Free Carnival of Death by Day Keene

contract with the shopping center. For X number of dollars, I agreed to furnish X number of gallons of free lemonade. All anyone had to do was ask for it.”
    Daly looked back at the girl. “Did you put anything in his drink, Paquita?”
    She shook her head, then drew an imaginary paper cup of lemonade from an imaginary container and drank it.
    “You drank out of the same container?”
    “In front of me,” Laredo answered for her. “When I saw Kelly go down, I walked over to the stand and asked her the same thing and Paquita was as puzzled as I was.”
    Daly changed the subject. “Why didn’t you tell me what happened to your parents when you were on my show Friday night, Mickey?”
    The younger man shrugged. “Probably because I still go to pieces when I think of it.” He added quickly, “But I’m not bitter or foolish enough to hold up an armored truck to get money for the cause.”
    DuBoise suggested, “Realizing how much can be at stake for you and Mrs. Laredo, and that the District Attorney’s office intends to charge you with murder in the first degree, suppose you tell us exactly what happened from the time you arrived at the shopping plaza up to and including the arrival of the armored truck.”
    Laredo sat on the edge of the table in the room. “There isn’t much to tell, Mr. DuBoise. Paquita and I got to the plaza a few minutes after eight o’clock. While she made up the juice I put on some coveralls and fixed one of the pipes on the carousel organ. That took me about an hour. Then I started for the Ferris wheel to see if I could do anything about a set of faulty main bearings and I met Jocko who told me he had worked most of the night replacing them with bearings he’d gotten from a junked wheel. That made me feel good. I felt fine. You know, like I might make it after all. Then I worked on the throttle of the locomotive of the miniature train.”
    “What was the matter with the throttle?”
    “A worn bushing made it stick.”
    “Do you usually run the train yourself?”
    “No. Usually I clown around to drum up trade. I pay a punk named Tommy Banks to run the train. But when he hadn’t shown up by twenty minutes of ten, I decided he’d quit. So I walked over to the men’s room in the service station and put on my makeup and clown costume, intending to run the train myself and save the twenty bucks I would have had to pay Banks.”
    “Do you wear a distinctive clown costume?” Daly asked. “I mean, did it originate with you?”
    “No,” Laredo said, “I use a more or less classical Pierrot. The only variations are that I paint on a sad mouth and put a few tears on my cheeks.”
    “Go on. What happened after you changed into costume?”
    “I started back toward the rides with the usual tail of kids following me. Then I hear a car horn beep behind me and when I turned to shoo the kids out of the way, I turned too quickly and fell. And it wasn’t a car that had beeped. It was the armored truck and Kelly was laughing at me.”
    “It was Kelly who’d beeped the horn?”
    “So Quinlan, the driver, said.”
    “And then?”
    “Kelly told him to drive on and made some crack about now that the one-legged clown was out of his way he wanted to cop another feel from the pretty dumb little Spanish broad and get a couple of glasses of lemonade before he made his deliveries.”
    “What did you do then?”
    “I gave the kids some passes to get rid of them and I limped after the truck and got my gun from the catchall box.”
    “What did you intend to do with it?”
    “Kill Kelly if he bothered Paquita.”
    “Did he?”
    “No. He was just needling me. While I stood there, holding the gun like a fool, he stopped at the stand but all he did was ask for a cup of lemonade.”
    Daly looked at Paquita. She nodded.
    Laredo continued, “So I put the gun back in the box and started for the train and I heard a woman scream and when I looked back Kelly was clutching at the collar of his shirt and