“Perhaps,” said Gunther, “but it will provide you no service if no one chooses to listen to you.”
It was once again, as Gunther always was, reasonable. I had the vague idea that I would go somewhere, sleep, think for a few hours, and make Mirador and the Rose and Elder circus what they were before, while Franklin D. did the same with the rest of the world.
We made it to Kelly’s. He was there and looking none too happy.
“Are you all right?” he said while I got out of what remained of my clown costume and into my last pair of trousers, a shirt, and my gray sweater with the brown reindeer on it.
“Let’s go,” urged Shelly.
“I’m fine,” I told Kelly.
“Sorry I got you into this,” he said, looking somewhat like Willie even without the makeup.
“It goes with the job,” I said.
“I want you to get out of this,” he said. “Just take care of yourself and send me a bill.”
“I’ll send you that bill,” I said, “after I catch a killer. I’ll be in touch.” And out the door I went, followed by my faithful band of merry men from Los Angeles forest. “This handcuff has to come off,” I said as we hurried in the general direction of Shelly’s car.
“Easy enough,” said the Sheriff of Nottingham, stepping out from behind a tent with a very large shotgun in his hands. We stopped. Behind us stepped Alex, also holding a shotgun.
“You shoot from there,” I said, “and you’ll kill each other.”
“And you in the cross fire,” said Nelson evenly, his white hat over his eyes.
“That hat doesn’t make you a good guy,” I said.
“Shut up, Toby,” whispered Shelly. “Do what they say.”
“I know who killed the Tanuccis,” I went on with more confidence than I felt.
Alex took a step up behind us, and Nelson stood his ground.
“So do we,” said Nelson. “Just put up your hands, all of you. You too, big fella and little fella, or maybe you won’t have any hands to put up.”
“I think,” said Jeremy, lifting his hands and whispering to me, “we try to take them now. If they get you back to …”
“No,” I said to him and then to Nelson, “OK. Let’s go. You’ve got me.”
“Indeed, indeed,” said Nelson, rocking on his heels. “I have a whole menagerie, a regular conspiracy of freaks.”
“You,” said Gunther indignantly, stepping forward, “are a semiliterate dunderkopf.”
“Sez you, peewee,” Nelson answered. “All of you just move along slow and sweet, like the little girls at the Catholic school in Palm Hills, and we will be friends.”
We moved in a single line with our hands up through the circus grounds and to a truck on the dirt road.
“Into the back of the truck,” said Nelson. “I’m going to drive, and Alex is going to be in the car right behind. We are going to go very slowly, and if one of you happens to fall out of the truck on the way back, there is a very great chance of an accident involving you and Alex’s car. We no longer have a police car. It met with a slight accident, the nature of which we will demonstrate on the person of Mr. Peters.”
“You have a way with words, Nelson,” I said, getting into the back of the truck.
Gunther had to suffer the indignity of being put up on the truck by Jeremy. Shelly needed the same help, but he didn’t see it as indignity. He was too busy blaming me for his troubles.
“I’m sorry, Gunther,” I said.
“You did not bring this to pass,” said Gunther, trying to keep himself and his wardrobe clean as he stood holding onto a piece of rope. Jeremy made himself confortable and kept his eyes on Alex as we drove.
“I don’t know how you talk me into these things,” said Shelly, cleaning his glasses on his dirty jacket. “Mildred is not a fool. She told me something would happen if I came here. Mildred went to college like me. She had courses in things like philosophy. I should have listened to her. I’m a dentist.”
I found nothing coherent in Shelly’s rambling, so I tried not to listen.
“Do you really know who the killer is?” Gunther asked as we bounced around. It came out, “Do … uh, uh … you … uh, uh … really … uh, uh …” Hardly the conditions for a prolonged conference.
“I’m not sure. I’ll tell you what I’ve got.” And I told him. He listened, nodded his head, thought, and nodded some more.
“There is hatred in that face,” Jeremy said, “but there is also something else too. Some sense of calm, balance.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The deputy,” Jeremy said, nodding to Alex in the car on the road behind us.
“He wants to kill me,” I said.
“He is not the one to fear,” said Jeremy. “It’s the one in the front, the sheriff, a frightened man. He sweats too much and is too far away from what he really is. A frightened man who doesn’t know who he is.”
“I don’t have to take that,” shouted Shelly. “Being a landlord doesn’t give you …”
“He’s talking about the sheriff,” I explained, and from the front of the truck came Nelson’s voice, “Shut up back there. We’re in town, and I don’t want you waking the dead or the citizens.”
The truck came to a stop, and Alex parked right in the middle of the street. He came out of his car, shotgun in hand. Nelson came around to the rear of the truck with his weapon out.
“Now,” he said. “You three and a half come out and get inside with no trouble.”
As he got off first, Jeremy took a dangerous step toward the sheriff, who backed away and cocked his shotgun.
“It would be best,” said Jeremy, “if you stopped trying to make something more of yourself by being offensive to us. It does not accomplish your end. In fact, it makes you look more pathetic.”
We were all off the truck now, and I had the uneasy feeling that we might be gunned down where we stood. The Mirador Day Massacre. Nelson looked far from pleased. I glanced at Alex, who was looking at me, and tried to read his look, but there was no reading it.
We paraded into the Mirador police station, pausing for only a second to notice the boarded-up window Alex had destroyed the day before. The sun was up now, low but bright. It was going to be a sunny day and a long one, maybe a very long one.
14
“I’ll have you laughing through a toothless mouth,” hissed Nelson to Jeremy, as we prisoners sat on the small wooden bench while Alex turned on the lights.
“‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ’tis that I may not weep.’ Lord Byron,” said Jeremy.
“A bunch of smartasses,” said Nelson between his teeth.
“Know your enemy and break his arm,” said Jeremy, answering Nelson’s look of hate.
“That is not poetry,” said Gunther.
“In a sense,” said Jeremy. “It was said to me before a tag-team match in 1937 by Strangler Lewis.”
“I’m a dentist,” announced Shelly, trying to get up. His glasses fell from his nose, and he managed to grab them blindly. He didn’t see the two shotguns turn toward him.
“Sit down, Shel,” I said, grabbing his arm. He sat down.
“A dentist, damn it,” he repeated, putting his glasses back on and turning to me. There was a huge thumbprint in the middle of his left lens which Shelly ignored. “A few more years and I could have been a real doctor. Things like this shouldn’t happen to people who could have been doctors.”
“Now,” said Nelson, putting his shotgun on his desk, which was about fifteen feet from where we sat. “Now.” He got behind the desk, sat, and folded his hands. His white hat was still on his head, and the gun was within easy reach. Alex leaned back against the wall, shotgun up.
“You can be spared much discomfort,” began Nelson, “if you simply tell me what happened, how you came to kill all these people, including one of the most prominent people in our town. You will do it slowly, and we will all go to bed. I have had a busy night and day and wish a few hours of sleep. In addition, I don’t want to have to bring any
