Unhappy Hooligan (3 page)

Rook’s nose wrinkled. “Don’t know exactly. But I think I’ve smelled that particular smell somewhere, sometime. It must have been years ago, though.”

“We know what it is. It’s elephant dung mixed with sawdust.”

“Elephant dung!”
gasped Howie Rook. “But—” He broke off suddenly as the door burst open and the woman he now knew to be Mavis McFarley plunged into the room; her lovely eyes wide and her rather remarkable bosoms heaving.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Parkman,” she cried breathlessly. “But I simply can’t wait out there any longer. Surely you’ve had time enough to tell this gentleman all the details by now; you’ve had him in here for simply hours!”

“Come in, Mrs. McFarley,” the Chief rather unnecessarily told her, and then he introduced them. Rook felt the solid impact of her personality: her gloved hand had a grip almost as strong as his own; her carefully painted lips were tight. Never averse to meeting beautiful women, he said, “Delighted, I’m sure.”

There were no further amenities. The woman had in her eyes the look of a gambler, and like a gambler she plunged. “Now that Mr. Parkman has told you everything, and shown you the evidence and the stuff, you’ve decided to help? Oh, I knew you would!”

“Well—” began Howie Rook, feeling rather like a bird being charmed by a snake, and enjoying it too.

“Because somebody has to do it. And the police say they haven’t any men to spare. Besides, policemen do so look like policemen, and think like policemen, don’t they?”

“If at all,” murmured Rook, with a side glance at the Chief.

“I’d do it myself in a minute. Only it’s impossible for a woman, you can see that. There may be some danger, but you look as if you could take care of yourself. I’ll pay almost anything—within reason of course.”

She came closer, and he could see that beneath the long curling lashes her eyes were decidedly greenish; they were pleading, too. Rook felt himself weakening; he had always secretly admired—from a distance—beautiful blondes with green eyes. He also at the moment admired the money, having less than twenty dollars in the bank to last until his next pension check. Mavis smelled strongly of some exotic flower—perhaps, he thought, it was the night-blooming cereus in his landlady’s garden. Anyway, the situation was a sort of challenge, a promise of adventure, and he was at an age when he was beginning to think that all adventure had passed him by.

“What in—what in the world do you want me to do?” he asked, not unreasonably.

Green eyes widened. “Why, I want you to go be a clown in the circus, of course!”

Unmeaning now, to me

As laughter was an hour ago,

Or laces, or a traveling show.

Or who died yesterday!

—Emily Dickinson

A
FTER A WORKING LIFETIME
on metropolitan newspapers, serving as everything from copy boy to obit writer to police reporter to city editor, Howie Rook was a man not easily flabbergasted, but now he stood flatfooted, not sure that he had heard aright. Mavis McFarley confidently slipped her slim arm through his, and edged him toward the door. “We’ve taken up enough of Mr. Parkman’s time,” she said sweetly but firmly. “Come along, and we’ll work out the details over a bite of lunch.”

With a polite nod at the Chief, she led Rook out of the office; he went not unwillingly though he was uncomfortably aware of the wicked grin on Parkman’s face. “He thinks I am riding for a fall,” thought Rook. “But at least I will get a free meal out of it, and that’s something.” He was getting rather tired of crackers and liverwurst as a steady diet.

Besides, he was a man who dearly loved puzzles, and this promised to be the goddamnedest puzzle in recent history.

They went out together—but they were immediately waylaid in the anteroom. The plumply pretty teen-ager whom Rook had noticed earlier leaped from her chair. “Just a minute, Mavis!” she cried. “What are you trying to get by with now?”

The temperature in the room was suddenly subzero. “Yes, Vonny?” said Mavis.

“I have a right to know what’s going on!” the girl announced, “It’s my own father, remember? All this stuff in Mr. Parkman’s office…”

“Vonny, this is Mr. Rook, who is going to do some investigating for us.”

“A detective? Are you actually trying to set a private detective on me to try and prove that I murdered my own father?”

“Perish forbid,” said Mavis calmly. “Mr. Rook is not a private detective, and I’m most certainly not trying to prove anything against you, Vonny dear.” She turned. “As you may have guessed, this is my former stepdaughter, Yvonne McFarley, otherwise known as Problem Child Number One.”

“How do you do?” asked Rook politely, not thinking of anything else to say.

The girl barely nodded, and did not extend her hand. “Well!” she exploded. “Of all people in the world, I’m certainly the one who has the right to know what’s cooking. I’m sick and tired of being left out in the cold. If my father committed suicide, I know who drove him to it, and if he was murdered I know who did it or who knows who did it! Mr. Cook or Rook or whatever your name is, I want to talk to you
alone.”

“I certainly have no objections,” Mavis said quickly. “I’ll be waiting down in the lobby. And while you two are having this cozy little chat, dear, why don’t you tell Mr. Rook about the time last summer at the Beach Club when you tried to brain your father with a champagne bottle?” She made a dignified if somewhat theatrical exit.

Rook had long since had his fill of trying to cope with hysterical women, but resignedly he led the girl over to the divan and sat her down, out of earshot of the desk sergeant. “Understand, young lady, what my position is in all this. Your stepmother, or ex-stepmother, thinks that your father’s death
wasn’t
suicide, and that he was murdered. She has not accused you of anything; in fact she seems to think that it was done by somebody with the circus which just left town, and she has asked me to try and find out the facts. That’s all there is to it.”

“But that isn’t all! You don’t understand. Mavis has you under her thumb, just as she has all men. This is my own father we’re talking about, and I’m the only one in the world who loved him and understood him at all! Oh, of course we fought—we were too much alike. Sometimes you can fight hardest with the people you love most. But if he was murdered—and I know he’d never take his own life—then she did it or she knows who did!”

“You said that before,” said Rook mildly. He thought that somebody should turn her over his knee and deliver a sound spanking. “And what possible motive could she have had—answer me that.”

“Motive? They used to fight like cats and dogs. And who is she to talk, a woman with a past like hers!”

“So? Everybody has a past, especially any woman as attractive as Mavis. You yourself are probably working on a past of your own, young lady. So this vague sort of accusation is pointless, unless you have something concrete to contribute. Pin it down.”

“She had boy friends,” Vonny said. “I don’t know just who, but I know in my heart she had boy friends. Of course, daddy did sort of neglect her, at least from her point of view. He was the studious type, and she—”

“Not enough for a motive,” said Rook, judiciously.

“She married him for his money!”

“Which I understand was left to
you.
So that would seem to be out. Was he going to fight her about the divorce?”

Vonny shook her head. “He never wanted a divorce, or even a legal separation like they had. He wanted her back, God knows why.”

Rook thought he also understood why. “So, since we’ve gone this far, it’s time for you to put up or shut up, isn’t it? What possible motive could Mavis have had, answer me that!”

“I—I—” The pretty roundish face was reddened with suppressed anger and frustration. “Never mind, Mr. Rook! Since you’re so good at finding out things, you can find that out too!”

He had lost contact with her, for the moment at least. Rook was too old and wise a hand to batter his head against a stone wall. He gave the girl his telephone number and asked her to call him if she had anything pertinent to contribute to the investigation; then, since she seemed to have a burning desire to go in and give Chief Parkman a piece of her mind, he let her go argue with the desk sergeant and went swiftly out of the place and downstairs. “How,” said Howie Rook to himself, “do I get into these things? Better I should have stood in bed.”

He found Mavis McFarley waiting, not too patiently, in the downstairs lobby. She greeted him with a smile, and they went out together to her flashy red convertible, parked in a no-parking zone, and then whipped out west on the boulevard almost as fast as the police car had traveled, even without benefit of siren. “Wunderkind had to put in her five cents, no?” asked Mavis, her bright hair wind-entangled.

“About two cents,” said Rook. “She just wanted to get into the act.”

“Exactly! She always did.” Mavis drove expertly, if erratically, cutting in and out of traffic and fighting for every light. “It was always that way when Mac and I were married. I tried to be friends with her for Mac’s sake. But she just wouldn’t have it. She never knew her own mother, but she definitely wasn’t going to have me for one.” Mavis turned the car into the parking lot at Carino’s. She was the type, Rook judged, who would never take a guest anywhere but to that famous and fabulously expensive restaurant. He himself would have preferred a simple drive-in or steak house. But they were ushered with some fanfare to a rear booth, and after the waiter arrived she ordered a
filet béarnais
for him and a simple fruit salad for herself. That over with, she fixed him with her glittering eye.

“Now!” she said. “You can see why it’s necessary to start with the circus. The Big One, as you probably know, played here last week and the forepart of this, and is now doing stands down the Coast. I think they open at Vista Beach, an hour or so from here, on Monday. If you say yes, I’m pretty sure I can fix it for you with Mr. Timken, the road manager. He’s kind of a cold potato, but he’ll co-operate because he’ll be told to from higher-up. And nobody needs to know why you’re really there."

“I’ll
need to know,” pointed out Rook firmly.

“But it’s so obvious! The white-face clown make-up that Mac was wearing when he died, and the bull dirt mixed with sawdust that was found on the floor of the apartment—they spell that out. Not that you need to have things spelled out for you; I’ve read your letters to the newspapers and some of your true-crime articles in the magazines, and I just
know
you’re a wonderful criminologist. That’s why I pulled all sorts of strings to get to the Police Commissioner so he’d have somebody get in touch with you and have you brought down so you could be shown all the clues and then introduce us. See?”

At the moment Rook saw very little, but he said “Hmmm” and went manfully after his fillet.

“So you’ll be going with the circus as an honored guest for a few days, playing clown…”

“But I thought you wanted me to play detective. Why must I play the clown?”

“Because Mac played the clown last week, I’m positive that he did! It’s always been one of his dearest ambitions; he was an inveterate circus buff. Sometimes the owners of the circus permit that sort of thing for influential friends. It creates good will, and the circus likes to have loyal friends, with influence, in every big town where they make a stand. And Mac was away somewhere during the time the show was in town; I know that because I tried to phone him and he was always out. He was an amateur playing clown. And somebody from the circus followed him home Wednesday night and shot him. It all adds up. And so, if you’ll go with the circus, and follow in his footsteps, you’re just simply bound to meet the same people he met, and you’ll have a chance to get the murderer to give himself away somehow. That part of it’s up to you.”

“It is easier said than done, ma’am.” Rook took another bite of meat, chewed it thoughtfully, and then said, “So you kept in touch with your ex-husband, I understand.”

She tossed her bright head. “Of course we kept in touch! We weren’t divorced; just legally separated, you know. We were discussing reconciliation, and I’d promised to give him my decision any day. I was going to say yes, of course—because I really did love the guy—but womanlike, I wanted him to dangle a little first.” She sighed. “How I wish I hadn’t been such a fool! But it’s too late now. It’s too late to do anything but get the murderer and see that he’s given the gas chamber. And I’ll devote every cent I have in the world to it, too!” Green eyes narrowed. “And I’d like to witness the execution!”

“We’re going a little fast,” Rook reminded her. “And excuse me if I seem to be prying, but just why did you and your husband separate in the first place?”

“Why?”

“Was it the usual triangle thing? Because if there was any situation like that, the Other Woman or the Other Man might have a motive for murder, what with you two discussing a reconciliation.”

“For goodness’ sake, no! Oh, there’s no use denying that Mac always liked women and they liked him. We both of us had other friends, naturally. This isn’t the Dark Ages, you know.”

“I sometimes wonder. But go on, Mrs. McFarley.”

She hesitated. “It was mainly just that I was jealous—jealous of his hobbies. Mac retired too young—he was a man still full of beans and business, as the saying goes—and he seemed hell-bent to waste himself on dozens of silly enthusiasms, with little or no time left over for me. He ran off in all directions at the same time. The big difference in our ages was a factor, maybe—but that wouldn’t have mattered so much if he hadn’t always been going off on wild tangents. I’m a woman who wants all of a man, and Mac was so wrapped up in so many things that included me out. I wasn’t one for sitting quietly at home with my knitting in the evening while he read Pepys’ diaries out loud, or fiddled with what he called the modern trends in parapsychology, and stuff like that.”

Howie Rook carefully mopped up his luscious gravy with a piece of French bread. “So you found life with him a little dull?”

“Sometimes, yes. Though he was a dear. Worst of all was the fact that Mac was so circus-mad! He was a grown-up little boy who could never stop trying to follow the elephants. He was a member of a club called Circus Saints and Sinners and of the Clown Fans of America—it was a sort of obsession with him. But I tell you, in spite of what the police say, he would
never
kill himself. No, he was murdered, I’m sure of it, by somebody from the circus who brought circus dirt in on their shoes. So the logical thing for you to do is to go with the show as a clown—I’ll check on it by phone, but I’m positive that’s where he was—and try to pick up a lead. The police can’t send anybody, and the show is out of their territory anyway by now. I’ll admit I thought of hiring an operative from some private detective agency, but none of their people could pass as an important businessman or judge or something, and that’s the only type who get to be guest clowns. I see now that you could pass easily, with a haircut and some new clothes, maybe. You’ll do it for me?”