Stuart Kaminsky - Catch a Falling Clown

Kelly shrugged, stopped eating, and tried to look through the wall in the general direction of Tanucci’s body.

“We do the show,” he said. “Even the Flying Tanuccis. They just do less of an act. Maybe they even mention what happened. Maybe they don’t. We don’t close up shop. Can’t. A circus, especially a shoestring one like this, can’t take too many nights down.”

He went back to his eggs, and I tried drinking my coffee carefully in a thick white porcelain cup that felt good against my palms.

“And you have to be funny,” I said more than asked.

Something like a chuckle came out of Kelly. “You know,” he said. “I usually am funnier when I’m down. The towners can’t tell. You know the story about Joey Grimaldi? First big circus clown about a hundred years ago. We’re still called Joeys because of him. One day his circus is playing Vienna, and Joey is so down he’s thinking of quitting. So he goes to a doctor’s office he spots on the way to his hotel and tells the doc that he’s so depressed that he’s thinking of taking his life.

“‘Don’t worry,’ says the doctor. ‘I know just the thing to make you feel better, better enough to keep going. The circus is in town. Just go down there tonight and keep your eyes on Grimaldi the clown, and you’ll find yourself laughing.’”

“Nice story,” I said, looking across the tent to watch the woman named Peg hurrying toward us.

“Maybe,” said Kelly, reaching for another pancake, “but I don’t believe it, a Jackpot for clowns. There aren’t many suicides in circuses. Circus people seldom give up hope. We learn to live on hope. That’s what we talk about most of the time: next year, the next job, things getting better, homes we’re going to buy, places we’re going to visit, things we’re going to be.”

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” I said with my crooked smile.

“I used to think I was going to be a cartoonist. I was pretty good. The clown I do, Willie, I really drew him first for an ad agency I worked for back in Kansas City. Then I thought for a while I’d be a trapeze star, center-ring stuff. Was too for a while, did a teeth-hanging act. Damned hard on the jaws. Until a few months back I thought I might like to be in movies, but … If I ever grow up, I think I’ll just be a clown.”

Peg was standing next to us with something in her hand. Her hair was gradually escaping from the hairpins, which tried to hold it against the wind. She was the kind of woman who left a trail of hairpins you could follow to the far reaches of Alaska.

“Hi, Peg,” said Kelly. “Want some coffee?”

“No … yes … I think no,” she said, patting back some hair. “Tom said I should give this to you.”

I took the sheet of paper from her hand and looked down at the list. It had the names of everyone in the tent when the harness was removed. It included the name of Emmett Leo Kelly and was, as for each person on the list except for me and the final name, followed by a place of birth and a date. Kelly’s was Sedan, Kansas, December 9, 1898.

Peg couldn’t make up her mind about staying or sitting. I pointed to the bench next to me, and she sat.

“Sheriff is here,” she said.

“And …” I prodded.

“I think he’s convinced it’s an accident,” she said, reaching for a piece of toast on my plate, realizing what she was doing and pulling her hand back. I took the toast and placed it on the table in front of her.

“I haven’t had a chance to eat,” she explained, picking up the toast with a guilty hand.

“Your not eating doesn’t help the Tanuccis,” said Kelly, pouring her a cup of coffee.

She took it, and I discovered that …

… Dr. Patrick Y. Ogle had been born in Singapore Falls, Maine, eighty years earlier …

… the Tanuccis were from Corsica …

… one person in the tent at the time of the theft was a snake charmer named Agnes Sudds …

… one person was a local businessman from Mirador named Thomas Paul …

… and one person was a movie director named Alfred Hitchcock.

One of them was probably the murderer. I showed the list to Kelly.

“Can’t help you much,” he said. “I’ve only been with this circus a few weeks.” He handed the list to Peg, who was consuming whatever Kelly and I weren’t holding onto.

“No,” said Peg.

“My money’s on one of the outsiders,” said Kelly. “Probably that Hitchcock fella.”

Which, I thought, is why you are a clown and I am a detective, though there were those who would argue that I would make a better clown than a detective.

“OK,” I said, standing up. “Then let’s start with Hitchcock.”

He was a short, fat man with a lower lip like a pouting tailor, hair sparse but neatly in place, and wearing a dark suit and tie that looked as if they had just been handed to him by Belman’s Cleaning and Dyeing in Hollywood. He was seated in Elder’s office with his hands folded on his lap like a schoolboy.

“Hitchcock?” I said.

“I am Alfred Hitchcock,” he replied, looking at me with large eyes hooded by lids which suggested indifference, but the eyes gave too much away. “Are you a policeman?”

The word “policeman” seemed to come hard for him. I’d never seen Hitchcock before, but I knew who he was.

“ Suspicion, ” I said.

He looked frightened. His knuckles went white, and his hands remained clasped.

“Of what?” he said.

“No,” I smiled. “I’ve seen Suspicion. I’ve seen your movies. What are you doing here, at the circus?”

“At the moment,” he said very slowly with a distinct English accent, “I am being very frightened. Before that I was trying to get some material for a sequence in a film I’m considering.”

“A circus scene?”

“Precisely,” he said with a slight uplifting of the right side of his mouth that represented pain or an attempt to be friendly. “I’m staying with an acquaintance nearby, and my plan was to stop by for a few hours this morning, get some sense of atmosphere, and present my ideas to the writer. Why have I been asked to talk to you, and who are you?”

I sat on Elder’s cot. “Between us, I’m a private investigator. Name is Toby Peters. I’m pretty sure that aerialist Tanucci was murdered.”

Hitchcock’s eyes opened with interest, and he shifted his fat body slowly to face me. “Murdered,” he repeated, either savoring the word or trying to hear it come from his own mouth when it was about something real. “You are sure?” he said.

“As sure as I am that I’d marry Joan Fontaine if she’d have me,” I answered. He definitely smiled this time.

“This is better than I could have hoped,” he said as much to himself as to me. “But I’m sorry. A man has been murdered, and all I can think of is my movie.”

“That’s all right,” I said, wanting to lie back on the cot but unable to do so with the rigid, rotund director seated across from me. “You’re not a suspect. You’re more in the way of a possible witness. I saw you come in the tent earlier, and I saw you watching me when I walked over to the practice hitch.”

“Yes,” he said. “It struck me as rather peculiar that someone should be walking away from the flow of the crowd, the movement toward death. It struck me as an interesting image, the isolation of one man moving away from where the world is looking.”

“Did you see anyone go over to that harness, that thing I was looking at, maybe take it down?”

Hitchcock pursed his lips, blinked his eyes, and nodded once. “Someone did, I believe. I wasn’t watching really, but I had the sense of a person in blue, rather tall, or something about the person seeming tall.”