Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page A

her a cup of coffee.
    She took it, and I discovered that …
    … Dr. Patrick Y. Ogle had been born in Singapore Falls, Maine, eighty years earlier …
    … the Tanuccis were from Corsica …
    … one person in the tent at the time of the theft was a snake charmer named Agnes Sudds …
    … one person was a local businessman from Mirador named Thomas Paul …
    … and one person was a movie director named Alfred Hitchcock.
    One of them was probably the murderer. I showed the list to Kelly.
    “Can’t help you much,” he said. “I’ve only been with this circus a few weeks.” He handed the list to Peg, who was consuming whatever Kelly and I weren’t holding onto.
    “No,” said Peg.
    “My money’s on one of the outsiders,” said Kelly. “Probably that Hitchcock fella.”
    Which, I thought, is why you are a clown and I am a detective, though there were those who would argue that I would make a better clown than a detective.
    “OK,” I said, standing up. “Then let’s start with Hitchcock.”

 
    He was a short, fat man with a lower lip like a pouting tailor, hair sparse but neatly in place, and wearing a dark suit and tie that looked as if they had just been handed to him by Belman’s Cleaning and Dyeing in Hollywood. He was seated in Elder’s office with his hands folded on his lap like a schoolboy.
    “Hitchcock?” I said.
    “I am Alfred Hitchcock,” he replied, looking at me with large eyes hooded by lids which suggested indifference, but the eyes gave too much away. “Are you a policeman?”
    The word “policeman” seemed to come hard for him. I’d never seen Hitchcock before, but I knew who he was.
    “ Suspicion, ” I said.
    He looked frightened. His knuckles went white, and his hands remained clasped.
    “Of what?” he said.
    “No,” I smiled. “I’ve seen Suspicion. I’ve seen your movies. What are you doing here, at the circus?”
    “At the moment,” he said very slowly with a distinct English accent, “I am being very frightened. Before that I was trying to get some material for a sequence in a film I’m considering.”
    “A circus scene?”
    “Precisely,” he said with a slight uplifting of the right side of his mouth that represented pain or an attempt to be friendly. “I’m staying with an acquaintance nearby, and my plan was to stop by for a few hours this morning, get some sense of atmosphere, and present my ideas to the writer. Why have I been asked to talk to you, and who are you?”
    I sat on Elder’s cot. “Between us, I’m a private investigator. Name is Toby Peters. I’m pretty sure that aerialist Tanucci was murdered.”
    Hitchcock’s eyes opened with interest, and he shifted his fat body slowly to face me. “Murdered,” he repeated, either savoring the word or trying to hear it come from his own mouth when it was about something real. “You are sure?” he said.
    “As sure as I am that I’d marry Joan Fontaine if she’d have me,” I answered. He definitely smiled this time.
    “This is better than I could have hoped,” he said as much to himself as to me. “But I’m sorry. A man has been murdered, and all I can think of is my movie.”
    “That’s all right,” I said, wanting to lie back on the cot but unable to do so with the rigid, rotund director seated across from me. “You’re not a suspect. You’re more in the way of a possible witness. I saw you come in the tent earlier, and I saw you watching me when I walked over to the practice hitch.”
    “Yes,” he said. “It struck me as rather peculiar that someone should be walking away from the flow of the crowd, the movement toward death. It struck me as an interesting image, the isolation of one man moving away from where the world is looking.”
    “Did you see anyone go over to that harness, that thing I was looking at, maybe take it down?”
    Hitchcock pursed his lips, blinked his eyes, and nodded once. “Someone did, I believe. I wasn’t watching really, but I had the sense of a person