Tears of a Clown Read online

astonished. “He was there?”

  Chip nods. “We thought somebody’d given you a lift.”

  “We’d better go,” Beverly suggests.

  Beverly, Chip, and Laurel step quickly towards Chip’s car.

  “I just remembered,” Laurel emits. “I have something to say to Parks.”

  She turns around and struts over to the principal sobbing on the ground beside his car.

  “Mr. Parks?”

  Hesitatingly, he looks up. She punches him in the face and rejoins her friends.

  Several minute later, Chip is driving up the dark forested road with the girls. Besides the full moon, nothing else lights the area. Chip, gazing in his rearview mirror, can still faintly see Park slumped against his Town Car on the shoulder with his legs stretched out in the street. Rubbing his chin, deep in thought, the All-American pulls the car over to the side of the road.

  “What are you doing?” Beverly asks.

  Chip motions to the rear. “That idiot’s sitting in the road.” He opens his door.

  “Where’re you going?” his friend inquires.

  Chip exits and closes his door. “I’ll be right back.”

  They watch as Chip runs back in Parks’ direction.

  “He sure picked the best time to turn into a saint,” Beverly groans.

  Laurel, still shaken up, puts on the car’s dome light, leans over into the rearview mirror and studies her cheek.

  “Is it red?” she asks her friend. “I can’t see.”

  Beverly examines Laurel’s cheek. “Yeah. It’s bruised.”

  “Freakin’ jerk.” She clicks off the overhead light.

  “It’ll be alright, girl,” Beverly reassures her. “I’d heard about Parks before. This ain’t the first time. A couple of girls on the cheerleading squad said he could get them modeling assignments for favors because he’s connected. I never bought into that. How he’s able to keep his job all these years is a mystery to me.”

  “He’s as slick as cooking oil.”

  “You know how it is. It’s our word against his. You know who always wins.”

  Laurel nods.

  Bev, rummaging through the glove compartment, comes out empty handed. “Darn.”

  “What’re you looking for?”

  “I thought there’d be a mirror in there. I guess not.”

  They both start feeling chilly.

  “I don’t like it out here,” Beverly complains. “You don’t know what’s in those bushes.”

  Laurel stares through her window, studying the dark surrounding area. Listening intently, all she can hear is the sound of wind blowing through the trees and the occasional cricket rubbing its hind legs together.

  “I wonder what’s taking him so long,” Laurel voices softly.

  Looking through the rear windshield, because of the darkness, they can barely perceive what’s going on. Laurel reaches over to lock the driver side door.

  “I’d feel safer if…”

  The driver door springs open. Both girls jump in startled surprise. Chip enters, takes his post at the com, closes the door, and eyes the nervous girls.

  “What’s the matter with you two?”

  “What were you doing back there?” Beverly entreats.

  “He’s just, I don’t know, like all the strength just got sucked out of him or something. I helped him move off to the side of the road so at least he won’t get hit.”

  “Why doesn’t he just drive himself home?”

  “He’s distraught…said he couldn’t face his wife right now.”

  Chip sparks his engine and takes off.

  “This place is creepy as fuck,” Beverly exclaims. “Can’t you step on it?”

  The football player speeds up. A car driving in the opposite direction passes them then stops, turns around, and follows a few car lengths behind. Chip gazes in the rearview mirror.

  “What the hell?”

  Seconds later, the sheriff’s blue & red strobe lights and siren blasts on.

  Chip hits the wheel. “Damn it!”

  He slows down and turns to Beverly. “See what you made me do?”

  “I made you do?”

  He pulls over to the shoulder. Sheriff Torrance drives up behind him, turns off the siren, gets out of his car, walks over to Chip’s car, and shines his flashlight in the driver-side window.

  “Hi, Chip, girls,” he greets them.

  “Hey,” they return.

  “You know, you were speeding.”

  “I was only doing 45,” Chip begs to differ.

  “Yeah, but the speed limit here is 30.”

  “It is? My bad. I didn’t see the sign.”

  Torrance notices how shaken up and bruised Laurel appears. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she answers meekly but the sheriff’s not fooled. Bev intercedes on her behalf.

  “No, she’s not. Principal Parks was trying to molest her just now.”

  “Bev!” Laurel castigates the cheerleader.

  “Is that right, Laurel?” Torrance queries her.

  “Yeah,” Beverly insists, “but it’s over now. Chip took care of it.”

  Torrance turns to the driver. “What does she mean you took care of it? What’d you do?”

  “Nothing,” Chip swears. “All we did was talk.”

  The sheriff motions to Laurel. “Wanna press charges?”

  “No,” she replies. “He was drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “Don’t defend that bastard, Laurel,” Beverly counsels her. “Look at how Chip had to fight him off you with a tire iron.”

  “Where’s Parks now?” Torrance quizzes them.

  “Where we left him, “Chip answers, “back down the road.”

  Sheriff Torrance, followed by the three students, march over to the site where Parks’ Town Car is still sitting. With the law bringer’s flashlight illuminating their path, they quickly examine the area. Laurel screams when the light falls on Principal Parks. Lying crooked & motionless on the side of the road, the principal has a tire iron sticking out of his bloody, destroyed right eye. Torrance checks the downed man’s pulse. He has none. The sheriff then whips out his handcuffs, spins Chip onto the Lincoln and handcuffs him. “You’re under arrest!”

  “Hey!” Chip yells. “That wasn’t me!”

  “Chip Atwater,” the sheriff advises him, “you are being detained for the murder of Principal John Griffith Parks. You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say and do at this point can, and will, be held against you. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t me.”

  The moonlight shining in through the tiny slit of a window, high up out of reach of the average man, is the silent company Chip has tonight. Grasping the bars of his cell, he looks up and down the fluorescent lit hall. For the first time in his life, he is utterly, despicably alone.

  It is mid-morning on a rural interstate in L.A.; the sun is bathing the sky with its visible light. Traffic is sparse. Hungry urban deer scurry across the road, their hard, rubbery hooves slipping awkwardly on the slick pavement. Rustic homes and farms lie on both sides of the street. Black crows and starlings scour the nearby yards for a bite to eat. A tan colored Japanese import is making its way down the recently paved roadway.

  Driving the car is Criminal Investigator Lincoln Mar Vista, a white haired, white bearded, beer bellied Spaniard in his mid-50’s. Drinking coffee from his silver thermos, he is listening to the police scanner on his dashboard. Next to him on the passenger seat is a Sunday Edition of the Jefferson Valley Times with the bold headline: CLOWN SUSPECT IN CENTURY CITY MURDERS. Beneath it is a picture of the artist’s sketch of The Clown.

  Mar Vista pulls up into the sheriff’s parking lot, exits his car, ambles to the rear of the station and gazes at the placid river flowing calmly by about 30 feet away. After soaking in the site, he knocks on the station’s front door. Seconds later, a sheriff’s deputy greets, then shows, him in. Mar Vista plops down in a padded chair against a
wall and picks up a magazine as the deputy exits. Now alone in the room, the white-haired investigator hurriedly rises up, zips over to the sheriff’s cluttered desk, taps a few keys into the computer’s keyboard, examines its screen, then quickly rifles through several sheets of paper scattered over the desk.

  Sheriff Torrance enters from the rear of the station. Mar Vista immediately erects himself and walks over to the sheriff with his hand extended.

  “Sheriff Henry Torrance,” Mar Vista states.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Lincoln Mar Vista from Jefferson Valley.”

  “Oh. Good morning. I was expecting you.”

  They shake.

  “Please…” Torrance points to the chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”

  The visitor complies; Torrance walks over to a coffee machine on a thin wooden table.

  “You drink coffee?” the sheriff asks.

  “Black, please.”

  Torrance pours them both a cup of java, brings one over to Mar Vista, then takes the seat behind his desk.

  “Your name sounds familiar,” the sheriff admits.

  “I used to be a novelist. Still am really, though it’s been a few seasons since I’ve put pen to paper.”

  “Yes. I think you wrote The Cape Hill Murders and A Vermont Affair.”

  “I see you read.”

  “I used to. Those were pretty popular crime novels. As a matter of fact, they actually used crime detection and forensic techniques from those books to solve real murders, right?”

  “Uh, huh,” the proud author acknowledges.

  “Where’d you get your criminology degree?

  “UC-Irvine.”

  “Cool. I’ve spent a couple of summers up at Big Bear.”

  “I’m a beach man, m’self. Oh, how was that takeout Spanish omelette?”

  Torrance’s eyes light up. “How’d you know I just…?”

  “Good eye for detail. There’s still a bit of