Carnival of Death (6 page)

T
OM
D
ALY
had a number of fantastic theories. One was the archaic belief that, even in a managed economy, a man had the right to enjoy what money he had left after taxes.

To that end, when the horses weren’t running at any of the major tracks in the Greater Los Angeles area, he normally did one of two things following his Friday night telecast.

He and Gene DuBoise drove to Palm Springs and spent the weekend basking in the desert sun and admiring the bikini-clad lovelies around the pool of whatever swank club or hotel the two men chose to patronize.

He and Gene flew to Las Vegas to visit the money they’d left on their previous trips and assuage any feeling of
mal du pays
DuBoise might have suffered during the week by applauding and frequently dating the bare-bosomed daughters of Eve in one of the imported French floor shows.

In Daly’s opinion, both spas were fountains of news and by combining business with pleasure, he seldom failed to return to Los Angeles without one or more newsworthy stories that justified the expenditure for the trip.

He had only one taboo. While he was in either resort, he refused to read the Los Angeles newspapers, listen to the news on radio or watch a news telecast.

The weekend the Ramsdale armored truck was robbed he and Gene had chosen Las Vegas. It was midnight Saturday night and DuBoise, at the moment twenty-four hundred dollars ahead of the game, was shooting two thousand dollars and coming out for his fourth consecutive pass when Lieutenant Schaeffer of the Los Angeles Homicide Squad walked up to the dice table where he and Daly were playing.

“Gentlemen,” Schaeffer greeted them.

“Hi, Charlie,” Daly said.

DuBoise nodded pleasantly. Then after exclaiming in pungent French, he breathed on the dice and bounced them off the far cushion of the table.

Daly translated. “Gene says his baby needs a pair of shoes.”

As DuBoise’s date of the evening, a tall, shapely blonde, leaned over the table to help DuBoise stack the additional chips he’d won, Schaeffer couldn’t help seeing the obvious. “I wouldn’t mind buying her a pair of shoes,” he sighed. “Look. I’d like to talk to you and Gene for a few minutes, Tom.”

“Go right ahead.”

“I mean in private.”

“It must be important.”

“It is.”

“In that case, just a minute.”

Daly transmitted the request to DuBoise. He nodded. “I’ll be with you as soon as I lose the dice.” With French frugality, he isolated most of the money he’d won and pushed the remaining chips out on the board. “Which should be in the next few rolls. I feel a cold wind blowing in off Brittany.”

Daly excused himself to the girl with him, gave her a handful of twenty-dollar chips to amuse herself with while he was gone, then led the way through the casino to an unoccupied table in the lounge.

“Don’t tell me you flew down here just to talk to Gene and me?”

“Evidently you haven’t read the evening paper.”

“I seldom do while I’m here.”

Lieutenant Schaeffer took a Los Angeles paper from his suit coat pocket and handed it to Daly.

Daly unfolded the paper and studied the picture on the front page. It was a four column cut, presumably of his male guest of the evening before, with Laredo wearing his clown costume and sitting with one arm around his pretty young wife. There was a carousel in the background and what appeared to be a male and female body in the foreground. Over the picture, a scare headline read:

The caption under the picture was equally as sensational. It read:

Daly realized he was holding his breath.

“I thought you’d like it,” Schaeffer said.

The story began:

Daly looked up from the paper. “I don’t believe it. Sure, the guy was pushed for money, but he wasn’t that hungry.”

DuBoise joined them. “You don’t believe what, Tom?”

Daly handed him the paper. “This.” He looked across the table at Lieutenant Schaeffer. “What does Laredo say?”

The homicide man sipped at the coffee he’d ordered. “He denies it Naturally. Why wouldn’t he? Three people are dead and the bulk of the money is still missing.” He moved his head from side to side. “You fellows should have been there. I happened to be cruising the neighborhood on another matter when we got the squeal and I never saw anything like it. Teen-agers were fighting with adults. Adults were fighting with each other. And when we tried to quiet them down and recover some of the money, the crowd turned on us and we were finally forced to use fire hoses before we got the thing under control.”

Daly asked, “Where were the Laredos all this time?”

Schaeffer admitted, “We haven’t any idea. Probably hiding the bulk of the money. We found them sitting on the platform of the carousel, just as they are in the picture.”

Daly glanced at the picture again. “That looks like blood on Laredo’s face and costume.”

“The dead guard’s brother did that.”

DuBoise asked, “What does Mrs. Laredo say?”

“Nothing,” the homicide man said. “And I mean that literally. It turns out the girl is a mute.”

“What a pity,” DuBoise sympathized. “She’s such a beautiful girl and seemed so intelligent. But that explains why she let her husband do all the talking last night.” He was puzzled. “But where do Tom and I come in on this?”

“Who arranged for his appearance on Tom’s show last night?”

“I did,” DuBoise said. “Part of my job is finding interesting guests for Tom to interview and I penciled Laredo in two weeks ago.”

“What kind of a guest did he make?”

Daly lit a cigarette from the stub of the one he was smoking. “Not very good. But you haven’t answered Gene’s question. Why fly down here to talk to us?”

Lieutenant Schaeffer made certain that Daly and DuBoise understood the department’s position. “Now, look, Tom. We’re not throwing off on either of you. You’ve given us too many good plugs. But we’re on a spot and will be until we nail down every detail of this affair. And we don’t want to make any mistakes. Did anything unusual happen before, during or after your show last night?”

“I got this eye,” Daly said.

DuBoise explained. “Tom was slugged by two goons when he drove onto the studio parking lot last night.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Schaeffer said. “I didn’t catch the show last night, but one of the boys on the squad did. And he said that Tom asked Laredo some questions that could tie in with what happened this morning.”

“They could at that,” Daly admitted. “As Gene just said, I was slugged by two goons who asked me, very politely, to warn Chico not to try something as that one was their pigeon. And that could have been the armored truck job.”

“Go on,” Schaeffer said.

Daly continued, “To emphasize their request they gave me this eye and knocked me down on the pavement and kicked me. Later, while we were on the air, I asked Laredo if the message meant anything to him, if he had ever been called Chico. And he said that the message didn’t mean anything, but that some of the boys in the invasion brigade had called him Chico.”

The homicide man was pleased. “Good. Did you record the show last night, Gene?”

“I always do.”

“The D.A. will want to listen to the tape. So far we haven’t filed charges against either Laredo or his wife. But as we see the deal, the two goons who beat Tom were members of the unsuccessful invasion who hoped to make money for the cause by looting the armored truck and didn’t want Laredo to beat them to it. Or they were planted by Laredo to shift the blame from his shoulders.”

“What does he say?”

“He claims he didn’t have anything to do with the caper, that the job was pulled by two John Does dressed in clown costumes and wearing makeup identical to his.”

“The story in the paper says there were at least six clowns.”

Lieutenant Schaeffer shrugged. “You know how eyewitnesses are. Few of them ever agree. All we know for certain is that Laredo was in clown costume and there was another clown in the money compartment of the truck. The one who threw the loose bills and silver to the crowd.”

“What,” DuBoise asked, “do the surviving guards say?”

“There,” Schaeffer said, “was one of the really clever parts of the caper. One guard wasn’t even on the lot while the truck was being looted. A doctor we can’t locate sent him for a stomach pump. And the guard who stayed behind, the one who should have been inside the truck, is the dead man’s older brother and so emotionally upset that his testimony is practically useless.”

“I suppose you’ve considered the possibility of it being an inside job?”

“We have. But that possibility seems remote. The guard who went for the stomach pump, an older man named Quinlan, has been with the company for thirty years. As I just said, the other man was the dead guard’s brother.”

Daly sucked at his cigarette for a moment “All right What do you want me and Gene to do?”

Schaeffer told him. “Give me a deposition as to what happened on the KAMPC-TV lot last night. Also written permission to get the tape of last night’s show out of your files.”

“We’ll do better than that,” Daly said. “We’ll fly back with you. On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“That we be given permission to talk to Laredo and his wife without a police guard or a stenographer standing by.”

“Granted. But if he lied to you last night, he’ll lie to you now. What do you hope to get out of him?”

“I don’t know,” Daly admitted. “But this could be one of the biggest local stories to come along in years and I want the whole of it before I go on the air Monday night.” He continued quietly, “It can be that Laredo is in this thing up to his eyes. Then, again, it can be that someone deliberately pinned it on him.”

“Come off it, Tom.”

“I mean it,” Daly said. “I’m not easily impressed, but while he gave a lousy show, Laredo impressed me. And it’s a little difficult for me to believe that a man willing to lose a leg and give up what he and all the other boys in the invasion brigade tried to do, against impossible odds, would go around killing old men and young mothers with babies in their arms for any amount of money.”

“You’ve a point,” Schaeffer admitted. “But you’re up against one big stumbling block.”

“What’s that?”

“Young Mrs. Laredo. Following your line of reasoning, girls as young and pretty as she is normally don’t go around slipping lethal doses of chloral hydrate into pink lemonade.”

“We don’t know she did.”

Schaeffer Was impatient with Daly. “Climb down from that cloud and get with the rest of us, Tom. There’s been bad blood between the Laredos and the dead guard for weeks. Ever since Kelly squeezed one of her boobies and tried to kiss her on a parking lot in Burbank. There was another exchange of words this morning, with Laredo admitting he was angry enough to shoot the dead guard if he made another pass at his wife.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No,” Schaeffer said. “He didn’t shoot him. But we have testimony to the effect that five minutes before he died, Tim Kelly had never felt better in his life. Then, to needle Laredo, he stopped at the stand and asked for — and Paquita Laredo gave him — a free cup of pink lemonade. Two hundred witnesses will testify to that Kelly drank the lemonade and walked on. A few feet from the stand, without making any other stop, he clawed at his throat and complained that his belly felt like it was on fire. Three minutes later he was dead, with, according to the lab report, enough chloral hydrate in him to kill two men.”

“It doesn’t look good,” DuBois said.

Daly studied the newspaper picture. “Who took this?”

Schaeffer finished the last of his coffee. “I don’t know the man’s name. But as I understand it, he’s a free-lance photographer and public relations man who was hired to beat the drum for the new shopping center.”

Daly continued to study the picture. “I assume it was taken before the police got there.”

“That’s right.”

“And the clown in the picture is Laredo?”

“Yes.”

“And the girl is Mrs. Laredo?”

“Yes. That’s just the way we found them.”

“With Laredo bleeding from a vicious pistol-whipping and Paquita Laredo holding the dead woman’s baby?”

DuBoise nodded. “I think I see what you’re getting at, Tom.”

“That’s more than I do,” Scheaffer said.

Daly tapped the picture. “Okay. Tell us this, Lieutenant Why, if Paquita Laredo is so cold-blooded that she could poison a man as her part in a plot to loot an armored truck of one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars did she stop on her way to her badly injured husband to pick up a crying baby? More important, if she and Mickey plotted the looting of the truck, why aren’t they out trying to get some of the money instead of sitting on their butts on the platform of a two-bit kiddy carousel?”

“I don’t know,” Schaeffer admitted.

“Neither do I,” Daly said. “But I intend to find out.”

T
HE LEGEND
over the doorway read: