Страница 70 из 141
Now, I have every intention of setting down the facts of this case as I understand and experienced them, without fear of the reader’s doubting them (or my own sanity), but I see no point in mentioning any further anatomical details of the crime, except to say that our coroner, Dr. Sauer, though he labored at the problem with a sad fervor was hard-put to establish conclusively that the victim had been dead before his killer went to work on him with a very long, very sharp knife.
The dead man, as I have already mentioned, was attired in a curious suit-the trousers and jacket of threadbare purple velour, the waistcoat bright orange, the whole thing patched with outsized squares of fabric cut from a variety of loudly clashing plaids. It was on account of the patches, along with the victim’s cracked and split-soled shoes and a certain undeniable shabbiness in the stuff of the suit, that the primary detective-a man not apt to see deeper than the outermost wrapper of the world (we do not attract, I must confess, the finest police talent in this doleful little corner of western Pe
“Those ca
“They are pretty fu
When I arrived at the clearing, having abandoned my solitary di
“Damn you, Ganz,” I said, though I was not in truth addressing the poor fellow, who, I knew, would not be able to answer my question anytime soon. “What’s a dead clown doing in my woods?”
We found no wallet on the corpse, nor any kind of identifying objects. My men, along with the better part of the Ashtown Police Department, went over and over the woods east of town, hourly widening the radius of their search. That day, when not attending to my other duties (I was then in the process of breaking up the Dushnyk cigarette-smuggling ring), I managed to work my way back along a chain of inferences to the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. Circus, which, as I eventually recalled, had recently stayed on the eastern outskirts of Ashtown, at the fringe of the woods where the body was found.
The following day, I succeeded in reaching the circus’s general manager, a man named Onheuser, at their winter headquarters in Peru. He informed me over the phone that the company had left Pe
“Missing?” he said. I wished that I could see his face, for I thought I heard the flatted note of something false in his tone. Perhaps he was merely nervous about talking to a county district attorney. The Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. Circus was a mangy affair, by all accounts, and probably no stranger to pursuit by officers of the court. “Why, I don’t believe so, no.”
I explained to him that a man who gave every indication of having once been a circus clown had turned up dead in a pinewood outside Ashtown, Pe
“Oh, no,” Onheuser said. “I truly hope he wasn’t one of mine, Mr. Satterlee.”
“It is possible you might have left one of your clowns behind, Mr. Onheuser?”
“Clowns are special people,” Onheuser replied, sounding a touch on the defensive. “They love their work, but sometimes it can get to be a little, well, too much for them.” It developed that Mr. Onheuser had, in his younger days, performed as a clown, under the name of Mr. Wingo, in the circus of which he was now the general manager. “It’s not unusual for a clown to drop out for a little while, cool his heels, you know, in some town where he can get a few months of well-earned rest. It isn’t common, I wouldn’t say, but it’s not unusual. I will wire my road manager-they’re in Canton, Ohio -and see what I can find out.”
I gathered, reading between the lines, that clowns were high-strung types, and not above going on the occasional bender. This poor fellow had probably jumped ship here two weeks ago, holing up somewhere with a case of rye, only to run afoul of a very nasty person, possibly one who harbored no great love of clowns. In fact, I had an odd feeling, nothing more than a hunch, really, that the ordinary citizens of Ashtown and its environs were safe, even though the killer was still at large. Once more, I picked up a slip of paper that I had tucked into my desk blotter that morning. It was something that Dr. Sauer had clipped from his files and passed along to me. Coulrophobia: morbid, irrational fear of or aversion to clowns.
“Er, listen, Mr. Satterlee,” Onheuser went on. “I hope you won’t mind my asking. That is, I hope it’s not a, well, a confidential police matter, or something of the sort. But I know that when I do get through to them, out in Canton, they’re going to want to know.
I guessed, somehow, what he was about to ask me. I could hear the prickling fear behind his curiosity, the note of dread in his voice. I waited him out.
“Did they-was there any-how did he die?”
“He was shot,” I said, for the moment supplying the least interesting part of the answer, tugging on that loose thread of fear. “In the head.”
“And there was… forgive me. No… no harm done? To the body? Other than the gunshot wound, I mean to say.”
“Well, yes, his head was rather savagely mutilated,” I said brightly. “Is that what you mean to say?”
“Ah! No, no, I don’t-”
“The killer or killers removed all the skin from the cranium. It was very skillfully done. Now, suppose you tell me what you know about it.”
There was another pause, and a stream of agitated electrons burbled along between us.
“I don’t know anything, Mr. District Attorney. I’m really sorry. I really must go now. I’ll wire you when I have some-”
The line went dead. He was so keen to hang up on me that he could not even wait to finish his sentence. I got up and went to the shelf where, in recent months, I had taken to keeping a bottle of whiskey tucked behind my bust of Daniel Webster. Carrying the bottle and a dusty glass back to my desk, I sat down and tried to reconcile myself to the thought that I was confronted-not, alas, for the first time in my tenure as chief law-enforcement officer of Yuggogheny County-with a crime whose explanation was going to involve not the usual amalgam of stupidity, mea