Carnival of Death (12 page)

Daly studied the other man’s face. “Look, Gene. I know you. You’ve been my manager for five years. You’ll gamble away or spend any amount of money for a good time. But when it comes to the show, your Gallic frugality takes over. Normally you wouldn’t pay General DeGaulle and Brigitte Bardot five hundred dollars to do a duet of ‘Mademoiselle From Armentières.’ What have the police come up with now?”

“It isn’t good,” DuBoise said quietly. “It seems that the D.A.’s office sent a work crew out to dismantle Laredo’s rides so they could be impounded as part of the state’s evidence. And what do you think they found?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“They found that one of the ponies on the carousel was hollow. And when a member of the crew felt inside it, he found five thousand dollars of the missing money.”

“Oh, no,” Terry said.

DuBoise continued. “The serial numbers on the bills check with the serial numbers on the list in the Ramsdale office.”

“It’s a plant,” Daly said. “It has to be.”

“I think so,” DuBoise agreed. “But the point of view depends on how you feel about the Laredos. And as if that wasn’t enough, Paquita has confided to one of the matrons that she is two months pregnant.”

Daly said, “Giving Laredo that much more motivation to need and want money. Did he know?”

“He claims not,” DuBoise said. “But it gives the District Attorney’s office another club to clobber him with. Now, even if they can’t prove he plotted with other members of the invasion brigade to rob the truck, they can claim he conspired with a couple of thugs to dress up in clown costume and help him get his hands on sufficient money to raise and take care of the child he knew was on its way.”

Daly added, “In a manner befitting the son or daughter of a onetime top flight circus aerialist who earned two thousand five hundred dollars a week.”

“That’s what the state will contend.”

Terry asked, “But what about the girl up on the mountain? Where does she fit in?”

“Your guess is as good as ours,” DuBoise said. “Maybe she’s Tommy Bank’s sister. Then, judging from what the barman at the ski lodge told us, that she drove up with a different man every weekend, she could be the communal moll of the gang who plotted to rob and who robbed the truck.”

Terry sighed. “That’s life. Some girls are just born lucky, I guess.”

Daly put on his dressing gown and walked over to the window and looked out. The view from the tenth story penthouse that he shared with DuBoise was tremendous. Especially at night. If night hid the palm trees and the swimming pools, it also hid most of the ugliness common to all great metropolitan areas. As far as he could see, out to the liquid black wall that was the ocean, the city was festooned with garlands of multicolored lights. He liked the night. Night was male and positive. At night there were no shades of gray.

He sat on the sill of the window. “Let’s itemize what we know. We know that when the truck left the garage it was carrying one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. We’ve seen the receipt the dead guard gave Miss Lindler. We know that between six and eight thousand dollars in bills and silver were thrown to the crowd to create a diversion. We know that both surviving guards have been cleared of any complicity. We know, at least have reason to believe, that a punk who called himself Tommy Banks and who has some connection with a Thelma Banks, not only assisted in looting the truck, he panicked when Jocko tried to stop him and fired the shots that killed the old roustabout and the young mother.”

Daly paused briefly, continued. “To get Mike Kelly out of the money compartment and Quinlan away from the scene, something
had
to happen to Tim Kelly. Now it appears that the dead guard was a chaser and probably in need of money. But we also know that men like Kelly seldom, if ever, commit suicide and it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume he knowingly drank a lethal dose of chloral hydrate.”

“No,” DuBoise agreed with him. “It doesn’t.”

Daly turned on the sill and looked out the window again. “It’s a frame, it has to be. Subtracting the money thrown to the crowd and the five thousand dollars the D.A.’s men found in the carousel, that still leaves someone out there with one hundred and sixty-odd thousand, unidentifiable, tax-free, dollars. A fortune. Who? And why did he or she or they hang this on a pair of nice young people like Mickey and Paquita Laredo?”

Terry shook her head. “I pass.”

DuBoise said, “That last one is easy, Tom. Because the Laredos were both handy and vulnerable. Because despite their circus background and surface worldliness, they are as guileless as newborn lambs. And the lambs of this world, unfortunately, have only two reasons for existence. One is to be fleeced. The other is to be eaten by their more voracious Carnivore anthropophagi.”

“Watch your language,” Terry said primly.

I
T WAS
ten-fifteen when Daly phoned the subterranean garage under the building and asked the attendant to have his car ready, and exactly ten-thirty when he stopped the car in front of the black-and-white barrier arm that barred the entrance to the dimly lighted KAMPC-TV parking lot.

“Right on the nose, Mr. Daly,” the uniformed guard complimented him. “And I can’t tell you how sorry I am about the other night. But I haven’t any control over foot traffic onto the lot.”

“Forget it,” Daly said. “You can’t hurt an Irishman by hitting him on the head. That’s not where he’s vulnerable.”

He drove onto the lot and across it to the marked parking space with the printed legend, RESERVED FOR MR. DALY.

“It must have been quite an experience,” Terry said.

“It wasn’t pleasant.”

The girl moved closer to Daly. “You know what, Tom?”

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Good for you.”

“I’m serious. Being the controversial figure you are, don’t you think you would be a lot safer if you had a loving wife who went everywhere you go?”

“How loving?”

“Very loving.”

Daly turned off the ignition and set the hand brake. “That could be.” He walked around the car and opened the door for his telephone girl. “But it would put a hell of a damper on a lot of the wild Hollywood parties that I’m supposed to attend.”

Father Hermosillo proved to be an interesting guest. The priest was articulate and sincere and expressed himself well. He’d never served a parish in Cuba, but he had been in Havana on ecclesiastic business for his order when he had been arrested and imprisoned on a charge of giving aid and comfort to the enemy by having heard the confession of a dying native saboteur.

The priest was more puzzled than embittered by his experience, but he was inclined to attribute it to God’s will to place a man of the cloth in a position where he could give spiritual consolation to the survivors of the ill-fated April 17,1961 invasion.

Yes, he’d met Miguel Tomas José Guido Laredo. No, he didn’t think Mickey was psychologically capable of committing the crime with which he was charged. During their months together in prison he’d talked to the one-legged youth perhaps a hundred times and while he had found Laredo a rather worldly young man, much more concerned with how his youthful bride was getting along without him than he was in eventual salvation, the priest was willing to swear on his breviary that Mickey, as the newspapers called him, had no part in conspiring to rob or in robbing the armored truck.

“What do you think?” Daly asked Keeley during the string of commercials that followed the interview with the priest.

His floor manager shrugged. “If I were the foreman of a jury trying him, I’d vote not guilty without leaving the box. But when you roll it out, all the priest really proved was that, in his opinion, Laredo is a pretty good joe. Or was when he knew him.”

It was debatable whether Daly’s second guest of the evening, Polly Madden, did the cause he was championing as much good as she did harm. A tall, shapely brunette in her early twenties, a typist for one of the space missile firms in the area, she was bitter about the guard’s death.

Yes, she had been Tim Kelly’s girl. They had been engaged to be married. At least that had been her understanding. No, she hadn’t known that Kelly had any other girls. Yes, to the best of her knowledge, Kelly had been satisfied with his salary. He drove a good car. He always had plenty of money to spend. No, he’d never discussed suicide. Why should he kill himself? He had everything to live for. For example, he had a friend who owned a thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser and on the afternoon of the morning he’d been murdered they had intended to take off and spend the balance of the weekend cruising to and around Santa Catalina. No, the murdered man had never mentioned Paquita Laredo to her or said anything about having words with her husband. Miss Madden was smug about it. Tim hadn’t had to go on the make for any married woman. He’d had her.

Realizing that he was losing more ground than he’d gained in his interview with the priest, Daly terminated the interview with Miss Madden as quickly as he could.

He did better with Luisa Vinifreda Teresa Garcia. Some performers objected to working with a child. They claimed that no matter how minor the part was, a child always stole the scene. Daly enjoyed working with children. He liked them. They liked him. He didn’t care who came out best as long as they gave a good show and his viewers were pleased.

Because the five-year-old was unable to reach the microphone on the desk even when sitting on a stack of piled telephone books, Daly conducted the interview wearing a “necktie mike” and holding the child on his lap. He began by asking her name.

“Luisa Vinifreda Teresa Garcia,” the little girl told him soberly.

Daly attempted to put her at ease by expending most of the Spanish he knew in the one sentence. “Isn’t that a rather
grande
name for such a
poco muchacha?
”

The five year old giggled.
“Si.”

Daly inclined his head at the camera. “Now you just look at that little red light out there, honey, and tell all the nice people sitting at home what you saw at the new shopping plaza parking lot on Saturday morning.”

“Si.”

Daly added, “In your own words. In English.”

The child wet her lips with her tongue. On Saturday morning, right after she’d had her breakfast, Brigida and Margarita, they were her best girl friends, had come to the house and asked if she could come out and play. For a while they had jumped rope and played sky blue in front of the house. Then Brigida had suggested they go to the new shopping plaza and look at the merry-go-round and the wheel with the hanging baskets and the little train. While they had been looking at the merry-go-round and hoping that they would be able to ride on the ponies, the pink
limonada senora
and the sad
bufón
had arrived. Luisa was very pleased about it. Then the pretty
senora
who couldn’t talk had picked her up and sat her on the counter of the
limonada
stand and had let her, and her friends, watch her make the
limonada
. She’d even given them paper cups of it while it still wasn’t very cold.

Daly asked, “And while this was going on, what was
Senor
Laredo doing?”

“He was trying to make the music box on the merry-go-round play music.”

“Did he?”

“Si.”
The five-year-old moved her body in time to imaginary music. “It made pretty music.”

“Didn’t he yell at you kids for hanging around the lemonade stand?”

“No. He always spoke very gently to the
niños
.”

“Then what happened?”

The child continued in detail, describing the arrival of the old roustabout and Laredo’s working on the
locomotora
of the little train. Then, seeing
Senor
Laredo take his white
bufón
costume from a big box, she and some of the other children had followed him to the
gasolina
station and had waited for him to come out so they could laugh with him.

They had been laughing and having a lot of fun until the big truck that carried money had almost run them down. Then, afraid that they might be hurt,
Senor
Laredo had turned so fast he had fallen down and one of the men in the truck had laughed at him and
Senor
Laredo had been very angry.

Daly didn’t press the point. “Go on, Luisa.”

The child continued. Then, after the truck had driven on,
Senor
Laredo had gotten to his feet and even if their mothers and their fathers had not yet bought anything in the stores to get the tickets that permitted you to go on the rides,
Senor
Laredo had been very gracious. The child was pleased by the memory. “He took some tickets from his pocket and gave them to me and to my friends so we could start riding right away.”

Daly was certain of one thing. Up to this point, at least, the interview was giving the viewing public an image of the Laredos that was entirely different from the one that had been plastered over the front pages of the newspapers. Luisa was making it plain she thought both of them were fine people. And the child’s opinion should bear some weight. Even the normally blasé cameramen were hanging on every word she said.

The five-year-old continued talking. At first she couldn’t make up her mind which ride to take. Brigida and Margarita had run to the little train. Some of the others had gotten into the baskets of the big wheel that went around. But, after thinking it over, she had decided to spend all of her tickets riding on the merry-go-round. She was very earnest about it. So, after the nice old man in the white hat and the green coat had given her a balloon, she had climbed up on a pink pony.

Daly forgot he was interviewing a five-year-old. “Which gave you a pretty good vantage point, eh, Luisa?”

The child looked puzzled until DuBoise who was standing off camera explained what Daly wanted to know in fluent Spanish.

“Si,”
she beamed. “From on top of the pink pony I could see everything.”

“Did you see the guard from the money truck stop at the lemonade stand?”