“Lion,” I said.
The small crowd backed away, and Peg came through to stand at my side.
“Who put this filthy jacket on this wound?” said the doctor, moving his head inches from the arm as he flung my jacket in the corner. “Man gets bit by a damn lion and you push the germs in.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Stop the bleeding and kill the patient,” said the doctor to himself, pressing the wound with his hands. The tamer grimaced but didn’t let out a sound. The bleeding slowed. “Pressure,” said the old doctor.
“It wasn’t a bite,” I said. “The lion tore his arm with his nails.”
“Claws,” corrected the doctor. “Well, pick him up and we’ll get him to my wagon. He’ll be all right. I’ll be sewing on that arm for two hours, but he’ll be all right. Now, if we can just declare a cease-fire for an hour or two …”
He had no ending for his observation. Two men started to help Sandoval out. His yellow mane was sagging.
“Thanks,” I whispered to him. He had probably saved me from his own fate or worse, but he didn’t hear me.
Shelly came running in just as the crowd left. “This is not good for me,” he said seriously. “It really isn’t. I’m not used to this stuff with animals. Did you see the tricuspid on that baby?”
I had been chased by an elephant and almost killed by a lion in one day. The closest I had been to an animal outside of the Griffith Park Zoo was a police horse, and I didn’t much like it.
“Let’s go back to my wagon,” said Peg to me quietly. I liked the invitation.
“Good idea,” agreed Shelly, picking up the words. “I could use a cup of coffee.”
We walked back to Peg’s wagon through the crowd streaming out of the big top. Some faces were tired, some flushed with recent memory, none aware that they had almost had a lion in their laps.
The three of us had coffee, and Shelly kept talking. It was clear that he wasn’t going to leave until someone told him where he was sleeping. There was no point in sending him to watch Henry. He had already been spotted. So he talked of past patients, bicuspid articles he would never write, and the state of restoration of his favorite customer’s mouth. Mr. Stange had but one crusty tooth, a small scenic reproduction of one representative of Monument Valley. On this decaying piece of enamel, Shelly planned to reconstruct a mouth full of false teeth plus some experimental creations which were to be the envy of the county dental association. I felt some pity for Mr. Stange, in spite of the fact that he had once tried to hold Shelly up and had wrecked our office in the process. As I was about to leap on Shelly and kill him, a knock came at the door. Peg looked at me in apology and shrugged.
“Come in.”
And in came Gunther and Jeremy.
Gunther sat on the bed next to Shelly, whose mind was back in our office in Mr. Stange’s mouth. Gunther looked decidedly dejected.
“I lost her,” he said. “I found her and then I lost her.”
“So,” I said to Peg. “Agnes, who was found inside the tent with Puddles, could have let him out.”
“But,” said Jeremy, putting his massive bulk into the chair near me, “Thomas Paul could not have. He was in the big tent all through the show. I found him quickly and watched him. When the show ended, I asked a father and son sitting next to him if Paul had been there all through the show. Paul’s face is not forgettable. He was sitting there when the father and son came in half an hour before the show started. I’m sure he didn’t know I was watching him. Strange man. He was more interested in the show than anyone I have ever seen at a wrestling match. I cannot always fathom the human mind.”
“So,” I said, “that lets Mr. Paul out.”
“Perhaps not,” said Gunther. His hand went to his neck as if to loosen his tie, but his. sense of decorum got the better of his instinct and the hand came down. “Perhaps it is Mr. Paul who has an accomplice.”
“Agnes,” shouted Shelly.
“Possible,” I said, pouring the last of Peg’s coffee for the group. “But why the hell would Paul want to ruin the circus?”
No one knew. Peg smiled at me, and I suggested that we all go out and find someplace for my troupe to sleep.
“Perhaps we should stay near our charges, our assignments,” said Gunther.
I convinced them to call it a night and went outside with them, whispering to Peg that I would be back soon. People in costume were milling about, still up from their performance, talking about how it went, the murders, the runaway animals. We found Emmett Kelly in his wagon, and I asked him if he could put my friends up.
“We’ll find room,” said Kelly soberly.
“I’ll find somewhere else to sleep,” I said sacrificially.
“No need for that,” said Kelly. “We’ll make room.”
Then Kelly looked at me and understood.
“I’m sorry about the lion,” Shelly said.
“It’s OK, Shel,” I grinned.
“I didn’t want to hurt him,” he said, taking Emmett Kelly’s bed when Kelly moved to search for some bedding for the others. “I just wanted to frighten him a little.”
“Sure, Shel,” I said, backing out of the door with no desire to hear the tale the pudgy dentist would spend part of the night telling. I said good night to Kelly, Gunther, and Jeremy. Jeremy was already comfortably on the floor. Poor Gunther was looking for a place to change into the pajamas and robe he would magically produce from somewhere.
“One good thing,” said Kelly to me as I started to close the door. “They found the missing elephant.”
“Now all we need is a killer,” I said and closed the door behind me.
I was back at Peg’s wagon in about fifteen seconds and knocking.
“It’s me,” I whispered.
“Toby?” she said. The wagon windows were dark.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think it would work,” her voice said, but there was no certainty in it.
“How do we know unless we try?” I pleaded.
“I’m not ready for something like this,” she said.
“Let me in and we’ll talk about it.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will,” I said with comic emphasis.
She laughed, and a voice came booming from the next wagon, “Let him in, for Chrissake. I’ve got to get up at dawn and take care of fifteen horses.”
She let me in.
10
Peg was right. It didn’t work. I’m not sure what it was. Friendly but not comfortable. Touched but not moved. Friends. It wasn’t what I had had in mind, but it wasn’t bad either. There wasn’t enough room in her bed for both of us to sleep. We tried for an hour, but my back began to ache again. She fell asleep while I was talking about the time I had been in New York chasing down a couple of runaway kids. I was in the Wellington Hotel across from the Waldorf. I thought the kids were in the room next to mine. I was going to wait till it got dark, knock at their door when they thought they were safe, and do my best to talk them into coming back to Los Angeles with me. I wasn’t getting enough for the job to do anything else, and they were a pair of skinny little things with pimples who had some pretty good reasons for leaving home.
I had looked out of my window after taking a shower and seen something moving in the window of the Waldorf across the way at about the fifteenth or sixteenth floor. It was a small kid, maybe two years old, with red hair. He was leaning out of the open window. The wind was blowing, and I looked into the light of the room behind him or her for an adult to do something. There was no one there. I thought of calling the Waldorf desk, but I couldn’t figure out what room it was, and by the time anyone got up there, the kid would be gone, one way or another. I thought of opening the window and yelling, but what would I yell even if the kid could hear me over the noise of the street? I might scare him into falling. But he was going to fall. No doubt about it. He or she put one foot up on the sill and looked down into the street.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t decide whether to watch, run, close my eyes under the blankets, or pretend I wasn’t seeing. I whispered to the kid to please crawl back. Then I stood there for maybe fifteen seconds watching until a figure behind the kid pulled him back and closed the window. The figure, a woman, turned her back, and the kid ran over to the bed in the room and that was all I could see. No one had suffered for what had happened in that room but me.