The Fear in Yesterday's Rings Read online

  “Who made the offer?”

  “The guy I talked to was some tight-ass lawyer type in a pinstripe suit who wouldn’t tell me the name of the buyer. I was drunk at the time. I think I cursed him out when he said the freaks and performers couldn’t be part of the deal. I told him I wouldn’t help kill my own circus, and I threw him out.

  “By then, I’d run out of operating expenses. We were just outside of Chicago, so I drove in and managed to get a bank loan, with the semis and all the rigging as collateral. That was a stupid play, I suppose, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was hoping it could still be like it used to be and that there’d be throngs of people waiting for us in the next town. What I got instead was a notice from the bank that I was in default on the loan and that the circus had been auctioned off. Christ, I can’t blame them; I was so drunk all the time that I’d missed five payments and hadn’t even known it. The next thing I knew there were marshals on the grounds ordering everyone off. I think whoever had wanted to buy it in the first place had managed to pick it up at the auction, because the only things the new owner or owners wanted were the semis, the rigging, and the animals.”

  “Did you ever find out who bought it?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you ask the bank?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me; they said it was confidential information. I was too drunk to argue.”

  “Maybe it was Cole, or Clyde Beatty, or even Ringling; one of the big boys trying to gobble up the competition.”

  Phil shook his head. “No. I checked. I swear I’d have killed somebody if I’d found it was circus people I knew who’d taken my show away from me.” He paused, swallowed hard, continued, “After the marshals threw me out of my own circus, I just walked away. Right now I don’t even recall where I walked to. As far as I was concerned, my life was over; I’d lost everything. I had no money, no place to go, and I just wanted to die. I can’t even remember how I eventually ended up here, in New York. I ate at soup kitchens as long as they’d let me wash dishes to pay for it, and I collected soda cans off the street and out of garbage cans to pay for my booze. I was busy drinking myself to death, and I guess I was pretty close to succeeding until you had to come along and butt your nose into my business. Now I owe you, and I always do my best to pay my debts. I don’t even dare take a drink until I manage to pay you back.”

  “Well, if you only plan to stay alive and off the booze long enough to pay me back, you’re going to find from my itemized bill that private hospital rooms and private nursing care in New York City are very expensive commodities. So you’d better plan on staying around a long time. But let’s stop talking nonsense. There’s something else I want to ask you, because something about this business strikes me as curious. By your own account, you were running an operation that couldn’t even pay its way as a mud show. And even if you had dropped the sideshows and cut back on everything else, you’d still have been left out in the cold because the other shows had exclusive contracts with all the big indoor arenas on the circuit. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Even at the bargain-basement price the circus must have gone for at the bank auction, who would want it?”

  “Beats me, Mongo.”

  “And then the new owner gets rid of all the performers and only keeps the animals. Christ, Mabel alone eats nearly a ton of hay a day, and that can get expensive. Buying that circus in the first place, and then keeping only the animals, doesn’t seem to make any business sense at all. If people aren’t going to come out to see a full-rigged circus, I doubt they’d come in any numbers to see a traveling zoo.”

  Phil merely shrugged and shook his head sadly.

  “What’s the name of the bank in Chicago that gave you the loan on the semis and rigging?”

  “Hell, I don’t remember. Why?”

  “Just curious. Think, Phil. What’s the name of the bank?”

  He cocked his head to one side as he pondered the question, idly drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “I think it was an outfit called United States Savings and Loan,” he said at last.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. Why the curiosity about the bank?”

  “Let’s just say that I want to know what bank not to do business with in Chicago.”

  “Now, my friends, I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news.”

  Garth froze with his brandy halfway to his mouth, then slowly set the snifter back down on the linen tablecloth. He brushed a heavily muscled hand back through his thinning, shoulder-length, wheat-colored hair, then turned to his wife. “What did I tell you, Mary? There’s no way Mongo was going to invite us into the city and spring for dinner at Café des Artistes unless he wanted something from us. I’ve seen some very nasty situations spring up from Mongo’s ‘good news, bad news’ crap.”

  Our table had been attracting attention all evening, and for once it wasn’t the dwarf that people were staring at. Mrs. Garth Frederickson was Mary Tree, and she came complete with a stunning figure and presence, piercing blue eyes, sculpted features, and a magnificent, flowing crown of thick, white-streaked blond hair. Mary had first burst onto the music scene and into the national conscience and consciousness in the sixties, when she was a teenage, barefoot, flowers-in-her-hair folk singer and antiwar activist. And she had always been Garth’s dream-lover, his idea of the perfect woman. I’d met her the year before, while I was investigating the death of a friend, and Garth had met her through me. Mary’s career had declined in the seventies and been virtually eclipsed by the early eighties. But a small record company in New York had released a new album of hers at just about the time she and Garth were getting married, and it had turned out to be a crossover success, revitalizing her career. The album had put her back on top, and she was once again the “queen of folk.” And so people stared. It tended to annoy my brother, but Mary had the grace to pretend that she didn’t notice. Now she laughed lightly, touched Garth’s arm.

  “Now, now, darling, be nice to your brother. Remember that if it wasn’t for him, we never would have met.”

  Garth heaved a mock, heavy sigh, looked back at me. “My wife says I should be nice to you, Mongo, despite my distinct sense of foreboding.” He paused to lift his crystal snifter and drain off his brandy, smacked his lips. “Give us the bad news first so we can get it out of the way.”

  “I’ve got a problem. You remember Phil Statler?”

  “Sure; the circus owner, your ex-boss.” He turned again to Mary, smiled thinly, continued, “Phil Statler is the man who transformed grungy, plain old Robert Frederickson into Mongo the Magnificent.”

  “He’s sick, Garth. As a matter of fact, I’m putting him up in your apartment in the brownstone. Right now, I’ve got Jacques baby-sitting him.”

  Garth frowned slightly. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “The doctors would cite alcoholism and the effects of living on the streets and eating garbage for a couple of years, but I’d say he’s dying of a broken heart. He lost the circus because he couldn’t bear to put people, freaks especially, out of work, and he went right down the tubes. The cops picked him up off the streets and took him to Bellevue, which is where I found him; Jacques found some circus posters with my name on them, and he called me.”

  Mary made a small, sad sound in her throat, shook her head, and looked away.

  Garth said, “That’s heavy, Mongo. The man must be close to seventy now. Can’t Social Services do something for him?”

  “He’s too proud to accept any kind of help. Besides, I believe the real problem is that he’s lost the will to live; he wants to die. He as much as told me that the only reason he’s not back out on the streets right now boozing it up is that he feels an obligation to stay sober and get well long enough so that he can get a job and earn enough money to pay me back for his hospital bills. I’m not sure how much longer I can keep him around the brown-stone.”

  Mary reached across the table, took my hand in hers, and squeezed it. “Tha
t’s terrible, Mongo,” she said softly. “How can Garth and I help?”

  “I’m getting to that, Mary. But first Garth has to ask me about the good news.”

  “I don’t feel much like joking around anymore, Mongo,” Garth said evenly. “I know something about how the street people suffer, and I know how much you love that man. Just tell us how we can help.”

  “Not so fast. I insist you ask me about the good news.”

  Mary started to say something, but Garth silenced her by putting a finger to his lips. Without change of expression or tone, he asked, “What’s the good news, Mongo?”

  I glanced back and forth between my brother and Mary, smiled wryly. “If Phil’s basic problem is that he’s lost the will to live, I think I have a solution to the problem.”

  Garth leaned forward on the table, peered at me suspiciously. “Which is?”

  “I’m going to try to buy a circus for him to run.”

  “Great, Mongo,” Garth said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “A circus is just what you need. And what will you—?”

  “Hear him out, Garth,” Mary said, wrapping her long, tapering fingers around my brother’s thick wrist. “Go ahead, Mongo.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” I said, nodding to the woman with the sky-blue eyes before turning my attention back to Garth. “Now, listen; Phil lost the circus when the bank holding a lien on it sold it off at auction, but there was something decidedly funny about the deal, judging from the way Phil described it. Assuming he was sober enough at the time to know what was happening, it sounds to me like the Statler Brothers Circus may have been some accountant’s bright idea of a tax write-off; for all we know, that circus may now be owned by Gulf and Western. At the least, I hope to find out just who does own it. The bank that auctioned it off is a Chicago outfit called United States Savings and Loan. If it is a tax write-off, a lot of depreciation has already been claimed by now; the owner may be tired of the whole thing and just might be receptive to an offer that would now give him a fair return on his original investment.”

  Garth grunted, shrugged. “No matter what deal you may be able to make, buying a circus is still going to take a lot of cash. If you’re asking if it’s all right with me to take a second mortgage on the brownstone to finance the deal, of course it is.”

  “Whoa, hoss; let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m thinking it would be a good idea to look for partners in the venture in order to spread the risk around, and I’m pretty sure I know where to find them. Phil kept his entire stable of freaks on the payroll right up to the bitter end, long after just about every other circus in the country had packed their freaks off to whatever fate awaits people like a three-legged man and a pig-faced lady. Even freaks who never worked for Phil Statler have heard of him and respect him; freaks who worked for him love the man. Well, there are a whole lot of retired freaks living in a small town in Florida, just outside Sarasota. Naturally, there’s a large percentage on welfare, but others made good investments over the years and are well enough off so that they might not mind using a circus themselves as a tax write-off if it couldn’t turn a profit. What I’ll propose to them is a corporation, a limited partnership where individuals will own shares, and where actual operations will be turned over to Phil Statler, who’ll be compensated on a profit-sharing basis after his expenses are covered. He may need some outside help to advise him on how to best manage and compete with the other big shows, but that’s a step or two down the road. The first thing I have to do is go to Florida and see if I can line up backers. If I can, I then head to Chicago to pry the name of the owner out of United States Saving and Loan.”

  Mary asked, “Why not just find out where the circus is now, go there, and make your inquiries?”

  “Oh, I plan to check out the circus itself, but before I do that I want to find out who I’m dealing with. If it is just one of hundreds of entities owned by some huge corporation or holding company, I have to know who I can approach to talk business; the circus manager wouldn’t necessarily give me that information or take me seriously.

  “Anyway, that’s my plan; I may be able to put it all together, or I may not, but I feel I have to try. I figure it will take me a week, maybe two, to take care of business. Garth, that means I have to ask you to handle our entire caseload while I’m gone. We’ve got those two big things hanging fire—Bechtel’s offer of a permanent retainer, and possible work for the Belgian consulate.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Mongo,” Garth said absently. He was looking at me, but his brown eyes were slightly out of focus, and I knew that my empathic brother was thinking of Phil Statler’s plight and pain, and the suffering of all the homeless people on the streets of the nation’s cities and towns. “Put us down for a piece of the action if you can put a deal together.”

  “And make it a big piece of the action, Mongo,” Mary said, her eyes misting with tears. “The album sales are going well, so we’ll have money to invest. If it all ends up a bust and we have to write it off, that’s all right too.”

  “We’ll talk figures if and when I can structure some kind of deal in the first place. In the meantime, I was wondering if the two of you can keep Phil company while I’m out of town—either at the brownstone or taking him back to Cairn with you.”

  Garth asked, “Which do you think is better, brother?”

  “Take him back up to Cairn with you, if you’ve got the room. I think the change of scenery might do him good.”

  “Will he agree to come?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to make up some story; it’s important that he doesn’t know what I’m up to.”

  Mary smiled coyly, batted her long, pale eyelashes. “We’ll all go back to the brownstone now, and I’ll work my feminine wiles on him.”

  “You’re a good man, Mongo,” Garth said in a low, husky voice, “and I love you.”

  “Harrumph,” I intoned as I signaled our waiter for the check. “You’d never know it from the way you talk to me sometimes.”

  Chapter Three

  Palmetto Grove is a small town of a few thousand people located an hour’s drive northeast of Sarasota. One of the most unusual towns in America, it isn’t listed in any tourist brochure, and few people have even heard of it; the residents prefer it that way. For decades, before the decline of the Big Tops and their accompanying sideshows, Palmetto Grove was where circus freaks, refugees from ultimate birthmarks like mine, owned homes where they went to live in the off-season, or to retire when their “performing” days were over. Although most of the freaks prefer, even here, to stay out of the public eye, the mayor of Palmetto Grove was—the last I’d heard—a “dog-faced man” by the name of Charles Harris. It was not at all unusual to see a half dozen or so “bearded ladies” chatting together in the municipal park or pushing their children in strollers. The state trooper unit with jurisdiction over Palmetto Grove often pressed the town sheriff—an eight-foot giant who came complete with his own customized van—into service when they thought the situation demanded. There was no rowdyism, no Saturday night bar fights, in Palmetto Grove.

  Neither Hertz nor Avis counters at the airport had any models I would feel comfortable driving, or they would feel comfortable renting to me, but I finally found a local car rental agency that handled Isuzus. I rented a Trooper and drove out to Palmetto Grove. I stopped in a motel-restaurant on the highway just outside of town, ordered coffee in a container, and took it out to a pay phone in the fern-lined lobby. I took out a pad and pen, then began thumbing through the local directory, looking for names of people I might know, and who would remember me. By the time I’d finished scanning the C’s I already had four names, but I kept going out of curiosity. It was when I reached the R’s that I saw a name that made my breath catch in my throat and my mouth go dry. I stared at the name, feeling bittersweet memories swell in my mind, and wondered what this particular woman was doing in a town filled with freaks.

  Harper Rhys-Whitney was no freak—not unless you held her accountab
le for the freakish effect she had on the glands and good judgment of virtually every man who had, at least in the past, laid eyes on her. Including me. Especially me. When, as a teenager, I’d first met her, I had instantly decided that this other teenager was the most beautiful and desirable woman I would ever meet in my lifetime. I’d only been half right. I’d since met a number of beautiful women, had affairs with a few, and loved one—a gorgeous and compassionate witch from upstate New York, a woman by the name of April Marlowe. April had not only saved my life and mind but had also given me the courage, for the first time in my life, to overcome the insecurities and feeling of emotional vulnerability that go with being a dwarf and loving someone freely in return. However, my deep love for April notwithstanding, no woman had ever had the same instantaneous, raw, and lasting impact on my libido as Harper Rhys-Whitney, with her aura of primal, animal energy and sexuality.

  And all of this thinly veiled promise of sensual paradise radiating from a woman who, while almost perfectly proportioned, couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds and stood only five feet tall—not that many inches taller than I am.

  I’d been with the circus a year and a half when Harper had descended upon our company with her scaled menagerie like a bolt of heat lightning out of a clear summer day. Although she was nineteen, certainly of age, she was still, in effect, a runaway. And what she was running away from was influential wealth and power that others would have killed for.

  Her family, I was to discover, was blue-blood, Mainline Philadelphia society, seriously rich, their fortune made in textiles in an industrial empire founded by her grandfather. As Harper had told it, she and her family never got along; they considered her a juvenile delinquent, primarily because of her defiance of virtually all authority, but also because of her obsession with dangerous reptiles and her propensity, from the time she was thirteen, to run with motorcycle gangs. Over the course of her childhood and adolescence she was frequently punished by having her snake collection taken away, and she was shipped off to more than a half dozen ultra-expensive boarding schools specializing in educating and smoothing the jagged edges off the troubled sons and daughters of the rich. She was thrown out of all the boarding schools and somehow always managed to start a new snake collection no matter where she was. Finally, upon turning eighteen, she invested a not inconsiderable sum of money into a large, and most impressive, collection of exotic reptiles—including not only many species of poisonous snakes but giant constrictors and a full-grown Komodo dragon with a taste for Big Macs and sauerkraut. She put her collection in cages, packed them all up in a truck, and went off looking for a circus. She worked for a few carny shows, didn’t like them, set off again. Finally, she found Statler Brothers Circus. Phil hired her on the spot, with only a cursory glance at her menagerie in her track. Sex, he’d patiently explained to his dwarf tumbler, sells tickets; if Harper Rhys-Whitney couldn’t really handle snakes, then he’d simply teach her to do something else. Anything else. She had that much presence, was that magnetic.