Free Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) by Stuart M. Kaminsky

came bellowing after me.
    I wasn’t in bad shape. Oh, I’d cut back on the number of days I played handball at the Y on Hope Street back in Los Angeles, but I’d been doing some running and lifting. Fear helped a lot too. I beat the elephant to my car by about four steps, scrambled inside, and went for my glove compartment. The compartment was open, and the gun was gone. The gun was gone, and my Buick was rocking. An elephant was trying to shake me out. A foot thudded against the door at my side, and I could see the dent stop just short of my leg. I put the key in the ignition, turned it on, and gunned the motor. The elephant backed off with a roar that would have frightened Kong. But something had him going, and he came at me again. He stood bellowing a challenge in the drizzle, elephant against car. I knew the car wouldn’t survive a battle, and I didn’t want to kill an elephant if I didn’t have to. So I hit my horn. The first blast startled him. The second blast sent fear into his already blazing eyes. The third, followed by my backing up, sent him running down the beach in the general direction of I-don’t-know-where but the opposite direction from where I knew I had to go.
    I watched the gray lump disappear and wondered what people would think when they saw the creature racing in the general direction of Mexico. I wondered even more what Arnie the no-neck mechanic would respond when I showed him my door and told him it had been kicked in by a wild elephant.
    I drove down the road as close as I could get to where the ghost town stood and the heap of clothing lay. Then I made my way down to the spot, with a good idea of what I would find. There were no footprints around the body except those of the victim herself. I could see it was Rennata Tanucci, knew it was before I pulled back the coat crumpled over her face.
    The bullet holes, two of them, were easy to find, one in the middle of her chest, the other in her stomach. I knelt next to her body and followed her hand that seemed to be pointing to something in the sand. The something was a crude drawing that she had apparently made. It looked like a snowman next to a snowman. One snowman was bigger than the other, and the bigger one had two eyes, a hole for a nose, and a mouth that drooped crazily. Both figures were inside a crude box, which may have been a house. It’s hard to apply rules of taste to the last creation of a dying artist. The message, whatever it might mean, was shallow and almost worn away by the rain. Her head was turned toward the shore, and her open eyes looked at a brick house on the far ridge above the beach.
    “Lady,” I said softly, covering her again, “I wonder what the hell you were trying to tell us.”
    “No doubt,” came a voice from behind, “that she expired with the hope that we would catch you. In which case, I am pleased to report, we have achieved that end.”
    I didn’t turn to Nelson’s voice right away. There was something I wanted to see first, and I saw it, my .38, about a dozen feet from the body where someone had thrown it.
    “You can’t expect to go chasing elephants and shooting people on beaches without attracting some attention,” said Nelson with clear satisfaction.
    I turned and stood up. Nelson and Alex were facing me. Nelson had his gun out. Alex didn’t.
    “Murder, as you know, is a rare thing in Mirador, Mr. Peters, a rare thing indeed. It is my belief, however, that if it does come, it is good if it is done by an outsider and good if I catch that outsider and even better if it takes place shortly before a major election.”
    “Then I’ve done you a favor,” I said.
    He nodded with a self-satisfied smile. “You might, indeed, say that,” he said. “Now, if you would be so good as to step a few feet away from the body of that unfortunate woman, Alex will get that weapon, which, I assume, is yours.”
    I stepped away slowly. Nelson might take it into his head to simplify matters by gunning down