The Fear In Yesterday's rings

Chapter Two

Phil regained consciousness a day later, but he wasn't talking-not to his doctors, not to Jacques, and not to me. The first time I walked into his room his recognition of me was clearly reflected in his pale blue, watery eyes, but then he quickly averted his gaze and wouldn't look at me again. It was the same the next day, and the day after that.

They released him from the hospital on the sixth day, into my care. The doctors had cleared up his pneumonia and a half dozen other infections on and inside his body with antibiotics, but he was still very weak. They estimated he would need a minimum of two or three weeks of rest before he would be strong enough to be on his own-presumably to return to his life on the streets. I was strongly advised to keep him away from booze. I'd contracted with a private nursing service for Phil's at-home care, and I had him transported by private ambulance from the hospital to my brownstone on West Fifty-sixth Street, where I put him to bed in Garth's apartment on the third floor.

He still hadn't spoken, and he still wouldn't meet my gaze.

Fearing that brain damage, Alzheimer's, or some other condition had robbed him of reason or speech, I checked once again with the doctors and was told once again what I had been told before-brain scans had indicated no organic damage, and there was nothing to indicate his mental faculties and vocal cords were not intact. Their suspicion was that Phil's muteness was caused by the same bone-deep depression that might have prompted him to take to the streets in the first place. Antidepressant drugs were contraindicated for the present time because of the other medications which had been administered to him.

And so I was just going to have to wait. Each day I popped up at frequent intervals from the offices downstairs to check with the nurse on duty to see how Phil was doing. I'd sit next to his bed and talk about anything that came to mind, but he would always turn his head away and remain silent. The plastic bag containing the circus posters I'd returned to him lay unopened on the night table next to his bed. I'd anticipated-dreaded-having him ask for a drink, but he didn't even do that.

On Thursday, four days after I'd brought my former boss home, I was in my office working on a report for a corporate client when the day nurse stuck his head in the door.

"Dr. Frederickson, I think you'd better go upstairs to see Mr. Statler. He just told me I was fired."

I paid the nurse for the rest of his shift, then bounded up the stairs to the third floor, fearing that the reason for Phil's sudden burst of animation was that he'd caught a glimpse of the well-stocked bar in the living room of the apartment. But Phil wasn't at the bar. I found him sitting up on the edge of the bed; he'd found the clothes I'd bought for him. He'd managed to pull on a pair of corduroy pants and was trying, with badly trembling fingers, to take the pins from a new shirt.

"I can't afford nurses," he said in a low, hoarse voice as I entered the room and approached the bed. He didn't look up but simply kept talking very rapidly, occasionally shaking his head from side to side for emphasis. "I can't afford that private room you put me in at the hospital, and I can't afford those fancy doctors you sent around. I wanted to walk out of there, but I was just too goddamned weak. If you think Phil Statler needs the goddamned dwarf he plucked off a farm in Nebraska to take care of him in his dotage, you've got another think coming. I don't know how right now, but I'm going to pay you back every goddamned cent you've spent on me."

It was the terribly injured pride of a terribly proud man speaking. I just let it go on. When he paused for breath, I stepped close to him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and hugged him to me.

"Oh, God, Mongo," he sobbed into my chest, encircling my waist with his arms. "I'm so ashamed to have you see me like this."

"Be quiet, Phil," I said softly, rocking him back and forth like a child. "Finish putting your clothes on, and I'll show you around the offices of Frederickson and Frederickson. Even though my brother's my partner, I insisted on having my name listed first."

"Where's your big brother?" Phil asked in a slightly less hoarse voice as he sipped his third cup of coffee.

We were sitting at Garth's kitchen table, close to a window where the sound of heavy rain splattering against the glass almost drowned out his weak voice. I judged that Phil was at least forty pounds lighter than when I'd last seen him, and Garth's bathrobe hung around his now-frail body like a shroud. My former boss was going to need a lot of tender loving care, some fattening up, and something else I had no idea how to give him.

"He got married, and he's happy as a clam in a mud bank. He married a woman by the name of Mary Tree. They're living in her place, in a town called Cairn; it's about fifty miles north of here, on the Hudson. He quit the force a few years back and came into partnership with me."

"Mary Tree the folk singer?"

"That's her."

"Antiwar activist? Pacifist?"

"Ex-pacifist."

"Good-looking woman."

"You've got that right."

Phil sipped at his coffee, holding the cup with two trembling hands. Then he set the cup down, stared into its depths. "I lost the circus about two and a half years ago, Mongo," he said to the cup. "After that I lost myself; things just kind of got out of control. Now it's all sort of an alcohol blur to me."

"You don't have to talk about it, Phil," I said quietly. "You don't owe me any explanations."

"I want to explain."

"If it'll make you feel better, go ahead. But, like I said, you don't owe me anything."

Now he glanced up from his coffee cup, and his pale blue eyes glinted with what might have been anger. It was the strongest hint of any feeling but depression I'd seen in him yet, and I decided it was a healthy sign. "I appreciate what you've done- what you're doing-for me, Mongo. The kindness you've shown to me is the kind of debt a man can't repay, but I'm telling you that I'm going to find a way to pay back every penny you've spent on me."

"Sure," I said evenly.

He stiffened. "You don't think I mean it? You don't think I can work and pay you back?"

"Of course you can."

"Then don't 'sure' me like that. I'm no welfare case. I may have lived on the streets and eaten out of garbage cans, but nobody ever had to support me. There's no way you could know this, but this is the longest I've been sober in a lot of years. I don't even want a drink. The reason I don't want a drink is that the minute I woke up in the hospital and saw you, I knew you'd been taking care of me. I'm too used to having people depend on me, Mongo, and I can't stand to be dependent on anyone; I'd rather starve or freeze to death. When I realized what you'd done, I knew I was going to have to find a way to earn enough money to pay you back. That's more important to me than booze."

Phil Statler, I could see, was going to be a problem; there's nothing more difficult to nurse than someone else's wounded pride. "Phil, you mentioned kindness, and how difficult it can be to repay. Well, think of all the kindness you showed to me, the skills you nurtured in me, and then the fame and fortune that those skills brought me. But the greatest gift you gave a certain defiant, defensive, and decidedly self-conscious young dwarf was an opportunity to live with dignity and self-respect. I wouldn't be where I am now, Phil, and I certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as comfortable with myself as I am, if not for you. As far as I'm concerned, this is at most simply payback time."

Phil sighed, once again looked down at his coffee cup. "I appreciate it more than I can ever say, Mongo," he murmured.

"I'm well aware of that, Phil. No problem."

"And I'm going to find a way to pay you back."

"Whatever you say, Phil. In the meantime, I'd take it as a personal favor if you'd think of this place as your home. It's a big house, as you can see, and I've been kind of clanking around in it since Garth moved out. I'd like you to keep me company, at least until you get your strength back and your plans in order. When it comes time to reimburse me for medical expenses, or whatever, I'll give you an itemized bill, if it'll make you happy. I'll always think of you not only as my mentor but as a second father. Now I'm asking you to let me be your friend. Please accept my help, Phil, until you're back on your feet."

He looked up, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again when tears welled in his eyes. He nodded, then rose and retrieved the coffee pot from the warmer on the stove. He refilled both of our cups, then sat down again. "What do you know about the circus business these days, Mongo?"

"Well, there's the Big Apple Circus, and Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey still comes into Madison Square Garden for a few weeks every year. Aside from that, I don't know much. To tell you the truth, I always had mixed feelings about being in the circus. Despite the fact that you'd made me a headliner, I still felt that being in a circus was somehow just too common for a dwarf."

Phil shook his head impatiently. "I don't understand what the hell you're talking about."

"People expect to find dwarfs in a circus; it's like going to see The Wizard of Oz."

"I still don't understand what the hell you're talking about."

"It doesn't matter."

"It's the same as I could never understand why you quit the circus to take a job as a college professor after you got that doctor's degree. You were at the top when you quit, and I know you were making a hell of a lot more money than you were ever going to make as a professor. Hell, the world has college professors up the ass, but there aren't a whole hell of a lot of circus performers who could do the stuff you did."

"There weren't-aren't-that many dwarf college professors. There are a hell of a lot fewer dwarf college professors than there are circus performers."

He stared at me for some time, and I could see pale shadows move in his pale eyes as he struggled to understand. "Ah," he said at last, raising his gray eyebrows slightly. "You mean it's the same thing as saying there aren't a whole hell of a lot of dwarf private investigators?"

"Now you've got it."

He shook his head slightly, brushed a strand of gray hair back from his eyes. "You're a pisser, Mongo. Always were."

I grinned. "Garth always says I have a tendency to overcompensate. But it all started with you."

"Yeah, well, I guess maybe you got out at the right time-even if you did just about break poor Mabel's heart and leave me with an elephant nearly nobody else could handle. The days of the real Big Top were about over, and everybody knew it but me. Ringling had already started developing into the mechanized arena show it is now, and it wasn't long before the Cole and Clyde Beatty people started going down the same road, booking up all the largest indoor arenas along their routes and cutting back on everything that wouldn't fit into one ring inside some goddamn armory.

"At first I was delighted to see Cole and Clyde Beatty going that way. Hell, our circuits had always overlapped, and we'd always been fighting tooth and claw to be at the top of the second-tier circuses, behind Ringling. Now, the way I had it figured, my competition had written themselves off by going into the indoor arenas. Statler Brothers Circus was the only genuine Big Top left in the whole goddamn country, not counting the little mud shows, and I couldn't imagine that parents and their kids would be content to sit inside some air-conditioned warehouse for two or three hours to watch what amounted to a vaudeville show when they could spend a day at a real circus, in real tents pitched in a field where they could wander around the midway or through the sideshows as long as they wanted, and then go inside a real Big Top to watch a real circus."

"And you were wrong," I said quietly.

The old man grunted, took another sip of coffee, said: "Yeah, I was wrong. I still don't understand it, Mongo. I kept doing everything the way I had been doing it, the way I'd been taught by my father and uncles. I got the best performers I could find and paid them well, kept a large stable of good animals and kept them in peak condition; I had the most interesting freaks, I made sure that the food at all the concessions was quality stuff, and I made damn sure that none of the carny barkers ripped off the rubes. But attendance just kept dropping off. Each year it got worse. I tried upping the advertising budget, but that was like pouring money down a rat hole. Toward the end we'd be playing matinees outside some town and we'd get maybe fifty people inside the tent. And damned if the other shows weren't packing people into the indoor arenas."

"There may be no place left in this country for real circuses anymore, Phil," I said evenly. "People just don't have the time, or maybe the patience, to spend walking around circus grounds. They're not interested in watching animals being fed. They want packaging, shows they know will start and end at a certain time; they want to be able to get reserved seats, and they want to be comfortable. Once you saw that you weren't getting the people to come out anymore, why didn't you follow along after the other big players and book indoor arenas?"

He shrugged. "Even if I'd wanted to, by that time it was too late. The other shows were already in place in the arenas, and they had exclusive contracts-as far as circuses were concerned- with all the best sites. Besides, it would have meant cutting loose the freaks and getting rid of more than half the animals."

"And you wouldn't cut back on operations."

Phil glanced at me sharply, smiled without humor. "Cut back on operations? Is that what you'd call it, Mongo?"

"Phil, I know-"

"What was I supposed to do with people like Roger, Harry, and Lisa? Give them a pink slip? Where were they going to find work? Some of those freaks had been with me since they were teenagers, just like you; they weren't just employees, they were family. You know freaks can't just go out and find some other job. I wouldn't go on welfare myself, and I wasn't going to put any of my family on welfare; cutting them loose would have meant just that for a lot of them. And what about the animals? Zoos don't like circus animals, even when they have room for them, because circus animals don't do well in zoos. Hell, put Mabel in a zoo, and she'd end up killing some keeper. Sell them off cheap to some mud show or carny operator? I'd rather shoot them myself and save them the misery. We took in Mabel from a carny man, Mongo, remember? You remember what kind of shape she was in?"

"I remember, Phil. So the bottom line was that you couldn't bring yourself to lay off anyone, or cut loose a single animal, if you weren't sure they'd be well taken care of. But there was no other place for them, as you saw it, so you had no choice but to try and keep going."

"That's right; I had to try and keep going. It was a bust, but I don't regret it even now. I'm a circus man, Mongo. I don't know anything else-and, to me, those shows you see sitting in a steel shed in the middle of some goddamn city aren't really circuses. I sank everything I'd saved over the years into the circus to try to keep it together. It took everything I had. Then I started losing my best acts, because I no longer had the money to pay them what they could get elsewhere-with Cole, Clyde Beatty, or Ringling. Finally, in the last couple of years, we became just another mud show, although I hated to admit it."

"Some mud show," I said, and sighed. "It had to be the only mud show with a full complement of freaks, a herd of animals no other show would take, and enough acts to fill three rings."

He spent a few minutes idly stirring the ounce or so of coffee left in his cup, finally said: "I'd always been a pretty hard driver, Mongo, as I'm sure you recall, and a heavy drinker. Now, when the troubles began coming down, I really started hitting the sauce. It was the only way I could find to fight the worry and the pain. I couldn't stand to see what was happening to the circus, or think about what was going to happen to my people and animals if it folded. I ended up drunk most of the time. Toward the end I got an offer from somebody to buy it. It was a good offer-more, really, than the circus was worth. But the buyer wouldn't agree to keep all the freaks. I was told they had no interest in sideshows and that they'd bring in all their own acts.

All they wanted from me was the equipment, the animals, and the rights to our permits around the circuit we did."

"Who made the offer?"

"The guy I talked to was some tight-ass lawyer type in a pinstripe suit who wouldn't tell me the name of the buyer. I was drunk at the time. I think I cursed him out when he said the freaks and performers couldn't be part of the deal. I told him I wouldn't help kill my own circus, and I threw him out.

"By then, I'd run out of operating expenses. We were just outside of Chicago, so I drove in and managed to get a bank loan, with the semis and all the rigging as collateral. That was a stupid play, I suppose, but I didn't know what else to do. I was hoping it could still be like it used to be and that there'd be throngs of people waiting for us in the next town. What I got instead was a notice from the bank that I was in default on the loan and that the circus had been auctioned off. Christ, I can't blame them; I was so drunk all the time that I'd missed five payments and hadn't even known it. The next thing I knew there were marshals on the grounds ordering everyone off. I think whoever had wanted to buy it in the first place had managed to pick it up at the auction, because the only things the new owner or owners wanted were the semis, the rigging, and the animals."

"Did you ever find out who bought it?"

"No."

"Didn't you ask the bank?"

"They wouldn't tell me; they said it was confidential information. I was too drunk to argue."

"Maybe it was Cole, or Clyde Beatty, or even Ringling; one of the big boys trying to gobble up the competition."

Phil shook his head. "No. I checked. I swear I'd have killed somebody if I'd found it was circus people I knew who'd taken my show away from me." He paused, swallowed hard, continued, "After the marshals threw me out of my own circus, I just walked away. Right now I don't even recall where I walked to. As far as I was concerned, my life was over; I'd lost everything. I had no money, no place to go, and I just wanted to die. I can't even remember how I eventually ended up here, in New York. I ate at soup kitchens as long as they'd let me wash dishes to pay for it, and I collected soda cans off the street and out of garbage cans to pay for my booze. I was busy drinking myself to death, and I guess I was pretty close to succeeding until you had to come along and butt your nose into my business. Now I owe you, and I always do my best to pay my debts. I don't even dare take a drink until I manage to pay you back."

"Well, if you only plan to stay alive and off the booze long enough to pay me back, you're going to find from my itemized bill that private hospital rooms and private nursing care in New York City are very expensive commodities. So you'd better plan on staying around a long time. But let's stop talking nonsense. There's something else I want to ask you, because something about this business strikes me as curious. By your own account, you were running an operation that couldn't even pay its way as a mud show. And even if you had dropped the sideshows and cut back on everything else, you'd still have been left out in the cold because the other shows had exclusive contracts with all the big indoor arenas on the circuit. Right?"

"Right."

"Even at the bargain-basement price the circus must have gone for at the bank auction, who would want it?"

"Beats me, Mongo."

"And then the new owner gets rid of all the performers and only keeps the animals. Christ, Mabel alone eats nearly a ton of hay a day, and that can get expensive. Buying that circus in the first place, and then keeping only the animals, doesn't seem to make any business sense at all. If people aren't going to come out to see a full-rigged circus, I doubt they'd come in any numbers to see a traveling zoo."

Phil merely shrugged and shook his head sadly.

"What's the name of the bank in Chicago that gave you the loan on the semis and rigging?"

"Hell, I don't remember. Why?"

"Just curious. Think, Phil. What's the name of the bank?"

He cocked his head to one side as he pondered the question, idly drumming his fingers on the tabletop. "I think it was an outfit called United States Savings and Loan," he said at last.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. Why the curiosity about the bank?"

"Let's just say that I want to know what bank not to do business with in Chicago."

"Now, my friends, I've got good news, and I've got bad news."

Garth froze with his brandy halfway to his mouth, then slowly set the snifter back down on the linen tablecloth. He brushed a heavily muscled hand back through his thinning, shoulder-length, wheat-colored hair, then turned to his wife. "What did I tell you, Mary? There's no way Mongo was going to invite us into the city and spring for dinner at Cafe des Artistes unless he wanted something from us. I've seen some very nasty situations spring up from Mongo's 'good news, bad news' crap."

Our table had been attracting attention all evening, and for once it wasn't the dwarf that people were staring at. Mrs. Garth Frederickson was Mary Tree, and she came complete with a stunning figure and presence, piercing blue eyes, sculpted features, and a magnificent, flowing crown of thick, white-streaked blond hair. Mary had first burst onto the music scene and into the national conscience and consciousness in the sixties, when she was a teenage, barefoot, flowers-in-her-hair folk singer and antiwar activist. And she had always been Garth's dream-lover, his idea of the perfect woman. I'd met her the year before, while I was investigating the death of a friend, and Garth had met her through me. Mary's career had declined in the seventies and been virtually eclipsed by the early eighties. But a small record company in New York had released a new album of hers at just about the time she and Garth were getting married, and it had turned out to be a crossover success, revitalizing her career. The album had put her back on top, and she was once again the "queen of folk." And so people stared. It tended to annoy my brother, but Mary had the grace to pretend that she didn't notice. Now she laughed lightly, touched Garth's arm.

"Now, now, darling, be nice to your brother. Remember that if it wasn't for him, we never would have met."

Garth heaved a mock, heavy sigh, looked back at me. "My wife says I should be nice to you, Mongo, despite my distinct sense of foreboding." He paused to lift his crystal snifter and drain off his brandy, smacked his lips. "Give us the bad news first so we can get it out of the way."

"I've got a problem. You remember Phil Statler?"

"Sure; the circus owner, your ex-boss." He turned again to Mary, smiled thinly, continued, "Phil Statler is the man who transformed grungy, plain old Robert Frederickson into Mongo the Magnificent."

"He's sick, Garth. As a matter of fact, I'm putting him up in your apartment in the brownstone. Right now, I've got Jacques baby-sitting him."

Garth frowned slightly. "What's the matter with him?"

"The doctors would cite alcoholism and the effects of living on the streets and eating garbage for a couple of years, but I'd say he's dying of a broken heart. He lost the circus because he couldn't bear to put people, freaks especially, out of work, and he went right down the tubes. The cops picked him up off the streets and took him to Bellevue, which is where I found him; Jacques found some circus posters with my name on them, and he called me."

Mary made a small, sad sound in her throat, shook her head, and looked away.

Garth said, "That's heavy, Mongo. The man must be close to seventy now. Can't Social Services do something for him?"

"He's too proud to accept any kind of help. Besides, I believe the real problem is that he's lost the will to live; he wants to die. He as much as told me that the only reason he's not back out on the streets right now boozing it up is that he feels an obligation to stay sober and get well long enough so that he can get a job and earn enough money to pay me back for his hospital bills. I'm not sure how much longer I can keep him around the brownstone."

Mary reached across the table, took my hand in hers, and squeezed it. "That's terrible, Mongo," she said softly. "How can Garth and I help?"

"I'm getting to that, Mary. But first Garth has to ask me about the good news."

"I don't feel much like joking around anymore, Mongo," Garth said evenly. "I know something about how the street people suffer, and I know how much you love that man. Just tell us how we can help."

"Not so fast. I insist you ask me about the good news."

Mary started to say something, but Garth silenced her by putting a finger to his lips. Without change of expression or tone, he asked, "What's the good news, Mongo?"

I glanced back and forth between my brother and Mary, smiled wryly. "If Phil's basic problem is that he's lost the will to live, I think I have a solution to the problem."

Garth leaned forward on the table, peered at me suspiciously. "Which is?"

"I'm going to try to buy a circus for him to run."

"Great, Mongo," Garth said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "A circus is just what you need. And what will you-?"

"Hear him out, Garth," Mary said, wrapping her long, tapering fingers around my brother's thick wrist. "Go ahead, Mongo."

"Thank you, my dear," I said, nodding to the woman with the sky-blue eyes before turning my attention back to Garth. "Now, listen; Phil lost the circus when the bank holding a lien on it sold it off at auction, but there was something decidedly funny about the deal, judging from the way Phil described it. Assuming he was sober enough at the time to know what was happening, it sounds to me like the Statler Brothers Circus may have been some accountant's bright idea of a tax write-off; for all we know, that circus may now be owned by Gulf and Western. At the least, I hope to find out just who does own it. The bank that auctioned it off is a Chicago outfit called United States Savings and Loan. If it is a tax write-off, a lot of depreciation has already been claimed by now; the owner may be tired of the whole thing and just might be receptive to an offer that would now give him a fair return on his original investment."

Garth grunted, shrugged. "No matter what deal you may be able to make, buying a circus is still going to take a lot of cash. If you're asking if it's all right with me to take a second mortgage on the brownstone to finance the deal, of course it is."

"Whoa, hoss; let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'm thinking it would be a good idea to look for partners in the venture in order to spread the risk around, and I'm pretty sure I know where to find them. Phil kept his entire stable of freaks on the payroll right up to the bitter end, long after just about every other circus in the country had packed their freaks off to whatever fate awaits people like a three-legged man and a pig-faced lady. Even freaks who never worked for Phil Statler have heard of him and respect him; freaks who worked for him love the man. Well, there are a whole lot of retired freaks living in a small town in Florida, just outside Sarasota. Naturally, there's a large percentage on welfare, but others made good investments over the years and are well enough off so that they might not mind using a circus themselves as a tax write-off if it couldn't turn a profit. What I'll propose to them is a corporation, a limited partnership where individuals will own shares, and where actual operations will be turned over to Phil Statler, who'll be compensated on a profit-sharing basis after his expenses are covered. He may need some outside help to advise him on how to best manage and compete with the other big shows, but that's a step or two down the road. The first thing I have to do is go to Florida and see if I can line up backers. If I can, I then head to Chicago to pry the name of the owner out of United States Saving and Loan."

Mary asked, "Why not just find out where the circus is now, go there, and make your inquiries?"

"Oh, I plan to check out the circus itself, but before I do that I want to find out who I'm dealing with. If it is just one of hundreds of entities owned by some huge corporation or holding company, I have to know who I can approach to talk business; the circus manager wouldn't necessarily give me that information or take me seriously.

"Anyway, that's my plan; I may be able to put it all together, or I may not, but I feel I have to try. I figure it will take me a week, maybe two, to take care of business. Garth, that means I have to ask you to handle our entire caseload while I'm gone. We've got those two big things hanging fire-Bechtel's offer of a permanent retainer, and possible work for the Belgian consulate."

"I'll take care of it, Mongo," Garth said absently. He was looking at me, but his brown eyes were slightly out of focus, and I knew that my empathic brother was thinking of Phil Statler's plight and pain, and the suffering of all the homeless people on the streets of the nation's cities and towns. "Put us down for a piece of the action if you can put a deal together." "And make it a big piece of the action, Mongo," Mary said, her eyes misting with tears. "The album sales are going well, so we'll have money to invest. If it all ends up a bust and we have to write it off, that's all right too."

"We'll talk figures if and when I can structure some kind of deal in the first place. In the meantime, I was wondering if the two of you can keep Phil company while I'm out of town-either at the brownstone or taking him back to Cairn with you."

Garth asked, "Which do you think is better, brother?"

"Take him back up to Cairn with you, if you've got the room. I think the change of scenery might do him good."

"Will he agree to come?"

"I don't know. We'll have to make up some story; it's important that he doesn't know what I'm up to."

Mary smiled coyly, batted her long, pale eyelashes. "We'll all go back to the brownstone now, and I'll work my feminine wiles on him."

"You're a good man, Mongo," Garth said in a low, husky voice, "and I love you."

"Harrumph," I intoned as I signaled our waiter for the check. "You'd never know it from the way you talk to me sometimes."