The Ninth Nightmare

‘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.

Walter meanwhile went over to the desk. He opened the laptop and switched it on, and when the screen saver appeared it was a picture of the same clown, Mago Verde, standing in a grassy field wearing an ankle-length green coat. In spite of his dark green painted-on smile, his expression was one of unmitigated rage, as if he were furious at having his photograph taken. The sky above him was gray and swollen with rain, and behind him there was a sinister collection of black circus tents and assorted marquees.

Beside one of the tents, half hidden behind its entrance flap, stood a small boy with a washed-out face, almost as gray as Mago Verde in his make-up. He looked both frightened and sad.

The rain sprinkled against the window. Walter picked up the notebook and rolled off the elastic bands. When he opened it he saw that it was Maria Fortales’ diary. It was written in purple ink, in rounded handwriting, which was so diminutive that he could barely read it. Every page was full to the last line, and some extra sentences had even been written vertically up the margins.

He turned to the last page, which Maria Fortales had written yesterday.

‘What’s that?’ asked Charlie.

‘Diary,’ said Walter. ‘Listen to this: “Last night the show was all packed up and ready to leave for Waterloo, Idaho. It rained and rained and it never stopped, and all of the meadow was churned up into thick black mud. I was cold and shivering and even the bears looked miserable. I went to BJ’s caravan for warmth even though BJ scares me so much. BJ never stopped ranting and raving although I could hardly understand a word he was saying. Then Natasha came and found me and warned me that The GF was growing impatient and that I should be very careful and have eyes in the back of my head especially where MV is concerned. I don’t know what to do. I am so frightened but I don’t know how to escape.”’

Walter turned back a few pages. ‘Here we are again. “Tonight only seventeen people turned up for the show and MV said that The GF was very angry. He wants to move on but two of the trucks are still out of commission and we have to wait for them to be fixed before we can leave here.”’

He flipped back again, and read some more, and then flipped back again. ‘Jesus. She has dreams about this circus every single night. Every single goddamned night. No wonder she’s obsessed.’

Charlie said, ‘I guess “MV” is Mago Verde. But who’s “The GF”, I wonder? And “BJ”?’

Walter closed the book, snapped the elastic bands back around it, and handed it over. ‘There. Take it home and read it from page one. Maybe you can work out who they are, and why she’s so scared of them. You’re the clown expert.’

Charlie took the diary and looked around the room again, as if he were half expecting to find her hiding under the candlewick bedspread, or standing completely motionless in one corner so that he hadn’t noticed her. ‘OK. But it still doesn’t tell us what’s happened to her, does it?’

‘Well, take her laptop, too. Have Morrie go through it, in the lab. My guess is that she’s simply gone wandering off someplace without telling her landlord about it.’

Walter lifted the home-knit cardigan off the back of the chair and rummaged in the pockets. The cardigan smelled of vanilla musk, too. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’

Out of the right-hand pocket he produced a brown leather purse, with Mayan decorations on it, a souvenir from Mexico. He opened it up, and there was Maria Ynez Fortales, frowning at him from her driver’s license. A pretty round-faced girl with wavy black hair and pouting lips and a beauty spot on her left lip.

‘Well, at least we know what she looks like.’

He went through the rest of the contents. Twenty-seven dollars in cash, a library card, a Visa card, and a business card from Alphabet Cabs. Also, a student identification card from Case Western Reserve University which carried another photograph of her, this time smiling and wearing a green silk headscarf.

‘She wouldn’t go out without her purse, would she?’ said Charlie. ‘So where the hell is she?’

‘She’s not here, for sure, but I don’t see any evidence of abduction, can you? If she went, she went without kicking over the furniture or pulling down the drapes.’

‘What about the screaming?’

‘Who knows? Maybe she was screaming at her boyfriend or something, on her cell.’

‘And the sawing noise?’

‘Pff,’ said Walter, dismissively. ‘If you ask me, the old man’s hearing-aid is on the fritz. My mom’s hearing-aid used to make a noise like a flock of Canada geese.’

‘But the door was locked from the inside. The key’s still in it.’

‘There are ways of doing that.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t make complications. Think Occam’s Razor. The simplest solution is always the most likely.’