“Man, weekends I sleep till noon.”
“I’ll check in the afternoon, then.” Stubb stood up.
“You don’t even know my name. I’m Buster Johnson.”
“Jim Stubb. Somebody told me about you once—I think it was the lady down at the all-night grocery. She said you were a tough dude.”
“She told you right. I does my share.”
“You look it.”
“See that scar?” Johnson touched his face with one finger. “That’s a busted beer bottle. You put that scar on you, man, and the little children would run off out the street. On a black man they don’t show so much.”
Stubb nodded. “It’s a shame.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Depends on whether you want to scare the men or cuddle up the women. I believe I’d just as soon cuddle up.”
“There were two women in that car I told you about. If you’ve got an eye for the ladies, you might use it to keep a lookout for them.”
“I might at that. Specially if there was somethin’ in it for Buster.”
“I haven’t got money to toss around on this one,” Stubb said. “But there might be some later. If you see something let me know, and we’ll see what we can do.”
As he went down the icy steps to the sidewalk, Johnson called behind him, “Man, you really got heat?”
A clown opened the next door. His nose was a red rubber ball; the rest of his long, smoothly ovoid face was of a white so pure as to be nearly luminous. Scarlet tears shaped like inverted hearts fell from his eyes. His collar was a wide ruff that would have honored an Elizabethan gentleman, and the buttons of his white blouse were pompoms.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m a detective. I’d like to talk to you.”
The clown nodded. It was hard for Stubb to tell what expression, if any, he wore under his sad greasepaint. “The neighbors have been complaining, I suppose,” the clown said.
“What do you think they have to complain about?” Stubb asked, stepping inside.
The room was not a living room, a sitting room, a parlor, or even a bedroom. It seemed half warehouse and half shop; there were stacks of queer clothing, masks hanging from the ceiling, and painted tubs, cabinets, and chests.
With startling agility, the clown sprang to the top of a coffin too theatrically coffin-like to be real. “I’m sorry there’s no place for you to sit,” he said. “Perhaps you can find somewhere.”
“I’ll stand,” Stubb told him. “I’ve been sitting down a lot lately.”
“What do they say?”
“Your neighbors? I think you know.”
“Of course. Get that clown out of here! Dissolve him like a dream! He’s a menace to society.” The clown pulled out a red handkerchief and pretended to blow his rubber nose. A paper butterfly propelled by a rubber band fluttered from the handkerchief and circled the room, blundering into woolen sausages and gargantuan shoes painted to look like feet.
“What’s your name?” Stubb asked.
“Nimo. Nimo the Clown.”
“Swell, Nimo. What do people call you when you’re not wearing that makeup?”
“You understand, don’t you? At least a little bit. They call me Richard A. Chester—that’s my name when I’m asleep.”
“Sure, I understand, Nimo. What does Richard A. Chester do for a living? If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Nothing,” the clown said. He used his thumbs and forefingers to make a circle. “Nothing at all.”
“He just sort of hangs around?”
“That’s right!” The clown smiled broadly and clapped his hands, delighted. “And he shops for me, and sometimes he eats for me. And he sleeps for me.”
“I don’t suppose he was hanging around out on the street last night, was he? Say, sometime between six and nine?”
“I doubt it—it was too cold. But you’d have to ask him.”
“Ask Dick?”
“Ask Richard. He doesn’t like being called Dick.”
“I’m for him. I never liked it much either. I guess if I was to come back later today I might be able to talk to him?”
“You might.”
“Maybe I will, but while I got you here, Nimo, there’s something I want to ask you. You know the house four doors down, the one they’re wrecking?”
