Carnival of Death (18 page)

“Then you’ve seen her?”

“Possibly. I don’t know.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“With one exception, she could have been any of the girls who attended the dead guard’s funeral. But it was too dark in the cabin for me to see anything, even if I hadn’t been pistol-whipped half unconscious as I walked in the door.” Daly was still furious when he thought of it. “However, by guiding one of my hands over her more feminine attributes on a personally escorted tour, she made certain I knew how generous nature had been to her and that she was unquestionably female.”

“And then?” Colonel Thumb asked.

“She finished pistol-whipping me.”

The giant sighed. “I don’t like to get sentimental at a time like this. But she sounds like a broad, and I do mean a broad, that I used to know in Sioux Falls. She was one of those dames who got her kicks by hurting others. What do you call people like that?”

“Sadists,” the midget told him.

T
HE
L
A
H
ACIENDA
M
OTEL
, consisting of fourteen small individual units of stucco construction, once painted white, had, in its day, been a pleasant oasis for out-of-state motorists who wanted to spend one or more nights on the outskirts of Los Angeles. There had been beds of flowers and blooming shrubs between the units. Children played in the sand pile and birds sang in the branches of its olive and orange trees. Travelers had warmly recommended the La Hacienda to friends who might pass that way.

Time had changed that Time and the freeway and the relentless growth of the city. Now there was a gasoline station on one side of the court, a liquor store on the other, an elevated eight-lane channel of steel reinforced concrete where the olive and orange trees had been, and the La Hacienda no longer catered to families.

For a number of years after the owners of the other tourist courts in the immediate vicinity had sold their properties for the land value and either retired or built elsewhere, the owner of the La Hacienda had hung on grimly, his units vacant most of the time, barely earning enough to pay taxes. Then he’d discovered that sex could not only be pleasant but profitable and even if the flowers and the shrubs and the trees were gone, the La Hacienda had blossomed again.

Now without any extensive remodeling and at an increase in prices, he frequently rented one unit as many as five and six times in one night. There was no law in California that said that the owner of a motel had to ask a couple to show him their marriage license. And to men out on the town with their neighbors’ wives, ambitious movie and television extras willing to use their bodies as rungs in the ladder they hoped to climb, secretaries happy to work overtime, middle-aged wives bored with their husbands, old men seeking an ephemeral illusion of youth, and to the general run of starry-eyed young and amorous, the clang of a tire being changed, the noisy rumble of the heavily loaded semitrailers and the continuous roar of cars passing the rear of the court on the elevated freeway didn’t present any problem. They hadn’t come to the La Hacienda to talk.

On the Wednesday night following Daly’s meeting with Colonel Tom Thumb and his fellow circus sideshow performer, the full-figured platinum blonde who usually asked for Unit 14 entered the office of the court a few minutes after midnight, as always trailing a wake of expensive perfume and this morning carrying a morning paper and an unopened fifth of whiskey in a brown paper bag.

It had only happened the one time. It would probably never happen again, but the youthful night clerk on duty was always glad to see her. One of his more pleasant memories would always be the one time that her date had stood her up and she’d phoned the office after waiting an hour to ask if he would be so kind as to step next door and buy her a bottle of whiskey and deliver it with some cracked ice.

“Nice to see you, Mrs. Bennett,” he enthused. “A beautiful night, eh?”

The blonde woman shrugged her mink-covered shoulders. “It’s all right, I guess. Did you save the unit I asked you to reserve?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The clerk laid a registration card on the desk. “Unit 14. I marked it occupied as soon as you phoned.”

As always, the blonde woman signed the card “Mr. and Mrs. Milo Bennett.” She added a Beverly Hills address, then paid for the unit with a twenty dollar bill. “Mr. Bennett will be along in a few minutes.” She gave her standard excuse. “He stopped to have the car serviced.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The clerk asked hopefully, “Would you like some ice tonight?”

“No. Not tonight.”

Getting a better grip on the whiskey in the paper bag, she left the office and walked down the gravel drive. Unit 14 was the last unit in the court and the freeway noise was deafening here. She unlocked the door with the key the clerk had given her.

“Would you like some ice tonight?”

That was a laugh. Ice was the last thing on the young punk’s mind. Young or old, rich or poor, at least in the one respect all men were alike. As far as women were concerned, they all had one thing in their minds. The corners of her mouth turned down. Pigs, that’s what they were. And they didn’t care how many other pigs had wallowed in the trough as long as they got their turn.

She tossed the morning paper on the bed. Then, without removing her coat, she took the fifth of whiskey from the bag and broke the seal and poured a stiff drink into one of the grimy glasses on the battered dresser. The warm whiskey tasted good.

She realized she hadn’t closed the door. She closed it and put the key in the lock but didn’t turn it.

Then, pouring more whiskey in the glass, she carried the glass with her into the old-fashioned bathroom of the unit and sipped at the whiskey from time to time as she removed her clothes.

There was only this one last hurdle. She hoped she didn’t lose her nerve. She didn’t think she would. She didn’t see any reason why she should.

She hung her coat and her dress on hooks on the back of the bathroom door, then unhooked the wisp of lace covering her breasts, worked the elastic of her sheer scanties down over her hips and debated removing her stockings.

For some reason the fact that an otherwise nude woman was wearing stockings seemed to make most men more amorous. It was a minor natural phenomenon she’d never been able to fathom. Shrugging, she removed her garter belt and rolled her stockings below her knees, walking back into the bedroom completely nude except for her stockings and her spike-heeled shoes.

It felt good to get out of her clothes. There were times when she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She picked her purse from the dresser and put it on the night table. Then she lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed and read the early edition of the morning paper while she waited.

There was the usual international crisis. A man in Woodland Hills had murdered his wife and her lover. The N.A.A.C.P. was planning a massive demonstration. Space officials were predicting that the United States would land a man on the moon before Soviet Russia did.

No story made headlines for long. The public’s taste was too jaded. Now, four days after it had happened, the robbery of the armored truck at the new East Valley Shopping Plaza had been relegated to the inner pages. She folded the paper to page three. There was nothing in the brief follow-up story that hadn’t been printed before.

As yet the District Attorney’s office hadn’t set a date for Mickey and Paquita Laredo’s trial. How could it? The eyewitnesses were still arguing about how many clowns there had been and whether or not Dr. Alveredo — now proved a fake — had left the scene in a car driven by a blonde woman. Seemingly the only witness to that had been the five-year-old Mexican-American child whom Tom Daly had had on his program.

Most of the story was a recapitulation. The police had recovered five thousand, four hundred and twenty dollars of the money, most of it in silver, that allegedly had been thrown to the milling teen-agers and adults around the truck. Another five thousand dollars in bills, the money found in one of the horses on Mickey Laredo’s carousel, had been identified by Miss Grace Lindler of the Ramsdale Armored Truck Company as part of the load the garage cashier had checked into the truck on the Saturday morning it had been robbed. There were, however, as yet no clues that might aid the detectives working on the case to recover the bulk of the money.

She snuffed her cigarette in the tray on the night table and resumed reading. A Miss Thelma and a Tommy Banks were still being sought in connection with suspected arson in the burning of a mountain cabin in the Big Bear City area. The police also wanted to question Miss Banks, believed to be a platinum blonde of questionable morals, in the fatal shooting of James Davis aboard his boat the
La Femme
in the Redondo Beach marina. Readers were asked to contact either the newspaper or the police station nearest them if they should chance to see a 1961 Volkswagen with California license plates HIU-587.

If you liked that sort of thing, it made rather interested reading. Personally, she found it rather boring. She dropped the newspaper on the floor and picked her purse from the night table, removing a small-caliber revolver. She spun the cylinder to make certain that all of the chambers were loaded.

Satisfied that they were, she stood up and turned back the spread and the top sheet and slid the gun under the far pillow. Then deciding the pillow was a poor hiding place, she recovered the revolver and kicking off her shoes, stretched out full length on the double bed and dropped the hand holding the gun between the edge of the wall and the mattress. Then raising her hand again she tried a dry run and smiled thinly. The floor between the bed and the wall made a much better hiding place than the pillow. It was much more efficient. There would be no need for any fumbling. While her companion’s attention was centered elsewhere, when the proper time came, and she wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry about it, all she would have to do was raise her arm and wait for the rumble of a passing truck to drown out the sound of the shots.

She laid the gun back on the floor, then ran her hands slowly over her breasts, down her body and between the yielding softness of her inner thighs and sucked in her breath sharply. She’d read that, biologically speaking, women differed from men in that sexual desire couldn’t be engendered in them by memories of past contacts and performances. If so, it wasn’t true of her. She hoped Carver wouldn’t be late. Then after he’d taken care of her need and she’d done what had to be done, the police could go blow their whistles.

• • •

Uriah said, “It was the Colonel’s idea. After we talked to Mr. Daly last night, we pounded the pavement all morning and most of the afternoon, getting nowhere. We talked to maybe thirty ex-circus and carnival people. All of them knew Mickey Laredo. A few had worked with Jocko. But no one we talked to had heard of a Tommy or a Thelma Banks. Then about three o’clock this afternoon, the Colonel had this brainstorm. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Let’s stop using our feet and use our heads. Everyone agrees on one thing. The costumes of the clowns who heisted the truck were identical with Mickey’s. Professional clown costumes are what you might call specialized merchandise. You just don’t go out and buy them anywhere. And if you wanted to masquerade as a special kind of a clown, where would be the best place to buy or rent a costume? At a theatrical outfitting company.’”

DuBoise swore under his breath. “Of course. We should have thought of that.”

The giant continued. “So we checked the yellow pages in the phone book and found twenty outfitters listed, beginning with the Acme Costume Rental Company on Beachwood Drive and winding up with the Western Costume Company on Melrose. And somewhere in the middle we found the one we wanted. Give Mr. Daly their card, Colonel.”

The midget took a business card from his wallet and handed it to Daly. The printing on the card read:

Colonel Thumb continued the story. “And when we talked to this guy we came up smelling like roses. To begin with, we knew a number of acts he’d outfitted. So we talked about the business for awhile. Then he told us what we wanted to know.”

Daly removed the last of the pancake makeup he’d used in an attempt to cover his discolored eye and tossed the towel on the shelf in his combination office and dressing room. “Go on, please, Colonel.”

“Well, this is what he told us. Last Friday afternoon, just before he closed, a big pink Cadillac pulled up in front of his place and this blonde broad, dressed to the nines, came in. She’s very high society, see? She claims her name is Mrs. Milo Bennett and she gave a swank Beverly Hills address. And she says that she and her husband are going to a costume party and they would like to go as clowns. And she rented two identical Pierrot outfits, one large and one medium, complete with caps and bladders. Then she bought two rubber clown masks, the kind kids wear on Halloween.”

Daly touched the swollen flesh around his eye. “This is beginning to make sense. And whoever wore them used them twice. Once outside in the studio parking lot. Then when they looted the truck. No wonder those clowns disappeared so fast. All they had to do was rip off their masks and put a pair of coveralls over their costumes and no one would pay any attention to them.”

DuBoise asked, “But why didn’t the owner of the costume company go to the police when he read about the robbery?”

The midget told him. “Because he has a second house in Palm Springs and after he closes on Friday, he drives down for a long weekend and doesn’t come back until Tuesday morning. While he’s there he plays golf and relaxes and doesn’t pay too much attention to what’s going on in the world. Besides, like he told Uriah and me, he rents or sells maybe two hundred costumes a week and he had no reason to connect a Beverly Hills society broad with the robbery of an armored truck.”