Роберт Колби - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 4, April 1972

In fact, Kay Foster, the cook-tent cashier, had once accused me of just that. “You know why you stay a carnie, Dave, when you could probably set up a private law practice somewhere? You like the power you have here. Big frog in a little puddle.”

Kay and I had a mild thing going, and she hated carnie life. I had practiced law briefly some years back, had run into a spot of trouble, not enough to get me disbarred but close to it.

Anyway, Kay thought I should marry her, quit the carnie and return to being a townie. I was willing to marry her, but wasn’t yet prepared for the other. I resented the frog-in-the-puddle crack. I enjoyed the life of a carnie, and the job I had. It had its compensations.

I noticed that Bernie had spotted me in the crowd. He winked and turned with a flourish of his cane. “All right, folks, I’m going to bring out the freaks now, give you a free sample of what you will see inside for the small price of an admission ticket!”

The freak show had ten acts. For each pitch Bernie brought out three freaks, usually different ones. Those that were mobile, that is. Sally, the Fat Lady, for instance, weighed in the neighborhood of seven hundred pounds, and it would have taken a hoist to get her onto the bally platform.

This time Bernie brought out Sam, the Anatomical Marvel, Dirk, the Sword Swallower, and May, the Tattooed Lady. Some freaks are natural, born that way, others are gimmicked. The Anatomical Marvel was natural, the Sword Swallower gimmicked, and May would have to be placed somewhere in between. I had been with Montana’s Wonder Shows for three seasons and had made myself familiar with all the carnies, the Ten-in-One freaks included, but I was still fascinated by May’s tattoos. Bernie, who’d been a freak show operator for twenty years, once told me she had the most thoroughly tattooed body he’d ever seen. Bernie was also the inside talker during each performance, so May was right under his nose, in a manner of speaking.

May was thirty, give or take, and had a lovely face. That was all you could see of her on the bally platform. She wore a long robe covering her from neck to toe. I’d seen her on exhibition inside any number of times, wearing briefs and a halter. The rest of her, every visible inch, was covered with marvelously designed tattoos, like a painting you have to study a long time to get its full meaning. Religious sketches, hunting scenes, profiles of famous men, the American flag, and across her abdomen sailed a two-masted schooner, which she could cause to pitch and toss with contortions of her stomach.

Wise old Bernie only tantalized with May now, flicking at the folds of her robe with the tip of his cane and giving the crowd a teasing peek at a leg tattooed up out of sight.

As I walked away, Bernie had already turned away from May and was pointing at double-jointed Sam, the Anatomical Marvel, who also knew just how much exposure a bally called for. He waggled each ear in a different direction and held one hand straight out while he rotated each finger separately.

It was close to midnight now, and the crowd was beginning to thin out as I strolled to the cook tent. The people remaining were mostly clotted around the show tents as the talkers did their last bally of the night.

The cook tent was beginning to fill up as some carnies had already packed it in for the night. At the cash register Kay was busy, so I flipped a hand at her and went on back for coffee and a midnight sandwich.

I took my time, having a second cup of coffee, waiting for all the shows and rides to close down, so I could prowl the midway and see that it was buttoned up for the night. It wasn’t my job to do guard duty — we had two night men for that — but I liked to check things out for myself.

Soon, everything was closed but the cook tent. Many of the carnies lived in house trailers or tents on the lot and could cook there, but most of them came to the cook tent to lie about their night’s grosses. I was about to get up and start my tour of inspection when I saw a man I recognized as a canvasman from the Ten-in-One hurrying toward my table.

“Patch, Bernie needs you right away!”

I stood up. “What’s the trouble?”

“It’s May. She’s dead!”

“Dead?”

“Murdered, looks like!”

I remembered where I was and glanced around, but it was too late. Those close to me had fallen silent, and I knew they’d overheard. The word would spread like a tent blaze. I waved the canvasman quiet and hustled him out.

We hurried toward the Ten-in-One, feet crunching in the fresh wood shavings already spread along the midway for tomorrow’s crowds. The midway was deserted now, all the lights off except a string of bulbs down the center. The concession tent flaps were down, like greedy mouths satiated and closed, and the rides were still, like monsters of various shapes and sizes slumbering under their night hoods.

Bernie was waiting for me in front of the show tent. A slender, dapper man of indeterminate age, he leaned against the ticket box, a glowing pipe stuck in a face as narrow as an ax blade.

“What’s happened, Bernie? Somebody kill May?” I asked.

“I can’t see what else,” he said in his raspy voice. “We turned a small tip for the last show and May said she had to... Well, she had something to do, so I told her to go ahead, the marks wouldn’t miss one tattooed lady. After we sloughed it for the night, I went back to her trailer. The lights were on, but she didn’t answer my knock. I found the door wasn’t locked, so I opened it and went in. May was lying there, a knife in her back.”

“Was the knife from Dirk’s trunk?”

Bernie looked startled, at least as startled as he ever looked. “You know, I never thought of that, but it could be, it just could be.”

I was silent for a moment, thinking. Before becoming a sword swallower, Dirk had had a knife-throwing act and May, before she’d been tattooed, had been his assistant. Knife-throwing acts are old hat, not much in demand anymore, so Dirk stopped throwing knives and started swallowing them, and May got tattooed. What was giving me pause for thought was a memory surfacing. Dirk and May had also once had a thing going, a romance that had dissolved when May met Vernon Raines, who talked her into becoming a tattooed lady. Vernon was a charmer and a crook. Not a crook in the carnie sense of a flat-joint operator, but a heist artist, a man with a gun. He had used the carnie as a cover-up, committing townie crimes, such as holding up banks. We hadn’t known that, of course — Tex Montana wouldn’t have stood for it. Last season, however, Vernon had held up a bank in a town called Midfork, killing a guard, and got away with a hundred grand. He was caught before he could spend any of it. That was when we learned Vernon had a record. Because of that record, and his killing the bank guard, he got life, with no possibility of parole.

The money was never found.

“Well...” I sighed heavily. “I guess we’d better go have a look.”

We started around the tent to where May’s trailer was parked. Bernie said nothing about my calling the police. I would have to do that eventually, of course, but the carnies wouldn’t call them on their own initiative if the midway was stacked knee-deep with corpses.

As we rounded the corner of the tent and came in sight of the Ten-in-One freaks clustered before the trailer, Bernie stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Before you go in there, Patch, there’s something you should know...” He hesitated.

“Well?”

“It’s kind of a queer thing... and I’ve seen some queer things in my years of carnying.”

“What’s the queer thing? Get on with it, man!”

“One of May’s tattoos is missing.”

“What?” I gaped at him. “What’s missing?”