Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

“Do you have a partner, Mr. Fatone?”

“I had a wife once. It didn’t really take, her and I. Now, you might say I’m like an old grandpa,” he said. “I have a lady friend every now and then, but nothing serious. Those days are behind me.”

I nodded. “Mr. Fatone, how long have you been the manager for Fellini’s?”

The old man leaned back and pursed his lips and stared at the ceiling. The short-sleeve shirt he wore was yellow and thin and it strained against his belly. I watched as dark patches of sweat made half-moons in the pits of the shirt.

“Well, I started with them back in the late seventies, when it was just Jack Fellini. Then he got his brother Sam involved, and it became the Fellini Brothers. When Sam was killed in the plane crash in eighty-five, Jack promoted me to general manager. So, yeah, it’s been about twenty-five, thirty years. Jesus, the time goes fast, doesn’t it?” he said. “Hey, can I get you a soda pop? Or some water?”

“No, thank you. And how’s it been, business, I mean? I imagine you’ve seen a lot of changes over the years.”

Fatone nodded. “You know, the circus used to be the greatest thing in town. When that long caravan of trains and trucks would roll in, the energy and excitement was just electric. It was a real family event you know, parents and kids together, having a good time. And then… I don’t know. Somewhere, I think it was in the late 1980s, everyone sort of lost their innocence. Maybe it was the recession. The circus became this antiquated creature, going from town to town, feeding and then moving on.”

I said, “That’s a strange way to describe it. You make it sound like some kind of parasite.”

He shrugged. “It was bad for a while there, but it’s better now. I think folks are ready for joy again in their lives. The kids just adore coming, you know. They love the animals, the cotton candy, the clowns, too. All of it, it’s just a blast.”

“And Reed Tolliver? Did he like the scene?”

The old man nodded again. He took another sip from the mug and stretched out his legs to the side of the tiny table. I noticed his socks were mismatched and I wondered if he was color-blind. Maybe he just didn’t care.

A breeze came in through the open trailer door, ruffling a stack of papers piled high in the corner. I wished Fatone would open the windows, too. The trailer was parked in the shade but the heat was already beginning to rise inside the tiny space.

Fatone said, “Reed was in bad shape in Cincinnati. We had finished our run and were packing up the tents and animals and he showed up at my door. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks, real skinny, kind of strung out.”

“Drugs?”

Fatone shook his head. “I never saw him touch them. Believe me, I keep my eyes open for that sort of nonsense. Once they start using, they’re no good to me. The risk is too high for something to happen, someone to get hurt. You know, Deputy, I’m not a real hard-ass… but the one thing everyone around here knows is that I run a clean operation. Yes, ma’am.”

He waited for me to acknowledge this statement, so I scribbled a few words in my notebook and gave him a very serious nod. He looked pleased at this.

“What else can you tell me about Reed Tolliver?” I asked.

Fatone said, “I still remember, as bad of shape as he was in, there was this real honesty about him that shone through. Kind of a sweetness.”

Tiny beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and he leaned over and cranked open one of the trailer’s windows. “I’m sorry, it gets warm in here pretty quick.”

“And he asked you for a job?”

He nodded. “Reed said he needed work, and that he’d been in theater. I had him do a few routines on the spot, and he was good, real good. And I’d just lost my best clown, Fred, so what the hell. I don’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. “Did you get his story from him?”

“You mean his life story? I don’t like to pry, that’s not really my business. But I got the sense he was a foster kid, maybe he ran away from a bad situation. You see that a lot these days, really sad shit, pardon my French. Like I said, though, he was a sweet kid. He was the kind of guy who’d chase you down the street to give you the shirt off his back.”

That certainly was in line with everything I’d ever heard about Nicky Bellington. It made sense he’d display the same nature as Reed Tolliver.

I consulted my notes. “Is his girlfriend, Tessa-T-is she available? I’d like to speak with her.”

Fatone stood. He walked over to a narrow ledge covered in loose file folders and opened one and scanned the contents and then said, “2B. The younger employees are all staying down at the Cottage Inn. She’s in 2B. I told her to take a few days off, she’s just real tore up about Reed.”

The Cottage Inn was a cluster of tiny cabins built along a narrow stretch of the Arkansas River that ran parallel to town. I knew it well. I’d been there just a few months ago, on a domestic call that resulted in a young man shooting his even younger wife in the abdomen. She bled out before the ambulance could get her to the hospital.

It was a beautiful location with bad juju, as Brody would say.

Fatone and I spoke for a few more minutes. He told me Fellini’s had more than two hundred regular employees, staying at various campgrounds, hotels, and motels in the area. I consulted my notes again and asked Fatone to put together a list of everyone who hadn’t already been interviewed by our officers. Then I called Sam Birdshead and asked him to swing by with a partner and pick up the list and get started on the rest of the employees.

I stood and walked out of the trailer. At the bottom of the steps, I turned around and looked back up at the general manager. “Thank you, Mr. Fatone. I’ll be in touch soon.”

He leaned down and shook my hand and gave me a sad smile. “Wait, don’t say it… don’t leave town, right?”

I looked up at him. An errant nose hair, gray and tiny, hung from his left nostril, just touching the whiskers that dotted his upper lip.

“It would be better, sir, if you and the others stay in Cedar Valley for the foreseeable future.”

Fatone nodded. “We’ll lose money, of course, but it’ll give everyone a break. We’ve been hitting the road pretty hard. The towns keep rolling by, week after week. Same story in each of them, until now, that is.”

I started to walk away, then thought of something and turned back to him. He stood in the doorway, looking off in the distance at the man I’d seen earlier, still sweeping up the previous day’s trash.

“Mr. Fatone, I would also advise you to tell your employees to be careful. Whoever killed Reed did it viciously, without remorse. This person may be targeting certain individuals, or it could be random. We simply don’t know yet. So, be careful. And tell your group to be careful, too.”

He said, “Absolutely, Deputy. We’re all spooked. We’ll be on the lookout. That’s what families do, you know-we watch out for one another.”

The midday summer sun beat down on the Arkansas, the sun’s rays dancing across the water like thousands of shimmering threads of light. As I drove to the Cottage Inn, I kept an eye on the river. A group of kayakers plucked their way through the rapids and boulders. If I wasn’t so big, I’d have been tempted to rent a kayak myself and hit the water for an hour of hard paddling.

There’s nothing like a good sweat to loosen old and rusty cogs in the head. At the moment, those cogs were rusted together. I felt like things in the case were progressing slowly, too slowly, and at the same time, too fast for me to hold all the pieces together.