Carnival of Death (3 page)

Daly protested, “But while we were still on the air, Laredo admitted that some of the men in the brigade called him Chico.”

DuBoise nodded. “I heard him. But I also heard him tell you that the incident didn’t make any more sense to him than it does to us. Let’s face it. There are quite a number of people in Los Angeles who, for one reason or another, don’t like you.”

Terry said brightly, “And one of them hired two thugs with Spanish accents to slug Tom.”

DuBoise shrugged. “Either that or someone with a perverted sense of humor was playing a practical joke.”

Daly studied his face in the makeup mirror. During the hour he had been on the air the flesh around his eye had become discolored and was so swollen that when he closed his other eye he could barely see.

“Hmm. Some joke,” he said, sourly.

W
HAT FAINT
breeze there was was onshore and even this far from the ocean, the faint, clean scent of the sea was barely perceptible in the stench of the monoxide fumes issuing from the exhausts of the cars and trucks and buses forming the growing river of traffic outside the open window.

The alarm clock rang at six o’clock. Laredo, who had been awake for an hour, reached out a muscular arm and shut it off before it awakened Paquita. With traffic, especially the outbound traffic, as heavy as it always was on Saturday mornings, it would take him at least an hour to drive to the other side of the Valley. When he got there he had plenty to do. The throttle on the miniature locomotive was sticking again. The carousel organ had developed a wheeze. If he didn’t replace the main bearings on the Ferris wheel, and soon, he would only have two rides instead of three.

It was time for him to get up and begin the business of the day. Instead, he lay a moment longer, staring up at the rain-streaked ceiling of the bedroom.

It had been a nice ceiling at one time. In those days, before his parents had died, before he’d lost his left leg, everything had been nice. Now all he had left was Paquita, an old house in a run-down neighborhood and three secondhand kiddy rides, with both the house and the rides mortgaged for almost as much as they were worth.

Laredo wished he knew what he was going to do. He wished he knew what he could do. The fifty-dollar check he’d received for appearing on the Tom Daly show and his take from the rides for the weekend opening of the new shopping plaza would barely meet his small payroll and the not so small payments that were due on his rides Monday morning.

He nuzzled the fragrant hair of the girl sleeping in his arms. There were times when he loved Paquita so much he thought he couldn’t stand it for another minute. This was one of those times. He’d tried to spare her as long as he could. Then when they’d returned home last night, unable to carry the load by himself any longer, he’d told her just how bad things were with them. And how had Paquita reacted? Had she wept and carried on the way most girls would have done? No. Instead, she’d come into his arms and pressed her lips to his, telling him in the only way she could that nothing mattered as long as they had each other. It had been almost morning before they’d thought of sleep.

Laredo sat up on the edge of the bed and eyed the contraption of cork and aluminum and leather straps lying on the chair beside the bed with distaste. A prosthetic appliance, they called it. P-r-o-s-t-h-e-t-i-c-s. The branch of surgery dealing with the replacement of missing parts, especially limbs by artificial substitutes.

Laredo lit his first cigarette of the day and his mood brightened. At least the brigade had tried. At least they’d done something besides talk. He made the sign of his faith with his free hand. If Papa and Mama and Uncle Charlie had been watching they’d had no reason to be ashamed of him.

He scooped the artificial limb from the chair and hopped nimbly and silently across the floor to the bathroom. He didn’t like to have Paquita watch him dress. It would always embarrass him to give her visual proof that she was married to half a man.

Laredo strapped on his leg and grinned as he stumped around the bathroom preparatory to shaving and dressing. True, he always removed the appliance before they retired for the night but, thank God, in the deep content of their double bed he didn’t need two legs to prove he was still a man. At least they had that.

Now that he was fully awake and the rising sun was growing brighter every minute, the natural buoyancy of youth took over. Somehow he and Paquita would make it. If the bank foreclosed on the house, they would move somewhere else. If they refused to extend the notes on his rides, he’d find some other way of making a living.

Somehow nature always managed to compensate. He was learning to live with one leg. And because Paquita had been born mute and would never be able to make herself understood except through the clever notes she scribbled on the writing pad she always carried with her, Providence had made her the wisest and most beautiful and most understanding wife in the world. Paquita didn’t have to tell him she loved him. She proved it.

He dressed, then opened the bathroom door cautiously and his grin widened as he saw that the bed was empty. Paquita had tricked him again. She hadn’t been asleep. She’d been waiting for him to get up so she could start their breakfast.

He stumped through the bedroom and down the small hall to the outmoded kitchen. There was the smell of freshly percolated coffee. Paquita, wearing tight black capri pants and a white silk bolero type blouse that left her attractive midsection bare, was standing in front of the stove grilling bacon. When she heard him enter the room, she turned and lifted her face to be kissed.

“I ought to spank you,” Laredo said as he kissed her.

The black-haired girl nodded, bright-eyed.

“Oh, no,” Laredo added quickly. “Let’s not get started on that again or we’ll never get out to the lot.”

He drank his coffee, admiring his wife, wondering why he’d felt so sorry for himself on the Tom Daly show the night before. When a man was married to a girl like Paquita, it was enough just to be alive.

He continued to think of the Daly program. He wished now he’d been more interesting and had made a better impression. He liked Mr. Daly. He liked Miss Carstairs. He liked Mr. DuBoise.

And there was one for the book. While he had been waiting to go on, one of the KAMPC-TV employees had told him and Paquita that DuBoise had been a captain in France’s famed
Régiments Étrangères
until he’d been so badly wounded in the fighting in Indochina that he’d had to resign his commission. He could believe it of DuBoise. Behind his precisely waxed mustache and his continental manners, DuBoise had that certain something.

The former aerialist was struck by a sudden thought. He and the other boys had tried. A lot of brave men had died for what they believed in. But most of them, like himself, had been amateurs at the business of killing. It was a pity they hadn’t had a few men like DuBoise and a company of Legionnaires with them when they had waded into the surf.

When a man like DuBoise settled his
kepi
to suit him, then drew his side arm and smiled, “Shall we take a little walk,
mes enfants?”
you followed him if you were smart. And it was odds on that you would take your objective.

Laredo daydreamed over his bacon and eggs. If they’d had just one company of Legionnaires in the first assault wave, the chances were that instead of having to drive to the East Valley Shopping Plaza to make certain his rides were in running condition, right now he would be sitting with his feet, both feet, up on a desk in the Presidential Palace, smoking a big cigar and wondering just what in Havana the Minister of Entertainment was supposed to do to earn his pay.

The thought amused Laredo. He laughed and Paquita laughed with him, then wrote hastily on her pad:

It was a pleasant bet to lose, but Laredo was slightly awed as he kissed his wife. He could understand that to compensate Paquita in some measure for her inability to speak, nature had sharpened her other senses. But he would never understand, unless it was because of the close bond between them, how she could read his mind.

“How did you know?” he asked her.

Paquita shrugged and laid her hand on his.

“You felt it?”

She nodded as she refilled their coffee cups.

Laredo sought confirmation of his own opinion. “I wasn’t very good on Mr. Daly’s show, was I?”

Paquita shook her head.

Laredo continued to think of the show as he backed his aged car from the garage. Mr. Daly’s remark about the two bruisers who had beaten him up and told him to warn Chico that they were watching him and for him not to try something hadn’t made sense at the time. It still didn’t.

Because of his slight stature, a number of the boys in the brigade had called him Chico. But none of them would have beaten up Mr. Daly. They weren’t thugs or brawlers. They were students and business and professional men, writers, artists, teachers, the
crème de la crème
of Cuba. They didn’t go around beating people. They were only interested in liquidating one certain party.

Laredo tried to remember the warning verbatim and succeeded. Mr. Daly had said:

“Now one last question. Would it make any sense to you if I told you that when I drove into the studio parking lot tonight two bruisers told me to warn you that they are watching you and for you not to try something as that one was their pigeon?”

Laredo parked the car in front of the house, then looked up and down the street. As far as he could tell, no one was watching him. He didn’t know anything about any pigeon.

T
HE EARLY
Saturday morning traffic was as heavy as Laredo had known it would be. The cars were four abreast on the outbound lanes of the freeway, big cars, little cars, station wagons filled with children, most of them headed for the sea, the mountains or the desert. It was one of the advantages of living in Los Angeles. If you could afford it, you had such a wide variety of places in which you could spend your weekends.

You could even combine them. During the first year that he and Paquita had been married, he had proved to her on a dare that they could swim in the ocean in the morning, have lunch in the desert, get in a little skiing in the mountains in the afternoon and still drive back to Los Angeles in time to dress and catch the second show at the world famous Cocoanut Grove.

It had been nice to have money, Laredo reflected. He meant to have money again, a lot of money. If he could just get past the next few weeks, he might make it. Any number of successful showmen had founded their fortunes on a lot less than a kiddy carousel, a Ferris wheel and a miniature train.

It was a few minutes after eight o’clock when they reached the new shopping center on the far side of the valley. Even this early in the morning the paved parking lot was reflecting the sun and it would grow hotter as the day progressed. Laredo hoped it wouldn’t get too hot. Whenever it became excessively warm the straps of his artificial leg always chafed him.

The scene was one of orderly confusion. There was a constant arrival of trucks and huge semi-trailers carrying last minute supplies for the more than forty shops and stores in the group. Beside the new supermarket and the branch bank there was a chain drug store, a one-stop gasoline station, a retail outlet for one of the large mail-order houses, several smart women’s shops, a beauty parlor, a barber shop, a pizza palace, a personal loan company. Plus others. All you had to do was make your desire known. There was a store or a shoppe that sold it.

Laredo had parked the three trucks on which he moved his rides from one location to another behind the gasoline service station. As he parked his car beside the truck that carried the carousel he saw that one of the big double tires on the back wheels had gone flat during the night. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning. If the tire couldn’t be fixed, he would have to buy a new one before he could move the rig.

He left the car on his side and limped around it to help Paquita out. As she stepped to the pavement, the youthful attendant hosing down the apron of the station whistled his approval of her well-filled capri pants.

Laredo debated saying something to him and let it pass. If he punched every punk who whistled at Paquita, he wouldn’t have time to make a living for her. In a way, every whistle was a tribute.

Gripping his wife’s arm, he guided her across the pennant-and banner-hung lot toward the three rides and the free pink lemonade stand that with Tommy and Jocko’s help he’d set up the afternoon before.

Because it was a Saturday and there was no school, in spite of the early hour the neighborhood children and teen-agers, even a few young mothers with babies in their arms, were swarming all over the plaza. Some watched the trucks unload or looked in the windows of the stores or clustered around the raised platform holding the new station wagon that was to be given to some lucky ticket holder. However the biggest group of the younger element was gathered around the rides and the gaudily painted lemonade stand over which Paquita would preside, admiring the Ferris wheel and the locomotive of the miniature train and trying to see under the canvas that covered the horses on the carousel.

Laredo hoped that the merchants who’d leased space in the shopping center, especially those dealing in luxury items, knew what they were doing. While it was true that the huge new shopping complex would draw customers from all over the valley, it had been located in an older, fringe-of-the-city area populated mainly by low income Mexican-American and Negro families. Not that he had anything against low income groups. Since he’d lost his left leg he’d become a charter member. It was a matter of economics. Most of the poor devils were in the same fix he was. They were too busy making a living, trying to meet their monthly payments and put food on their tables to be concerned with the so-called niceties of life. Gracious living was for people who had money.