Chapter Text
Was it too much to ask that his shoes actually flop at the end? Smiley yanked the oversized shoes off his feet and threw them into a rack of brightly multicolored jumpsuits in his small dressing room. The costume department had taken a dive in the last year. His shoes were off. His buttons were too small when he specifically asked for them to be cartoonishly large; he may as well have been wearing a cardigan and dad jeans. This was not how one clowned.
He looked at himself in the mirror. Thirty years in the business, and what did it get him? A rainbow fro that slipped off his bald cap, balloon pants with a rip in the seam, and a foam nose that had faded to pink and not been dyed or replaced in months. It was embarrassing.
His performances were worth the price of tickets, but his costumes undersold him. Kids hardly approached him for balloons or pictures. He was turning into a laughingstock, and nobody else in the circus seemed to be worried that one of their best assets was being placated with false promises and helium tanks when all he wanted was a new wardrobe.
He went out into the hallway and shouted in the general direction of the costume department, “You’re spitting on the backbone of this place! Clowns are the circus! When I walk, good luck hiring some amateur that can’t fall funny. I’m the only clown on the East Coast that can make a two-headed octopus balloon animal in under thirty seconds!”
All he asked for was new clothes. That was all. Also, whiskey. Whiskey was good.
He turned back around to pour another glass in the dressing room but ran smack into someone.
“Oh.” He wobbled a bit as he backed up in surprise. “Hey? What’re you doing here? I thought—”
The knife shot out and was hilt deep in his chest before he had a chance to register that there was a weapon between them. He choked on the words and his groan and the scream that all wanted to come out at once and only managed to give a strangled grunt as the knife was yanked out, and he dropped.
Footsteps hurried down the hallway away from him, and he tried to crawl for the phone in the dressing room to call for help even though the floor smeared wet beneath him as he dragged himself, but all he managed to do was get his torso over the threshold and block the door.
His vision got fluffy at the edges, black and zeroing in, and he knew what was coming despite the haze of too much booze and shock. A swell of bitterness filled him that he was going to die there in that ugly, old suit. That was no way for a clown of his caliber to go out.
There was still one thing he could do before the blackness swallowed him. Smiley grit his teeth and got to work. When he was done, he felt a rush of smug victory. Not a bad feeling to die with.
****
After Neal checked his phone for the fifth time that night, Peter’s admittedly impressive patience gave way to annoyance.
He turned to him in the car across the street from the abandoned warehouse they were staking out. “Will you stop moping?”
“I’m not moping.” Neal proved it by tucking his phone away into the inside pocket of his jacket. Out of sight, out of mind. “Checking is not moping.”
“It absolutely isn’t, I agree.” Peter pointed at his chest where the phone was hidden but not as quickly forgotten as Neal would have liked. “But checking to see if Mozzie has called back five times in ten minutes? Yeah, we’re skirting moping territory.”
“It’s not even near the fence of moping. You should tone down your awareness of my every move, also. Attention can move from flattering to stalking very quickly.”
“You’re the stalker,” Peter argued. “Mozzie is going to put a restraining order on you.”
“That would require him to willingly depend on the judicial system for something, so I think I’m safe.”
And he was not moping. Much.
Mozzie had been gone a week to do a job with Gordon Taylor in Paris, news passed to Peter more along the lines of ‘traveling to enrich his spirit’, which wasn’t exactly a lie anyway. The anklet kept Neal from joining, which he might have been able to swallow with less bitterness if Mozzie had bothered to return any of his calls for the last few days.
He got it. Things got messy or went sideways, and filling your buddy back home in on your adventures in high-profile burglary dropped on the priorities list. Even if things were going perfectly smoothly, there were preparations to be made and actions to put in motion. Taylor hired Mozzie, because Mozzie was the best at what he did. He was going to be busy.
Still, he worried. If Moz got busted, there was little he would be able to do to help him in France with a leash around his ankle and Peter monitoring his every move. Mozzie was not built for a cage. Neal went to prison and did the time forced on him, but even trying to imagine Mozzie behind bars made his brain hurt. People like Mozzie - and there were no people like Mozzie - needed fresh air, freedom, and anonymity to breathe. If he would just call back and let him know that things were fine but he was busy, he could stop annoying Peter by turning his phone’s screen on again to look for new messages.
“Time zones?” Peter suggested, and it took a moment to realize he wasn’t going to add on to that.
Neal nodded. “Yes, Peter, I am aware of time zones. Are you aware that within three days, there are several blocks of reasonable hours when he could have called me back? France doesn’t operate on a 30 Days of Night type system.”
He ignored him. "I thought Mozzie was in Spain."
Neal turned to look out the windshield to hide the flash of oops that crossed his eyes. Specificity wouldn't do Mozzie any favors if Peter heard about the robbery (likely) and became suspicious (extremely likely).
Lying was the best course. "That's what I said."
Peter passed him a look that said he didn't buy it for a second but decided to let it go. Neal hoped that apathy held up once Gordon Taylor's latest score made the news and turned into a case file on his desk.
“Maybe he met a girl,” Peter suggested instead. “Mozzie could be holed up in a hotel in Paris with the view of the Eiffel Tower, speaking French to some woman crazy enough to enjoy his craziness.”
“No.”
He leaned forward when he thought he caught movement up ahead, but the shadows remained undisturbed. He rested back against the seat, bored. False alarm.
“Why not?" Peter drank the last of his coffee, tapping the bottom of the cup to get the final drips. He was always very charitable towards Mozzie, adding, "I’m sure there are weirdos in Europe too.”
“Because Moz would have called and told me if there was a woman. We tell each other about women.”
It would have been more of a chore not to, considering Mozzie's habit of letting himself into his apartment at odd hours, with a perfunctory wave at anyone else that happened to be there in whatever state of undress, and launching into excited chatter about this or that word from the street until Neal put on a robe and his guest let herself out. He figured he should probably have been more annoyed by the interruptions, but Mozzie usually came bearing something interesting: word about a new score, rumors of an underground legend in town, and one time, a porcelain elephant with a coded letter rolled up and hidden in its trunk. They still hadn't cracked that one, but it was fun to think about.
As for Mozzie, his trysts were more infrequent, but Neal had a solid record just the same. There were more dates on record than sex and more tales of faraway admiration without any actual contact at all than either of those. They had breakfast at a pancake place with bad pancakes more than once because a waitress had attracted Mozzie's radar for suspicious activity. He lost interest when she turned out to not be a spy but a pot dealer. Less glamorous. They started eating breakfast at restaurants with food that actually tasted good again. If there was a new woman with a minor secret that Mozzie's imagination was building up into an alluring world-class supervillain, he would know.
Peter wasn't as quick to dismiss the possibility. “Like you’ve never gotten wrapped up in some new affair and forgotten to leave the room or eat, much less ring up your pals to tell them all about it.”
Not if he was on a job and not checking in meant letting Moz think he got pinched.
“He would call me about a woman,” he insisted.
Peter shrugged and pulled out the sandwich Elizabeth made for him, peering out the windshield and not noticing the way his next words swung into Neal like a barbed wire hammer. “Maybe he’s just tired of New York. Wants to live abroad.”
It hit a sore spot and left it to throb untreated in his chest. That was the core of his impatience to hear back from Mozzie. He wanted to be in Paris. He wanted to travel and live where he wanted and steal whatever he could pull off without getting tagged again. He should have been on Gordon Taylor’s crew right there with him. It was a bruise he couldn’t stop pushing on as his mind circled the possibility that, yeah, maybe Mozzie just wasn’t getting back to him because he was tired of New York, and tangentially, Neal’s leashed ankle to it.
The stakeout ended with no new leads and no new messages.
It wasn’t until the morning that things got interesting enough to turn his thoughts away from Paris.
Two obvious Feds walked into the White Collar Unit and after a couple of minutes with Peter, he leaned out of his office and beckoned him up.
He went over and smiled. The woman was striking, and the man with her wasn’t a slouch either. Between them and Diana and Jones out there, he was beginning to suspect that headshots and model measurements were a requirement to join the FBI.
“Neal, this is Agent Crue and Agent Bloom. They’re with the BAU.”
At his inquiring look, the blonde woman, Crue, explained, “The Behavioral Analysis Unit.”
“Ah.”
“They’re in New York investigating a murder.” To the BAU, he said, “This is the guy you want to talk to.”
Neal wasn’t so sure he liked the sound of this. “Murder isn’t my usual area of expertise.”
Peter sighed heavily and asked the last thing he expected, “Did you hear from Mozzie last night?”
Suddenly, with homicide investigators in the room, Mozzie’s silence over the past few days took on a much more sinister feel.
That barbed wire hammer wound back and knocked the air out of him. Neal blinked in surprise, feeling himself go tense. “What?”
Peter looked at the BAU and back at him, making the connection and dismissing it quickly. “No, no! Nothing like that. Mozzie’s status as far as I know is still just screening you.”
Relief came like water after a drought. His knees felt like they needed some concrete to support him. His irritation at Mozzie for ignoring him while he had adventures in Paris with Gordon Taylor vanished the moment his name and ‘murder’ were thrown into the mix together.
He pat his chest subconsciously over the phone with the empty inbox. “Thanks for the arrhythmia, Peter. No, I haven’t heard from Moz. What does that have to do with this?”
“Mozzie may be linked to their case.”
“To a murder?” Neal couldn’t help sounding incredulous.
After the hit on Keller, he was less shocked by what Mozzie may or may not have been capable of, but murdering someone himself (or murdering someone himself and leaving behind a trace) stretched the realm of possibility. He erased all evidence that he was ever there when he left a McDonald’s. A murder scene wouldn’t be the place to get sloppy.
“He’s missing?” Agent Crue asked.
“No. He’s traveling. And you have the wrong guy.” He didn’t need to see what they had. Even hard proof was dishonest. He knew that any road that led to Mozzie was a dummy trail. “Why do you suspect him?”
Agent Bloom pulled a full page photo from a folder and held it out for him to see. It was a picture from the crime scene. There were messy letters spelled out on a red splattered white carpet.
“The victim wrote his name in blood.”
That’ll do it. The phone took on the weight of a brick in his pocket, growing heavier the longer it didn’t ring.
He looked away from the ugly image and smiled with a tight shrug. “That could be any Mozzie. There must be a vast directory of Mozzies you could point the finger at.”
“He’s a person of interest, not a suspect,” Bloom clarified.
Yeah, Neal knew that game. They only wanted to ask questions. No one was in trouble. Then there were cuffs and tiny prison cells with plastic trays for lunch and wardens to con into giving you special treatment. If Mozzie got wind that he was a person of interest, it could have explained why he dropped so far off the grid.
Mozzie was going to be really disappointed that a group of Feds knew where to sniff around for him at all once he came back. Peter was to blame for that. The BAU’s tech support found a mention of Mozzie in one of Peter’s reports. The location was right, and a few phone calls confirmed a criminal history. Neal wouldn’t forgive himself if being connected to him got him a bogus murder charge.
Moz being soft-core accused of killing somebody should have been the weirdest part of the day. It was only the start of escalating weirdness.
He and Peter tagged along with Crue and Bloom to interview a witness. Peter pulled the car to a stop behind theirs, and Neal leaned forward and squinted to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He figured they were on their way to the witness’ house or the scene of the crime, but this was unexpected.
“Is that a—”
“Circus tent.” Peter glanced at him. “Mozzie can never be in normal trouble. It always has to be bizarre.”
‘Normal’ had never particularly appealed to him. “On the bright side, there are probably clowns inside, and Elizabeth tells me you don’t do well with those. So this could be really good for me.”
“When were you and El discussing clowns?”
“We were discussing Tim Curry, and Pennywise came up.”
“When were you and El discussing Tim Curry?”
“We were talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“When— Nevermind.” Peter got out of the car, and Neal followed, pulling his phone out and hitting the number one speed dial as he went, hanging back to leave his message in private.
“Moz. It’s me. If you don’t call me back by tonight, I’m sending Dog the Bounty Hunter after you. I know how much his mullet disconcerts you, but you brought this on yourself. Call me. Things are getting…” 'Weird' wasn’t a strong enough word. “Too you.”
He hung up as he caught up to the others and followed them into the tent.
A pretty middle-aged woman in a leopard print unitard abandoned the trapeze area when she saw them come in and walked over. Behind her, others in similar dress were practicing over a net. Neal craned his neck to watch.
“Oh!” Peter cringed as a glittery blue figure flew through the air from one bar to another.
“Kind of beautiful,” Neal said, admiring the strength it took to maneuver like that without incident and the lines of their bodies as they swung and flipped high above the ground. It was art.
Peter was already miserable inside the tent. “Don’t start.”
The leopard woman turned out to be Kelly Knight. She discovered the body, and already Neal wasn’t enjoying this case. If Moz wasn’t involved, he would have insisted on finding something more suited to his talents. Bodies and bloody messages were not what he signed up for. If he was working against his will, it should have at least been well away from the carnage of this kind of crime.
Crue and Bloom were interviewing the other trapeze artist that Kelly was with when they found Smiley. He was half Kelly's age, double her size, and loud enough in his enthusiastic retelling of it for Neal to catch scraps of his story, including gems like gnarly gash and he wasn't wearing his shoes, I thought his feet would be longer.
“So there I was,” Kelly said, round brown eyes widening and misting over, “making my way to the changing room, and I tripped over Smiley! Smacked the wall with my elbow.”
She twisted her arm around, revealing the rubbery movement of her double-jointed arm to show off the bruise there as proof. Peter’s displeasure at the movement was written across his cringe, but Neal wasn’t sure if he was more disturbed or intrigued.
“Smiley,” Peter deadpanned. “Does he have a real name?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Something Bloden? I don’t talk to the clowns.”
“You don’t like them either?” Peter warmed a little at having someone to share his distaste with, but her lips thinned judgmentally.
“No, I’m not a clownist.”
“That’s not a thing—”
“I’m just busy. And new. But there was poor Smiley, not smiling anymore. Well, he was. He still had his makeup on. The smile was big and really caked in there, but he was dead.”
“Mozzie,” Neal said, paying careful attention to her. Whatever happened to Bloden, she seemed genuinely shocked by stumbling across his corpse. “Does that mean anything to you? Is it a circus term?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what a mozzie is, but it must be important if Smiley decided it was worth dipping in his stab wound to paint that out. So gross. And sad!” she was quick to add. “So sad.”
Yes. So.
“What do you think?” Neal asked Peter as they were headed back to the car.
He gave him the look that meant things were fixing to get complicated. “I think you need to find Mozzie.”
Because luck was a frequent friend of his, there were no bloodhounds required for the task. Neal got home, folded his jacket on the back of a kitchen chair, and glanced up to see the back of a familiar head sitting out on the terrace under the burgeoning night sky.
Relief came first. Exasperation was quick on its heels.
Neal walked over and let himself out. Mozzie, being Mozzie, knew he was there without turning.
“Having the Eiffel Tower for a view was incredible, but I suppose the Chrysler Building is fine too.”
Neal stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked over within view. “Getting elitist on me, Moz?”
He smiled, mischievous, a look that always warned Neal that he was either going to love what came out of his mouth next or have to start scrambling for a strategy to keep them both out of prison soon.
“Have you checked your bank account?” Mozzie asked, which was at least better than the time he had smiled like that and informed him that, actually, the house whose safe they were currently in had four Dobermans guarding it that weren’t there when they cased the place.
It was an ominous enough question that he paused the interrogation he was fixing to launch into about circuses and bloody messages.
“How long have you been back?” he asked while he logged into his account on his phone.
“’Bout an hour,” he replied, and Neal hoped he had proof of that, that wouldn’t give away what he was really up to in France, or the FBI might try to make it out like Mozzie had been in New York at the time of the murder.
Neal was jolted from that line of thought when he noticed how much extra money was now nestled in his account with the rest of his savings. Mozzie had added a little something to it. “$200,000?”
Mozzie lifted his nearly empty wine glass in a toast, overly pleased with himself as he did so. “Your half of the job.”
That meant Moz had raked in 400K, and now Neal was doubly jealous that he got to pull a con that big while he was in New York interviewing contortionists about a guy named Smiley who apparently hadn’t made many other people smile themselves.
“My half? Moz, I wasn’t even there.”
“We’re partners. My score es su score.”
Neal shook his head, guilt and something that dropped dangerously close to self-pity, making the gesture feel correctly like more than he deserved. “It’s not fair. You shouldn’t give this to me.”
“Hey, if I ever get a government tracker strapped to my leg, I hope you’ll supplement my wages as well.”
Now there was a scenario that would never come to fruition. “You’d cut and run, first time they left you alone with scissors.”
“I’m a free bird, Neal. No suit is clipping my wings.”
It was just as well. Neal tried to imagine Peter having to shepherd Mozzie around with him everywhere, and it nearly sent his brain into a system shutdown. He wasn’t sure who would lose it first in that scenario.
In the end, because they were partners, and because he would do the same in his position, all that was left was gratitude. “This is incredibly generous, Moz. Thank you.”
Mozzie nodded happily and launched into a tale of how Gordon Taylor and the rest of the crew pulled off the robbery. Neal settled in the chair beside him and pictured it in his head: the strategy board of the building, all the moving pieces that had to shift and finesse and con the other pieces just right to pull off the timing needed to make out with the loot. It was cinema, fiction and reality blending to create an image just real enough to make the viewer buy into it. The rest was just money in the bank.
“Would have been more fun if you were there,” Mozzie concluded, “but crime is an imperfect art.”
“Sounds amazing.” Neal felt happy for him and green for himself. He loved his life in New York, he did, but he missed it, was afraid not stretching his muscles would put him behind in the game. Helping work cases was its own kind of practice, but he always knew he had backup in the form of a dozen agents at his back and no risk of prison. It was conning with a safety net.
Mozzie told him about the few hiccups too. It was nothing too serious, but Taylor did suspect there might have been a leak at one point and put everyone on radio silence at the pre-job hideout until the score was complete. Mozzie had to forfeit all of his phones and turn into a ghost for days, a precaution Taylor might have felt needed to be taken after the last job they collaborated on which did involve the FBI. Neal looked over, and the part of him that felt off-balance since Mozzie stopped checking in, righted itself.
“I thought you were screening me,” he admitted as they sat out there and enjoyed the city.
“What do you mean?”
“I hadn’t heard from you. Thought you might be putting down roots, turning your back on New York.” And him as a consequence. He wouldn’t blame him if he did. Mozzie wasn’t built to stand still, and they’d been in a fixed state for a few years now.
Mozzie pulled a face that suggested he did not agree with that logic. “I was gone a week. I hope you didn’t file a missing persons report.” He pointed at him suddenly, stern with alarm. "Never do that, by the way."
Living anonymously was everything to him. He would probably prefer to be lost at sea than have the Coast Guard be aware of his existence.
“I canceled the milk cartons when I saw you on the roof.” He watched Mozzie's profile, chin in the air as he inspected the stars, working through conspiracy theories about certain constellations leading to ancient hidden treasure or deciding what to eat for breakfast tomorrow. He never knew with Moz, but Neal preferred puzzle pieces to the picture it made anyway. “I’m glad you’re back.”
Mozzie brightened and leaned over, pulling a box out from under his chair. “Ooh! I brought you gifts. The velvet box is for June.”
Neal reached over and dragged it over to himself. “Is it jewelry?” At his nod, he asked, “Can she wear it in public?”
After some consideration, he decided, “Probably best to showcase it in a few months, after the heat cools off.”
The last thing they needed was to get busted because June was spotted with a hot necklace. He made a note to make a note for June and went through his own stuff. The hat he tried on right away to a nod of approval from Mozzie. There was a small hint of color from the two red and black feathers tucked into the ribbon band. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass behind them. It looked great, but his favorite gift was the small figurine of the Eiffel Tower with big plastic googly eyes and a cheap, toothy smile at the top.
Mozzie shrugged. “Lolana needed a friend.”
Yeah. Neal got the hint. They could run off to an island or run off to Paris. Mozzie was ready either way if Neal was. If they didn't stop collecting symbols for their freedom, they would end up on the run with a hula girl, a tower, and a backpack full of tourist souvenir toys.
"Had a good time on Taylor's crew," Mozzie said, and Neal started to nod along until he went on. "Just saying, I'm pretty sure I could get him to include you on the next job I get invited to if you wanted to—"
"No. Moz. I'm not doing anything else with this anklet on. It's too risky." Prison wasn't worth a painting. It wasn't even worth the thrill of acquiring the painting.
Mozzie had it in him to argue, though. "What if it's something big? Huge even? Something that could set us up for life. It could be our last score!"
He heard that before. 'Last' didn't come with finality. It was just the lie between this job and the next.
Neal shook his head despite Mozzie's building disappointment. "There are only three things in life that are forever. The sky is one." He peered up at the stars that made maps in Mozzie's head and stretched as far as his distrust in the generally accepted reality of things. "Chasing one last score is another. It's never the last, and no one ever wants it to be."
He and Mozzie should have started an anonymous support group for thieves looking to be reformed. Not that Mozzie had any desire or respect for reformation. Neal might have been the only one to show up to the meetings.
"True," he allowed, "though I'll argue the superiority of treasure over the proverbial dragon. What's the third?"
He was going to say getting caught by Peter when he stole something or ran, but Mozzie was high off a new score and too many mentions of prison or law enforcement would have been a buzzkill.
Neal grinned his best bullshitting grin. "Our friendship, of course."
Mozzie rolled his eyes. "I'll ignore the shameless sentimentality since it plays to my own ego."
It was only half-bullshit anyway. After Kate, past associates, and his family, he stopped trusting the idea that people could be permanent. Like things, they could be stolen or lost. Mozzie had a way of butting heads with most conventions, though. If anyone could give the sky a run for its money in the forever department, it was him.
Also, trouble. Trouble was a forever thing.
Mozzie watched him turn Eiffel over in his hands and asked, “So what did I miss?”
The moment of truth. Or, knowing him, the moment the weird got weirder.
Neal looked up and leaned over his knees to inform him, “Well, you’re a person of interest in the murder of a circus clown.”
The moment hung in the air with a bewildered silence that broke the only way it could have.
“Get the wine,” Mozzie advised.
“Yep.” Neal got up and went for an extra glass, a full bottle, and hopefully some answers.