7
I made my call to Los Angeles and then put myself in the hands of Elder and Emmett Kelly. What they did with those hands was transform me into a clown. My brother would have said that it didn’t take much, but it had to be enough to fool Nelson and Alex, who made it to the circus no more than twenty minutes after us. I had a little blue hat on and a shiny suit with an inflated inner tube inside it. I began to sweat almost immediately and knew that the greasepaint wasn’t letting me perspire enough; I was getting sicker by the minute.
Almost any law-enforcement agent, even the dumb cops played by people like Bill Demarest or Nat Pendleton in the movies, would have considered a clown costume.
“I’m going to tear this circus apart, elephant puddle by elephant puddle, until I find Peters,” Nelson told Elder through closed teeth. Kelly, I, and four other clowns were within listening distance. I was playing with a fake rope that looked as if I was twirling a lasso, only the lasso was a rigid hoop. It was a third-rate gag but a first-rate disguise.
“Lots of elephants, lots of people,” said Elder evenly. He leaned against a huge trunk in Clown Alley, where we were putting on costumes and fixing props. “Besides, Peters isn’t here. If he killed Rennata, this is the last place he’d come. He’d get himself torn to pieces.”
“Maybe,” said Nelson. Alex was looking around at every face, and when he came to mine I concentrated on the little hoop. He fingered his Adam’s apple, and his eyes went past me. I was sick of twirling the lasso.
“I don’t know where he is,” said Elder evenly.
“You are lying,” Nelson went on, letting his tongue go over his lower lip.
Elder laughed, a nice deep laugh. “Sheriff, how am I supposed to answer that? Say I’m not lying? Admit that I am, which I am not? Feel free to look around here as much as you want. My guess is that Peters got his car and is back in Los Angeles by now.”
Alex wandered over to me slowly, suspiciously. I kept twirling madly. I could feel him behind me, but I didn’t look.
“I have taken the precaution of doing just that,” sighed Nelson, removing his sweat-stained hat and wiping the band with his dirty handkerchief. I could see Nelson’s gray-stubbled chin announcing that he was losing his grip on his minimal appearance and the case.
“Hey,” said Alex behind me. Kelly, who was applying the end of his makeup, looked up, hesitated, and went back to finishing his mouth.
“Hey, you,” Alex repeated, touching my shoulder.
I turned to him, still twirling, and pointed to myself with my free hand. His eyes were looking into mine.
“How do you do that?” he said, pointing to the twirling rope. I stopped twirling and held out the hoop to him. I could see the black-and-blue mark on his neck, and his voice sounded more than a little raspy. He took the rope and held it up.
“When you are through fooling around like a damn baby,” Nelson called to him, “we can get on with catching a killer and, maybe, this time holding onto him.”
Alex stiffened at the public dressing-down, and I took the rope from his fingers. Maybe something about the way I took the rope attracted Nelson, who moved two steps toward us away from Elder, cocked his head to one side like a constipated stork, and looked at me.
Kelly stood up and looked at me, but of course he wasn’t Kelly as I knew him. He was a sad-faced tramp clown, as sad a face as could be painted on a human. His hands were plunged in his grungy pockets, and he winked at me as Nelson decided to take another step forward.
Before Nelson could challenge me, Kelly reached behind him and picked up a sledgehammer. Nelson hesitated, stopped, and put his hand on his gun. Suspicion had started to turn to more than that.
Kelly put the hammer in my hand and reached into his shaggy pocket to pull out a peanut, which he held up mournfully for us all to see. The other clowns in the tent, six of them, stopped what they were doing and watched. Kelly’s tramp went through a weary effort to crush the peanut with his fingers, under his arms, against his head, and by sitting on it. Finally, he dropped it on the ground, reached for the sledgehammer in my hands, and lifted it over his head. Nelson began to draw his gun, and Alex pushed me out of the way to make a plunge at Kelly if he attacked. Kelly brought the hammer down quickly on the peanut on the ground, dropped the hammer, looked down, knelt, and held up the crushed pieces of peanut in his hand.
Behind me I could hear laughter. Alex let out a small chuckle, and Nelson looked relieved. As frightened as I was at the prospect of being carted back for torture in the Mirador jail while wearing a clown suit, even I found Kelly’s act funny.
“We are wasting our damn time here,” said Nelson in exasperation. “Let’s look.” Alex followed him out of the tent, with Elder behind them to keep an eye on the Mirador duo.
“Thanks,” I said to Kelly.
“Thank Willie,” he said. “Willie took over.”
“Took over?” I said, trying to sit in a wooden chair in front of the line of mirrors in the tent. I couldn’t sit. The costume wouldn’t let me.
“When I’m Willie, he takes over. I mean, I always know I’m me, nothing like that, but Willie is a funny man. I’m not funny. I don’t even know what makes Willie funny. Most of my act just happened when I made it up while walking around the tent during a show. That bit with the peanut. Willie made it up in England a year ago. People ask me what makes it funny. I don’t know. I just do it, and people find it funny. I do another bit with pretending to saw wood. Audiences fall apart. I’m not sure why. Actually, the peanut thing builds up better than that. If you watch the show tonight, you’ll see what I mean.”
It was nearly time for the show and there wasn’t much time to talk, but I asked Kelly a few questions about himself and found out that he was married but not with his wife, that he had two sons, and that he had grown up in Huston, Missouri. He hadn’t run away to the circus. He had gone to the big city to get work, the big city being Kansas City, and had tried everything including cleaning milk bottles before getting a job with a company that did advertising films. He created the Willie cartoon. Later, when he was with the circus, he painted circus wagons before he became a performer. For a while, between seasons, he had done a nightclub act with his cartoons. He’d also done a little Broadway, working a few nights in Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin and then a comedy called Keep Off the Grass.
“Got good reviews for that play,” he said. “Met some nice people, Ray Bolger, Jimmy Durante. Nice kid named Jackie Gleason. Durante didn’t care for me getting big laughs, though. The circus is harder, but better. Might like to do a movie someday.”
“Movie director named Hitchcock has been hanging around the circus today,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror and not believing it was me. I tried not to think what would happen if I needed a toilet.
“The circus?”
“Right,” I said. “Short, fat, wears neat suits. Looks like he’s pouting.”
“Oh,” said Kelly. “I’ve seen him. That’s Hitchcock the director? I saw the one with the poisoned milk. Liked it. Something about him I don’t like, though.”
“The milk wasn’t poisoned,” I said.
It was now ten minutes before showtime. We could hear the crowd coming in, vendors hawking candy and souvenirs, the lions and tigers catching the scent of the crowd, getting restless and growling into the night. I had an appointment with the one person in the tent this morning I had not talked to. Kelly told me how to get to him, and I walked past the other clowns, into the night and the crowds.
Some adults pretended I wasn’t at all unusual. Others nudged their children to look at me. I had a hell of a time making my way with my inner-tube stomach through the crowds shoveling cotton candy into their mouths.