Darkness, Take My Hand (24 page)

“I was restless. I was—”

“You were instinct,” he said. “You always could size up any situation before the rest of us and act on it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit?” He chuckled. “Come on, Pat. It’s your gift. ’Member those spooky fucking clowns in Savin Hill?”

I smiled and shivered at the same time. “Oh, yeah.”

He nodded, and I could tell that two decades later he still felt the fear that had gripped us for weeks after our encounter with the clowns.

“If you hadn’t thrown that baseball through their windshield,” he said, “who knows if we’d even be here today.”

“Phil,” I said, “we were kids with overactive imaginations and—”

He shook his head violently. “Sure, sure. We were kids and we were on edge because Cal Morrison had been killed that week and we’d been hearing rumors about those clowns since forever and blah, blah, blah. All that’s true, but we were
there
, Patrick. Me and you. And you know what would have happened to us if we’d gotten into that van with them. I can still see it. Shit. The grime and grease all over the fenders, that smell coming from the open window—”

The white van with the broken windshield in the Hardiman file.

“Phil,” I said. “Phil. Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

“The clowns,” I said. “You just said it yourself. It was the week Cal was killed. And then, shit, I hummed the baseball through their windshield—”

“Damn straight you did.”

“And told my father.” I’d raised my hand to my mouth, half covering it because it was wide open in shock.

“Wait a second,” he said and I could see that the same knowledge prickling like fire ants against my spinal column had invaded Phil. His eyes lit up like flares.

“I marked the van,” I said. “I fucking marked it, Phil, without even knowing it. And EEPA found it.”

He stared at me and I could see that he knew it too.

“Patrick, you’re saying—”

“Alec Hardiman and Charles Rugglestone were the clowns.”

In the days
and weeks after Cal Morrison was killed, if you were a kid in my neighborhood, you were afraid.

You were afraid of black guys, because Cal had supposedly been killed by one. You were afraid of mangy, grizzled men who stared too long at you on the subway. You were frightened by cars that paused at intersections for too long after the light had turned green or seemed to slow as they approached you. You were terrified by the homeless and the dank alleys and dark parks in which they slept.

You were afraid of almost everything.

But nothing frightened the kids in my neighborhood as much as clowns.

It seemed so silly, in retrospect. Killer clowns rampaged in pulp fiction and bad drive-in movies. They lived in the realm of vampires and prehistoric monsters stomping Tokyo. Fictions conjured up to scare the only targets gullible enough to be afraid of them—children.

As I reached adulthood, I was no longer afraid of my closet when I woke in the middle of the night. The creaks of the old house I grew up in held no terror either; they were simply creaks—the plaintive whine of aging wood and the relaxed sighs of settling foundations. I grew to fear almost nothing except the barrel of a pistol pointed in my direction or the sudden potential for violence in the eyes of bitter drunks and men realizing their entire lives had passed unnoticed by all but themselves.

But as a child, my fear was embodied by the clowns.

I’m not sure how the rumor started—maybe around a fire at summer camp, maybe after one of our group had seen one of those bad drive-in movies—but by the time I was six or so, every kid knew about the clowns, though no one could actually claim to have seen them.

But the rumors were rampant.

They drove a van and carried bags of candy and bright balloons, and bouquets of flowers exploded out from their oversized sleeves.

They had a machine in the back of that van that knocked kids out in under a second, and once you were unconscious, you never woke back up.

While you were out, but before you died, they took turns on your body.

Then they cut your throat.

And because they were clowns and their mouths were painted that way, they were always smiling.

Phil and I were almost at the age when we would have stopped fearing them, the age when you knew there was no Santa Claus and you probably weren’t the long-lost son of a benevolent billionaire who’d return some day to claim you.

We were on our way back from a Little League game in Savin Hill, and we’d lingered until near dark, playing war games in the woods behind the Motley School, climbing the decrepit fire escape to the roof of the school itself. By the time we climbed down, the day had grown long and chilly, the shadows lengthening against walls and spreading out hard against bare pavement as if they’d been carved there.

We began the walk down Savin Hill Avenue as the sun disappeared entirely and the sky took on the cast of polished metal, tossed the ball back and forth to keep the gathering cold at bay and ignored the rumbles in our stomachs because they meant we’d have to go home sooner or later, and home, ours, at least, sucked.

The van slid up behind us as we started down the slope of the avenue by the subway station, and I remember very distinctly noticing that the entire avenue was empty. It lay before us in that sudden emptiness that comes to a neigh
borhood around dinner time. Though it wasn’t yet dark, we could see orange and yellow squares of light in several homes fronting the avenue, and a lone plastic hockey puck curled against the hubcap of a car.

Everyone was in for dinner. Even the bars were quiet.

Phil rifled the ball with his shotgun arm and it rose a bit more than I first expected; I had to jump and twist myself to snag it. When I came down I’d twisted myself to the side and that’s when I saw the white face and blue hair and wide red lips staring out the passenger window at me.

“Nice catch,” the clown said.

There was only one way kids in my neighborhood responded to clowns.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Nice mouth,” the clown said, and I didn’t like the way he smiled when he said it, his gloved hand resting on the outside of the door panel.

“Real nice,” the driver said. “Real, real nice. Your mother know you talk that way?”

I was no more than two feet from that door, frozen on the pavement, and I couldn’t move my feet. I couldn’t take my eyes off the clown’s red mouth.

Phil, I noticed, was a good ten feet down the hill, frozen too, it seemed.

“You guys need a ride?” the passenger clown said.

I shook my head, my mouth dry.

“He’s not so mouthy all of a sudden, this kid.”

“No.” The driver craned his head around his partner’s neck so that I could see his bright red hair and the bursts of yellow around his eyes. “You two look cold.”

“I can see goose pimples,” the passenger said.

I moved two steps to my right, and my feet felt like they were sinking into wet sponge.

The passenger clown glanced quickly down the avenue and back toward me.

The driver looked in the rearview and his hand disappeared from the wheel.

“Patrick?” Phil said. “Let’s go.”

“Patrick,” the passenger clown said slowly, as if he
were licking the word. “That’s a nice name. What’s your last name, Patrick?”

Even now, I have no idea why I answered. Total fear, perhaps, a desire to buy time, but even then, I should have known to give a false name, but I didn’t. I had some desperate feeling, I guess, that if they knew my last name, they’d see me as a person, not a victim, and I’d receive mercy.

“Kenzie,” I said.

And the clown gave me a seductive smile, and I heard the door latch unlock like a round ratcheting into a shotgun.

That’s when I threw the baseball.

I don’t recall planning it. I merely took two steps to my right—thick, slow steps as if I were in a dream—and I think initially I was aiming for the clown himself as he started to open his door.

Instead, the ball sailed out of my hand and someone said, “Shit!” and there was a loud popping noise as the ball buried itself in the center of the windshield and the glass fractured and webbed.

Phil screamed, “Help! Help!”

The passenger door swung open and I could see fury in the clown’s face.

I stumbled as I leaped forward and gravity pushed me down Savin Hill Avenue.

“Help!” Phil screamed and then he ran and I was right behind him, my arms still pinwheeling as I tried to keep my balance and the pavement kept jerking toward my face.

A beefy man with a mustache as thick as a brush head stepped out of Bulldog’s bar at the corner of Sydney, and we could hear tires squealing behind us. The beefy man looked angry; he had a sawed-off bat in his hand, and at first I thought he was going to use it on us.

His apron, I remember, bore swaths of meaty red and brown.

“Fuck’s going on?” the man said, and his eyes narrowed at something over my shoulder, and I knew the van was coming for all of us. It was going to jump the curb and mangle us.

I turned my head in order to see my own death, and instead I saw a flash of grimy orange tail lights as the van spun the corner onto Grampian Way and disappeared.

The bar owner knew my father and ten minutes later my old man came into Bulldog’s as Phil and I sat at the bar with our ginger ales and pretended they were whiskeys.

My father wasn’t always mean. He had his good days. And for whatever reason, that day was one of his best. He wasn’t angry we’d stayed out past dinner time, though I’d been beaten for the same offense only a week before. Usually indifferent to my friends, he ruffled Phil’s hair and bought us several more ginger ales and two heaping corned beef sandwiches, and we sat in the bar with him until night had risen up the doorway on our left and the bar had filled.

When I told him in a faltering voice what had happened, his face grew as tender and kind as I’d ever seen it, and he peered at me with soft worry and wiped my wet bangs off my forehead with a thick, gentle finger and dabbed the corned beef off the corner of my mouth with a napkin.

“You two had some day,” he said. He whistled and smiled at Phil and Phil smiled back broadly.

My father’s smile, so rare, was a thing of wonder.

“I didn’t mean to bust the window,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, Dad.”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re not mad?”

He shook his head.

“I—”

“You did great, Patrick. You did great,” he whispered. He took my head to his broad chest and kissed my cheek, smoothed my cow lick with his palm. “You make me proud.”

It was the only time I ever heard those words from my father.

“Clowns,” Bolton said.

“Clowns,” I said.

“Clowns, yeah,” Phil said.

“Okay,” Bolton said slowly. “Clowns,” he repeated and nodded to himself.

“No shit,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” He nodded again and then turned his huge head, looked directly at me. “You are, I’m assuming, fucking kidding me.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“No.”

“We’re perfectly and completely friggin’ serious,” Phil said.

“Jesus.” Bolton leaned against the sink, looked over at Angie. “Tell me you’re not part of this, Ms. Gennaro. You, at least, seem like a person of some rationality.”

She tightened the belt on her robe. “I don’t know what to believe.” She shrugged her shoulders in the direction of Phil and me. “They seem pretty certain.”

“Listen for a second—”

He crossed to me in three large steps. “No. No. We’ve blown the surveillance because of you, Mr. Kenzie. You call me over here and say you’ve cracked the case. You’ve—”

“I didn’t—”

“—figured it all out and you need to see me right away. So I come over here and
he’s
here”—he pointed at Phil—“and now
they’re
here”—he jerked his head at Devin and Oscar—“and any hopes we had of suckering Evandro into this place are shot because it looks like a fucking law enforcement convention in here.” He paused for breath. “And I could have lived with all that as long as we were, oh, I don’t know, getting somewhere. But, no, you give me clowns.”

“Mr. Bolton,” Phil said, “we’re serious here.”

“Oh. Good. Let me see if I have this right—twenty years ago, two circus performers with bushy hair and rubber pants pull up beside you in a van while you’re walking to a Little League game and—”

“From,” I said.

“What?”

“We were walking back
from
the game,” Phil said.

“Mea culpa,” Bolton said and gave us a bow and flour
ish. “Mea maxima fucking culpa, tu morani.”

“I’ve never been insulted in Latin before,” Devin said to Oscar. “You?”

“Mandarin,” Oscar said. “Never Latin.”

“Fine,” Bolton said. “You were accosted by two circus performers coming back
from
a game and because—do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?—because Alec Hardiman sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ during the prison interview you think he was one of those clowns and that means, of course, that he’s been killing people to get back at you for escaping that day?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Oh, well, thank heaven. Look, Mr. Kenzie, twenty-five years ago I asked out Carol Yaeger of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and she laughed in my face. But that doesn’t—”

“Hard to believe,” Devin said.

“—mean I thought it perfectly logical to wait a couple of decades and kill everyone she ever knew.”

“Bolton,” I said, “I’d love to keep watching you dig yourself a hole here, but time is short. You bring the Hardiman, Rugglestone, and Morrison files like I asked?”

He patted his briefcase. “Right here.”

“Open ’em.”

“Mr. Kenzie—”

“Please.”

He opened the briefcase, pulled out the files, and set them on the kitchen table. “And?”

“Check the ME’s report on Rugglestone. Specifically look at the section on unexplained toxins.”

He found it, adjusted his glasses. “Yes?”

“What was found in Rugglestone’s facial lacerations?”

He read: “’Lemon extract; hydrogen peroxide; talc, mineral oil, stearic acid, peg-thirty-two, triethanolamine, lanolin…all consistent with ingredients of white Pan-Cake makeup.’” He looked up. “So?”

“Read Hardiman’s file. Same section.”

He flipped a few pages and did.

“So? They were both wearing makeup.”

“
White
Pan-Cake,” I said. “The kind mimes use,” I said. “And clowns.”

“I see what—”

“Cal Morrison was found with the same properties under his fingernails.”

He opened the Morrison file, leafed through it until he found it.

“Still,” he said.

“Find the photograph of the van found outside the murder site—it was registered to Rugglestone.”

He leafed through the file. “Here it is.”

“It’s missing the windshield,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But the van had been hosed clean, probably that day. Sometime between the hosing and the time the police found it, someone chucked some cinderblocks through the windshield, probably while Rugglestone was being murdered.”

“So?”

“So, I’d marked the windshield. I threw the baseball and put a spiderweb in the center. That was the only thing to suggest Hardiman and Rugglestone were the clowns. Remove the mark, remove the motive.”

“What’s your point?”

I didn’t truly believe it until I said it.

“I think EEPA killed Charles Rugglestone.”

“He’s right,” Devin said eventually.

The hail had turned to rain shortly after eight, and the rain froze almost as soon as it hit. Streaks of water bled down Angie’s windows and rippled into veins of crackling ice before our eyes.

Bolton had sent an agent back to the RV to make copies of the Rugglestone, Hardiman, and Morrison files, and we’d spent the last hour reading them in Angie’s dining room.

Bolton said, “I’m not so sure.”

“Please,” Angie said. “It’s all here if you look at it right. Everyone goes on the assumption that Alec Hardiman, loaded up on PCP, does the work of ten men when he kills Rugglestone. And if I was convinced Hardiman had killed several other people, I probably would have
been swayed, too. But he had nerve damage in his left hand, seconol in his system, and was found passed out. Now, you look at Rugglestone’s wounds with the idea that maybe ten people—or, say, seven—
were
involved, and it makes perfect sense.”