Free 14 The Chocolate Clown Corpse by JoAnna Carl Page A

with a harmonica.”
    Elk lowered his head until it was almost inside the giant pot he was scrubbing out. “Some people knew him,” he said. “But Royal Hollis never come to the shelter.”
    Joe nodded. “It sounds as if he liked to camp on his own.”
    “That’s how he got in trouble.” Elk rinsed out the big cooking pot and handed it on to me.
    Then he stood back and glared at us again. “I could give you some dinner.”
    Joe took a deep breath, and I knew he was going to say we had to leave. So I spoke quickly. “I’d love some of that sloppy joe, Elk. It smells just like my mom’s.”
    “That sauce ain’t canned,” he said. “I make it myself.”
    Joe gave me a quizzical look, and I winked at him. By the time Elk had warmed some sloppy joe and fixed three plates—we got heavy crockery plates, not paper ones—we were through drying the pans, and the three of us sat down at the kitchen worktable.
    Elk’s sloppy joe turned out to be pretty good. The frozen vegetables left a lot to be desired, but I’ve definitely had worse meals. Heck, I’ve cooked and served worse meals.
    We all ate for several minutes before I spoke. “Royal Hollis came by our house once,” I said. “He raked some leaves for us. Seemed like a nice old guy. I was sure surprised when I heard they thought he killed someone.”
    “He’s a kind of a loner,” Elk said. “Or that’s the scuttlebutt around this place.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” Joe said. “I was hoping to find somebody who hung out with him, maybe who’d camped with him.”
    “Why would you want to talk to somebody like that?”
    “The deputies didn’t do much of an investigation, but when they picked Hollis up he was in a cabin at least a mile from where the killing took place. They did notice that more than one person had been staying there. I thought the other guys might know something that could help him.”
    “I guess they all split.”
    Joe nodded. “Probably Hollis came back after his run-in with Davidson and said he’d had some trouble, so the others took off. What I don’t understand is why Hollis didn’t take off with them.”
    “I guess he didn’t know the guy was dead.”
    “Yeah, but if he told the others he had punched somebody, or shoved him down—or whatever happened—you’d think he would have known it was likely the sheriff would be there PDQ.”
    “Maybe Royal told them a different story.”
    “Like what?”
    Elk sighed. “Well, the talk is that ol’ Royal claimed the guy had shoved
him
down.”
    “That Moe Davidson struck Royal Hollis?”
    Elk nodded seriously. “Now that’s just Royal talkin’. And he didn’t always make good sense. Or so I’ve heard.”
    I was careful not to look at Joe. Elk’s story was a new version of what had happened when Moe Davidson was killed. If Moe had struck first, that might be the basis of a plea of self-defense for Royal. I considered that and decided—in my nonlawyer way—that it was unlikely. Moe had been the householder. All the prosecution had to say was that Moe was protecting his life and property.
    But Elk was still talking. “What I always wondered was what that woman had to say.”
    I paused, my fork loaded with overcooked carrots and halfway to my mouth. When I spoke, I tried to sound innocent.
    “Woman? What woman?”
    Elk dropped his head nearly to his plate and didn’t reply. “It’s just scuttlebutt,” he said. “Probably nothin’ to it.”
    Joe chewed and swallowed. I could almost hear him thinking, I must not spook this guy.
    “The sheriff didn’t know that there had been a woman there,” he said. “It might help Royal a lot if we knew there had been someone.”
    Elk kept looking at his plate. “Anything I heard was gossip,” he said.
    “I understand,” Joe said. “Of course, it would have made sense for Mrs. Davidson to come up to the cottage with her husband.”
    Elk shrugged. “You want dessert?” he asked.
    The conversation was over. Joe