Elder and Carlo had been looking at each other in understanding through the explanation, and Carlo had clearly picked up enough words like “Mussolini” and “Communist” to figure out what was happening.
“Does he know that the kid might have been murdered?” I asked Elder.
“He knows,” came a voice, but it wasn’t Elder’s. It was the now youngest Tanucci, Tino.
Carlo said something quickly and earnestly to the boy. The mother put a hand on his arm, and Tino touched her reassuringly.
“My English,” he said, “is not so very good, but is enough. Rennata told us that Marco was maybe morted, murdered.”
He was a short figure, the darkest of the clan, with straight black hair down his neck. He was somewhere in his late teens, but I couldn’t tell where. His forehead was creased with the strain of publicly speaking English, a task he had probably not planned to take on for some time.
“What did she say?”
“She say she saw something, someone, and someone saw her seeing this,” he said. “It was not so clear to me, something to do with our equip … I don’t know how you say this word.”
“Equipment,” I supplied. “She saw someone messing with your equipment before your brother fell. Is that it?”
“Si,” he agreed. “She saw.”
“Who was it?” I pushed.
The young man shook his head. “I no know. She say she would take care. She was a very mad.” He showed mad by shaking his head furiously. “She say she … That’s all.”
One simple conclusion was that Rennata Tanucci had seen whoever cut the harness or whoever had taken it down after the murder. She was now going to find that person and do something to him or her involving an elephant. The number of unpleasant things someone could do with a two-ton elephant did not elude me or Elder.
“She’s crazy enough,” Elder confirmed, touching his lower lip.
“It can’t be that easy to hide an elephant,” I said.
The Tanuccis listened to what they couldn’t understand, and the young man tried to translate for them.
“Did anyone hate your brother, have a fight with your brother before this morning?” I asked. “Was anything on his mind?”
“Yes,” said the young man. “Marco say, said, he saw someone in the elephant tent. Saw him when circus up go do something. Then elephant go fried. Marco said maybe it not accident. Now, maybe …”
“Maybe,” I finished, “someone killed Marco because he saw them setting up the rigging to kill the elephant. Then Rennata saw the same person fooling with your equipment and figured she had a murderer. It makes sense.”
“The elephant,” sighed Elder.
“Thanks,” I said to the Tanuccis, taking each of their hands. “We’ll find Rennata and bring her back.”
“Grazie,” said the mother, a firm blonde with enough makeup to show she was hiding her face and feelings. Elder and I backed out of the wagon, and the trio didn’t move.
Outside the wagon, we looked beyond the circus grounds for a two-ton elephant and saw nothing.
“As Charlie Chan would say, ‘Two-ton elephant must leave deep tracks in mud.’”
Elder nodded in agreement. “Right to the road down there, but two tons isn’t enough to make holes in asphalt and rock.”
The road was the one I had come down to find the circus. It led down to the highway going one way and off into the farmlands in the other.
“I’ll head for town,” I said. “You take some people the other way.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” said Elder sensibly. “Nelson finds you in Mirador and you might not come out.”
“Right, but I know the town better than you and how to stay away from him.”
“That’s a lousy argument,” said Elder, pulling his jacket over his neck. The afternoon was cool, but not cold. The sky had clouded over and promised something damp. My back twinged, and I looked at my watch. I hadn’t any reason to know the time before this, and my watch didn’t help much. It was my one inheritance from my father, if you don’t count the debts on his Glendale grocery store. The watch stopped when it wanted to, started when it wanted to, and showed a hell of a lot more independence than my old man ever did, which may have been why I kept it. My old man’s indecision was probably a major contribution to my brother Phil’s becoming an angry cop and my seeking out violence.
Whatever the reason, my watch said it was two o’clock.
“What time is it?” I asked Elder. We stepped out of the mud rut to let some bears walk by, led by a man who looked almost as much like a bear as the bears. The bears, in fact, were dressed better than the man, in blue tutus. They would be cute from the audience. The audience wouldn’t have found them so cute this close up. Bears definitely do not brush their teeth.
“Lotze,” grunted the man who looked like a bear, when one of the bears hesitated and decided to growl in my face. Elder ignored the whole thing and bit his lower lip.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“I don’t either, but we have no choice,” I answered.
“You, Peters, are a liar,” grinned Elder, a wise grin I didn’t care for. My ex-wife had a grin like that. “You do like it. You’re as happy as a seal in a fish house.”
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.”