A Finger in Every Pie
Tales from the Kichirou Show - Chapter Six
Welcome to the Kichirou Show! Where the lights are bright, and the popcorn flows freely. Join us as we travel the country and entertain the masses, reminding patrons of a bygone era with carnival games, circus acts, and the controversial sideshow.
If there is something you fear, you can run away here.
Mitch Lorrins runs to the Kichirou Show to escape murder allegations. Suz joins the show in search of a fugitive. Agi the dragon flees an intergalactic cartel, and Lucky barrels through reality in the hopes of preventing the apocalypse.
But pack up and leave, and you’ll surely bleed…
Not everyone will be able to get what they want, and no one will escape.
Tales from the Kichirou Show is a serialized volume of interconnected short stories that gradually come together to weave a larger tapestry. If you’re new, then start here:
Chapter Six
Suz had forgotten how much she loved playing music. Spreading her fingers over the keys of her borrowed saxophone and pressing the reed against her tongue was a homecoming. Playing with the band and living out her abandoned dream of becoming a musician was far from the reason she was at the Kichirou Show, but she regarded it as a perk of the job.
Then came the rain. She listened to it beat against the window in her shared hotel room as she gathered her sheet music. Surely some acts would still perform. Unless lightning was spotted, then anyone stationed under a tent would be protected from the weather.
As prepared as she would ever be, Suz put her makeup bag together, gathered her instrument and sheet music, and took everything down the hallway to Christopher’s room. He answered the door wearing a puzzled frown.
“Hey, Suz … What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to do your makeup?”
“Oh! You didn’t hear? We got rained out. There’s a hurricane making its way up the coast. We’re probably not in any danger,” he assured her, “but nobody’s coming to the fairgrounds tonight.”
A hurricane? Well, now she felt stupid. How had she not noticed the violent howl of the wind? The way it seemed to claw at the building. So caught up in the role she was playing—in the magic of the show itself—that she forgot she was a detective for a minute. She wished her saxophone case dangling at her side wasn’t quite so obvious.
“Okay, then. I guess I’ll go back to my room.”
Strange that it was empty, now that she knew there was no show. Where were the two Morrigan sisters?
“Or you could come inside,” Christopher suggested with a hopeful smile. “A bunch of us are hanging out and praying that the hotel doesn’t lose power.”
He stepped aside and waved her in like the world’s friendliest traffic conductor.
The room was alight in a golden glow from the wall sconces. The TV was tuned to a local news channel, muted with the captions on so that it could be easily ignored. People were either talking to each other or busy on their phones. Some faces she recognized. All three Morrigans took up one bed, along with Lucky, who was draped across their laps. On the second bed was Christopher’s roommate, another clown named Sheldon. Next to him was Lizaveta and a heavily tattooed woman. A man with salt and pepper hair sat in the chair by the window. On the floor was Desmond.
So far, Suz had been making decent progress on the Lorrins case on her own and hadn’t needed to enlist the help of the surly, standoffish clown. For which she was grateful, since she had yet to find a way into Desmond’s good graces.
Christopher threw an arm over her shoulders. “I think you know almost everyone.” He pointed at the tattooed woman. “That’s Mercy Howell, Desmond’s mom.” He moved his finger to the man in the chair. “And that’s Laszlo Nagy. He runs the sideshow.”
Brief greetings were exchanged. There weren’t many places left for her to sit, so Suz ended up on the floor leaning against the bed nearest the door. Christopher folded his long legs into a pretzel and sat beside her.
“So,” he said amiably, “I hear you’re fitting in well with the band.”
The gangly clown was friendly and polite and a good listener. Now that she thought about it, she had told him how she first got interested in cosmetics while she did his makeup before a show. Suz couldn’t remember what had prompted the story, but she did recall Christopher raptly listening without interruption, his interest genuine.
“Yeah, I bet a lot of people talk to you.” Suz grinned and scooted closer. “What kinds of things do you hear?”
The way his blue eyes lit up, imbued with eagerness, was the brand of enthusiasm inspired by a guilty pleasure. Jackpot, she thought. Lowering his voice, he also unmuted the television so they were less likely to be overheard.
“You know Moon?”
“Obviously. Everyone knows him.”
Christopher shook his head. “No, I mean, had you heard of him before you came to Kichirou?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Unless you’re into Hollywood and celebrity gossip, then probably not. Moon made a name for himself directing indie films. Pretty good ones, too. He broke into Hollywood about five years ago with some Oscar-bait film that I never saw. Seven months later, and Moon almost gets nabbed for tax evasion.”
“Really?”
That was news to her.
Mischief gleamed in Christopher’s eyes. “Yep. Luckily, the Kichirou Show was in town, and Moon slipped into the fold.”
“How has he not been caught?” she wondered. “I’ve seen his name printed on the show programs. It’s not a secret that he’s here.”
“That’s the big mystery! Moon isn’t the only one at Kichirou hiding from the law.” His eyes darted across the room. “Take Laszlo. He was a con artist operating out of West Palm Beach when he almost got picked up by police. As soon as he came here, the cops didn’t care about him anymore.”
Suz snorted. It figured the con artist would be a Florida man.
“And Sheldon was the suspect in a public shooting.”
“What?” Her voice rose higher.
Christopher hastily turned up the volume on the TV. Updates on the hurricane scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Reporters on site documented the damage being done to the coastline.
“Yeah. By the time the police got anywhere near him, Sheldon had made his way here. The same thing happened. Everyone just gave up trying to apprehend him.”
The scandalized expression on her face sobered the clown’s enthusiasm.
“Not everyone at Kichirou is a criminal,” he hurried to add. “Take Mercy Howell. She just wanted to get away from an abusive husband. Odette Bouchard came here to ditch her stalker, and Patime Kwan wanted a new outlook on life after getting diagnosed with stage four breast cancer.”
Suz chewed on her lip, contemplating this wealth of information. She remembered how she had to fight her superiors for permission to go undercover at Kichirou. How her colleagues, including Ed, were skeptical of and disinterested in her hunch. She was the only one who had insisted that there was a lead here.
She whispered to Christopher, “What about the Magician? What’s his deal?”
An uneasy shadow flitted over the clown’s countenance before he banished it with an easygoing shrug.
“No one really knows,” he murmured. “Nobody sees the Magician out of costume, and it’s bad luck to ask for his identity or to unmask him. People around here take superstitions very seriously. The only two things I know for sure about the guy are that he never talks, and he’s been part of the Kichirou Show longer than anyone else.”
With a grin, he nudged her with his elbow.
“What about you, Suz? What brought you to our neck of the woods?”
“Oh, you know,” she replied vaguely. “I just needed something new. A revitalization.”
If Christopher was annoyed by her refusal to give him a real answer, he didn’t show it. All he did was raise an imaginary glass in a toast. “Here’s to new beginnings then.”
Twenty minutes later, and no one was paying attention to the news anymore. They were gathered on the two beds playing a new game.
“Depending on the brand,” said Suz, the center of everyone’s attention, “one ounce of microwave popcorn—sans butter or oil—has between one hundred and one hundred twenty calories.”
“Sounds right to me,” said Meera.
Sheldon shook his head of shaggy brown hair. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s less than that.”
Lizaveta said something in Russian that sounded like an insult, especially paired with the sly look she gave her fellow clown.
“She is spot on,” Christopher confirmed from the Google results on his phone. The hotel room filled with a mixture of cheers and defeated groans. Fewer than half of the occupants had bet against Suz; the majority had quickly come to the realization she was never wrong about food.
Meera cackled at Sheldon’s misfortune and tossed another handful of popcorn into her mouth.
“Why do you know that, Suz?” cried the clown, tossing his hair out of his eyes. It had been Sheldon’s idea to start the game after she informed Christopher exactly how many calories were in the pile of snacks in his lap. And now Sheldon was losing.
“Okay, I have another one,” announced Mercy Howell in her raspy smoker’s drawl. She held up her empty bag of chips to consult the nutrition facts printed on the back. “How many calories are in this bag of Doritos?”
Suz turned her eyes to the ceiling and recalled the binder she kept in her apartment. It had everything she needed to know about the foods and snacks she loved. Writing all of that information in one place had allowed her to memorize everything ages ago.
“While I don’t know precisely how many calories are in that particular bag, one serving of Doritos ought to be…” Pausing, she pictured the binder in her hands and opened it to the section about Doritos. “Approximately one hundred fifty calories.”
The others cast their votes, most of which were in Suz’s favor. Stubborn Sheldon was the only holdout, stating that—statistically speaking—she was bound to be wrong eventually.
“This bag says one hundred forty calories,” said Mercy, “but that’s within the margin of error.”
She flipped the bag so everyone could see the nutrition facts for themselves. Sheldon threw his bag of Cheetos on the floor. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Laszlo laughed from deep in his belly. “You know, Suz, when I used to work on the streets—”
The man was interrupted by a collective groan from all three of the Morrigan siblings.
“Come on, man,” said Atlas. “Don’t say it like that.”
Reggie concurred. “Moon will continue to call you a prostitute.”
The conman merely waved away their objections. “As I was saying, when I worked on the streets, I used to play all kinds of memory games with people.”
“Ah, yes,” said Meera. “Grifting 101.”
The wrinkles around Laszlo’s rich brown eyes deepened as he looked hard at Suz. “I think you would have made a fine business partner. You’ve got a keen mind, and if we spruced up your looks, you could have any mark you wanted by the balls.”
“Thank you…” Suz furrowed her brow, mulling over the man’s words. “I think.”
“It was a compliment,” Reggie confirmed. The young woman stretched her body lengthwise across the bed. Both she and Meera leaned against the headboard, resting their feet on Atlas’s back. Atlas laid next to Lucky on his stomach at the foot of the bed. “If you ever don’t feel slightly insulted by Laszlo, that means he wants something.”
Laszlo placed a hand over his heart, pretending to be wounded.
So caught up in their calorie guessing game, Suz almost missed the way Desmond fluidly peeled himself out of the corner. He had remained quiet all evening, not participating in the snacking, the conversations, or the games.
“Dezi.” Mercy Howell’s smoky voice cut through the buzz of other voices. “Where’re you going?”
Desmond’s spine went rigid, perhaps at the indignity of being given a nickname by his mother in front of the others. His voice was strained when he answered.
“I’m going to check on the lizard in the music trailer. Francisco hauled it here from the fairgrounds when the weather turned.”
“Mm!” Reggie hummed, her mouth full of Cherry Coke as she raised her plastic bottle to Desmond. “Meant to do that earlier. Thank you!”
Suz and Christopher pulled their legs up to clear a path past the beds, inadvertently tangling their feet with Desmond’s in the process. The clown stumbled into the dresser. A huge binder tipped over the edge and fell to the floor, and a sea of loose papers and envelopes scattered across the carpet. Suz sprang forward to help gather the fallen pages.
“Sorry.” Christopher’s cheeks turned red. “I should have put away the Big Binder of Everything.”
The Big Binder of Everything?
Suz took note of every piece of paper that passed through her hands. The binder contained records of paystubs, the schedule for the show each night this month, and a map of the show’s current circuit, among other things. What really caught her eye was a spreadsheet of names and numbers. Room numbers, she realized. The spreadsheet marked which hotel rooms belonged to whom.
Her breath hitched. If she could get a closer look at the spreadsheet, she could determine whether Mitch Lorrins was on record at the Kichirou Show. It had the potential to enormously narrow the parameters of her search.
Desmond snatched the sheets from her hands so fast that she checked her skin for papercuts. Shooting her a venomous glare, he shoved the pages into the binder and the binder into Christopher’s arms, then stormed past her. As soon as the door shut, the relaxed atmosphere resumed.
“Don’t take it personally, Suz,” Atlas advised her. “Human interaction isn’t Desmond’s forte.”
“I did try to socialize the boy,” Mercy said, a bit of defensiveness making the set of her shoulders tense. “It didn’t take.”
“It’s fine,” she assured them. Before she could say more, Atlas tossed her a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar. Reacting before thinking, she caught it. Suz stared at the candy, unsure what to do with it. “Um…”
“You haven’t eaten anything since you joined us,” the acrobat pointed out. “That’s for you, unless you don’t like chocolate. In that case, we have a ton of other snacks. I think we cleaned out every vending machine on this floor.”
A familiar discomfort—a suffocating constriction across her chest—settled over her as Atlas rummaged through the mountain of snacks on the bed. A sour pit formed in her stomach at the prospect of eating in front of others. Her hands broke into a sweat, and her bowels rumbled.
“Chocolate is fine. Thanks, Atlas.”
Her own voice felt, sounding as though it came from someone else’s body. She stared at the unassuming candy bar, heart thumping fast. She slowly peeled the wrapper, trying not to imagine that all eyes were on her. The feeling sent her back to high school, to all those times her friends teased and cajoled her into eating with them. All the while, they made offhand jokes about her weight that secretly hit a little too close to home. She would cave to the peer pressure every time, and she always felt the same in the aftermath. Shameful, guilty, bloated, and disgusting. There was only one way to get rid of those feelings. One way to feel clean again.
It was a vicious cycle.
A fake stomach floating in a jar came to mind. The same jar she had hidden in her suitcase. That thought dominated all the unpleasant memories and smothered the anxiety making her sick.
You’re not putting the chocolate into your body, she could hear the fake stomach telling her. You’re actually putting it into this jar, with me.
“Suz.” She looked up to see Christopher giving her a worried look. “Everything all right?”
She smiled, feeling lighter than she had since she was a child. “Never better.”
For the first time in twenty years, Suz bit into a piece of chocolate without a second thought.
The hour was getting late, and Suz felt comfortably full and blessedly free of emotional baggage. The steady barrage of wind and rain pelting the window had not let up, but the weather reports made it clear that the hurricane would not make it this far inland.
Atlas and Lucky were the next to vacate the room after Desmond’s departure. The eight-year-old had fallen asleep, his little mouth smeared with chocolate. Without waking the boy, Atlas struggled to lift the kid into his arms.
“Come on, Atlas.” Reggie snickered. “You don’t get to brag about how many pull-ups you can do if you can’t even lift one tiny third-grader.”
Grunting and straining, the acrobat got Lucky draped over his shoulder. His forehead shined with sweat. “I think this kid has been eating bricks.”
“I’ll get the door for you,” Suz offered. “I’m getting tired anyway.”
The party bid good night to the trio. Suz held the door for Atlas before heading in the opposite direction. As she neared her room, she reached into her pocket. Her plastic key card was warm from being in her pocket pressed against her thigh.
The door was already cracked open.
Suz froze, the key card halfway to the lock. The door was propped ajar by the deadbolt. Her hand twitched toward her thigh. She had a gun, a small pistol, concealed on her person. But if she drew it in a hotel hallway, then her cover would be blown.
She bit the inside of her cheek. A gunshot and the ensuing commotion would only spook Lorrins, and then he would be in the wind. Suz had a good feeling about this place, a hunch that Lorrins never left the Kichirou Show. Determined to keep cool and her cover, she exhaled long and steady, then pushed on the door.
A lone, lean figure stood over the end of her bed. It took her less than a second to identify Desmond’s distinctive profile. He held something in one hand, studying it intently.
“Desmond?” He didn’t startle or even look up when she said his name. “How did you get in here?”
Keeping his eyes trained on the object in his grasp, he answered by holding up his other hand. Clutched between two fingers was a key card identical to Suz’s. Since she was currently holding her key, he must have snagged his from one of the Morrigan sisters.
“Do Reggie and Meera know what you’re doing?”
He hunched his shoulders. “Call them if you want. They won’t do anything.”
“I thought you went to check on Reggie’s new pet.” Suz edged farther into the room. Desmond still hadn’t moved from the end of her bed.
“I did. That only took ten minutes, leaving me plenty of time to come here and snoop through all of your stuff.”
Fear struck Suz, which she hurriedly disguised as outrage. “Snoop? What the hell, Desmond! If there was something you wanted to know, you could’ve asked—”
“You wear many hats, don’t you,” he cut in calmly. “You’re a musician, a makeup artist, a high school teacher, and now you’re a professional people watcher.”
Finally, he turned to face her, the object that had captured his attention identifiable. It was her pocket notebook.
Suz had a good memory—no, scratch that. She had a fantastic memory. It worked best when she wrote information down, allowing her to later mentally flip through the notebook for recall. For this assignment, she used her pocket notebook to help her remember everyone in the troupe, taking note of their appearances and occupations within the show. She was still in the process of confirming everyone’s identities. But if she could get her hands on that spreadsheet from the Big Binder of Everything, she could not only rule out potential aliases for Lorrins, but she could also start eliminating hotel rooms where he might be crashing.
She painted on a grin, giving it a sheepish hue. “Okay, you got me. I’m terrible with names, so I have to keep notes. It’s embarrassing.”
She held her breath as Desmond skimmed the pages of her notebook once more. He hummed, a sound that Suz didn’t know how to interpret. When he spoke again, his gaze stayed fixed on her tiny handwriting.
“In my experience, there are two kinds of people that join Kichirou.” He flipped a page. “They’re either desperate, or they’re just plain bad.”
Desmond’s dark green eyes snapped up and pinned Suz to the carpet. He strolled up to her until only an inch of space separated them. She kept her face carefully composed in a mask of uneasiness and irritation, reminding herself that she was just an ordinary, unarmed woman who was annoyed at the invasion of privacy. Also, a little intimidated by how physically menacing he was.
She flinched when his hand suddenly rose between them. Desmond offered her the pocket notebook.
“You don’t strike me as desperate, Suz Vanderhoef.”
She snatched the book out of his hand. Desmond set the stolen key card on the dresser.
“Have a nice night.”
Without another implied accusation, he left the room. The door closed, and a weight slipped off of her chest. For now, her secret was safe. However, if Desmond kept investigating her, then she might have to invite him onto the Lorrins case. Whether she liked it or not.
Read the next chapter:
I want to know who the Magician really is! It's gnawing at me... And Desmond is a little too sharp.