Stuart Kaminsky - Catch a Falling Clown

I shrugged. He was right. There are some people who run from trouble and call it evil, and others who exist for games and thrills. There are some people who tell you boxing matches are savage and others like me who simply like to watch two guys fight. The big dangers you don’t set yourself up for, don’t have a choice about, like war, they aren’t fun. It has something to do with making the decisions or having them made for me. I was going into Mirador. I never claimed I was smart. I’m more a bull terrier than a fox.

“If either of us isn’t back in one hour,” I suggested, “someone from the circus should go for the state police. There’s a state police headquarters about twelve miles south on the Pacific Coast highway.”

“Right,” said Elder. “There’s no point in telling you to be careful. You have no intention of being careful.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said, and I really meant to be.

Ten minutes later, with a thin drizzle hitting my windshield, I headed toward Mirador while I listened to Hop Harrigan. After the announcer told us how to spot Nazi planes, Hop had to deal with two Japanese who had taken his plane and planned to do a suicide run at a dam.

There was no elephant on the main street of Mirador. The drizzle had sent humans inside too. I drove down one of the streets off the town circle. Mirador wasn’t too big, but it did sprawl around. I drove down the familiar road, where Howard Hughes had rented a house in which a murder had taken place, and past the Gurstwald estate, where the murderer had come from. No elephants. I drove around hills and roads for another twenty minutes till I started to worry about my gas and went back toward town along the beach road.

I almost missed it. If the rain had been a little heavier and darker, I would have. I stopped the car, got out and listened to the light drops ping off my head, and looked at the elephant tracks in the sand.

I had switched to my rumpled gabardine windbreaker, a May Company special whose zipper had been destroyed by my two-year-old niece Lucy. The rain pittered a warning to my trick back, but I couldn’t stop.

My.38 was in the car, but I didn’t think a.38 would stop an elephant. It might make him good and mad, but it wouldn’t stop him. It wasn’t really the elephant I was worried about.

The tracks were clear, not too deep but clear, and I followed them along the shore and around a bend in the rocks, where I found myself looking up at the lost hope of the county, the hidden ambition of the town, the unfinished hotel and recreation spa inhabited now by softly cooing gulls and one or two loudly cawing crows. No elephant.

“Rennata,” I called. “My name is Peters. Elder sent me.”

I thought I heard something, a shuffling, breathing sound behind one of the creaking boards of a building. Around the corner I went and found myself eye to knee with the elephant. His eyes, red and frightened, were a good four feet above me.

What do you say to an elephant on the beach?

“Hi,” I tried. “How’ve you been?”

The elephant took a step back from me, a lumbering step, and waved its trunk. Beyond him on the sand I could see a heap of cloth which might or might not contain a human form. I pushed my back against the rusted steel side of a building next to the elephant and began to ease my way past, saying soothing things like, “Good boy,” and “Easy, big fella.”

I had just decided to try a lullaby when hell tore loose. My pushing against the steel siding had given it all it needed to declare its freedom from the single old bolt that held it. The sheet came loose with a screech and clattered against a pillar.

The elephant bellowed, raised one massive right front foot or paw or hoof or whatever it’s called, and threw a wild jab in my general direction. I tripped backward as the elephant kicked a steel beam inches from my head and started a clanging that echoed out to sea.

The elephant took another step toward me, and I scrambled back into the rubble, ignoring bruises and bumps. I backed into a corner as the gray hulk moved forward, shaking the long unfinished floor. His weight swayed the warped wood, and I grabbed a glassless window ledge and started to scramble out. The elephant came right after me as I rolled on the sand and looked back over my shoulder. He crashed right through the side of the house, sending out a shower of shrapnel the Big Red One would have backed away from. I didn’t know how fast an elephant could run, but I didn’t think I could outrun one. On the other hand, I didn’t think I had much choice. I went down the beach, and he came bellowing after me.

I wasn’t in bad shape. Oh, I’d cut back on the number of days I played handball at the Y on Hope Street back in Los Angeles, but I’d been doing some running and lifting. Fear helped a lot too. I beat the elephant to my car by about four steps, scrambled inside, and went for my glove compartment. The compartment was open, and the gun was gone. The gun was gone, and my Buick was rocking. An elephant was trying to shake me out. A foot thudded against the door at my side, and I could see the dent stop just short of my leg. I put the key in the ignition, turned it on, and gunned the motor. The elephant backed off with a roar that would have frightened Kong. But something had him going, and he came at me again. He stood bellowing a challenge in the drizzle, elephant against car. I knew the car wouldn’t survive a battle, and I didn’t want to kill an elephant if I didn’t have to. So I hit my horn. The first blast startled him. The second blast sent fear into his already blazing eyes. The third, followed by my backing up, sent him running down the beach in the general direction of I-don’t-know-where but the opposite direction from where I knew I had to go.

I watched the gray lump disappear and wondered what people would think when they saw the creature racing in the general direction of Mexico. I wondered even more what Arnie the no-neck mechanic would respond when I showed him my door and told him it had been kicked in by a wild elephant.

I drove down the road as close as I could get to where the ghost town stood and the heap of clothing lay. Then I made my way down to the spot, with a good idea of what I would find. There were no footprints around the body except those of the victim herself. I could see it was Rennata Tanucci, knew it was before I pulled back the coat crumpled over her face.

The bullet holes, two of them, were easy to find, one in the middle of her chest, the other in her stomach. I knelt next to her body and followed her hand that seemed to be pointing to something in the sand. The something was a crude drawing that she had apparently made. It looked like a snowman next to a snowman. One snowman was bigger than the other, and the bigger one had two eyes, a hole for a nose, and a mouth that drooped crazily. Both figures were inside a crude box, which may have been a house. It’s hard to apply rules of taste to the last creation of a dying artist. The message, whatever it might mean, was shallow and almost worn away by the rain. Her head was turned toward the shore, and her open eyes looked at a brick house on the far ridge above the beach.

“Lady,” I said softly, covering her again, “I wonder what the hell you were trying to tell us.”

“No doubt,” came a voice from behind, “that she expired with the hope that we would catch you. In which case, I am pleased to report, we have achieved that end.”

I didn’t turn to Nelson’s voice right away. There was something I wanted to see first, and I saw it, my.38, about a dozen feet from the body where someone had thrown it.

“You can’t expect to go chasing elephants and shooting people on beaches without attracting some attention,” said Nelson with clear satisfaction.