Stuart Kaminsky - Catch a Falling Clown

“Come in.”

And in came Gunther and Jeremy.

Gunther sat on the bed next to Shelly, whose mind was back in our office in Mr. Stange’s mouth. Gunther looked decidedly dejected.

“I lost her,” he said. “I found her and then I lost her.”

“So,” I said to Peg. “Agnes, who was found inside the tent with Puddles, could have let him out.”

“But,” said Jeremy, putting his massive bulk into the chair near me, “Thomas Paul could not have. He was in the big tent all through the show. I found him quickly and watched him. When the show ended, I asked a father and son sitting next to him if Paul had been there all through the show. Paul’s face is not forgettable. He was sitting there when the father and son came in half an hour before the show started. I’m sure he didn’t know I was watching him. Strange man. He was more interested in the show than anyone I have ever seen at a wrestling match. I cannot always fathom the human mind.”

“So,” I said, “that lets Mr. Paul out.”

“Perhaps not,” said Gunther. His hand went to his neck as if to loosen his tie, but his. sense of decorum got the better of his instinct and the hand came down. “Perhaps it is Mr. Paul who has an accomplice.”

“Agnes,” shouted Shelly.

“Possible,” I said, pouring the last of Peg’s coffee for the group. “But why the hell would Paul want to ruin the circus?”

No one knew. Peg smiled at me, and I suggested that we all go out and find someplace for my troupe to sleep.

“Perhaps we should stay near our charges, our assignments,” said Gunther.

I convinced them to call it a night and went outside with them, whispering to Peg that I would be back soon. People in costume were milling about, still up from their performance, talking about how it went, the murders, the runaway animals. We found Emmett Kelly in his wagon, and I asked him if he could put my friends up.

“We’ll find room,” said Kelly soberly.

“I’ll find somewhere else to sleep,” I said sacrificially.

“No need for that,” said Kelly. “We’ll make room.”

Then Kelly looked at me and understood.

“I’m sorry about the lion,” Shelly said.

“It’s OK, Shel,” I grinned.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” he said, taking Emmett Kelly’s bed when Kelly moved to search for some bedding for the others. “I just wanted to frighten him a little.”

“Sure, Shel,” I said, backing out of the door with no desire to hear the tale the pudgy dentist would spend part of the night telling. I said good night to Kelly, Gunther, and Jeremy. Jeremy was already comfortably on the floor. Poor Gunther was looking for a place to change into the pajamas and robe he would magically produce from somewhere.

“One good thing,” said Kelly to me as I started to close the door. “They found the missing elephant.”

“Now all we need is a killer,” I said and closed the door behind me.

I was back at Peg’s wagon in about fifteen seconds and knocking.

“It’s me,” I whispered.

“Toby?” she said. The wagon windows were dark.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think it would work,” her voice said, but there was no certainty in it.

“How do we know unless we try?” I pleaded.

“I’m not ready for something like this,” she said.

“Let me in and we’ll talk about it.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will,” I said with comic emphasis.

She laughed, and a voice came booming from the next wagon, “Let him in, for Chrissake. I’ve got to get up at dawn and take care of fifteen horses.”

She let me in.

Peg was right. It didn’t work. I’m not sure what it was. Friendly but not comfortable. Touched but not moved. Friends. It wasn’t what I had had in mind, but it wasn’t bad either. There wasn’t enough room in her bed for both of us to sleep. We tried for an hour, but my back began to ache again. She fell asleep while I was talking about the time I had been in New York chasing down a couple of runaway kids. I was in the Wellington Hotel across from the Waldorf. I thought the kids were in the room next to mine. I was going to wait till it got dark, knock at their door when they thought they were safe, and do my best to talk them into coming back to Los Angeles with me. I wasn’t getting enough for the job to do anything else, and they were a pair of skinny little things with pimples who had some pretty good reasons for leaving home.

I had looked out of my window after taking a shower and seen something moving in the window of the Waldorf across the way at about the fifteenth or sixteenth floor. It was a small kid, maybe two years old, with red hair. He was leaning out of the open window. The wind was blowing, and I looked into the light of the room behind him or her for an adult to do something. There was no one there. I thought of calling the Waldorf desk, but I couldn’t figure out what room it was, and by the time anyone got up there, the kid would be gone, one way or another. I thought of opening the window and yelling, but what would I yell even if the kid could hear me over the noise of the street? I might scare him into falling. But he was going to fall. No doubt about it. He or she put one foot up on the sill and looked down into the street.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t decide whether to watch, run, close my eyes under the blankets, or pretend I wasn’t seeing. I whispered to the kid to please crawl back. Then I stood there for maybe fifteen seconds watching until a figure behind the kid pulled him back and closed the window. The figure, a woman, turned her back, and the kid ran over to the bed in the room and that was all I could see. No one had suffered for what had happened in that room but me.

The pimply kids in the next room were laughing at Eddie Cantor on the radio when I knocked at their door a few minutes later. They opened it and asked what I wanted. They looked happy. I told them I had made a mistake, went to my room, packed, and headed back to L.A., where I told the parents that I couldn’t find the kids.

Peg was asleep before I finished my story, which was fine with me because I wasn’t sure of what the incident meant to me. If she had asked, I had no idea what I would tell her. I knew it was important. I knew I had thought about it a lot lately, and maybe that was enough. But Peg was asleep and so was my right arm, and my back ached again. So I crawled over her, took one of her two blankets and her extra pillow, and got on the floor. The floor was cool and hard and just what I wanted. To get rid of the little kid in the window, I thought about who my killer might be. That should have been enough to put me to sleep, but it was still early.

I listened to “Information Please” quietly on Peg’s small Emerson while I tried to think. Boris Karloff and John Carradine were the guests, and they didn’t get anything wrong. They knew that Jesse James was shot in the back of the head, that Robin Hood was killed by someone letting his blood, and that Hamlet and Laertes were killed with poison rapiers. They were doing better with their fictional killers than I was doing with my real one.

It wasn’t working. I kept thinking of dead aerialists, a red-haired kid in a window, and falling elephants. Sometimes the thing you least want to think about or imagine jumps in front of you like a clown in heat and won’t go away: a disfigured man; some piece of rotten fish you ate when you were eight or nine; the memory of an elephant you never saw crumbling to the ground, landing on his knees and falling over dead.

For me the image that came now was Dr. Bumps. Dr. Bumps had been a small-time grifter on Broadway whose hand was barely steady enough to pick the pockets of bums and drunks and too-far-gones. Dr. Bumps had two big bumps on his forehead, like horns just starting to form or cut off because he had once too often gored someone on a streetcorner.