Stuart Kaminsky: Catch a Falling Clown

The gorilla was sleeping.

When he woke up he’d find a clown in his cage. There would be no reasoning with Gargantua. He was not a reasonable gorilla. Maybe there are no reasonable gorillas. This was the only nonhuman one I had ever met, and if fate didn’t step very gently in and let me out, it was the only gorilla I would ever meet.

His keeper had told me that Gargantua was so mean that they had to throw live snakes into his cage just to get him to move out so they could clean the floors.

“But gorillas, they don’t eat people,” said the keeper, a knotty twig named Henry Yew. “That is a misnomer. They rends ’em apart or chomps ’em sometimes, but they don’t eat ’em.”

So when Gargantua woke up looking for some succulent head of cabbage to bend or chomp, he would find instead a private detective named Toby Peters. With the war in the Pacific going badly and reports of the Japanese bombing Los Angeles and Seattle, I’d just make a curiosity item in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times: FAMOUS CIRCUS GORILLA RIPS PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Maybe the Times would wonder why I had been in his cage dressed as a clown. Maybe not.

Well, what the hell, forty-six isn’t a bad age to go out at. Not quite getting old, but sure as hell not young. If I survived the night in the cage, my back would probably be sore, and the killer I had been tracking would be gone.

Maybe that great black ball of fur would stay asleep through the night. He looked like a peaceful drunk with his arms out, palms up, his back against the wall of the cage, and his mouth slightly open. He smelled like a musty closet, but I probably smelled worse.

I didn’t have much hope of outsmarting him when those eyes opened. Given what had happened over the last three days, he was almost certainly smarter than I was.

The cage was in the corner of a side tent. A lion in the cage nearby lay with his head on his paws, watching me and purring. A breeze from outside sent ripples across the canvas and made a guwhump-guwhump sound. Through the open flap of the tent I could see the dark outline of a wagon and the open field in which the circus had been put up. In the moonlight, I could also see the frozen furrows of the truck tracks. In the morning, when the sun came out and the circus began to shrug awake, the thin layer of ice would be crushed or melt away, and the field would again be a sea of mud. The big cat watching me grew restless and yawned or howled sadly. Gargantua stirred, swatted an imaginary fly in his sleep, groaned a few echoes below sea level, and was quiet.

I could have yelled. Maybe someone would have heard me. Even if they did, I sure as hell would wake my cellmate.

I’d been told Gargantua didn’t like clowns. Actually, Gargantua didn’t seem to like much of anything or anybody. He had his own air-conditioned and heated cage and people left him somewhat alone, but he pined for the veldt or wherever the hell gorillas come from. I made a decision. I’d take off my clown makeup.

I rubbed at the makeup with my sleeve and considered taking the offensive. There was a tire in the cage that Gargantua snapped like a rubber band when he got bored. It was a better tire than the retread quartet I had on my elephant-battered 1934 Buick. What if I lifted the tire, slipped it over his furry head and shoulders, and then started to scream for help? Maybe it would hold him long enough. Like hell it would. A few more minutes or hours of smelling the air, feeling the chill of night, and wondering how all this happened had more appeal than trying to straitjacket the snoring hulk across from me.

Wouldn’t it be grand if he woke up and had a rusty nail stuck on his behind? I’d scramble over, coo something to him, pull off the offending fragment, and we’d be buddies forever. Yes, and the Nazis would apologize and pull out of Belgium.

Less than a week earlier, I had packed my single suitcase with my extra crumpled suit, two pair of socks, my last white shirt, and a couple of pairs of underwear whose holes might be worth a few laughs to a Peeping Tom. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough money to put my closet in order. I’d just come off a case that brought my bankroll up to almost two hundred dollars after rent and sundry bills. Now, that may not have been much of a cushion for most working Americans in February of 1942, but for me two hundred bucks was the top of the world. What I didn’t have was time. The telegram had said hurry, and hurry I had. I begged an extra few gallons of gas from my unfriendly neighborhood mechanic, no-neck Arnie, who figured gas was going to get tight and prices would go through the roof.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if someday we pay fifty, sixty cents a gallon of gas,” he had said, pointing his cigar at me.

The Buick had taken more paint than Nita Naldi trying to make a comeback. There was so much lead on it that it should have been bullet proof, which I knew from experience was not the case. The present paint job was most patriotic. It was supposed to be a sleek shiny green but looked more like a rotten olive drab. I had no unsolicited offers to buy it, but it moved and complained only when it had reason.

I had stopped only once on the way down the coast from Los Angeles. That was to negotiate for a full tank of gas by telling the kid operating the pump, who looked six years old, that I was a special representative of Eleanor Roosevelt, that I was touring the area to determine which small businesses needed immediate federal support. The kid paid no attention. It wasn’t his station, and he was going in the army in a few days. I was doing my act for the exercise, but in my business you have to keep in practice. You can’t tell good lies unless you practice lying a lot. Sometimes I lie when there’s no reason for it, just to see if I can get away with it. I had always thought it was a peculiarity of my profession until I ran into an actor who told me actors do the same thing. Then a cop told me that cops lie, and a grocery clerk told me … I thought of asking the kid at the pump how good a liar he was, but his eyes were off in the direction of the Pacific Ocean and he was listening to the sound of battleships two thousand miles away.

When I got back on the road I listened to Fibber McGee and Molly as the night folded in. McGee was hiding a horse in the garage. He didn’t want Molly to know he had it. His idea was that a horse would be cheaper and more patriotic than a car. I’d been on a horse once. Didn’t like it. Molly wound up falling in love with the horse, and I wondered if the horse would be part of the show for a while. The announcer told me that I’d be helping America defeat the Japs and Nazis if I kept my car polished with Johnson’s Wax. It would make my car last longer and keep me from having to buy a new one.

I caught up with the circus outside of Mirador, a little town not far from Laguna Beach, off the Pacific Coast highway. Through Santa Monica, Torrance, and Long Beach, I had a prickly feeling of where I was headed. By Newport Beach, I was sure of it. The sheriff of Mirador was named Mark Nelson. Nelson was a wiry little guy who smelled like a weak onion, wore sweaty lightweight suits and fake grins, and didn’t like me even a little bit. Less than a year before, I’d made him look bad on a case that had brought me to Mirador. He wasn’t happy about this happening in front of the state police and the local talent, mostly the Mexicans who arrived in Mirador pretending they were American migrant workers and had to pay him off. It was the rich folks who lived on the private estates down by the beach who needed the image of a sheriff who made no mistakes. It was the rich folks who paid a little extra to get special attention from Sheriff Nelson and his deputy Alex, a bull of a man Nelson had recruited from among the Mexican workers. Alex went about the job of removing headlights and heads according to Nelson’s needs and wishes. Alex did it without betraying feeling or interest. It was a job, like picking lettuce, and he wasn’t going to risk it by letting anyone know how he might feel.