The Big Midget Murders

by Craig Rice

  Malone poured three drinks, said gloomily, “I wonder if this is poisoned too,” and drank his. “We’ve got to do something fast, but I don’t know just what.”

  “We could call up all the people who might have come in here tonight, and ask them how they feel,” Helene suggested.

  “Wonderful!” Jake said nastily. “And the one who doesn’t answer the phone is It.”

  “It couldn’t have been a quick-acting poison,” Malone said very slowly, “or the person who got it wouldn’t have lived long enough to leave the Casino. So, that person may still be alive now.”

  “And could still be saved, if we found him in time,” Jake added.

  “If we knew who it was,” Helene said.

  “Maybe Helene was right,” Malone said. “Maybe the thing to do is call up everybody who might possibly have come in here tonight and give out a warning. It looks like the only thing to do.”

  Jake said, “And thereby advertise the fact that we knew there had been a bottle of poisoned liquor in the midget’s dressing room the night of his disappearance—or murder, if his body turns up. We’re trying to keep out of trouble, not get into it.” He paused. “Still, we can’t let some perfectly innocent person die, just to keep out of trouble.”

  “Oh, but Jake,” Helene said with a little gasp, “there’s forty or fifty people who might have come in here. And by the time we got to the right person on the list—”

  “Besides,” Jake said gloomily, “we don’t have all their telephone numbers, either. Heaven only knows where Ramon Arriba’s boys hang out.”

  Helene lit a cigarette very slowly and deliberately, and poured herself a drink of rye. “Well, we can eliminate Angela Doll. She left the Casino before the midget finished his last performance. And all of Al Omega’s band. They were on the bandstand all the time between when we were first here and when we came back. We can eliminate the girls in the chorus because I gave a party for them and none of them will touch Scotch. They all stick to rye or gin.”

  “Good bright girls,” Jake said admiringly. “So do I.”

  There was a momentary pause. Malone strolled over to the dressing table, picked up the bottle, and looked at it again.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of liquor for just one person to drink in that short a time,” he observed thoughtfully, “unless he or she had the capacity of a tank car.”

  Helene dropped her paper cup on the floor. “Of course!” she exclaimed. While the two men stared at her, open-mouthed, she jumped to her feet, pulled her wrap over her shoulders and began fastening it. “Ruth Rawlson!”

  Jake had only started to say, “But look here—” when she put her hand over his mouth.

  “Ruth was telling us about having a nice chat with Angela Doll, when we knew Angela had gone home. I thought she’d been chinning with the chorus girls, but now when I think about it, I know they’d all have gone home by that time. They don’t lose any time getting out of here after their last show. There’s only one other place where she could have been: here, all by herself, in the midget’s dressing room.”

  Jake jerked his head away and said, “Not necessarily—” That was as far as he got.

  “Listen to me!” Her eyes were like blue fire. “She was wandering around back here looking for someone who’d buy her a drink. She stuck her head in here and saw that the room was empty and that a bottle of Scotch was sitting on the dressing table.” Helene paused long enough to draw a quick breath and went on, “Malone just said whoever drank that much liquor in that short a time must have the capacity of a tank car. That’s a thumbnail description of Ruth. And you said yourself—when you put her in the taxi she was practically paralyzed. That wasn’t from the liquor—it was from what was in it!”

  “She’s right,” Malone said.

  Helene stamped her foot impatiently. “Come on, then. This isn’t any time to stand around talking about it.” She wheeled around and started for the door. “I know where she lives, and my car’s parked right outside. And Malone, stick that bottle of rye in your pocket. We might need it to bring her to.”

  “If anything would bring her to,” Jake prophesied, “that will.”

  Snow—a light, damp, April snow—was falling as they went outside. Malone shivered, growled something about the spring weather, and looked ominously at the streets. He’d ridden with Helene before when she was in a hurry.

  It was nine blocks from the Casino to the dreary Walton street rooming house where Ruth Rawlson lived. Jake and Malone preferred to forget how short a time it took for Helene to make the trip in the blue convertible.

  She slid the car neatly up to the curb directly in front of the doorway and said, “Ruth’s light is on. That’s her place—the English basement.”

  Jake grabbed her elbow as she started up the walk. “Wait a minute. Suppose you’re right about this, how are you going to explain it to her?”

  Helene shook her arm free indignantly. “When somebody’s been poisoned, you pump the poison out first and explain things afterward.” As an afterthought she added, “If she asks any questions, I’ll tell her you put the poison there for me.”

  At the steps Jake paused. “But if you aren’t right—if she didn’t get the poison—then how do we explain this three-o’clock-in-the-morning visit?”

  Malone growled, “Tell her I couldn’t wait till tomorrow to see her again. Besides,” he added, “she may not be here.”

  “I told the cab driver to see that she got here,” Jake said.

  Helene peeked through the window into the basement room. “She’s here all right. I can just see one foot through the window, but I’d know those slippers anywhere.”

  Jake rang the bell. Fifteen seconds later he rang it again. The third time, he simply pushed one finger against it and left it there. Malone went into the hallway, found the right door and pounded on it, long and loud.

  There was no answer. After one final try of ringing and knocking, Helene took another look through the window. Ruth Rawlson hadn’t moved.

  Chapter Five

  “This is no time to rouse the landlady,” Jake said, “but obviously we’ve got to get in.” He looked reflectively at the window. “Lucky there’s no grating. I think I can pry it open, if you two will keep an eye peeled for people coming down the street.”

  Malone gazed down the street through the veil of snow. Snow in spring, he thought. He remembered the snow ballet in one of those long-ago revues, with Ruth Rawlson as the snow queen, her red-gold hair rippling over her white arms. He’d been pushing a hack in those days to pay for the last months at night law school, but he’d managed to go to the theater twice a week during the show’s entire run. Fabulous Ruth Rawlson, who never wore any fur save white fur (he hadn’t known about press agents in those days, Malone reflected) nor any jewels save pearls. The little lawyer glanced through the dingy window at that dangling foot with its still unfastened slipper, and shuddered.

  “Come, come, Malone,” Helene said sternly. “She couldn’t have been that beautiful.”

  He glared at her. “If she’s dead,” he muttered, “it’s my fault. I should have had sense enough to put that bottle out of anyone’s reach.”

  “Its just as much Jake’s fault, and mine,” she told him.

  Malone shook his head. “You aren’t expected to have that much sense.”

  The sound of the window sliding open choked off whatever Helene had been about to say.

  “Go on down into the hall,” Jake said. “I’ll slip in and unlock her door from the inside.” He disappeared through the window, closing it behind him. A moment later he opened the door for them.

  It was a large, disordered, and dingy room, obviously improvised into a housekeeping apartment by the addition of a cupboard and a gas plate supposedly concealed behind a faded cretonne curtain. The walls had once been calcimined a muddy green, now they were a discolored, mottled grey. Most of the collection of autographed theatrical photographs hung slightly askew, and the threadbare rug was rumple
d at one end. There was a dun-colored flannel bathrobe on one of the sagging overstuffed chairs, a pair of slippers and a polo coat on the other. A pile of newspapers, five empty bottles—one milk, one gingerale, two beer, and one gin—a corset, and three overflowing ash trays occupied the single table. And on the studio couch was sprawled Ruth Rawlson, motionless and deathly white, but breathing.

  “We’re in time,” Malone said. He made it sound as though the marines had landed. While Jake and Helene looked on anxiously, he made a quick examination of the unconscious woman.

  “She hasn’t been poisoned,” he announced at last. “She’s been drugged.”

  He reached for a cigar, lit it, picked up one of the ash trays and emptied it into the wastebasket, and sat down beside Ruth Rawlson.

  “How do you know?” Helene demanded. “Because in case you’re wrong—this is no time for guessing games.”

  “I can tell by the way she’s sleeping and the way her eyeballs look,” Malone said. “I’ve seen knockout drops work before. That’s what was in that whiskey,” he added. “Dope.” He withdrew the bottle from his overcoat pocket and looked at it thoughtfully. “I hardly even need to have this analyzed now, but I might as well, just for the record. If we’d used our heads, of course, we’d have known it all the time.”

  Helene sniffed. “If we’d gazed into a little crystal ball, you mean.”

  “No,” Jake said, “Malone’s right. If the idea had been to poison the midget, the murderer wouldn’t have bothered to come back and hang him. Instead, he doped him, and then when he was out, came back and arranged his little noose.”

  “The murderer could have poisoned him and then tried to make it look like a suicide,” Helene objected.

  Malone shook his head. “Even a murderer of very slow intelligence would have made a better job of it.”

  “All right,” Helene said. “I won’t argue.” She looked closely at the sleeping woman. “What shall we do about her, Malone?”

  “Tuck her in bed and leave her in peace,” the lawyer growled. “She’s good for twelve to twenty-four hours. We’ll drop back from time to time and make sure she’s all right, and try to be around when she wakes up, because she’ll probably feel like hell. But that’s all we can do.”

  Helene dropped her wrap on the back of a chair. “To bed she goes, then.”

  While Helene busied herself with the unconscious woman, Malone prowled restlessly around the room. It was, he reflected, a horrible-looking place in which to wake up with a double hangover. He knew, because he’d occasionally waked up in places that looked about as bad. Suddenly he peeled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and went to work.

  From a cupboard shelf he took the last clean pillow case, and put it on the pillow Jake was preparing to tuck under Ruth Rawlson’s head. Then he emptied ash trays, wiped them clean, and put them back in convenient locations. He hung up clothes, put away slippers and stockings, dusted the table, and plumped up cushions. He emptied the coffeepot, washed it out, and put it away ready for use. Then he tiptoed down the hall with the wastebasket, emptied it into the container by the back door, returned it, and straightened the pictures.

  By that time, Ruth Rawlson was sleeping peacefully in her bed, and Helene was donning her wrap again. For just a moment Malone stood looking down at her; then he brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead. For all her tousled grey hair and haggard face, she looked at this moment like a dreaming child.

  “Sleep well,” Malone whispered. He reached into his pocket, drew out the bottle of rye Helene had filched from Angela Doll’s dressing room, and put it on the table beside the bed.

  “The supreme sacrifice,” Helene said coldly, under her breath.

  Malone glared at her. “Let’s get the hell out of this place,” he said fiercely, “and head for the nearest cup of coffee you can find.”

  He carefully slipped the key of Ruth Rawlson’s apartment into his pocket.

  Fifteen minutes later, they settled down around a table in an all night drugstore.

  “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?” Helene asked anxiously.

  Malone nodded. “Outside of the way she’ll probably feel when she wakes up, and I don’t even want to think about that.” He sighed and stirred his coffee. “Besides being the famous midget entertainer,” he said, “who was Jay Otto?”

  Jake frowned. “No one seems to know,” he said. “All the life stories in his press book seem to start with his being about twenty-one years old. There’s none of the usual stuff about being born in a small town in Indiana, or a village in the Bavarian Alps.”

  “Just strayed into this world, full grown,” Helene murmured, “from that other world where everybody is a midget. He probably was bright blue all over when he landed, but that faded out little by little.”

  Jake made a rude face at her and went on. “He never seems to have been in any of the regular midget shows. He was always a solo act. Turned up first on some fifth-rate vaudeville circuit, and was an immediate hit. If you ever read the entertainment pages, you know the rest of his history.”

  “I don’t,” Malone said, “but I’ll be satisfied to guess at it.”

  “Wasn’t he mixed up in some kind of scandal a few years ago?” Helene asked.

  Jake nodded. “He had a very gorgeous secretary who toured with him for a few years. She jumped out of a New York hotel window, and there was quite a stink about it. He came out of it all right, though.”

  “And he has all kinds of money,” Helene said. “He can’t have been saving his salary all these years, because he spends it like so much hay, and from all I hear about him, he always has. But in spite of the size of the salary he gouged out of Jake, he lived as though he had about four times as much.”

  “The rumors I’ve heard about his personal life,” Jake said, “shocked even me. But you know how people talk about anybody who isn’t exactly like everyone else. And he was such an unpleasant little guy.”

  Malone yawned. “I don’t know why the hell I should be asking all this, at this hour in the morning.”

  “Somebody’s got to ask,” Helene said reasonably. “Just the way somebody’s got to find out who murdered him.” She hummed briefly, “And it might as well be you.”

  The lawyer yawned again, long and luxuriously. “I don’t think I’ll need to, now. If the midget’s body had been found in the Casino, then Jake would have been on the spot, and I’d have had to get to work. But now—the body is probably at the bottom of the Chicago river, by this time. There will be a flurry of excitement because of the midget’s disappearance, and the Casino will get a lot of publicity, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “You think so,” Jake said.

  “I hope so,” Malone told him.

  “But,” Helene insisted, “what makes you think it’s at the bottom of the river?”

  The little lawyer leaned his elbows on the white-top table and looked at her wearily. “Because,” he said patiently, “the only reason anyone would have had for taking the body out of the dressing room was to dispose of it.”

  “But how,” Helene demanded, “did he know the body was in the fiddle case?”

  Malone sighed heavily and looked at Jake. “Why did you ever marry her, anyway?”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Jake said. “She kidnaped me. I really wanted to marry the girl who makes the doughnuts in the window on Madison street, but Helene forced me into her car and—Ouch! Stop pinching me!”

  “All right, Malone,” Helene said calmly. “Now. How did he know? And don’t give me that Superman stuff again, or I’ll pinch you too.”

  “It’s like this,” Malone said. “For some reason the murderer came back to get the body and dispose of it. We don’t know what that reason was, but we’ll assume there must have been one. All right. He came into the dressing room, and the body was gone. There hadn’t been any excitement around the Casino, so he knew whoever had taken down the body had hidden it. Do you follow me so far?”

  “
A very pretty line of reasoning,” Helene said, “and credible, too. Go on.”

  “The first thing our murderer would do would be to look around the premises, and the only place where the body might have been hidden was the closet. So, he looked in the closet. And what did he find there?”

  “I know,” Helene said coyly, “but you tell me. You fascinate me.”

  “He found the fiddle,” Malone said. “And he knew the fiddle case was in the dressing room. So probably he picked up the fiddle case, discovered that it was heavy, reasoned that the body was in it, and carried it away. Simple, isn’t it?”

  “Too simple,” Helene said. “I like the first theory better, that he had X-ray eyes.”

  “All right,” Malone said, “then we’ll strike the whole thing off the record, and leave it that he had X-ray eyes. What do you care, anyway? Whatever way it happened, the body won’t be found on the premises, and Jake won’t be in a jam.”

  “That’s right,” she agreed. “All our problems are solved, except one. Finding Allswell McJackson a job. Come on, let’s go home so we can get an early start on it.”

  They drove Malone to the Loop hotel where he had lived for fifteen years, said good night to him at the door, and started home. Helene settled down comfortably in the driver’s seat, turned into Michigan avenue, and drove slowly northward through the softly falling snow. Jake moved an inch or two closer, and rested one cheek gently against the smooth fur of her wrap.

  “Jake, why did you marry me, really?”

  “For your money,” he said promptly. “I’ve told you so a hundred times, and you keep on asking and asking—”

  “No Jake, really.”

  He sighed. “Because you’re so beautiful, and so smart, and so reasonable, and such a wonderful cook, and don’t bother me with a lot of damn fool questions.”

  Three blocks later. “Jake, I’m glad everything turned out as it did. I was afraid for a while we were in for a lot of trouble.”