Carnival of Death Read online

  “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.

  Chapter Five

  THE 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.

  He studied the location of his rides. He’d set them up, as he always tried to, on that section of the parking lot directly in front of the stores that were likely to do the most business. In this instance, the supermarket, flanked on one side by the glass and marble facade of the branch bank and on the other side by the chain drug store outlet and a pizza palace.

  Laredo was pleased with the setup. It should be a good location. Both he and Paquita liked children. It was pleasant, congenial work. If he could ever pay off his rides and his trucks, he’d have a good thing going for him.

  When they reached the rides, Laredo took off his coat, then opened up the lemonade stand so Paquita could start adding water and coloring to the powdered extract and ice down the pink lemonade that would flow in endless streams down a thousand thirsty little throats.

  As he did, a five-year-old Mexican girl with big black eyes and twin braids that hung down to the waist of her clean pinafore recognized Paquita from some other shopping center opening and squealed her delight.

  “She is here. She is here. The pink limonada senora.”

  Paquita was immediately surrounded by children. She picked up the big-eyed little girl and held her close and pressed her cheek to hers and smiled over the child’s head at Laredo.

  “She’s cute all right,” Laredo said. “Someday we’ll have one just like her.”

  Paquita’s smile turned enigmatic. She shifted the girl in her arms and held up one of her hands, extending first five fingers, then two.

  In the mood he was in, the prospect wasn’t particularly pleasing. “Oh, no,” Laredo said. “Not seven of them, baby. Let’s be like General Motors. Let’s start out small and grow.”

  Paquita stamped her foot, then set the child on the counter of the booth and turned her back to him. Puzzled, Laredo walked on to the carousel and shrugged into his coveralls, wondering what he’d said wrong. At times women, even the best of them, were difficult to understand.

  It took him half an hour to find the bad pipe in the carousel organ and another half hour to replace it. When he had, he turned on the power and listened critically. Leonard Bernstein probably wouldn’t approve, but most of the wheeze was gone. If you used a little imagination it wasn’t too difficult to recognize “The Skater’s Waltz.”

  He wiped his hands on a piece of waste, then leaving the organ playing he walked to the Ferris wheel and on his way met Jocko. As always the old man needed a shave and reeked of cheap whiskey.

  “You’re an hour late,” Laredo reproached him.

  “Yeah. Sure. I know, boss,” Jocko said. “But I worked until four o’clock this morning. Then I caught a few winks in one of the trucks and I guess I overslept.”

  There were times when Laredo was tempted to throw the old man off the lot. There were four reasons why he never did. One, Jocko needed the job. Two, cold sober or slightly woozy, he liked children and children adored him. Three, Jocko had been the head grease monkey on the Big Show and as such was a remote link with the past. Four, Jocko was the only mechanic he’d ever found who could coax and wheedle the aging carousel and the old Ferris wheel into reasonably continuous motion.

  Laredo limped on through the growing heat to the Ferris wheel, then realized what the old man had said. “What do you mean you worked until four o’clock this morning? We finished setting up here late yesterday afternoon.�
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  “That’s right,” the old man grinned. He unlocked the Ferris wheel and started the gasoline motor. “But turn the wheel over a few times and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Laredo engaged the clutch. The grind in the main bearings was gone. The wheel was turning as smoothly as a greased pig in a fun house barrel. He let it make a full revolution, then shut off the power. “What did you do to it, Jocko?”

  The old man removed his battered fedora and brushed the crown with his sleeve. “It’s a long story, boss. But after you left yesterday I just happened to hear about a same model wheel that had been in a big fire up at the other end of the Valley. So I borrowed one of the trucks and drove out and took a look see. And while the wheel is junk the bearings are still like new. So I took them out and brought them back and exchanged them for those clunkers we’ve been running on.”

  “Working until four o’clock this morning.”

  “We have to keep the show on the road.”

  “Yes,” Laredo said quietly. “We have to keep the show on the road. But right now you’d better inflate some balloons, then get into your lion tamer’s helmet and coat.”

  “Sure, Mickey. Whatever you say,” the old man said.

  Laredo walked on to the miniature train. If there were a lot of s.o.b.s in the world, there were also a lot of good joes. If he could hang onto his rides, the old man had a job with him for as long as he lived.

  His most recent employee, a nineteen-year-old youth named Tommy Banks, whom he had engaged to run the miniature train, still hadn’t shown up. It being as late as it was, Laredo doubted if he would. It didn’t matter. He had combined clowning with running the train before. He could do it again and save the twenty dollars he would have had to pay the punk.

  His run of good luck continued. All that was the matter with the sticking throttle was a worn bushing. Laredo replaced it. Then, after tooting the whistle three times, he invited the children watching him to take a free ride as he made a trial run down the narrow gauge rails that he and Banks and Jocko had laid the afternoon before.

  Her brief pique over, Paquita waved to them as they passed the pink lemonade stand. So did a number of the adults who were beginning to crowd the parking lot for the announced ten o’clock opening.

  Laredo enjoyed the ride as much as the children, but he still wished he knew why Paquita had been angry with him. He didn’t know how he could possibly feed them, but if Paquita wanted seven children it was all right with him.

  At twenty minutes of ten, he took his clown costume and makeup kit from the catchall box and dressed and made up in the men’s room of the service station. There were dozens of characters he could have chosen. Every clown in the business had his own idea of what was funny. In his own case he’d found that he did best with a modified version of a sad-eyed, white-faced, classical Pierrot.

  He made up carefully, taking special pains with his sad smile and the two painted teardrops on one cheek.

  In the few minutes it had taken him to make up and don his clown costume, most of the marked spaces in the parking lot had filled with cars. People in search of the advertised opening day bargains, and with hopes of winning the Ford station wagon or one of the other major prizes being offered by the stores, were swarming onto the lot.

  It looked like a good weekend. Carrying his street clothes under one arm and an inflated bladder on a flexible stick in his other hand, followed by a score of laughing children, Laredo pranced and bobbled and pretended to trip over the bladder as he limped painfully back through the heat toward his rides.

  Seen from a short distance, in the full glow of the mid-morning sun, they looked rather attractive. From a distance, the gilded fake smokestack of the miniature locomotive looked like gold. With a swarm of children waiting to board it, as soon as the stores started passing out tickets, the carousel was struggling bravely through a rather tinny version of “Beautiful Ohio.” Jocko had put on his white pith helmet and green and gold lion tamer’s coat and had turned on the Ferris wheel; the revolving wheel was framed in the bobbing cluster of balloons he was holding in one hand.

  As Laredo watched, a balloon escaped from the cluster and much to the children’s delight, trailing its string behind it, floated lazily up toward the cloudless sky.

  One corner of Laredo’s painted mouth turned down. If balloons had feelings, he knew how it must feel. Now it was in its proper element and no longer earthbound. He’d felt the same way once.

  As he watched the balloon, a car horn sounded sharply behind him. Worried about the children following him, Laredo turned to shoo them out of harm’s way. He turned too quickly, his artificial leg gave way under him and he lost his balance and fell.

  Looking up angrily, Laredo saw it wasn’t a private car that had caused his accident. It was the Ramsdale armored truck, presumably carrying money to the new branch bank and an ample supply of currency and change to the forty stores about to open their doors.

  He’d encountered the truck and its crew on other shopping center lots he’d played. The driver, an older man by the name of Jim Quinlan, wasn’t a bad sort. But he couldn’t stomach either of the two Kellys. The younger of the two brothers was an arrogant punk who had allowed his uniform and the fact that he carried a gun to go to his head. And anything Tim did was fine with his older brother, Mike.

  Laredo continued to scowl at the truck. Only the week before, on a shopping center parking lot in Burbank, the younger of the two Kellys had made a deliberate pass at Paquita. Nor had the pass been purely oral. After she’d served him a cup of pink lemonade, the younger Kelly had leaned over the counter and had slipped his hand into the bodice of Paquita’s dress as he’d pulled her to him and tried to kiss her. Kelly would have succeeded if Laredo hadn’t spun him around and warned him that he would beat in his goddamn brains if he ever tried a thing like that again.

  The driver of the truck looked out the window. “Sorry, Mickey,” he apologized. “It wasn’t me who honked. It was Tim, before I could stop him.”

  The big youth sitting beside him grinned. “What’s to be sorry about?” He leaned over the other man and looked out and down. “Well, if it isn’t the pale-faced hero of the Bay of Pigs.”

  “Take it easy, Tim,” Quinlan said.

  The younger man sat back. “Sure. Why not? Drive on, James. Now that that one-legged clown is out of my way, I want to cop another feel from that pretty little dumb Spanish broad and get me a couple of glasses of pink lemonade before I start toting all this money.”

  Chapter Six

  LAREDO GOT to his feet, heavily, as the armored truck drove on. He’d wrenched his stump. The heavy straps that supported his artificial limb were chafing him. There was a sour taste in his mouth as he stared after the truck.

  He realized that a tiny hand was tugging at his clown costume and looked down to see the big-eyed little Mexican-American child who had called Paquita “the pink limonada senora” looking up at him.

  “Did the funny man hurt himself when he fell down?” the child asked soberly.

  Laredo laid his hand on her head. “No. All he hurt was his pride.”

  To get rid of the children, he took a handful of passes from his pocket and distributed them, telling them to go on ahead. Then, no longer prancing or bobbing, or pretending to trip over the inflated bladder, he limped rapidly in their wake. He’d meant what he’d said on the parking lot in Burbank. If the big, good-looking black Irishman as much as touched Paquita again, he’d kill him. He’d shoot him dead.

  Because of the constant stream of cars being driven onto the parking lot by drivers looking for nonexistent parking places and the hundreds of adults and children whose cars were already parked and who were jostling their way toward the U-shaped group of stores, it was heavy going for a man with an artificial leg.

  Laredo limped on doggedly. The entire character of the crowd had changed. There were still plenty of children, but there were also hundreds of young and middle-aged couples and older teen-agers, the fir
st two groups intent on something they wanted to buy or price, the teen-agers looking for kicks, or for suitable opposite numbers who appealed to them.

  They were noisy, boisterous, young. As Laredo limped past a parked convertible with its top down, three young colored couples in it, and the car radio blaring the latest in teen-age “sound,” one of the boys called good naturedly:

  “Hey there, Mister Clown, where are you going so fast? Come on back and make us laugh.”

  “Get hip,” one of the girls in the car said. “Make the scene, man. Don’t you dig? He’s supposed to be sad. He’s even got tears on his cheek.”

  “What’s he so sad about?” one of the other youths wanted to know.

  “That’s easy,” a girl in the back seat said. “Ben Casey cut out his Pagliacci and now all he can sing is tenor.”

  It wasn’t that funny but the young people in the car laughed uproariously. The ribbing was friendly and Laredo turned his painted sad smile on them as he went on. It would be wonderful, he thought, to be that young again. He doubted if he ever had been.

  It was normal procedure for the armored truck to park as close as it could to the bank or stores, or group of stores, it had come to service. This morning, because a number of the huge semitrailers and smaller delivery trucks were still unloading supplies on the walk, Quinlan had pulled the money truck into the walkway between the pink lemonade stand and the slowly revolving carousel.

  The procedure was almost military. Quinlan set his hand brake, then he and the younger Kelly got out on opposite sides of the cab and drew their revolvers from their holsters as they walked to the back of the truck where Quinlan knocked on the door of the money compartment.

  The door opened immediately, revealing the elder Kelly holding two canvas sacks. Then, with Quinlan watching alertly, the younger Kelly holstered his gun and took the sacks from his brother, the steel door closed again and the two outside guards made their way through the crowd toward the bank.