Cochran gaped at Plumtree, totally disoriented. There had been a TV star called Nicky Bradshaw—he had starred in some situation comedy in the fifties. Was this voice Flibbertigibbet talking? Cochran was pretty sure that Nicky Bradshaw had died years ago. What bar was Flibbertigibbet talking about?
“Bradshaw doesn’t…blame me,” said the clown quietly, “for his death.”
Again the man’s voice boomed out of Plumtree’s throat: “Then you don’t mind if I tell him where you live, right?”
The clown sighed shakily. “Don’t do anything.” He clumped up the steps to the porch, digging a set of keys out of the pocket of his baggy trousers, and he unlocked the front door. “Come inside, if you’ve got to talk about these things.”
Plumtree followed the clown into the dark house, and after a light came on inside Cochran stepped in too, pulling the door closed behind him.
The green-carpeted living room was bare except for some white plastic chairs and a long mahogany credenza against the far wall; impressionistic sailboat prints and unskilled oil paintings of clowns hung in a cluster over it, as if Strubie had once, briefly and with limited resources, tried to brighten the empty expanses of mottled plaster walls.
Plumtree sat down in one of the plastic chairs and crossed her legs. Her jeans were tight, and it made Cochran dizzy to look at her legs and at the same time remember the voice she had just now been speaking with.
In the glare from the lamp on the credenza, the clown was hideous; the white face-paint was cracked with his anxious frown, and the orange tufts of hair glued onto the bald wig above his ears emphasized the exhausted redness of his eyes.
He didn’t sit down. “Who are you?” he asked, shakily pulling off his white gloves.
“That’s not important,” said the man’s voice from Plumtree’s throat. A sardonic grin made her cheekbones and the line of her jaw seem broader, and Cochran had to remind himself that it was a woman’s face.
Strubie cleared his throat. “Who’s your friend, then?” he asked, nodding toward Cochran, who, daunted by this attention, let himself fold into one of the chairs.
“I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know.” Plumtree’s face turned toward Cochran, and the wide-pupilled eyes squinted at him. “I gotta say I don’t much like the look of him. However, he may kiss my hand, if he likes.”
Cochran shook his head and licked beads of sweat off his upper lip.
Strubie took a deep breath, and then hugely startled Cochran by reaching both hands behind his ears and peeling the white scalp, with the tufts of orange hair still attached to it, forward and right off of his head. “Who is this bananas person,” the clown asked wearily, “and how can he help you out of whatever trouble it is that you’re in?” He tossed the white bald wig onto the wooden floor. His thinning hair was gray and tangled, and the inch of unpainted forehead below his hairline was the color of oatmeal.
The light dimmed out, then brightened.
And when Plumtree spoke, it was in a woman’s voice: “Don’t tell him,” she said. “You didn’t tell him yet, did you?” Cochran glanced at her quickly, but was unable to guess which personality was up at the moment.
“Tell who,” said the clown, “what?”
“The…the man who was speaking through me,” she said. “Valorie has blocked him, for now. Did you tell him how to find the boy?”
“No,” said Strubie.
“Good. I’ll go away, and you’ll never hear from…that man, again. Or me.” Cochran thought it was Cody speaking. “Tell me how to find the boy, and no harm will cbme to him, I promise.”
Strubie laughed softly, exposing yellow teeth in the white-painted face. “I used to be a divorce lawyer,” he said. “I’ve hurt enough children. Today I try to…give them some moments of joy, if only in a frail, half-assed way. It’s what I can do. How do I know you’re not going to go hurt this boy, or kill him? Other people have wanted to, in the past.”
Plumtree spread her hands. “‘I need to find him because he can restore a dead king to life. I killed…or at least, the man you were just listening to, I helped him kill… a king, and I need to make it right.”
“A king,” echoed Strubie. “And if I tell you nothing…?”
“Then I’ll hang around. I’ll be back tomorrow. The bad man will get it out of you one way or another, and incidentally you’ll have a terrible time. Everybody will.”
“God help everybody,” said Strubie softly.
Strubie reached under the lapel of his midgets jacket and slid out of an inner pocket a flat half-pint bottle Roses whiskey; he unscrewed the deep swig of the brown liquor; his long exhalation afterward was almost a whistle.
“The boy’s name is Koot Hoomie Parganas,” he said hoarsely. “His parents were murdered just before Halloween in ’92, because they were in the way. The Parganas boy had another person inside his head with him—you should be able to empathize!—and a lot of ruthless people wanted that person, wanted to consume it into themselves. For them to do that, incidentally, would have involved killing the boy.”
He sat down on the credenza and lowered his face into his hands. “The last I heard of him,” came his muffled voice, “he was living in an apartment building in Long Beach. I don’t remember the address, but it’s a big old rambling three-story place on the northwest corner of Ocean and Twenty-first Place, run-down, with a dozen mailboxes out front, and he was living there with a man named Peter Sullivan and a woman named Angelica Elizalde.” He raised his head and pried off his bulbous red nose; his real nose was textured and scored with red capillaries. “The building used to belong to Nicholas Bradshaw, the man who played the Spooky character in the old ‘Ghost of a Chance’ TV show—he owned the building under the alias Solomon Shadroe—but it was quit-claimed to his common-law wife, who had some Mexican last name.”
“Valorie’s got all that,” said Plumtree. “Do you owe this Koot Hoomie any money?”
“Owe him—?” said Strubie, frowning. “I don’t think so. No. In fact, I got gypped out of a reward, when I led the bad people there; they were offering a reward to whoever could find Bradshaw, find the Spooky character, and I used to work for Bradshaw when he was a lawyer, after he quit being an actor, so I was able to track him down there. I never got—”
“It sounds like you made Koot Hoomie’s life harder, doing that,” said Plumtree. “Would you like me to take any money to him, from you, as a token of restitution?”
The clown put down his bottle and stared at her out of his red, watery eyes. “I couldn’t,” he said finally, stiffly, “give you more than a hundred dollars. I swear, that’s the absolute—”
“I think that’ll do,” said Plumtree.
The clown stared at her for another few seconds, then wearily got to his feet and shuffled out of the room in his blimp shoes. Cochran could hear him bumping down an uncarpeted hall, and then a door squeaked and clicked shut.
Cochran exhaled through clenched teeth. “This is very damned wrong, Cody,” he whispered. “This poor man can’t afford your…extortion, or protection, or whatever it is. Hell, I’m sure that lady in the bar couldn’t afford to lose her purse! I’m going to—first chance I get, I’m going to pay these people back—”
“Talk the virtuous talk, by all means,” Plumtree interrupted. “Janis can give you tips on it. I’ll make my own restitutions, like always. In the meantime, I don’t need to hear your estimates of how much cash is enough to finance the resurrection of a dead king.” Her lip curled in a smile. “No offense, pansy.”