“Do you want me to tell you what to do?” I said.
Nelson looked at Alex, who kept looking at us. “Talk away,” said Nelson. “I can see no cost to listening.”
“Right,” I said. “I think I know who the killer is….”
“You said you knew for sure,” Nelson interrupted.
“I know for sure,” I said, “but I’ve got no real evidence. If you work with me, I’ll set the killer up for a confession you can hear.”
It sounded reasonable even to me, but I had no idea how I was going to do it.
“What does this plan involve?” asked Nelson.
“You let me go, and I set it up. You keep my friends here to be sure I’m telling the truth.”
“That is one rotten idea,” shouted Shelly, starting to get up, this time with a hand over his glasses. Alex motioned him back down, and back down he went.
“You know how much an extraction can really hurt if a dentist wants it to?” asked Shelly, looking at Alex with hatred.
“No deal, Peters,” laughed Nelson, near the end of the nerve he was faking. “You’d walk out on this crew of misfits quicker than I could fall off the chair.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” said Alex.
I had almost forgotten that Alex could talk.
Nelson turned his head to the deputy. “Well, well, an alienist in my own midst,” snickered Nelson. “The man you are willing to believe is the man who made a fool out of you, deputy, a large Mexican fool.”
“He wouldn’t run,” Alex repeated without emotion.
“All right,” Nelson said with the trembling voice of hysteria and no sleep. “Supposing we agree to let you roam around while we baby-sit with your barrel of monkeys. What next?”
Gunther began to whisper furiously in my ear. It was a plan. It was simple.
“If he needs a bathroom, all he has to do is come out and say it,” said Nelson. Gunther said it, and Nelson pointed the way. “No way out back there,” he added.
“You want to hear the plan or not?” I tried, testing a slightly aggressive tone of my own as we watched Gunther move down the corridor between the cells. I gritted my teeth. I was taking over. Jeremy gave me an approving nudge. Shelly had his arms crossed and was looking at the boarded-up window, having dismissed us from his world.
“Go ahead,” said Nelson.
He bought it. It wasn’t an easy sale, and he reserved the right to demand his money back, but he bought it. It took a few minutes to work out the details, and the final one came only when Gunther returned and whispered something to me.
“I need the keys to the truck or the car,” I said when I had finished.
“You want our shotguns too?” barked Nelson, but it was now the bark of a moody child.
“No,” I said. “I’d like my gun back, but I can do without it if I have to.”
“You have to,” said Nelson. I knew he would. I just thought it better to give him something to save his face.
“Be careful, Toby,” said Jeremy as Nelson handed me the key to the truck.
“I must be crazy myself,” mumbled the sheriff.
There were no shock absorbers worthy of being called shock absorbers on the truck. I bounced without event down the street, which was just waking up. The door of Hijo’s opened next to the sheriff’s office, and someone was fiddling with the lock of the “Fresh Bate” store.
There was clearly no day of mourning for Thomas Paul of Mirador. I got to Paul’s house after making a few mistakes, but I figured it out. It looked as if no one was there, and there might not be, but I had the feeling that there was. Gunther had said it was logical. Whoever was working with Paul would have to go back to his house to see if there was anything that could link the two of them. The killer might do it quickly or might take a long time. The killer might even say the hell with the whole thing and run for Acapulco.
But this killer had been in the game for a long time, had poisoned some elephants and started a fire the year before, had shared a hatred for the circus, and, if I was right, done some very dangerous and equally dumb things.
I parked in the driveway and went in, making a lot of noise. I didn’t want to catch the killer there and get myself killed. I was after a confession where others could hear it. I went into the living room, kicking things, singing “Flat Foot Floogie” and alerting any living thing within a hundred yards. The person I was trying to alert was not a hundred yards away but upstairs somewhere. I heard the creak and the step, and then it stopped. I kept singing and hurried for the phone.
There was no click on the line to indicate that anyone had picked up an extension. I asked for a number from the operator. It was 5454 and meant nothing to me.
“Quien es?” came a young man’s voice.
“Right,” I said loudly. “I’m out at Paul’s place now.”
“Que?”
“No, no point in staying here,” I said. “Look, it doesn’t mean anything unless you’re willing to tell the sheriff. Are you willing to tell him or not?”
“Que pasa aqui? Esta usted, Manuel?”
“I can’t force you to do anything,” I said with exasperation. “You can just pack up with the circus and go. Just forget two murders. If you saw who took the Tanuccis’ harness, and it wasn’t Paul, then it was someone working with Paul.”
“Es un chiste muy estupido, Manuel.”
“OK, then we talk. Come to town. Mirador. Right in the center of town there’s a little bar called Hijo’s. I’ll be there in ten minutes. It shouldn’t take you more than fifteen or twenty. We’ll talk, and if you agree, we go to the sheriff. Look, they’re trying to nail all this on me.”
“Loco en cabeza.” He hung up, and I kept talking.
“Just come,” I insisted. “Your life isn’t worth a box of popcorn if the bastard knows what you saw.”
I hung up the phone. I wondered whether I would have fallen for it, but it was hard to tell. I wasn’t a killer and I wasn’t crazy. Something creaked very slightly upstairs. I didn’t want to give the killer a chance to consider getting rid of me on the spot. I counted on the killer wanting me to point out the possible witness at Hijo’s, but I have been wrong so many times that I more than half expected a sharp phutt of a bullet hitting my back or the vibration of a chair against my head. I got neither. As I climbed into the cabin of the truck, I noticed a curtain move on the second floor of Paul’s house. I drove on down the road.
The trip back was faster than the trip out. I knew my way now. I parked on the street in front of Alex’s car, where the truck had been before, and stepped out. A little Mexican kid about nine stood outside the door.
“I seen you before,” the kid said, squinting up at my bristly chin and unforgettable face. “You came through when that guy got bumped off. Hey, you the guy they was looking for last night who cut off old Two-face’s head?”
“I didn’t cut off anyone’s head,” I said. “Now beat it.”
“Cost you,” he said.
I looked at the sun, the white clouds, and then at the sweet-faced kid asking for hush money.
“What’s the going price for covering a murder?” I said, digging into my pocket. I didn’t want to keep talking, but I didn’t want him messing the setup. I was willingly contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
“Four bits,” he said.
“Reasonable,” I said, giving him two quarters.
He took them in his hand and examined them carefully.
“You think I’m a counterfeiter in addition to a murderer?”
“Just being careful,” he said, pocketing the coins. “Don’t worry. I didn’t see nothin’, I don’t know nothin’, and I don’t say nothin’.”