Peanut is an African elephant,” Charlie said. “That’s the biggest kind.”
“Yeah?” said Bernie. We were in the Porsche, and everything was great except Charlie was in my seat, the shotgun seat, and I was on the shelf in back. But I loved Charlie, so I was being pretty good about it, hardly nipping the back of Bernie’s headrest at all.
“She has big tusks, Dad. The Asian females don’t. And her ears are big, too. The Asian ones have smaller ears.”
Bernie shot Charlie a quick glance. “Had a pretty good look at that video, huh?” Bernie said.
“Ms. Creelman says their ears help cool them down. We have to protect the elephants, Dad.”
Protect the elephants? I didn’t get that. Even if they don’t go bad, just think of the size of them. Why couldn’t they protect themselves?
We drove across the Valley, the sun shining bright, warm breeze blowing across my coat. I was feeling tip-top, lost in all the freeway smells going by: burning oil, grease, gasoline, hot rubber, hot pavement. Love freeway smells! Before I knew it, we were on an exit ramp, headed toward the fairgrounds—I could tell from the giant Ferris wheel in the distance. We’d worked a case at the fairgrounds once, not sure what it was about, maybe cotton candy. That was what I remembered most, the trouble I’d had with cotton candy, the way it got stuck all over my nose and even up inside: I’d had to breathe through my mouth, and the smell of cotton candy stayed with me for days.
“There’s the big top,” Charlie said as we drove through the gate. I could see it, too—a tent beyond the Ferris wheel, not far from the hills that rose at the back of the fairgrounds. We have a tent for when we go camping—my job is to carry the mallet for hammering in the pegs—but there’s a stuffy smell I don’t like inside the tent, so I always sleep outside. Bernie often leaves the tent in the middle of the night. He loves to sleep under the stars. He tells me lots about them, not easy to follow, but no problem: his voice is so nice to hear that often I don’t even bother trying to understand.
We came to the big top and parked near the ticket booth. “The big top kind of looked bigger in the video,” Charlie said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Bernie.
“And whiter,” Charlie said.
People were milling around the ticket booth in the way groups of humans do when something’s not quite right. Charlie pointed to a sheet of paper stuck on the window of the booth. “Hey,” he said, “does that sign say ‘No Show Today’?”
“Yeah,” said Bernie, stepping up to the booth; it was empty inside. “‘Please come back and see us tomorrow.’”
“How come, Dad?” Charlie said. “What’s going on?”
Bernie looked around. “No idea.” He took Charlie’s hand and walked away. I trailed behind, smelling lots of smells, some of them completely new to me. They all seemed to be coming from inside the big top. Soon I was right alongside the big top, sniffing along the bottom where the canvas met the ground. Animal smells for sure, but what animals, with smells so ripe, so rich, so strong? I squeezed my nose down under the—
“Chet?”
I looked up.
“Is Chet trying to get into the tent, Dad?”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything like that,” Bernie said.
I trotted over to them, tail stiff and up high. We were partners, me and Bernie, had confidence in each other. My behavior was beyond reproach, whatever that was.
“Let’s take a recon behind the tent before we go,” Bernie said.
“How come?” said Charlie.
“Just curious,” Bernie said.
Fine with me. Recon was one of my specialties. We circled the tent. On the back side sat a whole bunch of trailers, parked right up to a low chain-link fence at the base of the hills. Some of these trailers were huge, the biggest I’d seen, and what was this? Metro PD black-and-whites, and some uniformed cops laying down crime-scene tape? I knew not to go anywhere near crime-scene tape, one thing I’d learned for sure in K-9 school.
One of the cops looked up. I recognized him: Sergeant Rick Torres, our buddy at Missing Persons. “Hey, Bernie,” he said. “You working this already?”
“Working what?” said Bernie.
Rick Torres crouched under a strip of tape, came toward us, shook hands with Bernie. “Hey, Chet,” he said, and gave me a pat. “Lookin’ good. Is he still growing, Bernie?”
“Hardly seems possible,” Bernie said. “This is my son, Charlie. Shake hands with Sergeant Torres, Charlie.”
Rick held out his hand. Charlie gazed down at the ground.
“I won’t bite,” Rick said. Of course he wouldn’t! Hardly any humans did, their little teeth not being much of a weapon. I did remember a perp named Clancy Green chomping on some other perp’s arm, but that was on a Halloween night, the only holiday I don’t like—Halloween brings out the worst in people, Bernie says. Thanksgiving is my favorite, except for that one time with the drumstick incident, maybe a story for another day.
Charlie raised his hand, a little hand that disappeared in Rick’s big one. Rick shook it gently.
“There’s a gun on your belt,” Charlie said.
“Yeah, but I’ve never fired it,” Rick said, although I didn’t know why, since I could smell it had been fired, and not too long ago.
A trailer door opened and a cop looked out. “Ready for that witness, Sarge?”
“You’re really not working this, Bernie?” Rick said.
“Don’t even know what this is,” Bernie said. “We came to see the circus.”
“Bad timing,” Rick said. “The elephant tamer’s missing. And the elephant’s gone, too.”
“Peanut?”
Rick took a notebook from his chest pocket, leafed through. “Yeah, Peanut.”
“How can an elephant be missing?” Bernie said.
Rick shrugged. “Care to sit in?”
Bernie shook his head. “Seeing as how there’s no circus, maybe we’ll—”
“Dad?” Charlie’s eyes were big. “Did something happen to Peanut?”
Bernie glanced down. “No reason to think that, Charlie.”
“But then where is she?”
“That’s what Rick’s going to find out,” Bernie said.
“I’ll bet Corporal Valdez would be happy to entertain Charlie for a few minutes,” Rick said.
Bernie thought for a moment. I can always feel when he’s thinking, although what he’s thinking about is anybody’s guess. “Just a few,” he said.
Rick waved one of the cops over. Corporal Valdez told Charlie to call her Mindy and that she had a kid named Charlie, too, now in Iraq. That was where Bernie got his wound—he limped sometimes when he was tired—but he never talked about it, so that was all I knew about Iraq. “Want to work the blue lights?” Corporal Valdez said. She led Charlie toward one of the cruisers. Bernie and I followed Rick up the stairs and into the trailer.
That was when I got a bad shock. We were in a kind of office—desk, chairs, computer, none of that shocking—and standing by the desk was the cop who’d spoken to Rick, also not shocking. The shocking part was the clown sitting in one of the chairs. I’d seen clowns on TV. They scare me every time, and this was much worse. The clown had a horrible white face with a red mouth and green eyes and nasty orange hair sprouting out of his head here and there. And it wasn’t just the sight of him: how about the smell? Partly he smelled like Livia Moon, who operated a house of ill repute, whatever that may be, in Pottsdale, and partly he smelled like a human male. I hardly ever go backward, but I was going backward now, and barking my head off.
“Easy, Chet,” said Bernie.
“Dogs hate me,” said the clown.
He had a soft voice, actually sort of nice, although not as nice of Bernie’s, of course. I stopped barking, not all at once, more this gradual dial-down thing I do.
“Popo,” said the cop, “this here’s Sergeant Torres from Missing Persons.”
“And my associate Bernie Little,” Rick said.
I barked the last of the dial-downed barks, low and rumbly.
“And Chet,” Rick added.
“Nice to meet you,” said Popo.
“And your real name?” Rick said.
“Real?” said the clown. “John Poppechevski.” Or something complicated like that. “But everyone calls me Popo.”
“Even in normal life?” said Rick.
“The distinction between normal life and circus life eludes me,” Popo said. He had this big red smile on his face, but he didn’t sound happy. His eyes were small and dark; everything else about him was big and brightly colored. My barking almost started up again.
“Okay, Popo,” Rick said, “let’s hear your story.” The uniformed cop went to the doorway and stood there, looking out. Rick sat down, reaching for his notebook. Bernie leaned against the desk, arms folded across his chest. I sat on the floor beside him, picking a spot that turned out to be sticky. I shifted over a bit; that was better.
“Well,” said Popo, “my great-great-grandparents, in search of a better life, came to Ellis Island early in the twentieth—”
“How about we fast-forward to the events of last night?” Rick said.
A quick smile crossed Bernie’s face, not sure why. But I got the feeling he was having fun, which put me in a very good mood, and I’d been in a good mood already.
Popo nodded, the big red ball at the tip of his nose bobbing up and down. Balls are a big interest of mine; I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
“You want me to skip Trumpy?” Popo said.
“Who’s Trumpy?” said Rick.
“My mentor. He taught me everything I know about the profession.”
“Was he here last night?”
“Oh, no,” said Popo. “Trumpy passed away years ago.”
“So he couldn’t have had anything to do with these disappearances,” Rick said.
“Not even if he’d still been alive,” Popo said.
“I’m sorry?” said Rick.
“Trumpy was a man of the highest moral character,” Popo replied.
Bernie spoke for the first time. “And did he pass that on to you as well?”
Popo turned to Bernie. “I try,” he said. Yes, Popo had a nice voice, and there was also something nice about those dark eyes.
“Good to hear,” Rick said. “So getting back to last night.”
Popo licked his lips. The sight of his tongue—a normal tongue, at least for a human—touching those red smiley lips was very strange. I stuck my own tongue out, gave the end of my nose a lick, not sure why. “After the show,” Popo said, “the late show, I’m talking about, which went pretty well—pretty well considering the times, the house maybe not quite half full—I relaxed for a while with the Filipoffs and—”
Rick held up his hand. “The Filipoffs?”
“You don’t know the Filipoffs?” Popo said. “The Fearless Filipoffs, First Family of the Flying Trapeze?”
Rick shook his head.
“That says more about the state of the circus than about you,” Popo said. “A hundred years ago their names were on everyone’s lips.”
What was this? More lips? I was confused. Were we even on the job? I started panting a little bit.
“The Filipoffs’ trailer is next to mine, near the cages. The setup is the same in every town. After a drink or two, I went to bed. Sometime in the night I woke up, thinking I’d heard trumpeting. I listened but heard nothing more and thought it must have been a dream, and so—”
“Trumpeting?” said Rick. I knew trumpets. We listen to a lot of music when we’re on the road, and the trumpet is my favorite instrument, although the slide guitar is pretty good, too. The trumpet does things to my ears that are hard to describe, especially when Roy Eldridge is playing on “If You Were Mine,” which Bernie went through a stage of playing over and over.
“I’m talking about elephant trumpeting,” Popo said.
Whoa. Elephants could play the trumpet? I knew right then that this case was headed off the cliff.
“You’re telling us it wasn’t a dream?” Rick said.
“In retrospect,” said Popo, losing me completely. “But at the time I just went back to sleep. In the morning I got suited up first thing and started working the fairgrounds.”
“Working them how?” said Rick.
“Drumming up business,” Popo said. “Part of my job.”
Trumpeting and now drumming? I didn’t like this case, not one little bit. Were we even on it? If we were, who was paying? I felt a sudden urge to yawn, too strong to fight, so I gave in and yawned, a nice big mouth-stretching one, and felt better for it.
“About half an hour later Filomena came running over and broke the news,” Popo said.
“Filomena?” said Rick.
“Filomena Filipoff, granddaughter and current star of the act.”
“And the news was?”
“That Uri was nowhere to be found.”
“The elephant tamer?”
“He doesn’t think of himself as a tamer.”
Bernie spoke again. “How does he think of himself?”
Tears rose in Popo’s dark eyes. “As a friend. But he has no objection to the word trainer. Uri DeLeath is the best and most humane animal trainer in the business.”
“And the elephant was missing, too?” Rick said.
Popo nodded. “Vanished without a trace.”
“A little premature,” Bernie said.
“I don’t understand,” Popo said.
“Bernie means it’s too soon to give up on finding traces,” Rick said. “This elephant, uh—” He checked his notebook. “Peanut, how does he normally travel?”
“She,” said Popo. “She has her own trailer—like a horse trailer but much bigger.”
“It’s gone, too, I assume?” Rick said.
Popo shook his head. I always watch for that: it means no.
“What about other trailers, trucks, any kind of vehicle?” Rick said.
“All present and accounted for as far as I know,” said Popo.
“So what are you saying?” Rick said. “They just up and walked away? We’ve got an elephant roaming around the Valley and not one single citizen’s bothered to call it in?”
“I have no answers,” Popo said.
One of Bernie’s eyebrows rose a tiny bit. His eyebrows sometimes do the talking—have I pointed that out already? “Where did the trainer sleep?” Bernie said.
“When we’re on the road, you mean?”
There was a slight pause. Then Bernie said, “That’s right.”
“His trailer’s on the other side of the cages.”
Bernie turned to Rick, maybe waiting for Rick to say something.
“How about we check it out?” Rick said.
“Sounds good to me,” said Bernie.
We went outside. Charlie was sitting behind the wheel of Corporal Valdez’s cruiser—his head barely visible through the windshield because he was so small—with Corporal Valdez beside him and the blue lights flashing. Charlie’s voice came over the cruiser’s PA: “Hands where I can see them. You’re under arrest for murder in the first degree.”