Officer Skrolnik was waiting by the front door. Inside the hallway, his partner was talking to an elderly man with white hair and a baggy gray cardigan. Officer Skrolnik was very tall, with a prominent larynx that bobbed up and down like a Halloween apple whenever he spoke.
‘Thanks for coming so quick, detectives. The landlord and his wife are really spooked.’
‘What’s the landlord’s name?’ asked Walter.
Officer Skrolnik flipped open his notebook. ‘Richard Yarber. His wife’s name is Maude. They said that Ms Fortales came back very early this morning, around five thirty, after spending the night with some of her college friends. Around eleven forty-five they heard her screaming but the door to her room was locked and they couldn’t get in to find out what was wrong. Mrs Yarber went across the street and asked one of their neighbors to help them — Mr Herman Eisner, he’s a retired fire marshal. He managed to kick the door open but the room was empty. No sign of Ms Fortales or anybody else.’
Walter sniffed. ‘Couldn’t she have climbed out of the window?’
Officer Skrolnik shook his head. ‘It used to be their grandson’s room and the windows all have childproof bars. Apart from which, it’s a sheer twenty-foot drop down to the side of the house.’
‘Well, très mysterious. Let me talk to them.’
He entered the hallway and Charlie followed him. He showed Mr Yarber his badge and said, ‘Detective Wisocky, sir, and this is Detective Hudson. Sounds like you’ve had a kind of a weird experience this morning.’
‘I’ll shay,’ said Mr Yarber, with his false teeth clicking. ‘Shcared the living Jeshush out of ush.’
‘You heard Ms Fortales screaming?’
‘Never in my life heard nothing sho terrible. More like a pig being shlaughtered than a human being. And shomething elsh, too. Both of ush heard it. Like a shaw, if you know what I mean. A rashping noish, like a shaw.’
‘A rasping noise like a saw? But when your neighbor broke into Ms Fortales’ room, you didn’t see a saw?’
The young officer who had been talking to Mr Yarber had to cover his mouth with his hand to hide his grin.
‘No,’ said Mr Yarber. ‘No shign of a shaw anywhere.’
‘OK,’ Walter told him, laying a reassuring hand on his steeply-sloping shoulder. ‘Do you mind if my partner and me took a look at Ms Fortales’ room?’
‘Shure. Go ahead. Be my guesht. It’s upshtairs, shecond on the left.’
Walter and Charlie climbed the narrow, beige-carpeted stairs. The staircase was wallpapered with faded brown roses, and twenty or thirty photographs of the Yarber’s sons and daughters and grandchildren were hung higgledy-piggledy on either side, not one of them straight. The house smelled sweetish and musty, as if the windows hadn’t been opened in years, and there were dead blowflies lying on the window sills.
Walter carefully pushed open the door to Maria Fortales’ bedroom. The Yarbers’ neighbor Herman Eisner had kicked the door so hard that he had split the side of the frame and the tarnished brass knob was hanging at an angle. Walter eased himself inside.
On the left, against the wall, there was a single bed covered by a rumpled pink candlewick bedspread. It had three purple cushions on it and a small collection of soft toys — a floppy-eared rabbit, a bright green frog, and a pale green hand-knitted gnome.
Under the window stood a pine desk, with an Apple laptop on it, a half-empty coffee mug, and a thick red notebook bound with five or six elastic bands. A white home-knitted cardigan was drooping over the back of the chair. As Officer Skrolnik had told them, the windows were fitted with horizontal metal bars, so it would have been impossible for Maria Fortales to have climbed out.
On the right-hand side of the room there was a cheap plywood clothes-closet, painted cream. One side of the closet was plastered with dozens of cut-out pictures of circuses and clowns. Almost in the center was a large photograph of a gray-faced clown. He had wild staring eyes and tangled gray shoulder-length hair and dark green lipstick which was curved upward into a maniacal grin, even though his real lips were curved downward.
‘Somebody sure likes the circus,’ said Charlie, crossing over to take a closer look. ‘This fellow here is Mago Verde, the Green Magician.’
Walter sniffed again, took out a crumpled handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. ‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘I did a study of clowns at the Police Academy.’
‘That couldn’t have been too difficult. The whole place is run by clowns.’
‘No, there’s a distinct deviant psychology based around clowns. A lot of killers and criminals are inspired to dress up as circus performers, like John Wayne Gacy, for instance.’
‘Oh, you mean Pogo the Clown.’
‘That’s right. Gacy made himself up as a white-faced harlequin, didn’t he, a family entertainer. But he ended up raping and murdering at least thirty-three young men and boys around the Cleveland area and over half of their bodies were never found.’
Walter came up behind him and peered at Mago Verde over his shoulder. ‘I never liked clowns, when I was a kid. They always scared the crap out of me.’
‘An irrational fear of clowns — that’s called coulrophobia,’ said Charlie. ‘But this particular clown you’d be well advised to be very afraid of. He’s what the Venetians call a pagliaccio diabolico — an evil clown.’
‘Oh, yeah? What’s so evil about him, apart from the fact that he looks like Jack Nicholson in drag?’
‘Mago Verde always plays cruel and sadistic tricks on his audience. For instance he might produce a small guillotine and show a volunteer that when he sticks his finger in it, and trips the switch, it looks like this really sharp blade is coming down but he’s completely unhurt. So the volunteer willingly copies him, and crunch! he gets his pinkie chopped off.’
‘Hilarious,’ said Walter.
‘You know what Lon Chaney Junior once said about clowns? “There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”’
‘There is nothing funny about clowns in any kind of light, period, and especially in the dark. But what I would dearly like to know is, why did this Maria Fortales have a picture of this freak stuck up on her closet?’
Charlie was scrutinizing the pictures even more intently. ‘Mago Verde isn’t the only freak here. Look — here’s a picture of Prince Randian the Human Caterpillar and Johnny Eck the Half-Boy. They were both in that Tod Browning movie, Freaks.’
‘Yeah, I saw it,’ said Walter. ‘That guy didn’t have no arms or legs, did he? But he still managed to roll a cigarette, put it into his mouth and light it.’
They both frowned at each other, baffled. Then Walter abruptly opened the closet doors, as if he were trying to surprise whoever was hiding inside it. All that it contained, however, was a row of wire hangers, with dresses and skirts and two short coats, one tartan and the other brown suede.
Walter yanked out the three drawers underneath, but one of them was only a snakes’-nest of thongs and bras and pantyhose, while the other two were crammed with sweaters, purple and crimson and marigold yellow.
‘Smell that?’ he said, lifting up one of the sweaters. ‘She sure liked her vanilla musk.’
Charlie bent over and lifted the side of the bedspread so that he could check under the bed. There was nothing there but a large gray suitcase and a grubby red backpack. He dragged out the suitcase and opened it up but it was empty except for some travel brochures for Mexico and a sewing kit from the Hacienda San Miguel Hotel in Cozumel.