”

“That’s the way things sometimes get done,” Howie Rook told him, and hung up.

He went back to the circus grounds, which in the late morning were just really beginning to show signs of life. But he was not halfway up the Midway before he realized that he was strictly
persona non grata;
his hard-won comradeship with the circus people was all one-sided now. They looked on him askance, to put it mildly.

Which was not at all surprising. They had seen his homemade posters then. And suddenly he was on the other side of the fence; he was a danger, a potential menace…

Tom Reale was the only one who spoke to him, coming out suddenly from the booth where the midget chameleons were offered for sale. Nor was his an exactly friendly voice. “Rook, Mr. Timken wants to see you.”

“Why, I—of course, in a minute…”

“Mr. Timken wants to see you right now,” interrupted Reale, and escorted him firmly to the silver wagon. “Go right in,” said the mailman.

So Howie Rook girded his loins, hitched up his pants, and went in. Timken, all worry lines etched deeper than ever this morning, gave him a look and then turned to the pink-haired secretary. “Honey, I won’t need you for a while. Go get some coffee, or take a walk or something.”

She went. Rook upended the wastebasket and sat down without an invitation. He lighted a dollar cigar. “Well?”

“Not so well at all! Look here, Mr. Rook, I said when you came in here the first day that I’d give you all reasonable co-operation, but—I didn’t mean anything like your taking advantage of things and spreading those reward posters all over and disrupting the show. Frankly, there’s hell to pay. And this mixing the circus up in the ten-thousand-dollar reward! I distinctly told you that I hadn’t got an okay on that!”

Rook nodded pleasantly. “I know. Nobody else okayed it either.”

“Wha-a-at?”

Rook shook his head. “I got turned down by the McFarley family and by the
Tribune,
as well as by your bosses.”

“And you went ahead and stuck up those reward posters all the same?”

“I did. The end seemed to justify the means.”

Timken gulped. “Then you’re on your own! And if any reward is paid, you’ll have to pay it on your own.”

Rook nodded. “But maybe you haven’t considered the fact that if any reward is paid, there’s ninety-nine chances out of a hundred that I’d only have to pay it to myself!”

“Yes, but—” Timken was almost sputtering. “Those posters have set the place upside down. Your use of the circus name without permission…mixing us up in something that isn’t our business at all…”

“The circus is plenty mixed up in McFarley’s murder,” Rook told him firmly. “I don’t know yet just how much, and in how many ways, but I intend to find out today.” And he went on to present his case, explaining only as much as he thought absolutely necessary. Mr. Timken listened, gnawing at one cigarette after another, until Howie Rook finally ran down and stopped.

“This is—it’s incredible!” Timken said. “You expect me to believe that one of our people had some sort of grudge against McFarley, decided to kill him, and then used
a baby ape
out of our menagerie as an accomplice—just because it could climb in and out of transoms, and knew how to pull the trigger of any available pistol? Preposterous!”