“Your not eating doesn’t help the Tanuccis,” said Kelly, pouring her a cup of coffee.
She took it, and I discovered that …
… Dr. Patrick Y. Ogle had been born in Singapore Falls, Maine, eighty years earlier …
… the Tanuccis were from Corsica …
… one person in the tent at the time of the theft was a snake charmer named Agnes Sudds …
… one person was a local businessman from Mirador named Thomas Paul …
… and one person was a movie director named Alfred Hitchcock.
One of them was probably the murderer. I showed the list to Kelly.
“Can’t help you much,” he said. “I’ve only been with this circus a few weeks.” He handed the list to Peg, who was consuming whatever Kelly and I weren’t holding onto.
“No,” said Peg.
“My money’s on one of the outsiders,” said Kelly. “Probably that Hitchcock fella.”
Which, I thought, is why you are a clown and I am a detective, though there were those who would argue that I would make a better clown than a detective.
“OK,” I said, standing up. “Then let’s start with Hitchcock.”
4
He was a short, fat man with a lower lip like a pouting tailor, hair sparse but neatly in place, and wearing a dark suit and tie that looked as if they had just been handed to him by Belman’s Cleaning and Dyeing in Hollywood. He was seated in Elder’s office with his hands folded on his lap like a schoolboy.
“Hitchcock?” I said.
“I am Alfred Hitchcock,” he replied, looking at me with large eyes hooded by lids which suggested indifference, but the eyes gave too much away. “Are you a policeman?”
The word “policeman” seemed to come hard for him. I’d never seen Hitchcock before, but I knew who he was.
“
He looked frightened. His knuckles went white, and his hands remained clasped.
“Of what?” he said.
“No,” I smiled. “I’ve seen
“At the moment,” he said very slowly with a distinct English accent, “I am being very frightened. Before that I was trying to get some material for a sequence in a film I’m considering.”
“A circus scene?”
“Precisely,” he said with a slight uplifting of the right side of his mouth that represented pain or an attempt to be friendly. “I’m staying with an acquaintance nearby, and my plan was to stop by for a few hours this morning, get some sense of atmosphere, and present my ideas to the writer. Why have I been asked to talk to you, and who are you?”
I sat on Elder’s cot. “Between us, I’m a private investigator. Name is Toby Peters. I’m pretty sure that aerialist Tanucci was murdered.”
Hitchcock’s eyes opened with interest, and he shifted his fat body slowly to face me. “Murdered,” he repeated, either savoring the word or trying to hear it come from his own mouth when it was about something real. “You are sure?” he said.
“As sure as I am that I’d marry Joan Fontaine if she’d have me,” I answered. He definitely smiled this time.
“This is better than I could have hoped,” he said as much to himself as to me. “But I’m sorry. A man has been murdered, and all I can think of is my movie.”
“That’s all right,” I said, wanting to lie back on the cot but unable to do so with the rigid, rotund director seated across from me. “You’re not a suspect. You’re more in the way of a possible witness. I saw you come in the tent earlier, and I saw you watching me when I walked over to the practice hitch.”
“Yes,” he said. “It struck me as rather peculiar that someone should be walking away from the flow of the crowd, the movement toward death. It struck me as an interesting image, the isolation of one man moving away from where the world is looking.”
“Did you see anyone go over to that harness, that thing I was looking at, maybe take it down?”
Hitchcock pursed his lips, blinked his eyes, and nodded once. “Someone did, I believe. I wasn’t watching really, but I had the sense of a person in blue, rather tall, or something about the person seeming tall.”
“Man, woman?” I tried.
“A man-woman,” he mused. “No, I don’t think so. I should surely have noticed that.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking, but he must have been. What I surely couldn’t decide was whether the joke was on me or a private entertainment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I react rather badly when disaster strikes anywhere but on a studio set.”
“I forgive you,” I said, wondering how to get out of this polite, droll conversation and get murder back to the people where it seemed to belong. “Tall figure, blue?”
“Correct,” he nodded, looking at the posters. “I never realized how frightening a circus could be.” Instead of looking frightened, he looked quite pleased. “Do you think it would be all right if I stayed today and possibly tomorrow? My friend lives in Mirador. He drove me over this morning.”
“I guess so,” I said, giving up and lying down on the cot. “I suggest you stay away from the Mirador police.”
Hitchcock rose slowly with a distinct grunt. He looked even fatter standing than he did sitting.
“As I have indicated,” he said, “I have a morbid fear of the police, dating back to my childhood days when my father had a policeman put me in jail for an hour to teach me what happens to bad boys. I have endeavored since that moment to be a good boy and stay away from policemen.”
“I’ll run off copies of that philosophy and send it to a few hundred friends of mine who could use it.”
“Good afternoon,” Hitchcock said politely, moving to the door.
“If you remember anything more about who was standing near that harness, let me know,” I said, closing my eyes. “I’ll be around.”
“I shall,” he said and left the wagon.
Thomas Paul, the “businessman” from Mirador, was the next person ushered into the wagon-office by Peg. When I heard the door open I sat up, and it’s a good thing I did.
I hadn’t had a good look at the man in the business suit who had run into the tent an hour earlier. I knew he was big, but his face had been covered by a hat. That hat was still on, but it couldn’t hide the scar on his face, a purple scar that split his face in half. The right side was sharp-eyed and smiling with a secret joke. The left side was pulled down, distorted by what seemed pain or sorrow. He was a Janus who couldn’t be read, happy and sad at the same time. The scar cut across the corner of his mouth, so his speech was slightly distorted.
Grotesqueness was no sign of guilt, just of fascination. I shook his hand and pointed to the chair. He took it. With some stretch of the imagination, his suit might be taken for blue, but it was more black than blue. Paul didn’t seem a good bet for a killer. Whoever did it was probably tied in to the death of the elephants for the past few years and was affiliated with the circus.
“Why have I been asked to come in here?” he said, his voice slurred.
“Won’t take a minute,” I said reassuringly, trying to make up my mind if it would be more polite to avoid looking at him or to force myself to keep my eyes on him.
“My visage makes you uncomfortable, Mr….”
“Peters,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I assure you that it is an even greater source of discomfort to me,” he said, the one side of his face amused, the other even more in agony from its opposite grin. “War accident. The Ardennes. Shell exploded. I have a feeling that even more will suffer in our current confrontation with the Huns.”
“We don’t call them Huns anymore,” I said. “Nazis.”
