The Last Laugh Read online

him was unmistakable - checked pants, fuzzy orange hair, white face, a red ball for a nose.

  A goddamned clown.

  I levelled my pistol at him. The clown raised his arms right away. In his left hand he was holding a purple balloon. It began to grow, swelling up till it looked set to burst.

  I waved the gun again. “Put it down. Drop it, now!”

  The clown looked over at the balloon, arching his eyebrows in surprise as if I’d be fooled. Before I knew it he had lobbed the thing right in my face. It exploded with a flash that left my eyes stinging and my ears pounding. The clown tried to slip by, but it just wasn’t his lucky night. Half-blind I grabbed him and dragged him into the next room.

  “That’s two cops you’ve had a go at tonight,” I reminded him as I cuffed his wrist to the boiler. “You know some states’ll give you the chair for that. Funny thing is I can’t remember if this is one of them.”

  I stood up. “Now you sit tight for a minute while I go check on the kid. If he’s not sitting up rubbing his head in the next five minutes I might just come back and shoot you myself.”

  When I went back to the kid he wasn’t quite ready to sit up, but at least he was alive enough to feel the pain. The clown had been hiding in the filing cabinet. Damn thing had a false front, and that wasn’t the only trick he was about to play on us that night. When I got back to the boiler room the goon had slipped away, leaving my cuffs and a rubber hand on the floor.

  As I picked them up I noticed he’d left something else behind: it was a piece of paper with “Mellinsky” written on it. I turned it over and saw it was a photograph; it showed a bunch of clowns - what else? I stuffed it in my pocket and headed back to start cleaning up the mess.

  MacLane wasn’t happy. The bust had been a bust. Unless you counted a rubber hand, some oversized clothing and a novelty cabinet as a decent kind of a haul then the district didn’t have a whole lot to show for its night’s work. I kept the photograph to myself. Someone wanted to get Mellinksy’s attention and I intended to be close to the DA when he explained why.

  I paid Mellinksy a visit as soon as I could get out from under MacLane’s radar. If the job had gone well the chief would have made the DA’s office his first call. The way it turned out he’d be spending the rest of the night working out how to squirm out of his 9am. I figured that left the DA at a loose end for now with no one better than me to help him kill the time.

  I wasn’t wrong. He saw me straight away, but only because MacLane hadn’t reported in and he thought I was the chief’s messenger boy.

  “What’s your name, son?” was the first thing he asked. The way he said it made me want to spit in his face the moment he opened his mouth.

  “Detective Nickel, sir. Dirk Nickel.”

  “Let me take your coat, detective,” he said, striding pompously around the desk. “You’ve had a busy night.”

  Face to face he was shorter and younger than me. Sure he was the DA, but I’d have enjoyed seeing him walk more than a city block after dark. I let him take my coat, if only because it felt good to have someone like the DA to hang up your clothes for you.

  “Bourbon?” came his next offer.

  “I never drink after breakfast.”

  The DA nodded, and sat behind his desk again. He pressed his palms together and snorted. “Then why don’t you tell me how your night went, Detective Nickel?”

  “You’ll have the Chief’s report at sunrise. I just had something I needed to check out.”

  He grinned maliciously. “Then I have to take it your raid wasn’t a success. You’ve got some balls, son, coming here with bad news on the wind.”

  “The clowns we were after were there alright – only the word didn’t reach us in time to nail’em.”

  The DA sucked his teeth, his eyes glaring at me like cold flints. It seemed like he didn’t enjoy handling the buck. “I trust MacLane’s report will outline your exemplary performance.”

  “That’s for the chief to say,” I shrugged. “They left us some parting gifts. There's one I thought you might want to take a look at.”

  Mellinksy kept silent, brooding over his clasped hands. While my feet numbed themselves he went to his bureau and poured himself another bourbon, he didn't bother to offer me a slug this time. Too bad, I could have done with something to break the monotony.

  “Are you intending to keep this piece of evidence to yourself all night,” he eventually muttered, “despite your claim that it apparently requires my attention?”

  I walked over to my coat and pulled the photo from the inside pocket. I held it out face up. “It’s got your name all over it. There, on the back.”

  Mellinksy stared at it and sighed, the disgust written all over his face. The guy hated clowns so I didn’t expect him to be laughing and singing. Before I knew it he wrenched the snapshot from my hand and threw it in the trash in a crumpled little ball.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” he hissed. “It was only a matter of time before they singled me out.”

  “For what?”

  “Assassination of course.”

  It didn’t ring true, and it showed. The DA glared at me and, for the second time that night, I thought of Rupert Scully.

  “Good grief, man, were you people all raised in a barn? You have no idea of the danger to our way of life that I have taken it upon myself to fight. Do you imagine I’d be immune from attack? These... horrors have singled me out. That photograph is a message - a warning!”

  As far as I knew Mellinksy lived his life in an office, with a security guard in the lobby and, if that didn’t work, a pug-ugly secretary at the front desk. The worst attack he could expect was a few harsh words in the daily rag. And that didn’t tend to happen much anymore.

  “I hadn’t... considered that, sir,” I offered, as reasonably as I could muster.

  “Then I recommend you start using your brains along with your fists,” he screeched. A moment later and he thrust my coat back at me. “You can see yourself out.”

  I left without complaining about it. I realised too late he still had the photo, but the door was already shut behind me. It looked like I'd have to chase this one up with the chief in the morning.

  I nodded to Mellinsky’s secretary as I passed on my way to the lift. I didn’t need to ask why she was working nights. The dim light favoured her looks and the overtime could pay for a faceful of surgery.

  “Your boss is quite the hardass,” I commented as I walked by. “Thinks the world is out to get him.”

  “Maybe it is,” she replied in a voice pitched a little too deep for a clean-living woman.

  “You should stay off the bourbon,” I told her as I entered the lift.

  It was a cold night, and I felt like a suit with my coat slung over my shoulder, so I put it back on as the lift headed down. That was when I realised there was something new in the pocket. I pulled it out and knew straight away I’d been stitched up. It was a bright plastic flower with a clip on the back, and half a foot of tubing. At the other end of the tube was a pump filled with water: it was a classic clown gag, and I was the fall guy.

  I'd already reckoned it was the DA trying to frame me, but the guard waiting for me when the doors opened was the real clincher. Mellinksy didn’t want me to get out of the building a free man. The guard didn’t even want me to get out of the lift, unless it was in cuffs or on a stretcher.

  There was no choice. I took a chance and squeezed the pump. I got lucky. A jet of water streamed from the flower, hitting the guard square in the eye. Startled, he fell back clutching his face. The lift doors closed on the moment and I sent myself back up a few floors, I didn’t expect to be leaving by the ground floor anyway. I ducked out on third and let the lift carry on up to the roof, hoping the diversion might buy me some time. At worst it would get the guards a little red in the face before they caught up with me.

  Getting that snapshot back was my first job. Getting out of the building was a damn close seco
nd, but that would be the easy part. Whatever the DA had seen in the picture had spooked him enough to set me up as the worse kind of circus freak – a chuckler, the street name for someone who hung out with clowns. Once they finished with me I wouldn’t even be good enough to kiss Rupert Scully’s boot heels.

  I only had one ally in the building and that was a longshot. I grabbed a phone off the nearest desk and dialled Mellinsky’s secretary.

  “DA’s office,” she answered huskily.

  “Say honey, what’s a broad like you working a night like this for?”

  “It’s a cold night and I need the money.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. The talk was cheap, but I was on a deadline. It was time to get to business. “I don’t normally get broads to do my cleaning up, but I left my trash in the DA’s office.”

  “If it’s trash why do you want it back?”

  She was running rings round me, but I still had an ace up my sleeve. “You’re some kind of broad, and not the kind I like to go dancing with. You wanna help me or not?”

  “Do you always sweet talk dames like this, Detective Nickel,” she growled at me.

  “You ain’t no dame, and we both know how the DA feels about men who don’t dress in their own suits.”

  I wasn’t proud of myself, but that was my pitch. There was a deep sigh from the other end of the line.

  “You’re a son of a bitch, Nickel. What is it you want?”

  “How about a name for starters?”

  “Leslie Parrish.”

  “Is