Carnival of Death Read online

  Laredo smiled. “Not long. By the time I was ten I was doing a featured slack wire act. Meanwhile I practiced on the high traps four or five hours a day. And when I was fifteen, my mother and father and one of my uncles who worked with them took me into their act as a flyer and I became one of the Flying Laredos.”

  Daly said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but those are two terms I think I know. The high traps are the high trapeze. And a flyer is the trapeze performer who is thrown from one catcher to another while the catchers hang away up there by their knees.”

  Laredo nodded. “That’s right. As in the song about the daring young man on the flying trapeze. Only it isn’t quite as easy as it looks.”

  “I’ll buy that.” Daly said. “And then …?”

  “Then for the next few years, until I joined the invasion brigade, I traveled all over the world with the act.”

  Daly protested, “But a few minutes ago you said you graduated from Hollywood High School.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But how could you go to high school and still travel all over the world?”

  “That was easy. During the off season I attended class just like any other student. Then, when the circus went on the road or the act played an independent date, my teachers laid out a course of studies and I trooped a private tutor to make certain I didn’t fall behind the rest of the class.”

  “That must have taken a great deal of money.”

  Laredo was bitter. “It did. But I was making five hundred a week as a flyer when I was fifteen years old. And when I was eighteen and Paquita and I were married, as a wedding present, my folks and my uncle made me a full partner in the act and from then on I got a fourth of ten grand.”

  “In other words, when the act was working, you earned two thousand five hundred dollars a week.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And how many weeks a year did you work?”

  “Never less than thirty. It depended on the weather and on the number of towns that the advance man could fit into our schedule.”

  Daly was impressed. “That comes to around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. And you gave that all up to join the invasion brigade, wade ashore at the Bay of Pigs, have your left leg practically shot off by machine gun fire, then sweat out the next eighteen months as a prisoner of war?”

  “That’s what I did.”

  “And you’re not bitter about it?”

  “Sure I’m bitter. Along with all of the other guys in the brigade, I wanted to win. If we had been given the support we were promised, I think we would have.” Laredo made a gesture of impatience. “But all of that is past history. All that happened back in 1961.”

  Daly persisted, “But why? I mean why did you get mixed up in a deal like that? If you were born and raised in Los Angeles, you aren’t a Cuban national. You are a citizen of the United States.”

  “That’s true,” Laredo admitted. “It’s rather difficult to explain. It was just something I felt I had to do. True, I wasn’t born in Cuba but my mother and father were. In Oriente Province. You see, the first Laredo to come out of Spain, a Don no less, started a plantation there about the time that Columbus was sent back home in chains. All I heard all my life, in dressing rooms and on circus lots, from one end of this country to another, was how beautiful and how wonderful Cuba was. So, when the present regime took over and fouled up things the way they have, I guess I felt obligated to do something about it.”

  At a sign from Keeley, Daly broke for a commercial. When they returned to the air, he attempted to guide the interview into what he had hoped would be the meat of their conversation, the actual invasion. But while it was a difficult thing to analyze, Daly knew even as he questioned the younger man that this wasn’t going to be one of his more outstanding interviews.

  This one he would get letters about, few of them complimentary. Laredo’s loss had been too great, he was still too bitter to be objective. Questioning him about the invasion and his trial and the months he had spent in prison was too much like asking a man to turn his soul inside out so the mawkish curious could gawk at it. Daly dropped the subject and asked Laredo how he was currently earning his living and ran into more trouble.

  “Well,” Laredo said wryly, “as you can imagine there aren’t many openings for one-legged trapeze artists. So when Paquita and I finally got back here to L.A. I invested what little money I’d saved, and it wasn’t much, in three kiddy rides.”

  “Kiddy rides?” Daly puzzled.

  “That’s right. A small carousel, a miniature railway and a pint-sized Ferris wheel. And right now I’m playing what we call the supermarket and shopping plaza parking lot circuit.”

  “Would you explain that?”

  “Certainly. I set up my rides on the parking lots of supermarkets and shopping centers and big discount stores as part of the ballyhoo. You know, to draw a crowd. In fact, I’m opening a new shopping center out in the East Valley tomorrow. Is it all right to give it a plug?”

  “Why not?”

  Laredo looked into the camera. “Don’t miss the opening of the new East Valley Shopping Plaza tomorrow. That’s at the junction of Willowcrest Road and San Victoria Boulevard. We’re opening a brand-new bank and a supermarket and a deluxe one-stop service station and about every kind of store you can name. All at the one location. If you hold the lucky ticket you may win a Ford station wagon. And beginning at ten o’clock tomorrow I’ll be dressed as a clown and there will be free flowers for the ladies and free pink lemonade and free fun rides for the kiddies.”

  Daly smiled. “You make it sound rather attractive, Mickey. But you just said free rides. If you give away free rides, how do you make any money?”

  Laredo explained. “The stores give free tickets to the children. The children give the tickets to me. Then the stores pay me so much for every ticket I take in.”

  “I see,” Daly said. “But on a deal like that you can’t possibly make the amount of money that you are accustomed to earning.”

  “No,” Laredo said. He was understandably bitter. “I’m lucky if I take in enough to meet my payroll and make the monthly payments on my rides and equipment and have enough left over to live on.” He added quietly, “On the other hand I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Both Paquita and I like children. I’m still in one phase of the entertainment world. At least I didn’t have to go to work as a geek.”

  Daly admitted, “You’ve stuck me again. What in the name of time is a geek?”

  Laredo told him. “It’s another carnival and circus term, always deprecatory. Nowadays it is applied to any number of freaks. But the term was originally applied to any townsman or degenerate who either wanted to break into show business, or who wanted money so badly that he or she was willing to do a cannibal act and bite the heads off live chickens or pigeons in a freak show.”

  Daly brought the interview to a close. “Thanks a lot, Mickey. It’s been interesting talking to you. But, before you go, does anyone ever call you Chico?”

  “Yes,” Laredo said. “Not in Los Angeles. But quite a few of the boys in the invasion brigade used to call me Chico.”

  “I see,” Daly 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?”

  “No,” Laredo said. “It would not.”

  Daly saw that Keeley was giving him the hurry-up sign that signified that they were running out of time. He wrapped up the show with his usual sign off, then walked down the corridor with Terry to his combination dressing room and office.

  DuBoise was in the office waiting for them, rewinding the audio portions of the show he always recorded in case of possible lawsuits.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I had a winner when I scheduled Laredo. But it seems I didn’t.”

  Terry offered, “The interview with Miss Adams was a rio
t and I thought the question period went well. But the interview with Mr. Laredo was too raw, too real, somehow.”

  Daly made three drinks. “It was just one of those things, I guess. But you can’t blame the man for being bitter. He had it made. How much did you give him, Gene?”

  DuBoise filed the tape in the metal filing cabinet. “The usual. Fifty dollars. I’d have made an exception in his case and gone as high as two hundred. But with all that bitterness and pride bottled up in him, he’d probably have punched my face.”

  “Probably,” Daly agreed. He added another ice cube to the drink he’d made for himself. “Did you check with the gate guard?”

  “Yes,” DuBoise said. “I did. And he claims he didn’t see anyone.”

  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.

  Chapter Four

  WHAT 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 th
e 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:

  I’ll bet a kiss I know what

  you are laughing about. You

  are thinking about last night

  at the studio and what might

  have happened at Bahia de

  Cochinos if Captain DuBoise

  and a company of Legionnaires

  had been with the brigade.

  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: