longer had the money to pay them what they could get elsewhere-with Cole, Clyde Beatty, or Ringling. Finally, in the last couple of years, we became just another mud show, although I hated to admit it.'
'Some mud show,' I said, and sighed. 'It had to be the only mud show with a full complement of freaks, a herd of animals no other show would take, and enough acts to fill three rings.'
He spent a few minutes idly stirring the ounce or so of coffee left in his cup, finally said: 'I'd always been a pretty hard driver, Mongo, as I'm sure you recall, and a heavy drinker. Now, when the troubles began coming down, I really started hitting the sauce. It was the only way I could find to fight the worry and the pain. I couldn't stand to see what was happening to the circus, or think about what was going to happen to my people and animals if it folded. I ended up drunk most of the time. Toward the end I got an offer from somebody to buy it. It was a good offer-more, really, than the circus was worth. But the buyer wouldn't agree to keep all the freaks. I was told they had no interest in sideshows and that they'd bring in all their own acts.
All they wanted from me was the equipment, the animals, and the rights to our permits around the circuit we did.'
'Who made the offer?'
'The guy I talked to was some tight-ass lawyer type in a pinstripe suit who wouldn't tell me the name of the buyer. I was drunk at the time. I think I cursed him out when he said the freaks and performers couldn't be part of the deal. I told him I wouldn't help kill my own circus, and I threw him out.
'By then, I'd run out of operating expenses. We were just outside of Chicago, so I drove in and managed to get a bank loan, with the semis and all the rigging as collateral. That was a stupid play, I suppose, but I didn't know what else to do. I was hoping it could still be like it used to be and that there'd be throngs of people waiting for us in the next town. What I got instead was a notice from the bank that I was in default on the loan and that the circus had been auctioned off. Christ, I can't blame them; I was so drunk all the time that I'd missed five payments and hadn't even known it. The next thing I knew there were marshals on the grounds ordering everyone off. I think whoever had wanted to buy it in the first place had managed to pick it up at the auction, because the only things the new owner or owners wanted were the semis, the rigging, and the animals.'
'Did you ever find out who bought it?'
'No.'
'Didn't you ask the bank?'
'They wouldn't tell me; they said it was confidential information. I was too drunk to argue.'
'Maybe it was Cole, or Clyde Beatty, or even Ringling; one of the big boys trying to gobble up the competition.'
Phil shook his head. 'No. I checked. I swear I'd have killed somebody if I'd found it was circus people I knew who'd taken my show away from me.' He paused, swallowed hard, continued, 'After the marshals threw me out of my own circus, I just walked away. Right now I don't even recall where I walked to. As far as I was concerned, my life was over; I'd lost everything. I had no money, no place to go, and I just wanted to die. I can't even remember how I eventually ended up here, in New York. I ate at soup kitchens as long as they'd let me wash dishes to pay for it, and I collected soda cans off the street and out of garbage cans to pay for my booze. I was busy drinking myself to death, and I guess I was pretty close to succeeding until you had to come along and butt your nose into my business. Now I owe you, and I always do my best to pay my debts. I don't even dare take a drink until I manage to pay you back.'
'Well, if you only plan to stay alive and off the booze long enough to pay me back, you're going to find from my itemized bill that private hospital rooms and private nursing care in New York City are very expensive commodities. So you'd better plan on staying around a long time. But let's stop talking nonsense. There's something else I want to ask you, because something about this business strikes me as curious. By your own account, you were running an operation that couldn't even pay its way as a mud show. And even if you had dropped the sideshows and cut back on everything else, you'd still have been left out in the cold because the other shows had exclusive contracts with all the big indoor arenas on the circuit. Right?'
'Right.'
'Even at the bargain-basement price the circus must have gone for at the bank auction, who would want it?'
'Beats me, Mongo.'
'And then the new owner gets rid of all the performers and only keeps the animals. Christ, Mabel alone eats nearly a ton of hay a day, and that can get expensive. Buying that circus in the first place, and then keeping only the animals, doesn't seem to make any business sense at all. If people aren't going to come out to see a full-rigged circus, I doubt they'd come in any numbers to see a traveling zoo.'
Phil merely shrugged and shook his head sadly.
'What's the name of the bank in Chicago that gave you the loan on the semis and rigging?'
'Hell, I don't remember. Why?'
'Just curious. Think, Phil. What's the name of the bank?'
He cocked his head to one side as he pondered the question, idly drumming his fingers on the tabletop. 'I think it was an outfit called United States Savings and Loan,' he said at last.
'Are you sure?'
'Yeah. Why the curiosity about the bank?'
'Let's just say that I want to know what bank not to do business with in Chicago.'
'Now, my friends, I've got good news, and I've got bad news.'
Garth froze with his brandy halfway to his mouth, then slowly set the snifter back down on the linen tablecloth. He brushed a heavily muscled hand back through his thinning, shoulder-length, wheat-colored hair, then turned to his wife. 'What did I tell you, Mary? There's no way Mongo was going to invite us into the city and spring for dinner at Cafe des Artistes unless he wanted something from us. I've seen some very nasty situations spring up from Mongo's 'good news, bad news' crap.'
Our table had been attracting attention all evening, and for once it wasn't the dwarf that people were staring at. Mrs. Garth Frederickson was Mary Tree, and she came complete with a stunning figure and presence, piercing blue eyes, sculpted features, and a magnificent, flowing crown of thick, white-streaked blond hair. Mary had first burst onto the music scene and into the national conscience and consciousness in the sixties, when she was a teenage, barefoot, flowers-in-her-hair folk singer and antiwar activist. And she had always been Garth's dream- lover, his idea of the perfect woman. I'd met her the year before, while I was investigating the death of a friend, and Garth had met her through me. Mary's career had declined in the seventies and been virtually eclipsed by the early eighties. But a small record company in New York had released a new album of hers at just about the time she and Garth were getting married, and it had turned out to be a crossover success, revitalizing her career. The album had put her back on top, and she was once again the 'queen of folk.' And so people stared. It tended to annoy my brother, but Mary had the grace to pretend that she didn't notice. Now she laughed lightly, touched Garth's arm.
'Now, now, darling, be nice to your brother. Remember that if it wasn't for him, we never would have met.'
Garth heaved a mock, heavy sigh, looked back at me. 'My wife says I should be nice to you, Mongo, despite my distinct sense of foreboding.' He paused to lift his crystal snifter and drain off his brandy, smacked his lips. 'Give us the bad news first so we can get it out of the way.'
'I've got a problem. You remember Phil Statler?'
'Sure; the circus owner, your ex-boss.' He turned again to Mary, smiled thinly, continued, 'Phil Statler is the man who transformed grungy, plain old Robert Frederickson into Mongo the Magnificent.'
'He's sick, Garth. As a matter of fact, I'm putting him up in your apartment in the brownstone. Right now, I've got Jacques baby-sitting him.'
Garth frowned slightly. 'What's the matter with him?'
'The doctors would cite alcoholism and the effects of living on the streets and eating garbage for a couple of years, but I'd say he's dying of a broken heart. He lost the circus because he couldn't bear to put people, freaks especially, out of work, and he went right down the tubes. The cops picked him up off the streets and took him to Bellevue, which is where I found him; Jacques found some circus posters with my name on them, and he called me.'
