Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) Read Online Free

anything, so I just shut up when the doc said the elephant had a heart attack.”
    I looked down at the mass of wire, which meant nothing to me, and then at the man who held the lantern.
    “It’s more than the elephants,” I said.
    “More than the elephants,” he said. “Whoever did this saw me coming to check the wires. I think they know I’m thinking more than they want me to think. Truck went wild yesterday, almost ran me down. Driver was off having a sandwich when it happened. It might have been an accident.”
    “OK, but why would anyone want to kill the elephants?” I asked, keeping my eyes from those of the bull behind me.
    “We’ve got maybe forty elephants in this circus,” he said, the lantern light sending shadows to his face that suggested the face of a clown or a skull. “An elephant normally costs fifty thousand dollars. Something like that. Kill off the elephants and you haven’t got much of a circus. Damn, you can’t even replace elephants with the war on.”
    We both looked at the dead elephant for a few more seconds and headed toward the entrance to the tent.
    “What do they do with a dead elephant?” I said.
    “Don’t know,” sighed Kelly, stepping into the night. “Don’t want to know. What I want to know is who is trying to ruin this circus and maybe kill me.”
    “In reverse order,” I said.
    “Together,” he corrected. “It’s too late to meet people. You can start in the morning. What can you do?”
    He stopped and looked at me.
    “I can start asking questions and try to find someone with a motive for trying to …”
    “No, I mean what can you do that would fit in a circus?”
    I thought about it for a minute. I could fire a pistol, but not very well. I could take a punch but had already taken too many of them. I … “Nothing I can think of,” I said.
    “I’ll think of something in the morning,” Kelly said. “Don’t talk in front of Tiny. Tiny’s a good enough guy, not a bad clown, but he’s a talker. I’ll get you some cherry pie when we get up.”
    “Cherry pie?” I said, following him up the stairs of the train car.
    “Circus for easy work,” he said.
    “Right,” I said, following him up the three metal steps.
    Our footsteps clanged across the field and echoed back at us from the nearby railroad cars. Kelly stopped at the top and looked back.
    “I like it at night like this,” he said. “You look out and know what’s under those tents and in those wagons, and you can’t believe that tomorrow it’s all gonna be moving and that you’re going to be out in front of thousands of people, well, maybe hundreds. It’s like another world you know is there and can’t believe will come out.” He shrugged and stepped into the railroad car.
    Tiny was still there. There was an extra mattress in the wagon. Kelly wanted to sleep on it, but I told him a hard mattress on the floor was good for my bad back.
    The two clowns played rummy under a small, yellow-bulbed lamp, and I took off my jacket and shirt, scratched my stomach and felt my stubbly face. Kelly told me where to find soap, water, and a towel. It had been a light day. I had done some driving, laid out a drunk in a tavern, met a clown or two, and examined a murdered elephant. I expected the days to get busier and was bothered by the fact that I felt tired. Somewhere in my battered suitcase back in my battered car was a toothbrush whose bristles sagged like a forgotten Christmas tree and a can of Dr. Lyon’s tooth powder that would have done me no harm, but I wasn’t up to it. I lay back on the mattress with my arms under the thin pillow and looked at the wooden ceiling. Tiny asked me a question, which I answered with a lie before I fell asleep.
    Dreams, I’ve discovered, come in threes. I can usually remember the first two, and I always feel that it is the third one, the one I can’t remember, that will really tell me something. In my first dream, I was wandering through the streets of Cincinnati.