Kaleidoscope (23 page)

Every carney was looking after his neighbor in one way or another. Cassandra was cooing reassurance to Pinhead. A child found solace of sorts in Jo Jo’s fur-lined arms. Everyone had lost something of value. Many performers were without clothes; Gregory Lagopolus huddled with his sons in blankets, his parasitic twin hanging from his chest in a towel.

Tommy Speck trundled up to toss what looked like a scorched-out kerosene can onto the heap already piled at the steps of the café.

“How many is that?” Half Track spit.

“Six, at least,” Tommy answered. “Lit ’em all around the camp; it ain’t no accident.”

The porch coming alive with curses or prayers. Jack remained silent. What would the carnies do when they realized he was responsible for this awful visitation? Or did they know already?

He met Tommy’s eye. The little man spit into the sand.

Well, then. That was that.

“Anybody tracking Ambassador?” Half Track spoke up. “Any idea where he would be?”

“Georgia, perhaps?” Jo Jo offered and the carnies smiled bitter smiles.

“Maybe Luna’s looking for him,” Half Track spoke up. “I ain’t seen Luna, any of yous?”

“Luna—?”

Jack’s legs pushed him up from the porch as if they had a mind of their own. He scanned the porch.

“Has anybody seen Luna? Anyone?”

“Fighting the fire, wasn’t she?” Cassandra asked.

“Did you actually see her?” Jack pressed. “Did anybody see her?”

No reply.

Half Track shifted for the café’ door.

“Maybe we should check.”

Jack burst with a half-dozen fellow misfits into the stairway leading to Luna’s upstairs apartment to find a neighbor noosed at the neck. But it was not Luna. What they saw was a man stripped of his shirt, his tongue thrust obscenely forward and purple with recent coagulation. A rope twisted cruelly around the neck. Slung from a beam near the ceiling.

“SLATE!”

Jack stood in shock with everyone else below the corpse of The Human Blackboard. It was Slate’s gift that had doomed him; the hanging torso displaying a text freshly scratched into the performer’s famously erasable skin:

…
Finder’s Keepers
…

That cruel taunt raised in large, ugly welts.

But where was Luna?

“LUNA!” Jack stumbled past Slate to Luna’s door and his heart stopped.

The door that secured Luna’s upstairs rooms hung cockeyed on a single hinge, its mortise lock splintered and useless. Jack already knew what to expect when he stumbled inside. The place was ransacked, shattered mirrors leaving shards on the floor, tables overturned. The upholstery had been ripped from the parlor’s chairs.

“My God!” Cassandra whispered from the landing.

“LUNA!” Jack called again as he hobbled to her bedroom.

Everything was spilled to the floor, her chest of drawers, her clothes and underthings. The mattress ripped to shreds.

“LUNA!?”

“She’s not here, Jack,” Tommy said quietly.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Jesus!”

Jack reaching for a wall to lean on.

“Look here.” It was the twins, Marcel & Jacques, who spotted the unsealed envelope propped atop her vanity.

The twins’ hands shook like maple leaves as they cooperated to open the note.

“Read it,” Tommy directed. “Go on.”

“I have your moonpie held by the river. You remember the place, Jack. Bring the money and notes and come alone. Otherwise your Amazon will be missing more than her toes.”

“We have to get her back.” This from Doc Snyder.

“We
got
to,” Half Track echoed and that refrain rippled through the room and out to the stairs.

“We gotta get Luna back.”

Jack pushed himself off the wall.

“All right, then. But if this is gonna work I gotta come clean with you people. And you gotta be straight with me.”

No reply at first from the freaks. Until Tommy Speck spoke up bluntly.

“The fuck should we trust you, Jack?”

“Becker was on the trail for your stash way before I got cornered into the job. Not sayin’ that makes me less responsible.”

“Sure as hell doesn’t.”

Jack paused. “Tell you what, should we get Slate down from that noose, first? Then I’ll tell you everything I know.”

The Giant lowered Slate from his hanging tree and carried him downstairs. The message “Finders Keepers” was still clearly visible. They laid him out on a table. Cassandra covered the amazing human slate with a sheet and then they all convened in the chowhouse.

Where Jack for the first time in his life played his cards straight.

“I’m under a gangster’s thumb, fella name of Oliver Bladehorn, up in Cincinnati. Bladehorn sent me down here looking for property he claims was stolen from him. We’re talking about a sizable chunk of cash and a quarter million in railroad certificates. But I ain’t the only one looking for the loot.

“The man who torched your town, hung Slate, and snatched Luna is a cold-blooded killer name of Arno Becker. Becker’s been after the loot for a while; he followed me down here. He knows, and I know, and most of you people know that Luna’s got control of Bladehorn’s property. Now, if I don’t fetch the goods and turn it over to Arno, he will kill Luna, no doubt. And he’ll enjoy himself while he’s about it.”

The carnies taking that declaration still as so many stones.

“It’s down to the wire,” Jack went on quietly. “A straight swap is what he’s offering—cash and stocks for Luna. But I can’t make the swap until somebody turns over the stash. Now, I know somebody down here was in on this from the beginning. Somebody or bodies from Kaleidoscope had a connection with Jerry Driggers and Sally Price and copped themselves a fortune off Bladehorn’s old lady.”

Jack turned to Doc Snyder.

“Was it you, Doc? Aren’t you Alex Goodman? Aren’t you the man in the straw hat?”

Snyder affirmed with a nod.

“But I’m not the man controls the property,” he said.

“No? Then who is?”

For a long moment no one offered anything at all. It was Tommy Speck, finally, who spoke up.

“Ask Peewee,” he said.

A pair of hay bales and a blanket were all that was left of the Princess’s palace. A bald cypress provided her only shade. Peewee hugging her ragged doll to a thin, cotton shift, her eyes wide and vacant. Humming some lullaby, Jack couldn’t make it out.

“Princess,” he knelt beside her. “Princess, we gotta talk.”

No response.

“Luna’s in trouble, Princess. It’s about the money. Do you know where the money is?”

Peewee shifting her marbled eyes inside that wide skull to stare straight into Jack’s.

“You know where it is, Peewee?”

“Sure I do,” she said. “I’m the one who stole it.”

The ground came up to meet Jack’s ass.

“YOU?”

“Me,” she sighed. “See I am, I was—Oliver Bladehorn’s little boy.”

“His—?!”

“His son,” Peewee nodded. “
Was
his son, anyway, though there was always some difference of opinion on that point. On my birth certificate you’d see a name, all right: Oliver Peter Bladehorn, but if you checked my sex you’d see where the doctor scrawled ‘Undetermined’.

“I was a hermaphrodite, Mr. Romaine. Male and female organs from birth, a
real
freak.”

“And your father…he was embarrassed?”

“No.”

She managed a chicory smile.

“He was disgusted.”

“…I’ll be damned,” was all Jack could find to say.

Princess Peewee fluffed her cotton shift about her enormous thighs. “First thing Daddy did was to rewrite my birth certificate: Sex, Male. They started giving me shots, but it didn’t produce, shall we say, the desired effect.

“I developed horrible problems. He used that as an excuse to put me away. A sanatorium. I was fifteen.”

Jack tried to imagine that predicament, a double-sexed adolescent sentenced to a house for lunatics.

“The doctors performed some ‘procedures’ while I was there,” Peewee pawed at her eye with a pie-sized hand. “Things they would
never
do in a normal hospital! It left me with one sex, not the one Daddy wanted, but it also started me gaining weight. By the time Mother broke me out of that hellish place I weighed nearly five hundred pounds.”

Jack tried to imagine that scene. An ambulance backing up to a loading dock. A crew of men with, what—? A cart? A gurney? What would they have used to offload their quarter-ton contraband?

“Mother had her chauffeur bribe a guard at the hospital to get me out. Then Jerry Driggers and Sally Price drove me to the train station and loaded me into a boxcar for New York. Mother was waiting. She had booked passage for two to France and included my name with hers on the manifest. The idea was to make Dad think that I was on the boat with Mother, but in fact I never boarded Mother’s ship. Instead, Jerry was supposed to wait for a week and then put me on a freighter for London. The plan was for Mother to resettle with me in England, but only when she was sure we were out of Daddy’s reach.

“The last time I saw my mother was in New York. She told me she loved me. And she wanted me to know she had a will. Mother had her own estate, you see.”

Jack nodded. “Your dad said he married for her money.”

Peewee sighed. “Was a sizeable estate before he squandered it. But there was some cash and railroad stocks that she managed to hide. Was to be our nest egg. To start over. But then Mother’s ship went down in the North Atlantic and I knew if I tried to claim my inheritance, Father would declare me incompetent, put me back in the sanatorium and take everything for himself.

“So what’d you do?”

She shrugged. “Far as Daddy knew I was drowned at sea with my mother. So I let him believe I was dead and paid Jerry Driggers a pretty penny to bring me my cash and bonds.”

“So that’s how Jerry got involved.”

“Wasn’t hard. Mother told me the safe was under her bed. Beneath a really nice Persian. And she made sure I wouldn’t forget the combination: One-Eight-Nine.”

She smiled.

“January eighth, 1909. My birthday. I gave Jerry most of the cash, took the money that was left and all the stocks and came down here. To Kaleidoscope.”

“How’d you hear about Kaleidoscope?”

“The sanatorium. The Elephant Man.”

“Elephant Man?”

“Not the original, just an inmate with elephantiasis. Did a forty-miler in New Jersey before he got sick. He was talking about this place where no matter how different you were, you’d fit right in. It was in the middle of nowhere, he said. Good people in Kaleidoscope, he said.”

“I’d say he was right,” Jack agreed.

“When Luna took me in she didn’t know I had a dime. First week I was here I told her everything. I was worried my father would find me. Still am. I have nightmares. Initially, I was worried Jerry Driggers would give me away. Dad would know from Mother’s will about the cash and stocks and here was Jerry, her driver, splashing money all over town.

“Terrible to say, but it was luck for me when the cops killed Driggers. No way he could betray my secret from the grave. But I had another problem—Sally Price.”

“Sally knew about the will?”

“No, but she helped Jerry bounce me from the loony bin and she knew my mother paid handsomely for that service. When the cops found all that cash on Jerry, Sally knew my father would be looking for her; that’s why she got herself thrown in prison! I wrote regularly to reassure Sal I’d get her out of town.”

“That would be the doctor’s assignment.”

“Doc Snyder, yes. He was my proxy in Cincinnati. But it wasn’t Doc who was Alex Goodman. It was
moi
.”

Jack grimaced. “Something else I got half-right.”

“I don’t know what happened to Sally. Doc went to Cincinnati and left a train ticket and some cash. I was supposed to meet her.”

“I saw you at the station,” Jack nodded. “Looked like you had just come in from someplace.”

“From St. Petersburg,” Peewee nodded. “I had been down the day before to set Sally up with a job. Got her one, too, with Barnum’s show. Then I took the train back to Tampa to meet Sally, but she didn’t show. And that was—what? Three weeks ago.”

Jack hesitated. “…Sally won’t make it, Princess.”

“She’s—?”

“Becker killed her.” Jack felt himself blushing. “I found the letter you sent to Sally, and her ticket. How I got down here.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“Princess, I hate pressing you, but what did Terrence Dobbs have to do with all this?”

“Well, Terry was a fixer, wasn’t he? See, I had around twenty thousand in cash, but the stocks were in Mother’s name and Mother was dead. So Luna goes to Terry and first thing he does is fake a birth certificate for my mother, can you imagine? With that proof of identity, Terry used his brokerage in Tampa to backdate a sale in Mom’s name so it would look like she cashed in her certificates before she died.”

“Slick. And what did Dobbs get for that piece of work?”

“Fifteen percent, which should have been enough, but then
he
gets in trouble, loses his business and next thing you know he’s back to see me.”

“To blackmail you.”

“He said he’d tell my father everything, if I didn’t get him more money. Said he’d put me back in the sanatorium!”

“But Ambassador put an end to that plan, didn’t he?”

“Ambassador stomped on him, Mr. Romaine, that’s for sure. But he didn’t kill him.”

A sullen breeze brought the smell of carrion.

“I killed Terrence Dobbs,” Peewee’s voice was flat. “He was a perv. Was easy getting him to the tub. And once I got him between my legs—? I drowned him.”

She smiled sadly.

“That’s what upset Ambassador. He thought that Terry was hurting
me
.”

Peewee blinked back tears.

“So what’s Daddy holding over you, Mr. Romaine?”

“Gambling debts. And my family.”

Her hands fluttered.

“He knows I’m here?”

“No, no, Princess, he still thinks you’re dead at the bottom of the ocean with your mother. And that’s all he’s ever gonna know.”