Stuart Kaminsky - Catch a Falling Clown

Emmett Kelly took a step toward me with his hand out and his mouth open. That was my last memory of him, silent and looking a little sad.

I was aware of movement, I think, and Shelly’s voice talking about saberteeth. I was aware of snakes of green and Saint Patrick with an electric staff. I was aware of a body full of aches and the memory of a look of hate. And then I was aware of nothing.

The next time I woke up, I was just where I wanted to be, lying in my own room in Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse on Heliotrope in Hollywood. My bed was there, the sofa with doilies I wasn’t allowed to touch, and my wooden table and small refrigerator. I wanted to get up and have a bowl of Wheaties, but a hand reached out and pushed me back. It was a small hand.

“You must rest without disturbance,” said Gunther. We were the only two in the room. “The doctor has come here to look at you and declared you recoverable. The suggestion came that you be moved to a hospital, but I thought you would prefer …”

“I would prefer,” I said, sitting up. I was under one of Mrs. Plaut’s homemade quilts, dressed in a T-shirt and underwear and feeling an overall ache that made a lie of aches.

“A thousand natural shocks,” said Gunther sympathetically, watching me sit up.

“Something like that,” I said.

“It is that which flesh is heir to, Toby,” he said, handing me a cup of tea he retrieved from the table. “It is a bit cool but perhaps better for you for that.”

While I drank, Mrs. Plaut burst in. Mrs. Plaut was not a knocker. Even if she knocked, she would never hear the responding “Come in” or “Stay out,” and there were no locks on the doors of Mrs. Plaut’s rooms.

“Mr. Peters,” she said, crossing her thin arms. She was a tiny pink woman somewhere between seventy-five and a thousand, with the strength of a determined terrier. “You haven’t been killing people again, have you?”

“Not intentionally,” I said, sipping tea. “And not on the premises.”

“No more bodies here,” she said, stepping in to straighten a chair.

“I promised,” I said.

Satisfied, she dropped a bundle of handwritten sheets on my table. “Chapters,” she announced. “Papa and the well and Uncle Damper’s Eskimo wife.”

Mrs. Plaut was under the impression that I was, alternately, an exterminator and a screenwriter. I had never been able to determine how she came to this conclusion or when she made the transition from one to the other. I think she didn’t much care as long as I continued to make corrections of her family history, which was now well over 3,000 pages long. I was in for a night with Uncle Damper’s Eskimo wife.

Mrs. Plaut exited, and Gunther took my cup when I finished.

“There was something different about this one, Gunther,” I said. “I can’t grab it.”

“The circus,” said Gunther, cleaning my cup in the small sink on the far side of the room. “It has traditionally been a source of amusement for the young, a hint of danger, but when one penetrates its …” He searched for an English word and couldn’t find the right one.

“Whatever,” I said and put my head back for a few days of rest.

Koko wanted to play. I told him to go away. I had had enough of clowns and dreams.

It was a Tuesday when I walked into the Farraday Building on Hoover Street, which housed the offices of those on the way in and out of society I counted among my acquaintances, including me and Shelly Minck.

I loved the smell of Lysol that greeted me. It told me the world was normal, that Jeremy Butler was back in his building cleaning and battling decay and the trespassing bums who could make their way into the building through any crack or hole open to them.

It was great to feel the eroded marble under my feet. I was home, weak but home. I got on the elevator, knowing it might take me anywhere from five minutes to a week to get to my office on the fourth floor. The elevator and I split the difference.

Shelly was working on a patient I hadn’t seen before when I came through the door to our offices. He didn’t hear me. Neither did the bum in the chair.

“The clown, you know, Emmett Kelly,” Shelly was saying over the buzz of his drill. “I saved his jaw, his whole jaw. They called me down to work on him. And you know why?”

The guy in the chair grunted.

“Reputation,” said Shelly, holding his cigar aloft. “You have a reputation, and the world will come to you.”

The guy grunted in enthusiastic agreement. People in Shelly’s chair generally agreed with anything he said.

“Shel,” I said. He turned quickly, revealing his recently cleaned smock, and almost tore his patient’s eyebrow off with the buzzing drill. Shelly’s cigar went back in his mouth. “My car. Gunther said you took my car.”

“Arnie’s got it,” he explained. “You can pick it up anytime. You want to see a rotten mouth?” He pointed at his new patient, who gave a sickly grin. The mouth was certainly rotten.

“I’m fine, Shel,” I said, moving to the door of my own office beyond his.

“How are you, Toby?” Shelly asked, turning back to his patient.

I went into my office, smelled the dust, looked at the picture on the wall of me, my old man, and my brother with our dog, Kaiser Wilhelm. My private investigator’s license was next to it, needing dusting, and the cracks in the wall were just where they had always been and belonged.

I grabbed my Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine mug from my desk, ignored the ring inside it, and stepped back into Shelly’s office to get a cup of the darkness he made each day.

Shelly was humming “Perfidia,” and the world was back in order.

In my office, I made out a bill to Emmett Kelly. I was fair. I’m always fair. I didn’t charge him for clothing beyond my windbreaker and two pairs of pants. I didn’t overcharge him for what Arnie the no-neck mechanic would make me pay for whatever damage my car had taken from elephants and bullets. When I had finished, the total came to $186. It seemed like not very much for the four-day lifetime I had put into the case.

I put the bill in an envelope and mailed it to the address Kelly had given me. Then I sat back to enjoy my aches and Ovaltine. There was some mail, but I didn’t want to open it. There was a newspaper, but I didn’t want to hear that we were losing the war.

What I wanted least was the door of my office to open and my brother to walk in, but that’s what happened next. Phil was a little bigger than me, a little older, a lot grayer, and a lot meaner. He was a Los Angeles police lieutenant who had seen even more than I had and didn’t have the pleasure of sitting back when the case was over. Another ten cases were always on his desk. It kept him angry, but he had been angry even before he was a cop.

“You could have called me and Ruth,” he said.

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

“She worried anyway,” he said, loosening his tie. He was forever loosening his tie. “I could …”

And he could too. He could come in worrying about my health and get mad enough to beat the hell out of me.

But he looked away after taking one good stare at my cuts and bumps. Then he sat down in the single wooden chair on the other side of my desk. Something was on his mind.

“Nice day,” I said.

He looked back at the photograph of us and our dad and dog.

“A little cold for this time of year,” I went on.

“Shut up,” he rasped. “I’ll get to it.”

I shut up and started to open my mail. It was all junk, including one letter that told me I could help beat the Japs by buying a series of one hundred cards showing the silhouettes of all Axis planes and warships.

“I want your help,” Phil said softly. He bit his lower lip.