into a fried chicken joint.
“See,” I said.
“Even murderers have to eat,” Martha said, and she drove on by.
My plan was to end the business there, but it didn’t work that way. I pulled out of it and let them stay with it. All that week Martha and Jasmine played “What If.” They pinned up the fold-out in my apartment and they wrote out scenarios for who Waldo was and what he’d done, and so on. They drove out to his place at night and discovered he kept weird hours, went out at all times of the night. They discovered he let the poodles out for bathroom breaks twice a night and that there was one less than there had been during the circus act. I guess Mommy had been wrong when she told her kid the poodle knew how to land.
It was kind of odd seeing Jasmine and Martha become friends like that. Martha had struck me as having all the imagination of a fencepost, but under that rough exterior and that loud mouth was a rough exterior and a loud mouth with an imagination.
I also suspicioned that she had lied about not being able to pay her rent. The store didn’t make that much, but she always seemed to have money. As far as the store went, it got so I was running it by myself, fulltime, not only putting up books, but waiting on customers and closing up at night. Martha paid me well enough for it, however, so I didn’t complain, but when she and Jasmine would come down from my place talking about their “killer,” etc., I felt a little jealous. Jasmine had moved in with me, and now that I had my daughter back, she spent all her time with a bald-headed, mustached lady who was her father’s boss.
Worse, Connie had been on my case about Jasmine and how my only daughter was living in a shit hole and being exposed to bad elements. The worst being me, of course. She came by the apartment a couple of times to tell me about it and to try and get Jasmine to go home.
I told her Jasmine was free to go home anytime she chose, and Jasmine explained that she had no intention of going home. She liked her sleeping bag and Daddy let her have Coke for breakfast. I sort of wish she hadn’t mentioned the Coke part. She’d only had that for breakfast one morning, but she knew it’d get her mother’s goat, and it had. Only thing was, now Connie could hang another sword over my head. Failure to provide proper nutrition for my only child.
Anyway, I was working in the store one day — well, working on reading a detective novel — when Martha and Jasmine came in.
“Get your goddamn feet off my desk,” Martha said.
“Glad to see you,” I said, lowering my feet and putting a marker in the book.
“Get off my stool,” Martha said. “Quit reading that damn book and put some up.”
I got off the stool. “You two have a pleasant day, Massah Martha?”
“Eat shit, Plebin,” Martha said, leaning her golf club against the counter and mounting her stool.
“Daddy, Martha and I have been snooping. Listen what we got. Martha had this idea to go over to the newspaper office in LaBorde and look at back issues —”
“LaBorde?” I said.
“Bigger town. Bigger paper,” Martha said, sticking one of her dainty cigarettes into her mouth and lighting it.
“We went through some older papers,” Jasmine said, “and since LaBorde covers a lot of the small towns around here, we found ads for the Jim Dandy Circus in several of them, and we were able to pinpoint on a map the route of the circus up to Mud Creek, and the latest paper showed Marvel Creek to be the next stop, and —”
“Slow down,” I said. “What’s the circus got to do with your so-called investigation?”
“You look at the papers and read about the towns where the circus showed up,” Martha said, “and there’s in every one of them something about a missing woman, or young girl. In a couple cases, bodies have been found. Sometimes they were found a week or so after the circus came to town, but most of the news articles indicate the missing women disappeared at the time of the circus.”
“Of course, we determined this, not the papers,” Jasmine said. “We made the connection between the circus and the bodies.”
“In the case of the bodies, both were found after the circus passed through,” Martha said, “but from the estimated times of death the papers gave, we’ve been able to figure they were killed about the time the circus was in town. And my guess is those missing women are dead too, and by the same hand.”
“Waldo’s?” I said.
“That’s right,” Martha said.
I considered all that.
Jasmine said, “Pretty coincidental, don’t you think?”
“Well, yeah,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean —”
“And the two bodies had been mutilated,” Martha said. She leaned against the counter and reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out the fold-out I had found. She smoothed it out on the counter top. “Body parts were missing. And I bet they were cut up, just like this fold-out is marked. As for the missing body parts, eyes and pussies, I figure. Those are the parts he has circled and blacked out.”
“Watch your language,” I said to Martha.
No one seemed to take much note of me.
“The bodies were found in the town’s local dump,” Jasmine said.
“It’s curious,” I admitted, “but still, to accuse a man of murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence.”
“One more thing,” Martha said. “Both bodies had traces of black paint on them. Like it had been used to mark the areas the killer wanted to cut, and I presume, did cut. That’s certainly a lot of goddamn circumstantial evidence, isn’t it?”
“Enough that we’re going to keep an eye on Waldo,” Jasmine said.
I must admit right now that I didn’t think even then, after what I had been told, there was anything to this Waldo the Great as murderer. It struck me that murders and disappearances happen all the time, and that if one were to look through the LaBorde paper carefully, it would be possible to discover there had been many of both, especially disappearances, before and after the arrival of the circus. I mean that paper covered a lot of small towns and communities, and LaBorde was a fairly large town itself. A small city actually. Most of the disappearances would turn out to be nothing more than someone leaving on a trip for a few days without telling anyone, and most of the murders would be committed by a friend or relative of the victim and would have nothing to do with the circus or marked-up fold-outs.
Of course, the fact that the two discovered bodies had been mutilated gave me pause, but not enough to go to the law about it. That was just the sort of half-baked idea that had gotten my ass in a crack earlier.
Still, that night, I went with Martha and Jasmine out to the trailer park.
It was cloudy that night and jags of lightning made occasional cuts through the cloud cover and thunder rumbled and light drops of rain fell on the windshield of Martha’s van.
We drove out to the road behind the park about dark, peeked out the windows and through the gaps in the trees. The handful of pole lights in the park were gauzy in the wet night and sad as dying fireflies. Their poor, damp rays fell against some of the trees — their branches waving in the wind like the fluttering hands of distressed lunatics — and forced the beads of rain on the branches to give up tiny rainbows. The rainbows rose up, misted outward a small distance, then once beyond the small circumference of light, their beauty was consumed by the night.
Martha got out her binoculars and Jasmine sat on the front passenger side with a notepad and pen, ready to record anything Martha told her to. They felt that the more documentation they had, the easier it would be to convince the police that Waldo was a murderer.
I was in the seat behind theirs, my legs stretched out and my back against the van, looking away from the trailer most of the time, wondering how I had let myself in on this. About midnight I began to feel both sleepy and silly. I unwrapped a candy bar and ate it.
“Would you quit that goddamn smacking back there,” Martha said. “It makes me nervous.”
“Pardon me all to hell,” I said, and wadded up the wrapper noisily and tossed it on the floorboard.
“Daddy, would you quit?” Jasmine said.
“Now we got something,” Martha said.
I sat up and turned around. There were no lights on in the trailers in the park except for Waldo’s trailer; a dirty, orange glow shone behind one of his windows, like a fresh slice of smoked cheese. Other than that, there was
