“Tell me about Troy Pepper,” I said.
Pop Sonders uncapped the Mylanta bottle, chugged from it, and put it back, wiping at the pale green chalk on his lips. “Pepper’s been with us about five months. He works hard. I haven’t had a whisper of trouble with him. Till now, I guess. Some people, you take ’em on, you know day one they won’t hack it. This ain’t easy work. But Pepper caught on fast, and he pulls his load.”
“What did he do before he joined you?”
“Warehouse work, different things, hauled poles and cables for light and power. He was in the service a while before that.”
“I’d like to look at his personnel file.”
“I’ll have to think about that. This is all a big surprise. A murder, and one of our people charged?”
“Were you there when the woman’s body was found?”
“Right here. We shut things down quick and got the crowds thinned out. Even so, it wasn’t the kind of thing you want folks to have to see.”
“Did Pepper say anything when he was arrested?”
He shook his head. “Not really. He had a kind of dazed, sick look.
Sort of rubbery in the knees as they took him away, like a sailor before he’s got his land legs. I told him I’d hire a lawyer.”
“Have you been over to visit him?”
“Mr. Meecham said it’d probably be a good idea if I didn’t. Not yet, anyways.”
“That young woman—Nicole. She seemed upset when I mentioned why I was here.”
Sonders sighed. “She’s most of the time cheerful as a lark, and it rubs off on everyone. I like her around for that alone. She’s a sweetheart of a kid, a good scout. But she’s like a barometer, picks up on emotional weather real easy. Last night really got to her.”
I nodded. It had upset Phoebe badly, too. “She works for you?”
“She looks after things for us when we’re on the road, attends to the dogs, sometimes runs the ring toss or does ticket sales.” Sonders pursed his lips, as if deciding whether to trust me. “This is between us. Nicole’s mom was dying a dozen years back, when the girl was eight, and my wife and me—that’s my wife there in the picture—promised we’d take care of the kid. Kind of a deathbed promise, I guess. My wife’s gone now, too. Aneurysm.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He nodded. “Nicole has fetal alcohol syndrome. It hasn’t kept her back much, though I’m not sure what life would be like for her out there.” He gestured beyond the paneled wall. “She’s never really lived it. Most of her schooling’s been right here on the road. I’ve tutored her myself, and the first five, six years I got her a regular teacher. She gets by.”
“Is she a close friend of Pepper’s?”
“No more than any of us. We’re all close, come to that. Pepper’s a little newer is all.”
“How are the others taking this?”
“I haven’t talked to everyone yet. There wasn’t hardly time. I will, though. We’ll have a meeting today.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Forty-five or thereabouts. That’s the gang that travels. I got a booking staff and an accountant back in Jersey, and a safety engineer on a consulting basis. Here I got a full-time ride supervisor and a crew inspects all
the rides every day before we open. I got jacks who operate the rides and run the concessions. We add local hands as needed. We do about fifty shows a year, all over the Northeast. Mostly three- or four-day visits, though places like here we’ll come in and stay a week or longer. We’ve got sixty rides, food stands, games of chance, we generally work it with a percentage split between the folks who contract us and the show. If it’s a charity benefit or a fund-raiser, we’ll slice it accordingly. Everyone’s on hourly, with a guarantee of hours per week, and—” He broke off, clapped his hands on his thighs, and stood up. “I’m itchy just sittin’ and thinking that we’re not operating at all right now. Come on, it’ll be easier if I show you around.”
Outside we set off among the row of camper trailers, away from the thrill rides and the kiddie amusements, toward the area where the food concessions and games of chance were set up. The aromas of food and defeat lingered in the air. “Are you the owner?” I asked.
“Legally, on paper; but we run it family-like. Everyone gets a say. I make the final call, though. Someone’s got to. I give bonuses based on what we take.”
“That must create loyalty.”
He glanced at me but said nothing. We walked through the big mowed field where the show was laid out, Sonders pointing out things with the stem of the corncob as we went. “We’re a small outfit. Independent. A lot of ‘em are owned by big operations anymore. They do the big state fairs. I pick up the slack. There’re about a hundred and fifty shows like this that move around the country. We generally run full tilt, March through October. We got a few more dates to fill up here, and then we’ll start south with the cold coming, wind up in Florida. You’ve got to pan that stream pretty deep to come up with much, ’cause you’re always up against Mickey Mouse, but hey, come December, the weather’s nice.”
He explained that his father had once owned the show but sold it. Sonders had eventually bought it back. “I made it a profit-sharing operation. No union. I never met a union yet that didn’t start off as a good idea and end up feeling like a gun in your ribs.”
“Shh—not too loud in this town.”
“There may be some, I’m not saying that. But the solution to one
problem seems to create new problems. I don’t like the idea of shoving a stick into a turning wheel. There’s got to be something that works both ways.”
Over at Harvard Business School, students were paying plenty to study with people like him. I said, “I’d still like to see Pepper’s personnel file.”
“I’m not crazy about opening up files to just anyone. It’s an unwritten rule.”
I gave him a look. “Let me ask a question. Do you think Pepper killed that girl?”
Sonders frowned, letting it buy him a moment. “No.”
“Then who’s going to object to my seeing the file? Pepper?”
“Okay, you’re working with us,” he said, relenting. “I’ll pull his jacket when we go back.”
“Did you run a background check when you hired him? Call references?”
“When I need someone, I need them today. Usually, I go on horse sense. Not just anyone can do this work. Remember Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity? His ‘little man’?” He poked his potbelly. “I’ve got my own little man, right here. Tells me what I need to know. Okay, sure, I suppose I could hire a big fancy search firm, with a bunch of names in the title and letters after the names, and they could run applicants through parlor games, right?”
I let it alone.
“Like I say, I do my own hiring, and I stand by my choices. I can’t smoke for real anymore ’cause my wind is shot. Booze is out. My stomach’s got more holes than a tin can in a shooting gallery, but goddammit, it tells me when I’m on the right track.”
“What’s it telling you now?”
Again, he hesitated. “That I ain’t wrong to trust Pepper.”
We had looped back around to his motor home. Nicole was stepping out of a small adjoining camper, no dogs with her this time. She handed Sonders the morning’s edition of the Sun. He let his eyes drift across the front page. “You seen this?”
I had. He stuck the paper under his arm. “Nicole, will you go in and pull out Troy’s file for me?”
Her small face clenched with concern, and she glanced at me, then back. “Sure thing, Pop.”
When she’d gone to get the file, Sonders said, “The bull I talked to is named Cote. Know him?”
“Roland Cote, yeah.” The carnival boss was feisty; he wasn’t going to let the information exchange only run one way. “He’s steady. He’ll get the job done,” I said. “Is he imaginative? No, but then he doesn’t have to be. In this city, the killers aren’t very imaginative, either. They get caught.”
“Not this time,” Sonders said. “Not yet, anyhow. So, where do we go from here?”
“Fred Meecham is quarterbacking. You’ll hear from him. Obviously, you should cooperate with the police, but anything you come up with that’ll help us, too, let Fred or me know.”
Nicole brought out a manila folder, which she handed to Sonders, then went off in the direction of the midway. “You can lamp this in my digs,” he said.
“I’d like to take it along with me.”
He tugged at an earlobe. “Awright. I sized you up pretty good, I guess.”
“And your ‘little man’ gives me a pass?”
He winced and poked his stomach again. “That, or it’s gas.” He thrust the folder at me. “Come on, I’ll introduce you around.”
“I can do that myself. I’ve got my own horse sense.”
The fact was I wanted to keep a small element of surprise.
He regarded me skeptically from under the snowy hedges of his eyebrows, but shrugged. “Be my guest.”
“One more thing. The police seem to have their minds made up one way,” I said. “I’m going to look at whatever information I can get. But if I don’t find anything to contradict their read, I say so.”
“Hell’s bells, I know that. No one’s paying you to kiss ass.”
I handed him one of my cards, with the addition of my cellular phone number handwritten on it. Even with the pair of gold-frame specs he hooked on, he had to hold the card at arm’s length. “Never seen this spelling of ‘Rassmusen’ before.”
“No one has. It’s a printer’s error. I’m halfway done with a deck of five hundred.”
He put it in his shirt pocket. “I suppose you’ll want to be paid.” His laugh was the first trace of mirth he’d shown.
“I laugh at it all the time, too. Your lawyer will take care of me. Oh, and just an observation, Pop. You keep saying ‘hell’s bells’ and calling folks ‘geezer,’ the slickers around here are going to think you’re an anachronistic old seadog.”
He squinted one eye, and I suddenly felt like Bluto. “Just let ’em try.”
As I set off, I realized I liked the guy. If he was a little clattery and overprotective, that was okay. I knew where I stood with him. After freelancing for the past few months for a monolith, where people wore faces like cold coffee—if you got to see anyone at all—I was glad to have a real person, and not to have a sense that my sole purpose was protecting some outfit’s Dun and Bradstreet rating. Sonders’s rating appeared to be the good regard he held his workers in, including Troy Pepper. I felt inspired to want to prove him right.