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

might be a little angry with God for allowing Himself to accept the whim of young Tanucci’s death, but maybe God was just an onlooker.
    I shook my head. I mean I literally shook my head to try to clear it. Sometimes I get angry and sometimes I get serious. Not often, but sometimes. I almost never get depressed. To get depressed you have to have a long-range plan that fouls up. I don’t have any long-range plans. I go job to job, concussion to concussion, dime to dime. If people get in the way of a car or a bullet or one of the grisly weapons including bad luck, I step to the side and keep going, hoping for not much more than the chance to finish up whatever I’m working on.
    But the circus got to me. First the dead elephant, and now the Tanuccis. Hell, if I was going to feel guilty, I might as well feel it all the way. I felt worse about the dead elephant than I did about Tanucci. Tanucci picked the circus. He had a chance, maybe had some enemies, maybe didn’t check the harness. Maybe …
    I walked past the small crowd and glanced at the people at the entrance, straining to see in. One or two of them were Cora and Thelma, the Siamese twins. Beyond them, more people were talking, asking questions. The ones in front had heard the doctor and seen the reaction. I moved to the circus ring in the corner and to the trapeze in its center, no more than a dozen feet over the ground. The Mechanic thing Kelly had mentioned dangled down from a pole. It swung slightly in the flat air about six feet over the ground. I didn’t even have to touch it to see what I didn’t want to see. The place where the leather belt had given way was torn for about one quarter of an inch. The other three inches of the belt were cut. I couldn’t tell how thick or tough the leather was or how sharp the knife had been that cut it, but it was clear that the final break in the leather had been jagged and rough and the rest along a straight line.
    I was about to touch the harness to be sure when I heard Elder’s voice behind me say to either the doctor or the Tanuccis, “We’re going to have to call the police.”
    The word police may have done it. Maybe it was something else, but a small group from the tent entrance broke through, a group of four. Then someone took charge at the entrance and cut off the crowd. The last one through was a short, fat man who waddled forward slowly, far behind. In front of him were a big man wearing a dark gray suit and a dark gray look, a thin man in gray work clothes whose silent tears caught the light against his pale cheeks, and a red-haired young woman in spangled blue tights wearing a little hat with a tall feather.
    “Hold it,” shouted Elder, stretching out his right hand toward the crowd. “Right there. Stop. No one else in here. No Kinders, no brass. Peters.”
    I turned and moved to Elder, who whispered, “We’ve got to get Nelson back here. You want to take the home run. Now’s the time.”
    “Can’t,” I said, trying to ease him away from the Tanuccis. “Cops don’t like it when people they want to nail run away from murder scenes.”
    It was Elder’s turn to move me away from the others by grabbing my jacket and stepping back. His grip could have gone through my arm.
    “Hold it,” I cried, trying to shake him loose with less success than Billy Conn had had against Joe Louis.
    “Look,” he said evenly, looking over my shoulder at the small group gathering around the doc, the corpse, and the grieving family. “Don’t try to make a profit on this. Don’t turn the circus into a …”
    “Circus?” I finished.
    “For a lot of these people,” he said, his mustache bobbing up and down, “the only thing they call hometown or a religion or anything is the circus. You make them think murder, and the panic you’ll see is like nothing you’ve ever seen. These are people who put their life on the wire every day and twice on Saturdays and Sundays.”
    “But it’s murder,” I repeated. “No