Carnival of Death (17 page)

“No. It used to be. Because it’s so bulky we still carry silver that way. But after that Cape Cod job where a couple of men took an armored mail truck for over one million and a half dollars, Ramsdale inaugurated a new system. A sort of delaying action, you could call it. They built what amounts to steel filing cabinets into their trucks, each compartment bearing the name of the firms and the banks we service on that particular route.”

“Are these compartments locked?”

“No, they aren’t.” Quinlan shrugged. “And I can’t see that the new system turned out to be much protection. By the time I got back to the lot and fought my way through the mob around the truck, all of the compartments were standing open and empty.”

“How long would you say the actual commission of the robbery took?”

“Not more than a minute or two.”

DuBoise was incredulous. “A minute or two would be all the time it would take to empty an armored truck of one hundred seventy-eight thousand dollars?”

“That’s all.”

“But surely that much money must weigh a considerable amount.”

“In silver, yes. A thousand silver dollars weigh approximately forty-five pounds. Even ten thousand dollars in silver would be more than two or three men could handle easily. But the clown in the truck threw most of the silver to the crowd. The bulk of our load was in bills.”

“Have you any idea what it weighed?”

Quinlan thought a moment. “Well, as I recall the tally sheet, we were carrying seventy-five thousand dollars in one dollar bills. Forty-five thousand in fives, thirty thousand in tens. And twenty thousand in twenties. A thousand dollar sheaf of one dollar bills weighs an ounce and a half. A five hundred dollar sheaf of ten dollar bills, the same. A five hundred sheaf of twenty dollar bills, half that.” He made a quick mental calculation. “So, figuring it all in, but not counting the silver, the whole load couldn’t have come to more than twenty-five pounds.” Quinlan added, “But there’s one thing I don’t understand. There is something very wrong with this whole caper.”

“How so?” Daly asked him.

Quinlan told him. “All we were doing was delivering change. Any gang of pros would have known that. Why didn’t they wait until a Monday or a Tuesday afternoon when we were on our way back to the vault, with the truck carrying maybe a million and a half or two million dollars?”

E
VEN THIS
early in the morning, Daly’s car was only one of twin streams of cars traveling in both directions on the boulevard. There might be four feet of snow in the mountains, but here the night was unseasonably warm and the sidewalk cafes along the Sunset Boulevard Strip were all doing a good business.

Normally, he would have waited at the studio for DuBoise. He might have treated Terry to a late supper. He might have dropped into one of his favorite bars for a few drinks and some local gossip. This morning, for one of the few times in his life, he wanted to be alone.

There were a number of reasons for his feeling as he did. After his program of the night before, featuring Luisa, the program he’d just completed had been dull and anticlimactical. He’d had nothing new to offer on the robbery. Both of his guests had been dull, and he couldn’t care less whether the mayor or the City Council won out on the current rubbish issue. What difference did it make if the taxpaying public sorted their tin cans from the rest of their rubbish or put everything into one container? Fifty years from now who would know the difference? Who would care?

As he drove past the Gaiety Delicatessen, Daly debated stopping in for a bottle of beer and a corned beef sandwich, then decided to do without them. At this time of morning the tables and booths would be filled with fellow television commentators and musicians and agents and other radio and television personalities. All of them would be smug and superior as they asked what progress he and Gene DuBoise were making in their two-man crusade to keep Paquita and Mickey Laredo from winding up in the gas chamber.

The answer to that was a big zero. Seemingly, everything he and Gene had done so far, including talking with Quinlan at the cemetery, had done the Laredos more harm than good.

As the armored truck guard had pointed out, and it sounded logical, no group of pros in their right minds would have robbed an armored truck of less than two hundred thousand dollars when by a little better timing they could have gotten two million dollars.

That threw the whole thing right back into Mickey Laredo’s lap. And, the way the police were reasoning, into the willing but amateur hands of two or more members of the ill-fated Cuban invasion brigade — presumably the two Spanish-speaking men who had slugged him in the KAMPC-TV parking lot. That, and Mickey’s appearance on his program, had been what had sucked him into the affair in the first place.

“Un momento, senor. We will not detain you long. But please to give a message to Chico. Tell him not to try it
.
Tell him that we are watching and that one is our pigeon”
.

On the surface, the warning had to be a plant, an attempt to alibi Laredo. No professional thieves, intent on committing a robbery, would have called attention to themselves.

Nor had the murder of Davis and the discovery of his body opened any particularly new avenues of thought. The police and the District Attorney’s office reasoned that being the type of man he was, an overamorous former M.D. who would do anything for a dollar, Davis had been hired by the exile group to play a specific part in the affair. For X number of dollars he’d agreed to get Quinlan off the parking lot and away from the truck about to be robbed. He’d probably furnished the chloral hydrate with which Kelly had been killed. Then, ostensibly as lagniappe but in reality to conserve money for the cause and prevent him from ever identifying them, one of the wives or sweethearts of one of the members of the group had first stayed with, then murdered him.

As Charlie Schaeffer had pointed out, the still missing Thelma Banks could be the wife or girl friend of one of Laredo’s gang. Quite a few women of Spanish origin were blonde. Instead of an amorous hideaway, the cabin in the mountains could well have been a rendezvous for the plotters. To an organized gang of professional hold-up men, one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars wasn’t very much money. It was a tax-free fortune to a group of impoverished exiles led by a one-legged former circus aerialist whose only tangible assets were three heavily mortgaged kiddy rides and a wife who was two months pregnant.

Daly drove down the ramp of the subterranean garage under the apartment building in which he and DuBoise shared a penthouse, stopped his car and waited for the attendant. When the attendant didn’t appear, he drove on back to his marked stall.

It might be best, he thought, if he dropped the Laredo affair. He’d gone way out on a limb for them. Now if it should turn out that Mickey and Paquita were guilty, he was going to be caught with egg on his face. Not only would his rating plummet, he would be laughed at from one end of the network to the other. Seemingly he and Gene were the only two people in the city who didn’t believe the Laredos were guilty.

He got out of his car, walked down the narrow space between his and the next car and tripped over an animate object. He sprawled his full length on the cement, bruising his shoulder on the fender of his car as he fell and landing with one cheek resting in a pool of oily water.

Almost simultaneously a male voice apologized, “Sorry, Mr. Daly. But as one of a committee of two, I’ve been waiting for an hour to talk to you about Mickey Laredo.”

Daly sat up and wiped oil and water from his face. “Now look, fellows,” he protested, “have a heart. Let’s not go through that again. We did this bit last Friday night We …”

Seeing no one in front of him, he stopped speaking and the male voice that had spoken before said testily, “You’re looking too high, Mr. Daly. I’m down here. In back of you. You just fell over me. Remember?”

Daly looked over his shoulder. The man addressing him was a perfectly formed midget, not more than three and a half feet tall.

“No,” the midget assured him. “You’re not seeing things. The name is Colonel Tom Thumb, no relation to the original. At your service, sir.”

“How do you do,” Daly said.

The midget pointed the glowing end of his oversized cigar at him. “You are Tom Daly, the telecaster from KAMPC-TV?”

Daly got to his feet and tried to brush the worst of the oil and water from his suit. “That’s right. Now may I ask to what I owe this honor, Colonel? Don’t tell me you waded ashore at the Bay of Pigs?”

The other man ignored the question to ask one of his own. “We didn’t get to see your program last night. We were too busy packing and making plane reservations. But the newspapers quote you correctly? You are the clem who believes that Mickey and Paquita are innocent?”

Daly returned his handkerchief to his pocket. “I was up until a few minutes ago. But right now, I’m not certain of anything.”

He turned his head as the door of the self-service elevator opened. The emerging giant was as tall as the midget was small and the huge white sombrero he was wearing made him look even taller.

“It’s all right, Uriah,” the midget said. “I’ve found him. Mr. Daly, meet Uriah Heap.” He explained, “We call him that because he’s a heap of Uriah.”

The giant encased Daly’s hand in a hand the size of a small ham. His voice was surprisingly gentle. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Daly.”

Daly retrieved his hand. “It’s nice to meet you. Now may I ask what you gentlemen want with me?”

The giant set the midget on the roof of Daly’s car. “You tell him, Colonel.”

“We’re here,” the midget began, “on behalf of Mickey and Paquita Laredo. You see, while it’s been a number of years since we worked with Mickey, there are a lot of us circus and carnival people who have good reason to remember him. When he was the star of the Flying Laredos, he was good to a lot of us. When any of us were in trouble and needed a little help, Mickey was always the first to reach in his pocket and his hand never came out empty. That’s why, in spite of all the money he used to make, he’s broke. At least one of the reasons. He never turned down a friend. And now that he’s on a spot, if we can, we want to return the favors he did us. That’s why we’re here.”

Daly was impressed. “Go on, please.”

Colonel Thumb continued his explanation. “A lot of folks would be here if they could. But most of them are working and can’t get away, so they flew Uriah and me out here, as a committee of two, to see what we can do about this Hey Rube.”

The giant said, “If you don’t happen to know, Mr. Daly, that’s a term we circus and carnival people use as a rallying call when one of our own is in trouble. And from what we’ve heard on the air and read in the newspapers, someone is really trying to do it to Mickey and Paquita, but good.”

Daly had never felt more at ease with anyone on such short acquaintance. “Well, thanks for coming, fellows. I appreciate it. I was beginning to think that Gene and I were alone in our thinking on this one. But just what do you hope to do for the Laredos?”

The midget puffed furiously at his cigar. “Anything we can. And we represent a lot of people. Once the Hey Rube was sounded, every kinker and animal man and talker and bull boss and spec girl and whistle tooter in the business wanted to get into the fight.” He tugged a thick roll of bills from his pocket “We’ve collected eighteen thousand dollars so far. And we can raise as much as we need.” He pushed the bills at Daly. “Take it and get the kids the best mouthpiece in town. And when you talk to the guy, impress on him that money is no object We can raise four times that if we have to.”

Daly was even more impressed. He said so, but refused to accept the money. “Well use it if we have to, but you and Uriah keep it for now. I’ve already arranged for a lawyer and he’s doing everything, legally, that he can.”

Uriah leaned one of his elbows on the roof of the car and asked shrewdly, “Which isn’t very much, eh? All right We flew out here to help. You tell us what we can do. And we don’t give a damn if it’s legal or illegal.”

Daly thought a moment “You can help me locate two people.”

“You name them.”

“A Tommy and a Thelma Banks. If I have this figured correctly, Tommy, an eighteen-year-old punk who ran the miniature train for Mickey, was the clown who unlocked the door of the money compartment and threw a few thousand dollars to the crowd to create a diversion while he passed the bulk of the money to a confederate.”

Colonel Thumb took a notebook from his pocket “Can you give us a takeoff point?”

Daly gave him the street number of the youth’s last known address. “But you won’t find him there. His landlady hasn’t seen him since Friday afternoon and there has been an all points bulletin out on him since Sunday morning. All we really know about him is that he is in some way connected with a blonde woman who calls herself Thelma Banks.”

The midget poised his pencil over his notebook. “Sister, wife or shack job?”

“We don’t know,” Daly admitted. “But both of them, at times, are known to have driven a 1961 Volkswagen carrying California license plates HIU-587. And the car is registered to her.”

Colonel Thumb wrote the license number under the address of the rooming house. “Can you describe either of them, Mr. Daly?”

Daly gave him the description that Laredo had given him. “He’s eighteen, possibly nineteen, years old. Rather good-looking. Wears his hair long. A typical punk, according to Mickey. Oh, yes — and he likes the girls.”

“And the woman?”

“She’s blonde. Naturally or not we don’t know. Probably five feet three or four, one hundred and fifteen or twenty pounds. Well formed. Large, firm breasts. Likes to run around in her birthday suit And she isn’t particular where or with whom she sleeps.”

“How do you figure that?” Uriah asked.

Daly told him. “We’re almost certain she was the woman who waited for Davis in a getaway car at the scene of the robbery. The woman, or girl, who first slept with, then shot him to cheat him out of his share of the loot. She is also reputed to have entertained different men in a secluded mountain cabin every weekend for the past year. I know
I
caught her playing house with one of them.”